This dissertation examines urban walking in Canada as it deviates from a largely male peripatetic tradition associated with the flâneur. This new incarnation of the walker—differentiated by gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation—reshapes the urban imaginary and shifts the act of walking from what is generally theorized as an individualistic or simply transgressive act to a relational and transformative practice. While the walkers in this study are diverse, the majority of them are women: writers Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Régine Robin, Gail Scott, and Lisa Robertson and performance artists Kinga Araya, Stephanie Marshall, and Camille Turner all challenge the dualism inscribed by the dominant (masculine) gaze under the project of modernity that abstracts and objectifies the other. Yet, although sexual difference is often the first step toward rethinking identities and relationships to others and the city, it is not the last. I argue that poet Bud Osborn, the play The Postman, the projects Ogimaa Mikana, [murmur] and Walking With Our Sisters, and community initiatives such as Jane’s Walk, also invite all readers and pedestrians to question the equality, official history and inhabitability of Canadian cities. As these peripatetic works emphasize, how, where and why we choose to walk is a significant commentary on the nature of public space and democracy in contemporary urban Canada. This interdisciplinary study focuses on Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, cities where there has been not only some of the greatest social and economic change in Canada under neoliberalism but also the greatest concentration of affective, peripatetic practices that react to these changes. The nineteenth-century flâneur’s pursuit of knowledge is no longer adequate to approach the everyday reality of the local and contingent effects of global capitalism. As these walkers reject an oversimplified and romanticized notion of belonging to a city or nation based on normative identity categories, they recognize the vulnerability of others and demand that cities be more than locations of precarity and economic growth. This dissertation critically engages diverse Canadian peripatetic perspectives notably absent in theories of urban walking and extends them in new directions. Although the topic of walking suggests an anthropocentrism that contradicts the turn to posthumanism in literary and cultural studies, the walkers in this study open the peripatetic up to non-anthropocentric notions as the autonomous subject of liberal individualism often associated with the male urban walking tradition is displaced by a new focus on the interdependent, affective relation of self and city and on attending to others, to the care of and responsibility for others and the city.

Les études sur la migration des personnes provenant des pays en voie de développement utilisent souvent des approches macro-économiques où l’on décrit le fondement de la décision des émigrants de quitter leur pays natal à partir de critères économiques. Après avoir observé que plusieurs Brésiliens à Montréal invoquaient souvent d’autres raisons pour expliquer leur migration, nous avons choisi de concentrer notre recherche sur ses aspects. Les Brésiliens appartenant à la classe moyenne décident souvent de migrer à Montréal afin d’avoir un mode de vie différent de celui qu'ils connaissaient au Brésil, c'est-à-dire trouver l'équilibre entre la vie privée et professionnelle. Ainsi, le but de cette recherche était de savoir, entre autres, quels étaient les aspects pris en considération lors de la décision de migrer et si leurs priorités ont changé après l'arrivée à Montréal. En nous concentrant sur le cas de Brésiliens dont la migration est davantage liée à un désir de changement de valeurs, nous proposons une approche différente de celles qui estiment que la recherche de gains financiers constitue la principale motivation de ces migrants. / Studies on the migration of people from developing countries often use macroeconomic approaches that describe the basis for emigrants’ decision to leave their native land in economic terms. I found that many Brazilians in Montreal often invoked other kinds of reasons for their migration, and so I focus on these in the thesis. Middle-class Brazilians often decide to migrate to Montreal in order to have a way of life different from what they knew in Brazil, to find a balance between personal and professional life. The purpose of this research is to find out, among other things, what factors affected their decision to migrate and whether their priorities changed after arriving in Montreal. This study uses the lifestyle migration approach and seeks to disprove the supposition that Brazilians migrating to Montreal is only for financial gain.

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In this dissertation, I argue that from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, the Jewish community of Montreal underwent a series of changes that significantly altered its character. And while increasing numbers of Jews from all over the world began arriving on the island, the established elites reacted by creating and then entrenching a new cultural orthodoxy based on their own practices and values. Jewish women were fundamental to this process, as both objects of the new cultural discourse as well as active participants. Understanding the process through which a "Jewish community of Montreal" group was created requires a consideration of both public and private ethnic signifiers, so an analysis of the construction of gender norms for Jewish women is key. This dissertation will track these fractured dialogues through an analysis of currents of thought and discussion among Jewish individuals living in Montreal between 1945 and 1980. I will accomplish this through a comparison of both textual documents and oral interviews. In sum, I will examine how dominant discourses are constructed by elites, and how they are in turn experienced by the women themselves. / Graduate

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Cette thèse propose une généalogie des référentiels patrimoniaux animant les politiques de renouvellement urbain depuis 50 ans à Bordeaux et Montréal. L'analyse comparée internationale et la perspective historique démontrent le rôle variable du patrimoine urbain dans les stratégies et la composition des projets de renouvellement urbain (de requalification des qartiers anciens, de reconversions industrialo-portuaires, ou à l'occasion de projet de modernisation du territoire) ainsi que le rôle du débat public dans la constitution de ces référentiels patrimoniaux. <br />Une innovation est notamment repérée à travers le cas de la reconversion du Vieux Port de Montréal , celle de la constitution d'une trame patrimoniale, produite à l'occasion d'une planification négociée et participative.