YorkSpace has migrated to a new version of its software. Access our Help Resources to learn how to use the refreshed site. Contact diginit@yorku.ca if you have any questions about the migration.
 

Education

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 20 of 167
  • ItemOpen Access
    Drag Across Borders: Negotiating 2SLGBTQ+ Refugee/Migrant Being and Belonging Through Drag Personas
    (2023-12-08) McDermid, Paulie; Kyriakides, Christopher
    This qualitative study uses drag performance to better understand some of the complexity of 2SLGBTQ+ refugee and other migrant identities and experiences of in/exclusion from (national) belonging in Canada. Racialized Western border regimes and reception frameworks position refugees/migrants along an in/voluntary axis that both denies and fears agency while constructing ‘the refugee’ as a diminished ‘non-person’. Utilizing drag as an analytical lens sheds fresh light on questions of refugee/migrant agency and performativity as well as (racialized) queer/trans self-enactment and belonging. In this study, refugee/migrant drag artists describe materializing through their drag personas a desired ‘person’ that stakes out spaces of belonging for themselves and for others in their communities. Thus, they push back against dehumanizing social and political forces hostile to their being and belonging. The dissertation draws on in-depth interviews with twenty-two refugee/migrant drag artist and audience member respondents from across Canada and utilizes an abductive grounded theory approach to analyze the resulting data. The drag artists’ narratives counter Western scripts of ‘refugeeness’ by emphasizing agency and autonomy in their lives long before and after arrival. Through their personas, the work the drag artists do is social, political, and relational. Relationships with their families (of all kinds) and others form a vital part of building collectivity. The sharing of their knowledge and experience with new generations of artists shows how these refugee/migrant drag performers work toward the futures they desire for themselves and others and toward the change they want to see in the world. Uniquely, this study signals the public pedagogical potential of drag in relation to refuge and migrancy. The study adds to queer/trans migration studies that centre the everyday lived experiences of 2SLGBTQ+ refugees and other migrants before and after conflict/arrival. By focusing on the experiential in and continuity of (queer/trans) refugee/migrant lives, this research contests the reduction of ‘the refugee’ to an anonymous category of diminished ‘non-person’, stripped of a past and refused a future. In demonstrating how (past) social relations nourish present and future belonging for 2SLGBTQ+ refugees and other migrants through collectivity, the study also contributes to the theorizing of queer/trans-of-colour futurity.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Privilege and Vulnerability: Early Study Abroad Experiences and Policy Enactment in a Superdiverse Secondary School
    (2023-12-08) Bell, Nancy Louise; Schecter, Sandra Ruth
    This dissertation explores the lived experience of Early Study Abroad (fee-paying international) students in a publicly funded Ontario secondary school. I situate my research in the broader context of international education, particularly the recruitment and hosting of students from abroad. The study also explores the complex world of adolescent language learning and intercultural exchange in a superdiverse school setting. My qualitative case study comprises interviews with students, who describe their personal experiences, and educators, who reflect on their own practices and share observations of their colleagues’ pedagogical response to this cohort. My analysis was influenced by my experience as an English as a Second Language/English teacher who worked with Early Study Abroad students and informed by a reading of relevant policy documents. I use several complementary frameworks: Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological model of development; theories from critical policy research (Ball, 1993, 2015; Ball et al., 2012; Levinson & Sutton, 2001) and engaged language policy and practice (Menken & García; 2010; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996); and Vertovec’s (2007, 2019) concept of superdiversity. My findings reveal that students’ experiences and teacher responses are broadly shaped by discourses that support the marketization of education at a global scale. At the school level, highly agentive students successfully navigated their way through an educational system that did not widely acknowledge or support them, notwithstanding the efforts of few engaged teachers. My policy recommendations include stronger oversight of student care and well-being, more opportunities for professional development and collaboration for teachers who work in linguistically diverse classrooms, and greater transparency in accounting for the management of student tuition revenue. 
  • ItemOpen Access
    Journey With Me: Wanderings and Wonderings Through Childhoods
    (2023-12-08) Barnikis, Tiffany Victoria; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
    Dominant assumptions and views of children and childhood inform and guide educational policy and practice and have worked to institutionalize meanings of children and childhood. Within the sociology of childhood, literature has challenged these assumptions by recognizing the lived realities of children as contextually specific and historically dynamic, and by acknowledging the existence of multiple situations and perspectives of childhood (James & James, 2012; Mayall, 2002; Prout & James, 1997), however, these understandings are majoritively considered from an adult perspective. This qualitative study welcomes children’s perceptions and narratives into discussions of children and childhoods by exploring five children’s perspectives and narratives. This study is influenced by the Mosaic approach, “a multi-method, polyvocal approach that brings together different perspectives in order to create with children an image of their worlds” (Clark, 2017, p. 17). Semi-structured conversations, photography and child-led walking tours of their neighbourhoods provided the participants with an opportunity to express their thoughts, opinions, and retellings of their own lived experiences. Working within a social-critical paradigm and underpinned by the sociology of childhood, critical childhood studies, and post-structuralism, the aim of this inquiry is to explore from the perspectives of children themselves. Employing poetic inquiry alongside a thematic narrative analysis the child participants’ narratives are explored through the discussions of adult/child constructs; freedoms, restrictions and resistance; relationships; and been, being and becoming, and their decision-making and influence on curriculum. In conclusion, recommendations for future practices and areas for further research are discussed. Positioning children, rather than adults, as the storytellers of their lived realities this study works to de-objectifying children in conversations of children and childhood and seeks to acknowledge children as active and valued members of society, and important tellers of their own stories.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Consumer Culture and its Social Effects on Education
    (2023-01) Colangelo, Halldor; Tarc, Aparna Mishra
    Some of the difficulties that educators are having in teaching their students today are resultant from what Hannah Arendt (2006), called the crisis of authority in our modern world. It is hindering, among other things, the teacher’s ability to educate and protect the children from the world. This study proposes the importance of including consumer culture as the fundamental context with which to understand some of today’s more negative aspects of individualism and individuation that may be partly caused by a culture of entitlement in contemporary society in general, as well as in education and schools. Using consumer culture as an all-encompassing term to understand what Zygmunt Bauman (2007) referred to as our ‘liquid’ society, this study shows how this crisis is the result of capitalism’s metamorphosis from that of producers to that of consumers. It discusses how the change of capitalism’s ethos over the decades has had a marked effect on the individual sense of being and belonging by fundamentally replacing the citizen with the consumer. In education, consumer culture is promoting an individualized consumerist ethos that compromises the more metaphysical and holistic aspects of teaching (educere) while promoting the exclusively functionalist and mechanical educare with its more practical, skills-oriented, standardized, individualizing and ‘marketable’ aims of education. To understand the genesis of consumer culture’s alienating form of individualism, this study makes a brief historical analysis of capitalism’s initial stages of consolidation to its semiotic and surveillance forms of today. It demonstrates how the quasi-complete commodification of daily life, including often within rapports, is manufacturing our identities and personas through egotism, egoism, and even simulation. Through an autoethnography, this study manages to align and illustrate this discussion and theories espoused by several scholars through ten vignettes from this author’s personal life experiences both as a citizen and educator.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Anishinaabe Learning Places: Teaching and Learning through Gift, Relational, Movement and Spirit Pedagogies
    (2023-10-03) Hupfield, John Robert; Dion, Susan D.
    Powwows have always been a place of dynamic colours, beadwork, a celebration of life on the land, a site for Anishinaabeg to ‘dance, sing, and pray, the Anishinaabe way.’ Anishinaabe pedagogy and powwow as place: Teaching and Learning through Gift, Relational, Movement and Spirit Pedagogies is a project that examines the ways in which powwow as place can provide spaces for teaching and learning within powwow families. As a grass dancer themselves, the author centres relationship with three other powwow families through a methodology rooted in Anishinaabewin (Indigenous knowledge systems), dibaajimowinan (storysharing), and nbwaachewin (visiting). Through a series of ZOOM sessions, stories were shared and knowledge co-constructed about Anishinaabe pedagogy through processes of reciprocity and relationality. The stories shared by families were oft-framed by colonization, naming its impacts on family structures and Anishinaabe identity - the dismantling of kinship systems. Powwow as place was described as a space that not only provides respite from ongoing forms of colonization, but fosters kin-making, wholistic wellbeing, and the learning of Anishinaabewin through coming to understand teachings about kinship through roles and responsibilities. Powwow families expressed the need to nurture the ‘spirit’ of the learner, a notion rooted in wholism that they felt is oft-lacking in zhaagnosh (non-Anishinaabe) learning settings. These findings indicate a need for powwows to be reframed from cultural gatherings and celebrations, to critical places of learning/teaching for Anishinaabeg. The focus on gifts of learners, reframing relationships between teacher and learner relationships, and a call for the hosting of more Anishinaabeg places of learning such as powwow, are all aspects that non-Indigenous educational contexts can learn from.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Qissati. Counterstories of Muslim Women School Administrators in Schools
    (2023-08-04) Nada Aoudeh; Aparna Mishra Tarc
    This composite counter-stories study seeks to understand and illuminate the embodied experiences of Muslim women school leaders in Ontario public schools. Critical analysis of individual and group interviews with seven Muslim women public school administrators (principals and vice principals), autobiographical writing/reflection, and scholarship on racialized women’s school leadership shed light on: a) the systemic erasure of Muslim women leadership through ‘Invisibilizing’ and ‘Hypervisibilizing’ experiences, b) the experiences of Muslim women’s presence and actions as threatening to the cultural and institution reality of public schools and, c) the institutional attempts at containment of these leaders through controlling expectations and tools for reprisal should expectations be transgressed. Theories of Islamophobia and Critical Race/Feminism Theory are shown to arise out of the experiences of women as examined in the data. These theories inform the development of the composite counter-stories depicting the school lives of Muslim woman leaders. The composite characters allow for an embodied expression of the complexities of ‘being’ Muslim and woman in public institutions to resist further re-inscription into dominant narratives of their lives. These stories also disrupt majoritarian narratives about inclusive schools and Muslim women. The composite counter-stories provide a robust portrait of the impact of leading public-school spaces as a Muslim woman. Compiling the data through a composite depiction of individual experience, I provide new counterstories of gendered Islamophobia in school leadership and Islamophobia in schools more widely.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Writing "Home" in Rural Queer Teacher Narratives: A Collaborative Autoethnography
    (2023-08-04) Cummings, Darren Randall; Gilbert, Jen
    This dissertation seeks to investigate the lives of rural queer teachers in their communities and schools. I explore how notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ might keep queer teachers in their rural locations despite an overwhelming discourse that associates the rural with rejection and homophobia. This study is a collaborative autoethnography that employs writing and discussion groups to explore rural queer life through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical notions of the rhizome, assemblage, and perpetual “becomings” as a result of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. This framework informs the theoretical and methodological components of the study by demonstrating how group members negotiate their multiple identities as queer, educator, and rural community member, while also mapping “becomings” that occur within the collaborative writing group. I also investigate how the theoretical works on utopia by Cvetkovich (2008) and Muñoz (2009) might be utilized as a way to re-imagine the rural queer experience.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Alternative Public Education and Solidarity Economy: Values, Ideologies, and Looking for Spaces of Change
    (2023-08-04) Pearson, Megan Marie; Dippo, Donald A.
    Violence and exclusion are experienced by children of colour in the Toronto public school system through disproportionate suspension, expulsion, dropout rates, police presence and the streaming of Black youth. The solidarity economy has a long history of organizing through education programs that serve to teach and mobilize groups of oppressed peoples as well as to instruct the masses about their ideological agendas. Grounded in critical theoretical approaches, this dissertation explores if and how the solidarity economy might intersect with public education in Toronto, Canada. Through analysis of empirical interview data from Toronto alternative public-school actors, and thematic analyses of policies informing the establishment of alternative public schools, the values and ideologies of the policies are uncovered, along with the logistics of how others have navigated these policies. It arrives at an understanding of the values and ideologies of the solidarity economy through brief case studies. The study concludes that while there are pockets of struggle and resistance within individual schools and classrooms in the Toronto District School Board, the values and ideologies of the solidarity economy are not able to inform a different vision of schooling, within the current Toronto alternative school system and its establishment policies.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Teacher Identity and Ethical Responsibility: An Exploration Through Literary Representations
    (2023-03-28) Schwartz, Lisa Simpson; Farley, Lisa H. E.
    This dissertation investigates the meaning of ethical responsibility as a fundamental feature of teacher identity. While there is a tendency to construct both responsibility and teacher identity in terms of instructional practice, agency, and competency, this research foregrounds understudied complexes of dependency, uncertainty, and failure. Drawing on continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, I frame teacher identity from the vantage of concepts of natality, hospitality, and relationality to illuminate a central conflict of responsibility that places the teacher in a tension between an idealized conception of egoless passivity and the emotional situation of an ego-based affect of self-preservation and ego interests. Conflict and anxieties result, constituting the teacher’s emotional world. Through my investigation of this tension, I offer critique of the all-loving teacher figure by exposing how this idealization conceals the implication of education in discourses of aggression, exclusion, and social control. Literary portrayals of child/adult and student/teacher relationships in novels provide novel data to examine these tensions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Archaeology Education in Ontario: A Relational Inquiry of Indigenous Museums and Artifacts
    (2023-03-28) Martinello, Christopher Stefan; Farley, Lisa H. E.
    Many sectors of society, such as justice, health care, and education, are moving towards a relationship of Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Ontario’s secondary school History curriculum, however, especially that which concerns the deep history of Turtle Island, is still almost exclusively based on the findings of Western scientific archaeology and methods of artifact interpretation generated by colonially-trained archaeologists. Writers of this curriculum have traditionally not included Indigenous worldviews, ways of knowing, and relationships with artifacts in course content, even as professional archaeologists, historians, and curators are moving to more collaborative research frameworks with Indigenous communities. This research project investigates what Indigenous archaeologies entail, and how Indigenous approaches to understanding archaeological artifacts in museum contexts (re)centre, (re)member, (re)cognize, and (re)present Indigenous ways of knowing to decolonize my teaching of the history curriculum. Since I am not an Indigenous person, the research method and paradigm of my research is a Western qualitative approach based on critical and decolonizing methodologies that is affected by and respectful of Indigenous methodologies. Specifically, I conduct fieldwork in a selection of museums organized by Indigenous archaeologists/educators to learn how Indigenous experts are using artifacts to narrate history. One goal of the fieldwork is to identify themes, concepts, and approaches that Indigenous educators have selected to represent Indigenous histories to diverse public audiences. My dissertation applies that learning to consider what it means to change how I teach the history curriculum that spans the time before colonization. Drawing on concepts of multivocality, storytelling, fencing, and Métissage, the study interprets museum galleries as research data and recommends new directions in teaching the history curriculum of the time before colonization that align with the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Calls to Action.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Story of a Course, School, First Language and Home: A Qualitative Discourse Analysis of the Voices of Refugee Students and their Teacher
    (2023-03-28) Duran, Marcela Sofia; Dippo, Donald A.
    This study, seeks to understand the pedagogical and ethical dilemmas of the instructor when teaching an online undergraduate education course on multiculturalism and multilingualism in educational contexts to refugee students living in UNHCR refugee camps in Kenya. It asks questions about first-language loss, longing for home, and schooling experiences as expressed in the writings of students in that education course. The theoretical framework of the dissertation is informed by an ethical, social justice pedagogical perspective, refugee studies, postcolonial studies related to linguistic imperialism, and theories of bilingualism, multilingualism, and second-language acquisition. The dissertation intends to create a space for pedagogical inquiry through autoethnographic reflection, reflexive teaching, and discourse analysis of student and teacher voices. The study hopes to contribute new knowledge related to questions about first-language maintenance and second-language acquisition in the schooling of children in refugee camps.  
  • ItemOpen Access
    Overcoming and Re-envisioning White Resistance to Antioppressive Teacher Education: Creating Transitional Spaces to Process Difficult Knowledge in Small Groups
    (2022-12-14) Singer, Jordan Elliott; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
    This dissertation argues that a fundamental rethinking of how Antioppressive teacher education views white teacher candidate (TC) learning is necessary to diminish what has been called white resistance. Examining the inadequate models and methods deployed to transform TC thinking about difference and Otherness reveals how teacher educators (TE) adherence to traditional paradigms contributes to their refusal to learn and change. The addition of Psychoanalytic insights into subjectivity, thinking and learning, it is argued, can mitigate TC resistance while enhancing student engagement and instructor pedagogy. These insights are then further refined to frame a transitional space (in a small group setting) wherein TC's cognitive and emotional struggles can be attended to ethically. The body of this work draws directly on TC's experience in the highly lauded Urban Diversity Teacher Education Program (UD). Using a variant of discourse analysis informed by cultural theory and psychosocially defined ambivalence, TC thinking and their learning processes are considered within the UD curriculum, TE pedagogy, course work, and small groups. One year after the initial study, interviews and focus groups with former preservice teachers augment the research data while providing timely reflections on how small group processing impacts social justice teacher education. An analysis of how the particularized learning dynamics in small groups are informed by considerable external and internal forces throughout teacher training follows. This applied research concludes that if a transitional space within small groups is developed with care, white resistance decreases, and overall engagement with equity pedagogy increases. Consequently, UD graduates are more likely to reverse the disappointing outcomes for racialized students that birthed anti-oppressive efforts in their inception. 
  • ItemOpen Access
    This Book Will Destroy You: A Critical Comparative Analysis of YA Heroines
    (2022-12-14) Malka, Natalie Rachel; Krasny, Karen A.
    Despite the progress the Young Adult literary genre has made to diversify their characters and stories, the representation of a female protagonist has remained formulaic and predictable. YA commonly centers heroines who embody characteristics associated with female likability, resulting in the loss of authentic representations of teenage girls. Characters who do not personify these archetypes are often regarded as foils to the loveable protagonist, leaving readers with the impression that only idealized girls deserve to have their narratives told. This thesis analyzes quintessential YA heroines – Bella Swan (Twilight) and Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games) – and compares them to YA author Courtney Summer’s protagonists, Parker (Cracked Up to Be), and Sadie (Sadie). This work challenges the makings of a YA protagonist and explores the representation of an “unlikeable” female character in order to provoke a broader understanding of their behaviour and actions, and still embrace them for it.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Pedagogies of Navigation: An Account of Difference
    (2022-12-14) Khan, Noah Yusuf Hassan; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
    The present thesis develops a pedagogy that responds to the finitude of the human, as approximated by its lived technological experiences. Prominent pedagogies that espouse rhizomic metaphysical conceptions are subjected to systematic doubt to determine whether they are consistent with these experiences. Then, these experiences are examined to discern the nature of sense-making from the lens of the individual, focusing heavily on the role of cognition. The author then furnishes an enactment of sense-making through the provision of a dialogue and commentary on both sense-making and the dialogue itself. It is found that the lived technological experience suggests a shift in pedagogical development away from metaphysical suppositions that divorce themselves from the lived technological experience and toward navigational considerations which, it is argued, more accurately reflect the lived technological experience. A pedagogy of navigation is then furnished that attempts to adequately reflect the lived technological experience.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Teaching Cultures: Teaching Orientations, Rewards and Social-Political Influences
    (2022-12-14) Fockler, Melissa Catherine-Anne; Alsop, Steven John
    For decades, scholars have studied the experiences of early childhood educators, schoolteachers, student teachers, professors, and so on. However, the experiences of teaching assistants (TAs) have largely been under-explored. By TAs, I mean graduate students who work part-time as educators, assisting undergraduate courses. In this research, I interview [N = 17] current graduate students at a university in southern Ontario, Canada, about their recent experiences working as TAs on campus. The purpose of this interviewing is to gain insight into what teaching activities TAs do, how and why, and how their broad commitments to environmental/sustainability education impact their teaching. From analyzing interview data, drawing on principles of grounded theory, I find my interview data supports, extends, and refutes how Lortie (2002) and followers (i.e., Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009) depict teaching cultures. Discussions of teaching cultures are situated in broader conversations of neoliberalism and sustainability. Research results are arranged in a didactic model, to help TAs, along with a broader audience of educational stakeholders, make more informed teaching decisions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Centering Girls' (Media-Making) Stories: A Pandemic Exploration of Video-Storytellers and their Practices, Personas, and Projects
    (2022-12-14) Terzopoulos, Tatyana Zofia; Jenson, Jennifer
    This interdisciplinary, feminist-informed research explores racialized tween and teen girls’ video-based storytelling and considers how extracurricular programs can support their media-making. Drawing from youth media cultures and media education scholarship, this work aligns with and builds upon research about community-based youth documentary media-making initiatives and limited yet pivotal scholarship that centres girls’—marginalized girls in particular—experiences, including as media-makers. It was further motivated by the prevailing lack of diverse representation in key creative and leadership roles in media industries, my experiences as a woman working in media, and the paucity of research on Canadian youth and their experiences learning about and making media. My inquiry was underpinned by feminist theory, public pedagogy, and feminist media. Utilizing a qualitative case study design, I designed and facilitated a virtual digital storytelling program in Spring 2021 of the pandemic; four ethnoracially-diverse and marginalized girl-identifying youth from Toronto participated in both the program and research study. Research methods included interviews, vlogs, participant-created media, observational footage, and researcher notes. Analysis involved immersing myself in each participant’s data to holistically consider the creative, technical, and social dimensions of her video-storytelling; I also coded interviews and vlogs to identify themes that united the participants. Inspired by Lange’s (2014) exploration of youth technical identities and Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (1983) narrative portraiture methodology, I crafted a video-storytelling “persona” for each participant, weaving in her own words and media project images. Next, I note the broader significance of relationships and connection as well as video storytelling-specific peer and mentor support for participants. I then discuss their video-making in relation to postfeminist-influenced and video-based social media ecologies and girls’ informal, self-directed media education. This research honours participants’ stories and critically reflects upon the wide-ranging nature of their video-storytelling experiences and approaches. It also offers initial recommendations for girl-centered programs that emphasize community, support skills development, and provide safer spaces for their media-making and learning. I advocate for girl-specific media-making communities of practice—particularly for marginalized girls—as necessary interventions in evolving media industries and culture to more fully include, support, reflect, and represent diverse populations of girls and women and their stories.
  • ItemOpen Access
    "Put Together": Black Women's Body Stories in Toronto, (Ad)dressing Identity and the Threads That Bind
    (2022-12-14) Andrew, Jillian Laura-Lee Bianca; Stanworth, Karen S.
    “Put Together”: Black Women’s Body Stories in Toronto, (Ad)dressing Identity & The Threads That Bind centers child and adult body stories shared by eight Black women, including the author, 29 to 39 years of age living in Toronto – one of the most diverse cities in the world. Historically, the lived experiences and ‘body talk’ of Black women and girls have been routinely marginalized and tangentially documented within dominant monochromatic body image literature which usually centers the experience of white women and girls. The geography of the seven participants is intentional as it further destabilizes the Americentric lens of fat studies and Black feminist scholarship by adding to the canon the stories of Toronto-based women who self-identify with both blackness and fatness : two embodiments often misperceived, misrepresented and constructed as excess(ive) in need of repair and regulation. Through a hybrid, intersectional framework, informed by tenets of fat studies, anti-racist, Black feminist thought, symbolic interactionism and sartorial scholarship this dissertation intends to demonstrate the socially constructed educational ‘societal curriculum’ – the everyday and systemic ‘good body, bad body’ lessons - learned through social interactions with significant and generalized others and through the symbolic and cultural currency of objects such as clothing and self-fashioning practices that help to shape how these participants think, feel and remember their bodies through the qualitative, unstructured interview. Their stories are thematically analyzed and the threads that bind and bound them are made apparent. Participants’ accommodation and resistance of normalized body ideals and social forces are explored. Particular attention is paid to their material self-representation as impression management through dress since respectability politics and appearance factor significantly in their body stories along with various activisms that help them ‘buck the system’ through self-definition and valuation. Participants’ raced, gendered, and sized body stories are shaped through their family, schooling, workplace, public space, intimate relationships, community activism and sartorial engagements among other key influencers and as “Put Together…” unfolds, their experiences with racism, sexism, class bias, fat phobia and other intersectional forms of body-based discrimination, harassment and gender-based violence, and the mental health implications of these embodied traumas are laid bare. Traditionally, it is postulated that Black women have little worries about their weight, their bodies and are more welcoming of fatness. However, “Put Together…” demonstrates the falsehood of this essentializing assumption and addresses the paucity in the research. The “double whammy” of fatness and Blackness and the accompanying stereotypes set up a scenario where the Black women in this research are arguably engaged in a heightened awareness – a ‘triple consciousness’ of size, gender and race corporeality. This qualitative research can support educators, activists and policy pertaining to appearance-based discrimination, equity and inclusivity. It also supports the need for more inclusive sizing, good quality and affordably-priced clothing options for fat bodies. Body-based bullying, size discrimination and anti-Black racism are inextricably linked in this study. The outcome of that to future studies can be more comprehensive, culturally-relevant and size diverse research, images, analyses and conversations on body image which includes race and representation, in school curriculum, in workplace human rights, heath and wellness and in fashion industry policies and practice for instance.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Herbert Marcuse, Subjectivity and how Eco-Narrative can Provide New Pathways of Education
    (2022-08-08) Bannon, Michael John Oldfield; Alsop, Steven John
    My project examines how Herbert Marcuse’s notion of subjectivity can create a space in narrative fiction to read the relationship between humanity and the environment with an ecocritical lens. I then advocate for a reimagining of narrative fiction’s role in environmental education, and discuss how these understandings can be turned into praxis. The two texts I explore are Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o A Grain of Wheat and The Lamp at Noon by Sinclair Ross. These texts present two different yet related narrative stories in which people collide with the natural world, and in this relationship there are significant opportunities to expand our own understanding of environmental subjectivity. I delve into the space where humanity and nature meet, and what it means to consider nature as the other, independently of humanity’s wants and desires. Marcuse provides a theoretical yet active perspective of radical subjectivity, and this allows these narratives to inform on how to build a more equitable relationship with the environment.
  • ItemOpen Access
    "Cruel Optimism," Burnt-out-souls, and the Ruptured Fantasy of Education
    (2022-08-08) Azzarello, Louise; DiPaolantonio, Mario G.
    This dissertation conducts a philosophical political inquiry into ways in which the “pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) infiltrates and impedes public education and thus generates a “ruptured fantasy” of education. My project seeks to critically expose an exhausted depressive sensibility, promoted and perpetuated through the logic of neoliberalism, which gives way to what Byung-Chul Han (2015) terms the “burnt-out-soul.” Late critical theorist Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” offers a conceptual framework through which I critically consider the “double bind” induced through attachments to education. I particularly focus on the pernicious effects that result when education forges optimistic attachments, via the pervasiveness of “critical pedagogy,” to enact social transformation in our increasingly menacing times. “Cruel optimism” in education, I argue, is not only instituted through neoliberal rationality but also through mechanisms of neoliberalism, which exacerbate the pre-existing structural and systemic violence historically normalized in education (violence perpetuated on the basis of racism, classism, ability, gender, and through the colonial project). Tracking the trappings of an optimistic relation to education from an interdisciplinary perspective I wonder what it takes for educators to counter this wearing down of our souls that engenders a sense of hopelessness, and which impedes the “educational” (Di Paolantonio 2016, 2018; Biesta, 2013, 2018, 2020). Drawing on theorists both within and outside of education, and on my more than twenty-five years of experience as a high school educator, I consider the following questions: What happens when it is our “optimism” that provokes the cruelty of despair? What are the depressive repercussions of the “soul at work” (Berardi, 2009)? How do critical educators survive as they attempt to disrupt, fight, and hope for possibilities within public education while existing in a constant state of exhaustion and despair as they “manage” and negotiate education’s compromised conditions? Ultimately, I seek to think through how the “educational” can appear only in brief, fleeting moments given education’s present conditions. Finally, in the last part of the dissertation, I offer my concept of thinking with images. Thinking with images, I argue, provokes pedagogical moments of interruption that give students time and space to attend to what they see, thus affording them the chance to think differently about the violence they live in these wretched times when the “past not yet past” (Sharpe, 2016) impacts them daily.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Forms of Capital and Intergenerational Change in Higher Education Access: A Case Study of Aranguez
    (2022-08-08) Ramlal, Sabita; Trilokekar, Roopa
    The study explores higher education access in a marginalised community within a post-colonial context, specifically, why access was low given supportive government policies. The case study of Aranguez, a former sugar-cane plantation in Trinidad, involved interviews with descendants of East Indian indentured labourers of all ages, which allowed insight into intergenerational changes in education and impacts of policy shifts. The conceptual framework combined Bordieuan analytical concepts of social and cultural capital and postcolonial theory to analyse the data. Findings show a critical role for the mother and extended family (kin and non-kin) in first generation students' transitions to higher education. History, economics, and politics shape education policy formation and enactment from colonial to the post-colonial context, which provide new insights for critical education policy research. First, it expands our understanding of how intersections of race, class, religion, and geographical location operate as axes of marginalisation and discrimination resulting in inequitable access to education. Second, findings demonstrate how colonial legacies persist in education policy and the education system, operating to reproduce social inequality. In addition, a culture of violence lingers in the community along with intergenerational trauma, which have negative implications for educational access and life trajectories. The research challenges the global discourse to expand higher education in developing countries, as community members prefer informal training and and self-employment without formal higher education credentials. Findings demonstrate a need for education policy fit for the local context, addressing issues such as outreach and engagement of families; recognition of informal training; legacies of post-colonial trauma; brain drain; and the need for decolonisation of education. Keywords: higher education access, social capital, cultural capital, post-colonial, Bourdieu, indentured labourer, intergenerational trauma, education policy