A biological citizenship can be important to gain human rights. This is evident for the disability movement in Nepal, which recently have gained a lot of ground in their struggle for their rights. The NGO Nepal Hemophilia Society (NHS) is a part of this movement and has also profited from this progress. However hemophilia is disease that mostly transmitted to males, which means that the female members of NHS is not affected medically by the disease but socially to a high degree. This thesis aims to explore how the female members handle this situation and find an agency in their vulnerable position.

This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.

This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a system whereby members purchase shares in a farm in the spring and then receive produce (maple syrup, meat, honey, vegetables, fruit, etc.) over the course of the growing season. The significance of this system is contested with critics, chiefly sociologist Julie Guthman (2008), asserting that CSA reproduces neoliberalism. Guthman's thesis on the relationship between practices, subjectivities, and political imaginaries is generative. My intervention is predominantly methodological. Guthman offers a systemic overview, in keeping with Michel Foucault's scholarship on governmentality, but does not explore the embodied nature of governmentality at the scale of the people involved. I contend that to understand how neoliberal governmentality plays out in CSA, we need to explore embodied practices at the scale of the people involved. I rely on Dorothy Smith's agent perspective and examine the practices associated with CSA for a discursive reading of those practices. My discursive reading employs J.K. Gibson-Graham's diverse economies approach. Participation in CSA cultivates a sense of connection to a local geographic community, and a community of practice, contrary to the seemingly individualized nature of the market transactions which form the basis of CSA. This sense of connection is supportive of prefigurative practices, farming practices, and activism. The relationality experienced by CSA farmers and members undergirds political activism, and the connection to communities of practice galvanizes and supports both discursive and protest practices. Attention to discourse at the scale of the individual provides insight into how discourses are co-produced and allows us to observe discourses in various stages of development, from those just entering the public square on social media, to those further developed, conceptually rich, with saliency for both farmers and members, and linked to political protest. The communities that exist in opposition to the individualization of neoliberalism, the production of discourse that both resists and reinscribes neoliberalism, and the practices that shape our subjects and political imaginaries, visible at this scale, provide insight into the connection between local and global discourses, and the connection between everyday practices and protest.

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