This thesis questions the connection between Indigenous and immigrant Prairie literature, taking six contemporary texts as a case study. Aboriginal texts include Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed, Beatrice Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree and Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl. Immigrant narratives discussed are Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms, Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, and Madeline Coopsammy’s Prairie Journey. Read alongside one another, these texts demonstrate that Indigenous and immigrant populations do express similar concerns through literature, generally having to do with Canadian multiculturalism. Specifically, this project will discuss bodily and linguistic differences from a white, English-speaking ‘norm,’ home making on the prairies, and story-telling as an alternative indicator of home. This thesis asserts the importance of studying cross-racial literary engagements as they nuance existing discussions of race and space on the prairies and in Canada.

This master’s thesis research focuses on the experiences of people labelled/with intellectual disability in their current homes and also what they want for their future home. Few studies in Canada have focused on specifically asking this population what their ideal home looks like and acknowledging the gap between this and what their reality is. Advocacy groups in Canada and the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities have been calling for years to better address the rights of people with disabilities and their place in the community, yet there has been little progress within Ontario towards this. Using semi-structured interviews and an arts workshop, participants were asked to think about what their life is like now and what their aspirations are for their future. The research is based on a relational model of home as more than just a physical structure and expands the definition to include the neighbourhood, relationships, and support that participants experience, which shape their home and their feelings of belonging inside and outside of it. Findings show that, while there were opportunities for agency within their homes and relationships, there are many restrictions to attaining their ideal home, including funding constraints, long wait lists, and few choices for what type of housing they receive. The findings of this study have important implications for ideas of belonging and processes of home-making within geographic research, as well as for future policy based on housing for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities in Ontario. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis explores the Americanization efforts of educational leaders in Texas during the Progressive Era to demonstrate that reformers did not use vocational education, and specifically home economics, primarily to Americanize immigrant and ethnic minority students to become good, working-poor citizens. Through Americanization efforts in vocational curricula, reformers hoped to provide economically disadvantaged students with a practical body of knowledge and democratic values that would create healthy, economically viable communities occupied by loyal, educated American citizens. Federal legislation that promoted the development of vocational education in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates that this way of thinking reflected national rather than regional trends. In Texas, vocational education was largely directed at a population that was predominately white and rural for the first several decades of the twentieth century. That decision by educators casts considerable doubt on assertions that they were primarily motivated by racialized thinking. Notably, home economics curricula was constructed over the framework of Americanization, and children who took such courses in rural schools received training that advocated respect for others, cooperation, an appreciation of Western culture and the value of aesthetics, efficiency and thriftiness, and good hygiene practices. The homemaking program at the South San Antonio high school in the 1944-1945 school year provides an example. Homemaking teacher Nell Kruger's curriculum reached far beyond training future housewives, waitresses and maids. She sought, in accordance with the state-mandated home economics curriculum, to provide a practical body of knowledge and to inculcate democratic values in her students. Using Texas' State Department of Education and State Board of Vocational Education bulletins, Texas Education Agency literature, federal and state laws, conference reports, and curriculum guidelines, this thesis seeks to further nuance the understanding of Americanization efforts through vocational education, specifically homemaking, during the Progressive Era in Texas by arguing that Americanization reflected an urban, middle-class perspective directed toward economically disadvantaged white students as well as immigrant and ethnic minority students.

This thesis is the outcome of my twelve-month ethnographic fieldwork among Latin Americans in Edinburgh. Using life story interviews, participant observation and online communication technologies, the research aims to explore the senses of belonging that different Latin Americans in Edinburgh have claimed at different moments of their lives and the dynamics of concurrent identities – the maintenance and reconstruction of national identity as well as the emergence of Latin American identity. It also addresses the multiplicity of reasons why various individuals have chosen to belong to the Latin American 'community' in Edinburgh and scrutinises their manifold home-making processes. Moreover, this thesis hopes to contribute to the studies on Latin Americans and to a debate regarding whether members of communities should be treated as individuals or as collective actors.