Between 1971 and 1999, ParticipACTION, Canada’s Health Promotion agency, reached into Canadian homes, schools, and places of work to “educate, motivate, and mobilize” the public about the perceived need to become physically fit. This dissertation discusses how the agency employed a variety of professional marketing approaches to create compelling prescriptive literature concerning physical fitness to advance a nation-building agenda based in the state directive of individual accountability for the Canadian body. As a result of ParticipACTION's sustained and pervasive influence, Canadians not only remember this prolific brand, but its underlying messaging has become a part of how Canadians view physical fitness and citizenship. ParticipACTION was a project of healthism fostered in an environment of anxiety. The threat of the Cold War, the constructed menace of the Obesity Crisis, and the fear of Quebec Separatism were all used to bolster the message at this semi-public agency over its thirty years of national social marketing. How individual Canadians experienced ParticipACTION varied significantly based on their body type, socio-economic status, gender, language, ethnicity, and region. Through the use of Historical GIS mapping, oral interviews, and archival records, this dissertation offers a history from creation to closure of this national agency and its place in Canada’s social history.

This thesis draws on a political economy of fertility framework and the concept of biocitizenship to analyze changing family size and family planning among women and men in northern Ghana. I draw on a variety of ethnographic sources from eight months of fieldwork conducted under the umbrella of the Navrongo Health Research Centre in 2013 and 2014 in two rural communities in Kassena-Nanakana (K-N) West District in the Upper East region. The primary questions behind this thesis are: 1. How has the desire for smaller families emerged and to what is this transformation linked? 2. What role have family planning programs played in the reduction in family size? Have they been the most important driver of the transition to smaller families? 3. What are the current ideas about family planning and contraceptives in K-N West? Are they gendered? How have they changed over time? 4. Are local views about family planning and contraceptives in K-N West in keeping with those of public health practitioners? These questions are addressed in this sandwich thesis in three papers, which have been submitted or accepted for publication. A major contribution of this thesis is its call for health programmes to pay greater attention to the social context of both women’s and men’s lives where family planning takes place. Contrary to existing public health studies, I argue that while health programming has affected fertility decline, larger social and economic shifts have been some of the most important drivers of women’s and men’s changing practices of family formation and views of contraceptives. In Kassena-Nakana West, the desire for smaller families is linked to processes such as decreasing levels of child mortality and agricultural productivity, as well as parents’ increasing focus on educating their children. In addition, the emerging concepts of responsible manhood and companionate marriage, combined with the decline of polygamy, have helped improve communication between husbands and wives about family planning. Narratives of changing family formation from Kassena-Nankana West expand understandings of biocitizenship by illustrating the important role intergenerational relationships play in the construction of “political economies of hope”. When young people adopt family planning, they not only consider the well-being of their own children and the larger community, but make the decision in the context of their aspirations for a more successful life than their parents experienced. Due to larger political-economic shifts, the majority of Kassena women and men today think family planning is beneficial; however, worries about the side effects of contraceptives remain. Women’s ongoing concerns about infertility and the stability of their marriages and men’s conditional acceptance of family planning also reveal that gender inequality persists. I argue that typical policy recommendations, which focus primarily on educating and sensitizing communities to increase the use of contraceptives are problematic in that they often focus on decreasing fertility and are not articulated within a broader, multi-sectoral agenda. Greater attention to local biologies and expanding reproductive rights and freedoms would improve existing family planning programs. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:31:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Camila Claudiano Quina Pereira.pdf: 4102802 bytes, checksum: ba4ab62f6be485d3857e0d190e6ddb46 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-03-13 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The aim of this research was to understand how lay people, collectively organized, take part in the construction of knowledge about health problems affecting them. We have chosen a case study: how associations for people with rare diseases take part in the construction of the National Policy of Comprehensive Care for People with Rare Diseases in the Unified Health System (SUS). We started from the assumption that biological dimension enables new identities and expressions of citizenship, which have been reviewed with the advancement of biotechnology, like expressed in the human genome research. New socialities, based on political action and driven by hope in new treatments and medicines, have also been produced. Our hypothesis is: these collectives will organize forums when grey areas of knowledge appear or when new research horizons cease to exist. To achieve our purpose, our methodological strategy was to use multiple sources of information, such as analysis of public domain documents, interviews, participation in events and conversations with patients association s representatives. The study showed how new identities emerged by an organic design (biossocialities) and how they were rewritten in citizenship projects (biocitizenship) which claim for public policies that meet patients desires, including diagnosis, treatment and access to medicines / O objetivo desta pesquisa foi entender a participação de leigos, organizados em coletivos, na construção do conhecimento sobre os problemas de saúde que os acometem. Para isso, escolhemos como estudo de caso a participação das associações de apoio às pessoas com doenças raras na construção da Política Nacional de Atenção Integral às Pessoas com Doenças Raras no SUS. Partimos do pressuposto de que a dimensão biológica possibilita novas identidades e expressões de cidadania, que são reconfiguradas com o avanço da biotecnologia, a exemplo do que ocorre com as pesquisas sobre o genoma humano. São também construídas novas socialidades pautadas por uma ação política, movida pela esperança de novos tratamentos e medicamentos. Nossa hipótese é que esses coletivos passem a se organizar em fóruns, quando houver zonas cinzentas de conhecimento ou quando cessarem de existir novos horizontes de pesquisa. Para cumprir com os objetivos propostos, nossa estratégia metodológica foi utilizar múltiplas fontes de informação, como análise de documentos de domínio público, realização de entrevistas, participação em eventos e diálogos com representantes de associações de pacientes. O estudo das associações de apoio às pessoas com doenças raras nos permitiu entender não só como emergem novas identidades em torno de uma concepção biológica (biossocialidades), mas também como são reconfiguradas em projetos de cidadania (biocidadania), ao reivindicarem políticas públicas para atender à demanda dos pacientes, incluindo o diagnóstico, o tratamento e o acesso aos medicamentos

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La transformation du sang de cordon ombilical en une précieuse source de cellules souches a, dès le début des années 1990, donné naissance à une industrie commerciale globale de conservation faisant désormais concurrence à un large réseau de conservation public. Ce mémoire cherche à comprendre et à expliquer les soubassements socio-culturels liés à l’émergence de cette industrie, ainsi qu’à mieux cerner les enjeux éthiques et politiques qu’elle pose. En exposant en premier lieu la manière dont les institutions publiques de conservation de sang de cordon se définissent, et sont généralement définies par les comités bioéthiques, comme étant porteuses des valeurs d’altruisme et de solidarité nationale traditionnellement liées au modèle « redistributif » d’échange de sang et d’organes né au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, nous problématisons la manière innovatrice par laquelle les banques privées structurent le rapport entre les mères et leurs propres produits biologiques comme l’expression d’une reconfiguration du lien social et politique caractérisée par l’émergence de nouvelles socialisés. L’hypothèse au coeur de ce mémoire est que celles-ci peuvent être comprises comme l’aboutissant de l‘espoir collectivement partagé par les consommatrices d’améliorer leur propre condition biologique familiale, étant lui-même le fruit d’une financiarisation croissante des sciences du vivant. En analysant le discours « promissif » que représente le matériel promotionnel des banques autologues, notre objectif est alors d’identifier la manière par laquelle les multiples potentialités attribuées au sang de cordon définissent des subjectivités maternelles caractérisées par des obligations morales spécifiques. / The recent transformation of cord blood to a precious source of stem cells has given rise to a global commercial industry of conservation, which is now competing with a large network of public cord blood banks. This dissertation explores the socio-cultural context surrounding the emergence of that industry and aims at elucidating the ethical and political concerns that it generates. It begins by examining how public cord blood banks define themselves (and are defined by ethical commitees) as purveyors of values such as altruism and national solidarity -that is, values which were traditionally linked to the « redistributive » model of human blood and organs exchanges that emerged after World War II. It next argues that private banks are bringing about a radical transformation of the relationship between mothers and their biological “products”. This dissertation suggests that this innovative model of exchange is an expression of contemporary reconfigurations of the very notion of community, which is now characterized by what we call new forms of “biosociality”. Our hypothesis is that these new socialities can be understood as the consequence of a collective hope to improve familial biological conditions, which is itself the product of the growing financiarization of life sciences. By way of a foray into the « promissive » discourse employed by private banks for their promotional material, the dissertation attemps to identify how these potentialities attributed to cord blood define new maternal subjectivities characterized by specific moral duties and obligations.