The World Health Organization and the United Nations state that people normally access water through their place of residence. However, in North America people regularly need access to water services, such as toilets, fountains, or bathing facilities, when not in a private residence. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the current situation of access to water for personal uses for people outside a place of residence as an emergent research topic. To accomplish this, I conducted a literature review and a thematic analysis of nine key-informant interviews with stakeholders in Victoria. Findings from the research reveal that access to water for personal uses is limited in Victoria when outside a place of residence. Furthermore, the consequences and implications of this limitation directly and indirectly influence both individuals and the broader community. Finally, policy recommendations, action responses, and future research directions inform possible responses to address this issue.

Continued documentation of the disproportionate burden of ill health faced by Aboriginal Peoples in Canada raises questions about the gap between what is known and what action is being taken to improve Aboriginal health in Canada. In order to explore this puzzle of knowledge translation (KT), a conceptual framework was developed by synthesizing the KT literature with the Aboriginal health research literature. Using this framework as a guide, this study explored the idea of KT within one Aboriginal health research context – the Network Environments for Aboriginal Research British Columbia (NEARBC). Concepts, ideas, and patterns drawn from the systematic thematic analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews highlight the complexity of Aboriginal KT and the challenges that lie ahead. The lessons learned from these challenges are reviewed and opportunities for KT to help transform the discourse and practice of Aboriginal health research and policy in Canada discussed.

Gilles Deleuze’s ontology is often understood to ground a kind of radical pluralism, the political defense of which is thought to be articulated most strongly in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia books. It is clear, however, that this “politics” is defined in a wholly negative way, and that the revolutionary dimension of these books is animated by a strictly ethical logic. In my view, if there is a politics in Deleuze it must be understood in relation to the central problem of his ontology: namely, the problem of understanding how Being is produced. To grasp politics as a singularity, as a mode of ontological production, has a number of radical consequences – consequences, however, that Deleuze himself did not embrace. Ultimately, Deleuze’s conception of ontological production appears marked by an apolitics, in that any effective mobilization of Being’s transformative potential requires that we stand posed to sacrifice anything of the integrity and organizational capacity of political existence that limits the expression of Being itself.

Generations of women’s health workers, writers, activists, and academics have tended to present midwifery as the opposite of obstetrics; to summon the appealing association of midwifery by advocating ‘tradition and nature’ over ‘modernity and medicalization;’ and to invoke the melodrama of the subordination of female patients by and to male doctors. This thesis suggests that it is much more productive (and historically accurate) to think of the shifting roles and identities of childbirth practitioners and their clients in terms of “boundary work” rather than the oft-touted dichotomy of domination/resistance. The thesis navigates Enlightenment theories of body and nature and moves to explore the example of the Foucaultian “clinic” to illustrate a relatively unstable foundation on which the biomedical clinic appears not as an entity trapped in time and space, but always already subject to change and negotiation. A discussion of maternal health policy and the roles of birthing women in actively shaping the care they receive brings home the central argument that what is crucial to the ever-developing birthing models is not resisting that which appears to dominate, but affirming a practice that more adequately meets the needs of birthing women in BC today.

This thesis takes the position that it is not clear that the aspirations and assumptions expressed by theories of international relations predicated on the narrative about the emergence of mature sovereign nation states acting within a system of such states offers a particularly helpful guide to political practices concerning boundaries and borders that are identified on the ground. This is especially the case if we pay attention to the specific practices of bordering in Cyprus. Through a reading of various sites of limitation and excess of Cypriot sovereignty – in relation to the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, the modern system involving Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom, the United Nations and the European Union, ongoing complexities such as British Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) and the ethnically mixed village of Pyla/Pile – this thesis investigates the consequences and considers the implications, both theoretical and actual, that arise in Cyprus.

Indigenous and settler relations have been negotiated, and continue to be negotiated in various forms across Canada. This thesis begins from the continued assertions of treaty Elders that the historic Treaty relationships are valid in the form that they were mutually agreed upon and accepted at the time of negotiation. From this assertion, this thesis asks how this mutually agreed upon understanding of Treaty can be understood. In particular, the holistic approach to reading historic treaty draws on the oral history and first hand accounts to provide an understanding of the context and content of treaty. The holistic approach is then applied to Treaty 6 in Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as the contemporary Treaty process in British Columbia. This provides a critical analysis of the continued negotiation of the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Settlers, both regarding how historic treaties are understood in Canada, and how contemporary treaty relations continue to be negotiated.

On 11 June 2008 the Government of Canada delivered an official apology to former students of Indian residential schools for its participation in the schools’ creation and administration. The morally infused discourses of political apologies may at first seem to symbolize a progressive step towards a better and more egalitarian future. This thesis, however, will challenge and problematize such perspectives by presenting not only a critical analysis of the 2008 apology itself but also by contextualizing the apology’s narratives with the colonial framing strategies which have historically served to marginalize and dominate the Indigenous nations and peoples of Turtle Island. Through the critical exploration of the 2008 apology’s operability and political significance in Canada’s colonial context, this thesis intends to reveal both the message(s) that the apology got across to the Canadian general public and the forms of domination and political distraction that the apology’s seemingly moral and progressive narratives effectively belie.

Despite its presentation as a pragmatic and universally applicable path to peace, the author argues that liberal peacebuilding offers no clear break from past colonial and imperial relations. Liberal peacebuilding is, in fact, colonial in its attempt to penetrate the markets and political systems of post-conflict countries and restructure economies and political life through the hegemonic imposition of liberal norms, facilitating their integration into global capitalism and a liberal community of states. The “liberal peace” created by this political and economic order often involves violent conditions of assimilation and exclusion. Moreover, the confluence of security and development concerns in the 1990s has set the strategic foundation for the incorporation of locally-driven “civil society” approaches to peacebuilding within statebuilding operations. In this thesis, the author identifies existing criticisms of peacebuilding, and, drawing on theorists such as Michel Foucault, Partha Chatterjee, David Scott, and Jenny Edkins, initiates a deeper critique that considers the historical context of colonialism, legitimations of violence, the construction of the non-west in categories of development, and the relations of power and knowledge associated with liberal approaches to making peace. The author provides a historical and political overview of wars in Angola, proposing that discourses and practices of international peacebuilding have concealed the continuation of war by other means.

The Canadian constitutional crisis of 2008 triggered a renewed interest in the structure and workings of Canada’s institutions of government. Particular controversy was generated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertion that only the political party with the most seats in the House of Commons has the right to form a government and that it is illegitimate for the opposition parties to form a coalition with a legislative majority. Peter Russell terms these contentions “Harper’s New Rules”, and is one of a large group of scholars who deride the rules as being undemocratic and in violation of the traditional practice of parliamentary democracy and responsible government (which holds that the House of Commons is the final arbiter on the viability of potential governments). This thesis investigates the quick rejection of Harper’s Rules and determines that their attempt to enforce a critical moral standard on Harper is problematic because for a constitutional convention to be binding on political actors, it requires a consensus on how a convention promotes constitutional principle--a consensus that does not exist about how a party receives a mandate to govern. Throughout Canada’s history with minority government transitions, there has been a subtle discourse that implies many political actors have operated under the norm that the largest party in the House of Commons does indeed have a right to form the government. As well, many of the claims that are made about the democratic origin and purpose of the structure of responsible government are difficult to substantiate and can be challenged. The resulting disagreement makes it difficult to declare a constitutional interpretation to be wrong, given the malleable character of conventions, and that these constitutional disputes can generate into crisis and be exploited for partisan gain. This is the situation the federal party system may soon find itself in, as likely future minority governments will continuously bring the opposing conceptions of a mandate into conflict. This thesis concludes that determining constitutional conventions based on how they defend principle is a hazardous approach because political actors can always frame their actions in the rhetoric of democratic legitimacy, and if the actor can avoid serious political repercussions or find support in the public, then the interpretation becomes viable.

In Canada, ‘official multiculturalism’ is often viewed as working against historical exclusions by actively promoting a national culture of openness and diversity, and fostering a community of communities, united by mutual recognition and the celebration of differences. Through this characterization, the Canadian nation narrative has shifted to accommodate formerly excluded stories so that it is now the space of all stories. I argue that it is in these unity-seeking discourses that so inflect discussions of diversity and multiculturalism in Canada that critique is co-opted and, in the guise of inclusion, it exists in a weakened and static iteration. I outline a theoretical framework by working through texts that broadly link the study of nation-building with the construction of nation narratives or national histories and contextualize this through an examination of critical theories about nation-building in Canada. I apply this theoretical framework to two sites: statistics and literature. More specifically, I look at how census ‘identity’ (‘ethnic origins’ and ‘visible minority’) categories are constructed as more or less neutral statistical measurement tools used to further and legitimate multicultural narratives of the nation. For example, I examine Michael Adams’ Unlikely Utopia in order to show how the findings of censuses and public opinion polls are integrated into a multicultural nation narrative. The fiction I discuss – Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant – illuminates how narrative practices can work to reinforce nation-building practices or critique them, and, at times, serve to illustrate how critique itself can work to reinforce the relationships it analyses. I suggest that reading Canadian immigrant narratives as political texts can work to reinforce and/or disrupt the imagined coherence of the multicultural nation narrative by resisting closures and domains of acceptable speech, as well as disrupting the imposed linearity of nation narratives. By reading performances of nationhood as processes of narrativization, it is possible to critically examine the exclusions, implicit and explicit, of the construction of an intelligible nation.