Au tournant des années 1960 et de la Révolution tranquille, le Québec a connu l'aboutissement sociopolitique d'une profonde remise en question des institutions publiques catholiques et de l'identité nationale canadienne française. Ce travail de refondation collective hors des cadres historiques du catholicisme et du Canada français s'est traduit, pour maints intellectuels québécois, par l'institutionnalisation, dans la pensée commune comme dans les réflexions savantes, d'un grand récit séculariste et moderniste interprétant, sinon réduisant, l'évolution de la société québécoise à un schéma dichotomique tradition/modernité. Pourtant, le Québec moderne et laïc présente, à l'instar de nombreux anciens pays de la chrétienté, une persistance ciblée à l'endroit de l'Église catholique. À l'encontre de la lecture séculariste forte, l'Église catholique a en effet su s'adapter, selon les contextes sociohistoriques, aux différents processus de modernisation. Dans la foulée des travaux de Daniele Hervieu-Léger, Grace Davie et David Martin sur les " modernités religieuses multiples ", cette thèse exploratoire et évaluative se penche sur la pertinence d'études contemporaines entre le catholicisme et le nationalisme québécois post-Révolution tranquille. Une lecture théorique, sociohistorique et statistique (s'échelonnant de 1974 à 2008 et effectuée à partir des World Value Surveys et des Études électorales canadiennes) des rapports entre catholicisme et nationalisme québécois relève la fécondité de leurs interrelations contemporaines. En dernière instance, cette thèse suggère que le catholicisme québécois post-Révolution tranquille conserve une fonction culturelle et nationale, dans la mesure ou il contribue à inscrire les Québécois dans une trame historique et identitaire distinctive, et à ce titre, participe activement, non sans tensions, de l'expression nationaliste des Québécois modernes.

In Canada, a liberal democracy that constitutionally protects liberal freedoms and civic equality, how should the government respond to culturally based demands for accommodation? Should culture be recognized by a liberal democratic government? Does such recognition challenge liberal freedoms and civic equality? In this thesis I argue that there may be times when the Canadian government ought to acknowledge cultural differences for the purposes of legislating and creating public policy in the interest of fairness and to achieve good outcomes. Previous attempts at reconciling cultural diversity with public institutions have focused on protecting and affirming cultural identities. I critically examine three such approaches and argue that cultural identification is tied to fundamental liberal freedoms such that fixing cultural identities in bureaucratic and legislative frameworks conflicts with liberal freedoms in a problematic way. I propose an alternative approach to cultural accommodation that avoids the problems of cultural identification by focusing on concrete relationships between citizens and the practical consequences of cultural practices.

Les Suisses n'ont jamais été nombreux au Canada, et pourtant ils ont jalonné toute l'histoire du pays. À travers les repères qu'ils ont laissés au cours des cinq demiers siècles, ils se sont montrés de puissants révélateurs de l'imaginaire national canadien. Tour à tour traités en étrangers encombrants ou tolères, en incroyants assoiffés de gain, en hérétiques qui pervertissent les Canadiens, puis subitement en immigrants appréciés et courtisés, ils ont forcé les métropoles française et britannique à ajuster leur définition de la citoyenneté, ils ont préconisé le cosmopolitisme et accompagné l'ouverture du Canada sur le monde, ils ont galvanisé l'affirmation du sentiment national en agissant soit comme repoussoirs soit comme faire-valoir, et ils ont finalement remis en question la définition même de "nation" au Canada. La présente thèse, par un dépassement voulu des frontières chronologiques et géographiques, envisage sur la longue durée l'expérince de migrants qui tendent à échapper à toute catégorisation sociale. Grâce à une analyse microhistorique, elle procède aun jeu d'échelles et de contrastes qui autorise un examen rapproche des phénomènes révèles par les sources suisses, canadiennes, françaises, britanniques et américaines. Cette réflexion propose une façon originale d'étudier les migrations dans l'optique de la problématique identitaire. Elle fait ressortir à la fois les moments forts de l'émigration suisse et les dates charnières de la modernité canadienne. C'est à l'intersection de ces deux chronologies, au gré du dialogue constant et soutenu entre autorités politiques, religiouses et communautaires, sous l'effet des tensions linguistiques et culturelles, des tensions entre conquérants et conquis, des tensions internes et externes entre tradition et modernité, que s'est constituée et adaptée une conscience collective unique, marquée moins par la continuité que par les tenions, la diversité et les compromis. Les Suisses ouvrent justement une fenêtre sur ces compromis qui donnent lieu à la complexité canadienne.

The various elements that make up the individual's sense of cultural identity require a certain amount of negotiation and management in even the most straightforward of circumstances. This is particularly true for people who have multiple and/or contrasting identity claims. Group interviews with 72 allophone and anglophone Montreal residents were used to find patterns in strategies for negotiating these claims, given that these populations must contend with competing discourses about nation, language, ethnicity/race, religion, etc. A number of strategies were located and discussed, including modification of memory and performativity, strategic blindness, constitutive contradiction, constitutive contrast, and identification through exclusion. Individuals facing greater degrees of contradiction required increasing levels of cognitive labour and more sophisticated strategies of negotiation to make sense of their cultural identities; failure to do so was marked by feeling of isolation and alienation. Issues of “difference” and “authenticity” marked participants' discussions of identity, and a passionate attachment to Montreal was revealed to transcend for many any feelings of belongingness to either Canada and/or Québec.

The idea that gay men and straight women have much in common has a long cultural history, as seen in the work of sexologists, feminists, sociologists and cultural historians from the late 19th onward. Stories of relationships between gay men and straight women have been a significant, recurring phenomenon in American popular culture throughout much of the twentieth century, and the period from the late-1950s onward marks a time when such relationships became increasingly prevalent. With the weakening of Hollywood's self-censoring Hays Code and the maturing of television as a mass-market medium, the late-1950s/early-1960s saw the development of openly gay male characters who frequently shared friendships with straight women. Films and television shows featuring this dynamic grew more numerous and circulated more widely as time passed, but these developments progressed differently and at different rates for film and television. This study investigates the development, circulation and reception of representations of the gay-man/straight-woman duo as a cultural figure in North American film and television during the latter half of the twentieth century. As a set of texts in which sex and gender mediate each other in powerful ways, these gay-man/straight-woman stories produce rich analytic possibilities. Drawing on textual analysis, socio-historical context, and audience research, the project outlines the major relationship dynamics found in these gay-man/straight-woman texts (mother-and-son; perfect-couples; gals-and-pals), the historical shifts in their production and popularity, and the implications they hold for the ways our culture imagines relationships between men and women. Despite their gay cachet, the majority of these texts re-circulate normative clichés about gay male and straight female subjectivities and relationships, patterns that reproduce conventional, conservative thinking about who holds and deserves power and respect in our culture. Yet a few of these texts also provide alternative models for relationships between men and women, gay and straight, that contribute to more expansive possibilities for all: a culture of queer variations and relations. These examples affirm the emotional, social and affective value of relationships that cannot be neatly categorized into familial or romantic models, and argue for the importance of friendship as a form of social practice.

Front-line social service providers in Montreal, Quebec act as cultural mediaries facilitating immigrant and refugee integration into the host society. Cultural mediation requires practitioners to field many demanding, contradictory and overdetermined representations of person, place and culture. In this dissertation I argue that mediaries are uniquely positioned to construct temporal and dynamic borderzones where hypostatizations and their interstices generate conflicted cultural meanings. Far from postmodern celebrations of nomadic creativity, borderzones are agonistic, ephemeral spaces of powerful overdeterminations all about position and context. A working matrix of four variable sets is chosen as ethnographic data: (1) a set of theories; (2) narratives and histories about the city of Montreal, nationalism and belonging in Quebec, integration theory and policy, social work, and cultural mediation pedagogy; (3) narratives about belonging and cultural mediation from my interlocutors; and (4) my historical and positional contexts as an expatriate anglophone Québécoise researcher undertaking this project. Chapters explore how these variables overdetermine constructions of cultural mediation and this ethnography. I contend that cultural mediaries may be viewed as ethnographers' applied analogues given how they create, translate and negotiate dialectic/dialogic contrasts of cultural differences implicated in these variables. Three axes of philosophical thought are integrated and thereby modified when field data are socially positioned within analytic, dialectic conflicts: rational positivism (as positional binary logics and hegemonies), postmodernity (as relativism exemplified by hybridity and heteroglossia) and marxian overdetermination (as contextual variables defining Subjects as field effects). This ethnography establishes that conflicts sustain contrasts which form social field effects of human subjectivity as mobile, positional identifications and their communications. Logical binaries are shown to be constructed via individuals' signifying practices which generate interstitial borderzones for identity and culture which are necessarily dynamic, conflicted and ambiguous. Far from fixed binaries of positivist or structuralist logic which lead to reductionistic and totalizing theories, cultural mediaries utilize binaries in dialectic, overdetermined tensions as momentary, shifting sets. Acknowledging contradiction as intrinsic to constructions of meaning renders authoritative language and action necessarily ambivalent. From this emerges a complex political activism where subversion turns discursive conditions of dominance into difficult, creative uncertainties of cultural adaptation, invention and mutation.

The purpose of this project is to establish Joan Lavis MacDonald (1871–1962) as the intellectual and philosophical companion of her spouse, Canadian painter J.E.H. MacDonald. Her journals and articles are central resources in this reconstruction of the life and circumstances of a woman living in southern Ontario, Canada at the end of the Victorian-era. By the dawn of the twentieth century, urbanization, industrialization, opportunities for women to pursue post-secondary education, and social reformations found Joan Lavis at a point of conflict between the newly-available educational opportunities and traditions of homemaking, and the thesis is divided accordingly. Although the points of conflict are examined separately, the thesis nonetheless affirms Joan Lavis MacDonald's ability to combine the two by drawing on cultural and art movements like transcendentalism and the arts and crafts movement. The thesis moves beyond the male-dominated sphere in which the Group of Seven operated to examine Joan Lavis MacDonald as a contributor, and in turn influenced by, the distinctly Canadian domestic environment that permeates J.E.H. MacDonald and the Group of Seven’s insistence that nature is synonymous with Canaian-ness. This creates additional space for women in a national history intertwined with ideals of masculinity that are in turn fabricated by men, and studies an important art movement from outside the mythologized individuals and locations that have become indivisible from it. Thus, the thesis also creates a new avenue by which J.E.H. MacDonald may be studied and understood. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The aim of this dissertation is to make a contribution to the historiography of North American anthropology in the 1970s. Specifically, it asserts that by focussing exclusively on academic literature, the historiographical representations of materialist anthropology in this period are incomplete. Starting with the work by Sherry Ortner and William Roseberry on the development of Marxist anthropology and their analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the political economy and structural Marxist / mode of production trends in the discipline, it then turns to the explication of two case studies, from the Canadian context in the 1970s, where these approaches confronted each other directly. In particular, it examines the application of anthropological theories to the representation of Indigenous economies in disputes about resource development projects in the Canadian North. In these two examples — a court case, Kanatewat v. James Bay Development Corporation, where the Cree of James Bay sought an injunction against the construction of a series of dams which would flood large parts of their homeland, and a tribunal, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, where the Dene and Inuit sought to demonstrate that the construction of a massive gas pipeline would irrevocably damage the land and their societies and economies as a result — advocates for the projects adopted a political economy orientation to justify development in the regions, while those working on behalf of the Indigenous groups adopted an approach based on mode of production analyses to demonstrate the continuing vitality of Indigenous economies and social structures. More generally, I will show that the historiography of the period does not accurately reflect the relative impact of the two approaches on the wider world beyond the discipline; the conclusion includes a discussion of this problem as a problem shared by the historiography of anthropology more generally.

The focus of health care reform is to contribute to better patient health and maintain an equitable access to the system while at the same time achieving a more effective and efficient use of increasingly scarce health care dollars. Due to budgetary and other restraints provincial governments are either spending less on health care or are looking to change the delivery and management of the health industry. / How the Canadian health care system responds to the challenges depends upon the interpretation of a number of factors. Three basic factors which are linked to any health care delivery system are financing, delivery and allocation of resources with the altering of one of these components affecting the others. / Has there developed a right to health care and if so, would this foreclose a curtailment of health care services? If there is no right to health care, can the courts or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms be used to protect the existing system? Is it possible for public interest groups, or others, to utilize judicial intervention to force a government, either at the provincial or federal level, to spend more on health care or change their health care policy? What if a patient is affected by decision affecting health care delivery, does this bring in civil liability? / This thesis will review these areas in an effort to understand, articulate and ascribe values to Canada's health care system and provide a legal and ethical analysis of alternative health care delivery systems.

This Master's thesis examines the impact of the events of 9/11 on the discourses and practices that attempt to regulate the flow of refugee populations in Canada. Discourse analytical techniques are used to analyse a corpus of official documents that have contributed to the reframing of the status of refugees. The thesis provides an overview of the development of refugee policy in Canada and explores the world context for contemporary refugee flows. It draws on the securitization paradigm to track the discursive processes that have served to establish links between terrorism, national security and refugees in Canadian governmental discourses and its related practices. The thesis also draws attention to Canada's national and international commitments to protect human rights, and the challenges Canada has faced in maintaining a balance between its humanitarian tradition and its new pre-emptive security approach. It is argued that the new War on Terror, has, as a consequence, targeted innocent and vulnerable populations such as refugees, in this way eroding their rights.