Equitable opportunity for participation in environmental decision-making is central to arguments for environmental justice, yet remains an under-explored area in the literature. This thesis investigates engagement on environmental health issues in the Latin American community of Toronto. Drawing on an environmental justice framework, the objective of this study was to better understand barriers and facilitators to environmental action in this community, while exploring underlying definitions of environmental health, environmentalism, and community engagement. In-depth interviews were carried out with representatives of agencies serving the Latin American community; qualitative data from focus groups and interviews with community members was also used. Results identify social inequality and the whiteness of the mainstream environmental movement as pervasive barriers to participation, and suggest the utility of linking environmental and social justice concerns for community mobilization. The findings of this research contribute to an emerging discourse on environmental justice and racism in Canada.

Ground-level ozone (O3) is a familiar pollutant because it is associated with summer haze and smog alerts. The 2000-2008 weekday-weekend variations of ozone concentration were examined in relation to the Toronto weather conditions. The goal of this work is twofold: (1) To determine whether extreme ozone events were associated with specific weather conditions, (2) To determine whether the weekday-weekend effect of extreme ozone events could be detectable during the nine-year study period. The results show that in the study period, there were totally 313 days having extreme ground-level ozone events with ozone concentration ≥ 80 ppb, which is the current Ontario Ambient Air Quality Criterion for ozone concentration, in the four selected Toronto sites. Additionally, the weather condition mainly associated with these 313 days was the Dry Tropical one. This study also shows the phenomenon of the weekday-weekend effect of extreme ozone events in the past nine years in Toronto.

The aim of this project is to provide a manual wheelchair simulator for advanced wheelchair research within Toronto Rehabilitation Institute‘s Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratory (CEAL). To achieve this, a comprehensive mathematical model of the wheelchair/user system and a fully adjustable physical interface (which mimics various wheelchair configurations) have been developed. The mathematical model is unique in its ability to predict complex motions such as wheelies, and is able to update the wheelchair‘s position in a virtual environment, and calculate the force-feedback required for simulating various slopes and surfaces. The physical interface is used to measure the inputs required by the mathematical model (hand-rim input torques, hand and torso positions, and user centre-of-mass position), and utilizes servo motors to provide force-feedback at the wheelchair‘s hand-rims. Preliminary results comparing real-world wheelchair motion data to the mathematical model‘s predictions are presented, along with the physical interface design and mathematical model development.

By analyzing surveys, census data, policies and curriculum, it is demonstrated that the Toronto District School Board’s policies for equitable, anti-heterosexist, and anti-homophobic curriculum become stymied by how students and sex are routinely treated as subjects of moral control in curriculum. According to Gilles Deleuze's (1988) interpretation of Baruch Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical works, the distinction between morals and ethics is also the difference between slavery and freedom. Together with theoretical perspectives of sex and sexuality from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, the distinction between morals and ethics works to specify how particular discourses of sex can work to enslave or to empower students. Comprehension and circulation of the distinction between morals and ethics is proposed to increase the potential for curriculum to reciprocate with students’ individual learning needs, support the free and autonomous organization of desire, and promote the possibility of a democratic, inclusive, pluralistic, and secular society.

Equitable opportunity for participation in environmental decision-making is central to arguments for environmental justice, yet remains an under-explored area in the literature. This thesis investigates engagement on environmental health issues in the Latin American community of Toronto. Drawing on an environmental justice framework, the objective of this study was to better understand barriers and facilitators to environmental action in this community, while exploring underlying definitions of environmental health, environmentalism, and community engagement. In-depth interviews were carried out with representatives of agencies serving the Latin American community; qualitative data from focus groups and interviews with community members was also used. Results identify social inequality and the whiteness of the mainstream environmental movement as pervasive barriers to participation, and suggest the utility of linking environmental and social justice concerns for community mobilization. The findings of this research contribute to an emerging discourse on environmental justice and racism in Canada.

Ground-level ozone (O3) is a familiar pollutant because it is associated with summer haze and smog alerts. The 2000-2008 weekday-weekend variations of ozone concentration were examined in relation to the Toronto weather conditions. The goal of this work is twofold: (1) To determine whether extreme ozone events were associated with specific weather conditions, (2) To determine whether the weekday-weekend effect of extreme ozone events could be detectable during the nine-year study period. The results show that in the study period, there were totally 313 days having extreme ground-level ozone events with ozone concentration ≥ 80 ppb, which is the current Ontario Ambient Air Quality Criterion for ozone concentration, in the four selected Toronto sites. Additionally, the weather condition mainly associated with these 313 days was the Dry Tropical one. This study also shows the phenomenon of the weekday-weekend effect of extreme ozone events in the past nine years in Toronto.

The aim of this project is to provide a manual wheelchair simulator for advanced wheelchair research within Toronto Rehabilitation Institute‘s Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratory (CEAL). To achieve this, a comprehensive mathematical model of the wheelchair/user system and a fully adjustable physical interface (which mimics various wheelchair configurations) have been developed. The mathematical model is unique in its ability to predict complex motions such as wheelies, and is able to update the wheelchair‘s position in a virtual environment, and calculate the force-feedback required for simulating various slopes and surfaces. The physical interface is used to measure the inputs required by the mathematical model (hand-rim input torques, hand and torso positions, and user centre-of-mass position), and utilizes servo motors to provide force-feedback at the wheelchair‘s hand-rims. Preliminary results comparing real-world wheelchair motion data to the mathematical model‘s predictions are presented, along with the physical interface design and mathematical model development.

This thesis draws from ten semi-structured interviews with multiracial men in Toronto, Canada. It is an exploratory study that examines how participants experience race, masculinities and identities. Multiracial identities challenge popular notions of racial categories and expose social processes of racialization and the shifting nature of social identities. I explore how gender impacts participants’ experiences of multiple, fluid or shifting racial identities, and the importance of context in determining how they identify themselves. Participants also discussed the impact of multiculturalism and their understandings of racism in Canada. There were differences in the experiences of Black multiracial men and non-Black multiracial men in terms of how gender and race impact their lives. These differences imply that the colour line in Canada is shifting and that categories like ‘whiteness’ are being redefined. Analyses of these topics are taken up from an anti-racist and critical mixed race studies perspective.

This research examines the relationship between masculinity and recruitment at the University of Toronto during the Great War. Through a gendered framework established by historians such as Judith Butler, masculinity is approached as a constructed process that encompasses a variety of complex relationships between the individual subject and social processes. The following questions are explored: What motivated the administration the University to instate policies that first encouraged, and then forced, male students to enter active service? How did dominant discourses of masculinity influence recruitment efforts and the subsequent movement towards mandatory military training? The research reveals that gendered understandings of war and recruitment on campus presented active service as the defining moment of manhood. Enlisting, then, was understood as more than a willingness to take up arms; it publicly signified that a man was committed to the defense of democracy and to securing the freedom of generations to come.

This study analyzes the trends in temperature, and their extremes, in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in the context of urban heat island. The trends in annual and seasonal temperature changes were investigated in the GTA over the past century and a half with special focus on 1970-2000. The Mann-Kendall test is used to assess the significance of the trends and the Theil-Sen slope estimator is used to identify their magnitude. Statistically significant increasing trends for mean and minimum temperatures are observed mainly at the urban and suburban stations. The sequential Mann-Kendall test is used to identify any abrupt change in the time series of temperature (31 -161 years), and the results indicate that increasing trend for annual mean temperature has started after 1920 at Toronto downtown, after the 1960s at the suburban stations, and has increased significantly during the 1980s at all stations, which is consistent with the pace of urbanization during these periods in the GTA. The observed urban heat island (UHI) in Toronto is quantified and characterized by considering three different rural stations. The UHI intensity (∆Tu-r) in Toronto is categorized as winter dominating or summer dominating depending on the choice of a rural station. The results from the trend analysis of annual and seasonal ∆Tu-r suggest that the choice of the rural station is crucial in the estimation of ∆Tu-r, and thus can overestimate or underestimate its prediction depending on the location and topographical characteristics of a rural station relative to the urban station. The trends in extreme temperature indices are also investigated and the results indicate that indices based on daily maximum temperature are more pronounced at the urban and suburban stations compared to that at the rural stations. The changes in the trends for extreme indices based on daily minimum temperature are consistent at all stations for the period of 1971-2000. With the decrease in the percentage of cold nights and the increase in the percentage of warm nights, the diurnal temperature range has decreased throughout the GTA region. The analysis of heating degree days and cooling degree days revealed that the former is associated with decreasing trends and the latter exhibited increasing trends at almost all stations in the GTA. Finally, it is evident from the results that urban heat island phenomenon exerts warmer influence on the climate in cities, and with the current pace of urbanization in the GTA, it is imperative to understand the potential impact of the emerging UHI on humans and society.