This study on engagement in environmental activism can offer valuable insights into how Ontario’s young people come to be responsible stewards of the earth. This research seeks to understand the narrative complexities put forth by teachers and students (Gr. 11-12) about the influence school plays for environmental activists. The teachers’ involvement with activism is mediated by students and the social networks that support their actions. The students’ involvement in action is influenced by teacher mentors, learning about/in the environment, and having a venue for activism. These findings suggest that in order to live up to Acting Today, Shaping Tomorrow schools should be seeking to have at least one environmentally literate teacher who wants to provide students with a venue for action. To assist the teachers and students with activism, there needs to be support for environmental action initiatives from the school administration and the community.

Grounded in a historical, socio-cultural consideration of Indigenous women’s theatrical production, this dissertation examines representations of gendered violence in Canadian Indigenous women’s drama. The female playwrights who are the focus of my thesis – Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan – counter colonial and occasionally postcolonial renditions of gendered and racialized violence by emphasizing female resistance and collective coalition. While these plays represent gendered violence as a real, material mechanism of colonial destruction, ultimately they work to promote messages of collective empowerment, recuperation, and survival. My thesis asks not only how a dramatic text might deploy a decolonizing aesthetic, but how it might redefine dramatic/literary and socio-cultural space for resistant and decolonial ends. Attentive to the great variance of subjective positions occupied by Indigenous women writers, I examine the historical context of theatrical reception, asking how the critic/spectator’s engagement with and dissemination of knowledge concerning Indigenous theatre might enhance or impede this redefinition. Informed by Indigenous/feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical perspectives that address the production and dissemination of racialized regimes of representation, my study assesses the extent to which colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence – especially sexual violence – against Indigenous women. Most significantly, my thesis considers how and to what degree resistant representations in Indigenous women’s dramatic productions work against such representational and manifest violence.

Feminist activism has a rich history in Canada, but mobilization on the issue of violence against women specifically gained considerable momentum during what is often referred to as the “second wave” of the feminist movement. Since this time, the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have seen a proliferation of both grassroots and public policy responses to intimate partner violence and sexual violence. This study is an effort to construct a feminist history of the activism that occurred between 1970 and 2010, as well as to make sense of feminist claims-making strategies using a social constructionist approach to social problems and to make sense of feminist activism as a social movement using social movement impact theory. In constructing a feminist history, documents from the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives were consulted and interviews with current and former feminist activists were conducted. The historical component of this study focuses on how feminist activists first recognized and responded to the problem of violence against women. This analysis suggests that throughout the last forty years, feminist activists have engaged in a multi-pronged project of providing feminist services for victims of intimate partner and sexual violence, advocating for social and legal change as the “official” response to violence against women, and conducting their own research on the extent and nature of violence against women. Various strategies were used in this process, including forming partnerships and coalitions, but activists also faced challenges from within and outside the movement, including internal debates, struggles to fit in, and backlash from counter movements. The final chapter discusses how the history of feminist activism on violence against woman cannot easily fit into strict constructionist approach to understanding social problems and, as a social movement, is difficult to evaluate given the myriad goals, mechanisms for reaching those goals, and interpretations of success associated with the movement. Future research directions are also suggested, including looking at evidence of claims-making from other sources; bridging the gap, theoretically and pragmatically, between the “mainstream” feminist movement and other streams of women’s activism; and, more conceptual work on feminist movements and the separation between intimate partner and sexual violence.

Esta pesquisa consiste em um estudo de caso realizado com jovens estudantes da Zona Leste de São Paulo que fizeram parte da mobilização secundarista de 2015, marcada pelas ocupações de escola. O objetivo da pesquisa foi investigar a formação de visões de mundo e as formas de engajamento político desses sujeitos, procurando relacioná-las aos elementos imediatos do seu cotidiano. Ao longo da dissertação, discute-se a relação desses jovens tanto com ativistas quanto com atores que compõe sua realidade local. Verificou-se que o envolvimento em um cursinho popular atuante na Zona Leste de São Paulo teve grande peso em seu processo de politização e que, a partir dos laços ali construídos, ligaram-se a uma rede mais ampla de novas formas de ativismo. Identifica-se também uma tensa relação com o conjunto de atores identificado como agentes da ordem: policiais, burocracia escolar, igreja e famílias. Por fim, acompanhando seu percurso de engajamento posterior à onda de ocupações escolares de 2015, percebe-se o rompimento desses jovens com a ideia de representação e a afinidade com repertórios autonomistas, bem como uma forte ligação com plano local. / This research consists of a case study made with young students from the east side of São Paulo who were part of a mobilization in 2015, marked by a wave of school occupations. The objective of the research was to investigate the formation of the students worldview and political engagement, relating them to the immediate elements of their daily life. Throughout the dissertation, we discuss their relationship with both activists and actors that are part of their local reality. It was verified that a community college course had a great influence in their process of politicization and that, from the bonds built there, they were connected to a wider network of new forms of activism. It also identifies a tense relationship with the set of actors identified as \"agents of order\": police officers, school bureaucracy, church and families. Finally, following their path of engagement after the wave of school occupations, one can see the youth breakup with the affinity and idea of autonomist representation repertoires, as well as a strong connection with local plan.

This thesis examines the route I took to produce a live activist performance in which twenty-six self-identifying women collaborated to destroy wax assault rifles with domestic products. These guns act as a metaphor for the violence that happens to many women on a daily basis. One in four women will encounter domestic violence, and one in six women will be raped in their lifetimes in the United States. Not only are many of our bodies attacked mentally, physically and sexually, but also the government stakes claim on our bodies. With 138 representatives voting against the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and many of those same representatives also voting against stricter gun regulations it is apparent that these politicians do not see it problematic that women's bodies are targets. When the women come together, their connections are empowering, fierce, sometimes gentle, and always meaningful. As women, we may be targeted, but when we are together, and our voices are loud -- and in unison, we are strong.

Over the last two decades, the use of empowerment approaches to help reduce health-related vulnerabilities and violence among female sex workers has increasingly informed global health efforts directed at HIV/STD prevention. The empowerment approach to sex worker health rejects both abolitionist and narrowly conceived clinical approaches in favor of strategies that promote commercial sex as valid work, strengthen sex workers’ agency, reinforce female sexual autonomy, and support rights-based framing. A significant outcome of the empowerment approach to integrating health, social, and legal strategies has been the creation of numerous sex worker associations and NGOs, which advocate for collective mobilization and community-based HIV/STD prevention programs among sex workers. Despite numerous studies examining the efficacy of community empowerment approaches to sex worker health and the creation of civil society organizations to implement such approaches, there has been little theorization about how participation in sex worker NGO-based programming and activism shapes the personal, embodied experiences and subjectivities of sex workers. Similarly, questions of how sex worker associations and NGOs are shaped by the experiences, realities, feelings, and personal opinions of sex workers have received limited attention. Given the morally charged and highly stigmatized environments in which sex workers typically operate, studying how and which sex workers come into contact with these NGOs helps to illuminate how community and kinship relations, and individual and collective aspirations, shape sex work activism and contribute to the making (and unmaking) of related associations and NGOs. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with female sex workers and sex work activists, this work combines medical anthropological and feminist perspectives to interpret sex worker associations and NGOs as “local moral worlds” that highlight how subjectivities, body, moral experience, kinship, care, and women’s agency relate. From the subjective experiences of older female sex worker/activist informants, I argue that sex worker associations and NGOs are best comprehended not simply as the outcomes of global health efforts to curb the spread of HIV and other STDs, but also as complex social arenas that need to be reconsidered in light of existing relationships between and among sex workers and their families and the state. This argument is informed by my yearlong engagement with Women’s Solidarity House (WSH), a pseudonym for an organized association of active and retired female sex workers in the red-light district of San José, which recently received NGO status from the Costa Rican state. One important dimension of WSH that requires careful consideration is the fact that most of the women who participate in its development and programming are over the age of 40, with an average age of about 52. This fact makes WSH an interesting and important case study, since it caters most especially to female sex workers who are generally outside of the purview of most sex worker empowerment and health-related prevention programs, which are designed and implemented by public health researchers and development specialists. While theories of gender, stigma, and social inequality have increasingly informed medical anthropological efforts to understand how structural factors shape the personal, embodied experiences of sex workers and the distribution of HIV/STDs, there has been very little effort to understand how aging and ageism factor into the making and unmaking of sex worker embodiment and subjectivity and older women sex workers’ risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and infections. Given that sex work is a profession or income-generating strategy that adult women in various stages of their lives perform, the lack of research and theorization about these aspects of female sex workers’ lives, I suggest, has prevented a broader research and programmatic response both to common risks such as HIV/STDs and violence, and to work-related health problems and occupational conditions that older sex workers may consider more important in their day-to-day lives. My research shows that a “structural approach” to sex work, which highlights the underlying social, historical, political, and economic forces that encourage and foster the economic exploitation, stigmatization, and negative health outcomes of women (and men) who sell sex, would benefit from adding a feminist anthropological perspective on aging. In this view, aging is a critical social structural inequality that society uses to devalue women’s status and which women often experience as stigmatizing and/or shameful. In Costa Rica, where recent reporting has suggested an increase in the number of older women in the local sex industry, studying women’s experiences of and responses to growing old in the sex trade reveals not only the long-term impacts of neoliberal reform polices, but also how gendered discourses about aging, increasing familial caregiving responsibilities, and growing inequality and economic pressure, together, conspire to limit older women sex workers’ employment opportunities and put them at greater risk of violence, discrimination, psychological distress, sexual assault, substance abuse, poverty, and HIV/STDs.

This project analyses the role of social media and small media use during the ongoing Anglophone crisis in Cameroon by projecting social media as a product of new ICTs used to bring positive social change. An argument is raised to address some of the inadequacies that have centered around social media and protest with a focus on the Anglophone crisis. Questions aim at highlighting the positive and negative role of social media use, the role played by the Cameroonian diaspora’s “online activism” and how small media use served as an alternative medium in maintaining crisis status quo during the internet ban. The study suggests a combination of social and small media for community development and social change using theories of media affordances and participation in combination with qualitative ethnographic research methods (participant observation, interviews and online survey). It concludes that even though social media are very powerful tools for information sharing, their shortcomings in protests cannot be overlooked as the success of online activism greatly relies on offline action and the use of small media greatly complements social media use as platforms for alternative discourse. The research concludes that social media (online) activism without ground action (offline) is not enough to achieve development and social change. Key words: ICT4D, Social media, small media, activism, diaspora.

Through lenses of social movement theories, queer theory, intersectionality, performativity, and performance theory, my study employed a qualitative queer(y)ing methodology to explore how three queer theatre festivals contribute to the production of knowledge and learning, community building, and leadership and activism in the queer social movement in Canada. The queer theatre festivals included the Rhubarb festival, Toronto; Pretty, Witty and GAY!, Lethbridge; and OUTstages, Victoria. Data collection methods included participant observation through festival attendance, a postcard survey, and semistructured interviews with festivalgoers, performers, and festival organizers. Findings show that festivalgoers learned through spoken words and visuals of the performances and their embodied/somatic reactions to the performances, self-reflection, collective discourse and reflection, festival design elements, self-learning following the festivals, and from creating a performance and performing. The learning that resulted had significant impacts on festivalgoers including empathy development, therapeutic and healing benefits, a sense of hope, allyship development, and personal transformation. The festivals’ wider societal benefits were found to be increased queer visibility in the communities; the power to shift societal attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour; and economic benefits. The study sheds light on the leadership potential of queer cultural activists and artists (artivist-leaders) as it reveals how the festivals’ act as powerful cultural producing sites with individual and social transformation and learning possibilities. Finally, the study’s findings provide evidence that rejects the claim that a new queer social movement exists and is distinct from the traditional gay and lesbian social movement. / Graduate

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第22020号 / 人博第910号 / 2019||人博||910(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生文明学専攻 / (主査)教授 岡 真理, 准教授 齋藤 嘉臣, 教授 土屋 由香, 教授 和泉 真澄 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

Albuquerque, New Mexico, similar to many cities in the western and southwestern United States, continues to build large scale business and housing developments. In response, communities most affected by urban sprawl challenge local government decisions to approve such developments, citing concerns for environmental, cultural, and economic well-being. My thesis explores one such community effort to protect land and water resources within the historic Atrisco land grant, located southwest of the city of Albuquerque. In particular, I examine an event that occurred May 28th, 2015 when a group of concerned women and children disrupted a Bernalillo County special zoning meeting where a five member board of county commissioners denied community appeals to reject approval of a 14,000 acre development called Santolina. I employ ethnographic methods of in-depth interviews, participant observation, and secondary data collection to provide a rich description of the Women’s Action as an act of resistance. I situate my ethnographic account within the scholarship of Ewick and Silbey (1995; 1998; 2003) who empirically derive a theory of everyday acts of resistance as momentary reversals of hierarchical power relations embedded in institutional space. My research offers insights into how communities both engage in and disrupt public participation processes.