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Prior to the COVID–19 outbreak, food insecurity was already a serious public health problem in Canada, impacting 12.7 percent of households. In recent years, activists, practitioners and researchers from a range of health–related disciplines, have debated the legitimacy of food banks and other charitable food programs, contending that policy and programs at the federal level must be prioritized to address the underlying root causes of poverty. This paper challenges the discourse that charitable food programs prevent or distract from Canada's social equity goals. Alternatively, this paper argues that programs and initiatives at the local level can emerge to bring short–term stability and self–sufficiency to local communities while also advocating for longer–term structural change. Drawing upon structuration theory and critical ecologies of anti–Black racism, we examine the work of BlackFoodToronto, a food sovereignty initiative, to illustrate the negotiation of power and agency, and how groups and networks react to and reshape confining and enabling structures through collaborative practice. In addressing Canada's food security crisis, this paper offers an alternative perspective of community–based, nonprofit and charitable programs, which in practice, can help inform future food security policy and related health equity and community development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing processing times for immigration applications, increasing numbers of people admitted on temporary visas, and delays processing refugee claims mean that more newcomers spend longer periods of time living in Canada with precarious immigration status. This paper uses qualitative research to examine how people with precarious immigration status exercise agency in the face of restrictions to their rights and risk of deportability, as well as the extent to which agency is able to transform people's everyday realities. The research shows that regimes of immigration control construct people with precarious immigration status as un-belonging and undesirable as members of Canadian society. The research identifies two ways that research participants exert autonomy over their lives: persistent presence and critiquing their construction as un-belonging and undesirable. Both forms of agency involve the creation of counterpublics to build networks for practical support and recognition of the legitimacy of their presence in Canada. While agency made it easier for participants to sustain themselves, the research shows that participants internalized discourses hostile to people with precarious immigration status, suggesting that agency is both necessary but also limited in its capacity to mitigate the harm caused by the construction of them as un-belonging and undesirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of new industries that are not closely related to existing regional paths remains an underexplained process in evolutionary economic geography. This paper responds to this gap through a case study of a maturing ecosystem of activity related to artificial intelligence in Montreal, Canada. Conceptually it brings together recent thinking in economic geography about agency in path development with complementary concepts from the literature on technological innovation systems. The empirical findings demonstrate the role of multiple agents in system-building and legitimation activities that have varied across pre-formative and formative phases of new path development in this analytical knowledge field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose This paper sets out to understand how immigrants to Canada (specifically Hong Kong immigrants) deal with competing senses of their situation in deciding how or whether to adjust to their new environment. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the “in-between state” of mind where individuals try to manage competing senses of their experiences in Canada.Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on critical sensemaking (CSM) in the study of the micro-processes of identity work at play among a group of 19 Hong Kong Chinese skilled immigrants to Canada.Findings The study’s findings indicate that immigrant experiences are often filtered through the competing sensemaking of the immigrants themselves and those of the so-called “host” community. As the study of Hong Kong immigrants suggests, this can lead to confused and compromised experiences of being an immigrant in the Canadian context.Research limitations/implications The study was confined to immigrants to Canada from Hong Kong. Further study of different immigrant groups may throw light on the extent to which competing sensemaking is related to cultural differences that affect not only the distance in understanding but the management of that distance.Practical implications The paper contributes to the diversity management literature and practice through understanding immigrants’ identity construction and its oscillations, influences, and restrictions as agency in context.Social implications The paper helps diversity managers, policy makers, and social activists to understand the role of sensemaking when providing social and structural support in workplace contexts.Originality/value The study reveals the importance of sensemaking in the experiences of immigrants to Canada. In particular, it broadens knowledge of the problems of adjusting to a new (national) environment from structural constraints to micro-processes of making sense. In the process, the study of the management of competing senses of an environment contributes to the development of CSM with the focus on, what we call, the state of in-betweeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Political Science Review is the property of Canadian Political Science Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines changing migrant attitudes towards marriage practices among South Asians Canadians. Based on the responses of 64 first and second-generation immigrants to Canada from the state of Kerala, India, the paper provides an examination of the social forces which challenge, reinterpret, transform, and reject cultural practices. Migration narratives speak of the ways in with both first and second generations actively engage in the making of migrant identities. The findings point to migrant agency and consciousness in challenging patriarchal structures and transforming practices which are perceived by respondents as oppressive and exploitative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how arborists negotiate their work environment, including the pressures of policies, the labour market, technologies, government regulations and lack thereof, and the non-human agencies with which they are confronted. The political climate surrounding urban forestry in Southern Ontario influences and governs operations and physical labour. There are many (f)actors and conditions (both external and internal) surrounding fieldwork in urban forestry and that these affect work and personal lives. The questions guiding this paper include: (a) How do various political and labour conditions impact arborists’ sense of pride, independence and skill? ; (b) What are the social and labour divisions within the culture of arboriculture? ; and (c) What is the lived experience of urban forest workers, their employment, and what is it like to be a frontline worker ? This paper provides a closer look at licensing, work conditions, subcultures and social dynamics in urban arboriculture. Using accounts from semi-structured interviews with arborists across Southern Ontario and by examining field arborists’ activities, relationships with co-workers and working conditions through participant observation and ethnographic field notes, I explore and reveal how arborists feel about their working environment and the labour processes and people who oversee and surround them. Findings reveal that despite dehumanizing (f)actors within the field, there are elements of resistance and negotiation, and potential for an alternative future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the notion of human agency in the context of women experiencing a chronic illness. Based on two qualitative studies conducted with Canadian women of Chinese- and Anglo-descent living with diabetes, we unmask the complex power relations inherent in patient–practitioner interactions, and problematize the privileging of healthcare providers as knowers and experts on the patient’s body. Specifically, we analyse the meanings that women ascribe to their illness experience. We discuss how women experience the loss of agency in healthcare encounters, how they resist patienthood by reclaiming agency, and how healthcare providers foster agency in their interactions with women. Rather than suggesting that biomedical experts should be ‘written out’, we propose to rewrite healthcare providers as ‘reflexive practitioners’ through the construction of transformative knowledge. We argue that praxis-oriented practice, which is based on transformative knowledge, will provide the space for women and healthcare providers to enter into a new dialogue and a relation in which women can sustain a sense of self, and begin the journey of healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines legal discourses on precarious status children in Canada over the last decade. Drawing on different theoretical frameworks and taking into account laws and court decisions, the paper will examine the way in which precarious status children are regarded as powerless subjects in need of protection and as threatening others. The article argues that these two apparently contrasting discourses are embedded within specific socio-historical constructions of childhood and children's citizenship which deny and limit their agency and conceive of their claim to membership as illegitimate. In the case of precarious status children, illegality and citizenship need to be redefined in a developmental perspective, questioning the potential risks associated with prevalent moral and social assumptions on childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to current debates around neoliberalism and subnational developments in Canadian immigration policy. In response to critiques of neoliberalism's 'promiscuity,' scalar and governmentality frameworks are used to analyze Nova Scotia's failed economic nominee category experiment. The competing choices, calculations, and commitments at stake at 'meso'- and 'micro'-scales reveal a more complex and compelling reality that underscores the contributions and challenges of a range of political actors. This, in turn, suggests possible disruptions to neoliberalization and seeks to strike a better balance between structure and agency, as well as economic and social immigration priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the inaugural landscape study of the sponsorship industry in Canada. As the literature on sponsorship expands and practitioner interest grows, the time was right for such a study. A detailed methodology and ambitious data collection plan were implemented to acquire a representative sample of sponsors, sponsees and agencies from across Canada. The results outline the key aspects of sponsorship in Canada -- its size, its growth and its important metrics -- as well as noting the spending patterns of sponsors, the revenue-generation successes of sponsees and the billing amounts of agencies. Industry size, leveraging/activation ratios and spending growth were calculated. Benefits for future research and managerial implications for practitioners were outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mediation is a widely used form of third-party conflict management for which research has primarily focused on the role of mediators. But how are the relations between disputing parties constituted in communication involving written texts, such as official letters or medical reports, during mediation sessions? To gain deeper insight into the communicative dynamics through which third-party disputes are created, sustained, and resolved, this article proposes a new theoretical perspective on mediation that illuminates how human beings and written texts can act as vectors for each other, i.e., how they can make important differences in mediation sessions because they carry or convey what someone or something else is saying, doing, thinking, or feeling and, thus, contribute to composing the nature of disputants' relations. The value of this vectorial perspective on mediation is subsequently demonstrated through an inductive analysis of video-recorded sessions that took place at an administrative tribunal in Canada. By showing how texts (or their absence) can act as (1) conjunctive vectors that contribute to highlighting disputants' compatibilities and help them find common ground, or (2) disjunctive vectors that contribute to highlighting their incompatibilities and obstruct their dispute resolution, this article advances the academic and professional literature on the role of communication in conflict mediation work, and reveals significant implications for the study and practice of conflict management in organizations as well as scholarship on relational ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Political Science Review is the property of Canadian Political Science Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article focuses on young adults who travel to work and live in the Rocky Mountain resort destination of Banff National Park in western Canada. This is usually an early work experience in the lives of these young workers, often their first. I discuss the patterns and the impact of the work mobility of young adult tourism workers using three different frames of understanding: (a) the precarious employment associated with the tourism industry itself; (b) the specific place and community of Banff and how it shapes particular conditions of precarity and agency within the tourism industry and for young tourism workers' experiences; and (c) the young adult tourism workers themselves -- their motives for work and travel, their experiences of work, and their agency in navigating the tourism industry in Banff. Using these three frames, I examine the impact of precarity and agency on the transfer of work knowledge, on the sustainability of the tourism industry work and the community, and on the young adult tourism workers' future work experiences. It is critical to examine work precarity, worker agency, and job and community sustainability in order to understand more fully the experiences of mobility of young adult tourism workers, and their early work experiences. This is all the more important as, in a climate of economic change and restructuring, young adult workers are becoming central to the consideration of employment policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debates on masculinities and their use of 'forgetting' as agency by examining how Black Jamaican farmworkers transform and adapt themselves to survive the layers of oppression experienced in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). This is set against the understanding that Jamaican migrant farmworkers have long internalized some of the dominant narratives of masculinity in terms of being the main source of economic provision and head of the home, which serves as major reference points in their negotiations and performance of masculinity. But there is a marked suppression of dominant patriarchal tenets, which sees the farmworkers 'transgressing' gender expectations/practices in the process of social reproduction. Therefore, the transnational spatial (re)arrangement in which the farmworkers find themselves challenges the hetero-normative logic in which they have supposedly been socialized in Jamaica and the institution of patriarchy that informs their masculinity. I find that the process of 'forgetting' utilized by migrant workers influences and informs the performances and representations of gender in the SAWP, marked by the suspension of specific masculinities at least while workers are in Canada. Unlike other studies which focus on farmworkers experience of the present, the research population is made up of Jamaicans migrant workers – now living in Jamaica – with previous SAWP experience in Ontario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over the scope of the Canadian military's contribution to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali evolved from the ambitious promise of ground troops to the deployment of narrow support to the mission. This article examines how the strategic use of childhood in political persuasion shaped security discourse and the nature of the Canadian contribution to United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali. This article analyzes political and media genres of discourse to examine mechanisms which (re)constructed, legitimized, and constituted childhoods during the debate on the Canadian peacekeeping deployment to Mali. Looking through the lens of critical discursive analysis, the article demonstrates the policy implications of rendering children as, what Marshall Beier defined, "security anxieties." Representing children as potential security threats to the Canadian Armed Forces reveals their agency; it also, however, ignores the multiple, fluid roles of children in areas of conflict. This reductionist type of agency calls for correction on behalf of policy actors, furthering the objectification of children as a political problem. Examining how childhood is employed in influencing the debate about the use of military force, this article enhances our understanding of how narratives on childhood have consequences for global security. This article also displays significant opportunities to use the critical discursive approach to explore the diverse and complex experiences of children in conflict zones and (post)conflict societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food waste has serious economic and environmental repercussions, and there is growing policy attention to this issue in Canada. This study investigates how the material characteristics of wasted food influence its circulation and management in the City of Guelph, Ontario. Based on interviews with informants across the food value chain, we learned that there is a high reliance on systems and techniques to determine when food becomes waste (including cold chains, best before dates, and aesthetic standards). We document how these systems pervade the food chain and food recovery efforts, and also note attempts to disrupt their momentum. Our analysis emphasizes the relational agency of food waste: how social and cultural contexts interact with food's vital materiality in the determination of when it becomes waste, the circumstances under which waste can become food again, and how organic matter can find a second life as a source of energy and nutrients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clinical symptoms of dementia include difficulty with speech, poor short-term memory, and changes in behavior. These symptoms can affect how the person with dementia understands and performs in social interactions. This qualitative review investigated how people with mild to moderate dementia managed social connections. A systematic search of social science databases retrieved 13 articles; data were synthesized using thematic analysis. Results established the work undertaken by people with dementia to maintain and present a social persona seen as socially acceptable. Interpretations are contextualized within Goffman and Sabat's theories on "self." People with dementia were agentic in impression management: undertaking work to maintain recognized social roles, while being aware of when their illness led to others discrediting them. Wider recognition of strategies used to maintain a social self could inform interventions designed to increase capability and confidence in co-managing social connections following dementia diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prostitution stigma has been shown to negatively affect the work, personal lives, and health of sex workers. Research also shows that sex workers have much higher unmet health care needs than the general population. Less is known about how stigma obstructs their health-seeking behaviors. For our thematic analysis, we explored Canadian sex workers' accounts (N = 218) of accessing health care services for work-related health concerns. Results show that participants had mixed feelings about revealing their work status in health care encounters. Those who decided not to disclose were fearful of negative treatment or expressed confidentiality concerns or lack of relevancy. Those who divulged their occupational status to a health provider mainly described benefits, including nonjudgment, relationship building, and comprehensive care, while a minority experienced costs that included judgment, stigma, and inappropriate health care. Overall, health professionals in Canada appear to be doing a good job relating to sex workers who come forward for care. There is still a need for some providers to learn how to better converse with, diagnose, and care for people in sex work jobs that take into account the heavy costs associated with prostitution stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth are often perceived as passive and disengaged from civic and political life. However, many researchers have countered such discourses of youth passivity and isolation, highlighting young people's active and interactive political engagement through less traditional outlets, especially online. In this article, we are influenced by a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of eighteen young Canadians. The themes we have identified counter a dominant focus on youth civic disengagement, political apathy, and isolation, instead highlighting the diverse political issues young Canadian vloggers address, the strategies they use, their multiple subjectivities, the interaction and support of their online community, and the relevance of inequality. We show how YouTube has become an important venue for the production and dissemination of youth perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entry into sex work is not typically considered as an occupational choice comparable to entry into other jobs. In the sex work literature, initiation is often thought to occur through predisposing factors deep in the structure of society, including childhood disadvantage, abuse and neglect. Some studies have also identified need for money as the main reason for entry, while others document entry due to a desire for more disposable income. Few studies have focused on agency-level factors guiding entry, including seeing sex work as a viable career or professional choice. Analysis of data from interviews with a purposive multi-gender sample (N = 218) reveals the multiple reasons for entry into sex work in Canada. Participants identified three overlapping structural and agentic reasons for entry: critical life events; desire or need for money; and personal appeal of the work. These findings are discussed in light of the occupational choice and sex work literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I focus on the management of postcolonial difference and the production of belonging in a white settler nation-state in order to rethink the notion of co-optation. I first develop a theoretical framework for understanding co-optation by separating the "who" and the "what" of co-optation: actors who embody diversity in public, political debate become the "who" of co-optation, as their agency is shaped by gendered and racialized processes of subject making. The "what" of cooptation revolves around particular conceptualizations of practices, rights and freedoms, associated in this case with "gender equality," which is rendered an empty signifier in the process. I then illustrate this framework by drawing from research on the Sharia-based arbitration debate that took place in Ontario, Canada, between late 2003 and early 2006. I focus on the claims of two Canadian Muslim women activists to show that co-optation occurs as attempts to further liberation instead advance illiberal practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using examples from family letters sent to the Department of Education’s Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the western Canadian province of British Columbia in the early twentieth century, this article discusses three potential problems or traps associated with concepts of agency in the history of children and youth. Following a brief discussion of the emergence of agency in childhood studies, it focuses on three approaches to agency that it is argued limit our efforts to demonstrate the contributions of young people to historical change: contributory, binaried, and undifferentiated approaches to agency. Investigating the ECS family letters through these three approaches demonstrates their limits while also pointing the way towards more productive pathways. By focusing on more nuanced interpretive strategies, such as empathic inference, structural and relational analyses, and explicitly theorising around the key concept of age, young people emerge more clearly as actors in history, not merely subjects of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the midst of the widespread, long-term economic downturn throughout the Canadian manufacturing landscape, the contract (or office) furniture sector has demonstrated resilience and vibrancy. The study reported here investigated the institutional foundations of innovation and competitive advantage in this dynamic, design-led, export-oriented manufacturing sector. It connects to ongoing work in economic geography and the social sciences to enhance economic geographers' understanding of the role of institutions in shaping the practices of firms and competitive outcomes and seeks to advance a more agency-centered institutionalist economic geography. The study focused on three dimensions of industrial practices: (1) the use of training and investments in technology, (2) the nature of employment relations, and (3) the use of design. The analysis reveals that the most globally competitive firms operating in a Canadian institutional context prosper by learning a set of production practices and the value of design-intensive products from the embodied knowledge of their founders, who have lived, studied and worked in high-wage, coordinated market economies of continental Europe. The ability of these entrepreneurs to transfer industrial knowledge from continental Europe to Canada has had direct benefits for learning and innovation processes that are critical to the synthetic knowledge base of this sector. The empirical analysis entails a sector wide survey questionnaire ( N = 220) as well as 55 in-depth interviews with senior managers, production workers, and designers from a subset of leading firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I consider different ways that Filipino-Canadian immigrant youths and their mothers tell their stories of their transnational experiences. Second-generation youths tell of coming into Filipino identity in their teens and developing a strong sense of transnational identification. Filipino youths who have migrated recently to Canada through their mothers' involvement in the Live-in Caregiver Program provide a less fulsome picture of their transnational experiences. I puzzle over why this is so, reasoning that their experiences are more difficult to talk about because they involve revealing intimate details of family life, and because children often have little agency or information about family migration plans. Beyond this, there is the possibility that I simply failed to hear what they were saying because of the manner in which it was said. They do not construct their experiences in narrative form. Instead they tell of their experience in fragments, in what I call - following Berlant, spaces of ordinariness. I consider the practical and political implications of listening for different forms of agency and subjecthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores what it means to take women's agency seriously and to fulfill the potential of intersectional politics. If we accept the central tenets of intersectionality, that axes of oppression are simultaneous and interacting, then we must interrogate the framing of current debates over women's rights around the tension between gender and religious/cultural accommodation. It is argued that the unfulfilled potential of intersectional politics leads to the denial of intersectional voices. This potential can only be fulfilled by enabling participation that goes beyond responding to predetermined positions to permit the exercise of meaningful power in the construction of contexts. These claims are illustrated through analysis of the debate over so-called 'shari'a tribunals' in Canada. The debate is juxtaposed with the experiences of Somali refugee women who instead assert interacting and simultaneous challenges that combine the axes of religion, legal status, 'race', class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2009 Passive and Low Energy Architecture Conference (PLEA), held in Quebec City, Canada, was themed 'Architecture, Energy and the Occupant's Perspective', with the ambition of positioning building inhabitants as key 'active' determinants of energy performance in 'passive' design through adaptive opportunities. Conference delegates committed to a Manifesto that embodied both the key longstanding priorities of PLEA and explicitly conveyed the priorities of the conference hosts. The Manifesto is examined in terms of how it captures and represents a shift in thinking that has occurred over the past few years, away from technological and technocratic solutions to comfort provisioning and towards reframing building energy consumption as a social and ethical challenge in which comfort plays a key role. La Conference 2009 sur l'Architecture Passive et Basse Energie (PLEA), qui s'est tenue a Quebec, au Canada, avait pour theme « Architecture, Energie et la Perspective de l'Occupant », avec pour ambition de positionner les habitants d'immeubles comme principaux determinants « actifs » de la performance energetique dans un design « passif » par des opportunites d'adaptation. Les delegues de la conference se sont engages en faveur d'un Manifeste qui, tout a la fois, incarne les principales priorites qui sont depuis longtemps celles des Conferences PLEA et traduit explicitement les priorites des hotes de la conference. Cet article examine le Manifeste quant a la maniere dont il apprehende et reflete le changement intervenu au cours de ces dernieres annees dans la maniere de voir les choses, consistant a se detourner d'un confort fourni par des solutions technologiques et technocratiques et a aller dans le sens d'un recadrage de la consommation energetique des immeubles consideree comme un defi social et ethique dans lequel le confort joue un role cle. Mots cles: comportement adaptatif, agence, confort, fourniture du confort, qualite environnementale interieure, habitants, manifeste, Conference sur l'Architecture Passive et Basse Energie (PLEA) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collaborative inquiry is based on university instructors' reflections on their experiences in negotiating and facilitating an international telecollaboration that connected their English as a second language and English as a foreign language students in Canada, Mexico, and Russia. The central themes that emerged from the instructors' reflections were the tensions related to their different views of the project, research versus pedagogical agendas, securing the participation of ‘have-nots,’ and instructor participation versus non-participation in online interaction. The underlying reasons for these tensions were found in the mismatch of instructors' educational philosophies and in the affordances and constraints of the local contexts that informed their individual decisions. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for improvement of facilitation and teaching practice in online environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrating to another country is potentially fraught with both challenges and potential opportunities. This article examines ways in which mature Chilean, Chinese and Somali women who migrated to Canada deploy personal and communal resources to imbue shifting relations and novel spaces with new meanings. Through these activities, they create a place for themselves on Canadian soil while remaining linked to their homelands. I argue that the ability of immigrant and refugee women to reconstruct their lives—often under conditions of systemic inequalities—is evidence of their resilience, which consequently has a positive effect on health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]