Citizenship study of the past several decades has revealed citizenship as a multi-layered, multiply-scaled, and often exclusionary concept. Despite increasing and multi-disciplinary scholarly interest in the multi-faceted nature of citizenship as a political, social, and identity-oriented construct, it remains true that the majority of citizenship theory has developed in relation to adults, rendering children all but invisible to much citizenship discourse. Traditional citizenship theory has tended to position children as future adults and therefore as future citizens of the nation-state who prepare for citizenship through participation in public schools. Recent scholarship has also advocated children’s rights education as a key priority to help empower children as citizens in the present-day. This project investigates how citizenship in Ontario elementary schools, through curricular learning as well as non-curricular activities. I use multi-method research comprised of discursive analysis of provincial documents, semi-structured interviews with elementary school teachers in three school boards, and interactive activity sessions with elementary school students. These findings consider how provincially-scaled discourses persist through curriculum and policy which situate children as future adults and as responsible, competitive citizens in the present day. Teachers value such responsible citizenship as they negotiate the demands of delivering curriculum and maintaining functional classrooms, but concurrently contribute to local citizenship education through community knowledge and empowering student interaction. Children’s contributions reveal a willingness to associate citizenship with ‘good’ citizenship, law-abiding behaviour, and thus situate the school as a site where citizenship expectations are delineated. While these findings reveal the significant mediating role of local school teachers in delivering citizenship education as a supplement to standardized curriculum, only limited connections between citizenship and rights, and often between citizenship and the nation-state, are present overall. Children do figure as present-day citizens through their ability to perform responsible actions at any age, but this remains at best only tenuously connected to a citizenship of both rights and responsibilities.

This thesis examines the process by which innovative new products come to be accepted and adopted in the marketplace. As these products are inherently uncertain and not readily accepted and adopted, market intermediaries play an important role in the validation and subsequent diffusion of innovations. In this thesis I demonstrate that these social processes have significant impact on the spatial organization of the market development process. Drawing on a diverse but complementary set of literatures – including the economic geography of innovation, communities of practice, social networks, the sociology of scientific knowledge and reception studies – I sketch out an adoption-centric approach to understanding the social dynamics of the innovation process. Using comparative case studies of musical theatre and pharmaceutical vaccines, this research finds that the process of market development involves a range of participants that are each embedded in their own distinctive community. The social and geographic configuration of these intermediaries varies for different knowledge-intensive products: validating expertise for cultural products such as theatre is situated predominantly in ‘global nodes of excellence’, whereas for science-based goods such as vaccines this is situated in the local marketplace. These findings have implications for marketplaces in ‘beta-cities’ such as Toronto, which are not global nodes of excellence. Without these validating intermediaries, what role do beta cities play in the development and diffusion of cultural products? Akin to research on users’ involvement in the development of innovations, findings suggest there are qualities that make beta cities important sites for experimentation and the testing of new theatrical works. An adoption-centric perspective such as the one developed in this thesis sheds light on the social and geographic forces that shape the uptake of innovations. Application of this perspective has potential to significantly strengthen policy initiatives in support of the demand-side of regional innovation systems.

This thesis applies mixed ethnographic methods at field sites in British Columbia and the United Nations to explore the spread and uptake of the "ecosystem services" idea in different institutions of environmental governance. I explore intensifying efforts by ecosystem services proponents to rearticualte living nature in various ways and with various objectives around the concept. As the idea manifests in a wide array of different policies and practices, I attempt to characterize a process of 'discursive refraction,' and argue ecosystem services represents a kind of chimera, appearing differently to the disparate practitioners interpreting, responding to, and beginning to use it. Consequently, the idea takes on diverse forms and functions in those institutional settings where it appears. I conclude that the discourse of ecosystem services remains a locus of ongoing contestation, which significantly complicates the relationship between what its proponents intend for it, and its ideological, institutional, and ecological consequences.

This thesis applies mixed ethnographic methods at field sites in British Columbia and the United Nations to explore the spread and uptake of the "ecosystem services" idea in different institutions of environmental governance. I explore intensifying efforts by ecosystem services proponents to rearticualte living nature in various ways and with various objectives around the concept. As the idea manifests in a wide array of different policies and practices, I attempt to characterize a process of 'discursive refraction,' and argue ecosystem services represents a kind of chimera, appearing differently to the disparate practitioners interpreting, responding to, and beginning to use it. Consequently, the idea takes on diverse forms and functions in those institutional settings where it appears. I conclude that the discourse of ecosystem services remains a locus of ongoing contestation, which significantly complicates the relationship between what its proponents intend for it, and its ideological, institutional, and ecological consequences.

This thesis examines children’s (aged 11-12) ideas about climate change. Seventh grade children in 9 schools in Ontario were interviewed and submitted illustrated responses about climate change over a one year period of data collection. Qualitative grounded theory was used to allow themes from the data to emerge, and the use of computer software, NVivo7, was used to code and classify themes. The data were analyzed to answer three main research questions. First, the thesis explored if there were common similarities or differences between the children’s and adults’ responses (as gained from the literature). Second, children’s responses were grouped by geographical location. These locations included rural, urban, and suburban school. This was conducted in order to determine if any group differences exist among children in these three areas. The study found that children’s and adults perceptions are quite similar, and that in some situations, both groups tend to use substitution of other environmental knowledge (cultural models) in lieu of knowledge of climate change but that children also tended to use different cultural models to explain their ideas about climate change. The thesis concluded that no group differences existed among rural, urban, and suburban children and children in all groups tended to have much more detailed knowledge of mitigation strategies than the effects and causes of climate change. The thesis also concluded that a new educational framework, modeled after the Causes, Effects, and Mitigation Strategies of Climate Change (CEM Framework) ought to be used to redistribute this knowledge across these three areas.

On May tenth, 2004 Monsanto announced that it would discontinue breeding and field level research of transgenic Roundup Ready (RR) wheat. This decision was heavily influenced by the widespread rejection of RR wheat by Canadian prairie producers who voiced their opposition through a diverse coalition of rural and urban organizations. With six of the nine member organizations representing rural and farm groups, this research departs from the most common representation of anti-GM movements as being urban and European-centred. This dissertation contrasts the general acceptance of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola just five years earlier (in the mid 90s) with the widespread opposition amongst prairie producers to RR wheat. It uses an updated version of the agrarian question and the production of nature thesis to show how capitalist relations are differentiated across place and commodities. The research finds that producer resistance to RR wheat hinged on the specificities of local histories and institutions, cultural conceptions of worth and economic fair treatment, and the character of wheat as a commodity with particular biophysical properties. The research is also concerned with the ways in which producers articulated their resistance with and through discourses of consumption, while at the same time rejecting the attempts made by proponents of RR wheat to relegate them to consuming subjects, who would best register their dissent by voting with their dollars on the market. For many prairie farm organizations, the fate of the family farm is tied up with the future of wheat farming and the capacity of farmers to collectively market their wheat in international markets. Monsanto’s vision for the future of prairie wheat crossed moral and cultural boundaries for producers and organizations that understood themselves as active subjects.

Parks located in urban areas are known to mitigate the Urban Heat Island. Their cooling effects are well established in the literature as studies have been performed in urbanized areas around the world. This particular study was aimed at assessing the nature of suburban parklands in the City of Toronto vs. urban (downtown) and rural (outside the Greater Toronto Area) settings. To do this, five study sites were chosen; three parks of varying sizes (large, medium and small) and two backyards. The main research objective was to quantify the cooling effects; among the sizes, within the surrounding neighbourhood and through the day. The metrics used in this study included Day to Day Temperature Variability, Diurnal Temperature Range, and Temperature Variation through Time. The results showed the importance of trees in providing shade and the lake breeze from Lake Ontario. A clear suburban signal from the metrics was found.

This thesis tracks the politics of migrant remittances in the Philippines through an analysis of established possibilities and entrenched interests in the banking sector. Paying attention to banking sector narratives about the ‘migrant market’, I argue that remittances to the Philippines enter into an established economic space that is constituted by discourse, by history (especially the history of financial sector liberalization), and by ongoing practices of risk management and efforts at financial inclusion. At the same time, I gesture towards sites of “a politics of becoming” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 24), from which emerge potentially path-breaking economic discourse, subjectivity, and collective action in relation to remittance practice.

Parks located in urban areas are known to mitigate the Urban Heat Island. Their cooling effects are well established in the literature as studies have been performed in urbanized areas around the world. This particular study was aimed at assessing the nature of suburban parklands in the City of Toronto vs. urban (downtown) and rural (outside the Greater Toronto Area) settings. To do this, five study sites were chosen; three parks of varying sizes (large, medium and small) and two backyards. The main research objective was to quantify the cooling effects; among the sizes, within the surrounding neighbourhood and through the day. The metrics used in this study included Day to Day Temperature Variability, Diurnal Temperature Range, and Temperature Variation through Time. The results showed the importance of trees in providing shade and the lake breeze from Lake Ontario. A clear suburban signal from the metrics was found.

This thesis tracks the politics of migrant remittances in the Philippines through an analysis of established possibilities and entrenched interests in the banking sector. Paying attention to banking sector narratives about the ‘migrant market’, I argue that remittances to the Philippines enter into an established economic space that is constituted by discourse, by history (especially the history of financial sector liberalization), and by ongoing practices of risk management and efforts at financial inclusion. At the same time, I gesture towards sites of “a politics of becoming” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 24), from which emerge potentially path-breaking economic discourse, subjectivity, and collective action in relation to remittance practice.