Challenging the empowerment expectation: Learning, alienation and design possibilities in community-university research

As community-university partnerships have become mainstream, researchers have argued that these approaches have the potential to be transformative, supporting community learning and creating capacity for community development. While this remains the dominant narrative of community research, some researchers have questioned the impacts of community research on frontline community, or peer, researchers who represent partnerships in their communities. These studies complicate the narrative, suggesting that learning and capacity building are not straightforward processes. While on the whole community-university partnerships tend to be empowering for community researchers, research is needed to understand the experiences of community researchers for whom this is not the case. My research examines a Toronto-based community-university participatory action research partnership, asking what community researchers learnt through their participation. I argue that, while community researchers learnt a great deal from their participation, the overall impact was not empowerment, but alienation. They did have their knowledge of community validated, and they built research skills, developed grievances through their conversations with neighbours and interrogated the links between grievances, all of which were important aspects of their participation. However, through the process they developed, or entrenched, a sense of powerlessness and dependence on the university researchers to take up their cause politically. This contradicts the aspirations of community-university partnership models, especially participatory action research, and raises questions about the inevitability of empowering social action stemming from these research projects. I argue that the disempowerment that the community researchers reported points to the need for community research to be embedded within existing social action organisations and infrastructure to provide clearer pathways to action because, without this, peer researchers may become overwhelmed by the scope of the grievances in their neighbourhoods and withdraw from, rather than embrace, the need for collective social action

Politicization in Practice: Learning the Politics of Racialization, Patriarchy, and Settler Colonialism in the Youth Climate Movement

As anti-pipeline struggles have become a central focus of the North American environmental movement, the Whiteness, masculinity, and settler-coloniality of the mainstream movement has come under more scrutiny than ever. Though the mainstream environmental movement has long been acknowledged as a White default space, committed to strategies and tactics rooted in settler-colonial logics, and managed by White men at the highest levels, there is a broad conversation emerging right now arguing that the movement needs to unsettle those norms, and urgently. This study looks at one climate campaign as a case study with the potential to reveal both how mainstream environmental spaces become default spaces of Whiteness, masculinity, and settler-coloniality, as well as how these activist groups can become politicized, resisting social relations of dominance and centring reconciliation in their approach to climate justice. Using sociocultural theory as the lens for theorizing learning within the climate movement, this dissertation brings learning within social movements into focus, examining cognition, participation, ways of knowing and being, and identity development across a two-year activist campaign. This dissertation examines Fossil Free UofT, the University of Toronto campaign for fossil fuel divestment. I ask how participants learned to understand and disrupt social relations of racialization, settler colonialism, and patriarchy. I examine what participants in the campaign learned and how they mobilized their learning collectively to reproduce and resist racialized, gendered, and colonial power relations. I also question how sociocultural theories of learning enable theorizations of politicization, as well as how they can be strengthened through sustained attention to the ways that social relations shape opportunities to learn in movements. This dissertation contributes to an emergent field in the learning sciences, where social movements and community organizations are increasingly analyzed for their ability to foment unique learning opportunities. I theorize politicization within this context, providing a framework for sociocultural learning theorists to bring together disparate conversations about learning, civic engagement, sociopolitical development, and critical social analysis.Ph.D.2019-12-19 00:00:0

La Millennium Library de Winnipeg a besoin de solidarité et non de sécurité

We argue that Winnipeg’s downtown Millennium Library’s aggressive and invasive security screening practices represent a threat to libraries across North America. Drawing on critical librarianship literatures, as well as anti-racist and criminological scholarship, we argue that moves to implement security screening in libraries flies in the face of best practices for public libraries, creates opportunities for racial bias and harm, and does not make patrons or staff safer. We trace the multiple ways that securitization creates harm for different marginalized communities. We then argue that Millennium Library is not alone in facing this risk, and that solidarity and mobilization by other librarians will be necessary to stem the tide on securitization. Nous soutenons que les pratiques agressives et envahissantes de contrôle de sécurité à la Millennium Library au centre-ville de Winnipeg créent un précédent dangereux et restrictif pour les bibliothèques canadiennes. En nous appuyant sur la documentation sur la bibliothéconomie dirigée par la communauté, ainsi que sur les études antiracistes et criminologiques, nous soutenons que la mise en œuvre de contrôle de sécurité dans les bibliothèques va à l’encontre des pratiques exemplaires des bibliothèques publiques, crée des possibilités de préjugés raciaux et de préjudices, et ne fournit pas plus de sécurité ni pour les usagers ni pour le personnel. Nous retraçons les multiples façons dont le contrôle de sécurité crée des préjudices pour différentes communautés marginalisées. Nous soutenons ensuite que la Millennium Library n’est pas la seule à faire face à ce risque et que la solidarité et la mobilisation des autres travailleurs des bibliothèques seront nécessaires pour endiguer la vague de contrôle de sécurité

Millennium For All Alternative Report on Public Library Security

In response to the airport-style security measures implemented at the downtown Millennium Branch of the Winnipeg Public Library, concerned library users, academics, and library workers came together to prepare a report assessing the negative impact of the measures as well as to explore alternatives. Focusing on how securitization disproportionately affects already marginalized communities and is part of a larger trend of social exclusion in Winnipeg's public spaces, the report also covers existing community-led alternatives in Canadian libraries.https://osf.io/preprints/lissa/vfu6h

Cultural forces in journalism: The impact of cultural values on Maori journalists' professional views

Social system-level analyses of journalism have tended to focus on political and economic influences, at the expense of other factors, such as the role that culture and cultural values play in shaping journalists' professional views and practices. This paper identifies cultural values as a particularly fruitful area for providing a more nuanced analysis of journalism culture. It examines this issue in the context of in-depth interviews with 20 M?ori journalists from Aotearoa New Zealand. The study finds that Indigenous journalism in that country is strongly influenced by M?ori cultural values, such as showing respect to others, following cultural protocols, and making use of culturally-specific language. Cultural limitations are also identified in the form of the social structures of M?ori society, and journalists' strategies in working around these are discussed. The paper highlights the implications a renewed focus on cultural values can have for the study of journalism culture more broadly