1,721,056 research outputs found
Masculinity Contest Culture Under the Microscope: A Critical Analysis of Gender Relations Within Ontario Police Services
Full text linkEven though traits associated with masculinity contest culture have always existed within policing forces, this phenomenon is understudied. Masculinity contest culture has four principal characteristics: 1) show no weakness; 2) always demonstrate strength and stamina; 3) put work first; and 4) dog-eat-dog competition. This project investigated how police officers in Ontario, Canada negotiate gender in an industry where any deviation from masculinity contest culture results in negative consequences for the officer. Masculinity contest culture exists to varying degrees in occupations that are predominantly controlled by male workers but policing and the military are the two occupations with the strongest affiliation. There is no leniency for police officers to deviate from masculinity contest culture, regardless of their gender.In this study, 23 police officers from five police organizations were interviewed. Each interview was based on 20 open-ended questions. The researcher analyzed two models of policing commonly practiced in North America from a gendered perspective: community policing and traditional policing. Community policing is referred to as “soft” policing. The duties of policing are so highly gendered that women are geared towards community policing whereas males are geared towards traditional policing. Males who engage in community policing are
sometimes feminized by officers in traditional policing who do not consider this model to be real ii
policing. This research demonstrates women in policing in Ontario continue to struggle to achieve parity with males because of masculinity contest culture.
The findings demonstrate that masculinity contest culture could eventually be transformed from an observed phenomenon to a theoretical framework once testing is conducted on a larger scale. To reduce some of the toxic effects of this culture, the researcher recommends police officers should reorganize some of their off-duty time according to a caring masculinity framework, which is another understudied theoretical framework. This study contributes to the field by demonstrating the existence and effects of masculinity contest culture. It is hoped that it will provide a starting point for a closer analysis of masculinity contest culture by scholars and workers within the police services.Ed.D.2023-06-29 00:00:0
Exploring the Relationship between Skin Tone and Self-esteem Among Females in South Asian Families in India: A Multigenerational Comparison
Full text linkColourism or skin colour stratification is a persistent dilemma for people in India. Socially and culturally constructed definitions of beauty based on skin tone, represent Western realities and continue to sustain beauty ideals that shape the beliefs and practices around fair skin for women. The study of skin tone and its relationship to self-esteem is essential in expanding upon the limited research examining the intersections between body image and the sociocultural experiences of South Asian Indian women. Against the backdrop of Western hegemony, the research discusses how a fair skin beauty ideal impacts different generations of women in New Delhi. More specifically, investigating the relationship between skin tone and self-esteem among women in South Asian families through a multigenerational comparison, provides a deeper understanding of how skin tone bias is perpetuated, while reinforcing and normalizing white heteropatriarchy. Skin tone bias is disseminated through the family, culture and media. The narratives highlight how skin tone bias manifests itself among adult women in different South Asian family units according to their life stage and membership in the family. Women from the young age group (generation) had the lowest self-esteem and faced the most pressure to conform to white skin beauty ideals when compared to older generations in their families. Skin tone appeared to be heavily emphasized for these young women, namely in the context of marriage.Ph.D
Black Canadian Women, White Canadian Schools: Navigating Identity Within the Complexities of Blackness
Full text linkThis study focuses on the educational experiences and narratives of Black girls in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and is based on ten self-identified Black women who were interviewed over a four-month period, in addition to sharing my own schooling experiences. The literature review examines the ways is which today’s experiences of formal education, which were shared by the women, are shaped and circumscribed by various components of schooling. Overall, this study recounts the participants’ challenges and frustrations, coupled with their positive experiences in navigating the educational system in the GTA from elementary to high school. However, much more work needs to be done to ensure that formal education and learning are meaningful for Black girls and other systematically marginalized students in our Canadian school system. The thesis reveals the complexities associated with understandings and interpretations of identity and discusses Black women’s questions of identity as situated in Black Canadian feminist theory. My research question is: How did diverse self-identified Black women experience education in the Greater Toronto Area? This research is important because Black girls are not only made to feel invisible in schools, but they are also under researched. With the use of Black feminist thought, I used interviews while connecting my personal experiences to wider cultural understandings of Black women’s question of identity. This research found that the women participants were resilient but impacted due, perhaps, to their negative schooling experiences. While some of the findings support existing literature, the participants also recommended ways in which Canadian schools could be more relevant to Black female students. This work should encourage more Black girls and women of colour to share their stories, and for educators, school administrators, and policy makers to pay more attention.
Keywords: anti-colonial, decolonization, schooling, blackness, black female education, black girlsPh.D.2022-11-30 00:00:0
Decolonizing Narratives:Kittitian Women, Knowledge Production and Protest
Full text linkAbstract
The thesis acknowledges how women contest domination and challenge us to re-examine the subjects of our history. It centers the stories of 21 African women, who remember a popular uprising in St. Kitts in 1935. Their stories explore how these embodied narrators reconstruct a defining moment in the islandâ s history for insertion into the gaping holes of history that had been left for the imagination, conjecture, and a hegemonic discursive shaped by archival records. Their stories are worth remembering, demand examining and not just to be recorded for posterity. They must be accorded equal value as academic knowledge.
The use of storytelling as a methodological approach introduces the Kittitian language to text, removes the burden of colonized linguistic syntax and grounds the epistemological context of the findings and analysis. It provides new evidence of the invasiveness of coloniality and how it interlocks with Caribbean rebel consciousness to usurp decolonial exertions, discursively and institutionally. The work does not claim to provide a representative sample of the hundreds of protestors in 1935, nor do the women speak for all the citizens who were impacted by the social unrest. It questions the processes that normalize the silencing of valuable knowledge that can only be found in the language and memories of subjugated populations.
Finally, this study reconstitutes the tellers as knowledge producers, decolonizes their womanhood, and depathologizes the resistance movement. It focuses on how these culture bearers remember the protest and how they reconstruct themselves in relation to the historical event and how they reconstitute their subjectivities through their understanding of what the protest meant for themselves, their families, and communities. The study has implications for further research and knowledge production designed to decolonize Caribbean histories, to accelerate the process of healing the psychological scars and other residual effects of colonization and attests to the resilience of cultural memory.
Keywords: Caribbean cultural forms, womanism, feminism, indigenous research, decolonization, liberation, knowledge production, historiography, social justice educationPh.D
From Africa to Europe, Youth and Transnational Migration: Examining the Lived Experiences of Nigerian Migrant Youth in Malta
Full text linkInnovations in communication and transportation industries have improved and increased the potential for the movement of individuals, commodities, and capitals across international borders as they respond to global environmental and socio-economic stimuli. Extant studies have focused on adult transnational migrants, and youth migration is highlighted only in relation to the adult experiences. However, movement of young adults as independent transnational migrants is an emerging trend in international migration. There is a general lack of awareness on the working and living conditions of youth migrants. This research was therefore informed by the urgent need to understand the migration experiences of youth with the view of protecting young migrants and ensuring that migration leads to their development and those of their home and host countries.
The thesis employs data collected with interpretative phenomenological analysis, IPA in a qualitative field study conducted in 2013 in the Republic of Malta to examine the lived experiences of Europe-bound migrant Nigerian youth. By resisting the banal Push and Pull explanations for transnational migration, which literally blames migrants and the countries of origin for current trends in global migration, the thesis advances the understanding of global youth migration from the perspectives of Indigenous world views, anti-colonial, and antiracist theories. It disturbs, and by so doing, unpacks as colonial project, the existing dominant imaginaries around immigrants from the developing world. These imagined mindsets have informed immigration policies and praxis that have continued to generate and sustain the migrant other.
The study uncovered the enormous transit and settlement challenges that transnational migrant youth contend with as they are polarized into social and demographic opposites (male and female migrants, legal and illegal, citizen and alien) by the advanced border-surveillance technologies and authorities of receiving states. Within this intersectionality lies migrant struggles and resistance as they aim for the countries of their destination. It therefore concludes by recommending a holistic and multilateral approach to resolving the issues of global youth migration. The approach (es) adopted must include addressing the major driving forces of the 21st century migration, which is social insecurity and economic marginalization.Ph.D
Systemic Neglect in the Ontario Child Welfare System: An Analysis of Youth Testimonies from the 2012 Youth Leaving Care Hearings in Ontario
Full text linkThis research examines and incorporates the themes from youth narratives in My Real-Life Book: Report from the Youth Leaving Care Hearings in Ontario (2012). Employing and engaging with the voices of those directly impacted by the child welfare system (CWS), namely youth in care (YICs), former youth in care (FYICs), and adoptees, this research offers an important alternate narrative to dominant public discourses that problematize children and youth in care. Using a social justice education lens that engages with an integrated scaffolded framework applying critical race theory (CRT), anti-racist feminist theory, and the concepts of Foucault and Bourdieu, this dissertation examines YIC/FYIC/Adoptees’ narratives to expose how systemic power imbalances impact youth through institutional neglect. The analysis of the youths’ narratives along with the researcher’s themes from the literature review, reveals the impacts of institutional practices devoid of meaningful, purposeful youth participation in decision-making, the lack of stability, and the life-long impacts of mandated care purported to protect children and youth. Critical discourse analysis is applied to analyze youth narratives to expose implicit and explicit realities contextualized within broader historical and socio-political frameworks that shape the experiences of YICs. This research also includes current public perspectives offered by key stakeholders, such as child advocates, social workers, health and mental health advocates, educators, criminal justice researchers and housing advocates. Thus, the study provides an important perspective on and understanding of how interconnected institutions maintain structural disparities in access to opportunities. The findings and analysis accentuate the potential for youth voices to transform the CWS by challenging dominant structural hierarchies and existing practices that are no longer helpful to youth in care. This work advocates for and contributes to the current research, highlighting the critical need for meaningfully collaborative policies and practices toward institutional reform with input from youth who are directly impacted by interconnected systems. Finally, this research aims to intensify the plea for a genuine, empathetic, equitable, and humane CWS that fosters youth agency, autonomy, and dignity.
Keywords: Youth in care; child welfare system; critical race theory; systemic power imbalances; critical discourse analysis; Bourdieu; Foucault.Ph.D
The Trials of African Women in Patriarchal African Society: A Critical Study of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
Full text linkThis thesis engages with Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), a novel that reflects how the organization and use of space mirrors the entanglement of hierarchies of class, race, and gender in colonial societies and the subordination of women. The novel captures the destructive impacts of colonization on the African people of then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and tension in postcolonial structures where family members struggle with their identity, between African tradition and modern culture. The thesis provides an in-depth analysis of the novel and gives attention to the various female characters and the struggles they encounter that stem from gender oppression in their community. In providing a feminist analysis the thesis examines the different ways in which African patriarchy manifests itself regarding the subaltern position of women. It demonstrates that the tension between modern and tradition accounts for the negative representation of women and oppression in Nervous Conditions.M.A
Exploring the Relationship between Skin Tone and Self-esteem Among Females in South Asian Families in India: A Multigenerational Comparison
No full textColourism or skin colour stratification is a persistent dilemma for people in India. Socially and culturally constructed definitions of beauty based on skin tone, represent Western realities and continue to sustain beauty ideals that shape the beliefs and practices around fair skin for women. The study of skin tone and its relationship to self-esteem is essential in expanding upon the limited research examining the intersections between body image and the sociocultural experiences of South Asian Indian women. Against the backdrop of Western hegemony, the research discusses how a fair skin beauty ideal impacts different generations of women in New Delhi. More specifically, investigating the relationship between skin tone and self-esteem among women in South Asian families through a multigenerational comparison, provides a deeper understanding of how skin tone bias is perpetuated, while reinforcing and normalizing white heteropatriarchy. Skin tone bias is disseminated through the family, culture and media. The narratives highlight how skin tone bias manifests itself among adult women in different South Asian family units according to their life stage and membership in the family. Women from the young age group (generation) had the lowest self-esteem and faced the most pressure to conform to white skin beauty ideals when compared to older generations in their families. Skin tone appeared to be heavily emphasized for these young women, namely in the context of marriage.Ph.D
Deconstructing Psychosis: Dismantling Oppression
Full text linkAbstract
This document deconstructs the term ‘psychosis’ through an exploration of the origins of this term, a personal narrative of this phenomenon, and the exploration of a multitude of perspectives from around the world, on experiences which fall into this category. Integrating the wisdom of five Indigenous and Alternative Health practitioners, and exploring several alternative mental health healing centre models, the limitations of the mainstream Western medical approach are presented .Also discussed, are the diversity and power of these alternatives and their possible combinations. This exploration is carried out using the Two-Eyed Seeing Framework, developed by Mi’kmaw Elders Albert and Murdena Marshall, of the Eskasoni First Nation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which ensures readers appreciate each perspective on ‘psychosis’ in its own right, and invites readers to imagine and notice ways in which the healing perspectives presented, can be and are combined, in order to create new and important healing possibilities.M.A
Kemetic Initiation: A Dialogue on African Indigenous Knowledge and Its Sacred Role in Shaping Moral Character for the Making of a High-Quality Human being and Society’s Triumphant Birth
Full text linkThis dissertation primary research question explored Kemetic Initiation as an African Indigenous education model, aiming to uncover its profound insights and values as it reveals of African Indigenous Knowledge, contributing to African Indigenous education to foster individual elevation and societal development. Kemetic Initiation, a spiritual and educational practice rooted in ancient Egypt (Kemet), offers profound insights into African values and norms, with more context provided later in the study. The study sought to re-establish African ancestral roots and values, with Kemetic Initiation being a central element, by examining ancient practices from the Pharaonic era. In doing so, it aimed to address the misconceptions that have emerged over time, particularly those influencing contemporary interpretations of African traditions and spirituality. The research was driven by the need to enhance personal, professional, and scholarly understanding of self and others, recognizing the detrimental impact of colonization, particularly through the imposition of the Western Eurocentric education systems. Ultimately, the study was designed to illuminate the knowledge and values embedded in Kemetic Initiation, examining its potential relevance and benefits for contemporary societies.
The study employed an Indigenous research methodology, framed within an Indigenous paradigm, utilizing Storytelling and consultations with Indigenous Elders to decolonize knowledge production and promote Indigenous sovereignty. The Storytelling sessions and discussions included nine temple priests and elders who are custodians of the Kemetic Initiatic knowledge and practices. Participants were selected through non-probability purposeful snowball sampling. The findings highlighted the importance of Kemetic Initiation in developing high-quality individuals and societies, emphasizing spiritual, social, and environmental connections by revealing that Kemetic Initiation advances moral character, personal growth, and communal harmony. The research documented the continued relevance of Kemetic Initiation in contemporary society and proposes concrete action plans to harness its principles for holistic development.
By documenting Kemetic Initiation through the lens of today’s Dogon existing Kemetic society of West Africa, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of African Indigenous knowledge and its vital role in global human enlightenment and development.Ph.D
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