Geography

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/27574

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Access status: Open Access ,
Mercury Supply at Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mines in Africa: Actors, Distribution and Networks
(2025-11-11) Achamah, Felicia; Zalik, Anna
Through a regional case study of Ghana, this thesis explores the role mercury plays in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and broader agrarian livelihoods, in rural sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it seeks to introduce a fresh perspective to the debate on mercury in the region’s ASM sector, which has focused predominantly on the environmental and health-related impacts linked to its widespread usage. With ASM responsible for close to 40 percent of global anthropogenic emissions of mercury, donors and international NGOs have pushed to minimize – and where possible, eliminate altogether – its use. Findings reveal that mercury distribution and supply networks are firmly entrenched, populated by actors who are also embedded in the circuits linked to gold production at ASM sites. It is hoped that findings such as those reported here will help to stimulate a critical reflection on mercury management in the region’s ASM sector.
Access status: Open Access ,
Clarifying the Role of Wildfires and Permafrost Thaw in Brownification in a Shallow Boreal Lake Using Paleolimnological Analyses of Diatom Assemblage Change
(2025-11-11) Wu, Thomas; Korosi, Jennifer B.
Permafrost thaw in discontinuous permafrost peatlands has been linked to enhanced export of chromophoric dissolved organic matter (cDOM) into lakes, reducing water clarity through ‘lake brownification’. In the Dehcho region (Northwest Territories, Canada), diatom (siliceous algae, Class Bacillariophyceae) assemblages in small, shallow lakes have been shown to be structured along a cDOM gradient, indicating that lake brownification can be inferred from subfossil diatoms in lake sediment cores. This thesis presents the results of a diatom-based paleolimnological study of a small, shallow Dehcho lake covering the last ~300 years. Results indicate a shift beginning circa ~1920s from epiphytic and large-sized diatom taxa characteristic of low cDOM lakes (Denticula kuetzingii, Navicula) towards increased abundance of Pseudostaurosira brevistriata and Stauroforma exiguiformis associated with higher cDOM. The timing of this shift coincided with an anomalous sediment geochemical signature potentially indicative of a drought or wildfire that likely initiated an accelerated loss of permafrost.
Access status: Open Access ,
Searching for Belonging and Living with Saudade: Emotional Geographies of Brazilian LGBTQ+ Migration to Canada
(2025-11-11) Martins Cavalcanti Furtado, Leonardo; Gilbert, Liette
Many LGBTQ+ Brazilians drastically remap their lives by emigrating to Canada, having often been denied place-making and the safe (re)production of their queer identities in their homelands. This research traces such northern geopolitical migration trajectories and seeks to understand them at the intersection of queer and emotional geographies. Particular attention is directed to interpreting the feeling of saudade, a cultural emotion specific to the Lusophone sphere. Drawing upon 14 semi-structured interviews, a focus group, and 29 photographs of objects that symbolize saudade, I operationalize the multi-scalar relations between the queer Brazilian body and the home, the nation, and transnational flows. The findings of this research outline those relationships, highlight spatially contingent and transforming othering processes, and explores the emotional processes that lead to a queer Brazilian diasporic identity of in-betweenness, physically in Canada, but oriented towards queer Brazil.
Access status: Open Access ,
Staging an Olympic Myth: Democracy and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics
(2025-11-11) Roberts, Jacob Clark; Wood, Patricia Burke
My research examines how the discursive articulations of the Vancouver Olympics contributes to a spatial order, explored through a theoretical framework informed by Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy. Rancière (1999) explores politics as an aesthetic, spatial exercise, radically framed through equality. An Olympics case study, employing this theoretical frame, invites an emancipatory method to fill in the gap of the post-political literature and critically assess my research question: what is the status of democracy in Vancouver during the Games bidding and preparations phase? Interviews with Olympic volunteers, protestors, a city councillor, and organizing committee members have articulated the Games and urban image through themes of inevitability of the Olympic event, via aestheticization of particular neoliberalized transit infrastructure. This thesis interrogates the politics of neoliberalization in Vancouver, how urban space is (re)produced undemocratically, and discursively investigates how common-sense statements about the city are constituted through non-violent means and lack a disciplinary command.
Access status: Open Access ,
Assessing the Impacts of Recent, Intense Permafrost Thaw Slumping on Lakes in the Mackenzie Delta Uplands, Northwest Territories, Canada
(2025-11-11) O'Hagan, Claire Madeleine; Thienpont, Joshua
The Western Canadian Arctic is warming at a rate much more rapid than the rest of the globe. As a result of the increasing temperatures, this is influencing the rate of permafrost thaw throughout the Arctic. One of the most dramatic features that develop from permafrost thaw are retrogressive thaw slump, which are rotational landslide features that develop along the shore of impacted lakes. The terrestrial material from the slump is transported to the adjacent lake, impacting the water quality and health of the lake. In the Mackenzie Delta, due to rapid increases in temperatures, the rate of slump growth as well as the size of slumps are increasing. Due to this increase in slump activity in the area, this research focuses on the impacts of intense retrogressive thaw slump activity in the Mackenzie Delta region. Using a paleolimnological and remote- sensing approach, this research aims to assess the impact that large, highly active slump activity has on the ecosystem of adjacent lakes. Sediment core data taken from highly active slumps in the area allow us to examine the impacts that the slump have on the aquatic environment by looking at the effects on carbon and mercury dynamics within the system. Remote sensing analysis of the slump affected lakes allow us to assess the trends in turbidity in both slump and non slump impacted lakes, to assess differences in the patterns. This research is important as temperatures are expected to continue to increase in the western Canadian Arctic, and as such understanding the effects continued warming is having on slump development and slump impacted lakes is critical for assessing the health of the lakes throughout the region.
Access status: Open Access ,
Paleolimnological Study of Chironomidae (Diptera) Assemblage Responses to Multiple Stressors in Lake Nipigon (Northwestern Ontario)
(2025-11-11) Adano, Randelle Cheyanna Ong; Korosi, Jennifer B.
Lake Nipigon is a large, deep lake in northwestern Ontario that has experienced over a century of environmental disturbance linked to hydroelectric development, mining, and climate change. This thesis applied paleolimnological methods to reconstruct historical chironomid assemblages and their responses to multiple stressors in nearshore areas, as limnological data for Lake Nipigon is only sparsely available. Core surveys conducted show generalist and moderately tolerant taxa that suggest moderately warm, vegetated, and nutrient-rich conditions in the nearshore areas, with generally favourable oxygen conditions. Chironomid subfossil assemblage changes in Gull Bay were relatively muted, while recent increases in the warm-adapted taxon Stempellina in South Bay suggest a response to warming in the nearshore environment. South Bay also documented declines in cold, oxygen-sensitive Heterotrissocladius grimshawi-type. This study established the first paleolimnological baseline for Lake Nipigon, which is intended to provide a foundation for future Indigenous-led lake monitoring efforts that reflect both western scientific and Indigenous knowledge systems.
Access status: Open Access ,
Assessing Spatial Patterns and Temporal Trends in Lake Response to Rapid Permafrost Thaw in the Scotty Creek Basin (Northwest Territories, Canada)
(2025-11-11) Coleman, Kristen Amelia; Korosi, Jennifer; Remmel, Tarmo
Aquatic ecosystems at the southern limit of permafrost are highly sensitive to climate warming, including dramatic alterations of the landscape resulting from thawing of permafrost. In the southern Northwest Territories (NT), permafrost is typically restricted to forested peat plateaus, that are elevated above the surrounding wetland complex. As mean annual air temperatures approach 0°C, permafrost thaw can result in collapsed peat plateaus and waterlogged trees. These landscape changes can alter the connections between water bodies and the amount of terrestrial organic matter that enters these ecosystems, potentially contributing to the “browning” of lakes. Understanding how lakes in the southern NT have been responding to the acceleration of permafrost degradation is challenged by the scarcity of monitoring records. The Scotty Creek basin, southern NT, is an ideal location to study linkages among shallow lake limnology, landscape hydrology, and landscape change in thawing permafrost peatlands as three decades of field research has provided a unique long-term perspective on watershed changes rarely available for remote regions. For this dissertation, paleolimnological methods were applied to indirectly reconstruct long-term environmental change, using chemical and biological proxy data preserved in lake sediments from lakes in or near the Scotty Creek basin. Modern diatom ecology was assessed to improve diatom-based paleolimnological inferences of changes over time, and applied in a multi-proxy paleolimnological approach to investigate regional lake ecosystem changes over the past few hundred years. Two key findings emerged from the research: (1) dissolved organic carbon (DOC) quality, rather than DOC quantity, was a key driver of spatio-temporal variability in lake change; and (2) most lakes experienced only modest changes despite the widespread prevalence of permafrost degradation. This research presents a necessary step for integrating lakes into the ecohydrological research network at the Scotty Creek Research Station.
Access status: Open Access ,
Death and Resistance: Queerness in the Face of Violence and Impunity in Guerrero, Mexico
(2025-11-11) Payne, William John; Hyndman, Jennifer
Mexico stands out as a place impacted by anti-queer/trans violence, and the state of Guerrero is the site of a disturbing iteration of such aggression. Recent political struggle for LGBTQ rights there has paralleled a dramatic increase in violence linked to organized crime, with significant impacts for sexual and gender minorities. While a small literature on anti-queer/trans violence in places experiencing political violence and armed conflict exists, it has ignored places where such violence links to organized crime, impunity, and state complicity. Furthermore, this literature has largely failed to engage with two other bodies of work: the study of gender-based violence and of sexuality in such contexts. This dissertation addresses these gaps. The methodological choices guiding this project are rooted in a rejection of a myopic anthropological lens based on tropes that Orientalize Mexico as a distant, other place engraved with patterns of desire tied to tourism and ‘endemic’ violence. Drawing on a poststructuralist feminist epistemology and guided by feminist, queer, and Latinx scholarship regarding geopolitics and transnationalism, this project takes a geographical and critical human rights approach that recognizes how feminicide and homonationalist narratives about Mexico link to this anti-queer/trans violence. A commitment to constructivist Grounded Theory ensures that theorization emerges from the research findings. Research tools include participant-observation, in-depth interviews with key informants with knowledge of anti-queer/trans violence, hemerographic (media) analysis, and an in-depth study of a visual archive of Pride events in Guerrero. This dissertation makes three arguments that contribute to a queer theory of violence: First, anti-queer/trans violence is an iteration of feminicide, formed through impunity. Second, anti-queer/trans violence is linked to the political violence of organized crime and related state impunity, which has produced a version of queer/trans activism that has a contradictory, even perverse relationship with the state. And third, the transnational dimensions of this violence established through continental geographies of power with linkages to organized crime, drug trafficking, tourism, extractive activities and geopolitical relationships, further sharpen the danger faced by queer and trans persons through the creation of what I call a sallyport, a sort of metaphorical enclosure that magnifies their vulnerability.
Access status: Open Access ,
Characterizing Boreal Forest Fire Disturbance Boundaries Through Space And Time In Ontario
(2025-07-23) Keshmiri, Nadia; Remmel, Tarmo K.
The Ontario boreal forest contains vast natural resources but is increasingly threatened by wildland fires, which are becoming more frequent and affecting larger areas due to climate change. In response, this thesis compares wildland fire boundaries derived from vegetation index slopes with those provided by BorealDB a newly developed database that compiles consistent disturbance maps from 1972 to the present. BorealDB includes various attribute combinations and an ensemble confidence measure that shows how often different data sources agree. By examining which attribute combinations produce fire boundaries that most closely match remote sensing data, this research offers practical guidance for BorealDB users on selecting the most reliable disturbance points for their analyses.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Caregiver to Personal Support Worker: Canada's Caregiver Programs and Labour Market Segmentation Among Filipina Women in Toronto
(2025-07-23) Pagaling, Nikki Mary; Kelly, Philip
The lowest rung of the Canadian healthcare system is occupied by those categorized as personal support workers (PSWs). Despite their important contributions to Canada’s healthcare system, this work is stigmatized, devalued and characterized by multiple dimensions of precarity. It is also a labour segment that is increasingly differentiated by gender, race, and citizenship, with Filipina immigrants accounting for 30% of immigrants in this workforce. Recent scholarship has drawn connections between Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) and the overrepresentation of Filipina immigrants in PSW roles. While these studies demonstrate how most caregiver migrants eventually transition out of caregiving, many remain in a narrow set of low-wage, “low-skilled” occupations, with PSW work emerging as a notable choice. By centering the experiences of Filipina PSWs in Toronto who migrated to Canada as live-in caregivers, this thesis explores how the caregiver-to-PSW pathway is constituted in the local labour market and within the lifeworlds of Filipina former caregivers. Using a feminist economic geography framework, this research calls attention to: 1) the social and institutional mechanisms that construct a pathway towards PSW labour; and 2) the racialized and gendered discourses that construct idealized PSW subjectivities and the ways in which they overlap with notions of Filipina identity. Key theoretical concepts include the social embeddedness of labour markets, embodiment and interpellation, and citizenship. I situate this research within the wider institutional landscape of Canada’s temporary migrant caregiver programs and the gendered politics of transnational labour migration in the Philippines to illustrate the context in which Filipina women come to view PSW work as a viable and suitable post-caregiver program career.
Access status: Open Access ,
Guano Rain and Growing Pain: Co-Nesting Dynamics of Double-Crested Cormorants and Black-Crowned Night-Herons at Tommy Thompson Park
(2025-07-23) Weiderick, Baillie Marie; Podur, Justin
This study investigates the co-nesting dynamics between double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) and black-crowned night-herons (Nycticorax nycticorax) in Tommy Thompson Park, Toronto, Canada, from 1992 to 2023. Linear mixed models with Bayesian inference were used to examine the impacts of cormorant abundance, nest density, management practices, and environmental factors on night-heron population growth. The strongest and only statistically significant relationship was a positive association between cormorant and night-heron growth indices. Results showed substantial uncertainty in the effects of most variables on night-heron growth indices, with wide credible intervals for nest densities, night-heron road proximity, and management activities. Nest densities of both species and proximity to roads had minimal effects on night-heron colony growth, with posterior means near zero. Management activities showed a slight positive but non-significant effect on night-herons. The study revealed that while cormorant population growth generally benefited night-herons, there was high uncertainty in parameter estimates, potentially due to small sample sizes and ecosystem complexity.
Access status: Open Access ,
Chronically Excluded? Public Toilet Access for Youth with Gastrointestinal Illnesses
(2025-07-23) Kiriazis, Stefanie; Bain, Alison
This thesis explores the intersection between public infrastructure, health and youth geographies, time geography, and sensuous and emotional embodiments to highlight public toilets as a critical yet often overlooked urban space. Through these intersections, this thesis not only spotlights public toilets as central nodes in everyday life, but also the differential ways these spaces impact populations who rely on them most for medical needs. Through a feminist methodological approach that employs semi-structured interviews and space-time diaries, this thesis asks: How do the daily mobility patterns of youth with chronic gastrointestinal illnesses depend on the spatial and temporal availability and accessibility of public and private toilet facilities? This thesis investigates the constraints to mobility and wellness that these individuals face when met with inadequate and inaccessible toilet infrastructure, with a case study in the Greater Toronto Area. Encompassing both suburbs and city centre, the research sample illustrates the infrastructural disparities between dense and sparse landscapes. From the ‘in-betweens’ from one toilet to the next, to the sensuous and emotional experiences felt within these spaces themselves, this research investigates how the everyday lifeworlds of chronically ill youth – through work, school, and play – can be enabled and disabled by the quality of infrastructure they are met with, and the coping mechanisms they employ to aid their journeys and experiences, attributing to overall wellness.
Access status: Open Access ,
An Immigrant Neighbourhood as a Site of Planetary Urbanization: The Case of St. James Town, Toronto
(2025-07-23) Formanowicz, Dominik Tadeusz; Mensah, Joseph
Immigration is a contested topic in a global reality defined by the spatiality of nation-states. However, in the case of South-North mobility, the public debate usually overlooks the role of colonial legacies and capitalist dependencies in shaping the patterns and trajectories of migration. On the scale of the Global North’s cities, narratives tend to revolve around the immigrant enclaves as problematic or dangerous. This dissertation informs the debate with a qualitative overview of the neighbourhood of St. James Town in Toronto, an area characterized by a strong immigrant presence. Analyzing the spatiality of immigrants on the scale of the nation-state, the city and the neighbourhood itself, it employs the conceptual framework of planetary urbanization to explain the role of newcomers as agents creating and maintaining global flows of capital and ideas, actively taking part in the production of space in Canada and far beyond it. At the same time, this work examines the spatiality of an immigrant enclave as an expression of a settler colonial nation-state, highlighting the vital role of spaces such as St. James Town in global and domestic patterns of precarity and exploitation. Portraying the neighbourhood in a dynamic moment of change, both in terms of infrastructural interventions as well as population structure, this dissertation highlights the resilience and community-formation skills of newcomers as well as the great cost of spatial and social adaptation. It also points out the shortcomings of the planetary urbanization concept, underscoring the necessity to include post-colonial criticisms and a nuanced, multi-faceted role of human mobility in explaining the works of global capitalism.
Access status: Open Access ,
Mining Networks In The Making: River Sand And Stone Mining In South Sulawesi, Indonesia
(2025-04-10) Medina De Loera, Wendy Alejandra; Vandergeest, Peter
This dissertation examines the factors and processes that have shaped sand and stone mining activities in the Jeneberang river, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia from the 1970s to 2022. My focus is the making of “mining networks” which, following Actor Network Theory, I frame as socio-material associations/processes that take provisional forms. Like other social scientific research on sand mining, I consider various political, economic and sociocultural aspects that shape who participates in mining, how and why. Additionally, I examine the material dimensions of both the geographical area that I study and the mined river materials to provide a spatially grounded analysis of the regional political economy of sand and stone mining in the Jeneberang river. I also analyze the actions that local people undertake to shape how mining happens so that they gain some benefits. Thus, this dissertation is grounded in terms of sociocultural dynamics and political economic processes but it is also place-based in terms of material features and changes. My research questions query how material and human factors shape mining networks and with what implications for local people and local mining businesses. To account for the agency of the material and people in shaping socio-material and political economic outcomes, I draw on a materiality approach and the moral economy framework. I combine insights from recent social scientific research on sand mining, critical resource geography’s focus on materiality, political ecology’s ideas on the relationship between materiality and resource access, political economy of mining’s focus on social mobilization and resistance processes, and the moral economy framework. I argue that material elements —including the river, water, sand, stones, topography— and human elements —such as the actions of local people— actively participate in a continuous shaping of mining networks. I also put forward the idea that mining networks can be better understood as “in the making” rather than as end products. The dissertation contributes to the sand mining literature which has generally approached the material aspects of mining settings as the contexts within which social phenomena unfold and has yet to further explore the actions of local people in shaping how mining happens.
Access status: Open Access ,
Investigating The Impact Of Cryogenic Landslides On Lakes In The Eastern Mackenzie Delta, NT, Canada Using A Paleolimnological Framework
(2025-04-10) Carroll, Victoria Marie; Thienpont, Joshua
The Canadian Northwest is warming at an accelerated rate compared to other Arctic regions, the rest of Canada, and the rest of the globe. Enhanced temperatures can influence the development of thermokarst features, including cryogenic landsliding, which can impact downstream limnological systems physically, chemically, and biologically. In the summer of 2023, sediment cores were collected from three landslide-impacted lakes and one control lake at the eastern edge of the Mackenzie Delta (Northwest Territories, Canada). They were analyzed for total mercury, nitrogen, and carbon content. This research shows how cryogenic landslides can impact the conditions of receiving waterbodies in the eastern Mackenzie Delta, which is particularly important because permafrost thaw can affect people, wildlife, and natural environmental processes. Researchers, ecosystem managers, and land users can use this paleoenvironmental data to support informed decision-making regarding the trajectories of lake ecosystem change associated with terrestrial mass movement into lakes following permafrost thaw.
Access status: Open Access ,
Triggered Town: Situating Communal Violence And Dissonance In The Wake Of The Gujarat Earthquake
(2025-04-10) Chowdhary, Misba; Wood, Patricia
This thesis investigates the intertwined narratives of the 2001 Gujarat, India earthquake and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Ahmedabad. It examines the impact of these events on the city's urban population to explore the intersections of natural disasters, religion, caste violence, and rapid urbanization. Focusing on the rise of Ahmedabad's middle class, the study uses personal interviews with Hindu upper-castes and upper-middle-class earthquake victims to explore their evolving attitudes towards the environment, state politics, inter-community relationships and political amnesia. And more specifically, it seeks to delve into how this section of civil society who were impacted by both events, albeit differently, have interpreted and responded to them over the long term. It reveals how memories can be shaped and reconstructed with effective state-propagated distortions which in turn have led to widespread denial of social realities and contributed to then-chief minister Narendra Modi’s electoral victories. Over two decades, the influence of the Sangh Parivar and political leader Narendra Modi has fostered economic pride and aspirations among these citizens, overshadowing the city's traumatic seismic history together with religious, class and caste divides. As increasing climate induced disasters loom over India together with authoritarian supremacist threats to India's secular democracy, this research aims to highlight the potential contemporary crises that inland urban metropolises such as Ahmedabad are likely to face given their tumultuous environmental and political histories.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Affective Geographies Of Social Reproduction: The Case Of Athens Under Austerity
(2025-04-10) Katsikana, Mantha Alkisti; Peake, Linda
This dissertation titled “Affective geographies of social reproduction: the case of Athens under austerity”, explores the ways women’s and feminized subjects’ socially reproductive labor, in the context of everyday life and solidarity organizing in Athens, is socio-spatially performed, organized, and experienced under austerity. The dissertation introduces Athens as a locus of original knowledge production, centering social reproduction and affect in research on the affective dimensions of the austerity ‘crisis’, and on spatialized processes of resistance and anti-capitalist commoning against austerity urbanism. The dissertation covers the period from 2005 to 2021, providing an alternative, expanded timeline of austerity in the Athenian context, focusing on the lives of women and feminized subjects living, working and organizing in its underprivileged downtown neighborhoods: Omonia, Exarcheia, Sepolia Agios Panteleimonas, Gkyzi, Kypseli, Ano Patisia and Kato Patisia. Through its research questions, the dissertation addresses: the ways everyday socially productive labor, performed by women and feminized subjects, is vital to placemaking and the right to the city in Athens; the way women and feminized subjects navigate, process and produce the Athenian urban through affective, emotional, relational, and embodied understandings of the self and community in the city-in-crisis; and they ways women’s and feminized subjects everyday struggles for survival over social reproduction, and against austerity and neoliberalism, inform expanded understandings of the political and of the right to the city. Within the context of feminist and critical urban geography, the dissertation answers these questions by synthesizing a theoretical framework of social reproduction and affect in a context of decolonial knowledge production and critical historiography, utilizing digital geohumanities methods to analyze primary data from fieldwork conducted between June 2021 to April 2022.
Access status: Open Access ,
Platform Labour, Migration, And Resistance: Organizing Against Hyper-Exploitation In Paris And Toronto's Food Delivery Industries
(2025-04-10) Baril, Emile; Tufts, Steven
This doctoral thesis combines empirical research and theoretical innovations aimed at comprehending the dynamics of platform labour within advanced-capitalist economies. Through case studies in Paris, France, and Toronto, Canada, the thesis contributes to the evolving landscape of platform labour studies, migration studies, and labour geography. The over-representation of racialized immigrants engaged in platform food delivery has attracted significant attention from both academia and mainstream media, notably in Toronto with international students from India and in Paris with sans-papiers from Africa. Focusing specifically on migration and working conditions, this study unveils hyper-precarity in Euro-American cities. The primary objective of the thesis is to provide a new perspective that includes immigration and citizenship within current discourse on platform labour. Drawing inspiration from critical urban studies, migration studies, and science and technology studies, the research introduces two conceptual propositions: i) “citizen-rentier-ship”, designed to elucidate how various stakeholders benefit from precarious citizenship status, and ii) a “relational comparison” of platform labour resistance, offering insights into the evolution of the unrest against platform labour exploitation—a crucial facet of urban development. The thesis is based on extensive interviews with food riders, workers, spokespersons, and other key actors, shedding light on their capacity for self-organization within advanced capitalist societies. By exploring strategies, limitations, and the dimensions of resistance—both digital and physical—through interactions with riders and individuals who resisted deactivation, low wages, and algorithmic management, the research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by these workers. The case studies place emphasis on migrant workers’ perspectives. They reshape ongoing debates about global platforms by centering attention on the bottom ends of labour markets. In conclusion, the study contends that the struggles of migrant workers are deeply entwined with labour laws, immigration policies, misclassification practices, and urban policies in France and Canada.
Access status: Open Access ,
Walking Potatoes & Wilder-Beasts: An Examination Of The Socio-Ecological Relationship Between Humans And Mammals In Urban Agriculture
(2024-11-07) Buckvold-Beirne, Elle Clare; Podur, Justin
This project explores the positive and negative interactions and conflicts that arise between the people and mammals working, visiting, and living in urban farms and community gardens. This involved an anonymous survey of people that work and grow in the research sites, and the use of trail cameras to capture the mammals that visited the sites. The study examined two urban agricultural sites from August to November 2022, in Toronto, ON: one urban farm and one community garden, both with proximity to urban wildlife habitat. Growers have a complicated, nuanced relationship with the various species living in and benefitting from these miniature agricultural landscapes. Trail cameras at both sites captured numerous species, as well as several individuals who made repeated visits. Conflicts at both sites arose from the eating and spoiling of crops, and damage to infrastructure by wildlife, but some participants felt positively about their interactions with some species.
Access status: Open Access ,
Consciousness and Action among Auto Workers in India: The Maruti Movement, 2007-2017
(2024-11-07) Pati, Charvaak; Das, Raju J.
This dissertation is a study of the dialectical relation between class consciousness and collective action among auto workers in India. Specifically, it examines how the existing state of class consciousness shapes and, in turn, is shaped by class struggle in the context of the militant working class struggle in Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL), India’s largest carmaker. This dialectic of consciousness and action among the Maruti workers is shaped by workers’ working and living conditions, their own political organisations, and interventions by the institutions of the state. There are distinctive political barriers to class consciousness and class struggle such as caste, ethnicity and regional identities. Yet, there are objective economic and political conditions such as low wages and denial of trade union rights which have the potential to weaken these political barriers without undermining the importance of these identities for the working class. This dissertation argues that in the absence of political organisation/s imbued with a political consciousness that underscores the centrality of capitalism and the capitalist state and the limits (both material and discursive) they put on working class struggle and consciousness, it is not possible to scale up place-specific and plant-based militant trade union struggles.

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