Sociology

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/27586

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The Migratory Diagnosis: How the Refugee Role is Making People Sick
(2025-11-11) Mozafari, Farnoush; Cavanagh, Sheila L.
The present-day refugee claimant is statistically at risk of encountering pre-peri-post migratory trauma (Hynie 2018) and is often pigeonholed as ‘traumatized’ by Global North countries (Summerfield 1999; Weine & Henderson 2005; Gass 2014; Pupavac 2001, 2008, 2012). In an effort to de-pathologize refugees, a psychosocial perspective has been offered by trauma critics to problematize the trauma-centric understanding of the refugee to highlight the refugee’s ‘resilience’ (Maier & Straub 2011; Silove et al. 1998, 2000; Summerfield 2001; Papadopoulos 2002). Despite this, disconcerting data shows that refugees are “highly vulnerable to mental disorders even years after resettling in a high-income country” (Henkelmann, de Best, Deckers, Jensen, Shahab, Elzinga & Molendijk 2020: 6). My work seeks to address this urgent call by closely examining the trauma-ridden “apolitical suffering body” (Ikanda 2018: 582) of the ascribed role, ‘the refugee’. Through a retroactive analysis of clinical case notes from my clinical practice, which utilizes a resilience-based approach, I develop a therapeutic typology of refugeeness whereby I identify unaddressed, and potentially reinforced (through applied resilience models) tenets of refugeness, where such a typology is not available. A central claim is explained through what I call the migratory diagnosis, which asserts that psychiatric and psychoanalytic approaches to refugee diagnosis and treatment reframes the refugee’s experiences around migration-induced loss and the (un)successful mourning of a pre-migratory self. The migratory diagnosis includes the psychosocial model of resilience, which espouses “strengths based approaches” (Hutchinson & Dorsett 2012: 66) to supplant the traditional trauma-labelling “deficits approach” (Betancourt & Khan 2008; Wessells 2009). Although well-intentioned, rewriting the script from ‘trauma’ to ‘resilience’ simply supplants a trauma ascription with a resilience one. Ascription-assignment is the crux of the problem we are exploring, as it reinforces sickness. Herein lies the trauma trap. This trap reveals that trauma critics from the psychosocial perspective, alongside psychoanalysis, are isomorphic to the field of psychiatry which endorses the PTSD diagnosis. These seemingly diverse therapeutic approaches promote the internalization and reification of the refugee role for the migrant, creating a migratory mind that acts as a blueprint for ‘successful’ and ‘integrative’ behaviour in the exile country that actually causes negative conditions of refugeeness.
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Beyond Resistance: Futurities and Carceral Logics of Black Worldlessness
(2025-11-11) Anane-Bediakoh, Beatrice; Kyriakides, Christopher
In scholarly and policy discourses on socio-spatial patterns and Black well-being in Canada, little attention has been paid to how the spatialization of blackness, at the intersection of race, class, and carceral logics, shapes the lived experiences, expressive capacities, and futurities of Black residents in racialized neighbourhoods. This dissertation interrogates how Black life is both constrained and creatively negotiated within geographies marked by surveillance, neglect, and containment. Grounded in Black Radical Thought, Critical Race Theory, Critical Urban Studies, Black Geographies, postcolonial critique, and carceral studies, I examine the tactics of self-making, strategies of reclaiming Black life, and the envisioning and materialization of Black futurities among Black residents navigating what I theorize as Black worldlessness in racialized neighbourhoods within Toronto and the Region of Peel, Ontario. Based on 17 semi-structured interviews with self-identified Black residents (aged 18–57) across Toronto, Brampton, Caledon, and Mississauga, this study investigates how internalized and externalized racial-spatial constraints shape practices of belonging, subjectivity, and futurity. I demonstrate that dominant urban narratives, shaped by media, planning discourse, and state policy, deploy anti-Black frameworks that index Black life to social death, thereby legitimizing punitive interventions while erasing Black subjectivity and interior life from spatial imaginaries. In response, I introduce the Quiet, as mobilized by Kevin Quashie (2012), as an analytic of interiority: a contemplative, affective reservoir that Black residents draw upon to navigate the psychic and material dimensions of Black life. This inner world serves as a site of both refusal and possibility. Through this framework, I identify three experiential categories: (1) residents Quietly Holding Ground, who are constrained, but not fully, by the internalization of anti-black stigma and systemic abandonment; (2) residents Moving Ground, who mobilize interior capacities and external supports to envision lives beyond the terms of Black worldlessness; and (3) residents Making Ground, who remain in racialized neighbourhoods by choice, forging transfigurative futures through acts of interior sovereignty and collective care. Ultimately, I argue that Black life in racialized geographies cannot be apprehended solely through paradigms of resistance or structural domination. Instead, this work demands an analytic that centers Black aliveness, an orientation to being expressed through relations, dreaming, refusal, contemplation, and heterogeneity, as a legitimate mode of existence, as is. While anti-black spatial orders structure the external world, they do not exhaust Black lifeworlds. Attending to the practices through which Black communities envision and enact futurities, even within zones of abandonment, reveals a richer cartography of Black being, one that unsettles the epistemological limits of urban and carceral thought. This study contributes to our understanding of how Black life unfolds within carceral urban geographies by drawing on and further developing theory at the intersections of Black Geographies, Critical Race Theory, carceral studies, and Black Radical Thought. By introducing the internal-external continuum of Black worldlessness and mobilizing the analytic of the Quiet, this research expands the conceptual vocabulary for understanding how Black residents navigate racialized spatial containment, not solely through resistance, but through interiority, contemplation, and quotidian acts of self-making. It offers a methodological and theoretical intervention that reorients urban and sociological scholarship toward the interior dimensions of Black livability, revealing the nuanced and heterogeneous ways Black communities imagine and enact futurities within and against the structures that seek to delimit their lives. The envisioning of Black futures serves as a reminder that we have ambitions, we desire, we pray, we hunger, we dream, we cry, and we fear; the Quiet and interiority holds all of this within.
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Underground Patchworks of Access: Migrant Health Activism in Ontario and the Emotional Work of Storytelling and Deservingness
(2025-11-11) Marshall, Sarah Ann; Goldring, Luin
This dissertation examines how Ontario migrant health activists use de/bordering strategies to negotiate healthcare access for individuals with precarious status. It focuses on the emotional work involved in this advocacy, exploring how activists navigate shifting institutional and interpersonal contexts, manage emotional challenges, and adapt their de/bordering efforts accordingly. Using discourse analysis, I draw on 47 in-depth interviews and institutional and governmental health documents. Engaging interdisciplinary literatures in bordering studies, social movement theory, and affect scholarship, I analyze how storytelling, emotions, and context shape migrant health advocacy. Activists’ stories, shaped by evolving contexts and emotional responses, inform their de/bordering strategies. Their emotional work is sustained through coalition-building and solidarity, which help them cope with distress and build relationships that in turn shape their advocacy. I argue that by telling stories rooted in emotional experiences and shifting contexts, activists iteratively construct non-binary understandings of deservingness and challenge dominant discourses and power structures. Their de/bordering strategies evolve across socio-political and emotional contexts, drawing on storytelling, informal knowledge-sharing, and coalition-building as both advocacy and support. This dissertation contributes to bordering scholarship by offering empirical and theoretical insights into how de/bordering strategies are enacted in migrant health advocacy and how emotional and contextual shifts shape activists’ work. I examine how activists negotiate healthcare access while navigating exclusionary immigration and health regimes. In doing so, I bring de/bordering as a concept into conversation with broader dynamics of differential inclusion and expand the literature by developing a framework attuned to the complexity of deservingness assessments in this field.
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It's Your Responsibility: The Socioeconomic Implications of Home-Based Renal Care
(2025-11-11) Salerno, Amanda Jennifer Holly; Pupo-Barkans, Norene J.
Medical research has demonstrated that End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) is one of the most cost-consuming and labour-intensive chronic diseases. The frequent and perpetual need for dialysis treatments has created a crisis in renal care that has challenged health care systems to meet the current and future needs of the population. The crisis response in Ontario, Canada has relied upon the principles of neoliberalism to implement a home-based model of care that shifts dialysis from the hospital to the home. This transfer of treatment involves a significant downloading of work and costs to the patient, but offers them better health outcomes and autonomy over their care. To understand the socioeconomic outcomes of home dialysis programs, this dissertation draws upon interviews with patients, care partners, and frontline health care professionals to explore: 1) how home dialysis programs implement neoliberal processes of responsibilization which result in patients and their families performing their own care; and 2) how patients and their families respond to this responsibility within the context of their household. Major findings reveal that patients and their families experience significant hardships when transitioning to home-based care as they must negotiate divisions of labour within the family while managing the emotional and economic costs of treatment. In spite of these hardships, patients gain a significant amount of agency within the health care system upon their enrollment. Rather than being passive recipients of downloaded work and costs, they actively manage their care by directing the actions of frontline health care professionals, and influence wider care practices at the program level.
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From Paycheck to Pink Slip: Exploring Displaced Workers' Experiences of Living and Working Through a Factory Closure
(2025-11-11) Croft, Lacey M; Pupo, Norene
This dissertation examines the lived experiences of displaced workers during three factory closures in the Greater Toronto Area in 2019. The concurrent closure of these factories impacted nearly 3,000 direct workers, motivating this dissertation’s investigation into how displaced workers both affect and are affected by closure processes in one of Canada’s significant manufacturing regions. This study understands these closures as part of broader processes of deindustrialization and economic restructuring that have transformed manufacturing work and workers’ lives. Building on extensive scholarship documenting workers’ experiences of deindustrialization, this study examines how contemporary displaced workers navigate factory closures in urban contexts, focusing on the period between closure announcement and final shutdown. Moving beyond purely structural analyses, this study contributes to understanding how displaced workers navigate this liminal space by examining their sense-making processes, emotional, behavioural, and affective responses, and subject formation during displacement. Integrating feminist political economy and affect theory frameworks, I analyze in-depth interviews with 12 displaced workers to explore how they actively negotiate and respond to factory closures and closure processes. I organize their narratives into five thematic areas: first, how varied announcement practices operate as affective events that constitute displaced worker subjectivity and hierarchies of deservingness; second, how workers’ affective responses circulate and attach to specific anchors during closure procedures; third, how workers are reconstituted as particular kinds of subjects through intensified gendered performances and work ethic; fourth, how workers engage in both traditional and alternative forms of resistance; and fifth, how closure processes reconfigure temporal experiences of work. Across these themes, I demonstrate how workers’ social locations influence their experiences of displacement, while their collective responses both reproduce and challenge existing power relations. I argue that while factory closures disrupt workers’ attachments and relationships, workers are reconstituted within intensified subject positions through familiar performances of gender and work ethic, while simultaneously constructing counter-narratives that reimagine manufacturing’s future. I conclude by suggesting the need for more inclusive union organizing models that recognize diverse worker experiences of job displacement. This work has implications for unions, policymakers, and communities confronting similar industrial transitions.
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Embodied Social Relations in Contemporary Marxist-Feminism and Social Reproduction Theory: A Critique
(2025-11-11) Tanyildiz, Gokboru Sarp; Bannerji, Himani
In our contemporary moment, embodied social relations such as race, gender, and sexuality have become the categories of everyday praxis in social organization and the making of history. While marxist critique of political economy has been at the forefront of analyzing the gendered and racialized consequences of the global transformation and accumulation of capital, marxist social theory has lagged behind in examining the nature and formation of embodied social relations in their relationship to one another and to class. In the last decade, however, marxist-feminists have attempted to understand embodied social relations through a critical engagement with intersectionality. Undertaking a series of methodological close readings, this dissertation investigates these recent attempts in order to thematize, problematize, and re-envision the ways in which marxism may be brought to bear upon reckoning with embodied social relations. Part I conducts a critique of marxist-feminist critique of intersectionality, revealing that the conceptual aporias produced in this tradition of thought belong less to marxism than to the antinomies of classical sociological reason. Part II conducts a critique of social reproduction theory, which itself, in claiming to be a marxist-feminist alternative to and dialectical overcoming of intersectionality, constitutes a metacritique. I demonstrate that social reproduction theory, contrary to its self-fashioned identity as a total social theory, is a contemporary version of early socialist-feminist political economy and, thus, does not offer a substantive understanding of embodied social relations. Having discerned the shortcomings of these recent attempts, this dissertation points to alternative resources for a marxism that is capable of understanding embodied social relations in contemporary class societies, thereby producing knowledge that is necessary for social transformation.
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An Examination of Settler-Colonial Genocide in Canada at the Microlevel of Reserves
(2025-07-23) Goodchild, Eric Xavier; Jacobs, Merle A.
Genocide of the Indigenous peoples in Canada under colonization and settler-colonialism, is analyzed through Decolonization theory, using the United Nations Convention on Genocide definition of genocide, formally ratified by Canada in 1952. This includes the debate of ‘cultural’ genocide verse genocide period. Settler-colonialist mode of socioeconomic and political operation continues genocide via attrition, particularly via the healthcare disparity faced by Indigenous peoples. Issues: residential schools, overincarceration, obesity, inaccessibility of safe drinking water, opioid use, and the 60s scoop to present day millennial scoop. In a given Indigenous society, the elements and acts defining genocide are discernable, here from documents such as reports by the departments and institutional structures that comprise the Canadian system that have been directed towards Indigenous peoples. This is because genocide continues to be an ongoing process. Biigtigong Nishnaabeg First Nation Reserve my home community, is the societal example analyzed for examples substantive of the UN definition.
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Liberty and Security in an Austere City: Security Politics and Urban Restructuring in Post-Bankruptcy Detroit
(2025-04-10) Treffers, Stefan Rein; Williams, James W.
Detroit’s experience with emergency management and municipal bankruptcy has been the subject of intense public and academic scrutiny. Yet, few have explored how this moment of intense urban restructuring helped to reinforce security as a vital pillar of the city’s revitalization strategy. In response to this gap in scholarship, this dissertation explores highly experimental, post-bankruptcy securitization efforts with an empirical focus on the origins and growth of the city’s ‘real-time’ crime fighting initiatives and a city-wide CCTV initiative called Project Green Light. Formally introduced in 2016 as a ‘public-private-community’ partnership, Project Green Light involves a voluntary agreement whereby participating businesses agree to fund the installation and maintenance of cameras on their premises that can be actively monitored in real-time by the Detroit Police Department. In exchange, Project Green Light partners are promised prioritized police response and enhanced police presence. Conceiving of Project Green Light as a form of speculative security, this dissertation examines how the program has expanded despite conclusive evidence of its efficacy, numerous controversies surrounding its objectives and rollout, and resistance from community residents and grassroots organizers. The study draws from a large selection of documents as well as interviews with Project Green Light participants and neighborhood residents in order to explore perceptions and experiences of the program. In doing so, this dissertation unravels the contested politics around speculative visions of security and surveillance that have been intimately bound up in efforts to remake the City of Detroit.
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Towards a 'MacIntyrean Turn' in Sociology: A Case-Study in Syncretic Disciplinary Development
(2025-04-10) Kruger, Reiss John; Walsh, Philip
As a discipline born out of the intertwining of traditions of philosophy, political economy, history, and more, sociology has always been an interdisciplinary area of academic research. Despite this, there is a particular interlocutor who is under-explored in contemporary sociology: Alasdair MacIntyre. While a few have asked what MacIntyre might offer sociology, this has been far from a dialogue between MacIntyre and contemporary sociology. This work will catalyze such a process, aiming at the development of a ‘MacIntyrean Sociology.’ To achieve this, this work lays out the dialogical approach it seeks to deploy (Ch 1), deeply engaging in the explication of many of MacIntyre’s core theoretical developments throughout his career (Ch 2), and then traces the connection between MacIntyre’s ideas and his personal and academic development to some of the foundational theorists in sociology – especially Marx and Weber. Starting with his Hegelian foundations, Marx’s theoretical development is followed into MacIntyre’s work, and the continuing influence of Marx is explicated (Ch 3, 4). Likewise, tracing the Nietzschean roots in Weber, we see the influence of each on MacIntyre’s work (Ch 5, 6). The work concludes by deploying this broad range of theoretical grounding by taking up the case-study of ‘public sociology’ using the work of Pierre Bourdieu as an ideal-typical case-study in this regard (Ch 7) and asking the question of how a deployment of a more ‘MacIntyrean’ sociology might help overcome some of the challenges in this contemporary disciplinary development (Ch 8).
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“Reckoning the nation: 19th century statistics, probability theory and nation-building.”
(2025-04-10) Barber, Kathryn Elizabeth Wales; Goldring, Luin
Statistics are frequently viewed as straightforward and technical tools – applicable to the study of literally anything - capable of revealing ‘natural truths’ that are apolitical, objective and universally accepted by experts. However, the universal and unquestioned application of statistics is remarkable when one considers that some historical iterations of statistics used hardly any mathematics at all (see Porter, 1986; Hacking, 1991; Behrisch, 2016). Even the most cursory review of internal and external histories of statistics and probability shows that techniques like averages and correlations are historically contingent concepts that were developed not at the abstract level but rather through considerable discussion about specific natural and social problems. Statistical techniques and their interpretations changed over time as a result of debates over specific problems and fields of application as they became increasingly universal (Hacking, 1975/2006; Gigerenzer, Swijtink, Porter, Daston, Beatty, Krüger, 1989; Desrosières, 1998; Chatterjee, 2007). This dissertation opens the ‘black box’ of statistics through an examination of an early phase of social statistical history: the national statistics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. My research question asks: how were statistical techniques - including list-making, social category standardization and quantitative metrics - justified and developed by statisticians for the study and management of 19th century national populations? In this work, I analyze the discussions held by one of the premier groups of early statisticians – Pierre Simon de Laplace, Adolphe Quetelet and the members of the International Statistical Institute - as they justify the application of mathematical techniques to the study and management of national populations. My first argument suggests statistics should be included and theorized as a technique of nation-building- similar to literacy and the standardization of national vernaculars - that furnished a very compelling quantitative administrative vernacular of 19th century nation-states boasting “privileged access to ontological truth[s]” (Anderson, 2006, 36). I argue that this vernacular promoted a very literal form of methodological nationalism through the epistemology used to justify the application of probabilistic techniques to the study of human national populations. My second argument provides further empirical support for Lampland (2010) and Porter’s (2008) thesis that the precision of quantitative approaches is often mistaken for accuracy, giving the impression that through list-making, numbers and metrics, social reality has been simply translated to the page. However, following these thinkers, I demonstrate that precision is a feature of quantitative language itself and not the phenomena being studied. Instead, I contend that the use of statistics to describe social reality reifies the social processes, institutions and epistemological assumptions used to generate these numbers, rendering the numbers both scientifically and politically ‘objective’. As Lampland (2010) points out, “assuming that the effective use of numbers depends upon their veracity obscures crucial social processes at the heart of modernizing practices” (378). Numbers formalize and objectify social practice.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Access status: 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.
Access status: 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.
Access status: 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.

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