acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Jocelyn Horner

No description available.

The following research was completed with an understanding that there is much to know about women who use intravenous drugs (WUID). The extant literature about the lives of people who use intravenous drugs (PWID) is mostly quantitative, highly androcentric, and primarily focused on HIV transmission. What is needed is information about the culture of WUID and the circumstances contributing to their poor health both from drug use and the conditions in which they live. The ethnographic study involved (a) collecting artifacts, including photographs taken by the women, (b) observing participants during some of their daily activities and primary healthcare interactions, and (c) face-to-face interviews with WUID. The results portray a life that closely resembles that which is known, but also the findings enable a lens into (a) the vicious circle associated with obtaining drugs and survival, (b) the violence, both systemic and personal, that homeless, urban-living WUID in Canada endure, and (c) the importance of “being clean” that directs much of their activities and presentation. From a theoretical perspective, the study enabled a deepened understanding of the importance of the continuum of cleanliness and how it interfaces with what the women believe. In summary, WUID have received unjust opportunities to care for themselves given the current laws and stigmatization that forces them to remain hidden, perform illegal activities, avoid discrimination, and fend for themselves in a world that perpetuates the hegemony of white middle-class Western peoples. The results provide a direction for healthcare in terms of WUID. Primarily there is a need to engage WUID in establishing what would work for them and thus incorporating peers in the process of initiating and maintaining services. Clearly established is a need for drug use to be decriminalized to allow WUID to gain recognition, to avoid criminality, and to re-enter the world that belongs as much to them as any other.

The current moment of education in Canada is increasingly asking educators to take up the mandate and responsibility to integrate Indigenous perspectives into curricula and teaching practice. Many teachers who do so come from a historical context of settler colonialism that has largely ignored or tried to use education to assimilate Indigenous peoples. This project asks how teachers are (or are not) integrating Indigenous perspectives into the classroom curriculum. It asks if and how Eurocentric and colonial perspectives are being disrupted or reproduced in classroom dialogue, and how learning spaces can be guided by an ethics of relationality and co- existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing. Finally, it seeks promising pedagogical practices through which curriculum can be a bridge for building a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada. This project is a critical ethnography of five high school English classrooms in which teachers were attempting to integrate Indigenous perspectives into the curriculum. Over the course of a semester classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups gathered the stories, experiences and perceptions of five high school English teachers, their students, and several Indigenous educators and community members. The stories and experiences gathered describe a decolonizing praxis, which pedagogically situates Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews in parallel and in relation, each co-existing in its own right without one dominating the other. The teacher and students who took up this decolonizing praxis centered an Indigenous lens in their reading of texts, and saw questions of ethics, responsibility, and reciprocity as key to changing the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Despite this promising pedagogical approach, I identify knowledge of treaties and the significance of land to Indigenous peoples as a significant gap in knowledge for students (and some teachers), which allows many colonial misunderstandings to persist.

This study investigates creating antiracist spaces and determining what an antiracist sociohistorical geography looks like. I argue that an antiracist sociohistorical geography is always necessarily unfinished and in a state of becoming. I introduce as my study site a section of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that was once a neighbourhood known as The Ward. At different times in the past, the land of this area was home to the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, a Black community, a Jewish community, and a Chinese community. Through investigations of these historic racialized communities and through field site examination, I first document how current cultural representations within this space create racist exclusions. Next, through discussion of my experience with the Ontario Black History Society’s (OBHS) walking tour in and around this space, and through analysis of one-on-one interviews with OBHS representatives, I show the tour as creating starting points for developing antiracist geographies. Finally, by imagining the space devoid of racist exclusions, I illustrate what an antiracist sociohistorical geography might look like but also that the portrayal is a spatial and temporal moment and therefore unfinished. I combine an anti-essentialist antiracist historical methodology with critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography. My main finding is that inclusions of excluded racialized groups into dominant discourse can contribute to naming and perhaps troubling particular racisms, but do not automatically disrupt systems and structures that (re)create exclusions. To deconstruct these powers, antiracism must incorporate ongoing disruptions of dominance over space. My study shows the potential for shifting discursive meanings around racialized bodies in relation to each other and sociohistorical geographies they occupy. These shifts have implications for how sociohistorical spaces become forums of social studies and history education in everyday spaces and in schools, as people (re)learn to read bodies within sociohistorical spaces in antiracist ways.

In recent decades, reflective practice has taken a more central role in the construction of teachers’ knowledge and practice (Elliot, 1991; Roberts, 1998). Within reflective practice, action research has developed as an approach within which teachers can systematically question, challenge and improve their teaching and recently been introduced into teacher education programmes with the rationale of encouraging student teachers to critically engage with curriculum and practice (Mills, 2003). Recent years have additionally seen interest in how teachers’ knowledge is sociodiscursively constructed with a concomitant focus on the link between teacher identity and practice (e.g. Danielewicz, 2001; Miller Marsh, 2003; Norton 2000). However, few studies have attempted to explore the influence action research may have on the construction of student teacher practice and identity (Trent, 2010). This study explores the role of an undergraduate action research project in terms of the extent of its influence on the development of student practice in English Language classes and the trajectory of their emergent teacher identities. Informed by new theoretical directions in ethnography (Denzin, 1997), data was collected using naturally occurring texts integral to the student teachers’ studies, including weekly lesson observations, post-observation feedback discussions and three focus group discussions over the course of the research project. Analysis indicates that the undergraduate action research project differentially affects students’ practice and emergent identities, but that this relationship may be tangential and students’ agency may be overshadowed by methodological preoccupations and constraints of institutions. Both global and local discursive formations combine and interact to influence this process which occurs in a theoretical ‘interzone’ a third space, sociodiscursively constructed between institutions.

Thesis advisor: Maria E. Brisk / Drawing on Collins' (2009) framework on domination and seeing language as a signifier (Bhaba, 1994), this critical ethnography explores the relationship between language and power within the context of a school focused on serving the needs of newcomer immigrant youth in the United States, a country that has increasingly become polarized around issues of immigration, social, and educational policy. Conducting observations in multiple social contexts and informal/semi-structured interviews, the study focuses on six non-Spanish speaking newcomer immigrant youth navigating a particular phenomenon - English and Spanish being dominant languages in their social contexts inside and outside of school. Data were analyzed using guidelines of critical ethnography (Carspecken, 1996). Salient findings include issues of assimilation, meritocracy, and invisibility at the school. The importance of transnational connection, restoration, and accessing social and cultural capital outside of school were also noteworthy. Suggested additions to theorizing work and research with this population as well as critical implications for newcomer schools are also presented. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / In this study I asked two questions: "How does the ideological stance of two White elementary school teachers inform their construction of race?" and, "How do teachers' ideological stances and constructions of race influence teaching practice?" The purpose of this study was to understand the ways that White teachers negotiated the meaning of race and racism within their personal lives and professional practice. Using a critical ethnographic approach, I examined the experience of two White teachers from a variety of perspectives. Data included semi-structured interviews, participant observations and selected classroom artifacts. In order to look at the data, I developed a conceptual framework referred to as the "racial geography of teaching." This framework emerged from Frankenberg's (1993) conception of the sociology of race, Rousmaniere's (2001) interpretation of racial biography, theoretical and empirical work about White teachers, and repeated readings of the collected data. Findings suggested that White teachers are worried about race and this worry is negotiated through discursive repertoires such as color-blindness and race cognizance. For the color-blind White teacher, practice is shaped by avoidance and silence about race, which prevents him or her from fully knowing his or her students. For the race cognizant teacher, practice is shaped by the idea that practice is far more expansive than what goes on in the classroom or the school community at-large. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

The aim of this study is to examine key features within the cultural context in a Canadian Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) environment as experienced by nurses, and to identify what these influences are and how they shape nurses’ intentions to remain at critically ill children’s bed-sides for the duration of their careers. This is a qualitative study which follows a critical ethnographic approach. Over 20 hours of observation and face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted. Approximately one third of the nursing population at the research site PICU were interviewed (N=31). Participants describe a complex process of becoming an expert PICU nurse that involved several stages. By the time participants became experts in this PICU they believed they had significantly narrowed the power imbalance that exists between nursing and medicine. This study illuminates the role both formal and informal education plays in breaking the power barrier for nurses in the PICU. This level of expertise and mutual respect between professions aids in retaining nurses in the PICU. The lack of autonomy and/or respect shown to nurses by administrators appears to be one of the major stressors in nurses’ working lives and can lead to attrition from the PICU. Family Centred Care (FCC) is practiced in paediatrics and certainly accentuated in the PICU as there is usually only one patient assigned per nurse, who thus afforded the time to provide comprehensive care to both the child and the family. This is considered one of the satisfiers for nurses in the PICU and tends to encourage retention of nurses in the PICU. However, FCC was found to be an inadequate term to truly encompass the type of holistic care provided by nurses in the PICU.

No description available.