While the challenge of improving young North Americans’ civic engagement seems to lie in the hands of schools, studying alternative ways of teaching citizenship education could benefit the current educational system. In this context, free schools (i.e., schools run democratically by students and teachers), guided by a philosophy that aims at engaging students civically through the democratic activities that they support, offer a relatively unexplored ground for research. The present inquiry is a case study using tools of ethnography and drawing upon some principles of complexity thinking. It aims at understanding students’ citizenship education experiences during democratic activities in a Canadian free school. It describes many experiences that can arise from these activities. They occurred within a school that operated democratically based on a consensus-model. More precisely, they took place during two kinds of democratic activities: class meetings, which regulated the social life of the school, and judicial committees, whose function was to solve conflicts at the school. During these activities, students mostly experienced a combination of feelings of appreciation, concernment and empowerment. While experiencing these feelings, they predominantly engaged in decision-making and conflict resolution processes. During these processes, students modified their conflict resolutions skills, various conceptions, and their participation in democratic activities and in the school. Based on these findings, the study concludes that students can develop certain skills and attitude associated to citizenship education during these activities and become active from a citizenship perspective. Hence, these democratic activities represent alternative strategies that can assist educators in teaching about citizenship.

This research explores literacy as a medium for deepening student's awareness of their world and the impact of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT). Standardized testing is analyzed as a fundamental paradigm to our school culture. Ethnography is explored as a method for describing one group of students and their teacher as they prepare for the OSSLT. The findings conclude that the test occupies time, dominates definitions of literacy and undermines student and teacher agency. The conclusion considers reasons for why we seem to accept a testing paradigm that may be a direct affront to democratic practice in schools.

Over the past few decades, there has been a shift in crime control discourses, from an almost exclusive focus on traditional criminal justice objectives and practices, to attention to ‘community’ and a range of strategies that seek to prevent crime and increase safety. Overall, evaluations of the community mobilization approach to crime prevention and safety conclude that these initiatives have generally demonstrated limited long-term impacts on ‘crime’ and safety at the local level. Through the ‘what works’ lens, the limits of the approach have typically been attributed to implementation challenges related to outreach and mobilization, and inadequate resourcing. Through a more critical lens, using studies on governmentality as a starting point, this study examines the mechanisms through which crime prevention and community safety became thinkable as sites of governance in Canada, and more specifically within the Community Development Framework (CDF) in Ottawa (ON). To this end, I conducted an ethnography using a triangulation of data collection methods, including extensive fieldwork and direct participant observation within the CDF. The findings of this ethnography describe in detail how the CDF emerged and unfolded (from 2008 to 2010) from a variety of perspectives. These findings show that the CDF encountered a number of common challenges associated with program implementation and community-based evaluation. However, the lack of progress made towards adhering to CDF principles and reaching CDF goals cannot be reduced to these failures alone. The CDF highlights the importance of locating the community approach to crime prevention within its wider socio-political context, and of paying attention to its numerous ‘messy actualities’. These include the dynamics and repercussions of: governing at a distance and of the dispersal of social control; the neoliberal creation and responsibilization of choice-makers; relations of power, knowledge and the nature of expertise; the messiness of the notion of ‘community’; bureaucratic imperatives and professional interests; the words versus deeds of community policing; and processes relevant to resistance within current arrangements.

Canada has distinct contemporary faith communities that differ from western and European counterparts. Unfortunately statistics tracking denominational allegiances give little insight into the daily intricacies of collective religious practice. The purpose of this study is to contribute towards filling a gap within scholarly research on the lived culture and experiences of contemporary religious communities within Canada. This study examines the pattern of culture-sharing within a non-denominational faith community as lived and practiced in Ottawa. Through autoethnography, this study asks why members attend and how members view the use of popular culture video clips within church. Individual and collective religious identities are constructed through observations, interviews and material artifacts gleaned through participant observation from January 2011 to December 2011. The results show that within the church, a community of practice is built around shared parenthood and spiritual journey. Members place importance on children, on providing support of all kinds for one another, and on keeping religion relevant. Reasons for attending are echoes of the patterns of culture-sharing: members enjoy the feeling of community, the support, the friendships, the play dates. Participants view popular culture video clips played within church as one aspect of an overall importance placed upon relevance. Mutuality of engagement results in members experiencing their lives as meaningful, it validates their worth through belonging, and it creates personal histories of becoming within the context of a community of practice. Future research recommendations include further study of other contemporary faith communities within Canada, with investigation into the possibility that communities of practice may be what the churched and unchurched are seeking.

Delirium is a disturbance of consciousness and cognition that affects many terminally ill patients before death. It can manifest as confusion, hallucinations, and restlessness, all of which are known to be distressing to patients, families, and professional caregivers. Underlying the contemporary palliative care movement is a belief in the idea that a good death is possible; that dying can be made better for patients and families through the proper palliation of distressing symptoms and through proper attention to psychological, social, and spiritual issues that affect wellbeing at the end of life. Given that delirium is potentially disruptive to all that the good death assumes, i.e., mental awareness, patient-family communication, peace and comfort, the question was asked: What is the relationship between end-of-life delirium and the good death in hospice care? Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted at a freestanding residential hospice over a period of 15 months in a suburban community in eastern Canada. The research methods included participant observation (320 hours over 80 field visits), interviews with 28 hospice caregivers, and document analysis. The findings of this study provide an in-depth examination of the nature of caregiving relationships with patients and with families in end-of-life care. They illustrate how a commitment toward providing for the good death prevails within the cultural community of hospice, and how the conceptualization, assessment, and management of end-of-life delirium are organized within such a commitment. In this setting, experiences of conscious and cognitive change in dying are woven by hospice caregivers into a coherent system of meaning that is accommodated into prevailing scripts of what it means to die well. At the same time, delirium itself provides a facilitative context whereby processes of supporting families through the patient’s death are enabled. This study highlights the relevance of considering the contextual and cultural features of individual end-of-life care settings that wish to examine, and perhaps improve, the ways in which care of delirious patients and their families is provided.

This dissertation seeks to analyse the upsurge of insurgent violence in the North Caucasus following the end of the counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya in 2009. By looking at the development of radical Islam and the impact of the Chechen spillover in the region, this research suggests that these factors should be analysed and contextualized in each republic. By comparing the cases of Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, and Dagestan, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate the importance of vendetta, criminal activity, religious repression and corruption as local factors that contribute to the increase of violence. By focusing on the case of Dagestan, the author proposes a political ethnographic approach to study the mechanisms and details of religious repression and corruption in everyday life. This analysis permits us to map out the different pathways towards the participation in insurgent groups in Dagestan. By doing so, it demonstrates that one can identify three different generations of insurgent fighters in Dagestan. This dissertation demonstrates that the role of Salafist ideology is often marginal in the early stages of the process of violent radicalisation, and slowly gains importance as the involvement in violence increases. The emphasis should be placed on vengeance and religious repression as crucial triggering factors as they provoke a cognitive opening for young people in Dagestan to engage in violence.

Spiritual healing is a ubiquitous and fundamental part of Charismatic Christianity; it is indelibly linked to understandings of God, society, and individual identity. And yet, the phenomenon of spiritual healing—particularly its expression within North American, Abrahamic traditions—has been understudied within academia. In this thesis, I take a phenomenological approach in order to better comprehend the meaning-making process behind spiritual healing rituals amongst Charismatic Protestant Christians in Ottawa, Canada. Through a small-scale, local ethnographic study in Ottawa in which I conducted participant observation and several in-depth interviews, I explore Charismatic Christianity through the lens of lived religion. Based on a series of focused case studies, I conclude that the Charismatic cosmological worldview (one in which cosmic-wide restoration is emphasised) correlates with, and contributes to, the Charismatic emphasis on individual healing.

Condomless sex between gay men, also known as bareback sex, has been a popular object of research since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. One of the most common perspectives on studying bareback sex has been through a medicalization approach, as it may be observed notably with public health and psychology. In other instances, the abandonment of condom use is framed as an intentional act of resistance to public health. Through the methodological approach of ethnography, I studied how young gay men in their twenties from Toronto understand bareback sex in relations to popular discourses of the sexual practice. While my informants initially had a certain way of talking of bareback sex, their narratives on the sexual practice changed with time and challenged the common representations of bareback sex as either a site of resistance or medicalization, which I argue was possible because of the methodological approach of ethnography. During fieldwork, other themes also emerged in regards to shaping understandings of bareback sex and HIV as it relates to young gay men, such as the traumatic memories of an older generation who witnessed the earlier days of the AIDS epidemic. From this anthropological research, I seek to invite the opportunity to rethink the relationship between sex, biomedical science, and HIV.

While interagency collaboration among Children’s Aid Societies and violence against women (VAW) agencies have been mandated by the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Service, little is known about these local collaboration agreements. This study seeks to explore how the Ottawa CAS/VAW Collaboration Agreement mediates the work of VAW agencies to protect women and children. Using a purposive sample, a total of eight VAW informants were interviewed. Smith (1999) argued that people’s everyday experiences are organized, often unknowingly, by the actions of people located outside the local setting and that this organization is textually-mediated. This study used institutional ethnography and the listening guide approach to critically examine the collaboration process. The results explore the narratives and standpoints as they relate to the informants’ understanding of the agreement and their descriptions of doing collaboration. This study also adopts the mapping technique developed by institutional ethnographers to map social relations. The findings indicate that informants differed in their familiarity and knowledge of the contents of the collaboration agreement – only two informants indicated that they have reviewed and read the document. The findings also show that although most informants were able to describe positive experiences of collaboration, most also described negative experiences. This study concludes that the collaboration agreement has made VAW workers’ work with women more focused and specific to helping women address Children Aid Society’s concerns. The findings demonstrate that the collaboration agreement requires an update and further research is required to evaluate these collaborations and whether they improve outcomes for women and their children.

This thesis explicates how an international literacy testing (ILT) initiative, overseen by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), is put to use to coordinate teaching and learning in adult literacy education programs in Canada, and in Ontario in particular. The testing initiative was conceived to manage and monitor global literacy resources, and promote their development for economic productivity and competitive advantage. Guided by institutional ethnography, the analysis reveals how certain operational and support devices of the testing initiative have been transposed into the context of adult education and training, carrying with them the ideological concerns of the economistic testing project and some of its methodological procedures. Various devices and technologies of the ILT are reformulated as individual assessments for adult learners, and are also incorporated— as is and with extensions— into a national occupational skills framework, a provincial curriculum reform, and a series of policy persuasion projects. Educators, program coordinators and curriculum developers, concerned with the development of literacy that is responsive to learners and their aspirations, recognize the limitations of the curricular frameworks and assessments. They devote inordinate amounts of time and effort reformulating, translating, force-fitting, and supplementing them. At the same time, a narrowly conceived locating information pedagogy—distinct from both academic literacy needed to access formal education systems and a responsive and situated literacy needed to actively participate in social practices—is developed and widely promoted. Policy entrepreneurs have incorporated the devices into their policy persuasion projects, including a project that profiles adults according to their literacy proficiency, their value in the labour market and whether or not they are ‘economically efficient’ to educate. Persuasion tactics are aimed at policy-makers and adult educators in order to convince them to shift educational support away from those who already experience limited access to educational opportunities (adults with secondary education or less) to those closest to reaching what is deemed to be an acceptable literacy level (adults with post-secondary education). Attempts to limit and privilege the purpose of adult education and training, in combination with the development of curricula and assessments that do the same, obstruct and contradict efforts to support equitable literacy learning opportunities for Canadian adults.