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The contemporary precarious condition, ‘precarity,’ in life, work and culture parallels transformations in national and global economies, in part through the rise of immaterial production. Precarity has led to destabilization and reconfiguration of a class /class system and the creation of a new majority precarious class including domestic and farm workers, academic workers, care givers, part-timers and more. The thesis identifies how a historical moment of the Canadian Farmworkers Union (1979-1999) experienced marginal social protection, racial discrimination, limited legal rights, short-term contracts, vulnerable working conditions and precarious life without health care. The transnational lessons of the CFU include a better understanding organizing precarious citizens today — including what has not worked; importance of visual cultural analysis and counter-visuality to inform resistance. Theories of immaterial labour; porousness of international borders; lack of social protections; shorter career cycles; challenges to traditional craft unions; shift in social values as citizens organize across sectors, geographies and borders; and, migrant experiences as central to the experience of precarity. Confronted with the difficult task of re-imagining old ‘modernist’ visions of ‘class,’ ‘people,’ ‘nation-states’ and many established perspectives of resistance that have been stalemated. The thesis also includes a short survey of visual cultural expressions from twenty-first century precarious citizen groups. The Master of Arts - Cultural Studies major project is a 96-page illustrated history book (12” x 9”) titled Fields of Power: The Canadian Farmworkers Union with photographs and text by Craig Berggold.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries southern Italy passed irrevocably out of Byzantine control and into Norman control, at roughly the same time as the Roman papacy and the Christians of the East were beginning to divide into what we now know as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Historians have typically viewed the history of southern-Italian monasticism in this period around the notion of a cultural conflict between Latins and Greeks, either arguing for or against the idea that the Italo-Normans had a policy of ‘latinisation’ with regards to Eastern-rite monasteries. This thesis will argue, however, that this conceptual framework obscures more important long-term economic and social factors that affected Germany, Italy and Byzantium alike. Having outlined the political and social context of southern-Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 will demonstrate the manner in which southern-Italian monasticism was firmly embedded into a network of cultural and social contacts in the broader Mediterranean world, and especially with Byzantium, even during the Norman domination. Chapter 3 will focus on the fundamental patterns of southern-Italian monastic change in the early Middle Ages, emphasising the gradual movement from informal asceticism to organised monastic hierarchies. Chapter 4 will set forth the essential irrelevance of viewing this structural change in terms of ‘Latin’ and ‘Greek’ identities, underlining the point that the distinction is largely meaningless in the context of monastic change. Chapter 5 will explain by contrast the far greater significance of economic and social expansion to monastic change in both ‘Latin’ and ‘Greek’ areas of the Mediterranean, and especially southern Italy. Finally, Chapter 6 will show that consolidation in southern-Italian monastic structures was not simply part of a centrally-directed papal reform movement, but part of a wider range of innovations undertaken on a local basis throughout the peninsula and the rest of the Mediterranean, with a considerable range of influences. An extensive selection of literary and documentary evidence will be examined in both Latin and Greek, with an especial focus on the monastic and ecclesiastical archives of southern Italy.

This research is an account of Pikangikum Anishinaabeg experiences as provincial forest firefighters in the Red Lake region of Ontario. It illustrates historic and contemporary community roles in firefighting in light of institutional changes that have affected their level of involvement. It describes relationships between Pikangikum Anishinaabeg and Euro-Canadian people within the institution of fire control and details how these relationships have developed and changed since the early years of forest firefighting up to recent times. This story emerged through individual and collaborative analysis of documentary sources and empirical data from interview and participant observation settings. It finds that Pikangikum people excelled within the fire program at Red Lake from the 1930s to the 1970s by combining their pre-existing land-based knowledge with the hands-on training of Ontario Fire Branch representatives. This study also documents a period of decline in Pikangikum people’s presence on seasonal fire crews that began in the mid 1970s as Ontario adopted an increasingly standardized, technocratic approach to firefighting. It concludes by forwarding recommendations and highlighting recent developments which may hold the potential to reinvigorate Pikangikum representation on seasonal fire crews.