Tenancy and housing rights of racialized international students

1 online resource (176 pages) : colour illustrations, colour charts, colour graphsIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 162-176).This thesis examines violations of tenancy and housing rights of racialized international students (RIS) in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. It explores the factors that influence tenancy and housing options available to RIS, such as the internationalization of post-secondary education institutions and financialization of the housing sector in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. It investigates the distinctive relationships between RIS’ experiences of tenancy and housing rights violations and their resilience. The interactions of RIS’ multiple identities such as race, regional origin, nationality, gender, socio-economic status (SES), Canadian citizenship status, age, and education level with external factors are studied to understand RIS’ perceptions of resilience using their own voices. This thesis makes two central arguments. First, RIS preferred social support over institutionalized support services. RIS participants avoided disputing violations of their tenancy and housing rights due to perceived repercussions to their legal status as non-permanent residents in Canada as well as the tangible consequences in their social relations with rental property administrators. Second, participants revealed carefully woven webs of strategies to navigate challenges and to achieve optimum wellness characterized by physical, emotional, and psychological safety. I developed the concept of states of embodied awareness to understand RIS’ self-defined and unique forms of resilience

From coal pits to tar sands: examining labour migration between the Athabasca oil sands and an Atlantic Canadian region

In less than two decades, the Oil Sands industries of Northern Alberta have transformed from a costly experiment in oil production hidden in the Canadian hinterlands to a mega-industry employing over 100 000 individuals situated at the centre of the Canadian economy. This rapid growth is due in large part to industries' adoption of certain neoliberal strategies, in particular making use of mobile and flexible temporary migrant workforces drawn from communities from across Canada undergoing processes of deindustrialization, capital flight and high levels of unemployment. One such region is Industrial Cape Breton, a former centre of coal mining and steel milling. The region has become strongly connected to the Oil Sands industries following the demise of its central industries at the turn of the millennium and is now dealing with the impacts that patterns of long-distance labour migration have on local communities and families. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Industrial Cape Breton and the Oil Sands region, the present dissertation examines this emerging pattern of labour migration as an aspect of the ongoing neoliberalization of the labour force. Through an examination of the political economies of migration and resource extraction, an exploration of the sending and receiving regions involved in these commutes, and use of work-life narratives as a methodological tool to examine the lived experiences of those involved in these mobile labour arrangements, this dissertation argues for attention to the connection of class and migration. Such labour migrations are both cause and consequence of a shift in classed subjectivities among a mobile working class involved in long-distance commute work. The processes that allow for labour migration fall fundamentally within the scopes of a broader neoliberal project yet rest on the foundations formed through the pre-established Fordist project. The promises of Fordism and the Fordist legacy allow for the establishment and continuation of certain forms of neoliberalism and of certain forms of labour migration as workers attempting to re-create Fordist patterns of stable and secure relations to work instead become implicated in insecure and unstable work relations which highlight the neoliberal era

The use of the internet in the lives of women with breast cancer: narrating and storytelling online and offline

This thesis explores the experience of breast cancer patients' online participation in relation to their illness. The research focuses on the work of narrating as the key process in patients' online communication. Empirically, it stems from the noticeable recent proliferation of breast cancer forums, particularly in online spaces. I argue that the production of a story and its telling online enables the patient to cope with a radically new situation in her life. The claim for the significance of breast cancer patients' online communication, particularly narrating, is located within the historical and cultural context of the illness. In examining the process of narrating and storytelling, I draw on sociological and psychoanalytical theories of narrative and storytelling, and sociological debates on issues of health and illness, everyday life and the nature of agency, social exchange, and the tension between the public and the private. The study is based on a phenomenological study that included twenty nine online (e-mail) and twelve face-toface interviews with breast cancer patients, and a textual analysis of related websites. It shows how the work of narrating is facilitated through the online space, highlighting it as a process that has significant consequences for their ability to cope with their illness. The thesis concludes with a self-reflexive account of the employment of narrating as a conceptual, analytical and methodological tool for the study of breast cancer patients' processes of online communication. It argues for the need to acknowledge the constraints that shape the online space, calling into doubt its supposed openness, borderlessness, fluidity and lack of structure. In particular, the discussion highlights the persistence of the cultural dimension of the online communication, questioning the extent to which the nature of online communication is global, as is often argued. The concluding chapter uses the empirical case to engage with the broader concern with the relationship between media, communication and agency. Key words: narrative; narrating; storytelling; Internet; online; offline; breast cancer; agency; interviews

Continental drift in the legal profession : the struggle for collective bargaining by Nova Scotia's Crown prosecutors

ix, 357 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm.Includes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-345).This dissertation explores the apparent contradiction between the independence and autonomy of an elite profession and the pursuit of collective bargaining. Crown prosecutors employed in the Canadian public service bureaucracy are full members of the legal profession and also form a clearly recognized group of subordinated employees. Their need for prosecutorial independence clashes with management control in the context of dependent employment. This study examines the implications of a changing workplace and a changing profession for professional workers' choices of collective action. A case study of the Nova Scotia Crown Attorneys' Association experience and its members' struggle for collective bargaining rights forms the basis of this research. The study probes the question of how prosecutors move between two distinct strategies of labour process control and examines the implications of collective bargaining for professionalization. The research findings identify the existence of an occupational community within the broader legal profession. The occupational community reflects the marginalization of Crown prosecutors within their profession. Using narrative analysis of prosecutors' own stories of their career and labour struggles, the research reveals how this occupational community reflects the specialization and fragmentation of the profession and supports a unique work ethic and sense of professionalism among Crown prosecutors. Mobilization of prosecutors to demand bargaining rights, otherwise forbidden by law, is achieved with the use of specific language around fairness. This language has meaning and power in both a professional context as well as in the world of dependent employment, organization policy, and management decision making. An ethos of fairness enables Crown prosecutors to reconcile two competing logics of collective action, and to reclaim the benefits of professionalization eroded through dependent employment

The nationalisation of ethnicity: a study of the proliferation of national mono-ethnocultural umbrella organisations in Canada

In Canada, national ethnocultural advocacy groups are highly visible and are consulted by government officials in areas of multiculturalism policy as well as other areas of social policy and constitutional reform. Unlike local ‘ethnic’ associations that arise for a myriad of community specific purposes, national level ‘ethnic’ umbrella associations occupy a wholly different political space. One implication of this national level of representation is that who and what the group is becomes re-configured from a form of social organisation to a form of broad representation. At the national level, the organisation not only comes to represent the concrete aspirations of group members, but also becomes a guardian and advocate of a vision of ‘the group’. The process through which the ‘group’ boundaries are socially and politically constructed is the subject of this thesis. Writers tend to explain the proliferation of national ‘ethnic’ umbrella organisations through one of four therapies: interest group theory, social movement theory, theories of ethnic mobilisation, and state intervention. There is relative agreement that demographic changes resulting from the liberalisation of Canada’s immigration policy in 1967 led to larger and more politically active ethnocultural communities. Also, writers argue that the policy of Multiculturalism established in 1971 created opportunity for ethnocultural political participation as never before. There are strengths and weaknesses to each of these approaches, and they are analysed in the thesis. However, none of the existing theories explain how and why organisations formed at the national level at given periods of time, and how the substantive delineations of representation (i.e. in terms of ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ identities) were determined

1995-1999 Brock News

A compilation of the administration newspaper, Brock News, for the years 1995 through 1999. It had previously been titled Brock Campus News and preceding that, The Blue Badger