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No description available.

This research examines the challenges and barriers to service provision that newcomer settlement service providers (SSPs) encounter in Peel Region, Ontario. Semi-structured interviews are used to examine if suburban SSPs in the cities of Brampton, Mississauga and town of Caledon, encounter challenges related to providing services to both adult and youth newcomers. The findings indicate that government funding, and the conditions tied to that funding, are the greatest challenge for SSPs in Peel. Funding restrictions also produced challenges related to the structure and continuity of services and competition between service providers. Due to Peel's varied geography, transportation and organization location are challenges for some rural service providers. Service specific challenges are encountered largely in providing employment and mental health services. Reconsidering government policies around funding for settlement services is necessary. It is recommended that both SSPs and municipalities be integrated into settlement policy decisions.

This thesis explores the engagement of a group of Mapuche-Pewenche communities with tourism in southern Chile. I argue that Trekaleyin, their tourism initiative, is part of a broader and long history of resistance and struggles for autonomy, territory and decolonisation, in which identity, development, agency and relations with other beings are negotiated, revitalised and re-produced. From my experience working as a development practitioner with these communities in the beginnings of Trekaleyin, I became interested in understanding the ways in which, as a collective experience, it is embedded in and articulated with political concerns and contestation with regards to neoliberalism and multiculturalism. I also became interested in how the communities are incorporating and reactivating diverse and solidarity economies in their work on tourism, while at the same time reworking their relations with and the market economy itself. I suggest that through Trekaleyin, the communities are also re-producing a relational and open sense of place and connectivity, mobilising particular ways of knowing, being and relating to territory and more-than-human beings in a context of global neoliberalism, reshaping scales and their possibilities. With this thesis I aim to explore how, through their engagement in tourism, community members are disrupting, expanding and hybridising discourses and practices around development, the economy, nature and cross-cultural relations, reworking them so as to craft a better position from where they can participate in them, but the consequences of which extend beyond the “local”, affecting us all, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Therefore, from an ethnographic site and poststructural, post-human and decolonising geographic approaches, this thesis brings new perspectives to the study of development, tourism and the environment, particularly among indigenous peoples, in which autonomy, hybridity, diversity and relational ontologies are articulated.

In this study, I employ a combination of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis to examine the marketing media from corporate social responsibility campaigns focused on food bank philanthropy and awareness-raising for the issue of hunger. I use media from a sample of six of the largest and most visible corporate food bank philanthropy campaigns to represent a broad range of their differences. Each campaign is analyzed for how the problem of hunger and the solution as food banks are represented. Hunger is represented by these corporations as a problem of a lack of food that can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere, for which families and/or local communities bear responsibility. This typification of the problem of hunger comes packaged conceptually with a characterization of the solution to that problem in food banks represented as a food-focused, charity-based, volunteer-run response that relies on corporate sponsorships and corporate social responsibility programs to harnesses the marketability of hunger to increase donations. These representations are evidence form the basis on an analysis of how the problem of hunger is currently thought about and acted upon in Canada. Claims about hunger exist at a juncture between the resources available and the kinds of responses to hunger that are likely to arise. This study demonstrates what corporate claims about hunger mean in relation to the ongoing development of food banking. This study is also an analysis of a particular case of corporate food bank philanthropy as an example campaign to highlight how the corporate construction of hunger is deployed to obscure, marginalize, and foreclose on the possibility of the emergence of alternative understandings of hunger and approaches beyond food banking based on a charity model. The dominant typification of the problem of hunger by corporations further institutionalizes an inadequate food banking paradigm that cannot address the social underpinnings that lead to the expression of hunger. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2014-06-01 00:17:52.246

This thesis explores elementary schools’ homework practices on Prince Edward Island. I employ a feminist perspective that incorporates Foucault’s concept of governmentality (Foucault, 1991a) to examine homework as a ‘site’ where institutions (family and school) interact and power circulates. I focus on the ways in which the daily lives and subjectivities of mothers, and to a lesser extent teachers, are organized and regulated in the process of making homework work. I assembled and analyzed reports and policies related to education reform, parental involvement and homework. I draw on Foucault’s approach to genealogy (Foucault, 1984) to examine how homework has been established in these texts as a ‘good’ educational practice for young students, in spite of its dubious effects on educational achievement. Mothers and teachers are explicitly and implicitly addressed in education policy and practice as primary agents for the accomplishment of homework. Following qualitative research methodology, I conducted twenty in-depth interviews with mothers and teachers of elementary aged students. These mothers and teachers often have ambivalent feelings about homework, sharing frustrations about its effects on family time and relations and doubting its value for children. At the same time, ‘doing homework’ was closely linked to being a ‘good mother.’ Thus, my analysis draws attention to the complex ways that homework and parental involvement discourses work on and through people, to produce particular kinds of experiences and feelings. While homework may ‘fail’ to accomplish its professed educational aims for students, I argue that it serves to render women responsible for growing portions of educational labour. My study sheds light on the workings of power in the home/school relationship and more generally on the workings of neoliberal governance and educational reform. Modern government works through routine administration of our lives, in schools and families, and other institutions, often through persuasion, incitement and engagement rather than through explicit policy. I suggest the daily practice of homework is a concrete example of this and, extending Foucault’s analysis through feminist perspectives, I explore the unequal operation and effects of homework for those who are its main targets.

With amateur athleticism on the rise in Canada, older Masters athletes have been promoted as exemplars of “successful aging” in governmental population health campaigns that encourage all seniors to be physically active. This study investigates the life experiences of a group of ‘successfully aging’ Masters athletes to better situate their circumstances against the backdrop of a discourse of health responsibilization enacted by the state in its efforts to improve the health of aging citizens. Data were obtained from 15 in-depth interviews with Masters athletes age 60 and over. The findings revealed Masters athletes to have had exceptional life-long involvement in athleticism with intense physical training debuting early in adult life with several participants having been high-ranking amateur athletes prior to their involvement in Masters athleticism. Belonging for the most part to a high socioeconomic status, these participants were able to afford the costs associated with participation in high calibre athletic training and events. While these athletes might be held as exemplars of successful aging, they did not perceive themselves as such nor are their lifestyles and athletic achievements typical of the older seniors population that is targeted by state funded population health promotion efforts. This study offers insight into the socially constructed nature of successful aging under neoliberalism. It highlights a trend whereby health and aging are responsibilized as successful personal endeavours rather than as the outcomes of determinants largely outside the control of any one individual. / Graduate / 0340 / 0615 / mcgowanb@uvic.ca

This work is a philosophical examination of the relevance and function of socio-political myths in education. Central to this work is exploring the antinomy between myth and reason. Drawing on the work of philosopher Hans Blumenberg, I defend his view that one should go beyond the myth and reason antinomy and understand myth as an important and unique mode of symbolic orientation that, along with reason and science, is an essential part of humanity’s symbolic interaction with the world. From this view, I explore how socio-political myths are philosophically and practically relevant to the analysis of society in general and education specifically. Of particular importance, I argue that a philosophical understanding of ‘socio-political myth’ should be integrated as part of the critical democratic conception of education. By integrating a substantive philosophical understanding of socio-political myths into the critical democratic framework, a number of important pedagogical implications are revealed. Specifically, this work reveals how two particularly powerful socio-political myths that are currently embedded in the Canadian education system, the meritocratic and neoliberal myths, ultimately erode and undermine values, beliefs and educational practices that are consistent with democracy. In addition, I contend that socio-political myth should be understood as an important and necessary narrative corollary to critical democratic praxis. As such, I conceptualize and defend what I denote as democratic myth as an essential narrative to the development of critical participatory democracy both in and through education. Finally, I conclude this work by examining how democratic myth may be practically developed by teachers and students.

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In 1999, the World Bank launched the K4D initiative as part of its new development agenda. The Bank also established itself as the global development knowledge bank suggesting that these moves would yield more pro-poor development results. This thesis examines the Bank’s knowledge ventures and contends that they are part of the apparatus of advancing the Bank’s neoliberal agenda. The governmentality approach is used to argue that the knowledge ventures are a move away from the direct and interventionist mechanisms of control prominent in the earlier development agenda, but at the same time, representative of new, more subtle and indirect mechanisms of control. Furthermore, a close investigation of the literature published in connection to the knowledge ventures and the practical projects created as part of these ventures, reveals that neoliberal policies traditionally promoted by the Bank feature prominently in the propaganda surrounding the Bank’s knowledge ventures.