Social Anthropology

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Open Access
Queer Digital Performance During the Covid-19 Pandemic
(2025-04-10) Petit-Thorne, Alexandria Katherine; Kazubowski-Houston, Magdalena
This ethnography traces the creation and evolution of digital performance spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic, following a group of queer and trans performers and artists as they created digital performance and community spaces across multiple virtual platforms. For these interlocutors, the pandemic was characterized by distinctive shifts in uses of technologies and artistic mediums, alongside shifts in how this community conceptualized queer performance, community, spacemaking, safety, care, and joy in the digital realm. This research followed the trajectory of queer digital performance through seventeen months of digital fieldwork, participant-observation, and extensive interviews. This research also employed arts-based practices as ethnographic methods, partaking in what Pink (2011) terms “making visual representations”. These artistic methods enabled the visual representation of the absences and silences which came to characterize much of my interlocutors’ virtual worlds in this time. Four core themes emerged in this research. The first examines how space and place are made and experienced online, arguing that my interlocutors engage in and understand spacemaking and community-building in hostile digital environments as both political tactics and radical acts of care. The second teases out a tension between the increased access digital performance provides to many queer people who could not attend in-person spaces or did not feel comfortable in them and the new barriers to access that arose in digital spaces for other community members. The third examines the policing and erasure of representations of queerness and transness in digital space, arguing that moderation and “adult content ban” policies have been increasingly weaponized to target and harass queer and trans users on these platforms, effectively erasing queer content and users from these platforms. The fourth engages with the storytelling choices my interlocutors made to refuse dominant narratives about queer life and instead center queer joy in their art, which I argue constitute a refusal of heteronormative framings of queerness which center pain and injury. Ultimately, I argue that my interlocutors’ efforts to build and maintain safe community-oriented digital performance and community spaces – which I call queer communities of care – were political, and often strategic, acts of care and of refusal.
Open Access
"Tapija and the Politics of Communal Care"
(2024-11-07) Alilovic, Lea; Alexandrakis, Othon
This dissertation explores the contemporary movements, processes, and experiences of neoliberal dispossession in Pula, Croatia, focusing on the city's growing economic dependency on tourism. Central to this study is the local phenomenon of tapija, a term that describes pervasive feelings of melancholy and boredom ingrained in the city's fabric. The dissertation investigates the question, “What does tapija as a feeling do?” and argues that tapija is not merely a reflection of apathy or inertia but a complex and multifaceted sensation. Drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s (2012) concept of depression as a public feeling, the study examines how tapija can be understood as a way to engage with negative emotions as part of daily practice, cultural production, and political activism. The dissertation also reflects on how Pula's increasing touristification parallels processes of deterritorialization, where tourism acts as a force of dispossession, affecting the city's sense of place, livelihood, and stability. Using Laurence Ralph’s (2014) concept of social injury, the study considers how the wounds of social change manifest not physically but through changes in city space, heritage, and infrastructure. The work highlights how the experience and expression of tapija represent individual and collective responses to these socio-economic pressures, offering glimpses of concern and care for the community. Through examples such as complaints, small talk, graffiti, and walking paths, the dissertation demonstrates how locals inscribe and re-inscribe their connection to place, creating informal spaces to resist and navigate the injurious forces of tourism and economic change.
Open Access
Governance and Empowerment in Clinical Encounters: An Ethnography of Toronto's Sexual Health Landscape
(2022-08-08) Odger, Allison Rachael; MacDonald, Margaret
This dissertation is an ethnography of the clinic. My fieldsite was a sexual health organization, comprised of what I call The Centre and The Mobile. Created in the 1970s, The Centre was a pioneering force in the history of sexual health care and the women’s health movement in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This organization was created by and for immigrant women with the goal of providing free and accessible sexual health care. However, providing sexual health care to these populations in Canada’s public health care system needs to be understood in terms of the increasing emphasis placed on the managerial tasks of reporting as a form of accountability. I use the conceptual framework of sexual health governance to examine the delivery of sexual health care in Toronto. Sexual health governance is an assemblage of institutions, social actors, and expert knowledge, which regulates, counts, and fosters sexual health via technologies of care, surveillance, and metrics. In this dissertation, I ask: How is the sexual health landscape organized, and how does the sexual health governance shape everyday practices and experiences of care? I carried out participant observation in The Mobile and The Centre. I interviewed an array of sexual health social actors, including counsellors, physicians, administrative staff, executive directors, volunteers, sexual health promoters, and clients. In this dissertation, I argue that both The Centre and The Mobile were a part of, and were shaped by, sexual health governance. While their funding requirements meant they had to carefully manage their metric data (counting clients and services), they also remained productive spaces for meaningful forms of care. I argue that sexual health social actors were invested in biomedicine while also seeking to do it differently via valuing choice, bodily autonomy, and agency. Clients, too, exercised agency-within-compliance as they accessed sexual health care, both desiring biomedical information and care while also challenging it, revealing nuance in the operations of neoliberal disciplinary power. This is a dissertation about entanglements—highlighting the tension between care and surveillance, empowerment and governance—through an ethnographic study of sexual health clinical encounters and the meaning this held for the landscape’s social actors.
Open Access
To be Black in this Skin: Anti-Black Racism and How Heterosexual Black Men Engage with HIV Vulnerability in Toronto
(2022-08-08) Oakes, Wesley Jordan; Murray, David A. B.
Toronto is home to Canada’s largest and fastest growing Black population and it is also the probable epicenter of the Black HIV epidemic in the nation. While the HIV response in Ontario recognizes African, Caribbean, and Black people as a “priority population,” HIV in Canada has historically been thought of as an epidemic among gay white men, thereby impacting the preconceptions of service providers and the manner by which services are targeted and administered today. Based on 26 months of fieldwork in Toronto, this dissertation ethnographically explores how HIV-negative and HIV-positive heterosexual Black men navigate HIV-related stigma and anti-Black racism. Three key questions ground this project: 1) What does it mean to be straight, Black, and male in a world predicated on anti-Blackness?; 2) How do we philosophically conceptualize contradictory forms of resistance and agency in the lives of Black men—particularly those living with HIV?; and 3) How do enduring modalities of racial slavery structure how Black folks experience HIV? In analyzing how Black subjects come into being or, more precisely, struggle to be realized, I critically reflect on the writings of Afro-pessimist and Afro-optimist thinkers. In doing so, I expand on the concept of fugitivity—the notion that Black life represents a ceaseless act of ontological disobedience (Moten 2008). Fugitivity is employed as a productive lens to understand straight Black men’s attitudes about their own vulnerability to HIV, and the different ways they engage with socially imposed forms of subjectivity. I conclude that although Black men’s sexual acts and choices exist within anti-Black systems predicated on their negation, they are not passive objects of racial oppression. Rather, I argue that when Black men engage with the limitations of Black life it can produce remarkable acts of creativity, vitality, and affirmation. This dissertation contributes to a theory of Black subjectivity that upholds the idea of racial slavery as the basis of Black ontological production. My research seeks to expand anthropological discussions on Blackness and being, the anthropology of HIV, and broader social scientific inquiry on HIV critiquing responses that privilege behavioral change over structural determinants.
Open Access
Composing Care: The Aesthetics and Politics of Music Therapy in the Clinic
(2022-03-03) Evans, Meredith Glendyre Brown; Myers, Natasha
This dissertation examines the care work of music therapists in North American hospitals. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2020 in Canada and the United States, this ethnography investigates the clinical aesthetics of music therapy, or how music therapy is sensed and made sense of in the clinic. I show how, through its foundation in Western art music traditions, the profession of music therapy is depoliticized—grounded in the values of universality, rationality, and objectivity—and aligned with biomedicine. It is through an association with biomedical knowledge systems that, I argue, music therapy is made into a health profession. I found that music therapists struggle to have their work taken seriously as they care for patients on the margins of hospital systems. Music therapists are in pursuit of what I call clinical recognition—being seen and valued from a biomedical perspective. As they strive to be recognized as indispensable to biomedical care, I show how music therapists attempt to ameliorate biomedical care structures from within. They cultivate sensitivities to sensory experience, especially to sound, that inform their movement through hospitals and guide their interactions with patients and staff. By intervening in what I describe as the clinical sensorium—the dominant structuring of sensory modes of attention that shape what is sensible in the clinic—music therapists disrupt the stultifying anaesthetic, or numbing, qualities of the clinic by reconfiguring clinical attunements, composing atmospheres of care, and structuring feelings in their extra/ordinary care practices. These care practices, I argue, are grounded in reciprocity; through musical gift exchange, music therapists foster affective connections and attachments for hospital patients that reimagine care in ways that remain partially tethered to yet exceed biomedical logics. Mobilized for and against biopolitical care regimes that attempt to delineate, capture, and govern life and death, I argue the care practices of music therapists reimagine the sensory-affective possibilities of living and dying in the clinic.
Open Access
"God Willing, I Will Do Something Else": Affective Intensities in Cruise Ship Tourism Encounters in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic
(2022-03-03) Yusuf, Sarah Rubeyah; Little, William Kenneth
Based on 7 months of fieldwork conducted in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, this dissertation explores the affective intensities that emerge from an ever-changing, unstable tourism imaginary of a paradisiacal Puerto Plata, a frame into which Carnival Cruises sails. Located in the Bay of Maimn, just west of Puerto Plata, Amber Cove is the first cruise ship venture in the area since the last cruise ship sailed away in the 1980s, a venture meant to reinvent and reinvigorate the tourism industry in the province. Touted as an "incredible project" by tourism officials, this research traces the tensions, the frustrations, the disappointments and the hopes that overspill from the tourism encounters that unfold in this new project that promised so many things. Drawing on Gordon's (1997) notion of haunting, this research contributes a unique perspective to important work in tourism studies already examining the historical and contemporary socioeconomic and political consequences of the tourism industry. It is a way to explore the particularities of individual experience without disconnecting them from the political economy (ibid., xvii), throwing into stark relief the structures of power that reach across time and space to make themselves known, felt and sensed in the present. By informing this project using theoretical work on affect, I consider the things that "don't add up" (Stewart 2008, 72), the things that provoke and compel, the "something more" (Stewart 1996, 5-6) that efforts to codify would "[strip] of the dense and deeply mortal flesh of life" (Pandian and McLean 2017, 4). In so doing, this dissertation addresses two questions: 1) How does the cruise ship tourism industry shape tourist-local interactions and the expectations, desires, confusions and disappointments on which these relationships are fashioned? 2) How do locals frame, understand and experience these new kinds of encounters given the shift from enclave resort tourism to cruise ship tourism? By exploring how the cruise ship tourism industry animates and enlivens the tourism frame in Puerto Plata, my research contributes to our understanding of what tourism encounters in a cruise ship tourism context can look and feel like, moving beyond a representational or "critical" theory approach to the industry (Stewart 2008).
Open Access
Audiovisual Indigeneities and Cosmopolitics: Shifting Political Grounds in the New Landscapes of Communication and Resources of Hope in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
(2022-03-03) Castilho Da Silva, Marta; Yon, Daniel Arthur
This dissertation explores how collaborations between Indigenous audiovisual producers from different countries engender political and cultural arenas able to become resources of hope for Indigenous groups facing oppressive local practices. I centred my research on the activism of the Cultural Association of Indigenous Producers, which, since 2008, has cultivated close relations with Indigenous filmmakers from Bolivia and drawn inspiration from Indigenous audiovisual production from Canada. This independent collective is based in Mato Grosso do Sul, the Brazilian state with the second-largest Indigenous population, the largest portion of private lands in the country (92%), and the largest concentration of land for large-scale agricultural and farming operations (83% of private land) (IMAFLORA 2017). This dissertation analyzes how encounters within indigenous audiovisual production have nurtured deep research and creative explorations on subject and identity formation while propelling societal dreams confronting an increasing control of the land in the region by multinational agribusiness. It also examines how "new landscapes of communication" (Beck 2016, 112) created by the emergence of digital media-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Facebook open arenas for the "symbolic confrontation" (Gruzinski 1990) over the meaning of identities, their (re)presentations and their place in different projects of society, as well as spaces of maneuverability for carving paths for transcending the geontopower of neoliberalism (Povinelli 2016, 31). Anthropological interpretations of cosmopolitics present tools for analyzing the antagonistic relationship in Mato Grosso do Sul. Firstly, they draw attention to how political forces are increasingly being "formulated beyond the polis or state form" and how connections, discourses, and actions have been crafted simultaneously inside and outside national borders (Robbins and Cheah 1998, 23). Secondly, understandings of cosmopolitics illuminate political visions lifting the artificial divide between society and nature (Latour 1999, 267). This study is supported by multi-sited fieldwork occurring primarily in Mato Grosso do Sul but encompassing research in La Paz (Bolivia), Montreal (Canada), and online environments. Inspired by Marcus' search for new paths of connection in differently configured spatial canvas (1995, 98), it follows relationships developed during film festivals and audiovisual workshops that enabled participants to imagine contemporary ways of becoming and being indigenous.
Open Access
Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Expertise after Fukushima
(2020-05-11) Polleri, Maxime; Gururani, Shubhra
This dissertation focuses on Japanese public and state responses to the release of radioactive contamination after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. I argue that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has led to the emergence of new forms of expertise in governing radioactive risks. These include techniques of governance that attempt to normalize peoples relationships with nuclear matter as an everyday concern. They also include decentralized strategies that empower victims of the disaster by providing access to technoscientifc practices of radiation monitoring and delegating radiation protection from the state to the citizens. My findings uncover a major shift in how societies have formerly organized responses to radioactive risks. In the aftermath of nuclear accidents, scholars have criticized central authoritarian decisions, in which state management of radioactive hazards was associated with politics of secrecy, victimhood, or public knowledge deficit. At stake in Fukushima is an increased normalization of citizens relationship with residual radioactivity, which is transformed into an everyday concern, rather than being represented as something exceptional. This is not only done by state experts, but equally via the increased activity of citizen scientists that collectively monitor residual radioactivity. My research is a significant departure from traditional sociocultural works that predominantly focus on micro-scale studies, such as how prior sociocultural factors influence a group understanding of radioactive risks. By highlighting major shifts in the structure of expertise and the regulation of life amidst toxic exposure, my research highlights how the management of contamination risks is evolving in an era where the impacts of modernization represent permanent marks on the planet.
Open Access
The Techno-Politics of Food Security in New Delhi: The Re-Materialization of the Ration Card
(2019-03-05) Dandurand, Guillaume; Gururani, Shubhra
In the early 2000s, millions of households suffered from starvation as waves of drought repeatedly hit the northern states of India. Despite the famine, the Indian authorities remained shockingly unresponsive to the needs of starving populations. In the ensuing decade, a unique configuration of experts, activists, law-makers and lay-persons occupied key spaces and institutions to formulate a right to food law that establishes the biopolitical duties of the statethat is, improving peoples well-beingin the domain of food security. This legislation was enacted in 2013: the National Food Security Act (NFSA). Based on 17 months of fieldwork in Delhi, this dissertation ethnographically explores the productive tension between the ethico-political nature of the NFSA and its rather technical implementation in urban centres. I ask: How do biopolitical interventions, designed to make the state transparent and accountable in the delivery of food entitlements, reconfigure bureaucratic practices and subjectivities? Articulated at the intersection of the analytics of governmentality and an anthropological reading of science and technology studies literature, I scrutinize the re-materialized ration card deployed in the aftermath of the NFSA to render bureaucratic practices transparent. I examine how the ration card mediates governmental attempts of policing relations of patronage, monitoring practices of corruption, and shaping empowered bodies. I argue that while the NFSA was formulated to improve the lives of the Indian population, the distribution of re-materialized ration cards contributed to make the population into a collection of individual bodies empowered to combat chronic hunger on their own. This dissertation probes the gap between what ration cards seek to accomplish, what they do, and the unanticipated effects of these bureaucratic instruments on peoples lives. First, through a reading of Indias policy archive, I document the historic and political trajectory of food policies to contextualize the emergence of right to food discourses in India. Then, I scrutinize how and why notions of governmental accountability and transparency took a predominant place in the formulation of the food security legislation. Finally, I examine how key documents and devices used to implement the NFSA have mediated norms of accountability and transparency in different urban contexts.
Open Access
Rights and Rescue: Ethical World Making in the Anti-Trafficking and Sex Worker Rights Movements in Canada
(2019-03-05) McFadyen, Nicole Diane; Murray, David A. B.
Grounded in ethnographic research on the anti-trafficking and sex worker rights movements in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with additional insights gathered from the migrant worker rights movement, and rooted in activist anthropology research methodologies, this dissertation explores social movements, interactions within and between them, and how human rights frameworks are differentially imagined, produced, and interpreted by them. Drawing on the anthropologies of humanitarianism, ethics, and human rights, as well as the interdisciplinary scholarship on social movements and critical feminist anti-trafficking studies, social movements are conceptualized as ethical worlds wherein the individual ethical orientations and ideological beliefs of movement members contribute to the movements guiding framework, with implications for how tensions and conflict are navigated, the activities of movement members, and discursive and in-person encounters between different social movements. With implications for how human rights are conceptualized, deployed, and engaged with by both privileged and differentially marginalized populations in Canada, this dissertation identifies and unpacks the hierarchies of suffering and compassion that sustain them and presents a valuable theoretical framework for investigating the privileging of some over others.
Open Access
'Nai-rob-me Nai-beg-me Nai-shanty: Historicizing Space-Subjectivity Connections in Nairobi from its Ruins
(2018-05-28) Kimari, Wangui; Holmes, J. Teresa
What can personal histories from poor urban settlements in Nairobi tell us about the history and future of this city? How do these entangled life stories belie vogue narratives of phenomena such as rural-urban migration, urban-development and postcoloniality, while also shedding light on the durability of empire? Through an ethnographic and archival exploration of the poor urban settlement of Mathare, located close to central Nairobi, I argue that urban planning emerges from within an assemblage of imperial political, social, economic and ecological ideas and practices, to produce what I term ecologies of exclusion. In essence, these planning interventions, materializing from within epistemologies of empire, co-constitutively manifest as neglect and force in Nairobis margins to create and sustain inequality in certain neighbourhoodsits ruins. In addition, I show how, both now and in the past, this mode of urban governance conjures up and sustains negative stereotypical subjectivities about certain populations in order to legitimize inequalities within its formal spatial management practices. Furthermore, contemporary colonial modes of urban planning require a constant and ever more forceful militarization of poor urban spaces. Notwithstanding this now naturalized violent space-subjectivity enterprise, those who have long been categorized as the robbers, beggars and shanty dwellers of Nairobi engage with and emerge from these ruins of empire through unexpected ethical and political projects. And, from within their urban struggles, they render alternative subjectivities of self and space that articulate more grounded narrations of the history and possible futures of this city.
Open Access
"Keeping the Kids out of Trouble": Extra-Domestic Labour and Social Reproduction in Toronto's Regent Park, 1959-2012
(2018-03-01) James, Ryan Kristopher; Schrauwers, Albert
This dissertation is an historical ethnography of social reproduction in Regent Park, Canadas first public housing project. Built from 1948 to 1959 as part of a modernist slum clearance initiative, Regent Park was deemed a failure soon after it opened and was then stigmatised for decades thereafter, both for being a working-class enclave and for epitomising an outdated approach to city planning. A second redevelopment began in 2005, whereby the project is being demolished and rebuilt as a mix of subsidised and market housing, retail space, and other amenities. Despite its enduring stigmatisation, however, many current and former residents retain positive memories of Regent Park. Participants in this study tended to refer to it as a community, indicating senses of shared ownership and belonging that residents themselves built in everyday life. This dissertation emphasises the capacity of working-class people to build and maintain community on their own terms, and in spite of multiple and intersecting constraints. To theorise community-building, I begin from the concept of social reproduction: the work of maintaining and replenishing stable living conditions, both day-to-day and across generations. Much of this work is domestic labour unpaid tasks done inside the household such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children. In Regent Park, social reproduction demanded even more of residents: the stability of households was often threatened by dangers and challenges unique to life in a stigmatised housing project, and it was largely left up to residents themselves to redress these. To account for the considerable effort this involved, I propose a concept adjacent to domestic labour that I call extra-domestic labour: unpaid work done outside the household, usually through informal collaboration among members of different households, that is necessary for social reproduction. Extra-domestic labour built community and fostered a territorial solidarity that, I argue, is the primary means through which Regent Parkers developed class consciousness. This was often expressed through emic class categories, which were defined in relation to the locality more so than the workplace, and through which people interpreted their position in the wider social order.
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Situating Sikh Diasporic Dubs: A Case Study Featuring Humble the Poet and Sikh Knowledge
(2018-03-01) Kauldher, Amrita; Yon, Daniel
The turban and beard has been a focus of Sikh identity in the diaspora and since 2010 has resurged across North American within popular culture and social media. Based on virtual and visual research conducted on social media, qualitative interviews and lyrical analysis, this case study explores the concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism and Canadian hip hop in relationship to Punjabi-Sikh identities, articulated and performed by artists Humble the Poet and Sikh Knowledge. This case study addresses a lacuna of scholarship available on Punjabi-Sikh identity and hip hop by providing an analysis of album Turban Sex and book/album campaign for UnLEARN: Butterflies and Lions. I will explore how both artists respectively affirm and destabilize identity politics of popular representations of Punjabi-Sikh ethnicity and heritage. Looking beyond turbans and beards and labels of "ethno hip hop" or "desi rap", this research aims to interrogate the limits of multiculturalism and antiracism.
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Framing Absence: Visuals of the Wall and the Vanishing Landscapes in Palestine
(2017-07-27) Hatoum, Nayrouz Abu; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This dissertation explores peoples relationship to the landscapes of material, abstract, and visual borders in the context of Palestine-Israel. Since 2002, the construction of the Israeli separation Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has significantly transformed the way locals, particularly on the Palestinian side of the Wall see and articulate their relation to the landscape. Already living in a state of military occupation through restriction of movement, limited access to land and urban expansion on occupied territory, the Wall has considerably shifted Palestinians relationships to the landscape. To them the landscape has become a visual field on which power dynamics and political structures are embodied and expressed. Moreover, for many Palestinians the Israeli construction of the Wall is visible evidence of the on-going process of destruction of the Palestinian landscape. But what is the view of Palestinians and Israelis living on the Israeli side of the Wall and those living in Palestine but in close proximity to the Wall? What is their engagement with the Wall? To answer these questions, this dissertation draws on more than 12 months of ethnographic research in Israel and Palestine that involved extended interviews with Palestinian and Israeli photographers and activists in Israel, as well as Palestinians whose lives were affected by the Walls construction in proximity to their homes and for whom the Wall route brought them into direct confrontation with the Israeli military. This research also examined representations of the Wall in different visual projects. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation asks how do visual fields facilitate the structuring of national imaginaries and what sights and future visions are offered by different readings of the landscape? To answer these questions, I employ anthropological theories of violence, borders and the visual, and propose the concept of landscapocide, a violent visual process through which landscapes are framed, and made to be seen and unseen. Through landscapocide and other anthropologically grounded theories and concepts I offer a new reading of the ways in which people in bordered contexts give meaning to what they see.
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An Amikwa Family Through Their Eyes: An Auto-ethnographic Study of an Indigenous Community in Northern Ontario Canada
(2017-07-27) Nandlall, Ravindra Atma; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This work is focused on the lived experience in Northern Ontario, on the Pickerel River. The Mcquabbie Family history is used as a platform for discussing larger socio-political issues directly connected to person-hood, and identity politics. Through this discussion, we attempt to unravel the multitude of ways in which knowledge and the production of knowledge can be interpreted and understood in a variance of ways historically, and cross-culturally.
Open Access
Hamdard and Unani: The Contested Terrain of Indo-Muslim Medical Knowledge
(2016-11-25) Shah, Radha; Gururani, Shubhra
This thesis is a historical anthropological study of the Indian branch of herbal pharmaceutical company Hamdard. I examine Hamdards commercial representation of the Indo-Islamic tradition of medicine called Unani, through a document analysis of a variety of company commissioned literature, including marketing pamphlets, conference proceedings, scientific journal articles, newsprint media, educational materials, and print advertisements. Established in 1906, Hamdard emerged and developed during a period of Indian Muslim cultural modernization, Hindu nationalism, and anti-colonial politicization. I analyze the ways in which Hamdard literature contextualizes a narrative of the companys growth within this history, which sets the backdrop for Unanis professional reform in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century India. An emergent theme in my textual analysis, which I address throughout my project, is how Hamdardas an Indian Muslim companynegotiates this identity while articulating belonging in India.
Open Access
Bean There, Grind That: Queer Coffee Culture and the Politics of Place, Belonging and Representation
(2016-09-20) Faranda, Daniel; Murray, David A. B.
The gay village located in Toronto, Ontario, is generally thought by mainstream society to be excessively determined by the establishments, individuals and normative LGBTQ identity representations located in the area i.e. mostly white, middle/upper class. Based on this and the interviews with my informants, I assert how the dominance of normative LGBTQ identity makes the area over-determined. However, I will attempt to highlight the importance of alternative queer places along the strip in the Church and Wellesley Street area. My thesis will explore the relationship between place formations, LGBTQ identity construction, and coffee consumption. I aim to create a richer understanding of the various ways in which queer identities are understood, created, and negotiated within coffee shops. I highlight how, at times, queer coffee shops are open and dynamic, and allow for new and old meanings to become generated in and out of these places. Queer coffee shops shed light on how my research informants grapple and work with or against these complex sites of negotiations. Ultimately, queer coffee shops in the Church and Wellesley Street area are microcosms of the larger LGBTQ community in the same neighbourhood. These processes help to shape LGBTQ identity, membership, place, rootedness, and belonging while simultaneously encouraging misunderstanding, tension, conflict, and estrangement.
Open Access
Creating Imagined Homelands and the Politics Behind the Balikbbayan Identity
(2016-09-20) Humilde, Angeli Grace; Holmes, J. Teresa
Balikbayan is a Filipino term used to describe Filipinos who have left the homeland, and have returned for temporary visits. Due to the large economic contribution of balikbayans in the past, the Philippine state has hailed those who occupy this status as Heroes of the Nation. In the recent years, balikbayans have been targeted by real estate development companies as sources of capital due to the widely held belief by Filipinos that balikbayans are very wealthy. Many development companies specifically look to target balikbayans to purchase luxury enclave development properties in the Philippines as investment properties. Using data that I had gathered from my fieldwork in the Philippines in the summer of 2014, I will examine what role these luxury properties and consumer consumption have in displaying the balikbayan identity, why it is such a desired subject position by Filipinos, and the discrepancies between the state definition of balikbayan, versus on the ground definition of balikbayan.
Open Access
Surviving Oncology: Living With Cancer in the Wake of Integrative Care
(2016-09-20) Atkinson-Graham, Melissa Rose; Myers, Natasha
This dissertation analyzes the emerging medical field of integrative oncology, attending to how this approach to cancer treatment unsettles and reconfigures existing biomedical ideas about bodies and cancer. Informed by twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in the state of California, it examines the attempts made by integrative practitioners to provide whole patient care by incorporating complementary medicines such as Ayurveda and Chinese medicine into conventional oncology. I suggest that this approach enacts a kind of sensitivity for how cancer is lived as a disease conditioned by emotional, psychological, social, and environmental factors, requiring treatments attentive to these dimensions. Throughout this study I grapple with the intentions of integrative oncologists and the realities of the political economy of medicine and insurance in the United States that leaves integrative care out of the reach of most people, producing a situation where many are strained to imagine different ways of surviving oncology. At the core of this project is a concern for what it means and what it takes to live well with cancer in biomedicine.
Open Access
Spiritual Economies of Evangelical Worship: Technology, Stewardship and Experience
(2016-09-20) Baker, Laurie Mae; Schrauwers, Albert
The present work explores how American evangelicals have learned to use and think about performance technology, such as professional audio, video and lighting technologies as they endeavour to craft worship environments. I track the discourses from trade publications, like Technologies for Worship Magazine (TFWM) and Worship Facilities Magazine and Church Production, in their devotion to bridge the divide between religion and technology to create a house of worship market. Both TFWM and Church Production participate in conferences where they offer education on technology use. Technologies for Worship Magazine is the educational basis for the TFW Pavilion and Worship Facilities and Church Production for an event called Worship Facilities Expo (WFX). Ethnographic research at these events reveals that evangelical worship technicians learn to cultivate dispositions towards stewardship and technical mastery through attending these technology exhibitions and conferences, by taking offered educational seminars. Training at the TFW Pavilion and WFX focussed on two main areas: first, how to use professional performance technologies, like audio amplification and control devices, lighting configurations, and video capture, production and broadcast systems. Second, training addressed the importance for church technicians to use technologies to create excellent and relevant worship experiences. By excellent, trainers meant worship practice that uses performance technologies seamlessly to create immersive experiences. Churches who strive for technological excellence embody the belief that the relevance of the church and its message among believers and non-believers is coupled with the use of technology to enhance the affective potential of the message delivered by the pastor. Yet, as church technicianslike audio or lighting engineersreflect on technology use, they reveal the ways that technology troubles contemporary worship practice as much as it augments the creation of poignant, immersive experiences.