National multicultural and multiracial pluralism is a reality of modernity. In Canada multiculturalism has been an official policy since 1971. As a settler society the concepts, values and principles entrenched in multiculturalism, citizenship and immigration reflect a history of racialization. Uncritical views of nation building and citizenship assume that all Canadians have equal opportunity to participate and contribute to the social, economic, cultural and political life of the country. Given the current milieu of globalization, transnationalism and internationalism in an era of interconnectivity, market economies and of focus on economic capital, there is a challenge for Canada to consign a sense of place and equal participation to all its citizens. This is a conceptual thesis that looks at how government policy and dominant hegemony in Canada mediate relationships and identities within and among immigrant communities and other marginalized communities be they bound by geography, economics race, gender, religion or sexuality. Personal-narratives from my own experience as an immigrant are used to highlight how social relations are constituted, synthesized, merged, enacted, intersected, transpired and inspired. The objective is to interrogate the ubiquity of racially esssentialized and exclusionary practices that continue to inform and guide our development as a settler society, no matter how rigorously we may deny or how we frame the practice of racialization. The key issues to be examined are, first, the development of group and individual identity in its relational, political, historical and cultural contexts. The second issue is the development of social relations between marginalized communities as they are affected by government policies in areas of immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship. And finally the thesis examines the practice of Adult Education as contributing to social relations between communities. Identity and identity politics circumscribing the Canadian psyche provides a powerful location for adult learning in general but particularly in situations serving immigrant and newcomers. This thesis develops a lens that contributes to a critical approach to the provision of Adult Education in settlement services, health education, work place training, language acquisition and other services that shape social relations between communities. These programs should incorporate critical theories to make transparent the 'real' history of Canada and students place in the nation.

My dissertation is motivated by two general problems within contemporary North American racial politics. First, the increasing ideological impetus of a “post-racist” society contradicts a spate of events that are symptomatic and constitutive of racial and ethnic essentialisms. Second, the logic of multiculturalism and antiracism has often been expressed in a language of race and identity rooted in a rigid system of immutable differences (Hall, 1997; Ang, 2001). The challenge is to deconstruct race and ethnicity in a language that is critical of new racisms as well as the ways in which racial and ethnic difference is seized and diffused by market multiculturalism. While some theorists have used elements of postmodern theory to develop a “resistance multiculturalism” sensitive to shifting social meanings and floating racial signifiers (see McLaren, 1994), they have rarely explored the political possibilities of “ludic postmodernism” (parody, pastiche, irony) as a critical response to multicultural ideologies. If part of postmodernism as an intellectual movement includes self-reflexivity, self-parody, and the rejection of a foundational “truth,” for example, the various racial and ethnic categories reified under multiculturalism are perhaps open to revision and contestation (Hutcheon, 1989). To develop this particular postmodern critique of multiculturalism, I draw on three case studies concerned with identity and representation in North American popular media. The first case considers vocal impersonation as a disruption to the visual primacy of race by examining the stand-up comedy films of Dave Chappelle, Russell Peters, and Margaret Cho. The second case turns to the postmodern bodies of cyborgs and humanoid robots in the science fiction film I, Robot (2004) as a racial metaphor at the crossroads of whiteness, inhumanity, and redemption. The final case discusses the politics of irony in relation to ethnolinguistic identity and debates surrounding sports mascots. Each case study recycles racial and ethnic stereotypes for a variety of political purposes, drawing out the connections and tensions between postmodernism and multiculturalism. A postmodern critique of multiculturalism may offer antiracist politics an understanding of race and ethnicity rooted in a strategic indeterminacy, which allows for multidimensional political coalitions directed against wider socioeconomic inequalities.

This project outlines the existence of neoliberal multiculturalism and identifies the implications and limitations of its practice. Neoliberal multiculturalism involves the institutionalization of group autonomy by the state to download responsibility to jurisdictions that have historically lacked sufficient fiscal capacity and have been hampered by colonialism in the development of the political capacity necessary to fully meet the requirements entailed by the devolution. At the same time, this practice releases the formerly responsible jurisdiction from the political burden of the policy area(s) despite its continued influence and effect. As demonstrated by my analysis of the Indigenous child welfare devolution that has occurred recently in Manitoba, neoliberal multiculturalism therefore involves a certain kind of “privatization”—that is, it involves the appearance of state distance from said policy area. This practice problematizes the traceability of power and decision making while at the same time it co-opts and in many ways neutralizes demands from critics of the state by giving the appearance of state concession to these demands. In response to the dangers of neoliberal multiculturalism, I situate multiculturalism in a robustly political model of democratic multi-nationalism (characterized by both agonism and deliberation) in order to combat multiculturalism’s tendency simply to rationalize “privatization” and to enhance democratic accountability. My approach goes beyond dominant constructions of group autonomy through group rights by emphasizing that autonomy is a relational political practice rather than a resource distributed by a benevolent state. Building on my analysis of Indigenous autonomy and the unique challenges that it presents for traditional democratic practices, I outline a contextually sensitive, case-specific employment of what I term “democratic multi-nationalism”. This approach conceives of Indigenous issues as inherently political in nature, as opposed to culturally defined and constituted, and therefore better meets the challenges of the colonial legacy and context of deep difference in which Indigenous-state relations take place today.

This thesis examines the tension and cooperation between politics of conformity and difference that are embedded in urban spaces, such as burials and mosques in Britain and beyond. It examines the social, political and cultural ideologies and complexities of the historical past and present by focusing on death, belonging and architecture. It will show that the past has become re-imagined and embedded into the postcolonial concrete present. Thereby, carving out new national traditions and memories that travel through time and space. The study suggests that urban space, although often ignored is important not only for our everyday consciousness and social realities, but is pivotal to examine and study especially in relation to national policies, such as “multiculturalism”.

This research illuminates the gendered nature of immigration and business ownership in the Atlantic Canadian context. A feminist analysis of semi-structured interviews with 15 immigrant women entrepreneurs in Halifax, Nova Scotia, shows that immigrant women face many barriers to meaningful employment, but entrepreneurship in the food sector can facilitate substantive citizenship. The research explains why and how stores, restaurants, and farmers’ market stalls exist. The processes through which participants come to open their businesses and settle in Canada align with twentieth century anthropological understandings of rites of passage as developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Liminality – a key element of every rite of passage – is found to be a time in which participants feel lost betweentheir old and new lives, so conclusions in this research advance policy and programming recommendations aimed at reducing the length of time immigrants’ feel like outsiders in Halifax and the business realm.

This thesis examines images of volunteer tourism—or voluntourism—on internet sites and describes how the photographs that appear on them contribute to maintaining global systems of power. Voluntourism is defined as either the payment of a program fee to an organization to travel to a developing country to perform various volunteer tasks or as the pause of gainful employment in one’s own country to work for an extended period of time in a developing country at a local wage. Currently there is debate as to the real benefits of volunteer tourism: is it truly the sustainable form of responsible, alternative tourism it is intended to be, or does it merely replicate the conditions of mass tourism and exploit those it is intended to benefit? This study explores visual representations of voluntourism in non-Western cultures in developing countries, and the consumption of those representations by participants in Canadian-based volunteer tourism organizations. The primary focus is photographs of interpersonal relationships between “voluntourists” and “voluntoured” in an examination of how culture and skin colour are manipulated in an attempt to maintain Westerners’ positions of power in pictures and, by extension, in global power relations. I suggest that a complex interaction of the pictorial codes of tourism, colonialism and the popular media converge in voluntourism’s photographs, resulting in images that simultaneously offer potential volunteers the opportunity to “do good” in the world as well as to consume cultural difference as a commodity. The main body of work is a visual discourse analysis of the photographs of five Canadian volunteer organizations’ websites. I identify the thematic categories used to promote voluntourism and discuss them in relation to patterns of mass tourism, charity advertisements, colonial travel narratives and their associated visual representation. This paper includes interviews with Canadian past volunteers to assess the importance of images to their experience of voluntourism. I close with a discussion of multiculturalism in Canada which brings together the experience of working within another culture in voluntourism and the conditions of Canadian multicultural society. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 20:23:25.935

One of the most influential authors of the past decade who has tried to assess a theoretical model of defense of 'cultural rights' from a liberal prospective is Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka appears even to believe that his model of multiculturalism represents the only systematic account of minority rights that is yet available within liberal theory. He assumes that other liberal thinkers---e.g. Raz, Taylor, Habermas---'have sketched some concepts or principles which they think should govern liberal approaches to ethnocultural demands' but their views constitute, at the end of the day, 'more outlines than systematic theories' (Kymlicka 1997: 86, n. 1). This essay stems from my critical reading of Kymlicka's theory. / It is not my intention here to provide an alternative model of dealing with 'cultural differences'. My aims are much more modest. First, I want to provide a critical assessment of Kymlicka's theory by pointing out some of its conceptual ambiguities. Second, I want to discuss the case of Switzerland by defending the thesis that it does not constitute a multinational state. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This project explores the racialized construction of the Canadian nation through the teaching of history and the discourse of multiculturalism, and investigates the ways in which young people experience and make sense of history, nation and race in the context of 'official' narratives of the nation. I begin by reviewing the literature of critical race theory, then use this theoretical framework as a lens through which to review the literature of qualitative studies of young people's historical meaning-making. Following a discussion of the methodological approach, I analyse the construction of race and nation through the discourse of Canadian history, as manifested in a variety of sites, including federal policy, curriculum frameworks, textbooks, and the Historica Foundation's Heritage Minutes. Finally, I present the results of a conversation with youth about their experiences with and views of race, nation and history.

This thesis examines how cultural understandings are generated and transmitted in a Canadian multicultural teaching hospital. It explores how issues of 'culture' are addressed formally and informally in the experiences of patients and practitioners. Using the approach of an institutional ethnography, emphasis is placed upon informal strategies of cultural care as a taken-for-granted practice in clinical life. It illuminates how pressure to learn culturally sensitive care seeps into the fabric of daily clinical life, and how cultural practices are constructed within a complex set of organized social practices. / The study concludes that advocacy of multicultural policies, must consider the dominance of existing western health care paradigms. It advocates culturally responsive care as a parallel force that can collaborate with the regimes of formal health practices. It argues that providing effective health care to all segments of Canadian society requires structural changes in health education which need to address existing disjunctures between 'effective ideals' and ideological knowledge, in order that all are ensured optimum health care.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (Ph.D)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2006.