This article examines the socio-political intricacies of the United States Opiate Crisis. By first addressing the pharmaceutical origins of Oxycontin and its pain relief benefits within the United States, I construct a framework by which a conversation about substance abuse can move forward. Within the first chapter I provide background into the arguments for medicalization against personal responsibility as it relates to opiate withdrawal and seeking treatment for the prior. Furthermore, I include subheadings to further provide insight into Medically Assisted Treatment Centers and their function on the local level. I contrast these modern treatment models with the Reagan War on Drugs mentalities and illustrate a larger societal tonal shift towards increased medicalization. My second chapter addresses the bulk of my theoretical frameworks, including spatial and feminist theories to construct an argument about patriarchal dominance in relation to factors such as homelessness, race, and socioeconomic status. Finally, in my third chapter I examine the current debate regarding whether or not the U.S. Opiate Crisis can truly be considered a crisis. I address the arguments for why it could still be considered a widespread crisis, and end on the central argument for the crisis being a symptom of Disease of Despair.

Every school music program has a history and a culture. This thesis was a study synthesizing those two elements, seeking to explore the past culture of a rural school music program primarily through interviews with former members of this culture. Throughout are examples of how music teachers, music students, administrators, and community members interacted over the course of approximately 30 years. From these interactions, the researcher drew insights about patterns of teacher behavior that could improve or hinder progress in a music program, including the quality of interpersonal relationships, the value of a teacher trying to integrate in a community (especially when it is a small rural community), and the importance of cooperating with other faculty members to share limited resources in a small school.

Craig Santos Perez's poetic series from Unincorporated Territory describes and decries the U.S. militarization, colonization, and environmental degradation of Guam in the Western Pacific through multilingual, excerpted, and series-long poems. Perez's writing style requires slow, careful reading with translations sometimes appearing on the same page, various pages later, or not at all. I describe this kind of elongated translation as slow translation, recalling translation theorist Michael Cronin's "Slow Language" movement. This thesis invites readers, especially multispecies ethnographers, to slow down the translation of nonhuman species and their stories by paying attention to moments of untranslatability in multispecies literature and interactions. In modeling how to think-with untranslatability, I call upon translation scholars Barbara Cassin and Cronin, who describe untranslatability in temporal and agentic terms, and environmental humanist Donna Haraway, whose tentacular thinking model and multispecies approaches have slowed our tendencies towards linear and assumptive modes of thinking. In conjunction with these thinkers, my multispecies reading of from Unincorporated Territory proposes slow translation as a model for resisting easy or colonizing translations that homogenize the Other. Perez's multilingual, fractured poems create moments of untranslatability, especially when describing nonhuman species or environments, that are difficult to immediately understand due to nontranslations or delayed translations. This thesis pays special attention to such moments as opportunities for slowing down and staying with difference. Thus, moments of untranslatability offer an ethnographic and interactive mode for engaging with difference through slow translation, valuing the process and experience of translation, the agency of the subjects in translation, and the incomprehensibility or unknown nature of the nonhuman and Othered world.

Middle East and North African (MENA) nations, including Morocco, are witnessing the largest cohort of young people in their history, which today makes up roughly one-third of their total populations. Influenced by the democracy uprisings in 2011, state, media, and international organization discourses on youth in the Middle East and North Africa have solidified in two directions. One perspective presents the group as a threat to the security and fabric of their nations, potential purveyors of delinquency and extremism, in states of "waithood." The other view, a variant of which is explored here, considers the cohort as a group that constitutes an untapped potential and hope for addressing the ills and flaws of their societies. This accounting depicts Moroccan and MENA youth as passive victims of circumstances while also assuming their abilities to address their life circumstances without considering the complex contexts they confront. While those structural realities are surely real and sometimes paralyzing, youth can and do deploy several tactics, strategies and subversive accommodation to address the conditions they confront. That is, they continuously navigate liminal spaces created as they seek to move from "where they are" to "where they wish to be." This dissertation explores how a sample of young men and women from underprivileged neighborhoods in Morocco exercised their agency in their everyday lives. Addressing their family, education and work, this study draws on the findings from 30 semi- structured interviews focusing on the challenges and agential potentials of young individuals from underprivileged neighborhoods in Casablanca, Morocco, as they described their everyday paths to coming of age in their society. To contextualize their journeys, I present how young people have historically demonstrated individual and collective agency in ways that helped shape Moroccan modern history. I then employ the concepts of bounded agency, liminal space, tactics, strategies and subversive accommodation to demonstrate how young individuals navigated their everyday lives within their families, as well as educational and work trajectories. I argue that young people are not simply passive; they indeed exercise strategies and tactics to navigate and negotiate their daily lives. However, they do so in bounded or limited conditions as they address colonial legacies of social inequality compounded by demographic realities and neoliberal policies that have deepened those conditions. This study challenges mainstream conceptions of youth agency as empowerment, resistance and freedom and instead suggests that the agency of youth as well as their everyday aspirations and struggles need to be contextualized based on the social and material conditions in which they live. Their agency is real, but so too are the structurally difficult and limiting social, political and economic conditions they confront. / Doctor of Philosophy / Middle East and North African (MENA) nations, including Morocco, now have the largest cohort of young people in their histories, approximately one-third of their total populations. State, media, and international organization discourses addressing youth in the Middle East and North Africa have tended to adopt one of two storylines concerning the region's youth; one that views this population as a threat to the security and fabric of the nations, potential delinquents and extremists, and existing in states of "waithood." The other perspective tends to view young people as constituting untapped potential to address long-standing societal challenges. This accounting depicts Moroccan and MENA youth as passive victims of circumstances and assumes their capacity to address their life circumstances without considering the complex situations they confront. While those structural realities surely can act as obstacles or barriers, young people can and do deploy a range of practices to address the conditions they confront. Indeed, they continuously make choices as they seek to move from "where they are" to "where they want to be." This dissertation explores how a sample of 30 young men and women from underprivileged neighborhoods in Casablanca, Morocco exercised their ability to act in their everyday lives. Addressing their family, education, and work spaces, and drawing on the findings of individual semi-structured interviews with those in the sample, it describes their paths to coming of age in their society. To contextualize the life journeys of those interviewed, the analysis also examines how young people have historically demonstrated individual and collective agency in ways that have helped to shape Moroccan modern history. Overall, this study suggests that young Moroccans are not simply passive or in states of waiting; they indeed exercise strategies and tactics to navigate and negotiate the opportunity structures they encounter in their daily lives. However, they do so in limiting conditions that bound the possibilities they may reasonably explore as they address the continuing influence of colonial legacies of social inequality joined by demographic realities and the ongoing, and largely negative, impacts of neoliberal policies.

Utilizing institutional ethnography and a critical analysis, this thesis explicates the textually-mediated process and ruling relations of performance measurement data collection in emergency homeless shelters. The thesis aimed to answer the query of whether the performance measurements collected by a set of programs, within a non-profit social service, adequately captured the full contribution of the work the staff did at their respective emergency shelter. Using literature, that has captured the experiences and insights of frontline workers who feel their work is inadequately captured, as a launch pad, this study spoke to informants who are directly involved in the creation of data collection tools and the reporting of the output and outcome performance measurements. How were these tools created? Who influences the development of the tools? Are some performance indicators (i.e. outputs, quality assurance, outcomes) measured more frequently or thoroughly than others? What are some of the barriers to measuring performance indicators? The study is based on five one-to-one semi-structured interviews, with informants working for a non-profit social service in Southern Ontario, and an analysis of the data collection tools used to compile performance measurements. The purpose of this research is to help social services, especially those that focus on addressing homelessness, improve the tools used to collect statistics on service so as to better articulate the breadth of work done by these services. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

This study aims to understand the organization of Emergency Department (ED) nurses in Ontario after years of restructuring and cuts made to the healthcare system. The news is currently filled with ED closures across the country due to a shortage of nurses and high hospital occupancy. The recruitment and retention of nurses in the ED has proven extremely difficult due in part to the Ontario government's Bill 124 capping nurses' wage increases at 1%. This wage freeze is inscribed in a larger rationale present internationally advocating for efficiency and marketization of all spheres of life, healthcare included. Most of the literature published on the work of ED nurses refers to ideas of performance of flow. Using Institutional Ethnography (IE) as an approach and governmentality, more specifically neoliberalism, as a perspective, this study maps the ruling relations influencing the work of nurses in the ED. It also uncovers how the neoliberal discourse was not only internalized but applied by nurses in their work environment. The methodological approach and perspective used in this study highlight how a new rationale was implemented in the management and funding of healthcare, which then led to transforming the rationale of providing care in the ED. The ED now delivers care following a supply chain rationale employing technologies of governmentality such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) to entice a specific conduct from nurses in order to meet the demands of the market. This new rationale, coupled with the implementation and sustaining of the technologies of governmentality, has come to completely transform what an ED nurse is nowadays. This new ED subject is responsible for most aspects of care, flow, and even her own training and security. The findings suggest that the use of algorithms based on best practices (such as medical directives) came to further erode the decisional power of nurses, resulting in "checkbox" practice.

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