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The Writers’ Union of Canada was founded in November of 1973 “to unite Canadian writers for the advancement of their common interests.” Drawing on extensive archival collections – from both the Writers’ Union and its member authors – this dissertation offers the first critical history of the organization and its work, from pre-founding to the early 1990s, arguing that the Writers’ Union has fundamentally influenced Canadian literature, as an industry, as a community, and as a field of study. I begin by tracing the contextual history of the organization’s founding, interrogating how union organizing, celebrity, and friendship underpin the organization’s work. Chapter One discusses the Writers’ Union’s programs, reforms, and interventions aimed at ‘fostering’ writing in Canada as I argue that the Union was instrumental in building a fiscal-cultural futurity for CanLit. In Chapter Two, I consider the role that women played in this important work, as I highlight the labour of female Union members and the all-female administrative staff, who maintained and supported the organization’s work through its first twenty years. In Chapter Three I draw attention to the stories of, perspectives of, and experiences of BIPOC authors in relation to the Writers’ Union. While the Writers’ Union’s involvement in race relations is often positioned as having ‘begun’ with the Writing Thru Race conference in 1994, this chapter uses the archives to reveal a much longer trajectory of racialized conflict within and around the organization, providing important context for the very controversial and public battles about appropriation and race that would explode in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Throughout this work, I look to see how institutional narratives are deployed and upheld, and to what ends; how successful advocacy work is often effaced and forgotten; how institutional structures function; and how their boundaries and intentions are challenged and developed over time.

This thesis examines the history of the Provincial Workmen's Association of Nova Scotia, from iits formation in 1879, until the resignation of the union's first Grand Secretary in 1898. The study begins with a description of the economic background of the province's coal trade during the 19th century. The end of the "golden age" of wood, wind and sail, and the region's attempts to industrialize in response to the National Policy are discussed in relation to the coal industry. The difficulties experienced by tlthe miners as a result of these changing economic conditions are considered in the second chapter, and the formation of the P.W.A. is described. The early organizational activitities, constitution, ritual and structure of the society are also detailed. The following chapter investigates the three tactics employed by the P.W.A. to protect the rights and improve the condition of the Nova Scotia miners. The utility and ideological underpinnings of each method - strikes, governmennt lobbying and electoral politics - is considered in order to clarify the degree of success achieved by the union in its stated goals. Chapter Four focuses more directly on the idtdeology of the P.W.A. "Loyalist" and "rebel" attitudes toward the coal masters, the increasing alientation of the mine1ers from their work resulting from the development of industrial capitalism, and the growth of trade union consciousness and working class awareness are described. The influence of Robert Drummond on the Nova Scotia miners is also discussed. The fifth and final chapter describes the rank and file disconterent with leadership that emerged in the late 1880s and culminated with the company store dispute in 1896. The "invasion of thee Knights of Labor" and the resignation of Robert Drummond are examined. Final conclusions are then presented, followed by an epilogue, which describes briefly the path taken by the P.W.A. from 1898 until the dissolution of the union in 1917.

There is now a vast scholarship that explores union decline and renewal in various economic sectors and workplaces. To date, however, there is little understanding of how union decline has impacted unionized retail environments in Canada. Using a feminist political economy framework, this dissertation explores dynamics of union decline and renewal through a case study of labour standards in Ontarios unionized supermarket sector. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 28 union representatives and an analysis of collective agreements, this study examines the decline and trajectory of labour standards in unionized supermarkets, explores the unions perspectives and responses to changing standards, assesses how changing labour standards reflects the problem of union decline, and assesses how the case of Ontarios unionized supermarkets informs union renewal research and strategy. Findings suggest that the decline and trajectory of labour standards in Ontarios unionized supermarkets reflects a shift towards increasing precariousness in this sector. While there have been some wins for supermarket workers, unions have been largely unable to secure substantial improvements through collective bargaining. The precariousness associated with supermarket work is both contractually negotiated, as evidenced by provisions in collective agreements that ensure low wages and minimal and infrequent wage increases, demanding availability requirements, and limitations to the number of hours of work, as well as experiential, as indicated in workplace dynamics such as competition between workers, high turnover, and reduced health and safety measures. During the period under study, several factors have contributed to the increase in precariousness in this sector. While unions have implemented a variety of strategies in an effort to mitigate precariousness in unionized supermarkets, the persistence of deeply ingrained business union cultures and practices make improving labour standards through collective bargaining difficult. Continued precariousness in unionized supermarkets and the persistence of business unionism point to the need for an interrogation of the cultures and practices within unions that may contribute to the ongoing precariousness in unionized supermarkets and the challenges facing unions in this sector. The complex nature of union decline in this sector also suggests that multiple forms of union action are required to improve labour standards in unionized supermarkets and the strength of unions more broadly.

Canada’s continuous reliance on temporary foreign workers to address its labour shortage and maintain its competitive advantage has resulted in a seasonal transnational workforce characterized by its precarious living and working conditions, cumulative legal disenfranchisement based on the lack of permanent status, and vulnerability to the ongoing pandemic. Despite the common portrayal of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as a ‘model for migration management’ by governments and growers, a large body of academic publications has studied their precarious conditions in an attempt to explain the seeming contradiction between a highly-exploited workforce and the steady growth of willing participants. This project examines the exploitative practices embedded in the cycles of transmigration through a series of individual interviews with SAWP participants, scholars, and government officials. The central argument is that the differential treatment of migrant and citizen workers lies at the heart of the former’s precarity. It stems from the paradoxical promotion of human rights at the macro-level, while relying on an exploited workforce at the micro-level. The program creates mechanisms that keep workers in a state of continuous marginalization despite decades of participation in the program. The legal, subtle, and overt mechanisms that maintain workers in a continuous state of control and competition are among the key findings of this project. This project challenges the idealization of the SAWP by analyzing the main beneficiaries, its shortcomings, and its projected future. It presents a unique opportunity to reimagine temporary foreign worker programs and methodological nationalism in a globalized context.

AbstractThis dissertation explores the points of tension between dominant histories of neighbourhood activism in Toronto and Montreal between 1963-1989 and the lived experiences of locally embedded activists who organized for access to safe jobs, homes, and the right to exist in their neighbourhoods. It demonstrates how material conditions, determined by the overlapping processes of deindustrialization, post-industrial development, and the movement of capital from Montreal to Toronto, shaped how neighbourhood activists organized, who they organized with, what they organized for, and how they recorded what they were doing. Dominant narratives of neighbourhood activism during this period over-emphasize the perspectives white, middle-class, and cis-gendered male activists who benefitted from the world the sixties made. Their upward mobility, made possible through the expansion of public spending and their involvement in gentrification, gave them the time and resources to document what they were doing, elevating their perspectives in the historical record. At the same time, embedded poor and working-class, racialized, disabled, and trans activists who continued to experience the ongoing structural violence of the capitalist city also continued to collectively resist that violence. Unfortunately, their ongoing precarity denied them of the resources necessary to produce historical records to the same degree as their upwardly mobile contemporaries. By historicizing how uneven material conditions shaped what activists were doing and how they recorded what they were doing, this thesis demonstrates how power shaped the production of neighbourhood activism history. It also presents opportunities to contest this power in the historical record.

In a 2013 exhibition publication titled It’s the Political Economy, Stupid!, John Roberts made the observation that “Over the last ten years we have become witness to an extraordinary assimilation of art theory and practice into the categories of labor and production.” Whereas once art claimed for itself a critical capacity in relation to the larger system of capitalist domination by its status as a putatively ‘autonomous’ sphere of production from which it leveraged its difference and critique, today it is largely acknowledged that there is no longer any such ‘outside’ to be aspired to. If, in the recent past, the immaterial, informational, creative, experiential, and affective elements of conceptual art were seen as potential resistant forces, in our current climate, where these forms of labor have become the dominant mode of production for the capitalist economy, these potentialities are now being widely questioned. With these developments in mind, this dissertation consists of a series of integrated articles that focus on the increasingly diffuse and interconnected circuits of global exchange and labor as they interact with specific sites and interventions of contemporary artistic production. In this, they coalesce around a general binding inquiry: does artistic labor today have the capacity to function as a critique of the (transforming) mechanisms of control and exploitation characteristic of capitalism in the twenty-first century? And if not, what does that entail about the continued political viability, and persisting social functions of contemporary artworks? Drawing on autonomist Marxist thought, the sociology of work and labor, performance studies, and critical readings on the relationship between artistic labor and recent forms of capitalist production, the chapters are organized around exhibitions and artworks which represent, critique, or (re)produce the conditions of production in late capitalism, while situating these within a global economy characterized by an uneven network of productive relations. In so doing, they trace the trajectory of labor relations and production practices as they have transformed over the last half decade through artworks and exhibitions that engage specific emblematic sites of production—the factory, the prison, and the museum (or amalgams of these spaces), and attempts to tease out places where reflection on the relationship between ‘artistic’ and ‘non-artistic’ labor in each may lead to clarity regarding the socio-political efficacy of contemporary art in an increasingly saturated and complex economic infrastructure.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise traite du rapport qu’entretiennent les grandes entreprises minières avec les collectivités locales, dans un contexte nordique. À partir du cas québécois de l’exploitation du minerai de fer, nous tentons d’apporter un éclairage nouveau à l’idée communément admise selon laquelle l’implantation, sur des territoires enclavés, de grands projets extractifs, constitue un vecteur de développement régional important. La démarche d’économie politique proposée prend pour objet les modes de gestion des ressources humaines et financières privilégiés dans le secteur minier de la Côte-Nord. Les données recueillies dans le cadre d’une analyse documentaire et d’une série d’entretiens semi-dirigés, menés à l’hiver 2019, convergent vers la thèse suivante : la diminution des retombées économiques constatée dans cette région est attribuable à la déterritorialisation de l’organisation contemporaine du travail dans les mines ainsi qu’à l’émergence de stratégies de restructuration épousant la dynamique du cycle de commodités.

Over the past forty-seven years, thousands of temporary foreign migrant workers have been arriving in Canada annually, to labor in sectors of precarious work including farming, caregiving and the service sector given the demand from employers seeking cheaper sources of labor or for work that Canadians are not available to do or are unwilling to do. Given the context of 21st century neoliberal capitalist globalization which has transformed the international division of labor, there has been an increase in the demand for migrants as a flexible source of cheap labor. Canada’s dependence on migrant workers has been facilitated through bilateral and unilateral programs with countries of the Global South to provide a steady stream of workers for its workforce. The purpose of this research was to critically explore and develop an understanding of precarious migrant worker exploitation and concerns pertaining to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) in Canada to inform advocacy undertaken by migrant organizations. Utilizing a race-gendered neo-Marxist perspective on capital and migrant labor a case study strategy was adopted and developed pertaining to the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and the Caregivers Program. Data collection included in-depth and focus group interviews with 17 farm and caregiver migrant workers and advocates, document reviews and analysis of web materials. Thematic analysis suggests temporary migrant work is marked by coercion, misrepresentation of contracts and bonded contractual arrangements. Migrant work and living in Canada are characterized by increasing levels of labor unfreedom experienced as domination, subordination, and race-gendered exploitation. Temporary foreign migrant workers are being driven further into debt, endure substandard working conditions and a social experience in Canada marred by prejudice, discrimination, and oppression. These preliminary critical exploratory findings inform advocacy work for migrant workers by contributing to new ways of "knowing and doing” and to challenge existing predatory precarious migrant work policies, processes, and experiences in Canada and internationally.

Dans notre thèse, nous étudions la période de « flottement » et de réorganisation du mouvement ouvrier entre le déclin de l’organisation des Chevaliers du Travail et l’ascension du syndicalisme catholique. Notre étude révèle que cette expérience de transition, entre les années 1896 et 1914, est formatrice pour le mouvement ouvrier de Québec et Lévis. L’analyse de ces années s’avère essentielle mieux saisir et caractériser la suite des évènements dans le monde syndical de cette région. Notre regard nouveau sur le mouvement ouvrier de Québec et Lévis permet d’éclairer le rôle actif des travailleurs et de nuancer le misérabilisme contenu dans une partie de l’historiographie ouvrière. En effet, nous montrons que les travailleurs de Québec et Lévis s’activent dans le monde du travail, mais aussi sur la scène politique, entre 1896 et 1914 afin d’améliorer leurs conditions de vie et de travail. Notre thèse indique aussi que, contrairement au contexte montréalais, Québec devient le bastion du syndicalisme national durant cette période. Cette conjecture peut trouver racine dans la relation particulière qui se développe à Québec et Lévis entre les patrons, la classe ouvrière et l’Église. En effet, l’Église de Québec et Lévis se montre un acteur important entre 1896 et 1914 ; la classe ouvrière doit ainsi négocier avec cette dernière pour se développer. Notre analyse permet ainsi d’expliquer le cheminement particulier des ouvriers de Québec et Lévis entre 1896 et 1914 et de mieux saisir leurs idéologies et leur conduite.

This dissertation critically examines the history of the government of Ontarios policies towards the mining industry to analyze the impact of concentrated economic power on political processes in liberal democracies. It is the first comprehensive study of the political power of one of the provinces largest and most influential industries. Drawing on critical theories of business power, this dissertation examines policy developments across four contentious issue areas, namely fiscal policy, air pollution control, occupational health and safety, and access to mineral lands. Employing a qualitative historical narrative, the study draws on data collected from the Public Archives of Ontario, newspapers, published reports and secondary academic literature. Challenging those theoretical perspectives that downplay the direct influence of large business enterprises over public policy, this dissertation argues that the mining industry has exercised a predominant influence over the government of Ontarios public policies. While the industry disposes of several political resources that privilege it in relation to its opponents, two in particular deserve special attention: First, minings commanding economic presence in the provincial North where alternative investment opportunities are generally absent, and second, the industrys deep-seated linkages with the provincial mining ministry in terms of personnel and ideology. In sum, the mining industrys structural power over the Northern economy together with its close working relations with the provincial ministry of mines have rendered provincial policymakers particularly vulnerable to the industrys lobbying, allowing the industry to play a predominant, though not monolithic, role in shaping provincial public policy.

Increasing processing times for immigration applications and increasing numbers of people admitted on temporary visas mean that more newcomers spend longer periods of time living in Canada with restricted rights and uncertain if they will be able to remain. This has contributed to an increase in precarious immigration status, which refers to a sense of insecurity caused by ones formal immigration status. The purpose of the dissertation is to examine how people are affected by living for prolonged periods of time with uncertainty about future residence and how these effects vary across space and time. The study, based on qualitative research with migrants in Toronto and people who work on migration issues, investigates how immigration status is performed in everyday life and how immigration status intersects with other social relations to produce distinctive affective textures of life in Toronto. The research shows that formal immigration status affects people differently depending on their migration motivations, capacities, and community support networks. Lack of reliable information about the time required to become eligible for permanent residence and application processing times make it more difficult for people to make decisions about how to orient themselves towards the future, the present, and the passage of time in ways that meet their needs. It identifies two salient temporal orientationssuspending or embracing engagement with everyday lifeeach of which comes with benefits and risks. Finally, the research suggests that contemporary practices of immigration control can lead to an internalization of discourses that construct people with precarious immigration status as unworthy of membership in Canadian society. Participants sought to undermine these discourses through narrative redefinition of themselves as people who have something to contribute but are stopped from doing so. I find that this resistance is necessary to peoples ability to persist, yet it has a limited effect on the harm done. The research findings contribute to scholarly understandings of formal immigration status and the slow violence of living with precarious immigration status.

Notre doctorat est une recherche sur l’histoire du syndicalisme enseignant au Québec durant la première moitié des années 1990. Plus précisément, du Congrès de la Centrale des enseignants du Québec (CEQ) de juin 1990 à la convocation par le ministre de l’Éducation du gouvernement Parizeau des États généraux sur l’éducation en mars 1995. Notre recherche s’efforce de poser des jalons pour une première histoire critique du syndicalisme des enseignants à construire dans son rapport à l’histoire de l’éducation selon un constat initial que la première est sous-évaluée, voire largement invisible dans divers champs des sciences humaines et sociales (Relations industrielles, sociologie et histoire). La CEQ est la centrale syndicale des fédérations et des syndicats locaux représentant des enseignantes et des enseignants du Québec (des secteurs primaire, secondaire, collégial et même universitaire) et des professionnels de l’enseignement (animateurs de pastorale à l’époque). L’organe décisionnel de la CEQ est le Congrès national qui se réunit tous les deux ans ; l’application des décisions du Congrès se fait à la fois par le Bureau national (Conseil exécutif à partir de juin 1992) et le Conseil général des délégués de toutes les fédérations et de tous les syndicats locaux affiliés à la Centrale. Cette agora syndicale, qui se réunit six fois par année, est le cœur de la vie démocratique, tumultueuse, de la Centrale syndicale et étudie tous les rapports, les documents, les analyses, etc., qui lui sont soumis par le Bureau national / Conseil exécutif, l’unité de recherche de la CEQ ou divers comités. Dans un premier temps, notre thèse aborde le fait que le syndicalisme enseignant québécois est un objet historique inachevé et inabouti. Notre démarche tente de répondre à ce lien problématique entre historiographie et histoire. Puis, elle propose de nouveaux jalons pour une étude critique de cette histoire, notamment sur l’échec de la première tentative d’arrimage syndical de l’éducation à la souveraineté du Québec de 1977 à 1984. Mais alors, comment une centrale syndicale a-t-elle pu évoluer d’une opposition d’inspiration marxiste à toute tentative de réforme imposée de l’éducation et à un projet de souveraineté considéré comme conservateur et « capitaliste » portée par le PQ en 1977-1985 à iii une proposition d’une réforme globale, néolibérale, de l’éducation et un soutien à une souveraineté « sociale-démocrate » portée par le même parti politique en 1994-1995 ? Pour expliquer et comprendre ce paradoxe historique, nous allons étudier les nouvelles orientations stratégiques de la CEQ à partir du Congrès de juin 1990. Puis, dans un second temps, à partir d’archives syndicales – les procès-verbaux des réunions des délégués syndicaux au Conseil général de la CEQ –, notre étude historique porte sur le second arrimage de l’éducation fait par la Centrale à la conquête de la souveraineté du Québec, et particulièrement le rôle que joua le Conseil général des délégués syndicaux quant à la définition de quatre positions : 1) la question de la déconfessionnalisation, puis de la laïcité du système éducatif québécois ; 2) l’élaboration de la politique d’éducation interculturelle ; 3) les enjeux politiques et stratégiques autour de la définition de la souveraineté du Québec ; 4) le tournant participatif et la proposition d’une réforme globale de l’éducation au Québec. Enfin, notre recherche historique nous amène à décrire les mémoires syndicales enseignantes qui font de la CEQ une centrale syndicale si particulière dans l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier québécois.

This study analyzes the new sophistication of the organized labour movement and labour’s relationship to politics in a period of rapid change for the Lakehead. ““The CCF is not a Class Party”” argues that, between 1944 and 1963, the organized labour movement and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) at the Lakehead underwent parallel structural developments against the backdrop of conservative social forces in the postwar period that, by the end of the 1950s, necessitated a merger of the two formally distinct entities. The amalgamation of labour and politics, resulting in the formation of the New Democratic Party (NDP), is best examined through the political career of Douglas Fisher, who first represented the CCF and, later, the NDP in Port Arthur. The debate surrounding the ‘New Party’ idea in the late 1950s at the Lakehead is reflective of the uneasy relationship between labour and politics that had formed throughout the postwar period.

Cette thèse retrace l’itinéraire collectif d’un groupe de militants communistes libertaires de langue française pendant l’entre-deux-guerres à Montréal rassemblés autour d’Albert Saint-Martin (1865-1947). Figure importante du mouvement ouvrier au Québec, l’itinéraire politique de Saint-Martin est multiforme : on le retrouve associé au Parti socialiste du Canada, à la One Big Union, au Parti socialiste (communiste), à la Ligue des sanstravail, à l’Association révolutionnaire Spartakus, à l’Université ouvrière, à l’Association humanitaire, à la Ligue du Réveil féminin et à de nombreuses coopératives de consommation et de production. Saint-Martin est entouré de camarades provenant de divers horizons politiques. Notre thèse nous a permis d’identifier plus de 300 individus ayant pris part à des activités militantes à ses côtés. À travers l’analyse croisée de leurs parcours individuels, nous cherchons à mieux comprendre les modalités de leur engagement collectif avant, pendant et après la Première Guerre mondiale, leur représentation de la société idéale et les moyens d’y parvenir, la nature et la diversité de leurs liens de sociabilité, les territoires où se déploient leurs réseaux, la fréquence et les thèmes de leurs réunions de même que les symboles et les rituels qui y sont rattachés. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que celles et ceux qui participent aux activités de ce milieu partagent une même culture révolutionnaire articulée autour des notions de communisme, d’anticapitalisme, d’anticléricalisme et d’internationalisme, débouchant sur une critique des institutions autoritaires : l'État, l’Église catholique, la propriété privée, l’armée, le mariage, etc. Les stratégies d’émancipation individuelle et collective mises de l’avant par ces militants et ces militantes reposent sur l’éducation et l'action directe. C’est cet ensemble de principes théoriques, stratégiques et tactiques que nous regroupons sous le terme de communisme libertaire.

This dissertation examines prisoner-worker organizing in Canada by considering three case studies in detail: first, the successful unionization of an experimental privately managed abattoir at the Guelph Correctional Centre, a provincial jail in Ontario, in 1977; second, efforts by federal prisoners to unionize, with a particular focus on the efforts by the Prisoners Union Committee in 1975 and the Canadian Prisoners Labour Confederation, between 2010-2015, and; third, the nation-wide federal prison strike in response to prisoner wage cuts in 2013. Through these cases, this study examines the similarities and differences between prisoner-workers and their non-incarcerated counterparts, and considers the methods and motivations of prisoner organizers, as well as the substantial legal and organizational barriers that Canadian prisoners face in their organizing efforts. Working prisoners are one of many groups who labour on the margins of society and the economy, and who have been largely overlooked or dismissed by both scholars of work and labour and the labour movement. This study seeks to expand conventional definitions of who is a workerand what constitutes the working classby demonstrating ways that prisoners have asserted their rights as workers and the legitimacy of their organizations and struggles. Through these struggles, which have been conceptualized not only as economic, but also as political struggles, prisoners have contested their state of privation and laid claim to new sets of rights. At their most successful, the organizing efforts of working prisoners have resulted in not only improvements to their working lives, but also expanded rights and freedoms in relation to their incarceration.

This Master’s thesis examines tradeswomen’s experiences of and responses to gendered harassment at camp-based work in resource extraction industries in western Canada. This study predominantly features women working in the Alberta oil sands industry. Gendered harassment at work has been identified as a major issue in recent years (Curtis et al., 2018; Denissen, 2010; Wade & Jones, 2019) and this study aims to better understand tradeswomen’s day-to-day experiences of harassment in work camps. I utilize constructivist grounded theory methodology and critical feminist geography as the theoretical framework for the project. I find that tradeswomen employ a wide range of affective, material, and social strategies to manage harassment. I introduce two concepts, “just go to work” (JGTW) and “me vs. other girls,” to illuminate these strategies for self-preservation in the masculine occupational culture of work. This is labour that tradeswomen must perform in addition to their demanding work duties and schedules. JGTW demonstrates how gendered harassment is embedded into the masculinist culture of work of the trades. This study begins to address this gap in scholarly literature to capture the shifting cultural context of the oil sands industry and identifies new areas for future research.

In 1893 the Keewatin Lumber and Power Company planned the first hydroelectric generating station on the north shore of Lake of the Woods (near present-day Kenora, Ontario). Approximately fifty years later, federal officials seeking employment for Canadian veterans turned to Northwestern Ontario and its underutilized water resources, envisioning a manufacturing hub on the Precambrian Shield. Between 1950 and 1958, the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario remodeled the Winnipeg River drainage basin to produce power for federally-sanctioned peacetime industries, namely pulp and paper production. To redesign the Winnipeg River drainage basin, however, hydro officials needed to encroach on Anishinabek lands: both federally-recognized reserves and unrecognized, but heavily occupied, ancestral territories. This dissertation tells the story of how Anishinabek families used a diverse array of strategies adaptation, cooperation, and passive resistance to manage environmental change caused by Whitedog Falls Generating Station. Anishinabek families worked to stabilize their communities in an era of imposed environmental and economic change. Historians have long argued that hydroelectric development is necessarily at odds with Indigenous culture and subsistence economies. This dissertation provides a counter-narrative, arguing that cultural and economic damage, although linked to environmental damage, correlated more strongly with Anishinabek exclusion from resource negotiations. Moreover, this work complicates historical representations of a uniform Indigenous response to development. Given limited negotiations between the Hydro-Electric Power Commission and local First Nations, Anishinabek families did not respond to industrial incursions with one representative voice. The process of development itself, I argue, prevented a unified community response. As a result, Anishinabek communities fractured in response to hydroelectric development.

Against a tense socio-political backdrop of white supremacy, intensifying pressures of neoliberal fiscal austerity, and queer necropolitics, this thesis addresses performance-based activist forms of place-making for urban-based queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of colour. Using participant observation and qualitative interviews with pioneering members of Montréal's Kiki scene and Ottawa's emerging Waacking community and interpreting my findings through the theoretical lens of queer of colour theory, critical whiteness studies, queer Latinx performance studies and Chicana feminism, I argue that Kiki subculture, which is maintained by pedagogical processes of 'each one, teach one', is instrumental in facilitating i) life-affirming queer kinship bonds, (ii) alternative ways to simultaneously embody and celebrate non-normative gender expression with Black, Asian, and Latinx identity, iii) non-capitalist economies of sharing, and iv) hopeful strategies of everyday community activism and resilience to appropriative processes during economic insecurity and necropolitical turmoil.

Through two-part intergenerational oral histories, this thesis explores the intersections of labour, gender, and lived religion in the lives of twelve Southern Alberta, Dutch Reformed women from family farms from the 1950s to 2019. By focusing on the broader lived experience of the women interviewed, and not just their physical labour on the farm, this thesis argues that women’s roles on the family farm were crucial, while complicating the narrative of farm women’s roles to show their multiple and often conflicting identities.

Background and objectives: Globally, sex workers experience labour rights abuses, disproportionate burdens of workplace violence, and restrictions on safer ways of working (i.e., collectively and in indoor venues) due to criminalization. These inequities are often exacerbated among im/migrant sex workers, who may additionally face precarious legal status, restrictive immigration policies and racialized policing. Despite implementation of “end-demand” legislation (legal models aimed at ending clients’ demand for sexual services) in dozens of countries, little empirical research has explored how end-demand laws impact sex workers’ labour conditions. This dissertation sought to explore how end-demand laws and prohibitive immigration policy impact labour conditions, health and rights among im/migrant and indoor sex workers in Vancouver. Methods: This dissertation drew on quantitative and qualitative data collected from AESHA (An Evaluation of Sex Workers’ Health Access), a community-based open prospective cohort of 900+ women sex workers across Vancouver, Canada, who complete bi-annual interviewer-administered questionnaires and voluntary sexual health testing. Mixed methods (explanatory and confounder bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses; interrupted time series; coding of semi-structured interview data) were used to elucidate the impacts of end-demand laws and resulting law enforcement practices on indoor and im/migrant sex workers’ labour environments. Results: This dissertation found that end-demand legislation in Canada failed to improve sex workers’ access to justice, restricted access to supportive third parties and safer indoor venues, heightened the vulnerability of sex work venues to violence, and limited access to occupational health resources (condoms, community-led services); with negative implications exacerbated among im/migrant sex workers. Conclusion: These findings extend limited existing research on the impacts of end-demand legislation, and demonstrate that end-demand criminalization reproduces the harms of full criminalization models. These results have important implications for legislative, policy, and law enforcement reforms towards enabling safe labour environments among im/migrant and indoor sex workers. This dissertation calls for the decriminalization of sex work; removal of prohibitions on im/migrant sex work; sensitivity and anti-stigma trainings among authorities; dedicated efforts to address systemic racism in sex work policing; promoting rights-based municipal occupational health standards; and increasing support for sex worker-led outreach; to promote sex workers’ labour and human rights.