Late Additions
Asynchronous Session
Connecting Community: Artistic Echoes of a Forgotten Small-town Community View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Sinfield
Jean Paul Sartre said “People are always tellers of tales. They live surrounded by their stories and the stories of others; they see everything that happens to them through those stories and they try to live their lives as if they were recounting them”. As a social construct and an artistic inquiry this paper considers the impact on the community with the closure of its main industry. Through a series of artistic artworks shaped from interviews of people that worked at the factory, it will consider the artistic narratives of the community and the impact it had on its closure. According to Sharp, when artists participate with local community it can become a form of public art to “engage with communities and existing social struggles, to develop collaboration and dialogue with residents”. He defines this approach as ‘new genre public art’ and operates with ‘connecting’ a community. In doing so this paper will demonstrate how communities can engage with artists and how the town they live in can operate as an exhibition gallery of artistic artworks and narratives from the community. In doing so this paper reflects on the worker’s stories through a series of artistic works and how they were exhibited throughout the town and embraced by the local community. It also gives concerns to communities having political agency when the artistic narratives are expressed and exhibited inside the local communities of the workers’ lives that are being expressed and translated into artistic works.
Macro and Micro Histories Embodied In The Politics of Self-representation by African Youth: Case-Studies of Habesha Identity Formation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nassisse Solomon, Mary Goitom, Selam Abebe
African youth are equally influenced by their micro-histories in-so- much as they are influenced by the Canadian social/geographical milieu in which they are raised. Twentieth century developments in the Horn of Africa region have had profound explicit and implicit effects on the lives of youth of the Horn-of-Africa Diaspora born and raised within Canada. On the one hand, children of this particular Diaspora embody the cultural influences of their ancestral heritage and are profoundly affected by historical influences which have often been transcribed unto them by their families. However, born and raised within Canada, their narratives are equally reflective of the socio-historical climate of their birthplace. The micro histories of the families of the youth featured in this study mirror the trajectory of East-African migration to, and settlement in Canada; inextricably infusing the individual stories and experiences of the youth into the historical framework of both their country of citizenship and the region of origin of their ancestry. For the purposes of this research, discovery focused interviews were conducted with second-generation youth from the cities of Toronto, Ottawa and London, Ontario. Reinforced by findings from other available scholarship on Habesha, the voices and life experiences of six Habeshas aged between 20- 32, are reflective of the continued influences of the roots of the Horn- of-Africa Diaspora. Their narratives are prisms through which representations of historically rooted Horn-of-Africa identities can be located and contextualized within contemporary Canadian societies.
Education and the Making of Mobile Livelihoods: Dubai Indian Families’ Trajectories over Time and Space View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Sancho
This paper examines how Indian migrant families in Dubai actively sustain mobile livelihoods across the Indian Ocean and beyond, paying attention to the role played by education in the unfolding of such migrant lives. This paper aims to nuance the experiences of Gulf migrants that have broadly focused on systemic vulnerabilities produced by the legal, economic and social structures encountered in Gulf destinations. This paper builds on the stories of three families from the southern Indian state of Kerala with diverse mobility trajectories over time and space, which is conceptualized in relation to the practice of specific livelihoods, focusing on the patterns and impacts of mobility at different life stages and across generations. Literature engaging with the migration-education nexus, which reveals that education is an integral part of mobile livelihoods worldwide, provides an analytical backdrop. The paper shows distinct ways in which education forms a crucial part of complex agendas, informing family migration to and from the Gulf region. Furthermore, it captures how migrants’ educational agendas are continuously being adjusted in processes of migration, and how this relates to the ongoing transformation of individual and collective social identities and the remaking of mobile livelihoods.
It Takes Time to Shift Historical Paradigms: Changes in Structure, Governance, Perception, and Practice During a Decade of Child Welfare Policy Reform in the United States View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amy Vargo
This research explores changes in structure, governance, perception and practice within the United States’ child welfare system over a ten-year period. Using an anthropological perspective and holistic approach, the child welfare system is presented as a type of meta-organizational culture inclusive of subsystems and subcultures which are all embedded in historical and socioeconomic context that involves alternations between child safety and family preservation approaches to care. Guided by a grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis, content analysis of child welfare organization documents, child welfare stakeholder interview transcripts, community governance partner surveys, and observational field notes was performed. Findings are presented within a systems theory framework and include emphasis on 1) systems change as a nonlinear, evolving process that takes time to sustain real change, 2) externalities and emergencies, as well as response to crises as ever present influential factors impacting system change and the creation of shared meaning and perceptions of, 3) the challenges involved in aligning structural views on poverty with practice models that more often employ the idea that poverty is individual, 4) the merit of privatization for social services if the reform is designed to create a public private partnership inclusive of caring for all children and families in a community, and 5) the value of flexibility and variance in local system design in order to best match a community’s needs and resources.
