Theses (Political Science)
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Item “Short-Term Band-Aid Solutions”: A Feminist Analysis of Family Caregiving and Caregiver Immigration Policies in Canada(2023-12-18) Champagne-Holland, Morag; Clarke, MarleaThroughout Canada, the need for care provision services is on the rise. The number of people willing and able to provide these care services is insufficient to address the growing need for care. Care work is provided by a mix of paid workers and unpaid family members. The majority of both these groups of care workers are women. Care work has long been undervalued as feminized labour, resulting in insufficient government support for family caregivers, and persistent labour issues within paid care sectors. In this thesis, I explore two distinct sets of Canadian federal policies related to care provision – Employment Insurance (EI) benefits for unpaid family caregivers, and the Home Child Care Provider and Home Support Worker Pilot Programs, which facilitate the immigration of private in-home caregivers to Canada – in order to discover whether they are underpinned by a shared set of similar assumptions about the nature of care work, who is best suited to perform it, and how it should be provided. In examining the assumptions about care that underpin and shape these policies related to care provision in Canada, I identify a number of consistent gendered themes about care and care providers and analyze their impact on policy outcomes.Item Political integration and Indian self-government :hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourse(1986) Stevenson, Brian J. R.Item Addressing atrocity in the Canadian state: The discourse of ‘legacy’ and the comprehension of historical injustices(2023-08-28) Stilwell, Sarah F.; Glezos, SimonAs coming to terms with historical injustices have become a pressing concern for contemporary Canadian politics, a variety of discourses are engaging with what sorts of reparative responsibilities and accountabilities are necessary for harms inherited in the present. Since the late 1980s, reparative efforts in the Canadian state have focused on political recognition, compensation and official apologies for those harmed or otherwise impacted by injustices. Dominant discourse, however, has demonstrated a tendency to frame injustices as sad chapters, isolated moments of poor discretion, or the actions of imperfect individuals in their historical context. Today, monuments celebrating Canadian nation-building legacies are being confronted by their associated legacies of harm, exclusion, and white supremacy. As critical studies of the construction of Canadian identity have argued, narratives of ‘Canada’ and what it means to be Canadian have centred tenets of whiteness, settler colonialism, masculinity and Britishness. Reminders of these cornerstones of nation, and the figures and events that advanced them, populate everyday existence through monuments, place-naming of streets and public parks, architecture, and other heritage sites. In these contexts, nation-building figures and events are often framed as persisting, bearing on our present conditions and beneficial circumstances, while legacies of injustice associated with these figures and events are often framed as an event, a footnote, reduced through sanitized narratives, or not presented at all. The distinction between what endures, and what does not, seems perplexing. Understanding the continued dominance of these discourses and framings as an obstacle to promoting historical dialogue and accountability, I examine how the concept of political legacies operate in Canadian political discourse—a concept central to what representations of the world are inherited and seen as foundational and valued for the present and future, yet which has been conceptually overlooked as the subject of critical analysis. Advancing this premise through the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Foucauldian genealogy, I suggest that political legacy narratives have the ability to reinforce sanitized narratives of historical injustices in the Canadian state. Through an investigation of recent initiatives and contention surrounding revising, rewriting and rethinking the celebration of problematic pasts in the present, this research aims to develop paths forward for critically analyzing oppressive legacies and rethinking reparative responsibilities for enduring injustices.Item Authority-Making on the River of Mist: Reframing the Indigenous Sovereignty Impasse(2023-08-22) Mowatt, Morgan; Stark, Heidi KiiwetinepinesiikIndigenous sovereignty has evolved from its own frameworks of authority, distinct from those of the state, yet Indigenous assertions of authority and jurisdiction continue to be measured against those of the state by the Canadian government, the courts, and state agents. This pattern of domination is maintained – in part – through a discursive severance of Indigenous culture from Indigenous law and politics that works to invisibilize the active processes of legitimation that Indigenous sovereigns adhere to in order to maintain their sovereignty. It is precisely the connection between culture and politics that informs the source of authority that legitimizes Indigenous sovereignty – an intimate and reciprocal relationship with place. This relationship is expansive rather than reductive (a characteristic commonly cited against Indigenous sovereignty), and consequently holds potential within it to inform intersectional resistance to colonialism in Canada. This dissertation offers a reorientation of the fields’ approach to Indigenous sovereignty from familiar Western processes of legitimation towards Indigenous processes of legitimation. This project asserts that Indigenous sovereignty is legitimate and living, theorizing that Indigenous sovereigns source their authority from relationship (rather than land, Creator, or people) and thus hold expansive possibilities for intercommunity and international resistance to colonialism. The research is loosely tethered to the Gitxsan experience of authority-making, and includes one exception of an explicitly Gitxsan-focused chapter. I begin this work by using the Delgamuukw case and the events surrounding it to trace Gitxsan articulations of sovereignty in relationship with the Canadian state. This case maps out attempts by the state to sever Gitxsan culture from their law and politics, despite evidence from within Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en testimony of culture acting as the blueprint for their law and governance. The Delgamuukw trials also reveal that the discursive severance between culture and law has material impacts, and that observers of the case – in court and in public – were likely to understand assertions in the court as theoretical rather than applied Indigenous authority. The Delgamuukw saga leads into the second chapter, where I review leading sites of cultural severance in the Canadian-Indigenous landscape and respond by using key pillars of Indigenous sovereignty – land and language – to discursively re-affix culture to law and politics, revealing them as one and the same. Culture, law, and politics firmly re-connected, the third chapter theorizes Indigenous authority as being sourced from relationship. This theory emerges from evidence collected in the land-language analysis employed in the previous chapter and is reinforced with Indigenous scholarship and articulations of sovereignty from outside the field and outside of the academy. The fourth chapter is a mapping of Gitxsan articulations of sovereignty on their own terms, and applies relationship-as-authority theory to Gitxsan governance. I conclude the dissertation by considering the impacts of reframing Indigenous authority within its own processes of legitimation, and consider two offerings from Indigenous sovereignty – processes of transformation and expansion – in contributing towards intercommunity and international liberation.Item Aging in place with Google and Amazon Smart Speakers: Privacy and Surveillance Implications for Older Adults(2023-05-01) Percy Campbell, Jessica; Bennett, Colin J.Commercial-grade smart home technologies (SHTs) such as Google and Amazon smart speakers are rising in popularity among older adults. Marketing materials claim that smart speakers can support older adults aging in place through emergency contact features, medication reminders, and digital companionship with voice assistants. As our aging population challenges strained health and senior care systems in Canada, SHTs are positioned to alleviate some of the pressure. At the same time, under surveillance capitalism, big tech companies and marketers stand to profit from collecting massive amounts of user data in attempts to predict, modify, and control behaviour through targeted advertisements. While Canadian private sector privacy legislation hinges on meaningful user consent for data collection, obtaining such consent can prove difficult for smart speaker users in general, especially for older adults with limited technological experience. Further, little is known about the types of ads that follow older adults around the web through programmatic advertising. To better understand the dynamics between Google, Amazon, and older adult smart speaker users, this dissertation asks the following: How are smart speakers marketed to older adults and care partners, how are they used, and what are the implications for privacy, surveillance, and aging in place in Canada? A multi-methods approach is used to answer this question by including the voices of older adult smart speaker users alongside interviews with relevant experts in technology, privacy, and aging. This study also relies on a qualitative thematic analysis of marketing materials, documentary analyses of privacy policies and relevant legislation, and an algorithmic audit to further explore the relationship between older adults’ privacy, autonomy, and targeted advertising. Alongside user education programs, it concludes with suggestions for user-centric design and data justice as a regulatory approach that supports user privacy and autonomy while challenging the potential for bias.Item Making Political Music: Contrapuntal Constitutionalism and Indigenous-Settler Relations(2023-04-25) Kohlmann, Neil; Eisenberg, Avigail I.This thesis applies Edward Said’s thought to Canadian settler colonialism. I draw upon Said’s idea of contrapuntal reading to understand settler colonialism as an interdependent and co-constitutive relationship between domination and resistance. Contrapuntal refers to counterpoint in music, where two or more distinct melodic lines occur simultaneously. Each line is independent as a musical phrase but sounds out interdependently in the composition as a whole. I use this contrapuntal approach as a method of analysis and as the foundation for a normative practice of reimagining and rebuilding political community. Using contrapuntal analysis, I examine the installation ceremony of Mary Simon as the Governor General of Canada and the installation ceremony of Kevin Hall as the President of the University of Victoria to elucidate the limits of the foundational logic that underpins these attempts to constitute political community. I then consider potential alternative constitutional perspectives, drawn from Indigenous constitutionalisms, that resist and do not rely on settler colonial domination. Contrapuntal constitutionalism, the outline of a political practice for Indigenous-settler relations, grows out of what my analysis discloses. By extending Said’s use of counterpoint, in conjunction with Indigenous, prefigurative, and music theories, I contend with what a contrapuntal approach to anti-colonial constitutional politics could look like. The goal of this thesis is threefold: to make the case for the importance of Said’s thought to understanding the present manifestations of Canadian settler colonialism; to illuminate the dominating tendencies of Canadian political community dressed in the guise of palliative narratives of multicultural harmony; and to disclose an alternative constitutional relationship that does not further entrench domination as necessary and inevitable.Item The Case of the Russian Electronic Identity Card: from the Promise of E-government to the Problem of Data Sovereignty(2023-01-09) Matiyenko, Iryna; Bennett, Colin J.Electronic identity cards have been the focus of different disciplines in the last two decades. They are viewed as technological tools that enable e-government in public administration studies; as systems of surveillance and social sorting in more critical social studies literature; and analyzed as a result of political pressure from powerful groups and private sector interests in political science. This work examines the rise and fall of the electronic identity card in the Russian Federation using concepts and theories developed in Western scholarship. This is a qualitative case study of the Russian “Universal Electronic Card” project focusing on the processes of policy definition and implementation, while contextualizing them culturally, politically and historically within a state with the legacies of oppressive passport regimes. I document ideas expressed by the policy interpretive communities and analyze their views on innovation as a symbol of technological progress, which are expressed through multiple conflicting interpretations regarding the practicality, legitimacy, and morality of this progress. Based on interpretive policy analysis, I identify two antagonistic policy models that target the reform of the state identification system, based on the technological innovation of the electronic identity card. The first model, the Oligopoly on the Means of Identification, relies on market solutions to government problems through public-private partnerships with the banking and IT sectors. The second model, State Monopoly on the Means of Identification, is concerned with the enforcement of the electronic identity card technology, from design to production and implementation. I argue that a political struggle between the two models leads to the proliferation of problems with information ownership, control, and security, forcing the state to address these problems through national security, cybersecurity reviews, and data sovereignty regulations. As demonstrated here, the inability of the state to enforce data sovereignty in a complex, interconnected, and globalized technological system of information exchange became a significant constraint to the implementation of a national electronic identity card system in Russia.Item Deliberation and Diplomacy: Statue Removals in Two Municipalities in Canada(2022-12-21) Kielbiski, Corie; James, MattIn what seems to be a nascent culture of accountability, advocates across Canada, and beyond, are rallying against commemorative symbols, namely statues, to demand systemic change. Increasingly, conversations about removing statues are not just focused on outcomes, whether or not statues should stay or go, but about process – who and in what ways communities should be included within decision making. Democratic deliberation is often imagined as the most fair and just approach to resolving conflict together: the principles of inclusion, equality, and publicity ostensibly ensure that all who wish to share their opinions are heard. However, there are scholars who challenge these assumptions by focusing on the ways that historical injustice has caused structural, procedural, and behavioural discrimination that impacts whose opinions are shared or valued. Thus, contemporary scholars are interested in how deliberation can be modified, particularly within an age of reconciliation, to rectify these inequitable barriers. Because of where statues are situated, within municipal boundaries, it is local governments in Canada that are faced with addressing these complex questions. This research analyzes two distinct case studies of statue removals, the removal of the Edward Cornwallis monument in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the removal of the John A. Macdonald monument in Victoria, British Columbia, to understand the impacts of each distinct deliberative processes. Considering the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action and the principle of self-determination, this thesis shows that deliberating with Indigenous nations and representatives demands a new approach to deliberation, one that I call diplomatic deliberation.Item “The Straight Path That Leads to Sodom”: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Sexual Politics and 19th Century French Feminist Responses(2022-09-02) Sozen, Gizem; Glezos, SimonDespite the emphasis Proudhon placed on the significance of his ideas on women’s status within society, the patriarchal family, and the conjugal couple for his political thought, scholars of Proudhon display a tendency to bracket off Proudhon’s sexual politics from his general political philosophy. This dissertation comes to grips with Proudhon’s sexism and anti-feminism by first taking Proudhon at his word regarding its importance to his whole political project. I treat Proudhon as a strategist of patriarchal domination in the face of emerging feminist challenges and I argue that his ideas, all of them, should be examined in the light of his own claims about their relation to his anti-feminism. His was a vision of a new patriarchate in which men held full authority within their individual households and, beyond the household, freely associated and federated with each other—in other words, what Proudhon demanded was an anarchism of patriarchs. Proudhon erected the sovereignty of each man out of their absolute mastery over women and crafted mutualism and federalism in order to prevent any intrusion into that sovereignty, making apologetic readings that separate Proudhon’s revolutionary political thought from his patriarchalism difficult to accept. In addition to my engagement with Proudhon’s anti-feminism, this dissertation situates him in the context of 19th century debates around the so-called woman question in French socialism. I have chosen to directly engage with Proudhon’s feminist opponents such as Jeanne Deroin, Jenny d’Héricourt, and Juliette Lambert. On the basis of this feminist literature, this dissertation reconstructs Proudhon’s anti-feminist ideas and agenda dialogically by placing them in opposition to the women whose ideas and movement had actually motivated his writing on the subject in the first place.Item In and Against Canada(2022-08-26) Henderson, Phil; Stark, HeidiThis dissertation is an intervention aimed primarily at the field of Canadian Political Science, but informed by engagements with Indigenous Studies, literatures on racial capitalism, and Global Histories. The overarching aim of the project is to provide a theoretical framework by which to study multi-scalar struggles taking place within and against the Canadian state from an explicitly anti-imperialist perspective. The insights of this project should also be of interest to the broad left, both in Canada and beyond. The dissertation begins with a call to situate the Canadian state, and its practice of “settler imperialism” as part of multi-scalar system of global racial capitalism. Key to understanding this is the mobilization of Stuart Hall’s concept of the “historical bloc” as a tool to grasp political mediations, and to refuse the too-easy analytical reification of structures or their practices of difference making. Part two of the dissertation interrogates the politics of solidarity “from below” by engaging “activist archives,” composed of “allyship toolkits,” zines, and pamphlets. These activist archives reveal two (at least analytically) distinct theories of change operating through the discourses of allyship and decolonization. While to differing degrees, they point to the work of politics below the state. In the case of “allyship” discourses this dissertation finds a normative individualism and an understanding of power as an object rather than something collectively exercised, leading to a charity model where solidarity is seen as an external relationship. In contrast, the decolonization literature understands how solidarity can proceed from an interested position towards building a relationship of shared concern, it substitutes a deference model for one defined by “relational autonomy” in the process of “worldmaking.” The final portion of this dissertation makes an in- depth case-study of Indigenous-led opposition to the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline project. Tracing out a number of strategies of hegemony, counter-hegemony, and grassroots struggles, the aim is to show a number of interrelated sites and tactics of anti-imperialist struggle grounded in a defence of both shared place and the self-determination of Indigenous nations.Item Environmental activism, anarchist methodology, and Indigenous resurgence: renewed possibilities for ecological security in Canada(2022-08-19) Tkachenko, Aly; Greaves, WillAs climate change becomes a pressing concern for policymakers and citizens around the world, a variety of security discourses have emerged framing the environment as a security issue. While dominant frameworks focus on securing national interests, the international order, or individuals in vulnerable positions, the ecological security framework presents a radical alternative discourse. Ecological security requires a refocusing of the security discourse onto the environment itself, vulnerable communities, and future generations, and requires the exploration of alternative forms of social and economic organization. This framework has often been discounted as an impractical and radical alternative to dominant discourses, however, in this thesis I argue that ecological security can, and is, being enacted by local communities around the world. Similarly overlooked, yet highly relevant to ecological security, is anarchist political thought and methodology. I suggest that anarchist methodology, when employed by environmental activists through direct action, can enable the enactment of ecological security by local communities. By investigating the connections and overlap between blockadia activism, anarchist methodology, and Indigenous resurgence, it is possible to envision a locally-based, bottom-up model of ecological security. Through an investigation of the conflict between Wet’suwet’en land defenders and the Coastal GasLink pipeline, this blockadia-anarchist-ecological security nexus is drawn out and examined as a possible path forward for climate security.Item Foreign Assets for Chinese Control: Capital Filtration, New Triple Alliance, and the Global Political Economy of China’s Information Industry (1995-2020)(2022-08-02) Zhao, Can; Wu, GuoguangFor late developing countries, using foreign capital to modernize its economy is akin to wielding a double-edge sword. It complements much needed funding and technology that laggards lack endogenously but presents risks of economic dependence or even political subordination. How to maximize the economic benefits meanwhile minimize the challenges thus presents a dauting challenge for political and economic elites in the developing world. An emerging herd of information companies that rise from contemporary China represents a fascinating case to explore how Chinese policy makers manage to resolve this tension. Economically, its third-world and post-socialist context means internal investment resources are scarce, thus hampering a capital- and technology-intensive industry to emerge. Politically, an authoritarian regime that is vulnerable and vigilant to the liberalizing potential of communicational popularization is by no means an advantage. My research investigates how China has managed to parlay foreign investment into a home-grown information industry between mid-1990s and 2020. I seek to explain how and why massive cross-border capital inflows into this sector, which potentially threats the regime, did not challenge Beijing’s authoritarian rule. Contrary to much of the scholarly literature, I find that the Chinese political elites apply a different mechanism of political control and censorship that targets the form of foreign capital inflow rather than informational content. Accordingly, I propose a theory of “capital filtration” to show how Chinese regulators “filter” foreign investment through an unarticulated, nationalistic, and two-pronged industrial strategy. On the one hand, Beijing allowed and supported China-based and Chinese-controlled firms to sidestep its inefficient and closed domestic securities market to seek financial investment from their counterparts in the Global North through shell companies registered in offshore financial centers. I call this new type of cross-border capital flow offshore domesticated foreign finance (ODFF). On the other hand, through stringent measures to restrict foreign direct investment (FDI) such as equity caps, approval red tape, national security review, and haphazard licensing and technology transfer requirements, Chinese regulators crippled foreign industrial investors’ market entry, operations, and competitiveness inside China. By bringing in ODFF while pushing out foreign corporate influence, capital filtration has ushered in a neo-triple alliance among policy makers in Beijing, China-based and Chinese-controlled information service companies, and transnational financial elites. It also minimized economic dependency and political subordination, which had hobbled previous late developers after liberalizing domestic capital markets, and made informational censorship easier.Item The black homunculus: toward a grammar of black experience(2022-05-03) McDonald, Domonic Brian; Glezos, SimonHortense Spillers is renowned for her contributions to the canon of black thought which prefigure contemporary trends in Afro-pessimism. Specifically, her concern with developing a new grammar through which to articulate the experiences of black folks is considered here as imperative to the study of black ontology because of the vexed relationship between black folks and the liberal, humanist grammars endemic to the social sciences and humanities. With particular reference to the work of Giorgio Agamben, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Henry Louis Gates, I develop a linguistic account that justifies Spillers concern for an improvised grammar. I then make my own contributions to this intellectual project by offering the alchemical homunculus, or “little person”, as an allegory for the black body that apprehends the concerns of Spillers, Alexander Weheliye and Zakkiyah Jackson with the process by which black flesh is physically molded into black bodies through the exercise of violence onto black folks with impunity. This account offers an aesthetic principle in which perceptions about black folks result in an exaggerated perception of black physiology that parallels social anxieties around black folks’ behaviour and underly the violent policing of black flesh in a process that culminates in the composition of black bodies, contorted into a form that resembles human bodies but with few of the attendant entitlements that this form has come to be associated with within the modern psyche.Item Sovereignty and eschatology: the reordering of the apocalypse in Carl Schmitt's political theology(2022-05-02) Jing, Lingyu; Glezos, SimonThe thesis examines the relationship between sovereignty and eschatology in Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Schmitt is seen as an important political theorist of sovereignty but the contemporary understanding of his sovereignty lacks an eschatological dimension. As a political theologian, Schmitt notices that sovereignty and eschatology are in tension: if the apocalypse is near, the earthly sovereign order has no legitimacy to exist. According to him, this tension was rooted in Christianity but radicalized by 20th century Marxism which destructs the sovereign order by extremizing the class contradiction to negate the class enemy and creating a universal unity of humanity at the end of human history. This thesis interprets Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty as a response to the Marxist apocalypticism and argues that Schmitt’s political theology is a project to revive the sovereign as a Katechontic power which perpetuates but simultaneously restrains enmity to delay the apocalypse and continually legitimate sovereignty as the earthly order.Item Framing the climate change and human mobility nexus in Canada: from discourse to policy?(2022-04-27) Bates-Eamer, Nicole; Schmidtke, OliverMy dissertation examines how media and policy actors in Canada frame the intersection of climate change and human mobility. I address two gaps in the literature: (1) how the nexus of climate change and human mobility is emerging as an issue at the national and sub-national level in Canada; and (2) the conceptual connections and contradictions between internal mobility and global mobility in the context of a changing climate. I examine and compare how policy actors and newspapers frame the issue and related policies in Canada at multiple governance levels and in four newspapers (two local, two national) by drawing on discourse and frame analysis. My research reveals that policy makers and newspapers frame the intersections of climate change and human mobility differently depending on where the mobility takes place (within Canada or beyond) and the context in which the framing occurs. These different framings reflect different representations of the problem (or problem definitions) and therefore require different policy options or responses.Item Redress through constitutional change: reimagining the Canada Round for its reparative potential(2022-04-25) Sherbino, Jordan; James, MattThe Canada Round was a period of megaconstitutional politics where many of the perennial topics of Canadian politics were viewed through a constitutional lens. This research analyzes the Canada Round of negotiations for its potential to act as a project in historical justice to address the state’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. By viewing constitutional change as a means of engaging in political redress, this research offers a corrective to understanding the dynamics of the Canada Round and provides an expanded understanding of redress to compensate for its limited and non-transformative nature in settler-colonial contexts by introducing the idea of redress constitutionalism. Through an analysis of the primary documents from the Canada Round, this research demonstrates that national Indigenous organizations—the Assembly of First Nations, the Métis National Council, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, and the Native Council of Canada—sought to employ constitutional change for its reparative potential to address long-standing injustices against Indigenous peoples in Canada caused or worsened by the constitution. Therefore, the failure to significantly renew the constitution was also a failure to significantly engage in redress, remedy their historical exclusion from decision making, and respond to the suppression of their self-determination.Item Haptic performativity: exploring the force of bodies and the limits of linguistic action in silent protests(2022-04-25) Lavender, Luke; Glezos, SimonThis thesis engages with the tension between political action and political speech in political understanding. This tension arises in a context whereby speech is represented as the sine qua non of being political and the way to change the conditions of being political; specifically, this thesis explores this tendency within a linguistic account of performative action (where action is understood through/as language effects). Against this backdrop, the thesis develops a notion of haptic performativity—performative action where the action (or doing) occurs without or in spite of linguistic (de)legitimation. Here, haptic performativity begins answering how marginalised populations act politically when defined by a lack of voice. To develop this notion—centering forms of action that occur in absentia of linguistic legitimation—the thesis: 1) reveals the disjunctive relation between deeds and speech with linguistic Performative Speech Act (PSA) theory; argues that 2) PSA theory reveals the inability for speech to convey the full force of bodily deeds within/through language; and, thereby, explores 3) how bodies or actors defined by a lack of social standing (or linguistic efficiency as a subject) remain politically impactful. Thus, while linguistic performativity gestures to the assembling power of speech (the power of already assembled subjects), conversely, haptic performativity testifies to the disassembling force of bodies who revolt without speech (the force of actors who are yet to be subjects). The thesis ends by bringing this haptic perspective into a contemporary context: the place of the body in the Black radical tradition of thought and the force of silent protests in the Black Lives Matter Movement.Item Thawing the tension: U.S.-Greenland relations and climate change (non)securitization(2022-01-27) Crowther, Joe Edward; Greaves, WillU.S. Arctic foreign policy and the U.S. influence on Greenland has been studied predominantly regarding U.S. military and defence concerns. However, during the Trump Administration, the U.S. Arctic foreign policy agenda significantly shifted, placing Greenland as an integral component of the 2017-2021 Republican administration’s Arctic geopolitical aspirations, and not only for defence purposes. I argue that U.S-Greenland relations were significantly impacted when President Trump offered to purchase Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark in the summer of 2019. Following the offer, Greenland emerged as a focal point of the Trump Administration’s geopolitical and economic security interests in the Arctic. Consequently, Greenland finds itself at the centre of a complex Arctic arena, with vastly larger and more powerful states taking an interest in Greenland’s economic potential due to its natural resources. Nevertheless, Trump’s offer was highly problematic as Greenland is an Inuit nation with the political goal to become independent from their colonial ties with Denmark. Despite the offer causing initial outrage, U.S.-Greenland collaborative relations have only developed since. I analyze why this has occurred, conveying that the similar approaches of Trump and Greenland towards climate change created the possibility for the strengthening of U.S.-Greenland bilateral relations. Climate change threatens the Arctic, yet the melting ice also provides more accessibility to rich natural resources. Climate change therefore presents not only threats, but opportunities. Greenland has a right and desire to pursue economic development for a financially viable independence through utilizing carboniferous, extractive industries. The U.S. has also sought to utilize the economic opportunity that Arctic climate change presents but with different motives. The U.S. and Greenland have subsequently become interlinked in a complex Arctic constellation of foreign policy and economic opportunity. Regardless of changing approaches to climate change, the Trump Administration has significantly impacted the future of U.S.-Greenland relations and Greenland’s political future.Item Onkwehón:we women’s roles in regenerating and reclaiming their ancestral food systems: a pathway to healing(2021-12-21) Jacco, Katsistohkwiio; Corntassel, JeffOnkwehón:we Food Systems throughout Turtle Island have always been and continue to be foundational to Onkwehón:we worldviews, social interactions with all living kin, and community health. However, the process of colonization and federations of the settler states now known as “Canada” and “The United States,” have greatly impacted all Onkwehón:we peoples’ abilities and capacities to maintain their ancestral food systems; this thesis will illuminate how colonial-imposed structural barriers, laws and phenomena such as the Indian Act, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirited (MMIWG2S+) gender-based genocide and environmental violence have particularly affected Onkwehón:we women’s engagement with their ancestral food systems historically and continually. Yet, Onkwehón:we women have remarkably found innovative ways to regenerate their ancestral food systems, which is an actionable way for them to reclaim and reembody their traditional roles in leadership, governance, decision-making and nation-building. Underlying impacts of these undertakings by Onkwehón:we women are improved wholistic health and wellness for Onkwehón:we women, which can pave a positive pathway for Onkwehón:we communal healing especially by promoting collective relations, collaboration, and normalizing women’s leadership. To bring this theoretical argument to life, I include a case-study of an Indigenous food sovereignty project that I initiated and co-created in my community, Kahnawà:ke. As a Kanien’kehá:ka, Rotinonhsón:ni and Onkwehón:we woman, initiating an Indigenous food sovereignty project with the ultimate goal of contributing to the regeneration of my own ancestral food system was important for me to attempt to address community health issues and improve community relationships through fostering an inclusive and empowering environment for Onkwehón:we women. Ultimately, this thesis celebrates Onkwehón:we women’s excellence in resurgence, particularly highlighting their work in reclaiming and regenerating Onkwehón:we food systems.