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Based on 19 qualitative interviews with girls (aged 11-17; grades 7-12), as well as separate interviews with their parents (mostly mothers), this paper investigate the "push and pull" of girls' narration as they discuss themselves, their families, mothers, schools, and teachers as it relates to conversations on the HPV vaccine, their health, sexual health, and sexuality. I find that other people, negotiations of independence and autonomy, and trust (as in, who girls look to) are main themes in all the interviews. Reading girls' narratives with these themes in mind, three particular types of selfhood emerged. Some girls: 1) prioritize their mother's narratives, presenting a type of "tethered self"; 2) explore enactments of agency, autonomy, and independence (although, with varied success), presenting an "autonomous self"; 3) have confidence in the accountability that is diffused between their parents, schools, and doctors -- instilling trust in these institutions gives them a sense of assurance in their stance on these topics. This is the "trusting self." Highlighting four girls as exemplars of these types, this research reveals the patterns through which girls' subjectivities, sexual health knowledge, and thoughts on the HPV vaccine are intertwined and operate in relation to other people and larger sociocultural structures. In short, this research focuses on how girls' sense of self emerges in relation to topics like the HPV vaccine, health, and sexual health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking within Ontario, this research asks what a vaccine against a sexually transmitted infection tells us about gendered logics and practices of motherhood. How are mothers discursively implicated as actors responsible for their daughter's health and sexual health, and how do mothers take this responsibility on in their everyday lives? In Ontario, parents of 8th Grade girls must decide whether or not to vaccinate their daughters against the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) when schools ask for their consent to vaccinate their daughters - a decision that usually falls to mothers. Focusing on the HPV vaccine, I analyze how mothers narrate their decision to vaccinate their daughters to understand how they manage their responsibility as a mother in terms of caring for their teen daughters' current and future sexual health. I find that parents' narratives on the HPV vaccine decision reinforce gendered logics of maternal responsibility. I argue that the routinized way the vaccine decision enters into the everyday life of mothers situates the vaccine as their responsibility and reinforces the gendered division of labour and childcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, a funding structure for social science research in Canada went through a major transition in that any social science research related to health was shifted from a funding agency that specializes in social science and humanities, to the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) which is dominated by natural and medical science. Based on my ethnographic research on social science graduate students who go through the process of making a CIHR application, the paper examines how this transition to CIHR problematically inhibits these social scientists during the development of their research applications. I discuss the double subordination they face from both their supervisors and CIHR, as well as the perceived challenges that lead them to leave their feminism, theory, and ethics out of the funding application. This research offers a critical reflection on interdisciplinary work/agencies to demonstrate how and why social science is becoming more in line with normal science paradigms, and how only certain types of social science make it through 'to market' due to the ideological and structural constraints implicit in agencies such as CIHR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]