This dissertation presents an alternative understanding to current works exploring the creative class. Extant views of the creative class portray it as a concentration of individuals and organizations producing clusters of interconnected cultural activities fostering positive socioeconomic change in the communities where they are located. By contrast, this dissertation articulates the creative class as time evolving geographical organizing of networked creative individuals whose presence over time in a community may or may not foster positive socioeconomic change. The creative class is thus conceptualized as contingent and continuously evolving processes whose emergence at any one point in time may or may not be sustainable over time. Framed theoretically through a nexus between strategic management, economic geography, and economic sociology, the unfolding of a creative class is explored as location specific phenomenon illustrating mutually co-constructing processes of organizations and their environment. It focuses –as its exemplar- on local socioeconomic processes enacted by an assortment of artists and artisans in a small New England (USA) former mill town. A case study was derived from data collected for over four years in fieldwork through a multi-method approach. Underpinned by interpretative notions, methodology included participative ethnography and social network analyses, where quantitative and qualitative data functioned in a complementary way. Exploring relationships between artists and artisans and their organizing attempts to become members of the community, observations focused on mundane situations through which these processes were enacted. Social network methodologies contributed to mapping processual linkages between community members, while further ethnographic work contextualized relationships uncovered through social network analyses. The resulting case study presents a narrative about the unfolding of a potential creative class as dynamic bottom-up phenomenon whose socioeconomic consequences cannot be guaranteed by formal planning. Artists and artisans struggle to become a community of creative practice and become acknowledged as such by their neighbors when their organizing opens up socioeconomic change. These processes, which may lead to a sustainable cultural economy in this location, are not independent or exogenous to the place. They are part of the local history, influenced by shared and ongoing socioeconomic processes, and specific to locality.

In 2001, Cowichan Tribes successfully negotiated the protection of an important cultural landscape, preventing imminent logging and development through a treaty-related measures (TRM) agreement with British Columbia (BC), Canada and the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (HTG). This was the first land protection TRM in BC which protected 1700 hectares at Hw’teshutsun, located in the Cowichan Valley on southeast Vancouver Island, BC. The TRM followed the declaration of a “tribal preserve” by Cowichan Tribes (Cowichan Tribes, 2000a) and a ceremony between five Hul’q’umi’num’-speaking communities to share, “protect, preserve and maintain Hw’te shutsun for the use and benefit of present and future generations” (Cowichan Tribes, Stz’uminus First Nation, Halalt First Nation, Lyackson First Nation and Penelakut Tribe 2000). This protection TRM is notable as it is an exercise of provincial jurisdiction which attends to the cultural, rather than ecological, value of Hw’teshutsun: legislative actions undertaken through the TRM protect Hw’teshutsun in accordance with Hul’q’umi’num’ teachings. In effect, the TRM is an entanglement of Hul’q’umi’num’ and Canadian law which has resulted in the protection of an off-reserve Hul’q’umi’num’ cultural landscape – a green, forested area observable in satellite imagery amidst a territory that is over 85% privately owned and devastated by logging and urban development. In such a context, the work done by Cowichan Tribes leadership is a significant achievement, a successful assertion of their jurisdiction to protect a Hul’q’umi’num’ cultural landscape in accordance with their teachings. This thesis documents the work done by Cowichan Tribes in asserting their authority and jurisdiction at Hw’teshutsun through both their own legal pathways and in relation to municipal, provincial and federal governments to prevent logging and the construction of a dump and a race car track. Teachings shared by Cowichan Elders and knowledge keepers about Hw’teshutsun stem from an intimate knowledge of “place” (for examples of intimate relationships with place, see Basso 1996; Mohs 1994; Thom 2017; Charlton 2018; Thornton 2008), which is reflected in Hul’q’umi’num’ law (Morales 2014; McLay et al. 2008; Morales and Thom 2020). Through extensive work by Cowichan Tribes leadership, teachings about the integrity of the landscape – particularly quiet and seclusion around places within Hw’teshutsun – shaped exercises of provincial jurisdiction, protecting a large area through rather than typical mitigation strategies that seek to shrink Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the land to tiny, isolated sites. Understanding these legal entanglements opens possibilities for innovative governance that attends to Indigenous peoples’ teachings of places and their enactments of their own laws shaping the governance of shared landscapes. / Graduate

This dissertation examines the ways in which abandoned and sparsely populated spaces can begin to offer up their hidden, alternative histories through the process of ethnographic inquiry. My research explains how it is possible to engage with peripheral and often marginalized North American cultures through the anthropological study of affect, space and materiality. Here, I have endeavoured to construct a rich narrative of space, place and human geography that sees the ghost towns of the North American prairies and the isolated fishing communities of Grand Bruit, Newfoundland and Matinicus, Maine as dynamic texts that can be read as both alternative historical inscriptions and as anthropological phenomena that describe a unique aspect of unseen culture. Far from being empty spaces, these locations present deeply engaging deposits of local history and alternate world views. However, if left undocumented, I believe that these spaces will soon be erased from the dominant narratives of culture and historicity, swept away by the winds of resource depletion and rural-to-urban migration. In what follows, I present an opportunity for the reader to join me in unpacking and analysing these rarely understood and oft-neglected histories that are intrinsic to contemporary North American culture and identity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is an institutional ethnography (IE) examining the social organization of Community Care Access Centre School Health Support Services (CCAC SHSS) for children with diabetes in Ontario schools. More specifically, it explicates the social relations embedded in, and coordinating the work organization of mothering (parenting) and nursing in the school setting. The inquiry begins in my personal experience as a mother of a child with diabetes starting kindergarten, and the troubles I encountered in getting the care and attention needed to keep my child safe at school. Starting from experience, a place outside of theory and institutionalized categories and discourse, I set out on a journey to discover the social organization that coordinates my experience, and to seek answers to my query: how are school health supports put together in such a way that I, as a parent, am left feeling worried about my child’s safety when she is at school, have had to fight to secure the much needed ‘diabetes care’, and even then, am often called upon to provide voluntary supplementary healthcare work to ensure her safety at school? I have structured this thesis into two main parts. The first part provides the set-up for this thesis. First, I orient readers to this distinctive way of doing an IE, directing their attention to how I used the core IE concepts in this research and calling upon them to read the remainder of the thesis taking up this distinctive theoretical and conceptual lens. Indeed, what we know and how we know it has much to do with how knowledge is socially organized. Then, I go on to examine the different ways of knowing about ‘diabetes care’, how these distinctive ways of knowing create a disjuncture for me as a parent and how this disjuncture is used to establish the research standpoint to begin and direct the explication. The last chapter in this part situates health supports for children with diabetes within the services provided by public-funded home care. I sketch three decades of the history of reform and organizational restructuring of home care in Ontario, in particular, the introduction of privatizing relations into the local practices of community nursing and the creation of CCACs. These relations of privatization reorganized the home care sector, the workforce, and the relation between the ‘state’ and its citizens. What went on before sets the groundwork for what can happen next, and it is under this context and conditions in which my inquiry is set. The second part consists of four academic journal manuscripts. They are the descriptive analysis for this IE. These four chapters describe what I have learned and discovered in doing this research, and three of them in particular provide an empirical analysis showing how school health supports for children with diabetes are put together such that the troubles I experienced came into being. These four chapters are conventionally referred to as research ‘findings’ in traditional qualitative research methodology. Each of these chapters speaks to a particular way of knowing about ‘diabetes care’. One focuses on parents’ experiential ways of knowing based on the actualities of their daily and nightly everyday world to show the amount of work and knowledge required to care for and to keep their children with diabetes alive; while the other three underscore the CCACs’ institutional ways of knowing about ‘diabetes care’ in the school setting. I show how these objectified ways of knowing derived from institutional texts (Standardized CCAC Medial Orders, information technology software and the Diabetes Checklist for Independence) are used to determine a child’s eligibility to receive health supports at school. These objectified textual forms of knowing are removed from the actualities of people’s real life circumstances, and differ significantly with how and what parents know is needed for their children with diabetes to stay well and safe at school. It is precisely this form of text-mediated social coordination that leaves parents feeling worried and draws them in to doing voluntary healthcare work at school, without which the child’s safety and the continuity of care is not possible. Tracing the institutional relations organizing how health support services for children with diabetes actually happen in the classroom, I show the kind of work expected of parents, and demonstrate that the CCAC SHSS policy and practices only ‘work’ as they should with the incorporation of parents’ ‘unauthorized’ knowledge and their ongoing voluntary complementary healthcare work. While it is in parents’ interests to ensure their children’s safety and well-being at school, there are differences between parents in how, and if, they can deliver their knowledge and resources. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Diabetes is a chronic health condition that requires individuals with diabetes or their families to maintain a daily well-coordinated and intensive diabetes self-care routine. Lapses in this complex daily regimen can have devastating immediate and long-term consequences. How children’s diabetes, that is children’s health and well-being, are cared for at school is of concern for parents. The inquiry begins in my personal experience as a mother of a child with diabetes starting kindergarten, and the troubles I encountered in getting the care needed to keep my child safe at school. Starting from experience, this thesis examines how the institutional context and routine practices of diabetes care in school affects the care children actually receive. Despite legislation that requires accommodations for students with disabilities, what I found in this study is that parental involvement (which is inequitably available) is essential to ensure diabetes care is adequate for children in schools.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / This dissertation presents an ethno-case study explaining how students at a conservative Christian high school were socialized into ideas about civic and public life in a pluralistic society. Drawing on democratic educational theory and institutional theory to analyze ethnographic data gathered during a full school year of observations, interviews, and document collection, this dissertation addresses the following questions: (1) What are the logics, practices, and symbolic representations concerning civic identity and participation in democratic society conveyed explicitly and implicitly at a conservative Christian high school? (2) How do students understand and engage with ideas about civic identity and participation conveyed at that school? (3) How do families understand and engage with these ideas about civic identity and participation? This dissertation argues that the school was organized around a theo-political institutional logic committed to the absolute truth of Christianity. This logic was symbolically represented in the language and concepts of the “Christian worldview” and reinforced through consistent and recurrent school practices that shaped students’ behavior and their ways of interpreting the world. This theo-political logic, which was pervasive throughout formal and informal curriculum and instruction at the school, presented an all-encompassing vision of Christianity as “the truth” and offered a coherent connection between doctrinal beliefs and actual behavior. This logic was also notable for what it omitted and lacked, particularly acknowledgment of the racialized nature of schooling and society, attention to the pluralism of worldviews in a diverse democratic nation, and recognition of the systemic and structural causes of injustice in society. The emphases as well as the omissions of the theo-political logic at the school shaped students’ civic identity as first and foremost a religious identity, which meant engaging with society to promote conservative social policies, candidates, and political perspectives. The dissertation shows that students largely embraced the theo-political logic that animated the school, and their parents chose the school because of the presence of this logic. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

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