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Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in Vancouver, Canada experience ongoing systematic conditioning processes that are rooted in Philippine colonial history. Utilizing a multi-ethnographic approach and a framework drawn from Berger and Luckmann's concept of institutionalization and Foucault's biopower, I rethink the Filipino labour diaspora and interrogate how empire, labour, and migration, shape Filipino trajectories. Existing scholarship has documented the structural and working conditions of Filipino labour migration; this research contributes by foregrounding how these arrangements between the Philippines and Canada are lived, internalized, and reproduced through the institutionalized subjectivities of the Filipino citizen, the ideal migrant, and the Bagong Bayani (new hero). These subjectivities sustain systemic inequalities, coerce joining the labour diaspora, and render OFWs more vulnerable to exploitation while glorifying their sacrifices as noble contributions to family and nation. I further discuss the agency and resistance of OFWs, who actively reimagine their subjectivities and challenge these neocolonial paradigms.

In 1904, the Qing monarchy announced the Presented Schools Regulation policy, which sought to modernize education in China by introducing a scientific curriculum to complement the classical curriculum rooted in Confucianism. At the same time, ongoing criticism of the ancient Chinese philosophy as the cause of contemporary social woes culminated in the May Fourth and New Culture Movements. As a result, the hold of Confucianism on Chinese society began to weaken over successive generations. Yet, these intellectual developments did not affect the Chinese in British Columbia, who continued to place their faith in Confucianism as an ideology that would bring harmony to society, especially in a society rife with anti-Chinese discrimination. This thesis examines the influence of Confucianism on the Chinese in British Columbia between 1923, the year the Chinese Immigration Act was imposed, and 1960, when Wong Foon Sien, a vocal advocate for Chinese immigration rights, resigned from the presidency of the Chinese Benevolent Association. It examines the extent to which the Chinese adhered to the teachings of Confucianism. On the one hand, the Chinese practised certain customs and continued to shape their relationships in accordance with neo-Confucianism, the same traditions criticized by the intellectuals in China. On the other, their ideals for the future were defined by the original Confucianism preserved in the Analects and Mencius. Throughout these years, the Chinese built schools to pass on traditional values and language, created Chinese Benevolent Associations to protect themselves from discrimination, contributed to the war efforts of China and Canada during the Second World War, and lobbied for fewer immigration restrictions after the repeal of the Immigration Act in 1947. In these endeavours, the Chinese demonstrated Confucian virtues of zhong (loyalty), yi (righteousness), and even ren (benevolence). This thesis elucidates Confucian principles as written in the Analects and Mencius and examines the motivations and actions of the Chinese from 1923 to 1960 through a Confucian framework. The research demonstrates that the values of Confucianism were still relevant to the Chinese who grew up in British Columbia during the first two decades of the twentieth century and continued to guide their actions throughout their lives.

Workplace racial discrimination remains a pervasive and harmful reality with profound implications for health and well-being. Drawing on evidence from three interrelated independent studies using both primary and secondary Canadian data, this research provides a comprehensive understanding of how workplace racial discrimination functions as both a social determinant of health and a chronic stressor contributing to adverse health outcomes and persistent health inequities. The findings demonstrate that workplace racial discrimination, manifesting through inequities in hiring, promotion, retention, and interpersonal interactions, increases the risks of significant psychological, physiological, and physical health outcomes for racialized workers. Experiencing workplace racial discrimination was strongly associated with heightened risks of anxiety, depression, stress and post-traumatic stress disorders, reinforcing mental health disparities across racialized groups. In addition, workplace racial discrimination increased perceptions of work-related stress, which in turn elevated the risk of diagnosed chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, stroke effects and musculoskeletal disorders. Physiological assessments further revealed that recalling racial discrimination experiences contributes to dysregulated cardiovascular reactivity, including elevated systolic and diastolic blood pressure, as well as mean arterial pressure values above the normal range. Particularly severe forms of racial discrimination, implicating job loss, early retirement, undesirable resignation or leaves were linked to greater blood pressure increases. When incidents of racial discrimination were reported, especially when participants received acknowledgment of their experiences, physiological responses were attenuated. These results underscore the importance of personal action, recognition, accountability and institutional action in mitigating health risks. These findings underscore how workplace psychosocial stressors trigger harmful biological and physiological responses that may result in lasting health consequences. Taken together, this research highlights workplace racial discrimination as a critical public health concern that transcends individual experiences and reflects broader organizational inequities. Conceptualizing discrimination as a chronic stressor provides an essential understanding in addressing racial health disparities. The evidence points to the urgent need for organizational reforms, robust anti-discrimination policies, and workplace practices that not only prevent discrimination but also support the mental and physical health of racialized workers. Addressing workplace racism is not solely a matter of social justice; it is a public health imperative with the potential to reduce disparities, promote workplace equity, and improve the overall well-being of diverse populations.

Precarious work is becoming more common globally and the healthcare sector in Ontario, Canada is no exception. Aspects of precarious work such as low wages and job uncertainty have negative influences on work quality. Digital platforms (DPs) introduce the threat of gig work as a form of precarious work. With the growth of precarious gig work and its expansion into healthcare, it is important to understand how platform technology shapes actual work practices and the work-related protections for workers. This dissertation focuses on unregulated personal support workers (PSWs) who use DPs to find work. Specifically, there are two aims of this research: first is to examine the precarious work experiences of women PSWs who seek eldercare work via a DP model in order to understand socio-technical implications of DP; second is to examine the work-related protections that apply to digital platform care workers and how these shape work conditions. Using Institutional Ethnography as a guiding methodology, in 2023 and 2024 in Ontario I conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 PSWs who used DPs to find gig care work; I also interviewed 10 key informants who were in various positions of expertise about gig care work platforms. This included end-users of DPs such as clients and companies. Additionally, I observed workers demonstrating their use of DPs and examined screen shots from DPs. These PSWs face precarious work conditions, with precarity deepened by the technology of DPs. In the three papers comprising this thesis, I cover socio-technical elements of the DP model of care and portray how this form of work makes both workers and clients vulnerable. In the first manuscript, I describe two different models of gig care work platform, (marketplace and on-demand platforms) and explicate how each model is found in a separate sector of healthcare: marketplace models are found only in homecare, and on-demand models are found exclusively in long-term care and hospital organisations hiring workers. In the second manuscript, I describe the risk to hospital and LTC organisations in hiring gig care workers. In the third manuscript, I explore trust as I write about how homecare workers using DPs experience this work and how a couple of clients experience hiring workers. This thesis allowed me to closely examine how platform technology shaped the actual practices of women using DPs and their work circumstances. The primary contribution of this dissertation is revealing day-to-day experiences of gig care workers, filling a gap in the literature on location-based care platforms. The findings of this thesis underscore that DPs increase precarity for already-precarious PSWs. I demonstrate that instead of being neutral technology, DPs introduce a governing text of entrepreneurial self-employment which involves risk for the workers and clients using DPs. Organisations may not have opportunity to properly vet staff, train staff, or insure staff. Private clients gain access to more services when they use DPs, but then they shoulder all the risk when something goes wrong. Overall the DP form of gig care threatens growing precarious work, dodges social security and employment protections, and undermines publicly-provided care employment in Ontario, Canada.

“‘neither boy nor man’: Transnational Trade Identity in Canada’s Typographical Trade Press, 1860-1900” is situated at the intersection of literary, periodical, print historical, and labour studies. Examining the eight printing trade journals produced in central and eastern Canada during the later nineteenth century (Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick), this project contributes a Canadian dimension to extant scholarship on printing trade journals, which has mostly attended to British and American publications. This study of Canadian printers’ trade journals offers important insights for understanding how the Canadian trade was situated as a node within the printing trade’s transnational network. Journeymen hand typesetters working in the Canadian newspaper trade of the later nineteenth century identified various threats to their aristocratic trade identity: apprentices, amateur labourers, and tramp printers; rising literacy rates and the middle-class worker; women; the work of Black, Indigenous, and Chinese compositors; and the introduction of machines in typesetting. Situating these perceived threats within the context of local and transnational/transatlantic histories of printing, I demonstrate how journeymen used narrative, poetry, correspondence, humour, and visual devices as defensive tools to reinforce and protect the trade’s aristocratic labour identity and to associate the work of typesetting with masculinity, skill, superior intelligence, and whiteness. Due to Canada’s position within the British Empire and its proximity to the United States, the exclusionary discourses that Canadian journeymen compositors cultivated and circulated were shaped by both national and transatlantic labour discourses. Further, I argue that these representational strategies were largely misplaced, given that the actual threats of deskilling and technological unemployment resided not with half-trained compositors, women, and other apparent dangers to the trade, but in the structural conditions of print capitalism and of waged labour more generally. The textual and historical analysis of the labour discourses found within Canadian printing trade journals that I present in this dissertation demonstrates that Canadian journeymen were ultimately concerned about what changes to the economic and technological landscape of their trade at the end of the century would mean for their status as men whose identities were intrinsically tied to waged work, skill, and craftsmanship.

As manufacturing spaces deindustrialize, and are reabsorbed into the urban fabric, there is an opportunity to interrogate and reassess our collective relationship with work and material productivity. Under the expanding powers of automation, global capitalism, and new digital technologies, industrial zones experience a collapse of meaning before they are reappraised and reconstituted around immaterial activities. Rather than bringing us closer to work equity, the reappraisal of these spaces often contributes to gentrification, erases difficult labour histories, and perpetuates unsustainable narratives of continuous economic growth. This project takes the residential rezoning of Montreal’s Garment District on Rue Chabanel as a case study of a global manufacturing site in transition, and explore how a new program of housing can act upon the site as an act of hauntological critical heritage, that which reveals ruptures in time and space as the global north shifts towards an immaterial labour hegemony.