Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Spencer D. Wood / It is the intention of this thesis to come to a better understanding of the factors that lead to food insecurity, a concept for understanding if people have enough food to eat. The tool for household measurement was developed by the United States Department of Agriculture, and is the backbone of the Food Security Supplement, which is conducted annually as part of the Current Population Survey. Three literature are reviewed: concentration of markets, civic agriculture and localism, and food security and nutrition. Each approaches understanding food security from a different angle offering insights along with its shortcomings. Most US studies consider food insecurity as a contributing component of poor health. In this study, I ask instead, "What are the major predictors of household food insecurity?" Using data from the Food Security Supplement of the Current Population Survey from 2000 to 2007, I use descriptive statistics and logistic regression to investigate the causes of food insecurity. I show that as currently measured food insecurity is largely a function of economic inequalities. Within this broad finding, however, I also show that households in a principal city and nonmetropolitan counties are not more likely than other households to experience food insecurity even when controlling for economic and sociodemographic variables.

This thesis presents an ethnographic study based in the city of Toronto on how ethnic Chinese negotiate their ambivalence towards the category “Chinese-Canadian”, particularly in relation to discourses about race, ethnicity and language. It is the finding of this study that second generation, economically privileged ethnic Chinese women are likely to feel most comfortable with the aforementioned category, in relation to their counterparts. This is because they are most likely to be able to speak Chinese and English, as well as seek out a vocabulary that allows them to make sense of their experience. They are also likely to be most comfortable because, as Chinese is a feminized category, they more easily fit into the mold of what a Chinese person is “supposed” to be like. Ethnic Chinese men, however, are less comfortable with the category and assert their masculinity by engaging in humour driven in racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Dana M. Britton / Historically, relationships between police and residents in minority communities have often been contentious. However most of the literature on race, place, and policing has focused on the policing of Blacks and their interactions with the police in urban settings. Building on this work, this study aims to capture similar processes of racialized policing as they occur in the suburbs. This project expands our understanding by exploring policing as it is carried out in a marginalized Black enclave located in a predominately white middle class suburb. Specifically, I focus on Meacham Park, which is a segregated enclave annexed to the nearby white community of Kirkwood, Missouri. Drawing on interviews with thirty African-American residents of Meacham Park, I explore how residents experience policing and their attitudes toward the police. The interviews reveal a contentious history of relations between residents and the police, and I discuss respondents’ accounts of specific experiences with police surveillance, harassment, and (in some cases) misconduct. However, though many respondents reported extremely negative attitudes toward the police, the great majority also reported at least some positive interactions and experiences. This study extends research on the policing of minority communities into a segregated suburban context and offers implications for improving relations between the police and minority communities.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Chardie Baird / Dana Britton / Racial profiling by the police on the nation’s streets and highways has attracted much attention over the past two decades from scholars, media figures, politicians and police administrators. Several highly publicized cases propelled the issue into national consciousness in the early and mid 1990s, bringing a new public awareness to an undoubtedly old problem. Despite the proliferation of research and political attention, many questions remain unanswered. Among the most common criticisms facing racial profiling research today is the literature's lack of theoretical development. Grounded in focal concerns theory and the concept of symbolic assailants, the present research draws upon both crime control and discriminatory frameworks of racial disparity in traffic stop outcomes. The findings suggest that, while police concerns of crime and safety diminish the effect of race/ethnicity and gender on stop outcomes, race and gender remain important predictors of police decisions. The implications are discussed.

This dissertation addresses the problem of how, in a global future, humanity is to comprehend the singularity of the place, the biosphere it calls home. Will communities, nations, and the earth itself, for example, be regarded as ‘one’ place in which many live, or as the product of many separate, but linked compositional elements? The ‘many in the One’, or the “One in the many”? From the perspective of International Relations, in a global future will ‘integration’ at the individual level necessarily imply ‘homogenization’ at larger intercultural levels? Might the conditions of existence in a global future be understood rather as the universalization of certain key values and practices that respect the diversity of distinct regional differences? What spiritual or ethical ideas will serve as a unifying meta-narrative in a global age? These are questions of keen interest to those whose lives are touched in some way by the growing convergence of cultures, especially by the stream of classical East and South Asian wisdom paths now flowing into the West.

In A White Wedding? The Racial Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, I examine the inter-locking relations of power that constitute the lesbian/gay subject recognized by the Canadian nation-state as deserving of access to civil marriage. Through analysis of legal documents, Parliamentary and Senate debates, and interviews with lawyers, I argue that this lesbian/gay subject achieves intelligibility in the law by trading in on and shoring up the terms of racialized neo-liberal citizenship. I also argue that the victory of same-sex marriage is implicated in reproducing and securing a racialized Canadian national identity as well as a racialized civilizational logic, where “gay rights” are the newest manifestation of the modernity of the “West” in a post-9/11 historical context. By centring a critical race/queer conceptual framework, this research project follows the discursive practices of respectability, freedom and civility that circulate both widely and deeply in this legal struggle. I contend that in order to successfully shed its historical markers of degeneracy, the lesbian/gay subject must be constituted not as a sexed citizen but rather as a neoliberal citizen, one who is intimately tied to notions of privacy, property, autonomy and freedom of choice, and hence one who is racialized as white. The critical race/queer analytic also attends to the temporal and spatial registers framing this legal struggle that re-install various troubling racial hierarchies in a “gay rights” project often lauded as progressive. This analysis of the discursive terrain of same-sex marriage reveals the race shadow that lies at the heart of this equality-rights struggle. The conclusion of this thesis provides reflections for developing an ethics of activism that dislodges and resists the (re)production of racialized relations of power in lesbian and gay equality rights activism. In so doing, I seek to provoke, question and re-draw the landscape of our thinking, not only about same-sex marriage but also about the terms with which we conceive, articulate and practice racial and sexual justice.

Emerging infectious disease has become a paradigmatic way of thinking about disease in recent years. In response to the widely-held view that an emerging pandemic is an imminent, albeit uncertain, event linked to global interconnectedness, pandemic preparedness has been the target of considerable political concern and economic investment. To date, there has been relatively little critical research questioning the broader social and political implications of this seemingly natural undertaking. My research addresses this knowledge gap by exploring pandemic influenza planning as a global approach to the regulation of emerging infectious disease. I investigate how pandemic is framed and the ways in which these framings link to broader political and economic contexts. I undertake a Foucauldian-informed, critical discourse analysis of four key pandemic planning documents produced by the World Health Organization between 1999 and 2009. I ask how infectious disease is constructed in particular ways, and how these constructions can be interpreted in relation to broader global contexts. My findings, which describe a range of discursive strategies in governing pandemic, are four-fold. First, I examine the characterizations of the influenza virus, and their effect of rendering normal and pandemic circumstances as indistinct. I describe how these constructions are implicated in the framing of preparedness as a continuous engagement with the process of emergence. Next, I explore how the delineation and regulation of boundaries simultaneously constitutes bodies and territories as distinct. Third, I describe the discursive construction of a particular kind of global geopolitics which represents vulnerability according to the interconnectedness of states. Finally, the pandemic virus acquires a form of utility that portrays preparedness as having the potential for securing society against a broad range of potential threats. Anticipating the exceptional features of pandemic is to be achieved through the integration of contingency mechanisms into existing systems of preparedness whose objective is continued economic and social functioning. The regulation of circulation central to pandemic preparedness establishes an ongoing engagement in decisions about freedom and constraint in relation to different forms of mobility or circulation. My findings are interpreted in light of their implications for understanding the global regulation of, and intervention into, molecular life.

This inquiry examines the ruptures and continuities in local democratic practices in opposition and in government. I conducted research in seven rural municipalities in Chalatenango, El Salvador where leaders of oppositional community-based organizations entered municipal politics 15 years ago. This new generation of municipal officials established forums for citizen participation that incorporate patterns of citizenship learning and participation developed in oppositional civil society. The democratic outcomes of these municipal spaces for citizen engagement are mixed, however: they improved the quality of citizen participation in municipal governance, but circumscribed autonomous forms of citizen participation. The influence of partisan political and institutional state interests are the principal factors that account for this outcome. At the same time, civil society and local government in Chalatenango exist in a relationship of mutual influence. This suggests that efforts to foster democratic citizen participation should complement support to institutional innovation with efforts to strengthen civil society.

This thesis contributes to the ongoing conversation on at-risk youth intervention programs as a site of struggle for, resistance to, and negotiation of the cultural politics of youth. Thinking with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, particularly his concepts of doxa and field, I pose new questions that trouble youth as truth to suggest an alternate way of imagining youth as a struggle. A case study of one at-risk youth intervention program serves to make visible the ways in which historical and political narratives of youth(s) and truth(s) inform, pressure, constrain, shape at-risk youth intervention programs by implicitly defining and redefining the problem, prescribing the solution, recommending best practice, and works to draw connections between youth(s), truth(s), and social space.

This inquiry examines the ruptures and continuities in local democratic practices in opposition and in government. I conducted research in seven rural municipalities in Chalatenango, El Salvador where leaders of oppositional community-based organizations entered municipal politics 15 years ago. This new generation of municipal officials established forums for citizen participation that incorporate patterns of citizenship learning and participation developed in oppositional civil society. The democratic outcomes of these municipal spaces for citizen engagement are mixed, however: they improved the quality of citizen participation in municipal governance, but circumscribed autonomous forms of citizen participation. The influence of partisan political and institutional state interests are the principal factors that account for this outcome. At the same time, civil society and local government in Chalatenango exist in a relationship of mutual influence. This suggests that efforts to foster democratic citizen participation should complement support to institutional innovation with efforts to strengthen civil society.