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This transnational history of the Jewish Labour Committee of Canada (JLC) retraces the organisations narratives, networks, and practices of diaspora solidarity, from the moment of its establishment and into the post-war period. The JLCs activists refracted their solidarities through the lens of a diasporic Jewish identity. At a time when Canada imposed strong barriers against refugees, the JLC worked to send aid to the anti-fascist resistance in Europe while participating in a series of immigration schemes to bring Jews from displaced persons camps over to Canada. It was in this unique moment that the JLC could also launch pioneering human rights and anti-racism campaigns within the labour movement. Representing one section of the organised Jewish community in Canada, the JLC proved a critical part of the transformation of the countrys treatment of refugees and minorities in the following decades.

In the neoliberal academy, professors who disclose any form of impairment risk raising concerns about their fitness to perform their jobs. Academics are expected to deliver highly measurable outcomes from their work in order to build a positive reputation among their peers. But given the negativity that typically characterizes the disability discourse in Western cultures, it is all too easy for the scholarly community to infer that differentness equates to ineptness. Thus, individualist and ableist discourses are central to the discussion of power relations and care of the self in the contemporary academy. The focus of this doctoral thesis is “diversable” professors performing under neoliberal academic regimes. The term “diversability” is used to designate people with disabilities—particularly of an invisible nature—while debunking the fallacious connotation of incompetence habitually attached to their differentness. Combining self-narrative and postmodern-grounded theory, this study derives valuable insights from the stories of 16 professors, both tenured and untenured, who reveal how they navigate disability, as well as the intersecting dimensions of differentness attached to their self-identities. The findings suggest that diversable professors, in spite of an academic environment embedded in disability avoidance—and the usual structural contingencies that can prevent scholars from fully demonstrating their value—can present counter-narratives that include positive constructions of self-identity as good teachers, researchers and advocates for social justice. This research also uncovers inadequacies in the academy itself—but not without a message of hope for remedial change.

This dissertation sits at the intersection of critical international political economy and a decolonizing, anti-racist approach to empirical political science. Specifically, I examine how liberal state forms are presupposed by and premised upon illiberal practices of sorting, policing, and defining populations. Rather than view such practices as anomalous to the modern state form, I view them as productive. I depart from the dominant literature in this field of study (postcolonial theory) with a typical focus on discursive and local practices, and instead advance a defense of Marxism rooted in an examination of the material practices of states responding to global political-economic pressures. This analytical and methodological focus stems from an engagement with the theoretical and empirical work conducted through Political Marxism, and through an engagement with the concept of uneven and combined development. I compare instances of racialized nation-building from the nineteenth century, focusing on the ways in which the creation of racialized hierarchies of belonging were seminal to the production of liberal state capacity and legitimacy. I examine the cases of Canada and Argentina to explore how the dispossession and management of indigenous peoples served to foment vast networks of bureaucratic, fiduciary, and coercive state capacities. Such capacities were necessary in the project of constructing competitive liberal economies to respond to pressures generated by an emergent global market in agricultural goods. This work sheds new light on the role of race and racialization in the formation of the nation-state system, while responding to and contesting common assumptions about the legal equality assumed to underpin Western nationalism(s).

This institutional ethnographic study explores the coordinated processes that organize Black female child protection workers’ (re)construction of their role as carers in the Ontario child protection system. This examination occurs within the backdrop of colonialism and shifting and unequal power relations in Canada. Absent from social work research is an understanding of the complex sequences of actions in every day child protection activities that authorize colonial ideologies and practices and the impact of Black female child protection workers’ negotiation of this context on their well-being. This study’s informant sample includes 9 Black female child protection workers currently employed at a child protection institution in Ontario. Data was collected from semi-structured interviews and textual analysis. The findings revealed colonialism in the child protection system is maintained through institutional patterns of exclusion and acts of dissimulation in the institutional discourse and practice. In response, Black female child protection workers resist colonial practices through their injection of acts of caring into their work. At the same time, their constant experiences of structural violence lead to institutional trauma. This research highlights a contradiction within the social work framework; the overt espousal of human rights and social justice as ethical priorities, while covertly maintaining colonialism in the child protection system, specifically towards Black female child protection workers and their communities. The findings advance social work knowledge by offering a way to identify the existence and the impact of the colonial context on Black female child protection workers as well as map out the sequences of actions or inactions that embed colonial ideologies and practices in the child protection system.

Thousands of Russian anarchist immigrants, organized by the Union of Russian Workers (URW), took part in a surging union movement and strike wave that broke out across North America in the 1910s. However, they have received scant attention from historians, and no account of the URW exists. My dissertation fills in this gap by detailing the activity of the URW against the background of the rising labor movement, and it considers the question of anarchism's relationship to the working class. Historians have traditionally situated anarchism outside of the labor movement, yet the Russian anarchists in North America joined both radical and mainstream unions, and URW leaders recruited migrants explicitly by appealing to their class interests as foreign workers exploited by American capitalism. The study highlights the anarchists’ involvement in labor organizing, and it centers their perspectives to help narrate a history of the period. It first traces a history of the international anarchist movement along with migration patterns to North America in order to contextualize the research and shed light on the origins of the URW and why their story matters. Utilizing anarchist publications, local English-language newspapers, government surveillance files, and archival materials, the study finds that URW members made a wide array of contributions to the emerging industrial union movement in the United States and developed a critique of American capitalism that ranged beyond the immediate strikes. It argues that alongside the Industrial Workers of the World, the URW helped to push labor to the left and prepare the ground for the rise of major industrial unions with socialist leanings in the 1930s. Simultaneously, the study shows how the URW harnessed its strength in North America to make substantial material contributions to the anarchist movement in Russia, in the lead up to the 1917 revolution, while developing an anti-Bolshevik critique also echoed by subsequent movements on the left. By locating Russian anarchism and the URW in the labor movement, this study challenges historiographical claims which deny anarchism's working-class character. Thus, it contributes to a growing body of newer research which finds the anarchist movement rooted in labor and working-class organizing.

The tooling of theatrical spectacle requires collaboration between stagecraft technicians and designers in an increasingly globalized and standardized manufacturing process. While hand skills are still used and remain useful, digital fabrication and other tools are now incorporated in labour processes in scenery manufacturing workshops, altering collaborative work in complex ways. This thesis is an inquiry into the epistemological role of software and digital fabrication tools in stagecraft practices and explores how the politics of craft labour intersect with material practices in media production labour. The technical aspects of the fabrication of theatrical spectacles and display environments, the way objects are used to think, and the ways tools mediate practices suggest how tacit knowledge is produced and reproduced in scenery manufacturing workshops that build theatrical sets and corporate display environments. The articles in this thesis draw from case study research of a community of craft technicians who work in the industry of theatrical display in southern Ontario, Canada. Each of the four articles focuses on different facets of this case study. The technician’s work in labour processes in scenery workshops is compared to repair and bricolage. Autonomy or self-determination over tasks in the workshop sites is explored in its material and embodied sense. The collaboration between the designer and scenic artist is mediated with digital media and this complicates established occupational roles. A case of collective organizing exemplifies the individualistic/collective dichotomy of craft labour. Using an inductive approach, the empirical research for this community case study was accomplished with participant observation and semistructured interviewing. My analysis of interview transcripts and interpretation of field data utilizes an autoethnographic methodology to reflect on and draw from my past work experience in theatre production labour as a builder and scenic artist. In this integrated article thesis, I consider how material practices constitute culture in media production labour.

Embracing a spatial and historical lens and the insights of critical legal theory, this dissertation maps the patterns of protest and the law in modern British Columbia―the social relations of adjudication—the changing ways in which conflict between private property rights and customary rights invoked by social movement actors has been contested and adjudicated in public spaces and legal arenas. From labour strikes in the Vancouver Island coal mines a century ago, to more recent protests by First Nations, environmentalists, pro- and anti-abortion activists, and urban “poor peoples’” movements, social movement actors have asserted customary rights to property through the control or appropriation of space. Owners and managers of property have responded by enlisting an array of legal remedies and an army of legal actors—lawyers, judges, police, parliaments, and soldiers—to restore control over space and assert private property rights. For most of the past century, conventional private property claims trumped the customary claims of social movements in the legal arena, provoking crises of legal legitimacy where social movement actors questioned the impartiality of judges and the fairness of adjudicative procedures. Remedies and legal technologies asserted by company lawyers, awarded by judges, and enforced by police and soldiers were often severe―from Criminal Code proscriptions against riotous assembly and deployment of military force, to the equitable remedy of the injunction and lengthy prison sentences following criminal contempt proceedings. But this pattern shows signs of change in recent years, driven by three major trends in British Columbia and Canadian law: (1) the effective assertion of indigenous customary rights; (2) growing recognition of the importance of human rights in democratic societies, particularly in the context of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and (3) changes in the composition of the legal profession and judiciary. This changing legal landscape has created a new and evolving legal space, where property claims are increasingly treated as contingent rather than absolute and where the rights of one party are increasingly balanced by customary rights, interests, and aspirations of others. Consequently, we are seeing a trend toward the dilution of legal remedies traditionally available to the powerful, creating space for the assertion of non-conventional property claims and the emergence of new patterns of power relations.

Some studies have shown strong support for positive outcomes related to flexible work arrangements such as improved performance and productivity (Bloom, Liang, Roberts, Ying, 2015; Laschinger, Finegan, Shamian, Wilk, 2001; Laschinger, Leiter, Day, Gilin, 2009), while others have found detrimental effects including negative impacts on managing and separating work, life, and family demands (Cohen Single, 2001; Yuile, Chang, Gudmundsson, Sawang 2012). The typical approach to studying flexible work arrangements is to examine outcomes at the individual level among employees, assessing the relationship with performance and work-life, or work-family balance. This study examined the relationship between flexible work arrangements and job attitudes and work-life balance, simultaneously at both the individual and organizational unit level of analysis in the Federal public sector in Canada. The data is from responses captured five times over the span of 12 years within the public-sector workforce. The findings provide further contributions to the body of research on the job demands-resources model (Bakker Demrouti, 2007) and support the idea that some types of flexible work arrangements are positively related to work-life balance and job satisfaction, while also being positively mediated by structural empowerment of employees. These findings hold both at the individual and organizational level. Certain flexible work arrangements, namely flextime and telework, show consistent and positive relationships with work-life balance at both the individual and organizational unit level. Compressed work weeks, and income averaging, however, show signs of negative relationships and require further study. A critical finding of this study is that empowerment consistently fosters improved work-life balance and job satisfaction, providing strong evidence for practitioners to prioritize employee structural empowerment as part of strategic human resource plans.

This thesis aims to increase understanding of the association of underemployment (unemployment or overqualification) to mental health inequities between immigrant and Canadian-born labour force participants. The first paper provides a theoretical framework to guide design, analyses and interpretation of findings for this thesis, and future research on social determinants of mental health inequities. The second paper uses the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) Cycle 1.2 to assess the construct validity of self-rated mental health (SRMH) for the overall population, and sub-groups by immigrant status and sex. Positive associations between SRMH and a comprehensive array of mental morbidity measures were large and consistent, but a sizeable percentage of respondents with mental morbidity did not rate their mental health as fair/poor. SRMH is useful for assessing social determinants of inequities in general mental health, but not specific mental health morbidities. The third paper uses CCHS Cycle 2.1 (2003) to examine the association of underemployment to fair/poor self-rated mental health (SRMH) in: 1. labour force participants (18-64 yrs) in Canada, and 2. between a. immigrants vs. Canadian-born labour force participants, and b. recent immigrant (< 10 years in Canada) vs. long-term immigrant (³ 10 years in Canada) labour force participants. Underemployment was positively associated with fair/poor SRMH for labour force participants. There was a significant positive association of overqualification to fair/poor SRMH for immigrant (AOR 1.63), but not for Canadian-born labour force participants (AOR 1.03), and differences between the groups were significant (p<0.05). Unemployment had a higher magnitude of association (AOR 3.41) than overqualification (AOR 1.52) to fair/poor SRMH for long-term immigrants, while overqualification had a higher magnitude of association (AOR 2.04) than unemployment (AOR 1.15) to fair/poor SRMH for recent immigrants arriving between 1993-2003. For recent immigrants, the associations of unemployment and overqualification to fair/poor SRMH were not statistically significant (p<0.05). Though differences between groups did not achieve statistical significance (p<0.05), differences may have practical importance....

From 1995 to 1998, Ontario was the site of a sustained political and industrial conflict between the provincial government of Premier Mike Harris and a loosely-coordinated protest movement of labour unions, community organizations, and activist groups. The struggle was aimed at the defeating the “Common Sense Revolution,” a sweeping neoliberal program advanced by the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. The program designed to renovate the state, rationalize the social safety net, repeal barriers to capital accumulation, and decisively weaken the strength of organized labour. What became a union-led extra-parliamentary opposition drew in large sections of the population often aligned with a political culture of statist collectivism encompassing both social democracy and “Red Toryism”. The movement emerged at a time when the two major parties aligned with such ideas embraced neoliberal policies. Under the leadership of Mike Harris, the Red Tories were pushed out of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the one-term New Democratic government of 1990-95 made a decisive turn towards neoliberal austerity amidst a catastrophic recession, declining federal transfers, and employer hostility. Through the union-led “Days of Action” of large political strikes, mass demonstrations, and numerous militant protests, the implementation of the Common Sense Revolution was slowed and weakened and the government’s popularity greatly diminished. However, the province’s union leadership was deeply divided over loyalties to the New Democratic Party following its turn to neoliberal austerity. One union leadership faction opposed the Days of Action while the other proved unwilling to escalate the scale of industrial disruption against the Common Sense Revolution. The crisis led to an open factional dispute within organized labour that culminated in the formal suspension of the political strikes in the summer of 1998. The outcome was an unprecedented political defeat for the labour-led forces defending an expansive redistributive welfare state, and a retreat by organized labour from extra-parliamentary political strategies in favour of electoralism. The government managed to regain support before winning re-election in 1999. The end of the Days of Action marked the political triumph of neoliberal restructuring and permanent austerity, and the crafting of a new political and economic common sense that has endured in Ontario to this day.

Ce mémoire porte sur l’immigration au Québec en comparant le point de vue des principales organisations représentant le monde patronal et le monde syndical de l965 à 1995. Les instances étudiées sont, du côté patronal : le Conseil du patronat du Québec (CPQ) et la Chambre de commerce du district de Montréal (CCDM). Du côté syndical, nous analysons le discours des principales centrales, soit la Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), la Fédération des travailleurs du Québec (FTQ) et la Centrale de l’enseignement du Québec (CEQ). Avec l'augmentation constante du nombre d'immigrants et la diversification de leurs origines, la période étudiée se caractérise par la volonté du gouvernement québécois de prendre en charge les politiques d’immigration et d’intégration des immigrants à la société québécoise. Désireux d'intervenir conjointement avec le gouvernement fédéral, il crée, en 1968, un ministère de l'Immigration. Tout au long de la période étudiée, des négociations entre les deux paliers de gouvernement se traduisent par des ententes qui définissent la marge de manoeuvre de l'État québécois et guident ses actions en matière d'immigration et d'intégration. Au cours des années 1980, l'État québécois se dote d'une politique d'intégration et d'encadrement des immigrants qu’il qualifie d’interculturalisme, destinée à promouvoir la reconnaissance de la pluralité ethnoculturelle et l'adhésion de tous les citoyens à la langue française. En participant aux consultations publiques du gouvernement et en présentant des réclamations, les organisations patronales et syndicales tentent d'influencer les politiques d'immigration. Chaque instance développe une manière particulière d’analyser les questions liées à l’immigration. Dans une large mesure, leurs discours se rejoignent sur l’idée que le gouvernement du Québec prenne en charge le domaine de l’immigration et sur l’apport bénéfique des immigrants pour la société québécoise. Bien souvent cependant, elles s’opposent sur les normes de sélection et sur la manière de mettre en application les politiques d’immigration.

Notre thèse porte sur l' histoire du militantisme en faveur des droits humains au Québec, de la fm de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale aux premières années de la Révolution tranquille. Elle s'appuie sur une analyse comparative des discours et des revendications portés par quatre organisations issues du mouvement syndical (la Fédération des travailleurs du Québec et la Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada), de la communauté juive (le Congrès juif canadien) et du mouvement étudiant francophone montréalais (l'Association générale des étudiants de l' Université de Montréal). À travers ces quatre études de cas, nous mettons en lumière le rôle déterminant des organisations non gouvernementales et des groupes et individus victimes d'atteintes à leurs droits dans les processus de réappropriation, d'internalisation et de diffusion des idéaux des droits humains à l'échelle locale et nationale. En exposant les similitudes et les spécificités des trajectoires de ces organisations, de même que l'étendue de leurs réseaux d'alliances, nous démontrons que le discours des droits humains s'est érigé comme un important instrument de mobilisation, de contestation et de changement social pour les principaux groupes et mouvements sociaux actifs au Québec dans les deux décennies suivant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Fondée sur une approche multiscalaire, notre recherche porte une attention particulière aux réseaux transnationaux dans lesquels s' inscrivent les acteurs que nous étudions et aux enjeux internationaux qui influencent leur combat pour la reconnaissance de droits humains à l' échelle locale, nationale, régionale et mondiale. À partir de cette dialectique globale-locale, nous démontrons l'impact déterminant du mouvement international des droits humains sur l'évolution des débats qui agitent la société québécoise, mais aussi le rôle structurant du contexte local, marqué par le passage de la période dite de la « Grande noirceur» à celle de la Révolution tranquille au Québec. Sur le plan théorique, notre étude explore la manière dont les identités et les rapports de pouvoirs ethniques, de classe, d'âge et de genre contribuent à orienter les discours, les revendications et les stratégies des militants qui se revendiquent de l'idéal universaliste des droits humains. En nous inspirant des approches discursive, délibérative et socioconstructiviste, nous montrons que ces droits ne constituent pas un idéal abstrait et universel qui serait par essence désintéressé. Ils apparaissent en effet, sur le plan empirique, comme une catégorie discursive socialement construite et historiquement contingente, qui peut être mobilisée, négociée ou contestée par les acteurs sociaux en fonction de leurs idéologies, de leurs intérêts, de leurs stratégies et de leurs propres conceptions du juste et de l'injuste. Enfm, en envisageant ces droits dans leur dimension formelle (les normes établies par l' État, le droit et la loi) et identitaire (la reconnaissance d' identités sociales et citoyennes), nous mettons en lumière la dialectique entre universalisme et particularisme qui est à l'oeuvre dans l'universalisationconcrète de l' idéal des droits humains.

In this dissertation, I outline a history of the labour union organizing efforts of journalists at the Thomson Newspapers chain in Canada from 1963 to 1995. Such organizing efforts provide an entry point into examining control over employment conditions in the newspaper industry. To undertake this study, I develop an analytical framework that I call a “labour union standpoint to news organizations” and a “labour union standpoint methodology.” I conduct a historical and labour union standpoint analysis of nine labour organizing campaigns, situating them within their broader political, economic, and social-historical contexts. I draw on union archival documents, newspaper content, corporate and government documents, and a critical review of the published body of literature. Between 1963 and 1995, Thomson adopted a long-term strategy of vertical growth, expanding from radio broadcasting and newspapers into other media. The corporation also adopted a strategy of horizontal growth, building a newspaper chain through acquisitions, and typically obtained a monopoly or oligopoly in the markets in which it operated. Thomson consistently had double-digit profit margins and was among the “big three” newspaper chains in Canada with regard to number of daily newspapers owned, share of total daily newspaper circulation, or share of total revenues. In response, Thomson journalists organized labour unions to protect their employment conditions. Accordingly, I consider the labour organizing tactics that journalists’ unions adopted to “bite back” at the corporation and the communication tools that they used to facilitate those tactics.My analysis reveals that journalists’ unions contested and negotiated control over employment conditions within news organizations. The outcomes of union organizing efforts were contingent upon the local circumstances of the journalists, unions, and management at a particular newspaper within the chain. While journalists’ union organizing campaigns were sometimes unsuccessful, journalists were more successful when they focused on building bridges with community members rather than developing communication tools such as strike newspapers. Some journalists’ unions challenged the established social relations and advanced social transformation by mobilizing massive community support, connecting their workplace struggles to broader social issues, and creating publicity campaigns to communicate these struggles to the public.

Over the past decade in Canada, student work has become a topic of public criticism, legal action, academic research, and labour activism. Cultural industry employers’ use of unpaid, low-paid, and flexibilized labour in the form of internships and other kinds of ‘work experience’ raises questions about the future of work in already precarious fields such as news production, advertising, television, and film. Against the backdrop of neoliberal processes still shaping universities and labour markets, the student worker emerges as a strategic figure in the contested politics of cultural work. This thesis offers a theoretical and empirical investigation of the dominant discourse and counter-discourse through which work experience is constructed, legitimized, critiqued, and re-visioned. Drawing on autonomist Marxist theory, critical philosophies of education, and feminist political economy, I situate cultural work experience as a discursive site where struggles over knowledge production and labour rights become visible and urgent.

Models of reference dependence have improved the connection between economic theory and documented labour supply behaviour. In particular, the Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007, 2009) [hereafter "KR"] theory of expectation based reference dependent preferences appears to be a disciplined way to unify the conflicting wage elasticity estimates, and recent laboratory and natural experiments suggest this theory may work in practice as well. I take this theory to the field in a pair of laboratory-like experiments designed to test if expectations determine the effort of a group of impoverished individuals involved in piece-rate work in Northeast Brazil. I use Abeler, Falk, Goette, and Huffman's (2011) experimental mechanism, which is a clear test of KR preferences in effort provision, in two experiments: first to test if rational expectations act as a reference point that influences effort, and second to test if adaptive expectations act as a reference point that influences effort. In both experiments, I find that although people do not behave in accordance with KR preferences, they do not behave as though they make their decisions following canonical lines either. I then outline a speculative rationale for the observed behaviour in these experiments—the adaptive heuristic of regret matching—where workers are able to evaluate their ex-post feelings of regret, even if they do not know the source of those feelings, to optimize behaviour going forward.

In this dissertation, I explore several social economic topics, including health, labour, and the environment. Although the chapters of this dissertation explore diverse subjects, the overall theme is to analyze important social issues and their policy implications. I made use of a variety of rich datasets, as well as employing various econometric analyses, often supported by a theoretical model, to examine the research topics identified in each chapter. In Chapter 1, I explore a 1997 policy change, which altered eligibility requirements for Disability Insurance (DI). While DI in Canada provides income support to millions, it has also been criticized for creating a disincentive for labour force participation. The 1997 change affected some Canadians, but not others, creating a natural experiment setting in which to explore this policy. I found that, following the tightening of eligibility requirements, relative labour force participation for women did increase, but their level of employment did not. There was little effect for men. This distinction between labour force participation and employment is a crucial one in this context: it indicates that what may appear to be individuals returning to work after not being eligible for DI may instead be individuals returning to the labour force, but unable to find suitable employment. In Chapter 2, I examine whether searching for health information on the internet acts as a complement or substitute for the demand for information from physicians (proxied by physician visits). I found that the effect on physician-based information hinged on an individuals prior trust in the formal medical sector: those with high prior trust tended to use health information searching on the internet as a complement for physician visits, whereas, those with low prior trust substituted away from physician visits in favour of information found online. The results were very similar when a telehealth program was examined instead of internet-based information. Further, those who were online health information searchers also tended to be more likely to use a telehealth program. This is a reassuring result, as it may mean that those who substituted out of the formal medical sector, in favour of health online information, may also be using the more quality-controlled telehealth programs. In Chapter 3, I explore how attitudes towards the environment affect behaviours in five key areas of environmental-related household consumption: waste generation and recycling, energy use, organic food consumption, personal transport, and water use. Prior studies have not examined these areas together, often due to data restrictions, and not in the context of environmental attitudes. Using a modelling procedure that allows for the errors in these five areas to be correlated, I found that attitudes were often a more significant predictor of ones behaviour than the financially driven policy implemented in the area.

Focusing on the Eastern Townships area of Quebec, this dissertation attends to the complex values that can be assigned to landscape as visual representation, and to landscape as place. The case-studies, beginning at the turn of the 20th-century, consider landscape in relation to a broad network of social relations and cultural meanings. Section I of the thesis starts by examining paintings and illustrations of loggers by F.S. Coburn as a way to address the logging industry in the Eastern Townships, and to consider the presence or absence of labour in landscape representation. Section II concentrates on early 20th-century postcards of towns, sites of leisure and asbestos mines in the region. I approach these postcards as modern material agents that articulate the everydayness of landscape and place through their imagery, as well as through their usage. Section III comes up to the present day through a discussion of an eco-park in Magog that negotiates the tension between ecological activism and eco-tourism, as the Eastern Townships struggles to achieve a post-industrial identity. Organized into three chronological and overlapping sections that span 115 years of one region's history, the thesis develops an approach to landscape that is both art-historical and interdisciplinary. This study builds on recent scholarship within Canadian art history that challenges the association of landscape art with a myth about the country’s uninhabited wilderness; the region's landscapes studied here are inhabited, and imbued with rural, industrial and bilingual histories. The visual culture methodology deployed here means that canonical modes of artistic landscape representations are addressed relative to landscape images circulating on postcards, newspaper and book illustrations, documentary photographs, a labour recruitment booklet and an ecopark's website for example. The theoretical and scholarly foundation of this thesis has been constructed by drawing on discussions of landscape by art historians, but also by sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and philosophers. It is this interdisciplinary breadth that allows landscapes to be regarded as sites of everyday human interactions, that inevitably intersect with collective, commercial and political motives, and with cultural ideals, interests, and values. The writings of Henri Lefebvre on the value of the everyday have been important for this thesis, as has his critique of capitalist practices of labour and leisure. Another key author is Félix Guattari who was also highly critical of capitalism, while turning his attention to the state of the world's post-industrial ecology. Likewise, this thesis calls attention to the role of capitalist initiatives in the production of everyday landscapes. This analysis of diverse landscape images is meant to shed light on the Eastern Townships' complex identity as it transitions from a former industrial modern era to its current post-industrial phase. This thesis asks what the term landscape has come to imply measured against social tensions relating to class differences, or economic and environmental imperatives, and how its range of meanings can encompass territory, property, picture, place, and environment.

In the early twentieth-century, the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) initially hesitated to discuss the politics of reproduction as a means of easing material inequity for women and men of the working class. Nevertheless, over five decades, this topic appeared often in the CPCs official and unofficial publications, illustrating a sustained interest in the taboo subject. My thesis draws upon archival materials, communist and mainstream newspapers, and medical periodicals to survey contemporary opinions of birth control, abortion, eugenics, juvenile delinquency, venereal disease, and state medicine. Using the lens of left-politics, these topics are contextualized with reference to the extant literature on the histories of politics, sex, reproduction, labour, and medicine in Canada and beyond. Far from being confined to a few secretive individuals, the militant left engaged a dense network of activists who took stock of the social as well as physical reproduction of the nation. Often their interests appeared indistinguishable from the mainstream, and occasionally overlapped with those of their right-leaning opponents. The CPC unfailingly argued for an understanding of sex and reproduction that reflected its Marxist worldview. Some multi-generational discussions were so durable that they would outlast and outgrow the militant left to emerge within the rhetoric of a multitude of Canadian liberation groups by the late sixties and early seventies. I argue that investigation of the politics underwriting the ideas of the CPC and its ideology of a healthy, socialized body politic, elucidates complexities in the formation of mainstream Canadian approaches to sex, reproduction, and health.

This dissertation explores the nature of workers’ self-activity during World War II and the ensuing responses to these actions by the state and capital. A close examination of wartime strikes demonstrates that top-down efforts by unions to operate within normative industrial relations were generally failures. Far more likely to be effective were democratic strikes, generally illegal, called from the shopfloor. The Workers’ War further illustrates that while the government passed incredibly coercive legislation to control labour, such legislation failed to have a significant impact. Even where it was most influential and targeted it was eventually beaten through direct action. Even Japanese Canadian forced labour in work camps with armed guards, undertook effective strikes. Largely interested in institutional and legislative changes, the unions, far from being a militant force, spent much of their energy trying to stop or curtail strikes. This thesis contends that the concretion of industrial legality in Canada was imposed to control effective action. Rather than breaking unions of their militancy, the dearth of a state terror apparatus necessitated the creation of compulsory bargaining legislation. First, it argues that the creation of the modern industrial relations regime that forms the foundation for modern labour law was the result of effective workers’ action rather than militant unions. It further shows that the repressive apparatus of the state was unable to control workers, necessitating a structural adjustment. In a larger sense, this thesis argues that this story is at the centre of the history of capitalism in Canada. The imposition of capitalist social relations on the geographies that become Canada had the transformation of land into capital via labour at the very core of its project. Controlling labour was a central concern, and the manner in which labour relations were consolidated was a reflection of a negotiation between labour, capital, and state- a manifestly unequal negotiation that largely failed to reflect the interests of workers.

In recent years K-12 school systems from New York to Mexico City to Toronto, serving vastly divergent students and communities, have been subject to strikingly similar waves of neoliberal policies by governments. A key manifestation has been the de-professionalization or deskilling of teachers. Organized labours response has been highly uneven geographically. Professional autonomy means a capacity and freedom of teachers to exercise their judgement in interpreting broad curriculum guidelines, into their day to day classroom activities. It is the primary obstacle to the further neoliberalization of education. The expansion of standardized instructional and evaluative techniques and technologies are necessary for opening new markets within schools and for weakening the collective power of teachers and their unions. Their proponents are limited by the existence of the classroom as a space of labour autonomy, run by experienced and highly educated teachers. Recognizing the significant crossover of policy at the North American scale alongside significant economic and political linkages, this dissertation centres on case studies in three cities, New York, Mexico City and Toronto. This dissertation assesses challenges to teachers professional autonomy from 2001 to 2016 across five dimensions of comparison. First are changes in governance, namely the centralization of authority, often legitimized by mobilizing policies from elsewhere. Second are policies which have shifted workplace power relations between principals and teachers, as with School Based Management programs that download budgetary, discipline and dismissal practices to school administrators. Third are the effect of standardized testing of students and teachers on the latters capacity to exercise professional judgement in the classroom through designing unique lesson plans, pedagogy and evaluation. Fourth is the creation of school choice for schools competing for enrolment and thereby funding, which has tended to perpetuate class and racial segregation. Finally, the ability of teachers unions to construct a multi scalar strategy is considered, including alliances with parents, communities and other sectors of labour. This dissertation concludes with recommendations for how teachers unions could respond to the challenge to professional autonomy with a stronger engagement on teacher practice and professional self-regulation.