Although the civil restraining order is the most commonly sought legal initiative to combat intimate partner violence in British Columbia, no known qualitative research has assessed the application process or the enforcement of the orders in BC. Previous quantitative research presents mixed findings and fails to provide an in-depth analysis of how legal and institutional work is organized, and in turn, organizes the process. This thesis employs Dorothy Smith's institutional ethnography to critically examine civil restraining order application processing in the BC Provincial Court. A combination of interviews, observations, and textual analyses contribute to the mapping of the way formalized texts regulate the different phases of practitioner's work. Particular attention is paid to disjunctures between battered women's experiential knowledge and what becomes formally known to practitioners who manage her case. This research found that abused women's lived experience with violence is transformed and shaped into accounts in which her safety needs disappear. Court practitioners become immersed in text-mediated activity within a legal ruling apparatus that emphasizes timely completion of a large quantity of cases, with little or no commitment to quality solutions. In the same effort to preserve limited police time and resources, one policy directs judges to add a police enforcement clause to only a few of the most serious cases. All restraining orders that do not have this clause are currently unenforceable.

This dissertation examines the repertoire of governmental responses to neofascism and hate in post-World War II Europe and North America, focusing on the way in which they are problematized within the contexts of democratic political behaviour, free and restricted speech, criminality, and multicultural relations. Materials examined include academic literatures, state commissioned reports, media coverage, court cases, remedial programs for hate offenders and autobiographical materials. Governmental responses are marred by a series of impasses that demonstrate the constitutive inability of post-war authorities to respond to the political element at the core of neofascism and hate. Attempts to address them as pathological social phenomena or simply as criminal or legally actionable forms of speech and behaviour fail to recognize their properly political force. In particular the neofascist problem reveals the limits of. and what occurs at the limits of, the technological mode of government, the biopolitical administration of life, and the sovereign structure of political community. This phenomenon has been the uncanny product of postfascist society, a society whose ethico-political structure revolves around the express prevention of the return of Fascism in its various guises. It institutionalizes and naturalizes the cut produced by Fascism's exclusion from legitimate politics, inadvertently creating the conditions for neofascist revivals that exploit the discontents of this process. To initiate the critical thought necessary to prepare a way out of the impasses of postfascist politics - to begin to think what it would mean to live in a non fascist as opposed to a postfascist society - - I present a minor analysis of the lines of transformation that animate the relationship between postfascism and neofascism. This analysis reveals the diabolical properties of the emerging politics of the exception, a politics with clear analogues in the current `war on terror,' in which the distinction between Fascism and liberal democracy becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. It also reveals a line of becoming that indicates the possibility of embracing a truly nonfascist sociality. The pathway beyond fascism does not and cannot pass through the repertoire of postfascist solutions but only through a singular assemblage of revolutionary forces that would have as their effect a non-fascist form of life.

This thesis explores how photography has been used in the governing of subjectivities and draws on the following three forms of governmentality identified by Michel Foucault: biopower, discipline and ethics. In photography's early history discourses on character and insanity privileged visual observation and the camera was used as a more precise extension of the clinician's eye. With the emergence of Freud's "talking cure" the use of still-photography in treatment and diagnosis was generally neglected until the 1970s when the medium was re-configured as an ideal technique for accessing the unconscious. Currently Phototherapy clients, with the aid of a therapist, use personal photos in order to identify and modify problematic aspects of self. I draw on Michel Foucault's second and third period work in order to investigate these shifting relationships of photography to subjectivity.

Thoughts and feelings around commitments and responsibilities to ensure the well-being of others are an important aspect of the everyday experience of relationships, particularly family relationships, and are especially salient in caregiving situations. In this dissertation I focus on the interpretation of the meaning of filial responsibility, from a sociological perspective: that is, how discourses are enacted within adult children's descriptions and assessments of what they do and feel towards aging parents. Between 2005 and 2006, I interviewed a non-random sample of 28 men and women with one or both elderly parents living in or near Victoria. British Columbia. Interviews were loosely structured explorations of participants' feelings and thoughts about their personal sense of responsibility for their parent(s). I viewed the data not only as windows into individual experiences. but as interpretive accounts mediated by dominant socio-cultural discourses. Participants responded to the construct of responsibility for parents by contradicting themselves, repeatedly qualifying their responses, or rejecting or revising the concept. There was particular difficulty in talk about "feeling responsible." Participants" accounts are explained with reference to the interpretive construction of personal meaning, and to the broader symbolic meanings of responsibility: as externally imposed obligation, as involving control over others, and as burdensome and unwanted. In their own accounts, participants reacted to this meaning by redefining or rejecting the concept at the level of their personal experiences. In doing so, they often prioritized individualistic ideals of personal choice and parental autonomy. Many also emphasized the role of love and affection in their relationships, although the extent to which this represents the manifestation of individualistic or familialistic discourses varies between individuals. Lastly, despite privileging individualism in their accounts of personal responsibility for parents, when asked to comment about "Canadian society," a cultural emphasis on individualism tended to be characterized negatively by participants and blamed for a decline in filial responsibility more broadly. Participants- accounts are explored for what they reflect about the symbolic meaning of filial responsibility in contemporary Canadian society, as well as for what they suggest about the process of its interpretation at the individual level.

One of the objectives of my thesis is to argue that regulatory capitalism and international law are problematic forms of power implicated both directly and ideologically in the standardizing practices and regulation of certified fair trade. My work begins by explaining variations in the way fair trade coffee is conceptualized and offered in the market, then moves on to explain how fair trade certification standards link up with other international standards and certification bodies, and finally, describes how standards and certification are used to textually construct social facts. I examine first those places where regulatory capitalism and international law remain embedded and active in fair trade certification practices, then the way standardizing practices work to organize (or disorganize) the relationships of people who work with fair trade coffee. The ethnography consists of interviews with three informally regulated fair trade roasters in the Victoria region. My aim is to identify precisely the points where the standardizing practices of certified fair trade reduce concrete relations of exchange to conceptual notions of fair trade. Identifying these points allows me to examine areas where dominant forms of power remain embedded and active in the concept and realization of certified fair trade coffee, and also how standardizing practices limit the potential of fair trade to transform unjust relations of trade. The question this thesis raises is not whether or how we can make fair trade coffee but rather, how can we focus solutions to unjust trade relations to be politically effective for all involved?

Produced through relations of power, West Nile Virus (WNV) as it exists on the Public Health Agency of Canada's (PHAC) website, is an effect of the kinds of knowledge, techniques of power. and disciplinary apparatuses that operate on the website and in society. Cumulatively, these forces have produced WNV as a bio-socio-administrative construct. With reference to Michel Foucault's relations of power and to Jennifer Gore's operationalization of Foucault's techniques of power, this thesis both describes the PHAC's overall production of WNV and analyzes the production process. This thesis illustrates one way that Foucault's theories of power can be used to conduct a social construction analysis. The study also shows conclusively that power relations are an important factor in the production of newly emergent infectious diseases in Canada. It will be of value to other researchers who are interested in the sociological study of disease, public health, and risk.

In this thesis I explore the relevance of role exit theory in relation to heterosexual persons who formerly identified as gay, lesbian, or queer. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a self identified sample of seven women and four men from south-western British Columbia. Participants discussed the social processes involved in establishing a heterosexual identity. including social stigma, reactions of significant others, presenting authentically, and establishing heterosexual relationships. Research results indicate that role exit as theorized by Ebaugh (1988) cannot be used as an extension of Troiden's (1988) model of sexual identity formation to account for shifts in sexual identity subsequent to the establishment of gay, lesbian, or queer identities. Further, the experiences described by participants did not conform to the stages of role exit, which suggested the need for a flexible model of heterosexual identity (re)formation that takes into account behaviour, affect, cognition, and the acceptance of heterosexual or straight as a personal label.

The participatory economics project (parecon) is Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel's vision for radically democratic workplaces and communities. This thesis examines the daily practices and ideology of the Vancouver Parecon Collective (VPC), one organization working to promote parecon as a viable socialist alternative. Arising from criticism of both the contradictions of the capitalist marketplace and the disparate power relationships within "communist" command economies, parecon is a powerful alternative to capitalist triumphalism. This thesis examines the efficacy of parecon as a prefigurative socialist vision and argues that parecon groups typified by the VPC need to combine Gramscian counter-hegemony and Richard Day's non-hegemonic approach to move from idealism and small-scale alternatives to large-scale and deeply transformative political economic change.

In the spring of 2005, a Vancouver Island Health Authority Inspector tried to stop the sale of ungraded eggs at the Saltspring Island Farmers' Market. This event, and the actions that followed, came to be known as the "Saltspring Island egg wars." Using the egg wars as a starting point, I explore the inner workings and contradictions of the egg sector in British Columbia by asking the question "how is it that food grown locally in sustainable ways is seen to be less safe by regulatory food regimes than food produced in the industrial food system?" To do this I take up the standpoint of egg farmers who "farm otherwise." From this grounding I rely on the insights of these farmers, civil servants, and social theorists Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Dorothy Smith to understand the ordering of power, knowledge and the social in relationships between sustainable egg producers and the British Columbia egg scheme.

I seek to reflect on the question of freedom in modern social thought, drawing primarily from the works of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Martin Buber. These three theorists situate the question of freedom in a post-Nietzschean vector of inquiry, within certain claims with regard to power, the modern self, and the ethical imperatives incumbent upon the human actor. I work through various inflections of freedom present in modern social thought, including conceptualizations of 'limit-experience', 'care of the self', and those suggested by a relational ontology of the subject. I bring Foucault, Butler and Buber into dialogue with one another, to both make a case for the continued importance of the question of freedom today, as well as contribute to its ongoing problematic.