Sociology

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Open Access
Coalition-Building and the Fight for Universal Child Care in Ontario, Canada, 1981-2022
(2024-11-07) Peters, Kaitlin Amber; Coburn, Elaine
This thesis constructed a chronological account of the advocacy work of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care (OCBCC) from 1981 until 2022, evaluating how effectively the OCBCC advanced an inclusive vision of child care that served all families and child care workers. This account of the OCBCC was based on a descriptive analysis of news articles, Hansard transcripts, organizational documents, and interviews with former OCBCC executive, OFL and CUPE staffers, child care researchers, and Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECEs). I also used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to identify discourses used by government to justify child care reform and the OCBCC in its campaigning for a public child care system. I found that although the OCBCC campaigned for reforms that benefitted low-income racialized families, including campaigning for expanding child care subsidies, the OCBCC did not engage in more explicit anti-racist campaigning to demand culturally appropriate and anti-racist child care. Similarly, although the OCBCC campaigned to improve the wages and working conditions of child care workers as a highly feminized and racially diverse profession, the OCBCC initially opposed supporting child care’s integration with the education system in the 1980s and more disruptive forms of direct action in support of child care workers. I discovered that even as neoliberal reform, including austerity, deregulation, and marketization, undermined the actualization of the OCBCC’s child care objectives, neoliberalism and its ongoing threat also had a conservatizing effect on the OCBCC and its affiliates. This occasionally undermined the coalition’s ability to advance an inclusive child care system. The defunding of women’s advocacy groups by the federal government left the OCBCC with fewer resources to support the equitable inclusion of marginalized workers and parents within the OCBCC’s decision-making executive bodies. Austerity and its threat also conditioned the OCBCC’s non-profit child care operator affiliates to oppose reform beneficial to child care workers because of concerns over rising labor costs and lost revenue in the absence of sufficient direct operational funding from scarcity-minded governments.
Open Access
"Nothing Makes Me Hate Myself More Than a Skinny White Person on Tumblr": Evaluating Exclusionary Ideals and Racial Discimination in Online Pro-Eating-Disorder Communities
(2024-11-07) Shaikh, Aynur; Jacobs, Merle
Pro-eating-disorder internet communities extend hegemonic standards of health, beauty, and fatness to inform their cultural ideals, producing a racialized subculture in which marginalized communities are stereotyped and excluded. I present qualitative content and discourse analyses of pro-ED communities on Tumblr, TikTok, X, and Facebook to examine how they reproduce the domination of racialized bodies, providing serious health risks to marginalized users. BIPOC are predominantly excluded from pro-ED communities, lacking representation or being displayed in explicitly discriminatory presentations. The primary pro-ED ideals are: whiteness, youthfulness, sickness, and emaciation. These exclusionary ideals, reinforcing class distinctions, are also evidenced by the production of idealized subject positions that are informed by racial hierarchies: The Girl Who Has It All, The Beautiful Bag-of-Bones, The Phenom, and The Little Doll. Racialized users are found to internalize the thin white ideal and are enmeshed in moral health discourses which situate them as non-ideal biocitizens, reinforcing structural oppression.
Open Access
Indigenous Futures: What Makes Indigenous Resurgence Possible?
(2024-07-18) Ray, Dean Raymond; Mykhalovskiy, Eric
This dissertation is about Indigenous resurgence amongst six First Nations communities in the Nicola Valley, British Columbia. The Nicola Valley is home to both the Syilx and Nłeʔkepmx. Drawing from the work of Indigenous theorists, I conceptualize resurgence as the regeneration of an Indigenous cultural system and the simultaneous turning away from relationships that reproduce settler-colonial power dynamics. I investigate the conditions of possibility for resurgence through a theoretically informed empirical study of 1) Indigenous organizations; 2) Indigenous self-help cultures; and 3) Settler and Indigenous thinking about the future. I undertook this study using what I call a resurgent methodology. This methodology takes resurgence as its ethical, epistemological, and analytical standpoint to doing research with Indigenous communities collaboratively. I conducted five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Indigenous organizations and 54 qualitative interviews with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Indigenous organizations. I argue that Indigenous resurgence is made possible through the weaving together of different forms, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to create an institutional and cultural infrastructure for resurgence, principally through strategic organizational practices, self-help cultures, and a culture of vision. This toolkit enables the rebuilding of Indigenous societies. Indigenous communities in the Nicola Valley fuse Indigenous cultures with organizational forms to create resurgence, providing an institutional infrastructure through which Indigenous communities create space and time for their cultural practices, reconnect with the Land, limit whiteness as a credential, transform Indigeneity into a credential, and reject practices that perpetuate settler-colonial power dynamics. Self-help cultures are deployed by communities to reconnect their members with traditional language, spirituality, and culture, enabling the valuable work of rebuilding their worlds. Finally, Indigenous communities in the Valley combine different temporalities, including their own culture of vision with modern time, to create historical cognition or an enhanced awareness of the past and the future that reshapes the capacity for Indigenous agency in the present. This cultural toolkit, comprised of elements from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, makes resurgence possible.
Open Access
“We Came Here for You”: Parental Involvement and Notions of Success for First-Generation and Second-Generation Students and Parents in a Canadian Ethnoburb.
(2024-03-16) Kwan-Lafond, Danielle Silvie Oiming; James, Carl Everton
This dissertation explores notions of success among racialized first- and second-generation high school seniors and their parents in the ethnoburb (Li, 2009) of Brampton, Ontario. Employing qualitative methods, the study analyzes data from four focus groups, twenty-two student essays, and fifteen students’ interviews with their parents – along with project memos and research notes. It investigates the ways in which these families discuss success, the influence of parental engagement, and childrens’ and parents’ alignment or resistance to the prevalent social discourses of meritocracy and neoliberal success. Critical discourse analysis is the primary methodological approach, and analytical frameworks include critical race theory, sociology of education, and Yosso's concept of community cultural wealth (2005). Findings reveal varied understandings of success, often centred on a university education and professional careers, and narrated as an intergenerational endeavor that will ensure financial stability, community well-being, and personal fulfillment. Motivated by their parents' sacrifices and efforts, the students reported a strong sense of responsibility to their families, perceiving their educational and career accomplishments as part of a collective and intergenerational effort. The ‘sacrifice narrative’ emerges as a significant motivator for students, and education was often cited as a key reason for family migration to Canada. The research indicates that while parents primarily support their children's education at home and focus on their academic performance, school administrators sought parental engagement through school-based volunteering. Findings suggest that expanded notions of the definitions and expectations of parental involvement are needed, with attention paid to the socioeconomic barriers these parents face. The study also discusses the varied perceptions of community among parents and youths, with some noting feelings of belonging, while others, particularly racialized males, reporting experiences of social conflict and/or feeling unsafe in some contexts. The school environment emerges as a central site of the youths' community experiences, differing from their parents' focus on suburban life. Additionally, narratives of parental and student experiences in the community reveal some tensions and highlight the need for future research into social relations in this ethnoburb (Li, 2009) community. The study contributes to strengths-based understandings of success among first- and second-generation Canadian students and families, through Yosso’s concepts of communal cultural wealth (2005) and critical race theory.
Open Access
The Crisis in White Women's Mental Health
(2023-12-08) Greto, Evan Phillip; Wu, Cary
Mental health can be challenging for individuals of varying racialized and gendered identities. However, not everyone experiences mental health in the same way. Contemporary research and literature have suggested that white women, especially within the United States of America, experience significant difficulties and disadvantages that result in poor mental health experiences and states. In this paper, I adopt an intersectional life course approach to consider how race and gender intersect to affect mental health and overall wellbeing across the life span. This approach will allow me to understand an interesting paradox in mental health wherein white women experience poorer mental health because of various cultural and social stressors that have less of an impact towards the mental health of men and minority populations. Findings situate that white women’s poorer mental health experiences are a result of not only racialized and gendered differences, but can also be attributed to age, income, marital status, trust, and education.
Open Access
In-Group Gender Consciousness and White Women's Perceptions of Racism
(2023-12-08) Nilsson, Jenny Solveig; Wu, Cary
The denial of racism is pervasive in our societies and has negative implications for anti-racist social change and cross-solidarity coalition building. In the U.S., White people are less likely to report that there is racial inequality compared to People of Color (POC). Previous research has identified marginalized group consciousness, preservation of the status quo through group presentation and group image, and critical knowledge of historical racism (i.e., the Marley hypothesis) as predictors of perceptions of racism. No previous study has explicitly explored the impact of White people’s marginalized group consciousness on perceiving racism and how these other frameworks may contribute to that relationship. This study examines whether White American women’s greater marginalized group consciousness in the form of gender consciousness (i.e., identifying as a feminist, perceiving gender discrimination, demonstrating pro-gender equality values) positively correlates with greater perceptions of racism. Specifically, I hypothesized that it would have a positive impact on their perception of (1) anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Asian discrimination, (2) anti-Black racism as a systemic issue, and (3) anti-Black policing. I utilized data from the American National Election Study (2020) and conducted Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) analysis to study this connection. Each study's sample consisted of between 1,290 to 1,947 White American women. Overall, the results confirmed my hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between gender consciousness and perceptions of racism, as almost all aspects of gender consciousness significantly affected the group’s perceptions of racism. I argued that the increased reporting of perceived racism is informed by a greater understanding of oppression overall, heightened motivation to recognize racism due to overlapping group interests, and exposure to mainstream feminism. The findings of this thesis contribute to the inquiry about perceived racism by being the first study to study the impact of gender consciousness on perceptions of racism.
Open Access
From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards A Collective Memory Of HIV/AIDS Resistance
(2023-12-08) Da Costa, Jade Crimson Rose; Gazso, Amber M.
The goal of my dissertation is to help mobilize a collective memory of HIV/AIDS resistance that confronts the historical erasure, or whitewashing, of Queer and Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activists from mainstream remembrances of the movement within and around the city colonially known as Toronto. I formulated this goal with the desire to enable younger and future generations of QT/BIPOC activists, advocates, and organizers to better connect with the region’s rich and ongoing history of non-white HIV/AIDS activisms. Approaching collective memory from a bricolage theoretical framework rooted in posthumanist Black feminism, queer of colour affect theory, and hauntology, I argue that the dominant accounts through which Toronto histories of HIV/AIDS resistance are narrated operate according to the racist temporal-spatial-affectual logics of white futurity: that which grants white folx forward-facing agency against an out-of-time, and thus forgettable, racial Other. With this, a whitewashed collective memory of the movement has emerged, and younger racialized and Indigenous individuals who are currently engaged in gender and sexuality organizing writ large, have become primed to forget the work their elders did in response to the pandemic. Accordingly, I conducted 60 in-depth interviews with racialized and Indigenous gender and sexuality activists, organizers, and advocates between the ages of 18–35 about what they felt they knew about local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance, and why. Interview findings reveal that the historical frames through which HIV/AIDS resistance is most narrated within and around Toronto limit younger organizers’ collective memories of the movement to a first occurrence typology that makes white, gay cis men into the first subjects of HIV/AIDS activism. For many participants, this typology took on the form of a racialized haunting, in which their sense of connection to local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance was constrained to the mainstream historical narrative of the AIDS activist figure: the white, cis gay treatment-based AIDS activist of the late 1980s and early 1990s who engaged in radical public dissent and ultimately set the perfect standard of Toronto AIDS activism. QTBIPOC activists (among others) who do not fit this mould, were made periphery to younger organizers’ memories, perpetually posed as newcomers to the movement. The impacts of this were strongly felt within participants’ past and present-day conceptions of HIV/AIDS politics. Those of negative or unknown serostatus often felt wholly disconnected from the ongoing, and largely racialized, struggles of the epidemic, whereas those currently living with HIV felt this way up until their diagnosis (and sometimes, even afterwards). In both cases, participants remained disconnected from the histories of HIV/AIDS resistance. However, a handful of participants indicated the possibility of disrupting this trend, either through their transnational-lived connections to HIV/AIDS, which ultimately thwarted the whitewashing of their collective memories, or through instances in which they engaged pedagogical-cultural sites that briefly disrupted the first occurrence typology’s hold on their memories. Turning to these outliers, I conclude that, to move towards a collective memory of Toronto HIV/AIDS resistance in which younger racialized and Indigenous organizers feel meaningfully connected to the histories of the movement, we need to cultivate accessible educational sites on HIV/AIDS politics that concertedly disrupt the first occurrence typology. From here, we can start to move towards a collective memory of HIV/AIDS resistance that is built, not from hegemony, but from liberation, from transformation, from radical possibility; from the wonderous echoes of QT/BIPOC organizers, past, present, and future.
Open Access
The Changing Structure of Inequality in Canada: A Multi-Level Analysis of Licensing and Education Effects on Wages Within and Across Occupations
(2023-12-08) McDonald, Erika Claire; Ornstein, Michael D.
This dissertation investigates the claim that occupational licensing is social closure, creating barriers to entry and generating rent for its existing members, and that licensing has thus contributed to increasing wage inequality. Using Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey and a database of occupational regulations collected from public data sources, I explore the wage effects of licensing and it interacts with other occupational characteristics. This dissertation includes three primary chapters. Chapter 3 compares a human capital approach with a social closure model using two-level hierarchical models. I find that the entire wage premium associated with licensing can be explained by education and skill differences between occupations, suggesting licensing does not have independent effects on wages. Chapter 4 explores the question of how education shapes wages; is it just human capital or can it function as social closure? I use factor analysis to measure the presence of different labour allocation mechanisms, reflecting the influence of human capital, internal labour markets, and social closure. I also explore the extent of over-qualification and returns to over-qualification to determine how the three mechanisms shape the effect education on wages. I conclude that education does function differently based on the three mechanisms, and that it can function as social closure. Finally, chapter 5 employs growth curve models to investigate the wage effects of new licenses enacted between 1997 and 2019. I am able to show that new licenses do have wage effects, contributing to an acceleration in wage growth after enactment, an effect that is more significant if the occupation achieves high levels of coverage, and that education plays only a small part in this process. Overall, I conclude that occupational licensing can have wage effects independent of education, but this effect is modified by other occupational characteristics like education, the number of years since the license was enacted, and the coverage of licensing achieved in the occupation. While licensing does appear to contribute to wage inequality, it is likely that licensing is only one part of a larger societal process of institutional transformation in the Canadian labour market.
Open Access
On Racism: An Interrogation of the Canonical Theory of Knowledge of Anti-Racism Politics
(2023-08-04) Campos-Garcia, Alejandro; Mongia, Radhika
There are multiple ways of framing the analysis of racism and racial discrimination as public problems. Crucial differences in scope, ideological positions and theoretical standpoints inform these frames. Despite the tensions and disagreements among these stances, they all embrace four epistemological features: they treat racism and racial discrimination as given realities, which have an independent existence from awareness or recognition; they assume anti-racism and anti-discrimination practices and theories as contestations to those given realities; they all conceive power in terms of differentials in resources, access/opportunities, and capacities to impose a rule, interest or ensure privileges; and they understand subjectivity as relational identities deriving from the givenness of racism. While acknowledging these assumptions’ political and intellectual value and being fully aligned with the legitimacy of their purposes, this dissertation problematizes the theory of knowledge that makes them possible. It also proposes an alternative theory of knowledge and discusses the epistemic consequences of embracing a shift in how we understand and mobilize against racism. With the support of the theory of objective validity of the Marburg Neo-Kantian School, and Michel Foucault’s work on discourse, power, and subjectivity, I present three main arguments. First, I contend that racism and racial discrimination are not given but become epistemologically established through the discursive practices anti-racism mobilizations embrace. Second, I claim that anti-racist problematizations are not reactive but have constitutive power. This position implies complementing the idea of power as disparity with the idea of power as the possibility of objectifying reality. Finally, this dissertation argues that the subjectivities anti-racism talks about emerge in discourse and only become self-evident through discursive practices. The thesis is structured into four chapters. Chapter 1 critically interrogates the mainstream theory of knowledge of anti-racism politics and introduces the alternative approach I am suggesting. In the following chapters, the dissertation presents three cases that serve to illustrate my theory of knowledge: the First Universal Races Congress of 1911; the conceptual and theoretical transitions in international politics against racial discrimination between the late 1980s and the 1990s; and the emergence and consolidation of the Afrodescendants as subjectivity in the early 2000s.
Open Access
Negotiation of 1.5 and Second Generation Filipino Canadian Identity: Language, Internalized Racial Oppression and Ethnic Identity
(2023-08-04) Abella, Kim Lynette; Kim, Ann H.
This master’s thesis analyzes the identity formation of 1.5 and second generation Filipinos in Canada. Semi-structured interviews have been conducted to look at how this demographic defines, understands, and how closely they connect to, their hybrid transnational Filipino Canadian identities while navigating Canadian society as racialized minorities. In total, 12 initial participants completed a single semi-structured interview, 11 participants completed a follow-up interview, and 1 participant completed a second follow-up interview. Findings reveal that language and internalization of racial oppression are salient factors in the ambivalent connections in the negotiation of Filipino identity.
Open Access
She's Got Game: An Exploration of the Athletic, Academic, and Social Experiences of Black Canadian Female U.S. Athletic Scholarship Recipients
(2023-03-28) George, Rhonda C.; James, Carl Everton
Much has been said about the academic, social, and athletic experiences of Black males, but very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the axis of gender, intersecting with race and class creates very specific experiences. Therefore, using Social Reproduction, Critical Race, and Black Feminist theories, this study explores the specific athletic, educational, and social experiences of Black female basketball athletes from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) who have received U.S. athletic scholarships. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with Black Canadian female scholarship recipients, between the ages 25 and 35, this study analyzes how they navigate athletic, academic, and social life to obtain U.S. athletic scholarships. Firstly, I find that the participants were socialized into the U.S. athletic scholarship pathway through a number of factors including social, familial, peer, and media influences. In addition, scholarship aspirations were also informed by negative schooling experiences and motivations like the avoidance of school debt and heightened athletic possibilities. Secondly, I find that once the participants were immersed in basketball, they relied on informal networks/communities of support to develop and share knowledge about scholarship opportunities to co-create complex and sometimes challenging pathways to American universities. Thirdly, I find that throughout this navigation, the participants endured, navigated, and resisted racial and gender stereotyping, identity projections, and gender and race-based barriers that were distinct from their non-Black female and Black male counterparts. Lastly, I highlight how while all the athletes successfully obtained athletic scholarships to American universities and benefitted from their experiences athletically and socioeconomically, their pathways were often arduous and precarious, rife with numerous drawbacks, risks, and sacrifices. In addition, I found that creating fulfilling and enriching academic and athletic opportunities and experiences was often perceived as unavailable and inaccessible in the Canadian context, resulting in the need for emigration. Therefore, I argue that it is not that Black youth lack the economic, social, and cultural capital to be successful athletically and academically, but that the rate of exchange for their capital shaped by historical scripts, systemically devalues the abundance of capitals they do possess and reproduces existing inequalities, failing to address the systemic nature of their exclusion.
Open Access
The Gender Confidence Gap: A Life Course and Intersectional Approach
(2023-03-28) Ong, Joanne; Wu, Cary
The confidence gap is the well-documented phenomenon that women are less self-confident than men. I consider the patterns of the gap across the life course and social categories of race to test theories of the gap. I adopt an intersectional and life course approach to test nature versus nurture theories of the gap. Analyzing data from the three-wave MIDUS, I provide evidence that the gap remains consistent across the life course (age groups) and race categories. I show that the gap is most significant among working-age groups and that education has a positive impact on self- confidence that is more significant for females. These findings suggest that self-confidence is not simply driven by genetics. The significant effects of age, race, and the interplay between race and the life course suggest it is created by cultural socialization and experiences. I discuss how the gap exacerbates the wage gap and mental health gap.
Open Access
The Social Organization of Opioid Use for Chronic Pain
(2023-03-28) Comer, Leigha April; Mykhalovskiy, Eric
This dissertation is an institutional ethnography of the social organization of opioid use for chronic pain management in Ontario, Canada. Within the context of the contemporary ‘opioid crisis,’ people with chronic pain have found their access to prescription opioids restricted as physicians rapidly taper patients’ doses, adopt ‘no narcotics policies,’ and bar people with chronic pain who use opioids from their practices. These changes in physicians’ work of prescribing opioids have had significant impacts on the lives of people with chronic pain. To explicate these abrupt changes in patients’ access to opioids, I conducted interviews with people with chronic pain and with health care practitioners, as well as analyses of texts including prescribing guidelines. I found that physicians have changed their opioid prescribing practices since the late aughts as the medical profession has come to be targeted as responsible for increases in opioid-related harms in North America. While previous panics around drug use targeted people who use drugs and attempted to change their behaviour, recent shifts in medico-legal conceptions of opioids have meant that opioid users have emerged in the public imaginary as blameless victims of unscrupulous physicians. Strategies to resolve the ‘epidemic’ of opioid-related harms have focused on changing physicians’ prescribing practices through new forms of opioid pharmacovigilance, surveillance, and punishment. In response to these modes of surveillance and punishment, physicians have responded by adopting work practices that demonstrate their compliance with and accountability to these regimes of ruling. These include tapering patients’ doses and refusing to prescribe opioids to any patients ‘tainted’ by social determinants of health such as poverty or racialization. While people with chronic pain are not directly targeted by interventions to end the opioid crisis, they are impacted by these policies as physicians change their opioid prescribing practices in response to heightened surveillance and risk of penalties such as losing their license to practice or public shaming.
Open Access
ON THE BUSINESS OF SOCIALITY: A FIGURATIONAL EXPLORATION OF THE ETIQUETTE INDUSTRY IN POST-REFORM CHINA
(2022-12-14) Zhao, Yikun; Walsh, Philip D.
This research analyzes the rise of the etiquette industry and its auxiliaries in post-reform China. Methodologically, it adopts an Eliasian figurational approach and combines archival research with six months of ethnographic fieldwork. Each of the four analytical chapters analyzes a sub- phenomenon, to explore how etiquette was transformed into commodities with market value amid two streams of figurational changes that began since the early 20th century and in the post- reform era, respectively. The first two chapters are situated in the figurational developments along China’s modernization process that has been recharting the relationship between the individual, society, and the state. The state-led “civilizing” initiatives for embodying civility to produce modern citizens are discussed in Chapter One by comparing the official doctrines from the New Life Movement (1934-1949) and public propaganda posters found in Chinese cities and towns during my fieldwork. Chapter Two furthers this line of investigation by following an etiquette business headquartered in Shanghai to explore profit opportunities in the top-down “civilizing” process, through strategically creating what I termed as culture scissors. The next two chapters analyze how etiquette-related businesses strive to carve out opportunities in the social stratification process in the post-reform era, by centering on two new professional roles. The first of these chapters (Chapter Three) presents a portrait of the new professional type of modern butler for China’s High Net Worth Households. Its characteristic performativeness is interpreted figurationally by relating to the new economic elites’ pursuit of social status. The second (Chapter Four) examines the particular functional role of etiquette professionals as advertised experts for self-betterment in the mainland. The features of functional integration and cultural differentiation observed in this sub-field are analyzed by identifying and comparing their projected images of the ideal self, situated within the background of China’s path to individualization. Overall, this research showcases how figurational changes and the resultant tension with the one-party system were turned into a source of valuation by the etiquette industry and its auxiliaries in post-reform China through profiting from established sociocultural hierarchies founded upon the tensile equilibrium of power balances, risking reinforcing these hierarchical inequalities.
Open Access
Fattening up Health Care: Exploring the Ways Fat Women Navigate Health Care Services in Canada
(2022-12-14) Ioannoni, Kelsey Ann; Hanson, Barbara Gail
This dissertation explores and documents how fat women in Canada experience fatphobia in health care settings, focusing largely on primary care. This study, which is based on interviews and focus groups with fat women, asks broadly: How does fatness act as a barrier to accessing health care services for fat women in Canada? To answer this question, I explore the following four sub questions: (1) How has fatness come to be socially constructed as a moral panic of an ‘obesity epidemic’, resulting in the medicalization of fatness?; (2) How does the framing of fatness as an ‘obesity epidemic’ impact the relationship fat women have with their bodies and themselves?; (3) With a focus on primary care physicians, how does the advice of medical professionals’ impact fat women’s perceptions of their bodies and their health?; and (4) How does the categorization of obesity as a disease by Obesity Canada, in the 2020 Canadian Adult Obesity Clinical Practice Guidelines, further entrench fatphobia in health care practice? Working at the intersections of fat studies, sociology of health, and feminist standpoint epistemology, I argue that fatness is a barrier to accessing health care services in Canada. Through the experiences of my participants, I find that the framing of fatness as an ‘obesity epidemic’ has resulted in fat women having antagonistic relationships with their bodies, understanding their bodies as moral failures. These feelings carry over to health care spaces where practitioners often hold anti-fat bias, resulting in weight-based discrimination and experiences of fatphobia in health care. Finally, despite an abundance of research calling for health care professionals to re-consider and re-frame their approaches to fatness in health care settings, health care professionals are ignoring the research on anti-fat bias and instead are doubling down on obesity as disease.
Open Access
Turn On, Tune In, and Heal Together: Culture, Interaction Rituals, and Collective Self-Transformation in Psychedelic-Assisted Group Therapy with Individuals with Treatment-Resistant Mental Distress
(2022-12-14) Rose, Jarrett Robert; Walsh, Philip D.
This doctoral study has been concerned with psychedelic (psilocybin) culture, its therapeutic application on group-based retreats, and its impact upon the subjective healing and self-transformation of individuals with treatment-resistant mental distress. While clinical trials suggest psychedelic-assisted therapy can be efficacious in resolving various mental health troubles, and psychedelic retreats advertise the transformative potential of psychedelics, less understood is the role that intersubjectivity plays in therapeutic outcomes. In this study, retreats were framed as a type of therapeutic community, in which culture, interaction, emotions, collective effervescence, and social connection were investigated as aides to the psychedelic-therapeutic process. This research used in-depth interviews combined with autoethnographic, participant observation data to consider how psychedelic-assisted therapy, in conjunction with intersubjectivity and a therapeutic culture in retreat settings, impacted the lives of people struggling with treatment-resistant forms of mental distress and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The range of sociocultural phenomena associated with psychedelic therapy retreats were examined using micro-sociological frameworks, especially Interaction Ritual Chain (IRC) theory (Collins 2004). The research question for this study was: How are “healing” and self-transformation defined and achieved in psychedelic therapy culture, and to what extent are they impacted by intersubjective dynamics? This dissertation found that the efficacy of psychedelic therapy can be enhanced by intersubjective dynamics, and these dynamics can be analyzed by using a Symbolic Interactionist—namely an IRC—framework. The therapeutic outcomes of group-based psychedelic-assisted healing retreats were not solely attributable to the causal powers of psychedelics themselves; also crucial were the sociocultural, psychological, and emotional 3 factors allied with the overarching retreat environment, each of which impacted upon psychedelic consciousness and post-retreat “integration” practices. These factors—such as the evolution of a community (between guests), therapeutic alliance (between therapists and guests), compassionate “emotion culture” that paid deference to cultural/symbolic objects (self-transformation and healing, the collective, and psilocybin rituals), and “cultural set and setting”—operated in unification with using psychedelic mushrooms as a tool of introspection, autognosis, and self-healing. In this sense, self-transformation and healing in psychedelic-assisted group therapy was achieved collectively. This research adds to scientific knowledge in three principal areas. First, sociologists have largely neglected studying psychedelics in the 21st century, whether as cultural, subcultural, or countercultural social phenomena, or as a therapeutic modality. This dissertation thus contributes to a nascent sociology of psychedelic culture/s and therapy. Secondly, this social scientific research complements psychedelic science and psychedelic studies by investigating the sociocultural aspects attendant to psychedelic healing and self-transformation. Most research on psychedelic therapy is clinical in nature, takes place in laboratories, and is predominantly positivistic, quantitative, and focused on individual outcomes. Distinctly, this study is the first of its kind to contribute qualitative, naturalistic, and intersubjective approaches to psychedelic therapy. Thirdly, rarely has IRC theory been employed in mental health research or research on therapeutic communities. This study advances this theoretical framework by applying it to the micro-dynamics of everyday life on psychedelic retreats, the latter of which are framed as therapeutic communities. In so doing, this research underscores both the ongoing value and the limitations of IRC theory.
Open Access
Theorizing Sustained Solidarity: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement in Toronto
(2022-08-08) Sukarieh, Rana; Wood, Lesley Julia
This dissertation seeks to understand the multiscalar dynamics that led to the fragmentation of the once relatively unified Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto. The dissertation analyzes the interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors shaping the trajectory of the BDS movement in Toronto. These dynamics are informed by ontological (political imaginaries), temporal (intergenerational), institutional (community institutions), and agonistic (counter-movements) logics. Locating this project within an analysis of settler colonialism allow us to understand the particular contexts that shape solidarity. Both Israel and Canada share similar logics of settler colonialism that eliminate and/or racialize the native populations, and deploy various interconnected tools to keep the silencing dissident voices. The research is an activist-research, in which I employed triangulation as a methodological strategy, by combining in-depth interviews, archival work, and participant observation. Deploying Bourdieu’s theory of practice and its concepts of field, habitus, and capital, this dissertation contributes to theorize the multilayered and multiscalar variables that shape transnational movements. These dynamics are manifested in distinct political imaginaries oscillate between reviving the anti-colonial Third World Internationalism or adopting a pragmatic rights-based approach; collaborating with others with converging political projects versus avoiding those with diverging political visions; (un)intentionally reproducing colonial formations or attempting to decolonize. The dissertation also integrates a temporal analysis that accounts for the variations of the political contexts, the birth of the “War on Terror” generation after 9/11, and the resurge in the demonization of the Arab, Muslim, and other people of color. Through an intergenerational lens, and by incorporating Mbembe’s entangled temporality, the dissertation challenges the assumed total rupture created by transformative events that are associated with the formation of new political generations, and illuminates the internalized values and ideas that the “War on Terror” generation inherited from the previous generations, thereby contesting the reified boundaries that activists themselves have build between generations. The continuity of the solidarity with the BDS is contingent on its ability to confront, adapt, and strategize against the multilayered and relatively unified Zionist counter-movements both in Toronto and transnationally. Moreover, the dissertation discusses the paradox facing social movements between institutionalization and grassrootedness.
Open Access
Refusing Internment, Reclaiming Vitality, and Moving Past the Bargain Of Recognition: The Case of a Muslim Creative Counterpublic
(2022-08-08) Ali, Nadiya Nur; Kyriakides, Christopher
The overarching goal of my project is to investigate the tactics of resistance and self-making available and picked up by those living on the receiving end of overbearing racializing structures. Actively listening to the formation and operation of a Muslim creative counterpublic called the Muslim Writers Collective (MWC) demonstrates that the analytics of self/social transformation available to racialized actors cannot simply be limited to ‘resistance’, understood as antagonist-oppositionality, and ‘transformation’, understood through the frame of recognition politics. The study of MWC draws on an ethnographic full-participant observation of two chapters - located in Toronto and New York City - in addition to 30 conversational interviews of performers, organizers, and attendees. For MWC regulars, comprised of racialized actors fielded to perpetually remain in quarantine and internment, expansion, revelation and mundanification emerge as powerful acts of refusal. Through communal storytelling, improvisation, and congregational experimentation, the altar of whiteness comes to be decentered, and a refusal of abjecthood and subalternity is collectively embodied. MWC fosters a space in which generative acts of refusal operate to engender an analytics of resistance and transformation prioritizing vitality and subjectivity. In consequence, actively rejecting the static, unidimensional, and reductive constructs of Muslimhood circulated in dominant racializing public(s). Hence, in contrast to the re-inscribing role of the corrective curations antagonist-recognition politics demands, MWC locates self/social transformation in the hazardous horizontal work of bearing witness to internal difference, in all its contradictions, incoherencies, and divergences, in order to ignite vitality as a congregation, as a Jama’ah.
Open Access
The Price of Knowledge: An Exploration of Student Demographics between Regulated and First-Degree Professional Programs in Ontario
(2022-08-08) Barakat, Grace Marana; Spotton Visano, Brenda
In recent decades, we have seen various governing bodies reduce their economic support for the publicly funded post-secondary education (PSE) system in Canada. This trend is one of the neoliberal measures which seeks to reorganize the structures and distribution patterns of public goods and services. Through the process of neoliberalization, the lack of public financing has created a funding gap for universities and colleges, which has been increasingly filled by relying on private sources of funding, primarily in the form of tuition fees. This shift has led to a rapid increase, and at times, deregulation of PSE tuition fees. In 2006, tuition differentiation assigned professional programs higher tuition fees than regulated program, revealing a new, reconstructed version of tuition deregulation. This study seeks to explore the differences between student demographics of first-degree (undergraduate) professional and regulated programs in Ontario. A secondary data analysis using the 2018 National Graduates Survey (NGS) is conducted. Logistic regression models are used to predict the likelihood of professional or regulated program enrollment controlling for social markers such as source of funding, race/ethnicity, SES, gender, etc. An analysis of student debt is also performed to investigate the management of large PSE student loans. Findings reveal that students from more privileged and affluent backgrounds are more likely to be enrolled in first-degree professional programs, both nationally and in Ontario. The odds of enrollment for professional programs are higher for self-funded (not relying on student loans), non-racialized, Canadian-born-citizens, males, with high levels of parental education in Ontario. Additionally, students from marginalized groups are more likely to accrue high levels of student debt ($25,000 or more), take longer to repay their loans, and struggle with debt repayment. There is evidence to suggest that tuition differentiation may be functioning as an exclusionary policy that reproduces social inequities and class disparities. First-degree professional programs, which have higher tuition fees than regulated programs, are largely populated with students from affluent backgrounds. When examined cumulatively, these findings have implications for PSE policy and the ability of PSE to function as a great equalizer. Since professional programs tend to lead to more affluent employment positions and higher wages, the cycle of economic marginalization may be reproducing itself through PSE.
Open Access
Worker Cooperatives: Strategies and Tactics for Interstitial Transformation
(2022-08-08) Hax, Heather Anne; Wood, Lesley Julia
The number of worker cooperatives in the United States has grown substantially in recent decades, as has a robust cooperative movement dedicated to advancing worker-ownership. Many of these individual cooperatives, as well as the movement that incubates and supports them, critique capitalist workplace relations and aim to disrupt them. This dissertation addresses the claim that worker cooperatives, workplaces owned and operated by their employees, prefigure post-capitalist workplace arrangements and ultimately, a post-capitalist economy. While there is substantial literature that outlines the role of worker cooperatives as a strategy to disrupt exploitative and alienating capitalist labor relations, very little attention has been paid in the academic literature to the resources and strategies necessary to start a cooperative as well as the complex ways in which workplace democracy unfolds in practice. Additionally, this research evaluates the claim that worker cooperatives are a means to democratize wealth on a large scale. Erik Olin Wrights (2010) concept of interstitial transformation is used to understand the process by which small changes to the political economy can accumulate to large-scale systemic shifts. This research is based on a case study of cooperatives in Baltimore from 2014-2021 and identifies three structural conditions necessary for the growth of cooperatives: access to non-extractive capital and high-touch technical support, building a culture of worker ownership, and political advocacy/legislation that supports both worker ownership and wealth redistribution. This dissertation outlines the ways in which cooperatives have already realized their potential for interstitial transformation and the challenges that lay ahead.