In this thesis I argue that David Miller has not successfully generated an account of nationalism that is liberal. I first present Miller’s account the nation, national identity and national culture. I then draw out how the ability of internal minorities to contest repugnant elements of national identity or culture is deeply ties to the liberal character of nationalism. I then argue that the exclusion of particular identities that is required by Miller’s public sphere deprives internal minorities of the epistemic resources they need to challenge repugnant elements of national culture or identity. This puts the liberal character of Miller’s nationalism into question. After I provide a rebuttal on behalf of Miller that leads to a reinterpretation of his view. However, I argue the modified account is still unsatisfactory in providing a means for contestation. Consequently I conclude if Miller is to provide an account of nationalism that is truly liberal he needs to tell a different story about the role of particular identities in public sphere deliberation.

Video games are often written off as juvenile or frivolous, but they are actually vehicles of socialization and hegemonic ideologies. Because of this, video games are deserving of research and critique. In video games, women are often underrepresented or hypersexualized, while men can be hypermasculinized. Many times, racial and ethnic portrayals in video games paint the person of color as victims of violence, villains, or sports athletes, while white characters take the role of hero or protagonist. Heterosexuality typically goes unmarked and is considered the default sexuality, and homophobic sentiments and slurs are prevalent in the gaming community. Because game developers still adhere to the belief that gamers are a homogenous group of white, cisgender, heterosexual men, LGBT+ representations generally fall into stereotypes—if they are included in the first place. With the lack of marginalized representation, gamers can queer video games through role-playing, queer readings, and in-game modifications. Furthermore, an intersectional analysis of video games is a missing gap in the literature, and this research aims to fill this gap. Through the deployment of critical discourse analysis, I analyzed the critically acclaimed video game The Last of Us Remastered and its accompanying side story The Last of Us: Left Behind for hegemonic or subversive representations of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and intersectionality. I discovered that although the game may incorporate diverse characters, the story ultimately centers on masculinity, heteronormativity, and whiteness through deployment of hegemony.

This thesis explores the lived experience of race as told through narratives of the city. It draws on photo diaries, observations and qualitative interviews with 32 people aged between 20 and 30 years old in three areas of Manchester. It examines how discourses, which construct UK cities as tolerant and multicultural spaces, are reproduced by the respondents and yet are contradicted by their everyday experiences. It argues that narratives that actively silence race, for example through notions of tolerance and colour-blindness, obscure the ways that people are differentially positioned and makes it difficult to name difference and name racism. The thesis explores a series of dilemmas that form part of the struggle to reconcile multiple and often contradictory levels of experience and situates these within the broader political context. The thesis engages with discussions around what have been broadly defined as ideas of ‘post-race’. It argues that the city becomes a useful avenue through which to direct this discussion, because it acts as a location in which race is imagined in conflicting ways; simultaneously as a site of segregation and conflict and cosmopolitanism and ‘mixing’.The thesis explores how people talk race through their representations of different spaces of the city. It argues that people’s stories about their relationship to place help make perceptible the different ways that they deal with difference. Race is silenced in narratives of place, emerging primarily through coded references to class and criminality, except when it is articulated with exotic and ‘sympathetic’ representations of the ‘ethnic’ or ‘migrant’ neighbourhood, or with a white underclass. It also examines how, within these narratives, people talk about knowing others that they emphasise are racially or ethnically different. Notions of tolerance and colour-blindness are invoked throughout these narratives and used to suggest that they are emblematic of a new generation. The thesis argues that the respondents' narratives resonate with national discourses of multiculture that imagine liberal spaces of cosmopolitanism and, simultaneously, silence inequalities and exclusion. The central problem is that these discourses and processes of silencing do not take account of the meanings of race and how people are differentially positioned. Consequently, they disable questions about the significance and the effects of race. This has implications for how racism can(not) then be named. People subjected to racism are, instead, under pressure to assimilate and conform to the behavioural norm. The thesis argues that respondents’ narratives of the everyday can, therefore, be interpreted as a form of orientalism (Puwar 2004). They are indicative of the kind of multiculturalism that ‘tolerates’ and ‘bestows rights’ on the racialised Other, but does nothing to demythologise the Other, or engage with the needs of minorities (Amin, 2010). The façade of ‘racial etiquette’ when it is constructed as such, thus implies a ‘refusal to understand’ (Foucault 1978), because to do so would necessitate confronting the currency of racism and the fact of white privilege.

Master of Arts / Department of Communications Studies / Colene J. Lind / Artists influence society. We also often consider the question of whether we can or should separate the art and the artist. In January 2016 The Birth of a Nation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to near unanimous praise. Shortly after the release, past allegations of sexual assault against the filmmaker, co-writer, and star Nate Parker’s past came to light. This revelation about his past continues a long and unfortunate history of artists who have completed culturally relevant works but who have been morally suspect human beings. I therefore explore how communities reconcile and support an artist accused of reprehensible acts or how they condemn the artist and reject support for them or their work. I find that commentators who engage in this controversy call forth specific communities. These communities are bound by their identities, and I suggest how they potentially are able to move forward, grow, and possibly come together across lines that include gender, race, ideology, social status, and personal identity and how they communicate and grow as individuals. Through revised discourse, these communities may be able to one day communicate across cultural lines that are currently deep chasms, separated by ideology and identity.

The mining industry in Arizona first gained prominence with the growth of the Morenci-Clifton district in the 1870s. A "Mexican camp" from its inception, the town differed racially from the other mining centers across the State, most notably that of Bisbee to the south. As the industry expanded and with the coming of the 20th century, each town established its reputation as an ethnic center for Mexicans and Anglos. Competition for jobs and debates over the rights of workers both contained an underlying issue of race. Questions about who held rights to which jobs isolated Morenci-Clifton as a cultural outlier, and the union push to regulate the industry left the region in a precarious situation. A 1903 state law shortening the work day to eight hours prompted the first major strike in the history of the district, and the motivations behind the law's passage had connotations beyond the protection of workers, extending into the realm of racial exclusion.

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The Royal Commission on Japanese Claims (1947-1951), known as the “Bird Commission,” investigated and offered compensation to Japanese Canadians for their losses of property during the 1940s. It is largely remembered for what it was not: that is, it was not a just resolution to the devastating material losses of the 1940s. Community histories bitterly describe the Commission as destined to failure, with narrow terms of reference that only addressed a fraction of what was taken. Similarly, other historians have portrayed the Commission as a defensive mechanism, intended by the government to limit financial compensation and to avoid the admission of greater injustice. Yet scholars have never fully investigated the internal workings of the Commission. Despite its failings, Japanese Canadians used the Bird Commission in their struggle to hold the state accountable. Hundreds of Japanese Canadians presented claims. Their testimonies are preserved in thousands of pages of archival documents. The Bird Commission was a troubling, flawed, but nonetheless important historical process. This thesis examines government documents, claimants’ case files, and oral histories to nuance previous accounts of the Bird Commission. I draw from ‘productive’ understandings of Royal Commissions to argue that the Liberal government, cognizant of how such mechanisms could influence public opinion, designed the Bird Commission to provide closure to the internment-era and to mark the start of the postwar period. Their particular definition of loss was integral to this project. As Japanese Canadians sought to expand this definition to address their losses, the proceedings became a record of contest over the meaning of property loss and the legacy of the dispossession. Navigating a web of constraints, Japanese Canadians participated in a broader debate over the meaning justice in a society that sought to distance itself from a legacy of racialized discrimination. This contest, captured in the Commission proceedings, provides a pathway into the complex history of the postwar years as Canadians grappled with the racism of Second World War, including Canada’s own race-based policies, and looked towards new approaches to pluralism. / Graduate / 2018-12-22

A plural society is like the proverbial iceberg: looking at it is not tantamount to seeing the whole of it. No amount of idealism can erase diversities as long as the stimulants which generate these diversities are rife. Only political maturity and political experience can overcome the separatist trends of a splintered society. Until the foundations for such maturity and experience are firmly laid, politics in such a society will remain complicated and confused, and nationalism will continue being a vicious abstraction. Communalism has become the cardinal problem of the Federation of Malaya. The peoples of the country are of different racial origins, conform to different social patterns, follow different courses of occupation, exhibit territorial preferences and, consequently, tend to have divergent political aspirations. Indeed, the most conspicuous demographic fact about the Federation rests in the balance of numerical power between the indigenous and immigrant segments of the population. Today, the former is outnumbered by the latter. Broadly speaking, herein lie the roots of the problem. It is the purpose of the following study to identify and analyse the influences exerted by communal factors in the political development of the Federation of Malaya. The first chapter is aimed at placing the communal problem in the country in its proper historical and political perspective. The creation of Malaya's plural society is analysed, followed by a study of the inter- and intra-communal diversities which have been so responsible for complicating the Malayan political scene. The chapter also discusses the impact of the Japanese occupation, both on inter-communal relations as well as on the country's nascent nationalism. Chapter two is based primarily on an analysis of Great Britain's attempt at political experimentation in Malaya during the first few years immediately following the war. As such, discussion is focussed on the two constitutional proposals (namely, the Malayan Union proposals of 1946 and the Federation Agreement of 1948) which form the main body of this experimentation. The period in question is made particularly significant by the fact that British policy during this time was considerably influenced by the reactions and aspirations of the different communities. Included in the chapter is a less detailed survey of some of the more important developments during the first decade after the war. Chapter three, on Political Parties, is designed to give a better understanding to present day politics in the country. It is also hoped that this chapter will give adequate insight into the present racial paradox, for today's co-operation was achieved largely through the alliance, for inter-communal purposes, of three parties (the United Malays' National Organization, the Malayan Chinese Association, and the Malayan Indian Congress) which, not so long ago, were organized for the distinct purpose of furthering the individual interests of the country's three main racial groups. This makes a study of the country's political parties a necessity if one is to sufficiently understand the principal features involved in the Federation's attempt to solve the so-called "population puzzle". In a broad sense, it may be observed that the present Malayan nation is the child of immigration. The country's economic potentialities (coupled with the impoverished condition of labour in India and China) have been responsible for luring a flood of immigrants who, today, have become a part of the settled population and hence demand rights equal to those of the indigenous Malays. The problem which needs to be solved is the extent to which these demands deserve to be satisfied. Thus a study of Malayan politics at once becomes interesting to both the political historian as well as the political sociologist. Nor is it void of interest to the political theorist, to whom the problem of successful representative government in a plural society, involving such controversial issues as the representation of minorities, has always constituted an absorbing field of study. The Federation of Malaya appears to have solved this problem to an appreciable extent, as evidenced by the electorate's voting behaviour during the country's first (and, to date, only) national elections held in July 1955. The results have been most gratifying, not only insofar as present socio political expedience is concerned, but also with regard to future stability. Issues pertaining to citizenship rights, involving, on the one hand, the demand for less stringent regulations from the non-Malays and, on the other, the necessity to preserve, for political as well as economic reasons, the "special position" accorded to the Malays, have always presented the country's administrators with a very trying problem. Consequently, the interests of two distinct groups (as represented by the "indigenous Malays on the one hand and the "alien" Chinese and Indians on the other) have had to be placated. While the Malays are apprehensive of the fact that lenient citizenship requirements would make them a political minority in their own country (which they already are numerically), the Chinese and Indians demand equal rights stating that, in addition to having made invaluable contributions to the economic development of the country, they also have, especially in post-war years, changed from a primarily non-resident population to a largely resident one. Compromises have had to be made, but opposition has always been significant. From this standpoint, the present Constitution is of particular importance, since the compromises inherent in it have had to be effected by the different races themselves (through the instrumentality of the UMNO-MCA-MIC Alliance), and now it is also up to them to implement it. Those articles in the Constitution related to communal issues will be the focus for discussion in chapter five. The encouraging potentialities which the present appears to hold for the future of the Malayan nation is a tribute not only to the races resident therein, but also to the flexibility and good sense displayed by British policy. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analysis to analyze a popular blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’ and asks the main research question: How is whiteness represented and understood in the satirical blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’? Grounded in theories of representation, discourse, myth and racialization, the thesis looks at two posts, “#1 Coffee” and “#92 Book Deals” and their user comments to investigate the ways whiteness is defined, understood, produced and negotiated. The blog and the comments reveal important discussions of knowledge production strategies of racialization and racism in popular media. Specifically, these negotiations expose three major registers of whiteness that are continually enacted within the discourses of the blog and the comments. These registers encompass understandings of whiteness as biological superiority and heritage; defining whiteness as a performance of privilege; and whiteness as an enactment of dominance and oppression. Sites of antiracist educational pedagogy are also discussed within this study to reveal the importance of investigating everyday discourses and understandings of race for the future.

This thesis is intended to enhance our knowledge of the processes behind the relinquishing of Canada's nuclear roles. As such, the underlying factors which helped bring about this change in Canadian defence policy are to be isolated and assessed. The process of retiring Canada's nuclear roles was long and complex, involving many actors and influences. The factors examined in this thesis are looked upon in the greater context of the 1960s and 1970s. The global and domestic political climates, the strategic environment and Canada's power within the global community as a whole during this time period, are considered. This study has revealed several interesting conclusions which one may draw concerning the relinquishing of Canada's nuclear roles. First of all, the Trudeau government's position on nuclear weapons coincided with growing opposition to nuclear weapons within the Canadian public. Furthermore, it is evident that public opinion on the nuclear issue was closely related to an individual's perception of the United States and his or her position on defence spending. Secondly, the process of retiring the nuclear weapon systems was led largely by Pierre Trudeau and some of his close associates, in particular Ivan Head and Donald MacDonald. This was done in the face of intense bureaucratic resistance. Thirdly, abandoning the nuclear roles was strongly related to Canada's declining position in the global community and also to the growth of detente. In addition, it was also partly the result of a rapidly changing strategic environemnt in which weapon systems were quickly made obsolete. Perhaps most importantly, this thesis shows that relinquishing Canada's nuclear roles was an extremely important part of the 1971 defence review. The issue of nuclear weapons is one which has been largely overlooked by defence and foreign policy analysts in the past, such as Thordarson as well as Granatstein and Bothwell, and therefore merits our attention. For this thesis, telephone interviews had to be conducted because very little written material is available to the public. Regrettably, these interviews must remain confidential for the time-being. Several books, articles and public opinion surveys also were very helpful in conducting this analysis. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate