The purpose of this study is to describe and provide a critical review of a program called peer mediation currently adapted by a Montreal Area Anglophone School Board or MAASB. This program was implemented to address the growing incidence of violence and conflict within MAASB high schools. This study focuses on the objectives that the MAASB established in addressing the problem of violence in their high schools and the peer mediation programs' ability to meet these objectives based on the claims it purports to. Described and examined in this study is the setting in which peer mediation becomes a suitable "response" to conflict and violence in high schools and including: the role and responsibilities of schools; some of the sources and causes of violence; some of the challenges facing adolescents; and the links between violence as the problem, peer mediation as a possible solution, and the role schools play to make this happen. Of specific interest and addressed in this study is whether or not the peer mediation program is resolving violence and conflict at the source, or if the program serves primarily as problem management. Following a qualitative approach to research, observation and interviews were conducted using semi-structured and open-ended methods. This study also includes some recommendations for further research.

The everyday life of people on the street has not received the attention it deserves in the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Quebec. This dissertation joins a small number of recent studies which redress this omission. It makes a significant contribution to existing examinations of North American cities and Canadian social history through the use of categories which are rarely employed and questions that are seldom posed in investigations of working-class history during the period of industrialization. A holistic treatment of Marxist philosophy provides the theoretical underpinnings for a sensitive engagement with daily street life in an urban milieu. As a site of intense sociability, Notre-Dame Street, the main street of the industrial suburb of Saint-Henri, offers a unique perspective on the intricate use of public space and its relations to social space. This thesis covers the period between the years of town incorporation in 1875 and annexation to the City of Montreal in 1905. / Notre-Dame Street underwent significant transformations in this period. A main street of a small town on the outskirts of Montreal became the principal commercial street of a bustling industrial city. The 1890s was a decade of particularly marked shifts, characterized by significant population growth and dramatic changes in physical form. Class and ethnic tensions intensified as a result. A 1891 labour dispute at Merchants Manufacturing, a textile factory, took to the streets, and the local elite contested George A. Drummond's refusal to pay municipal taxes in 1897. Resistance to monopoly control of utilities was evidenced by the use of petitions and protets or notarized letters. Workers' parties, journalists, and municipal reform leagues increasingly challenged the hegemony of the local elite whose persistent practices of overspending resulted in a substantial debt and annexation. / The study of a local street in an industrializing community demonstrates the prevailing social and political distribution of wealth and power. It reveals significant differences between the various class ideologies which were played out in the management of the public space of the street. An economic liberal ideology was instrumental to the development of the modern Western city through the creation of divisions between public and private spaces. Social usage, the visible presence of the working and marginal classes and women on city streets, suggests a different reality. A reconstruction of daily street life from a diversity of written and visual sources indicates that women, men, and children inhabited and frequented homes, shops, and offices, travelling to and from work, and various places of recreation. The rhythm of everyday street life was punctuated by unusual events of a celebratory, criminal, and tragic nature, which emphasize the connections between spatial structures and subjective experience. / The local management of public space thus involved class antagonisms, characterized by negotiation, transgression, and resistance. This dissertation argues that the politics of this public space benefited the class interests of a grande bourgeoisie of Montreal and a local petite bourgeoisie, to the detriment of the working classes. These conflicting class interests were played out in a variety of different ways. The exclusion and appropriation of social and symbolic spaces were characterized by distinct property ownership and rental patterns. An anglophone grande bourgeoisie of Montreal owned vacant and subdivided lots. A francophone petite bourgeoisie dominated property ownership, and a majority of renters lived in flats on the main street and on adjoining streets. The shaping of the physical infrastructure was distinguished by the growth of monopolies and minimal local intervention. The civic manifestation of the ordered and ritualistic celebration of the parade emphasized a Catholic identity. Attempts to impose an appropriate and genteel code of behaviour on city streets led to the moral regulation and social control of criminal behaviour.

This dissertation explores the cultural practice of smoking and its connection to social relations from the beginning of cigarette mass production in Montreal in 1888 to the First World War. It uncovers the norms of smoking etiquette and taste, their roots in gender, class and race relations and their use in reproducing these power relationships. It argues that these prescriptions reflected and served to legitimize beliefs about inclusion, exclusion and hierarchy that were at the core of nineteenth century liberalism. Liberal ideals of self-control and rationality structured the ritual of smoking: from the purchase of tobacco; to who was to smoke; to how one was supposed to smoke; to where one smoked. These prescriptions served to normalize the exclusion of women from the definition of the liberal individual and to justify the subordination of the poor and cultural minorities. Furthermore, even while these prescriptions were at their height, an emergent group of beliefs began to recast notions of respectable smoking around new ideals of speed and ungendered universality. This challenge was not only part of the transition from bourgeois to mass consumption, it was the roots of a transformation of the liberal order in the years previous to the First World War.

Field research was carried out in the community of Notre Dame de Grace, an urban environment typical of the kind in which more and more older women will reside as Canada's population ages. Results of a questionnaire administered to 232 older urban dwellers demonstrate there are significant differences, especially with regard to fearfulness, in the ways in which elderly women who live alone, elderly women who do not live alone and elderly men know and use urban environments. Recommendations are made for changes to the planning process which would result in urban communities better suited to the needs of elderly women. / Anthony Gidden's structuration theory is applied as a framework for explaining why older women are more fearful than elderly men, and why older women alone are the most fearful group. Deficiencies in feminist and gerontological approaches are identified, and an argument is made for greater integration of these perspectives.

Based primarily on notarized farm leases, this thesis examines approaches to agriculture on the island of Montreal from 1780 to 1820. This source permits us to establish the crucial relationship between people and farms and to then link them to differences in capital investment, production and farming techniques. By understanding the common, day-to-day farming operations, we can address ourselves to the larger questions of what contributed to the state of Lower Canadian agriculture, a subject of contentious debate in Quebec historiography. / The island of Montreal, already favoured by the geographic circumstances of climate, soil and location, was also a crucible for two profound changes which were occurring in Quebec society during this period--the beginning of a wave of English-speaking immigrants who would permanently alter the ethnic composition of the province's population, and the development of a significant urban market. In the 564 notarized farm leases passed in this forty-year period, half of the lessors were merchants and professionals, most of whom resided in the city and suburbs of Montreal. The farms of the urban bourgeoisie were on average larger and better-stocked than the farms of habitants, artisans and other proprietors. Most attempts at agricultural innovation and more intensive cultivation occurred on the farms of this elite, not on the lands owned by those with less capital resources: capital, not ethnicity, directed the approach taken to farming.

The first decades of the twentieth-century featured a full-scale assault on prostitution and Red Light Districts in cities across North America. The Committee of Sixteen's efforts to erase 'commercialized vice' from Montreal reflect moral regulation projects as they have been recently theorized. The Committee's members represented a range of commercial, feminist, social and religious institutions with various agendas. This thesis considers how prostitution is constructed to mobilize a diverse range of social actors at specific times. Examining the press of the time, as well as reports and speeches produced by the Committee over its seven-year history reveals how members constructed prostitution as a symbol and scapegoat for multiple, sometimes contradictory, contemporary concerns and anxieties in the years following World War I. This discourse served to further marginalize the very women the Committee ostensibly sought to 'rescue'.

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