Excavating Feminist Phenomenology: Lived-Experiences and Wellbeing of Indigenous Students at Western University

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission underscores the need to incorporate narrative accounts of Indigenous students’ experiences as part of wide-scale de-colonizing efforts. This dissertation asks; how do Indigenous students experience their identities at Western University? What is at stake for phenomenology, feminist methods, and Indigenous theory, in the post Truth and Reconciliation era? There is a gap between theories centering on reflective cognition in philosophy and the embodiment of land, prevalent across Indigenous cultures. However, phenomenology can provide a method to facilitate dialogues with discourses outside Eurocentric domains that empathize with marginalized communities’ struggles, through an understanding of location-based knowledge. I will explore how Indigenous learners’ experiences inform concepts in phenomenology, Haudenosaunee, Cree, and Anishinaabe thinking, before they become marked literary categories. I undertake a ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach, from Eurocentric and Indigenous perspectives, to connect non-hierarchal epistemologies across nation-specific expressions. In chapter two, I discuss relational, land-based methods, through Dolleen Manning’s Anishinaabe ‘mnidoo’ concept, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, and feminist epistemologies, in terms of dialogues with Indigenous students and Elders. In our discussions, I explore concepts about community, home, health, and belonging, in relation to lived theories of embodiment, places, and beings, within an interpretive circle. Chapter three discusses the impacts of language, reflexivity, emotion, oppression, environmental repossession, and experience, within feminist research methods and Indigenous paradigms, through anthropology’s ontological turn. Chapter four discusses how experiences influence Indigenous artists, in their efforts to create work that is emergent from, and reflexive of culture and identity. Chapter five surveys concepts that include, citizenship, human rights, and freedom, through Indigenous scholars’ episodes of wellbeing and theories about emergent governance. I conclude, by offering Indigenous students’ reflections about education, ally-ship, and reconciliation. Indigenous subjectivities are unique, not homogenously categorized. This project’s interviews bring forth information missing from research involving community-based wellness services, without statistical representation in government and university strategic plan reports. Hearing individuals articulate desires to instigate healing in their communities is a powerful gesture and offers teachable moments, for the listener. I hope that when interviewees speak their gifts and insights, in our interactions, it inspires continued activist incentives that foster community-wide changes

Sex trafficking in Nepal: A qualitative study of process and context. Abstract.

Thousands of Nepalese girls are trafficked to India and other neighbouring countries every year, primarily for sex work and the majority return to Nepal after spending a years in sex trade. The sub‐group of Nepalese girls who become involved in sex work via trafficking are the focus of this paper. The aim of this study was to increase understanding regarding the context of sex trafficking, the methods and means of trafficking, living conditions in brothels and survival strategies among trafficked girls. We conducted 33 in‐depth interviews in early 2013 with returned trafficking survivors (n=14) and policy‐makers, people working in trafficking related NGOs/INGOs (n=19) in Nepal. All 14 trafficking survivors were recruited in Nepal through the NGO working on trafficking field. The young girls trafficked from Nepal to India in this study were typically unmarried, illiterate and very young (8 to 14 years at the time of trafficking). The key methods of trafficking were false marriage, fake job offer, and abduction. Among the 14 respondents, some had spent one month and others nearly 5 years in Indian brothels. Respondents were either rescued, escaped or released by brothel owners. Four out of 14 were HIV positive. Most policy makers mentioned that poverty, unemployment and illiteracy are the causes behind the trafficking of young girls. The anti‐trafficking interventions need to be considered at a) community level before movement has begun; b) urban centres which are both source and transitory centres for trafficking; c) trafficking level when girls are highly mobile and when they are in brothels; and d) return from trafficking as girls to m ove back into the community

A Sensing Platform to Monitor Sleep Efficiency

Sleep plays a fundamental role in the human life. Sleep research is mainly focused on the understanding of the sleep patterns, stages and duration. An accurate sleep monitoring can detect early signs of sleep deprivation and insomnia consequentially implementing mechanisms for preventing and overcoming these problems. Recently, sleep monitoring has been achieved using wearable technologies, able to analyse also the body movements, but old people can encounter some difficulties in using and maintaining these devices. In this paper, we propose an unobtrusive sensing platform able to analyze body movements, infer sleep duration and awakenings occurred along the night, and evaluating the sleep efficiency index. To prove the feasibility of the suggested method we did a pilot trial in which several healthy users have been involved. The sensors were installed within the bed and, on each day, each user was administered with the Groningen Sleep Quality Scale questionnaire to evaluate the user’s perceived sleep quality. Finally, we show potential correlation between a perceived evaluation with an objective index as the sleep efficiency.</p

Florida Undergraduate Research Conference

FURC serves as a multi-disciplinary conference through which undergraduate students from the state of Florida can present their research. February 16-17, 2024https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/university_events/1006/thumbnail.jp

Passage to Rights: Rethinking Indigenous People’s Drinking Practices in Taiwan

This thesis aims to explicate the meaning of indigenous people’s drinking practices and their relation to indigenous people’s contemporary living situations in settler-colonial Taiwan. ‘Problematic’ alcohol use has been co-opted into the diagnostic categories of mental disorders; meanwhile, the perception that indigenous people have a high prevalence of drinking nowadays means that government agencies continue to make efforts to reduce such ‘problems’. Indigenous people in Taiwan still face continuous marginalisation and systemic discrimination which render drinking a prominent issue. However, interventions based on public health narratives lack efficacy due to discordant understandings of illness, moral experience and perceptions of culture. Based on 12 months of multi-sited research in Taiwan, my study finds indigenous drinking cultures have been both generated and reshaped by their life situations, both historically and contemporarily. Drinking practices today reveal suffering under structural violence but also show resistance emerging from social change. Drinking is also practised at the interstices of contested values that make health narratives invalid. An ever-reproducing drinking culture shows a gesture of self-fashioning under multiple sufferings, as well as strategies to restore livelihoods. In the time to pursue transitional justice, indigenous people’s symbolic sobriety unfolds through resistance against current governmentality over drinking in one sense, but fighting for autonomy in another. Therefore, drinking can be understood as a ‘passage to rites/rights’ that represents the struggle of indigenous people in search of traditional values and future respect