Though there is significant academic interest in the law of religious freedom in Canada, there has been little research into the experiences of participants in religious freedom litigation. Based on a qualitative analysis of participant interviews and legal documents in three decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, this dissertation explores the social processes at play in that litigation. At issue in the three cases were, respectively, (1) the right of Jewish condominium co-owners to install ritual huts (succoth) on their balconies; (2) the right of a Sikh student to wear a ceremonial dagger (kirpan) in a public high school; and (3) the right of a Hutterite group to be exempted from the photo requirement on driver’s licences for religious reasons. This dissertation adds to the existing academic commentary by looking beyond the judicial decisions and incorporating firsthand accounts of lawyers, litigants, and expert witnesses in these cases. The substantive analysis is divided in three sections. First, the dissertation examines themes of overlapping legal systems in participant narratives. Litigants understood themselves to be subjects of both state and religious laws, and the particular interactions between these legal systems help refine theories of legal pluralism. Second, the work analyzes religious freedom litigation as cross-cultural communication. Specifically, the dissertation employs the normative criteria of respect and self-awareness found in the literature on cross-cultural communication to approach participant narratives and judicial decisions, finding both successes and failures in this regard. Third, the dissertation engages issues of belonging to the Canadian civic community inherent in participant narratives. All litigants told the stories of their litigation as part of their larger immigration and integration narratives, and successful litigants were quick to give positive accounts in this regard. The unsuccessful litigants told more complex stories of integration, complicating the analysis of the impact of a judicial decision on their narratives of civic belonging. Nevertheless, the dissertation argues that the notion of civic belonging ought to be explicitly taken into account by Canadian judgments when dealing with issues of religious freedom.

Women’s Studies students’ accounts of their experiences academically, emotionally and politically in feminist university classrooms will be investigated in this thesis. Central to my work, through an anti-racist feminist and intersectional analysis, is to demonstrate the ways in which Women’s Studies university classroom spaces are neither ‘innocent’ nor are they devoid of racism/white supremacy as it is present in the bodies who are allowed to enter the space, voices allowed to speak and knowledge being taught. As this research is informed by a personal experience in an undergraduate Women and Gender Studies course at a local university, I will use both auto-ethnography and interviews as method in and through anti-racist feminist research methodology. Highlighting the importance of anti-racism education as a call to action in attending to this disjuncture and also to erode superficial notions of sisterhood will demonstrate white feminist supremacy as an implication for the sociology of race.

The intention of the study is to come into a better understanding of the way in which the Diasporic body comes to know and understand its subjectivity within the governing contemporary public sphere. I suggest that this knowledge is diverse and that it can assist us to re-conceptualize learning in the context of schooling and education. I am interested in this seemingly mundane thing of ‘blackness’ and the way in which the signifying power of ‘blackness’ has come to constitute the conditions of possibility for the formation of a certain humanism. I trace somewhat abstract historical trajectories in order to better understand how contemporary everyday Diasporic life comes to be classified, organized, self-regulated and inscribed through particular intersections of race by way of gender, ableism, class, and sexuality. I seek to ascertain ways in which race is interpreted as the ‘Truth’ in order to impute the ethic of colonialism onto the Diasporic body. With this study my interest concerns understanding my lived experiences within the context of Diaspora and about how I come to make sense of race/racism/blackness through the cultural location of the colonial West. I am seeking to understand how, at certain moments, abject bodies of the Diaspora become predisposed to socialize in specific ways through these protean subjectivities. My interest involves coming to know critical pedagogies immanent to African Diasporic spaces that are germane for re-imagining schooling and education. I am interested in the school as a Diasporic space, the pedagogical and instructional implications for the teacher/educator, and about the ways in which meaning is made of Diaspora. I am suggesting writing Diaspora for schooling and education presents alternative ways of making sense of one’s subjectivity, citizenry, identity, about coming to know and understand how belonging, power and privilege come to be inscribed within the governing nation-state.

This autoethnography uses narrative inquiry within an anticolonial theoretical framework. As a White Italian male settler living on Turtle Island, I bring survivor experience to psychiatric definitions of “psychosis,” or what I call psychosic narrative, and to broader literatures for the purpose of decolonizing “mental” relations. Using reflexive critiques, including feminist antiracism, I question my own privileges as I consider the possibilities of Mad culture to disturb authorizations of practices like forced electroshock and drugging. Using journals, salient themes of experience are identified, including “delusion,” “psychosis,” “madness,” and “illness,” especially as they appear in texts about politics, culture, and theory. A temporally rigorous narrative approach to my readings allows for a self-reflexive writing on such themes in relation with antiracist anticolonial resistance. Thus a White psychiatric survivor resistance to psychiatry and its social (local) history is related to the problematic of global Western neoliberal heteropatriarchy in psychological institutional texts. Survivor testimonies bring critical madness and disability theories as they pertain to racialization and constructions of sex/uality and gender. Rather than present a comprehensive analysis, this narrative inquiry is generated from the process of research as it was experienced in order to represent and question its epistemological grounds.

Though there is significant academic interest in the law of religious freedom in Canada, there has been little research into the experiences of participants in religious freedom litigation. Based on a qualitative analysis of participant interviews and legal documents in three decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, this dissertation explores the social processes at play in that litigation. At issue in the three cases were, respectively, (1) the right of Jewish condominium co-owners to install ritual huts (succoth) on their balconies; (2) the right of a Sikh student to wear a ceremonial dagger (kirpan) in a public high school; and (3) the right of a Hutterite group to be exempted from the photo requirement on driver’s licences for religious reasons. This dissertation adds to the existing academic commentary by looking beyond the judicial decisions and incorporating firsthand accounts of lawyers, litigants, and expert witnesses in these cases. The substantive analysis is divided in three sections. First, the dissertation examines themes of overlapping legal systems in participant narratives. Litigants understood themselves to be subjects of both state and religious laws, and the particular interactions between these legal systems help refine theories of legal pluralism. Second, the work analyzes religious freedom litigation as cross-cultural communication. Specifically, the dissertation employs the normative criteria of respect and self-awareness found in the literature on cross-cultural communication to approach participant narratives and judicial decisions, finding both successes and failures in this regard. Third, the dissertation engages issues of belonging to the Canadian civic community inherent in participant narratives. All litigants told the stories of their litigation as part of their larger immigration and integration narratives, and successful litigants were quick to give positive accounts in this regard. The unsuccessful litigants told more complex stories of integration, complicating the analysis of the impact of a judicial decision on their narratives of civic belonging. Nevertheless, the dissertation argues that the notion of civic belonging ought to be explicitly taken into account by Canadian judgments when dealing with issues of religious freedom.

Women’s Studies students’ accounts of their experiences academically, emotionally and politically in feminist university classrooms will be investigated in this thesis. Central to my work, through an anti-racist feminist and intersectional analysis, is to demonstrate the ways in which Women’s Studies university classroom spaces are neither ‘innocent’ nor are they devoid of racism/white supremacy as it is present in the bodies who are allowed to enter the space, voices allowed to speak and knowledge being taught. As this research is informed by a personal experience in an undergraduate Women and Gender Studies course at a local university, I will use both auto-ethnography and interviews as method in and through anti-racist feminist research methodology. Highlighting the importance of anti-racism education as a call to action in attending to this disjuncture and also to erode superficial notions of sisterhood will demonstrate white feminist supremacy as an implication for the sociology of race.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Gerad D. Middendorf / A number of cities in Kansas have experienced rapid growth in Hispanic population during the last twenty five years, due to immigration related in particular to the development of the meatpacking industry in the region. Garden City, Dodge City, and Liberal in southwest Kansas and Emporia in eastern Kansas have undergone significant transformation due to the influx of immigrants, the large majority of whom are of Mexican background. The present research approaches these immigrants from a sociological perspective, observing their cultural characteristics in order to understand who they are, and the process they face when adapting to the receiving environment, as a process of acquisition of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1977). This study focuses on the elements from Midwestern culture that are adopted and adapted, as well as the elements from the immigrants' cultural backgrounds that are softened or modified in order to fit within the receiving environment. The study examines these processes, from the theoretical perspective modeled by Pierre Bourdieu, as an attempt to develop an interpretive and comprehensive approach of immigrant experiences.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / Kay A. Taylor / This qualitative multiple participant case study examined Mexican American women‘s experiences at the intersection of race and gender in public high school. Mexican American women‘s experiences cannot be isolated and described independently in terms of either race or gender. The intersection of race and gender for Mexican American women has not been investigated fully. The few studies that include Mexican American females focus on dropouts and emphasize at risk factors such as gender, race, socioeconomic status, and language. Consequently, the gaps in the empirical literature are caused in part by the shortage of research on Mexican American women and the propensity toward examining Mexican American women from the deficit perspective. Critical Race Theory was the framework for the analysis and the interpretation in this study. The significant findings of this research support CRT, in that racism is prevalent and ordinary in the daily the lives of Mexican American females. The findings of the study included: First, racism is endemic and pervasive in public education. Second, colorblindness is the notion from which many educational entities operate. Third, the participants perceive social justice as the solution to ending all forms of racism and oppression. Finally, navigating the system is necessary to learn to be academically successful. The results contribute to the limited research on Mexican American women at the intersection of race and gender and the racism experienced in public high school to the overall CRT research in education, and in particular, to LatCrit research.

This work brings an anti-colonial reading to the production and maintenance of racial logic in Cuban schooling, through conversations with, and surveys of Cuban teachers, as well as through analysis of secondary and primary documents. The study undertaken seeks to contribute to the limited existent research on race relations in Cuba, with a research focus on the Cuban educational context. Teasing and staking out a middle ground between the blinding and often hollow pro-Cuba fanaticism and the deafening anti -Cuban rhetoric from the left and right respectively, this project seeks a more nuanced, complete and dialogical understanding of race and race relations in Cuba, with a specific focus on the educational context. With this in mind, the learning objectives of this study are to investigate the following: 1) What role does racism play in Cuba currently and historically? 2) What is the role of education in the life of race and racism on the island? 3) What new questions and insights emerge from the Cuban example that might be of use to integrated anti-racism, anti-colonialism and class-oriented scholarship and activism? On a more specific level, the guiding research objectives of the study are to investigate the following: 1) How do teachers support and/or challenge dominant ideas of race and racism, and to what degree to do they construct their own meanings on these topics? 2) How do teachers understand the relevance of race and racism for teaching and learning? 3) How and why do teachers address race and racism in the classroom? The data reveal a complex process of meaning making by teachers who are at once produced by and producers of dominant race discourse on the island. Teachers are the front line race workers of the racial project, doing much of the heavy lifting in the ongoing struggle against racism, but are at the same time custodians of an approach to race relations which has on the whole failed to eliminate racism. This work investigates and explicates this apparent contradiction inherent in teachers’ work and discourse on the island, revealing a flawed and complex form of Cuban anti-racism.

Appropriate housing with security of tenure is an important factor in the immigrant settlement and integration process. However, many studies of immigrant settlement and the housing careers of immigrants do so within the borders of a nation-state without reference to transnationalism – immigrants’ ties and cross-border connections with the country of origin. This case study of the transnational ties and housing careers of Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto aims to increase our understanding of one recent immigrant group’s settlement and integration process in Canada. Using a mixed-method approach involving both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, this study explores how transnational housing activities influence the housing careers of Ghanaians in Toronto. The findings include insights into the immigration history and the socio-demographic characteristics of Ghanaians in Toronto; the nature and extent of transnational ties between Ghana and Canada; the nature of housing careers among Ghanaians in Toronto; and the influence of transnationalism on housing careers of Ghanaians in Toronto. Although Ghanaians’ immigration to Canada dates from the late 1950s, Ghanaians started coming to Canada in noticeable numbers after the 1960s. Ghanaian immigration to Canada generally and to Toronto particularly surged in the 1980s and beyond. Deteriorating economic and political conditions in Ghana and relatively favourable immigration policies and a good economic climate in Canada were the driving forces behind Ghanaian migration to Canada. However, the Ghanaian settlement process in Toronto does not culminate in a complete break with the homeland. Rather, Ghanaians in Toronto have engaged in a range of transnational activities with the country of origin, including contacts with family and friends, travelling to or visiting Ghana, following Ghanaian politics, investing in housing or property in Ghana, running businesses in Ghana, attending funerals in Ghana, and making regular remittances to Ghana. With respect to Ghanaians’ housing careers, the study reveals that during their initial settlement period, most Ghanaians lived in public subsidized rental housing or poor-quality private rental housing. They considered their housing conditions as inadequate and unsuitable and were not satisfied with their neighbourhood’s safety and security. At the time of the survey, however, respondents were more likely to own homes and were more likely to feel safe and secure in their neighbourhoods. However, housing affordability remains a major problem for Ghanaians in Toronto. With respect to the influence of transnationalism on housing careers of Ghanaians in Toronto, the study finds that transnational housing activities, especially Ghanaians’ attitudes to and preference for investing in housing in Ghana, affect their housing careers in Toronto. Sending regular remittances to Ghana and investing in housing in the homeland involve mobilizing huge financial resources from Toronto to achieving their housing needs in the country of origin, while many Ghanaians struggle to meet their own needs in Toronto. A logistic regression analysis shows that personal income and strong ties with Ghana are statistically significant predictors of investing in housing in Ghana. At the same time, significant predictors of Ghanaians’ propensity to own a house in Canada include loyalty to Canada and household income. The study contributes conceptually and empirically to three areas of research – transnationalism, housing careers, and immigrant settlement and integration – which hitherto have been studied as separate themes. Conceptually, it breaks away from the traditional way of researching immigrant settlement and housing careers by introducing a new conceptual dimension, transnationalism. Further, this research has added new insights about a recently arrived immigrant group in Toronto. Finally, the study contributes to the social work literature by identifying an emerging field of international social work. It has drawn attention to the fact that in the era of transnationalism, the emergence of a population of migrants whose needs and lives transcend national borders will affect the future of social work research and practice.