Since Kingston Penitentiary’s opening in 1835, prison labour has been an integral part of Canada’s penal history. With purported goals such as deterrence, rehabilitation, reintegration, and providing sustenance to the state, the practice of coercing or forcing a prisoner to work while serving a sentence of incarceration was further embedded in the penal landscape in 1980 with the inception of CORCAN, the Correctional Service of Canada’s prison labour program. Despite critiques of the prison as “a fiasco in terms of its own purposes” (Mathiesen, 2006, p. 141), prison labour continues as a mechanism of the state’s penal apparatus. Drawing on political economy of punishment and penal abolitionism literature, this study reveals and disrupts official discourses used to justify and perpetuate this modern form of slavery in Canada. Through a content analysis of 33 Solicitor General of Canada and CORCAN annual reports, I demonstrate how CORCAN’s prison labour program is legitimated as a “positive reform” (Mathiesen, 1974, p. 202) of Canada’s penal system, beneficial to the reintegration of prisoners into society, communities, and the needs of the Canadian state and economy. Underneath this benevolent mask such representations are found to reproduce neoliberal capitalism as the hegemonic form of economic organization, construing prisoners and prison labour as solutions to the gaps and shifts in the national economy and labour market. After outlining these contributions, I suggest ways that future research can reveal and discredit penal ‘solutions’ such as prison labour to eradicate the penal system as a means to address the harms inherent in our social and economic systems.

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Based on an ethnographic investigation, the dissertation examines the emergence and significance of discourses around “the environment” in the Lake District of the Araucanía region of Chile (Araucanía Lacustre). These are understood as part of the discursive aspect of globalization – the process by which the territory and its population are integrated ever more tightly into the networks of global market society – and considered in conjunction with discourses around Mapuche indigenous identity. Drawing on mediacultural studies, actor network theory, and medium theory, the analysis seeks to advance an ecological concept of communication that does not privilege human consciousness and agency. Communication is argued to be the principle by which space (physical and metaphysical) is configured and connected. Through a discussion of the physical and human geography of the territory it is argued that discourse is mutually immanent with material realities, including human practice and pre-discursive, nonhuman elements (chapter 3). The connection between environmental discourse and Mapuche culture is examined through the stereotype of the ecologically virtuous indigenous subject – a stereotype whose significance is changing as parallel neoliberal multicultural and sustainable development discourses boost the prestige of both Mapuche culture and ecological responsibility, even as the steady expansion of market society undermines both (Chapter 2). A program run by an NGO, funded by the Chilean state, and intended to market the agro-ecological produce of Mapuche small farmers to tourists, provides a concrete case of the intersection of neoliberal multiculturalism with environmental discourse (Chapter 4). The concept of “postmaterialism” is adapted, with a critical edge, in an exploration of the environmental activism and a certain dissatisfaction with modernity among college educated immigrants to the District from Santiago, North America and Europe (chapter 5). The process of globalization, through which Mapuche campesinos come to use environmentalist discourses, involves interactions among old and new information technologies, transportation technologies, and the nonanthropogenic realities of physical space-time and geography (chapter 6). The dissertation concludes with a normative argument about the ethical and epistemological inadequacy of globalizing market society.

Over the past few decades, decreased federal and provincial funding for municipal services and infrastructure has constrained municipal budgets and led to competitive, entrepreneurial styles of municipal governance. These structural changes have coincided with growing public demand for municipalities to protect the local environment and take action on climate change. Drawing on discourse analysis, historical research, and interviews, this thesis applies an ecological political economy (EPE) perspective to examine the influence of federal and provincial neoliberal policies on municipal environmental governance in Ottawa. The main argument of this thesis is that amidst global economic instability and a worsening climate crisis, the City is shifting to a ‘climate urbanism’ policy approach that positions Ottawa to compete globally for labour and capital investment to fund ‘low-carbon’ and ‘climate-resilient’ technological and infrastructure fixes. Strategically adopting discourses from global climate science, ‘climate urbanism’ is the City’s current attempt to reconcile ongoing fiscal challenges with worsening environmental problems and a neoliberal economic growth imperative. Over the past three decades, the City has co-opted environmental discourses to legitimize economic growth while externalizing the problematic consequences of this growth, contributing to deepening social and ecological crises. Case studies on the People’s Official Plan and the Herongate redevelopment demonstrate how Ottawa residents are contesting the City’s ‘climate urbanism’ by developing and advocating for grassroots policies that recentre social and ecological needs.

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Over the past twelve years, Philadelphia has undergone an unparalleled large scale shift in the way maternity care is provided, accessed, and considered. Key aspects of the changes to the landscape of birth in Philadelphia include: the closure of the majority of hospital-based maternity units, the activities of local women's health non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the new set of pregnancy care and birth choices that parents navigate. One of the most striking results of the restructuring of Philadelphia's maternity care system is a drastic reduction in the number of hospitals with maternity units. While the birth rate in Philadelphia has remained consistent around 22,000 per year, since 1997 two-thirds of the hospitals in Philadelphia have eliminated their maternity services. During this time, numerous local women's health-oriented NGOs worked to established themselves in Philadelphia. The aim of each NGO has been to respond to inadequacies in the provision of maternity services that develop as hospitals, the dominant resource for maternity care, withdraw from the maternity care business. With only six hospital maternity units remaining and a couple of local nonprofit organizations attempting to supplement the dearth of services, the current system within which parents and health care providers maneuver is both unstable and inadequate for meeting the maternity care needs of the community. In this research project, I explore the processes through which this new maternity care system is being established in Philadelphia with a particular focus on the influence of neoliberalism as an active force in the restructuring process. I examine the outcomes of this restructured system in terms of how lived experiences are influenced by the social, political, and economic reconfiguration of birth. The case of Philadelphia is of particular value as the City's maternity care system has undergone an accelerated restructuring that is unmatched in other areas of the US. While a similar trend in restructuring can now be found in other locations, these changes happened earlier and have continued in a more extreme manner in Philadelphia, marking Philadelphia as a possible canary in a coal mine. Understanding the outcomes of this large scale change in the system of care provides a basis for contending with similar trends elsewhere. My ethnographic work focuses on the experiences of particular individuals as they navigate Philadelphia's new system of maternity care. Within this restructured system of maternity care, the interests of parents and health care practitioners are increasingly devalued or disregarded, particularly for those whose philosophy of birth differs from dominant biomedical maternity care practices. Midwives, whose non-interventionalist methods of care starkly contrast with the biomedical model of care, and parents who wish to have a low-intervention or natural childbirth struggle to achieve their goals within the confines of Philadelphia's maternity care system. Similarly, individuals running local NGOs strain to intervene in the process of restructuring, and often face the dilemma of remaining true to their mission on one hand or preserving financial security by meeting the imperatives of funders on the other hand. Therefore, I have made the stories of midwives and parents seeking alternatives to biomedical care central to my analysis in addition to conducting in-depth fieldwork with three local women's health-oriented NGOs. This project adds to our understanding of how broad political and economic trends in health care translate into select cultural formations which inform the life choices of individuals. In times such as now, when national policy regarding the provision of health care is under scrutiny, it is essential to connect the dots between the circumstances of individuals and the structure of systems of health care. This research project fuses analyses of civil society institutions, the politics of reproduction, national ideology, and local political and economic agenda to present a complex and inclusive assessment of the landscape of birth in the uniquely positioned city of Philadelphia. / Anthropology

For the past several decades, the neoliberal school of economics has dominated public policy, encouraging American politicians to reduce the size of the government. Despite this trend, the power of the state to surveille, criminalize, and detain has become more extensive, even as the state appears to be growing less powerful. By allowing information technology corporations such as Google to collect location data from users with or without their knowledge, the state can tap into a vast surveillance network at any time, retroactively surveilling and criminalizing at its discretion. Furthermore, neoliberal political theory has eroded the classical liberal conception of freedom so that these surveillance tactics to not appear to restrict individuals' freedom or privacy so long as they give their consent to be surveilled by a private corporation. Neoliberalism also encourages the proliferation of information technologies by making individuals responsible for their economic success and wellbeing in an increasingly competitive world, thus pushing more individuals to use information technologies to enter into the gig economy. The individuating logic of neoliberalism, combined with the rapid economic potentialities of information technology, turn individuals into mere sources of human capital. Even though the American state's commitment to neoliberalism precludes it from covertly managing the labor economy, it can still manage a population through criminalization and incarceration. Access to users' data by way of information technology makes the process of criminalization more manageable and allows the state to more easily incarcerate indiscriminately. / Master of Arts / Since the era of President Reagan, the American economic and political tradition has been committed to opening trade, limiting government regulation, and reducing public benefits in the interest of expending freedom from the government. Despite this commitment to shrinking the size of the government, the government still considers it responsible for public security, including both national security and criminalization. At the same time as this wave of deregulation, information technology companies such as Google have expanded their ability to collect and store data of individual users—data which the government has access to when it deems such access necessary. The deregulation of private markets has ushered in an era of extreme labor competition, which pushes many people to use information technology such as computers and cell phones, to market their labor and make extra money. However, whenever a person is connected to GPS, Wi-Fi, or uses data on their phone, their location information is being stored and the government has access to this information. Neoliberalism therefore encourages people to use technology that allows them to be watched by the government. Location information is one of the main factors of criminalization; historically, a persons’ location informs the police’s decision to arrest them or not. Enforcing laws against vagrancy, homelessness, prostitution, etc. require law enforcement agencies to know where someone is, which becomes much easier when everyone is connected to their location data by their cell phone. This gives the state a huge amount of power to find and criminalize whoever it wants.

Yes / Planetary health sees neoliberal capitalism as a key mediator of socioecological crises, a position that is echoed in much COVID-19 commentary. In this Personal View, I set out an economic theory that emphasises some of the ways in which neoliberal capitalism's conceptualisation of value has mediated responses to COVID-19. Using the intersection of ecological, feminist, and Marxist economics, I develop an analysis of neoliberal capitalism as a specific historical form of the economy. I identify the accumulation of exchange value as a central tendency of neoliberal capitalism and argue that this tendency creates barriers to the production of other forms of value. I then analyse the implications of this tendency in the context of responses to COVID-19. I argue that resources and labour flow to the production of exchange value, at the expense of production of other value forms. Consequently, the global capitalist economy has unprecedented productive capacity but uses little of this capacity to create the conditions that improve and maintain people's health. To be more resilient to coming crises, academics, policy makers, and activists should do theoretical work that enables global economies to recognise multiple forms of value and political work that embeds these theories in societal institutions.