Recent, new and forthcoming projects in Quebec and Canadian Studies
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Tobias Hertel, Department of Astronomy, "The fabrication of thin transparent films made of semiconducting or metallic single-wall carbon nanotubes" Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Department of English. "Do visual representations reproduce the problems of written histories? Televisual and filmic representations of black-Canadian history"
A recurring argument in Canadian literature is that Canadians have an identity crisis, one that holds complex implications for black Canadians. From this line of thought, because of former French and British imperialism and present-day U.S. cultural and media imperialism, Canadians have a difficult time locating distinctively Canadian traits. ;Rather, they define themselves by negativity—not French, not British, definitely not American, and yet, partially French, formerly British, and mostly American—or by looking “elsewhere” for their characterization. Robin Winks and George Elliott Clarke demonstrate how this works with respect to black-Canadian identity. In an oft-quoted 1969 essay, Winks writes, “There has been no Canadian Martin Luther King, no national figure to whom Negroes can turn, and perhaps it is their hunger for such a leader that induces the Negroes throughout Canada to speak of the dead, as Marcus Garvey, and of the distant, as Tom Mboya” (3, emphasis mine). Although his summation seems hyperbolic, Winks’s statement encapsulates common readings of the black-Canadian identity crisis, which causes black Canadians to look to the dead, the distant, and the United States for a sense of their own history, all the while failing to recognize black-Canadian historical figures. Similarly, Clarke argues that black Canadians define themselves by and against “model blackness,” or representations of blackness that they import from the Caribbean and the United States. Through a process called “resistive appropriation,” African Canadians identify with African-American literature, art, history, and, historical figures, and then deconstruct, revamp, and adopt those aspects of the model that most characterize a black-Canadian experience. For Clarke, this is both a problematic means for building identity and an often useful strategy for doing so. Black Canadians look elsewhere for self-definition and simultaneously validate U.S. cultural imperialism in Canada by making the U.S. the model. Yet, after over-identifying with African Americana, many black Canadians turn north again with a newfound sense of pride in their now-reinforced Canadian heritage and heroes. This project focuses on black-Canadian heritage and heroes and feeds from my ongoing research of comparative U.S.-Canadian representations of national identity. I began this work in spring of 2006 during an independent study under Paul Young (English and Film Studies) and continued it from 2006-2007 with the assistance of an Arts and Sciences Summer Research Grant that funded my research at National Library and Archives Canada. During my stay in Ottawa, I found, through the archive and quotidian encounters, that Canadian representations of black history essentially reinforce Clarke and Winks’s assessment. Black-Canadian history remains poorly documented and disseminated and, thus, encourages looking “elsewhere— to African-American historical events and figures that hold only a vague significance for black Canadians. This branch of my project will help me develop two papers I wrote on U.S.-Canada relations (both have been accepted to the International American Studies Association’s upcoming conference), one of which explores resistive appropriation of U.S. model blackness in black-Canadian memoirs. I found that black-Canadian authors over-identify with U.S. historical figures because they feel that African-Canadian “struggles” with blackness are not “difficult” enough to constitute “authentic” blackness. In each memoir, the author “finds” his or her black-Canadian self after delving deeper into black-Canadian history and thereby recognizing at-home struggles with racism and oppression. In many cases, the authors do not even seem to know Canada’s history of black chattel slavery and segregation, so they focus on Canada’s “better,” “liberal” race relations and the “multicultural mosaic” that allows minorities to avoid assimilation. Canada becomes the mythical North Star, the locus of “at least it’s better than over there [the U.S.]” sentiments, while the United States becomes the site for authenticity, “real” struggles to overcome. My current research investigates this problem from a media and cultural studies perspective. I would like to study archived televisual and filmic representations of black-Canadian history—through the holdings at the University of Toronto, the Royal Canadian Museum, and the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia—to analyze whether visual representations reproduce the problems of written histories. The project will also explore several Canadian sites—such as the Norval Johnson Heritage Library and Centre—that detail black-Canadian history through oral and literary traditions. The Norval Johnson Centre, located in Niagara (the heart of the Underground Railroad), offers a full-day tour and historical assessment of the Underground Railroad, its various stops, and Little Africa, the location where early black-Canadian emigrants settled. Through the archival and cultural research, I want to determine whether black-Canadian history qua Canadians centers on U.S. figures (reinforcing the problem of model blackness), or if it focuses on homegrown black-Canadian figures. This research will inform my revisions on the papers that I wrote on this topic last semester and my dissertation prospectus (due next fall), which will also explore representations of Canada-U.S. national identity. As an interdisciplinary project (filmic, televisual, cultural, and literary), it incorporates several academic fields and contributes to developing Canadian Studies at Vanderbilt. Harmony Newman, Social Science Dissertation Fellowship, Department of Sociology (Harmony.d.newman@vanderbilt.edu"
"Constructions of Risk: Strategic Framing in Breastfeeding Discourses" Which frames (and actors) are most influential in shaping women’s understandings of and behaviors toward infant feeding? Research establishes breastfeeding as the medical gold standard for infant feeding (Knaak 2005). Yet, even though medical arguments favor breastfeeding for children, its use and duration among U.S. and Canadian mothers is significantly lower than the governments’ goal rates. To increase breastfeeding initiation and duration rates, medical, state, and other organizational actors have attempted to frame the alternative—formula feeding—as a risky behavior. Nonetheless, we do not know the impact of this strategic framing on women’s understandings of breastfeeding. Examining patterns in the use of particular persuasive strategies and the impact they have on women’s understandings and behaviors will illuminate the effectiveness of particular framing characteristics as well as which strategy for framing breastfeeding arguments is most effective on mothers’ understandings of infant feeding. For this dissertation, I am using an exploration of the ways that organizations frame formula feeding as a risky behavior and how individual women interpret these arguments to better understand the relationship between structural arguments and individual agency. To do this I use a cross-cultural analysis of infant feeding discourses to explore how scientists, government agencies and social activist organizations construct formula feeding as a public health risk. Secondly, through interviews with mothers in Nashville and Toronto, I examine how mothers challenge or reaffirm these arguments about infant feeding. Finally, I will interview medical professionals (i.e., doctors, nurses and midwives) in Nashville and Toronto to better understand their roles as mediators, gatekeepers, and shapers of information about infant feeding practices. Specific research questions address the relationship between the structural-level risk framing and individual responses to these messages, informing debates on the relationship between macro-level discourses and individual agency (e.g., Grant, Hardy, Oswick, and Putnam 2004) as well as which frames (and actors) are most influential in shaping women’s knowledge of breastfeeding and whether the understandings women hold about breastfeeding align with their infant feeding behaviors. Not only will understanding this relationship between framing and women’s reactions illuminate power dynamics among institutions, discourses, and people’s health beliefs and behaviors, but also it will further our understanding of persuasive framing. This project is generally about framing and specifically about the framing of risk. Snow and Benford (1988) describe the “framing” process as the active construction of reality by activists in order to mobilize potential constituents, garner bystander support, and demobilize antagonists in the context of a social movement. Therefore, this process of framing serves to identify a problem, a target to blame, and provides a possible solution to the problem in order to mobilize potential movement participants. Researchers have discovered that particular characteristics of frames make them more or less likely to be persuasive to the intended audience (e.g. Benford and Snow 2000; Burstein and Hirsch 2007). However, we know very little about the extent of these strategic characteristics, including under what conditions is a particular strategy likely to be used and which audience is most likely to respond in the desired manner. In particular, we do not know the effectiveness of risk framing as a particular persuasive strategy, a frame very often used to persuade populations to change their behavior for health and safety reasons. In her research on the creation and implementation of public health policies, Nathanson (1996) notes three necessary components for persuasive risk framing. The first condition is “the existence of groups or individuals with the authority to define and describe the danger that threatens” (Nathanson 1996:615). Given the medical professions’ specialized knowledge concerning health and healthy behaviors, the government and medical communities are often considered “credible articulators” with regard to medically based arguments. The second condition to creating a credible risk is the clarification, but not necessarily demonstration, of a causal relationship between a particular behavior and dangerous outcome. This factor, also known as “empirical credibility,” (Snow and Benford 1988) refers to whether the empirical basis of the argument can be verified and if some evidence for the claim exists. The final condition is the “designation of potential victims” whereby the authority illustrates who, exactly, is going to be affected by the negative outcomes of the risk (Nathanson 1996:615). This research suggests that public health agencies are most likely to persuade a community to change behavior when they convincingly frame an undesirable behavior as risky. In addition to testing the effects of these framing characteristics, I also examine the role of morality in breastfeeding arguments as an additional persuasive framing strategy. Lupton (1995) argues that risk is nearly always constructed in terms of morality such that it is the responsibility of individuals to avoid risky situations and those who choose not to, the “risk takers,” are represented as irresponsible and immoral. Therefore, this research will advance our knowledge of persuasive framing strategies by connecting the relationship between morality, framing, and people’s beliefs and actions in relation to infant feeding. Morality is certainly a marked factor in breastfeeding framing. In their effort to increase breastfeeding initiation and duration rates, U.S. and Canadian government, medical, and institutional activists have tried to establish breastfeeding as not only the best feeding option medically, but also as “the moral gold standard for mothering” (Knaak 2005:197). While the coercive character of moral breastfeeding discourses is inherently problematic in its transformation of the context of choice (where mothers weigh the costs and benefits of breastfeeding and make a decision best for themselves and their children) into a contested political terrain (where women feel that they must breastfeed so as to not seem like bad mothers), I examine whether the use of morality in a breastfeeding argument increases its impact on women’s understanding of infant feeding. Therefore, in this project, I test these theories and hypothesize that the breastfeeding arguments most likely to affect mothers’ understandings of infant feeding and their decisions about it are those that: 1) have the most credible articulator, 2) most clearly relate formula feeding with undesirable outcomes, 3) demonstrate empirical credibility by identifying children and/or mothers as potential victims of formula feeding, and 4) have a moral component in which women are considered “bad” mothers if they formula feed rather than breastfeed. Therefore, this project builds on the social movements literature by examining the effectiveness of several framing characteristics in shaping beliefs and behaviors. Comparing Nashville and Toronto as research sites provides an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between national beliefs about women’s and mothers’ roles in society and the local interpretations of breastfeeding messages. Although the United States and Canada share many cultural and economic traits, these two countries differ dramatically in their approach to medicine and health care. One structural difference between the two nations is the provision of universal health coverage in Canadian provinces whereas health insurance is an individual responsibility in the US. This is particularly relevant with regard to infant feeding because research suggests that breastfed babies can significantly reduce the cost of health care during a child’s first year of life and since the cost of health care is a national rather than individual burden in Canada, there is institutional pressure to continually increase breastfeeding initiation and duration rates from a cost/benefit perspective. Although US breastfeeding advocates have not been as successful at obtaining structural-level support from health professionals, they have recently made significant strides. For example, in August 2007, New York City hospitals decided to no longer distribute bags of free formula to new mothers, replacing the formula with a breast-milk bottle cooler, disposable nursing pads, breastfeeding tips and a baby T-shirt with the slogan "I Eat at Mom's" printed on the front. This change suggests a cultural shift in the US whereby health professionals may be more sensitive to the breastfeeding movement and moving towards a more similar perspective as that found in Canada. These national-level differences, where Canadian breastfeeding activists have been much more successful in providing breastfeeding support to the public than those in the US, are also present at the local level in Nashville and Toronto. For example, with regard to city parental leave laws, in Toronto a woman is guaranteed up to 17 weeks pregnancy leave and up to 37 weeks maternity leave with pay at the discretion of the employer. Conversely, Nashville only guarantees 16 weeks of leave, for pregnancy or maternity, and pay is at the discretion of the employer. Therefore, we see some similarity in the offering of a leave with optional pay, however Toronto provides a much greater leave time than Nashville. With regard to breastfeeding rates, Table 1 lists the actual rates for each of these cities in relation to the national goal rates. We can see that in general, Toronto has much higher breastfeeding initiation and duration rates than Nashville, so much so that the rates in Toronto actually exceed the national goal rates for the United States. These differing levels of success by breastfeeding advocates may be an effect of the different framing strategies utilized in each city. It is likely that the different successes breastfeeding advocates have made in each city is directly related to the culture in which the movement is embedded. Research has noted that the cultural context of a social movement can make the reception of arguments more or less likely by the general public (see McCammon, Muse, Newman, and Terrell 2007; Ferree 2003). The arguments being used in each locale will interact with the local culture and the interpretations of a similar argument may differ considering the context. For example, given Nashville’s strong conservative religious community, it is likely that a religious based moral argument will be more effective in Nashville than other kinds of moral arguments. In contrast, it is possible that this kind of discursive or cultural opportunity structure does not exist in Toronto making religious moral argument ineffective in that context. Therefore, Nashville and Toronto as specific spaces, offer insightful comparisons as both are English-speaking, mid-to-large sized urban environments with a service-based economy. As research locations, these spaces provide variation in the use of authority, risk, victimhood, and morality in breastfeeding frames as well as variation in mothers’ reception of these frames. Studying women in Toronto and Nashville not only allows me to compare the Canadian and American cultural effects but also allows me to examine how different framing strategies may have led to varying levels of success for breastfeeding advocates. TABLE 1: 2003 City Breastfeeding Rates / National Goal Rates in Nashville and Toronto City Ever Breastfed Breastfeeding 6 Mos Breastfeeding 12 Mos Exclusive at 3 Mos Exclusive at 6 Mos Nashville 72.8 / 75 36.9 / 50 18.1 / 25 44.0 13.5 Toronto 89.9 / 100 58.3 / 100 25.6 / 75 61.8 / 100 18.0 / 100 I use institutional ethnography to look at this relationship between the construction of risk and mothers’ reactions to this construction. Institutional ethnography is a method that seeks to uncover and explicate the structural processes organizing people’s everyday experiences of a given phenomenon (Smith 2005). Such an approach allows me to take on two levels of analysis simultaneously, both the macro-level, where we can account for big structures and large processes, and the micro-level, where individuals respond to these dominant discourses (Smith 2005). Thus, for the macro-level analysis, I conduct a cross-cultural qualitative content analysis of the breastfeeding frames used by state, medical, and activist organizations in the United States and Canada. Qualitative content analysis involves analyzing texts for codes and themes and connecting the emergent ideas to a developing theory (Miles and Huberman 1994). For this analysis I use policy statements, initiatives, and publications from major stakeholders in the public health arena, including major medical associations, governmental health officials, and activist groups located in both the United States and Canada. It is in these publicly available documents that I will be able to uncover frames used by these organizations. The link between these large macro-conversations and the micro-experiences are developed through an analysis of a series of interviews. Firstly, I conduct semi-structured 1-2 hour interviews with 50 mothers, 25 in Nashville and 25 in Toronto. In these interviews I investigate their reactions to dominant messages about infant feeding. I explore which frames have been the most influential in the development of women’s understandings of breastfeeding by tracing their individual encounters with these messages and how they have interpreted and reacted to them. As I come to understand how these women construct infant feeding, I can examine the ways their construction intersects with, challenges, or reaffirms the dominant discourses established by the state and other institutional actors. My second set of interviews is with 20 medical professionals, 10 from Nashville and 10 from Toronto. In these interviews I explore the role of medical professionals as mediators between structural-level discourses and individual responses. Although the official positions of medical professionals are represented in the content analysis through the organizations that represent them (e.g. the American Medical Association), researchers and activists have been critical of medical professionals for not being individually committed to the organizational-level position (see Wolf 2006). In fact, in a survey conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, researchers discovered that while physicians may often recommend breastfeeding to their patients, they are just as likely to agree with or have a neutral opinion about the statement “breastfeeding and formula-feeding are equally beneficial infant feeding methods” (Schanler, O’Conner, and Lawrence 1999). Therefore, conducting interviews with these medical professionals will allow me to examine the extent to which individuals’ opinions and advice align with the organizational stances. I will be able to examine the extent to which individuals’ opinions and advice align with the organizational stances I analyze all of these data using a grounded theory approach and analytic induction. This approach to the development of theory begins with a set of cases and builds the theoretical analysis from the findings (Charmaz 1983). Therefore, I code the framing texts and interview transcripts for themes and processes and write analytic memos on developing patterns as a way of making sense of what is happening. Furthermore, analysis of the textual data will result in a two-step process: in the initial round of analysis, I develop and refine theoretical categories used to code the data, while the second round, I apply the newly refined codes to the broad body of the text (Miles and Huberman 1994). This project advances our sociological knowledge in multiple ways. An examination of the impact of strategic framing on a target audience’s conceptualization of a given phenomenon will advance our knowledge of framing theory in several ways. First, we will have a better understanding of how risk, authority, and a construction of victimhood affect the relationship between macro-level discourses and the micro-experiences of these arguments. Secondly, we will have a better understanding of how morality, as a particular type of strategic framing, affects the relationship between discourses and a target population’s reaction. Furthermore, by examining the ways in which these discourses construct a particular type of femininity and enforce that ideal through moral constructions of risk, this project will advance the sociological understanding of gender in U.S. and Canadian societies. However, the impact of these findings extends beyond sociology to multiple disciplines including cultural studies, political science, and public health. From a cultural standpoint, this project will provide insight into contemporary conceptualizations of gender. Through a cross-cultural analysis of breastfeeding and formula feeding arguments, I will uncover what kinds of femininity national organizations are constructing. I will address questions regarding whether patterns exist in the constructions of femininity and the strategies used to enforce these femininities. Secondly, this project will speak to the ongoing debate regarding interactions of discourse, power, structure and agency. By exploring how mothers’ conceptions of infant feeding intersect with, challenge or reaffirm these structural-level discourses, we will better understand the contentious relationship between individual agency and structural-level power. Furthermore, since the sample in this study includes women from multiple races and socioeconomic statuses, we will have insight into how these reactions may differ based on the race and/or class of the consumer. Finally, in a very practical sense these findings will advance what public health experts know about the effectiveness and impact of arguments used to convince a population to change its behavior. These findings can inform the tactics of multiple public health movements. In relation to breastfeeding specifically, by knowing which arguments have the biggest impact on mothers’ understandings of breastfeeding it is possible public health organizations may use these strategies to raise the breastfeeding initiation and duration rates in the US and Canada. I am confident in my ability to complete this project with the highest level of quality and in a timely manner. I have honed my skills as a researcher in several ways. First of all, I have earned high marks in all my research methods classes. Secondly, I used qualitative interviewing as a data collection strategy in my masters papers, which earned committee approval, and my undergraduate honors paper, which won a regional award. Furthermore, I have participated in several faculty research projects where I have conducted qualitative content analysis and interviews, the findings of which have been published in highly-ranked, peer-reviewed journals. This project has already received approval from the Vanderbilt University Institutional Review Board and I have already begun conducting interviews with the Nashville participants.  A proposed new collaboration with the University of Pennsyvlania to bring this Modern Jewish Artists exhibit to the campuses of Vanderbilt and Penn, in 2009.
Christina Dickerson, Graduate Department of History, Vanderbilt University. "The Jumonville Affair"
In 1754, in the contested territory of America’s Ohio Country, British soldiers ambushed Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville and his military escort. They easily defeated the French and Canadian force. Jumonville survived the initial skirmish, but then Tanaghrisson, an Indian ally of the British, murdered him with a tomahawk. The government of New France immediately responded to the assassination of Jumonville, whom they claimed had been a peace envoy. The Canadian commander at Fort Duquesne, Claude Pécaudy de Contrecoeur, sent Jumonville’s brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, to avenge the injustice. Villiers trapped and conquered the British, led by George Washington, at Fort Necessity. The French and Indian War had begun. The murder of Jumonville infuriated the residents of New France. Jumonville, after all, came from a distinctive lineage. The Coulon de Villiers and Pécaudy de Contrecoeur families belonged to the elite class. They both possessed La Croix de Saint-Louis, an honor reserved for the oldest and most distinguished military families. Contrecoeur’s decisive response to Jumonville’s death reflected his commitment to military duty as well as his class loyalty. Surprisingly, the Jumonville Affair had an impact on the French public. Generally, the French remained unconcerned with the lives and deaths of Canadian colonials. Jumonville’s death, however, stirred a nationalist fervor that lasted for years. During the war, the French invoked the name of Jumonville to promote public animosity towards the British. The French writer Antoine Leonard Thomas, for example, published the Jumonville Poeme in 1759. In this four-part epic, Thomas portrayed Jumonville as a martyr and the British as villains. That same year the poem won the prize of the Discourses at the Academie Francaise. After the British defeated them in the war, the French clung to the belief that they were at least culturally superior to their vanquishers. They spoke the name Jumonville to remind themselves that they were like the murdered Canadian, virtuous victims of British barbarity. Through his death, Jumonville helped to consolidate French identity. He transcended his colonial status to become a nationalist symbol. My dissertation will address the following questions relating to the Jumonville Affair: How did Canadians identify with Jumonville? How was the military elite formed and how did it function in New France? What led the French to identify with a colonial like Jumonville when they generally excluded Canada from their national consciousness? Laura Carpenter, “News Media and the Making of Health-Related Public Problems: The Politics of Male Circumcision and Female Genital Cutting in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.” This project compares the controversies over male circumcision (MC) and female genital cutting (FGC) in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain, from 1985-2007, in order to explicate the means by which grassroots activists, medical professionals, state actors, and especially journalists contribute to the construction of health-related public problems. Canadian funds will be used to hire a French-speaking graduate student assist in the collection, translation, and coding of news coverage of MC and FGC in Quebec. Shubhra Sharma, Associate Director and Senior Lecturer, Women's and Gender Studies, Vanderbilt University (shubhra.sharma@vanderbilt.edu; www.vanderbilt.edu/womens-studies). "Traveling Discourses of Nation: Production of Cultural Identity Amongst the Indian Diasporas in Dubai and Canada", research funds provided to offset costs of travel to Toronto, Canada, for archival research.
Daniel Ridge, "Trois jeunes hommes de letters"
This research project relies heavily upon the expertise of leading Montreal-based intellectuals, and to this end the Quebec and Canadian Studies program is financing Daniel Ridge's voyage to meet (primarily) with Marc Angenot and Michel Pierssens, of McGill and U of Montreal. The project, to result in a PhD thesis and a coffee table book, describes "three young men of letters" in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. By the time Pierre Louÿs met André Gide in 1887 at the Ecole Alsacienne in Paris, the notion of the decadence had already become an integral part of the identity of Paris’ elite literary and artistic circles. Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), Huysmans’ A rebours (1884), Verlaine’s Poètes maudits (1886), and Maupassant’s Une Vie (1883) and Bel-Ami (1885) had contributed early on in that decade to shaping the idea of what it meant not only to be a modern artist, but also a poet, intellectual, and dandy. We know from journals and letters that these works, among other nineteenth century classics by Hugo, Baudelaire, and Stendhal, played a key role in the esthetic and literary formation of both Gide and Louÿs, as well as their friend Paul Valéry. For these three young artists arriving on the literary scene at the end of the 1880s, the three of them born between 1869 and 1871, the pessimism, which often defines this period, as well as “la crise des vers” and “la crise du roman” were reaching their ever-suffocating zenith. Early on in his literary formation, Gide was conscious of the need to go beyond the stifling literary conventions that had painted his generation into a corner, while Louÿs was content with making a name for himself in Paris’ elite literary society, even if that meant tempering a desire for artistic innovation. Louÿs’ interest in “la vie mondaine” contrasts sharply with Gide’s distaste for this same world and Valéry’s very real battle, along with Mallarmé, with “la crise des vers.” However, beyond the personal relationship that binds these three young men to one another, is the relationship they had with the literary habitus, to borrow a term of Pierre Bordieu, in which they were formed and helped perpetuate in their divergent ways. The elements that define this habitus and their effects on these writers is the object of the following study which attempts to look at not only the literature which informed their early works, but also those cultural elements (objects, behavior, etc.) which were characteristic of their particular late nineteenth century Parisian society.
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