This thesis is a critical assessment of the role of photography in representing suffering and death. Drawing on the images of torture from the Abu Ghraib prison, I argue that the ways in which things become visible structure our affective and ethical dispositions, with crucial implications for our ability to attend to the suffering of others. In the first chapter, I examine the political importance of photography in its capacity to differentially represent vulnerable lives. In the second chapter, I illustrate the ways in which the prison photographs made visible the violent exploitation of Iraqi civilians, contrary to the official narrative of liberation offered by the Bush Administration. Finally, in the third chapter, following Judith Butler, I implicate the viewers of images of suffering in order to illustrate their roles in perpetuating norms of visibility, as an opening to the consideration of lives which remain unseen. I conclude that photographs open an important reflective space for considering the differential distribution of vulnerability.

In Nixon v. Vancouver Rape Relief Society, a legal case involving the exclusion of a male-to-female transsexual from a volunteer position with a women-only organization, the question of what a woman is one of the central questions being addressed. Questions of this kind place significant limits on cases like Nixon that involve women-only organizations and transgendered persons, since they can only address the place of women, and not the transgendered, in an organization like Rape Relief. This thesis examines two of the decisions that have emerged from Nixon v. Vancouver Rape Relief Society and Vancouver Rape Relief Society v. Nixon - in order to account for their shared investment in determining what a woman is. It then utilizes select writings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas to consider how the discussion taking place in Nixon might be recast in a manner that better accounts for the claims of women and the transgendered, enabling a responsive encounter between the one and the other.

This thesis argues that current environmentalist initiatives aimed at creating a stable regime of ecological governance in Canada’s northern boreal forest are structurally complicit with the forces driving its exploitation. Through the negotiation of the Canadian Boreal Framework Agreement and the aggressive institutionalization of Forest Stewardship Council certification, environmental organizations participate in the erection of a regime of ecological production predicated on the maintenance and delivery of ecosystem services. Through the creation of a stable, uniform field of exchange of natural functions, these initiatives deepen the entanglement of capital with new vestiges of nature. I trace the production of this ecologized, boreal capitalism through the concepts of fixed capital and real subsumption, arguing that this organization of nature constitutes a ‘fixing’ of value and thus a determining factor in the trajectory of capitalist development in the region. In this, I assert that environmental organizations have become essential institutions in the functioning of processes of accumulation. They ensure an articulation between the epistemic realms of a burgeoning ecological science and capital, and secure the communication of value down the commodity chain for ecological services and certified products. Further, they take on some responsibility for the organization of consumption, and thus the modes of possible political engagement. I conclude by finding that despite this deep identity between market and environmentalist institutions the possibility for productive – rather than protective – resistance is opened up alongside the more lamentable consequences of these developments.

This thesis explores the notion of betrayal through a sustained examination of two politically abject types – ‘the corpse/body’ and ‘the dilettante’. By expounding on what is here termed an ‘antipathology’, it performs a phenomenology of these types, not so much enclosing them as totalities, or consistent concepts/essences, as taking them in their discursive import, “at their word”. The argument unfolds via readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas – both serving as each other’s readers and interpreters – taken to share the project of critiquing morality in the name of what I term, after Lévinas, ‘ethics’. This antipathology of treason aims at evoking the mechanisms of political ‘abjection’ – a concept borrowed from Julia Kristeva – employed in the traitor’s expulsion from the political. It will thus probe into the ethical implications of this expulsion, insofar as it is taken here to be inscribed deep within prevalent ethico-political discourses, part-and-parcel of their sustaining inertia.

This thesis examines how the various characteristics of the Central and Eastern European new Member States, as indicated by the case studies of the Czech Republic and Hungary. affect how elite monetary policy makers within these states perceive the euro, both politically and economically. In order to answer this question economic and political expectations of what one would predict the perceptions of the euro within these state to be are developed from the official sources and existing Iiterature. The expectations reflect both the symbolic and political utility of currency in the development of collective sentiment as well as address the economic roles of currency. These expectations are then assessed against interview data collected from interviews with elite decision-makers within the Czech Republic and Hungary. Through this approach I argue that the opinions of elite decision-makers suggest that there is a complex interplay between the economic and the political regarding the perceptions of the euro within these states which reflect the unique character of these states. Moreover, I argue that even though the motivations of policy makers are in many cases particular to the NMS they are also run counter to some intuitive and scholarly predictions which indicate the need for further research.

This study analyzes the drought coping strategies and decision making processes of households and communities in response to a long and severe drought that prevailed from 1997 to 2004 in Nushki District, Pakistan. The relevant information was gathered through a review of the available literature, analysis of government documents, relief agencies- reports and newspaper articles. The analysis suggest that households adopted similar patterns of drought coping relating to food acquisition, income generation activities, extension of credit and management of productive and non-productive assets in Nushki District as in other drought affected areas. However, the coping strategies relating to security of access to drinking water were a major pre-occupation of households owing to the scarcity of water in Nushki District and these constitute a departure from the pattern of coping strategies reported elsewhere in the literature. The study concludes by offering a critique of government's drought policy for its failure to address the issues of livelihood security. It recommends that the Government of Pakistan should adopt a long-term approach focussed on rehabilitation and recovery of livelihoods for mitigating the effects of drought and make significant changes in its water supply, agricultural and livestock development policies to reduce the vulnerability of households to the effects of drought.

Proportionality review has become a common and expected legal test to determine the limits of rights under Canadian Charter adjudication. Section 2(a) of the Charter, which provides for freedom of religion, is one tool for people of cultural diversity to challenge the social order with their own nomoi. In this thesis I look at the freedom of religion cases that have been decided under section 1, thus also through proportionality analysis for how the proportionality test engages the democratic voice of persons of religious diversity. I argue that while the proportionality test is intended to recognize the democratic voice of diversity the reasoning structure of the test as usually utilized does not facilitate the processes of communication necessary to respectfully engage the voice of religious diversity and results in societal fragmentation. There are however, two recent cases that exemplify a very different and significantly new form of reasoning under the language of the proportionality test. I argue that these forms of proportionality analysis represent a form of deliberative or practical reason in which the nomoi of religious persons is recognized as of equal value as legislative nomoi and where political conflicts might be resolved not solely on the basis of power, but through the construction of shared histories that facilitate creating shared nomoi.

This thesis sets out to identify and problematise the Eurocentric proclivities that have characterised various approaches to anti-capitalist thought since the mid-nineteenth century. First, I consider the liberal democratic approaches of Eduard Bernstein and of Jürgen Habermas. Next, I consider the grand narrative approaches of Karl Marx and of Hardt and Negri as an alternative. I highlight the Eurocentric and imperialist tendencies of these approaches, while drawing out a series of considerations that must inform anti-capitalist theory if it is to remain committed to plurality and to anti-imperialist struggles. Finally, I explore the possibility of grounding anti-capitalist politics in the affirmation of the everyday, non-capitalist alternatives that already are being practised by subjects within the interstices of capitalism. I argue that by working to strengthen and proliferate these interstitial alternatives, anti-capitalist politics would not only prove far more accommodating to plurality than the previous approaches considered, but it would also hold far more transformative potential.

Attempts to limit suburban sprawl by publicizing its social, economic, environmental, and health problems have not been effective. An important aspect of this ongoing appeal of sprawl is its promise of ideal community. The discourse of ideal community in advertisements for housing developments in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. echoes discursive constructions by Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant. Sprawl is therefore another attempt to solve a problem in political thought that originates with the polls, namely, how to envision, authorize, construct, and secure the best possible space, form, and practice of human organization. By constructing secure political community as the physical embodiment of metaphysical truth, a necessary but impossible resolution between nature and culture, this discourse constructs the central problem of politics as unsolvable. Thus the intractability of sprawl needs to be understood as a political problematic where the act of imposing a solution regenerates the original problem.

The urban governance literature is currently situated in the nexus of globalization and devolution. On the one hand, scholars are trying to understand the ways that globalization and neoliberalism impact the nation-state. On the other hand. scholars are trying to understand recent changes in urban governance. In New State Spaces: Urban governance and the rescaling of statehood, Neil Brenner tries to bring these two streams of analysis together. He claims that changes to the nation-state have subsequent implications for urban governance in face of capitalist globalization. Brenner bases his argument on examples drawn from Western Europe that span the 1970s to the present. This research investigates Brenner's account by exploring the application for the city of Vancouver and the development of the Greater Vancouver Economic Council. Through the use of a document review and interviews, it is demonstrated that Brenner's account fits at a broad level but falls short under closer scrutiny. Neither the timeline nor the emphasis on urban locational policies are applicable in the Vancouver case. While the neoliberal agenda is identifiable, I argue that local factors - old local places - have a critical impact on the trajectory of regional governance.