This dissertation intervenes in debates in Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Canadian Immigration Studies, and Critical Race Studies to explore how shifting news media and political representations of Muslim families reflect the complexities of what it means to be Canadian beyond holding citizenship. In the post-9/11 era, the Muslim family has re-emerged in Canadian English-language news media and Canadian political debates as a site of inherent violence. Drawing on orientalist narratives of the Muslim family, news media and political conversations tend to frame these homes as being headed by patriarchal fathers and oppressed mothers, and children seeking to break from families and traditions, yet always holding the potential to become violent themselves. Even though Canada identifies as a multicultural nation, Muslim families are often presented in media as undeserving of the rights of Canadian citizenship, and even deserving of state violence. While news media play a key role in reproducing orientalist framings of Muslim families, news media can also take the government to task when it comes to the violation of immigrant and racialized Canadians’ rights as citizens. Some news media coverage counter orientalist narratives by producing “positive” representations of Muslim families, however, these “positive” representations frequently frame Muslims who are worthy of the rights of citizenship as adhering to heteronormative family dynamics, productive citizenship, and normative Western gender roles and kinship formations. These “positive” portrayals produce varying representations of Muslim families, but such framings can also labour in the way of reifying Canada’s multicultural ideals and Canada’s idea of itself as “civilized.” Drawing on the news media coverage of the family of Maher Arar, the Khadrs, and the Shafias, I argue that such representations still produce the norms of the settler-colonial Canadian nation, where some racialized bodies, in this case Muslim families, can be granted the rights of Canadian citizenship if they are able to proximate normative Canadian kinship formations. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In the wake of 9/11, many Canadian English-language news media have framed Muslim men as violent and Muslim women as oppressed. This dissertation analyzes the shifting Canadian news media portrayals of the Muslim family. Muslim homes in Canada are often portrayed as spaces for the perpetuation of violence that threatens the Canadian nation. Simultaneously, news media also portray some Muslim homes as spaces of purportedly “good” Canadian citizens, if these Muslim families are able to conform to Canadian “values.” I examine how Canadian news media mobilize heteronormativity, middle-class status, productive citizenship, among others, to portray some Muslims as ascribing to Canadian values, and therefore worthy of the rights of citizenship. Drawing on the news media coverage of the cases of Maher Arar and Monia Mazigh, Ahmed and Omar Khadr and Maha Elsamnah, and Mohammed Shafia, Rona Mohammed, and Tooba Yahya, I analyze how Muslims who are viewed as not assimilating to Western ideals of family are deemed as undeserving of the rights of citizenship, and, in addition, may even deserve violence.

<p>  </p> <p>Free-roaming dogs on Native American Reservations are called rez dogs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD. Understanding the human-rez dog relationship is needed to develop best management practices. As a member of the Oglala Lakota nation and a resident of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, I used a combination of western scientific methods and Lakota ways of knowing to research how rez dogs are related to their human caretakers on the Pine Ridge Reservation. First, I determined how they are related to humans spatially. To do this, I installed trail cameras at 73 sites distributed within four zones around six communities on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I analyzed presence-absence and count data to estimate how human habitat covariates influenced rez dog occurrence and abundance. My results show that rez dog occupancy and abundance is related to human habitation and emphasizes the importance of considering human caretakers when developing best management practices. To investigate how human caretakers may perceive rez dogs and current management practices on the Pine Ridge Reservation, I used semi-structured questionnaires. I distributed surveys to 107 residents at grocery stores and convenience stores within five towns. The survey assessed the communities' perceptions of rez dog overpopulation, and topics related to their attitude toward dogs overall and rez dog sterilization programs. I used ordinal regression to determine if community member demographics, the number of people and dogs in the household, and distance to the veterinary clinic influenced these variables. My results show community members support rez dog sterilization programs and that policymakers should focus on free or low-cost sterilization programs for ambiguously owned rez dogs in conjunction with owned dogs. In addition, these results highlight how the economic disparity and lack of culturally appropriate methods of rez-dog population control prevent effective management of rez dogs. This dynamic is one example of how the settler-colonialism structure continues to negatively impact Native American communities and prevent effective, efficient, and ethical ways to manage rez dogs. I describe how the Lakota ways of knowing can be used to develop best management practices for rez dogs that are culturally appropriate. I describe the seven Lakota values, lessons learned from the Lakota dog creation story, and approaches to Lakota research methodologies. This paper introduces an example of a seven-generation, One Health framework that implements Lakota ways of knowing to establish rez dog management and centers community values, beginning generational healing through <em>Shunka </em>(dog) caretaking. In conclusion, this research describes how rez dogs are related to us spatially, by occupying the same area as us, and how we are related within a social context, with dogs being an indicator of our own well-being as humans. </p>

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Museums as colonial institutions and agents in nation building have constructed, circulated and reinforced colonialist, patriarchal, heteronormative and cisnormative national narratives. Yet, these institutions can be subverted, resisted and transformed into sites of critical public pedagogy especially when they invite Indigenous artists and curators to intervene critically. They are thus becoming important spaces for Indigenous counter-narratives, self-representation and resistance—and for settler education. My study inquired into Cree artist Kent Monkman’s commissioned touring exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience which offers a critical response to Canada’s celebration of its sesquicentennial. Narrated by Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the exhibition tells the story of the past 150 years from an Indigenous perspective. Seeking to work on unsettling my “settler within” (Regan, 2010, p. 13) and contribute to understandings of the education needed for transforming Indigenous-settler relations, I visited and studied the exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. My study brings together exhibition analysis, to examine how the exhibition’s elements work together to produce meaning and experience, with autoethnography as a means to distance myself from the stance of expert analyst and allow for settler reflexivity and vulnerability. I developed a three-lens framework (narrative, representational and relational/embodied) for exhibition analysis which itself became unsettled. What I experienced is an exhibition that has at its core a holism that brings together head, heart, body and spirit pulled together by the thread of the exhibition’s powerful storytelling. I therefore contend that Monkman and Miss Chief create a decolonizing, truth-telling space which not only invites a questioning of hegemonic narratives but also operates as a potentially unsettling site of experiential learning. As my self-discovery approach illustrates, exhibitions such as Monkman’s can profoundly disrupt the Euro-Western epistemological space of the museum with more holistic, relational, storied public pedagogies. For me, this led to deeply unsettling experiences and new ways of knowing and learning. As for if, to what extent, or how the exhibition will unsettle other visitors, I can only speak of its pedagogical possibilities. My own learning as a settler and adult educator suggests that when museums invite Indigenous intervention, they create important possibilities for unsettling settler histories, identities, relationships, epistemologies and pedagogies. This can inform public pedagogy and adult education discourses in ways that encourage interrogating, unsettling and reorienting Eurocentric theories, methodologies and practices, even those we characterize as critical and transformative. Using the lens of my own unsettling, and engaging in a close reading of Monkman’s exhibition, I expand my understandings of pedagogy and thus my capacities to contribute to understandings of public pedagogical mechanisms, specifically in relation to unsettling exhibition pedagogies and as part of a growing conversation between critical adult education and museum studies. / Graduate

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<p>  </p> <p>Many viewers—especially those from the continental United States—have praised Disney for such recent actions as casting Pacific Islanders in the animated feature film <em>Moana</em> (2016) and assembling a group of cultural advisors (named the Oceanic Story Trust) to guide the filmmakers’ creative decisions. However, my project contends that Disney continues to play a significant role in the maintenance of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, despite these seemingly progressive attempts at challenging Hollywood’s whitewashing. In this project, I argue that Disney creates and replicates the structures of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i through a mechanism that I term <em>imagineered imperial tourism</em>. In my formulation, imagineered imperial tourism involves commodifying historical narratives of colonization to serve the Disney brand by “innocently” repackaging them for the purpose of settler tourist consumption. To signal a Disney-specific branding and reproduction of settler colonial tropes and ideologies, I use the term “imagineered”—a play on Disney’s trademarked term <em>Imagineering</em>, which names the work of the creative team tasked with engineering the company’s most innovative devices, built environments, and technologies.</p> <p>Through a sustained study of Disney’s relevant productions—from the feature films <em>Lilo & Stitch</em> (2002) and <em>Moana</em> to its built environments at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL, and Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa in Ko Olina, Hawai‘i—I suggest that over time, Disney has normalized a version of Native Hawaiian people and history in US popular culture that reproduces common settler colonial discourses which have structured popular perceptions of Hawai‘i. The company’s almost century-long history of media production has cemented these discourses into a set of public pedagogies that have been reproduced across generations. Disney’s Pacific Island-themed productions and attractions are rife with tropes of native primitivism and imperialist nostalgia. They also reveal the primacy of the discursive framework of hegemonic multiculturalism vis-à-vis the commodified “spirit of aloha,” a sentiment which is superficially rooted in Native Hawaiian epistemologies and branded as a key selling point by the tourism industry. Furthermore, Disney has actively colonized Hawaiian lands since 2007, capitalizing on the Islands’ exploitative tourist industry while also obscuring longstanding battles over land ownership and denying Native Hawaiians sovereignty over their stolen lands. Ultimately, I suggest that Disney’s ostensibly “innocent” repackaging contributes to the violent erasure of Native Hawaiian history in popular culture. </p>