Master of Science / Department of Communications and Agricultural Education / Jason D. Ellis / The general public is more generationally and geographically removed from agricultural production today than ever before, yet as influential as ever with regards to its ability to impact the operating conditions of the animal agriculture industry. To date, the agriculture industry has focused research and extension on how to educate and persuade the public in order to gain support for its practices and policies. Little work has investigated how the language choices of those communicating about agriculture may be functioning to position themselves and other participants with regards to authority and credibility, and how this affects their communication and the industry as a whole. This study sought to develop an understanding as to how three key groups in the animal agriculture conversation (experts, professional communicators, and agricultural advocates) use discourse and language to position themselves and other participants, their explanations of opposition to animal agriculture, and their ideas about how to best present and justify their arguments to the wider public. In addition to this, the study also sought to understand what power structures and dynamics exist within the conversation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data for a critical discourse analysis. The discursive practices of the participants functioned to ultimately undermine and delegitimize the role of the public and individuals and groups opposed to animal agriculture, as well as position the industry and its constituents as the only authoritative and credible voices in the animal agriculture conversation. This is likely to be prohibitive to achieving the goals of agricultural communication activities. Those communicating on behalf of the animal agriculture industry should become more aware of how their beliefs, values, and ideologies impact the discourse from which they are operating, as well as how their communication is functioning. This research was undertaken from a critical inquiry perspective, shedding light on some of the power structures inherent between the animal agriculture industry and the general public. Others undertaking agricultural sociology and related research should consider doing so integrating a similar theoretical perspective to continually challenge the assumptions and conditions under which the industry operates.

The term “evidence-based” is ubiquitous in practice and policy-making settings around the world; it is de rigueur to claim this approach. This dissertation is an inquiry into the work of evidence-based policy-making with a particular focus on the social practices of policy work/ers involved with developing policies relating to chronic disease at the Ministry of Health in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada. I begin with an examination of tensions in the policy-making literature germane to the relationship between knowledge, its production, and policy-making: the environment into which evidence-based policy-making emerged in the 1990s. Drawing on the theorising of knowledge, discourse, and power – particularly from Foucault’s work – for the analytic approach, I present the commitment to claims of “evidence-based” practices found in key government policy framework documents and policy workers’ accounts of their practices, gathered through interviews. I then show the unravelling of this commitment in those accounts. This research reveals how the policy frameworks construct chronic disease as a financial burden on the health care system and direct policy workers to develop policies with this construction in mind. The discourses associated with evidence-based policy-making narrow how policy workers can think about evidence and its production to positivist, scientific methods and numerical measures that will provide proof of cost cutting. Proponents of evidence-based policy-making laud it as keeping politics and ideology out of the policy-making process. However, the policy workers I interviewed reveal the power relations organising their deeply political work environment. Furthermore, the minutiae constituting policy-making practices produce a “managerialist approach to governance” (Edwards, Gillies, and Horsley, 2015, p. 1) in which people with chronic disease are noticeable by their near-absence. When they do appear, they are responsibilised to decrease the burden on the health/care system and the economy. I argue that as a governing project with an appearance of failure, given the many cracks in the commitment to the claim and the practices of being evidence-based, the discourse of evidence-based policy-making is actually quite successful. It has continuous effects: people are separated (so-called apolitical policy workers into imagined neutral space and decision-makers into political space), knowledge is divided, costs and responsibilities are downloaded to individuals, and evidence-based discourses appear in countless settings. The governing works. / Graduate

Hyperpedagogy seeks to actualize social justice pedagogies and poststructuralist theorizing in digitally enhanced and online learning environments. Hyperpedagogy offers ways to incorporate transactional pedagogies into digital curricula so that learners throughout the United States' pluralistic culture can participate in e-learning. Much of the hyperbole promoting e-learning is founded on social-efficiency pedagogies (i.e. preparing tomorrow's workers for the information-based, new global economy) that tend to homogenize culturally pluralistic learners. The premium placed on a strict adherence to rigid learning systems inculcated within standards-based reform movements typically, moreover, discriminate against historically marginalized learners. Hyperpedagogy seeks to elucidate the closeting of privilege in e-learning so that learners of color, female learners, and homosexual learners can be better represented in the literature than is currently practiced. / Ph. D.

Throughout the history of universities, university autonomy and academic freedom have come ~o be regardeci as indispensable if the university has to fulfill its function of generating and disseminating knowledge and information for the benefit of society. Al though these are often conflated, they are distinguishable though interdependent. Autonomy relates to the self-governance of the university without external interference. Academic freedom entails the freedom of an individual academic to hold whatever views, orthodox or unorthodox, without censure or other penalty. critical inquiry. It also entails Although academic autonomy and freedom are critical to the academic function, they are not beyond dispute. There is always a continuous debate on what are the proper boundaries of legitimate academic autonomy and freedom. These boundaries are not fixed and keep on shifting. The shifting is often caused by government intervention into university education by way of subsidising it. As a quid pro quo for subsidizing university education, the government often feels entitled to stipulate conditions for the granting of such subsidies. Various governments follow different ways of doing this. There is a general trend in terms of which the government is defining the degree of academic autonomy. With autonomy it emphasizes accountability and with academic freedom it emphasizes responsibility. These are not mutually in conflict. iii Al though universities cherish their autonomy and academic freedom, these are always subject to threat. These cannot flourish in an authoritarian culture, but can only thrive in a democratic culture where other civil liberties are respected. The reason for this is that human freedom is indivisible and academic freedom cannot survive when other rights ar-e violated. The South African Constitution protects academic freedom. This is not generally done in most constitutions of the world. The reason why the South African Cons ti tut ion expressly protects academic freedom is because academic autonomy and freedom were severely violated in the past. Al though the protection of academic freedom in the Constitution does not provide indefeasible security, it makes the way of a transgressing government difficult. This is important because even a democratic government can violate academic freedom. / Constitutional, International & Indigenous Law / LL.D. (Constitutional, International & Indigenous Law)

This institutional ethnography relies on observations, interviews, and textual analyses to explore the experiences of mothers and children who attend a women-centered agency in Vancouver, Canada where a hot lunch, child care in the emergency daycare, and participation in group activities are vital forms of support. Mothers who come to the centre have many concerns related to their need for safe housing, a sustainable income, adequate food, child care, and support. And like mothers anywhere, they have concerns about their children. While many of the children, the majority of them First Nations, have never had a diagnostic assessment for fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or for the relatively new umbrella category, ‘fetal alcohol spectrum disorder’ (FASD), a number of the mothers were concerned or even knew that their children had FAS. This thesis asks – how does it happen that mothers have come to know their children in this way? The study critically examines how FASD knowledge and practices actually work in the setting and what they accomplish. My analysis traces how ruling practices for constructing and managing ‘problem’ mothers and children coordinate work activities for identifying children deemed to be ‘at risk’ for FASD. In their efforts to help their children and improve their opportunities for a better life, mothers become willing participants in group activities where they learn how to attach the relevancies of the FASD discourse to their children’s bodies or behaviours. They also gain instruction which helps them to confess their responsibility for children’s problems. While maternal alcohol use as the cause of FASD is contested in literature and in some work sites it is, in this setting, taken as a fact. This study discovers how institutional work processes involving government, medicine, and education actually shape and re-write women’s and children’s experiences into forms of knowledge that make mothers and children institutionally actionable. It is only by exposing the relations of power organizing mothers’ work that it may be possible to re-direct attention to mothers’ and children’s embodied concerns and relieve mothers of the overwhelming responsibility for which they are held and hold themselves to be accountable. / Graduate

Throughout the history of universities, university autonomy and academic freedom have come ~o be regardeci as indispensable if the university has to fulfill its function of generating and disseminating knowledge and information for the benefit of society. Al though these are often conflated, they are distinguishable though interdependent. Autonomy relates to the self-governance of the university without external interference. Academic freedom entails the freedom of an individual academic to hold whatever views, orthodox or unorthodox, without censure or other penalty. critical inquiry. It also entails Although academic autonomy and freedom are critical to the academic function, they are not beyond dispute. There is always a continuous debate on what are the proper boundaries of legitimate academic autonomy and freedom. These boundaries are not fixed and keep on shifting. The shifting is often caused by government intervention into university education by way of subsidising it. As a quid pro quo for subsidizing university education, the government often feels entitled to stipulate conditions for the granting of such subsidies. Various governments follow different ways of doing this. There is a general trend in terms of which the government is defining the degree of academic autonomy. With autonomy it emphasizes accountability and with academic freedom it emphasizes responsibility. These are not mutually in conflict. iii Al though universities cherish their autonomy and academic freedom, these are always subject to threat. These cannot flourish in an authoritarian culture, but can only thrive in a democratic culture where other civil liberties are respected. The reason for this is that human freedom is indivisible and academic freedom cannot survive when other rights ar-e violated. The South African Constitution protects academic freedom. This is not generally done in most constitutions of the world. The reason why the South African Cons ti tut ion expressly protects academic freedom is because academic autonomy and freedom were severely violated in the past. Al though the protection of academic freedom in the Constitution does not provide indefeasible security, it makes the way of a transgressing government difficult. This is important because even a democratic government can violate academic freedom. / Constitutional, International and Indigenous Law / LL.D. (Constitutional, International & Indigenous Law)

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