Holler, Jacqueline

Child protection workers are responsible for making complex decisions to protect children from abuse and neglect. Child protection workers receive specialized training on how to make unbiased decisions based on evidence. Yet, external factors can influence the decision-making process. Method: A qualitative study using interpretative description was deployed and eight former child protection workers in northern British Columbia were interviewed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with an emphasis on the external factors that may influence child protection workers’ decision to remove a child from a legal guardian. Results: Three main themes with 10 subthemes emerged from the data. The first overarching theme was pressure (workload, appearance, politics, and policies). The second overarching theme was hierarchy (management, team leader, team members, and experience). The final overarching theme was resources (support services and placements). The former child protection workers established and clarified external factors that may influence their decision-making process. Conclusions: Several external factors that influenced decision making in relation to the removal of a child from a legal guardian were identified. These findings may help inform professional training for future child protection workers.

This thesis examines current national sustainable diet policies in China and Japan and their conformity with the Sustainable Healthy Diets policy guidelines proposed by the FAO and the WHO. Qualitative content analysis is used to identify the level of conformity, policy themes, and objectives of the texts of the policy documents. MaxQDA 2022 text-based analytic software was used to organize and enable a close reading and a line-by-line coding of the analyzed policy documents. The content analysis method proved useful in examining the policy documents and revealing their themes, objectives, and level of conformity with Sustainable Healthy Diets. The current policy of China has an overall low level of conformity, whereas the Japanese policy has an overall medium and high levels of conformity.

Theorists who study the formulation of the hero have identified that the appearance of the hero varies depending on the time and place they are needed. Yet, the function of hero archetypes, such as Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, have reinforced traditional Caucasian masculine male mythic ideologies in young-adult fiction. Reconfiguring the idea of the hero to question its masculine bias and include a female androgynous heroic paradigm will expand the limited classification of “hero” as the hero is encouraged to hone both her masculinity and femininity. This project focuses on a hero with both an androgynous personality and an Indigenous heritage. These aspects of my project push back against the gender and cultural norms often associated with heroic journeys in Western culture. Throughout this thesis, I formulate a more accepting form of identity by mapping an encompassing version of the hero’s journey that pushes the boundaries of classic “heroism” but still utilizes the familiar and effective pattern of the heroic journey of the self by comfortably living in the what I am titling “grey space”. By illustrating the fluidity of identity, young readers can relate to a heroic character who encompasses more than the traditional role outlined by Campbell.

Canada implemented Bill C-127 to eliminate sexual assault against wives in 1983, while Ghana criminalized marital rape in 2007. Although Ghana was late in establishing the Domestic Violence Act, which eliminated the idea that husbands can rape wives, there has been little to no legal report of marital rape in Ghana. This study explored the experiences and perceptions on the factors that lead to the justification of marital rape among Ghanaian-Canadian women. The study adopted a qualitative research approach and a descriptive case study design. The general research question was: What factors influence the justification of marital rape as perceived and experienced by Ghanaian-Canadian married women? A purposeful sampling procedure targeted Ghanaian-Canadian women living in Canada. A total of twenty (20) highly educated women participants within the ages of 28-63 were identified. A case study was pursued using semi-structured interviews. Telephone interviews were conducted with all the participants. The methods of data analysis of the interview data involved transcription, categorization, and coding for major themes. Major themes identified as factors that influence the justification of marital rape include the following: lack of confidence in the Ghanaian judicial system, exaggerated ideas of the effectiveness and ruthlessness of the Canadian judicial system in dealing with marital rape, economic instability, and women's immigration status. Hence, one major factor that helped achieve these findings was the comparative approach the participants identified by relating the Ghanaian society to their host country, which helped to examine differing influences of the identified themes. Ethical consideration to confidentiality and anonymity are demonstrated in this thesis with pseudonyms used for the participants in the discussion of the findings. The thesis concludes with vital recommendations such as the need for further research to uncover the factors leading to the justification of rape from diverse religious and non-religious groups and tribes of diverse nationalities living in Canada, and further research to investigate the support services available within Canada’s provinces and their response to domestic violence, especially with women of colour.

Equine assisted therapies are growing in popularity as a modality for treating various mental health and developmental challenges. Many of these challenges require focused work on the development of empathy, perspective taking, and attunement to self and others. This study examines the participants’ experiences and understanding of empathy as it relates to self, humans, and equine partners via structured qualitative interviews with four therapy participants. The interviews conducted for this study demonstrated a distinct common understanding of empathy as the ability to take perspective based on the human’s or animal’s own orientation in the world; an understanding that developing empathy within the context of equine therapy was emotionally laborious and required significant work and emotional engagement on the participant’s behalf. The interviews indicated that the participants’ perceived the horse as emotionally neutral in therapeutic interactions. Furthermore, the study indicated that a central component to the perceived success of this modality of therapy was a parallel process in relationship between the facilitator/client dyad and the client/equine dyad.

In literature and film, werewolves have gone through an incredibly varied series of portrayals, but, throughout all of their changes (cycling largely between being antagonists and protagonists), werewolves have always interacted with the essentialist concept of the human-animal binary. Mutable at their core, werewolves reflect the people, places, and times of their various manifestations; the werewolf is whatever we need it to be. The fact that werewolves are inherently liminal creatures means that, for the purposes of my thesis' discussion, werewolves can serve as a tool for addressing preconceived notions of human exceptionalism (i.e., anthropocentrism). I question the assumptions of boundaries and socalled human traits with a story about embracing the uncertainty that our classifications and labels seek to efface. Simultaneously, I draw attention to female werewolves to level a concurrent challenge against patriarchal scripts that denigrate the association of human females with non-human animals. Just as many historical portrayals of werewolves reinforce the negative connotations of a woman-animal alignment, so too do contemporary representations of female werewolves become subject to portrayals that reinforce patriarchal values, rather than challenge them. Therefore, my focus is two-fold: to present an alternative narrative (in the form of a theory piece married to a novel) that draws attention to the artificial nature of both anthropocentrism and androcentrism. These two ways of thinking—that humans are inherently more important than animals and that the perspectives of male humans, in particular, trump all other points of view—are inextricably linked in their ideological othering of alternative experiences of being. The female werewolf, an embodiment of both inferior entities, is a well-suited symbol to decentralize dominant patriarchal narratives. Presented herein is my theory piece and the first fifteen chapters of my novel, Then, We Were Wolves, Again. It is a story about a woman who becomes the wolf she was all along and a man who undergoes a transformation but does not change. As a human, the protagonist, Harley, drifted through life like a lone wolf, but now, as an actual werewolf, she struggles to reconcile her instinctual need for her pack with her growing sense of disenchantment with her fellow lycanthropes. Indoctrinated by their leader, Arden, they're convinced of their sovereignty as a superior species to humans, but this new werewolf picks away at the cracks of hypocrisy, revealing the same species-centric thinking the wolves claim to transcend.

This thesis argues that the witch trial of Zug, Switzerland, held between August of 1737 and January of 1738 provides a window into the world and spatial conceptualizations of lower status Catholic women living in eighteenth-century Switzerland. Through the examination of the accounts of the accused, the realities and fantasies held by these women are laid bare in the narratives of witchcraft they constructed, informing their interactions with the world around them. The marginal spaces of the Canton of Zug and the broader Swiss context were the backdrop to localized and broader diabolical concepts of witchcraft. Geographic information systems (GIS) databases and maps of the accused’s worlds as demonstrated through the trial record were created, allowing for the visualization of the records. These maps demonstrate that the boundaries of these women’s worlds were intrinsically tied to their regional Catholic identities, forming the basis of their interactions with the world around them.

The thesis investigated how conflicting gender ideologies influenced Nigerian-immigrant women's experiences of domestic violence in Canada. Nigeria, the participants' country of heritage, practices patriarchal social stratification while Canada, the country of current residence, has egalitarian structures. Using a qualitative research orientation and non-probability purposive snowballing sampling procedures with ten (10) Nigerian immigrant women to Canada, data collection procedures involved electronic phone interviews. The data analysis process involved transcription, categorization, coding, and theme generation by the researcher. The nine major themes identified that the study participants experiences a change or shift in gender ideologies towards more egalitarian ideologies while some of their partners did not experience the same change, thereby resulting in conflicting gender ideologies that influenced their experiences of domestic violence. The thesis concluded with recommendations for culturally sensitive services that combat domestic violence, and ease adjustment into Canadian communities for the study participants and immigrant women in general.

This paper describes a qualitative study involving six participants who work in the field of sex offender intervention. Participants’ struggles and professional rewards are examined. Recommendations on workplace policy and procedure adjustments are made based on the findings. Although participants identified rewards of their work, they described many physical, emotional, and mental health struggles they encountered, because of their employment. They also identified supports that promoted their wellbeing in the work.

Studies of how gender is characterized, performed, and understood in outdoor activities in relation to skill development are limited, but growing. This research explored gender and social relationships across levels of recreation specialization in fly-fishing among anglers in Prince George, BC. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 participants, 11 of whom then attended a level-specific fishing day during which participant observation was conducted. Interviews were transcribed and coded. Four main findings were derived. First, anglers’ social relationships shifted from dependence on others to intentional self-expression. Second, anglers learned to belong ecologically and socially through skill development and equipment use. Third, anglers’ relationships with fish moved from possession to communion. Fourth, anglers’ described escaping their daily routines to engage with rural places and fishing. The analysis and discussion show how masculinity was constructed and performed, and highlight the roles of socialization, behaviors, and equipment in shaping and gendering rural settings.

The Highway of Tears is a term that is known across northern British Columbia. Since 1969, women and girls have gone missing and been found murdered along the 724 km stretch of Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George, British Columba. Many of these women were trying to get from one destination to another when their safety was compromised. These individuals were from communities with few transportation options available and where hitchhiking is a common form of transportation. Using an interdisciplinary perspective including northern studies, political science, and women’s studies I will analyze the issues of transportation in the north in connection to the Highway of Tears case. In particular I will examine how the Highway 16 Transportation Action Plan developed in order to determine what happened and why it took ten years for a policy response to emerge that addressed safety concerns and transportation gaps in the north.

This research explores the experiences of women participating in CDOs (community development organizations) in communities in northern British Columbia and how that participation affects their capabilities. Data was gathered through interviews, electronic surveys, and participant observation. This data was then assessed within the combined theoretical frameworks of the capabilities approach and participatory development. Through analysis, the positive impacts of women’s participation in CDOs on their capabilities and communities were brought to light.

Over the last decade, the number of Honduran migrant children traveling undocumented to the United States and Mexico increased substantially and both countries have focused on the detention and return of these children. While several organizations in Honduras assist returned children, these efforts have been insufficient as returned children migrate again and more children are migrating for the first time. This thesis aims to examine organizations’ challenges in promoting returned children’s human rights during their reintegration. Through a qualitative research design, data were collected from the literature, institutional documents and interviews with representatives from organizations in the government and non-government sectors. Results reflect challenges to implement the human rights approach and some principles such as non-refoulement, the right to life, survival and development and the best interest of the child. Also, practical challenges were found including the lack of inter-institutional coordination, financial and human resources, and monitoring mechanisms.

This thesis explores how Wilkie Collins’s portrayal of disabled female bodies disrupts the Victorian opposition between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ bodies, and, in doing so, offers an alternative to the prevailing contemporary ideal of femininity, as passive, pure, and spiritualized. In Hide and Seek (1861), The Moonstone (1868), and Poor Miss Finch (1872), I argue Collins reconfigures traditional readings of both disabled and able-bodied women. Drawing on theories in disability and gender studies, my thesis examines how prevalent understandings of the disabled body offer insight into how we think about the human body in general, and how in Collins’s novels the disabled body is used to question gendered norms placed upon all members of society.

This research explores how the body is implicated in transmuting meaning for women who are substance dependent on opioids and have engaged in survival sex work. Using a hybridized application of narrative, theorizing, and interviews, this interdisciplinary thesis identifies some of the ways these women navigate the constraints of their marginalization. Eight women were interviewed on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, British Columbia. The research works to acknowledge and explore how these women exist in an ‘alternate’ economy in order to obtain opioids to meet their life-needs. The employment of materialist feminist examinations of alienation and access to capital located shared experiences in the women’s narratives. Though the research did not reveal an explicit connection between the body, meaning, and sex work, there was a strong indication of meaning making through advocacy and engagement with those in similar social positions.

Ghana joined the league of oil and gas producing countries in 2007 when oil was discovered in the Gulf of Guinea. Through the years, however, concerns have emerged over the impacts of oil and gas activities on coastal livelihoods, especially since the benefits of extraction do not seem to trickle down to these communities. This thesis employs the Feminist Political Economy framework to examine the gendered disparities embedded in relations between offshore oil extraction and livelihoods of women in Ghana. Through an exploratory approach and a mixed methods design, I reveal how the intersection of culture, geography, politics, race and class foster the dispossession of coastal women. Among other findings, this thesis reveals that fishing is still the main source of livelihoods, and a culturally import source of food for the Western Region. It also shows that the advent of oil in the region has not improved but worsened women's livelihoods.

Men are stereotyped as more physically competent than women. The stereotyping of women’s poor performance creates the conditions for stereotype threat. Stereotype threat, the fear of confirming a stereotype, can undermine women’s performances and participation in sports. Stereotype threat, however, has not been tested in strength-building activities. The present study experimentally tests whether stereotype threat undermines women’s willingness to perform unmodified push-ups and undermines their push-up performance. Women were assigned to four conditions: a stereotype-threat condition, an implicit stereotype-threat condition, a relief condition, and a control condition. Under stereotype threat, women were expected to choose modified over unmodified push-ups and, among those performing unmodified push-ups, to complete fewer push-ups than women in the other conditions. These hypotheses were not supported. During debriefings, women described their experiences related to push-ups and strength training. A thematic analysis of women’s debriefings offers insight into the gender complexities of women’s engagement with strength training.

Widespread displacement of persons domiciled in northeastern Nigeria is one of the most profound aftermaths of the Boko Haram insurgency. This study investigates the challenges of internally displaced persons (IDPs), particularly women and girls, in northeastern Nigeria. The focus is primarily on the United Nations’ (UN) interventions and reintegration policies as the “government of the world,” the implementation of these policies in the Nigerian context, and their effectiveness for women and girls. The study asks the following questions: What are the general and gender-specific challenges of IDPs in northeastern Nigeria? How have the UN intervention and reintegration processes responded to those challenges? How gender-sensitive are the UN’s intervention and reintegration processes for Nigeria’s female IDPs in that part of the country? The researcher applied internationalism and a feminist perspective on human security as the conceptual framework for this study.

Divisive political discourse today reflects a need to address issues of oppression in North American society. Accordingly, teachers can help students confront these problems. Linking critical pedagogy and transformative learning theory, this interdisciplinary research examines whether reading and discussing March Book Two, a historical nonfiction graphic narrative written by civil rights activist John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, led students in a British Columbian Adult Basic Education English class to transform their perspectives on social-justice related issues. Qualitative data were collected from student work, classroom observations, and post-semester interviews in an instructor-led action research case study.