This study explores the conditions in which women teaching and conducting research in the fields of computer science, computer engineering and information technology in six Romanian universities live and work. The research begins from women’s concerns and practices of everyday life, rather than those of institutions and disciplines. This exploratory work asked two fundamental questions of the women interviewed: what does it mean to be a woman academic in these high-tech disciplines, and what does it mean to be a second world academic. Employing a critical feminist ethnographic framework, the study explored the professional lives of seven women academics whose ranks varied from Lecturer to Professor through in-depth, face-to-face interviews. A number of documents were also reviewed in order to create a context for the major social and political changes in Eastern Europe – including its new connections to Europe – that had an impact on the professional journeys of women academics in Romania. Findings convey a multiplicity of conscious and unconscious inclusion and exclusionary practices, and ways in which gender, technology, higher education, neo-liberalism and globalisation are bound together. The findings reveal nuanced systemic gender exclusionary practices suggesting that the theoretical underpinnings and practice of gender equality employed in Romania and by Romanian higher education institutions needs much further study. Women academics in computing face a complex interplay of discouraging factors such as severe financial austerity and the masculine domination of the disciplines being most salient. The implication for educational change is the need to establish structures and mechanisms to foster honest debate around the dilemma: equality of opportunity, equality of outcome versus gender mainstreaming which has been the normative action in Eastern Europe for decades.

Moraine and glacier dams bordering the Homathko Icefield burst in the 1980s and 1990s, causing catastrophic downstream floods. The largest of the floods occurred in August 1997 and was caused by rapid breaching of the dam that impounds Queen Bess Lake, below Diadem Glacier. The outburst flood from the lake eroded the Holocene-age sediment fill in the valley below, exposing a series of subfossil forest layers separated by overbank floodplain sediments. A field investigation of the eroded valley fill in 2008 revealed multiple paraglacial valley-fill units, many of which are capped by in situ stumps and woody detritus. Dendrogeomorphic dating and stratigraphic evidence revealed six major sediment deposition events that coincide with regional, independently dated glacier episodes over the past 1200 years. Construction of tree-ring chronologies for the study area also allowed for the examination of the relationship between radial tree growth and hydroclimate. Dendroclimatological and dendrohydrological techniques were used to reconstruct summer stream discharge of nearby Chilko River. An Engelmann spruce tree-ring chronology provided a proxy for mean summer discharge of Chilko River for the period 1775-2007. This record is the first to be developed from tree-ring data for a river draining a glacierized watershed in the British Columbia Coast Mountains. This proxy record provides insights into streamflow variability of a typical Coast Mountains river over the past 232 years and confirms the long-term influence of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and El Niño-Southern Oscillation teleconnections on hydroclimatic regimes in the region.

This research examines the experiences of Malaysian Neurosurgeons in managing communications with patients and their families in the aftermath of adverse medical events. These experiences were interpreted from a conflict avoidance and management perspective and the data from the research was analyzed using heuristic methodology. (Douglass and Moustakas 1985) The field of Neurosurgery in Malaysia was chosen firstly as a model of a high-risk medical specialty and secondly because of the researcher’s lived experience with the phenomenon being studied. Participants in the research were eleven Malaysian Neurosurgeons with at least ten years of independent clinical practice as specialists. Qualitative data was obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews that were subsequently transcribed and analyzed heuristically, looking for different conflict management and patient-physician communication themes. The observations indicate that adverse medical events precipitate a major shift in the focus of tacit conflict management skill sets applied by the participants. The patient-Neurosurgeon relationship is abruptly transformed from one of high trust to one imbued with patient anxiety and suspicion of malpractice or medical error, and physician defensiveness. The observations also indicate that in multicultural Malaysia physician-family relationships were prioritized more than would be expected in a Western context. This may have implications for humanistic and interactive skills training for medical students and residents.

While studies in masculinities and globalization are a rapidly growing field, few studies address the role of marriage in shaping masculinities. This project explores the emerging pattern of young, urban Fijian men who marry non-Fijian women and in doing so, challenge neo-traditional marriage formations and gender roles. In this particular project, I investigate how Fijian men experience these types of marriages with non-Fijian women and how they negotiate their masculinity within their marriages. I also explore how the confluence of colonial experiences, current globalization trends, and culture affect how these men understand their masculinity. I employ several methodologies including multiple interviews, participant observations, and visual anthropology methods. Through these methods, I explore how the relationship between Fijian men and non-Fijian women alters men’s experiences of masculinity and identity at the individual level. Results illustrate the importance of work in defining manhood, according to these men. As well, results suggest that the wives play a powerful role in influencing their husbands’ values with regards to work ethics and the general acceptance of global values. These relationships show the intersection and complexities that emerge between evolving ideas regarding masculinities and marriage, Fiji’s colonial experience and current global values.

The complex health profile of older adults entering hospital presents staff and administrators with new challenges. In a climate of fiscal restraint, competing priorities and public pressure. it is necessary for acute care hospitals to rethink their views of caring for older adults. This critical ethnographic study applies a social ecological perspective using the concept of person-environment fit to illuminate how problems arise from conflict between needs and expectations. Constant comparative analysis and coding techniques take account of hospital operations and the perspectives of hospital employees and older people together. Data included hospital observations, and interviews with older adults (N=11) and hospital employees (N=14). Procedures to ensure rigor included continuous reflexivity. participant selection, triangulating data sources, peer debriefing, multiple checks. and an audit trail. Findings yield four areas of poor fit: architectural features, bureaucratic conditions. chaotic atmosphere, and hospital employee attitude. These environmental features act in independent and cumulative ways to produce a disempowering synergy that erodes independence and confidence: produces stress, worry, and anxiety; and enhances disabilities when functional impairments exist. Incongruent relationships emerge only when non-ideal older people enter the hospital's cultural space. A lack of fit exists for those considered different either because of their personal functional attribute or because hospital employees judge them to be unsuitable or inappropriate for the unit or service. Being different is key to lack of fit in the hospital environment and the construction of problems. The study also contributes groundwork for identifying indicators of older adult-hospital environment fit. and by doing so. aids in defining quality of hospital services based on what older people need and expect compared with what the hospital provides and the demands it places on older people. This research has the potential to set the stage for assessing hospitals and ensuring policies are better suited to the needs of older people.

Understanding the ecology of an organism is fundamental for defining conservation and management priorities for wildlife and natural ecosystems. The most basic ecological framework identifies the key components of an organism's habitat, and the scale for measuring the quality of those features. How these core needs are expressed and vary in the surrounding ecosystem changes over time and space. In marine systems, the physical environment has few strict boundaries, and variations regularly occur on a scale from days to decades. The dynamic and patchy nature of marine habitat makes defining the ecological roles of an animal difficult, even where baseline data exists. In this study I analyze long term field records on the ecological interactions between foraging gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus), and their mysid prey (Family mysidae) in Clayoquot Sound, B.C. By looking at spatial and temporal shifts at both trophic levels, I measure foraging responses and requirements, and assess prey resource availability and resiliency in the marine environment at a series of scales. Appreciation for bottom-up and topdown trophic interactions provides the foundation for identifying natural variability in marine habitat, and a baseline for conservation measures that seek to use marine predators as a barometer of broader ecosystem health.

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.

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.

During the Second World War, tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers stationed in Britain met and married British women. The majority of these British war brides and their husbands settled in Canada, where these women had to quickly adjust to Canadian customs. Based on interviews with fifteen British war brides currently living in the Victoria area, this thesis analyzes the way in which these women recount stories of their lives and experiences as war brides through recollections of food-centred narratives. Their recollections of the pre-war years, the war years and the post-war years often revolved around memories of food. This thesis will show how war brides make use of such food-centred narratives as a comfortable medium through which to express their emotions regarding the past and to relate their stories, be they joyful, traumatic, nostalgic, somber or elegiac.

The marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) is listed as threatened in both Canada and the United States due to logging of old-growth forest stands, their primary nesting habitat. Existing research is primarily focused on this terrestrial aspect of the species’ ecology. Our understanding of their at-sea foraging ecology, however, is limited to broad-scale studies of population abundance and dynamics. In order to further understand the spatial and temporal variations of marbled murrelet at-sea foraging behaviour and habitat use, bi-weekly surveys of marbled murrelets were conducted in Clayoquot Sound, BC, between May 1 and September 1, 2007 and 2008. Data were first analysed using a Getis-Ord Gi* spatial analysis to identify high-use foraging areas. Total marbled murrelet presence was consistent between years, but spatial distribution varied significantly in both years. A subsequent analysis of oceanic environmental variables found that temperature, salinity and phytoplankton densities (measured as chl a) were spatially ubiquitous, with no significant variation in measures across the study area. Chl a levels showed significant temporal variation, though similar trends in marbled murrelet abundance over time in both seasons suggest that phytoplankton levels do not directly affect murrelet presence. Marbled murrelets were also observed foraging within several metres of gray whales (Eschrictius robustus) feeding on epibenthic zooplankton in 2006 and 2008, a previously undocumented relationship. Join count statistics identified significant clustering of murrelets up to 300m from 39 feeding gray whales in 2006, and no association with 5 gray whales in 2008, marking a foraging association conditional on the abundance of both gray whales and their prey, but potentially significant to marbled murrelet survival and fecundity.