This paper focuses on issues of Jewish identity, whiteness and victimhood within hegemonic Holocaust education. I argue that today, Jewish people of European descent enjoy white privilege and are among the most socio-economically advantaged groups in the West. Despite this privilege, the organized Jewish community makes claims about Jewish victimhood that are widely accepted within that community and within popular discourse in the West. I propose that these claims to victimhood are no longer based in a reality of oppression, but continue to be propagated because a victimized Jewish identity can produce certain effects that are beneficial to the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state. I focus on two related Holocaust education projects – the March of the Living and the March of Remembrance and Hope – to show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state.

Critical Indigenous scholars and their explicit allies have emphasized the need for curriculum and pedagogy in teacher education to address settler colonialism in Canada (Cannon, forthcoming(a); Cannon and Sunseri, 2011; Dion, 2009; Friedel, 2010a; Haig-Brown, 2009; Schick, 2010; Schick and St. Denis 2003, 2005; & St. Denis, 2007) . This thesis is primarily concerned with the existence of and possibilities for such a curriculum. In this thesis, I analyzed the curricula used in the three required courses of the secondary consecutive Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program in the 2011-2012 year at OISE for representations of settler colonialism in Canada. This study finds that while the curriculum in the ITE program at OISE focuses broadly on social justice, it shies away from addressing the ways that Canadians are complicit in ongoing colonialism. The thesis ends by highlighting some clear possibilities and challenges for a curriculum of settler colonial responsibility.

It has been argued, albeit with some degree of success, that the challenges facing the 21st century Canadian classroom are highly complex. A troubled economy riddled with cutbacks to the education system, ongoing enrolment decline and challenges in embracing a growth in the diversity of students are among the changes that have made classrooms increasingly difficult to navigate. Though the last assertion may be true, disciplinary policies and the tools used to address unwanted student behaviour have remained relatively unchanged within the education system. Using Critical Race Theory, the author examines the implications of school suspension and expulsion programs on students and provides an analysis of current literature on alternative disciplinary methods in public schools. Findings suggest that a mixture of strategies within various disciplinary programs can benefit some students, but more work must be done to address socioeconomic disparities plaguing the majority of students found in these programs.

Nursing is a high risk profession for injury. A Canadian survey reports many nurses are in poor physical and emotional health; they sustain more musculoskeletal and violence related injuries than other occupational groups. In Ontario, an injury management approach called Early Return to Work (RTW) requires injured workers, including nurses, to go back to work before full recovery. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board cite this approach as beneficial to both the employer and employee. This study uses an institutional ethnographic approach to examine critically the RTW process from the standpoint of injured registered nurses. Through interviews and mapping activities with nurses, other health professionals and managers, a rendering of the social organization of hospital injury management emerges. The findings suggest that the implementation of RTW is complicated and difficult for nurses, their families and hospital employers. Injured nurses engage in significant amounts of domestic, rehabilitation and accommodation work in order to participate in the RTW process. When the returning nurse is unable to engage in full duties hospital operations become disorganized. Collective agreements and human resources procedures limit the participation of injured nurses in creative and/or new roles that could utilize their knowledge and skills. As a result, nurses are assigned to duties, which hamper them from returning to their pre-injury positions and cause their employment with the hospital to be reconsidered. The unsuccessful return of injured nurses to employment is counter to provincial retention initiatives, which seek to sustain an adequate cadre of nurses ready and able to care for the increasing health care needs of an aging population. Sites of change which could support and promote the successful return of these injured workers to nursing work are identified in this study.

Governments across the world rationalize interdisciplinarity as an effective strategy for answering complex problems of social importance, drawing on large investments of resources to technical and biomedical sectors. I have identified this rationale as part of specific discursive relations and subsequently troubled its dominance through an exploration of how it has been authorized, and how faculty and administrators negotiate subjectification in engineering and medicine where this discourse dominates. Neo-liberal approaches to knowledge-production are deconstructed and analyzed. An archive was assembled of key texts pertaining to interdisciplinarity including documents produced by the OECD, the Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments, the University of Toronto (UofT), academics and the popular press. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of these texts provided a specific historical context for interviews conducted with 20 faculty and administrators identified as interdisciplinary knowledge-makers. Subsequently, a situated analysis of how discourse is embodied and experienced was developed and applied to the whole archive. Four inter-related concepts were identified as making-up the popular discourse of interdisciplinarity: diversify-collaborate-innovate-integrate. According to this narrative, knowledge-makers are expected to diversify through collaboration in order to innovate and produce knowledge that is useful and marketable. From the discovery of insulin to the establishment of the MaRS discovery district, knowledge-making examples from UofT are analyzed to identify the social relations that make the idea possible that researchers should address problems of ‘relevance’. I argue that interdisciplined subjects are ‘facilitated’ to fulfill this popular narrative by management approaches that capitalize on intrinsic notions of ‘making-a-difference’. Concurrently, different narratives of interdisciplinarity are embodied and promoted as individuals negotiate ontological and epistemological issues in their daily practice. This research contributes to the refinement of Foucauldian discourse analysis, and informs scholarship on the effects of neoliberal approaches to knowledge-making and the professionalization projects of engineering and medicine.

This qualitative study focuses on students and instructors who study, teach, and learn critical concepts of identity, such as gender, race, and dis/ability. The participants’ reflections on these university classroom experiences are examined in order to explore the ways they understand their encounters with privilege and power. In classes that take up discussions of identity – critical identity classrooms – the intention is often to teach, study, and learn how (our) identity or identities manifest in social life, how these manifestations can be problematized, and how these explorations can lead to social change. Often, these courses centre on discussing identity in terms of oppression, rather than investigating the intersections of privilege and oppression. A major contention of this study is that a lack of discussion about privilege in the academy enables the pervasive invisibility of many unearned social advantages to remain under-theorized and ‘invisible.’ This study questions how it is that we come to understand concepts of identity to be one-dimensional, rather than understanding privilege as dynamic and situated. Using in-depth interviews with 22 undergraduate students and 8 instructors from 2 contrasting universities, this study explores 3 main questions: (1) How do students in higher education who are engaged in critical identity studies interpret privilege, both for others and themselves? (2) How do the participants understand their experiences inside and outside the classroom to be related to notions of privilege and oppression that often arise in critical identity classrooms? (3) How does using a multi-site approach to study critical identity classroom experiences extend the ways in which students’ understandings of privilege can be explored? Using these research questions, the intersections of space/location, power, and identities as they inform notions of privilege and oppression are demonstrated. The participants’ reflections expose how questions of belonging, safety, and ‘place’ contribute to the silences around the study of privilege. The study suggests that understanding privilege and oppression as located within the same network of relations, rather than as binary opposites, will aid in making privilege more accessible as a topic of study in critical identity classrooms.

This study examines the dynamics and implications of trans-spatial subordination in/across the lived experiences of six incarcerated participant youths in a secure custody facility for juveniles in Louisiana. Five male teenagers (four African American, one White) and one female teenager (African American) discuss the limitations, harassment, and confinement in various aspects of their lives and speak about the impact on their expectations for the future. The author employs several methodologies in order to develop a multimedia, multifaceted representation of their lives. The narratives elicited through interviews provide the bulk of the data as the participants describe this perpetual subordination. The photographs, resulting from the implementation of a visual ethnographic methodology, provide images that serve as catalysts for introspection and analysis of significance in the mundane and routine, particularly as they apply to the carceral facilities, structures, and policies themselves. Film viewing and discussion offer an array of depictions of youth and criminality to which the youths responded, granting a simultaneous peek at how these marginalized youths viewed themselves and how mainstream media productions depict them. After a particularly provoking viewing session of an animated film, the author expands the preliminary boundaries of the work beyond cells and the walls of the prison. The expanding focus examines subordinating elements in their lives with their families and in their neighbourhoods. The challenges, harassment, and obstacles experienced in their communities continued in their schools and during their encounters with law enforcement, the latter of which often led directly to imprisonment. Finally, the youths reflected on the confining subordination that existed in the facilities, the product of the combination of: their discomfort with the surveillant structure, their perceived arbitrariness of privilege, and the lack of any relevant education. They also identified opportunities for voicing their opinions and recognized the relative safety of this facility compared to others. As the participants conceptualized their futures and articulated their relatively narrow and often ambiguous hopes, the sobering influence of such perpetual subordination is evident. The author closes with a discussion of the study’s importance to future research with marginalized youth in a society of increasing surveillance and security as well as implications for teacher education.

Through an analysis of Social Studies textbooks of the government primary school curriculum of Bangladesh, this thesis highlights the role of the education system in pushing poor and ethnic minority children out of school. The texts and graphics are analyzed in order to examine the ways in which they oppress and exclude these children by perpetuating dominant ideologies of nationhood, constructing a notion of the “ideal citizen,” and criminalizing those who do not fit this category. Using an anti-colonial and post-colonial theoretical framework, the study situates the education system of Bangladesh within its histories of colonial domination and argues that the discourses present in these textbooks reflect colonial forms of racism and oppression, and reproduce class and ethnic hierarchies characteristic of the larger Bangladeshi society. Most importantly, this study advocates the need for a just and equitable education system that respects all children of Bangladesh as citizens of the country.

This analysis is concerned with the spatially-anchored hierarchies of power that organize Ontario’s current schooling model. Using the experiences of four young Latina girls, it questions how current school safety discourses function as barriers to educational success, vis-à-vis their role in reconfiguring these students’ identities through narratives of danger, menace, and unruliness. Specific safety and security related practices are explored as sites through which marginalized students are produced as dangerous bodies who are undeserving of full educational opportunities. It is argued that these practices (as manifest in current approaches to surveillance, policing, discipline and punishment, and the restriction of educational mobility) all work to produce the school space as dominant space. Rather than offering youth the opportunity to overcome inequalities, schools and education instead play a definitive role in their continued propagation by sanctioning the control, containment, and eviction of those who are deemed to be deviant.

Governments across the world rationalize interdisciplinarity as an effective strategy for answering complex problems of social importance, drawing on large investments of resources to technical and biomedical sectors. I have identified this rationale as part of specific discursive relations and subsequently troubled its dominance through an exploration of how it has been authorized, and how faculty and administrators negotiate subjectification in engineering and medicine where this discourse dominates. Neo-liberal approaches to knowledge-production are deconstructed and analyzed. An archive was assembled of key texts pertaining to interdisciplinarity including documents produced by the OECD, the Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments, the University of Toronto (UofT), academics and the popular press. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of these texts provided a specific historical context for interviews conducted with 20 faculty and administrators identified as interdisciplinary knowledge-makers. Subsequently, a situated analysis of how discourse is embodied and experienced was developed and applied to the whole archive. Four inter-related concepts were identified as making-up the popular discourse of interdisciplinarity: diversify-collaborate-innovate-integrate. According to this narrative, knowledge-makers are expected to diversify through collaboration in order to innovate and produce knowledge that is useful and marketable. From the discovery of insulin to the establishment of the MaRS discovery district, knowledge-making examples from UofT are analyzed to identify the social relations that make the idea possible that researchers should address problems of ‘relevance’. I argue that interdisciplined subjects are ‘facilitated’ to fulfill this popular narrative by management approaches that capitalize on intrinsic notions of ‘making-a-difference’. Concurrently, different narratives of interdisciplinarity are embodied and promoted as individuals negotiate ontological and epistemological issues in their daily practice. This research contributes to the refinement of Foucauldian discourse analysis, and informs scholarship on the effects of neoliberal approaches to knowledge-making and the professionalization projects of engineering and medicine.