Gastown, Vancouver's birthplace, is a small historic district embedded within the broader community of the Downtown Eastside. Over the past 25 years Gastown has been slowly upgrading; refashioning itself as a loft style residential neighbourhood and central tourist destination. Over the same period the Downtown Eastside's reputation as the city's "skid road" has become firmly entrenched. The pace of this community's upgrading and downgrading has quickened over the past five years and resulted in a current geography where we find loft-style condominiums, cappuccino bars and rising affluence interspersed with needle exchanges, homeless shelters and deepening disadvantage. What we see within the Gastown/Downtown Eastside community is a convergence of the spatial processes of social polarisation and the kinds of conflicts and negotiations that result. Polarisation, most broadly defined, describes a growing socio-economic and spatial divide between the "haves" and "have-nots" of Western societies and cities. While considerable attention has been paid to polarisation's conceptual meaning and empirical definition at the national and intra-urban levels, little focus has centered on how the process can be identified and analysed at the intra-community level. In the same way that polarisation at broader scales of analysis can be viewed as the sociotemporal coincidence of pauperisation and professionalisation, this dissertation defines intracommunity polarisation as the simultaneous occurrence of socio-spatial upgrading and downgrading. Using quantitative data from the census tract level, this dissertation investigates the empirical evidence of social polarisation within Gastown/Downtown Eastside. Using qualitative data the study explores the extent to which both revitalisation and deterioration are competing for the community's future and this polarisation is being experienced and negotiated by the varied residents and stakeholders of this urban community. Ultimately this dissertation sheds light on how the characteristics and causes of community based polarisation differ and parallel those at other scales of inquiry. It also outlines the truly local factors that affect polarisation's development, entrenchment and impact and illuminates the process' inconstant character and the time lag that exists between its qualitative experience and its quantitative identification. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (D. Min.)--New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Seminary, 2006. / Includes abstract and vita. "November 2006" Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-155)

Joe Louis Clark was the principal of Eastside High School (EHS) located in Paterson, New Jersey from 1982 to 1989. The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to explore Mr. Clark’s leadership style as principal of EHS, and to investigate from the point of view of Mr. Clark’s former students, teachers, and administrators what, if any effect, his leadership style had at EHS, as well as on his students, teachers, and administrators’ lives during and subsequent to their time at EHS. I conducted this investigation by giving voice to my classmates, teachers, administrators and myself. I graduated from EHS during Mr. Clark’s tenure and I am a member of his first graduating class in 1986. When Mr. Clark arrived as principal, EHS was characterized by large numbers of students living at or below the poverty line, overcrowded classrooms, and outdated resources. Additionally, there were issues such as: high dropout rates, drugs, teenage pregnancy, violence towards students and teachers. In an attempt to raise the students’ Minimum Basic Skills Test scores and eliminate the violence at EHS, Mr. Clark was hired as the principal. Through face-to-face and telephone semi-structured, open ended in-depth interviews with twenty-two participants, I uncovered personal views of Mr. Clark’s leadership style. Mr. Clark used a leadership style that was characterized by the informants as autocratic, directive, charismatic and caring. The voices of his students, teachers, and administrators speak volumes about the strategies he developed that made an impact on their lives in addition to reforming EHS.

Joe Louis Clark was the principal of Eastside High School (EHS) located in Paterson, New Jersey from 1982 to 1989. The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to explore Mr. Clark’s leadership style as principal of EHS, and to investigate from the point of view of Mr. Clark’s former students, teachers, and administrators what, if any effect, his leadership style had at EHS, as well as on his students, teachers, and administrators’ lives during and subsequent to their time at EHS. I conducted this investigation by giving voice to my classmates, teachers, administrators and myself. I graduated from EHS during Mr. Clark’s tenure and I am a member of his first graduating class in 1986. When Mr. Clark arrived as principal, EHS was characterized by large numbers of students living at or below the poverty line, overcrowded classrooms, and outdated resources. Additionally, there were issues such as: high dropout rates, drugs, teenage pregnancy, violence towards students and teachers. In an attempt to raise the students’ Minimum Basic Skills Test scores and eliminate the violence at EHS, Mr. Clark was hired as the principal. Through face-to-face and telephone semi-structured, open ended in-depth interviews with twenty-two participants, I uncovered personal views of Mr. Clark’s leadership style. Mr. Clark used a leadership style that was characterized by the informants as autocratic, directive, charismatic and caring. The voices of his students, teachers, and administrators speak volumes about the strategies he developed that made an impact on their lives in addition to reforming EHS.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995. / Includes tables and appendices. Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Frank Smith. Dissertation Committee: Francis Ianni. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-274).

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1996. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Frank L. Smith. Dissertation Committee: Jeanette E. Fleischer. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-130).

Thesis (D. Min.)--New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Seminary, 2006. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes project in ministry report. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-155, 97-104).

Unattached women with problem backgrounds are repeatedly using crisis related services in Vancouver's skid road. These services consist of emergency shelter accommodation, counselling, and housing referral. The women requiring these services have an urgent problem locating and maintaining stable, long-term housing. Such women are usually between the ages of 19 and 55 years and live without spouses, dependents, or other significant attachments. They are likely to be physically, mentally, or socially handicapped, and unable to support themselves. Most of them are defined by social service and health agency workers as "hard-to-house" in most private market housing. Members of this group have personal problems characterized by psychiatric difficulties, mental instability, and drug and alcohol problems. Their present residential environment and the lack of suitable residential alternatives, exacerbate their problems, causing extreme psychological and often physical hardships. Agency workers express urgent concern that, while the provision of emergency services may temporarily stabilize a client, the constant moves and the repetition of these services is not only therapeutically disruptive, but does nothing to meet the clients' long-term needs. As most of the target group is unable to cope with independent living and requires 2n>-hour living supervision, the need for residential care is perceived as a remedy. There is evidence that the occurrence of deinstitutionalization has added to the numbers of skid road residents by releasing ill-prepared patients or inmates of institutions into the community. Hotels and rooming house operators express concern over a hard-to-house population who are burdensome. Mental health professionals have expressed concern over the lack of residential alternatives available to former mental patients in Vancouver. The recent trend in the care of deinstitutionalized mental patients in North America, point to the provision of supportive housing. This is housing which provides social supports designed to assist the resident in coping with daily living while integrating into the community. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the nature of these women's housing problems in their current residential environment; to discover their dissatisfactions and requirements with regard to housing; to examine the supply of residential options; and to explore the - type of residential alternatives that would be most suited to their needs. Three data sources were used: skid road agency workers and their clients experiencing housing related difficulties; key informants in the community involved in the provision of social housing and residential care programs; and the mental health literature. Interviews with agency workers and their clients found that hotel and rooming houses are highly inappropriate living arrangements for the subject group. Several conditions related to the skid road residential environment were found to render unattached woment especially vulnerable to physical and sexual assault and other forms of harrassment. These conditions included poor security; limited supervision; discrimination; as well as the fact that women are a minority population. The interviews also found that women prefer safe, secure, self-contained suites or sex-segregated bathrooms and toilets. The inventory of residential options in Vancouver revealed that most were unsuitable, and of those considered suitable, the supply was extremely inadequate. The mental health literature suggests that residential programs encouraging independent living, have been successful for other populations with characteristics similar to those of the target group. This thesis recommends further study of the population, their capabilities, and the extent to which they can be rehabilitated, as well as/'the necessary support services required, to be followed by the initiation of a pilot project. The thesis also recommends that skid road hotels and rooming houses be improved in ways that would reduce the hardships imposed on unattached female residents. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

The Dryland Diaries is a multigenerational narrative in the epistolary style, a tale of four women, central character Luka; her mother Lenore; grandmother Charlotte; and great-grandmother Annie – cast in the Quebecoise tradition of the roman du terroir, invoking place and family, the primal terroir of a storyteller. The novel is driven by three acts of violence – the possible murder of Annie’s husband, Jordan, by her Hutterite father; the rape of Charlotte; and the probable murder of Lenore by a notorious serial killer. Set in rural Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Luka, a single mother, finds Annie’s and Charlotte’s journals in the basement of her farm home, where both her predecessors also lived. She reads their stories while attempting to come to terms with her search for her missing mother, and with her attraction to her former flame, Earl, now married. Luka learns that Jordan disappeared shortly after the Canadian government enacted conscription for farmers in the First World War, when Annie became a stud horsewoman, her daughter Charlotte born before the war ended. Letters and newspaper clippings trace the family’s life through the drought and Great Depression; then Charlotte’s diaries reveal her rape at Danceland during the Second World War. Her daughter, Lenore, grows up off-balance emotionally, and abandons her daughters. Luka returns to Vancouver and learns her mother’s fate. Told from Luka’s point of view, in first-person narrative with intercutting diary excerpts and third-person narratives, the novel examines how violence percolates through generations. It also examines how mothers influence their children, the role of art, how the natural world influences a life, and questions our definition of “home.” At its heart, the novel is a story about what makes a family a family, about choices we make toward happiness, and about how violence perpetuates itself through the generations. Inspired by Margaret Lawrence’s The Stone Angel, Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries, and the place-particular writing of Annie Proulx and Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Dryland Diaries paints a family portrait of loss, hope and redemption, locating it on the boundaries of historical fiction, firmly within the realm of epistolary and intergenerational narrative.

The murders and suspicious disappearances of women across Canada over the past forty years have received considerable national attention in the past decade. The disappearances and murders of scores of women in British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba have highlighted the vulnerability of women to extreme violence. Girls and women of Aboriginal ethnicity have been disproportionally affected in all of these cases and have high rates of violent victimization. The current socio-economic situation faced by Aboriginal women contributes to this. To provide publicly available data of missing and murdered women in Canada, a database was created containing details of 3,329 women, including 824 who are Aboriginal. There are key risk factors that increase the probability of experiencing lethal violence: street prostitution, addiction and insecure housing. The vast majority of sex workers who experience lethal violence are street prostitutes. The dissertation examines the legal status and forms of prostitution in Canada and internationally, as well as the individual and societal impacts of prostitution. A review of current research on violence and prostitution is presented. The thesis provides summaries from 150 serial homicide cases targeting prostitutes in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. The trends and questions posed by these cases are identified. The cases of the missing women of Vancouver and Robert Pickton are detailed. The key findings from the provincial inquiry into the missing women cases and an analysis of the most egregious failings of the investigations (Projects Amelia and Evenhanded) are discussed. Frequently encountered challenges and common errors, as well as investigative opportunities and best practices of police, and other initiatives and recommendations aimed at non-police agencies are evaluated. The three other RCMP-led projects, KARE, DEVOTE and E-PANA, which are large, dedicated units focused on vulnerable women, are assessed. All Canadian women deserve to live free of violence. For women with vulnerable life histories, violence is a daily threat and a common occurrence. More must be done to prevent violence and to hold offenders responsible when violence has been done. This dissertation is a plea for resources and attention; to turn apathy into pragmatic, concrete action founded on solid evidence-based research.