Anthropology

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9870

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Anthropology.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

Waterloo faculty, students, and staff can contact us or visit the UWSpace guide to learn more about depositing their research.

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Careful capitalism: Children, residential kinship, and live-in domestic work in Costa Rica
(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-31) Font, Camila; Lo, Adrienne; Daǧtaș, Seçil
Limited publications address structures of residential kinship and live-in domestic work in Central America. Informed by participant observation fieldwork with three families, and open-ended interviews with employers (6) and domestic workers (5), this thesis discusses how kin relationships are created and sidelined through the industry of live-in domestic work in Costa Rica. Employers understand the industry of domestic work as a tradition to be upheld for proper societal standing. These relations of labour and kinship are sites of patronal benevolence that encourage the workers to limit their involvement with their families through poverty wages and patriarchal employment practices, and thus reproduce nationalist and gendered social orders that erase interdependence between employer’s tradition and worker’s paid labour. Furthermore, as a project of philanthropic social reproduction, selective kinship embeddedness of the worker and their child in the employer’s kin structures does not guarantee financial citizenship for the live-in domestic worker. Social mobility for the children of domestic workers is framed as depending on the worker’s present labour and on continued patronal investment. Furthermore, this thesis recognizes how workers, their children, and employers learn to understand structures of difference and navigate their shifting roles across social groups according to Marian ideologies of age and gender. This thesis offers a critical approach towards public issues anthropology as a social practice, and contributes to linguistic anthropological theorization on kinship, gender ideologies, and labour.
Class Divides: An Ethnographic Study of Social Service Workers in Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2021-01-06) McKellar-Harries, Kennerley; Lo, Adrienne
Drawing upon narratives collected from those working in the fields of social work and child and youth work, this thesis examines the relationships forged between middle-class social service workers and low-income youth and their families. The focal site in this study is a subsidized housing complex, including a small non-profit run community center, located in a mid-sized Ontario city. Both semi-structured interviews and personal reflection were used in the collection of data. This work draws upon the existing body of literature on class and youth, with particular focus on class-based differences in values and parenting styles. Through examination of the naturalization of middle-class practices by participants, it becomes possible to re-examine relationships with working class and poor communities, and to find ways to best serve them.
Flora Tristan: Rethinking the Intersection of 19th Century French Women’s Travel Writing and History of Anthropology
(University of Waterloo, 2023-09-21) Rueb, Karen Jean McAndless; Lo, Adrienne
Flora Tristan was a 19th century French socialist and feminist writer and activist. During her lifetime, Tristan published two works of travel writing, Pérégrinations d'une paria (Tristan 1838a; 1838b) and Promenades dans Londres (Tristan 1840), which were read and received in a variety of ways by a variety of reading publics. Existing scholarship on these texts, primarily in the field of literary studies, has tended to focus on Tristan’s gender, and on the ways in which this intersects with her writing and activism; by contrast, Tristan – like other women travel writers of her time – has been largely marginalized in broader discussions of travel writing and its history. Furthermore, Tristan and her texts appear to have been entirely absent from histories of anthropology. This thesis examines the relationship between travel writing, ethnography, anthropology, and their respective histories, seeking to reconsider Tristan’s travel writing in relation to these. I argue that Tristan’s travel writing resonates in important ways with ethnography, anthropology, and their interconnected histories, and that taking seriously her works as part of broader discussions on these topics has the potential to contribute additional possibilities, perspectives, and insights that might otherwise be erased, overlooked, or elided.
Living as a Self-sufficient Second-class Citizen: Chinese International Undergraduate Students’ Journey to Permanent Residency in Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2018-01-24) Chan, Yuet; Lo, Adrienne
In recent years, Canada has become one of the world’s most popular destinations for studying abroad, and China has become the top sending country of international students to Canada. In Canada’s 2015 International Student Survey, more than half of international students indicated an interest in applying for permanent resident status following graduation. Meanwhile, the deflation of Western degrees in the Chinese market and recent spate of media coverage circulated portraying the outbound Chinese students as low-quality students have created barriers for studying abroad returnees for seeking desirable employment in China. Thus, it is logical to estimate that a considerable percentage of current Chinese international students will eventually become Canadian citizens. During my undergraduate years as an international student at the University of Waterloo (UW), I heard many of my fellow Chinese international undergraduate students express their strong and sustained desire to stay permanently in Canada but complained about Canada’s “backwardness” and its “lack of urban vitality”. Such irony sparkled my scholarly interest and I decided to conduct an ethnographic research on the Chinese undergraduate student community at UW. My thesis looks at the University of Waterloo’s undergraduate students’ aspirations and perspectives on becoming permanent residents in Canada. Specifically, I examine how they envision their future in Canada in relation to their individuality, self-happiness and self-satisfaction, neoliberal potentials, moral personhood, and skepticism toward Canadian multiculturalism.
Migration Narratives from Third Wave Bulgarian Immigrants in London, Canada: Internalization of Balkanism and its Effects on Citizenship
(University of Waterloo, 2022-01-24) Petrova, Ivelina; Lo, Adrienne
Bai Ganio, a brash fictional character famous among Bulgarians who grew up during communism, has become something of an example of what not to do for Bulgarian immigrants to Canada aged thirty-five and up. Subconsciously, they tend to model citizenship and moral behaviour opposite to his as they work to integrate into Canadian society. Interviews with eight Bulgarian immigrants in London, Ontario who arrived between 1999 and 2005 were conducted with a focus on their migration narrative. A cross-chronotopic lens was applied to better understand how internalization of ‘the Balkan other’ (Bai Ganio) and their invisibility as white ethnic immigrants are presented in several scales. Bai Ganio, created by Aleko Konstantinov around the time of independence from Ottoman Rule, represents Bulgaria’s longing to become a part of Europe. The figure gained popularity again in the 1990s after communism ended in 1989 when Bulgarians were free to move to wherever they wished. The participants in this research think of themselves as being among the intellectuals whose leaving caused a brain drain from Bulgaria. This thesis argues for the importance of drawing on Bulgarian history when having conversations about their migration because it reveals the internalization of their image as a non-modern “others” and how they orient to it. Analyzing their narratives through the framework of chronotopes, which tie in aspects of time, space, and figures of personhood, further reveals how the same dynamics of understanding their identity in different spaces and time is constantly being presented in multiple scales as the United States, Bulgaria and Canada are in constant relation in their narratives.
Multiculturalism: The Un/making of an In/visible Un/problematic Citizen
(University of Waterloo, 2021-01-06) Kang, Jane; Lo, Adrienne
This thesis explores the lived experiences of Chinese Canadian youth (n=9) and their understandings of multiculturalism and racialization in Ontario, Canada. Canada is often cited as the epitome of acceptance and cultural diversity. The establishment of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act [1988] and the discourses surrounding multiculturalism have largely dictated the ways in which Canadians must act or portray themselves. By practicing the values of acceptance, tolerance, and kindness, one is made to believe that Canada has very minimal faults. As a result, racialized minorities deflect their encounters and experiences with racism (or any injustice) to uphold Canada’s peaceful image. Furthermore, this has contributed to the belief that all Chinese Canadians are successful, intelligent, and thus, unproblematic citizens. Drawing upon the participants’ experiences and their understandings of racism, I examine how racism is indeed veiled as microaggressions and both geographically and temporally deflected.
“The System is Built to Exclude Them”: Using Sociality to Manage Health Amongst Women Experiencing Homelessness
(University of Waterloo, 2020-01-22) Elliott, Kate, 1996-; Dagtas, Secil; Lo, Adrienne
The lives of women experiencing homelessness are often invisible from both statistics and the public eye. Yet, to support the population, specifically their health, their lived experiences must first be understood. Practicing engaged anthropology, this research uses a combination of non-participant observation, a focus group, and semi-structured interviews with both residents and staff at a shelter open to women, families, and trans and non-binary individuals. The shelter, Valdridge House, is in a medium-sized city in Southern Ontario. Using anthropological understandings of structural violence and gendered dynamics of homelessness alongside the data collected, this research explores how women experiencing homelessness manage their health through sociality within the shelter. Adapting to the perceived inaccessibility of the healthcare system, the residents use sociality to narrate their mental health and trauma, placing blame on their environment for their situation rather than individual fault. Here, they create support amongst residents without any perceived judgement. However, alongside this supportive dynamic, it is shown that structural violence still impacts the shelter sociality negatively, where theft and tensions are still present alongside the group bonding.

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Browsing Anthropology by Author "Lo, Adrienne"