Graduate Student Profiles The following profiles represent only those students who voluntarily provided information for the website.
My thesis will examine the evolution of commemorating Indigenous historical sites within the city of Saskatoon between 1980 and 2015 to demonstrate how Indigenous activism propelled early commemoration efforts and paved the way for the establishment of commemorative sites resulting from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 94 Calls to Action.
My dissertation, "Manufacturing Dissent: Anti-Vaccination Networks in Canada," expands the work I began in my master's interrogating the role of risk and choice discourse in anti-vaccine rhetoric. I trace how government actions galvanized the budding anti-vaccine movement in English Canada. I also show that West created a series of strategic alliances to generate new critiques of vaccination from marginalized Canadians.
Using primarily children’s correspondence, magazines, and judicial records, this project explores how Western Canadian youth navigated puberty and reproduction during a period when nationalism, the mental hygiene movement, and purveyors of medical quackery fought to shape the values of Canada’s post ‘Great War’ generation of children.
My thesis aims to explore the legal fate of cunning women post-restoration in England. By examining ecclesiastical and secular legal records, I will determine if there was any noticeable change in the number of women who practiced popular magic following the witch trials, in the types of magic they practiced, or how they framed their practices—particularly I want to discover if the church continued to regulate magic practice among the common people following the trials as it had done before.
This project seeks to uncover Indigenous understandings of health and healing as practiced by Nehiyaw (Cree) peoples living in northwest central Saskatchewan from 1921 to the 1970s, with an aim to answer the question: How have understandings of traditional knowledge and cultural practices related to health and healing changed as a result of treaty signing and the colonial practices that followed? This research will use Elders’ narratives and stories to explore traditional healing knowledge and practices as understood before and after treaty signing and will employ an Indigenous research methodology and a community-engaged focus. Research will be conducted in Waterhen Lake First Nation with community members with a storytelling approach meant to ensure I build and maintain strong respectful and reciprocal relationships with Indigenous research participants (Wilson. 2008). I strongly believe that it’s important to validate Indigenous worldviews and perspectives in everything we do, whether in Indigenous or non-Indigenous communities, institutions, and organizations.
My dissertation examines energy developments in Saskatchewan during the energy crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, paying special attention to rhetoric and research surrounding non-fossil fuel energies such as hydropower, nuclear power, renewable energy, and energy conservation. I’m particularly interested in how this period presented “energy opportunities” for the province given the wide range of energy resources available there, and the ways that the government and different sectors of society envisioned the future of energy—and the province—in a period of perceived crisis. Moreover, the dissertation considers these debates and developments through the lens of health, highlighting a growing awareness of the intersections between the health of environments, communities, and human bodies. As part of this work, I examine the centrality of energy issues to the rise and resurgence of social movements in the province, including environmentalism and Indigenous rights.
My thesis research will investigate the history of two-tier public-private healthcare systems. Analysis of the two-tier South African healthcare system and Canadian Medicare case studies will illustrate the impact that changing effects of health systems have on the delivery of healthcare over time. A focus will be on socio-political and socio-economic factors which influence debates concerning the privatization of healthcare.
This dissertation examines how the Inter Press Service (IPS) became an international ally of Third Worldist nations during the high age of decolonization. The non-profit cooperative of journalists joined transnational efforts challenging international communications structures and, in turn, facilitated the free flow of marginalized perspectives into the global media system. With Third World movements in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, IPS played an important role in the decolonization of information and the democratization of world news. Ultimately, my doctoral project aims to unearth how IPS helped expand a planetary Third World imagination in the 1970s and 1980s.
My dissertation explores the development of second-wave feminism in Saskatchewan from the 1960s to the early 1980s. My research will highlight how local circumstances shaped women's experiences of feminism in the late 20th century. I am further interested in how the intersections of regional, racial, class, and gender identities informed relationships between the various and unique women's groups within the province. Thus, through a detailed study of these feminist groups and their engagement with one another, I will work to chart the landscape of second-wave feminism in Saskatchewan.
My thesis investigates the relationship between communities and institutions, through the example of a 15th century church court. Using a primary source base of legal manuscripts, I analyse cases of lenocinium—sexual pandering—prosecuted in the diocese of Hereford, England. As a vague and malleable charge, lenocinium encompassed diverse modes of aiding/abetting: from parents permitting adolescent fornication; to spouses consenting to adultery; to remunerated pimping and procuring. I argue that these diverse cases reflect an ongoing, gendered discourse between court and community over 3rd party responsibility. Through a comparative study of sessions held in two rural communities between 1440 and 1480, I aim to demonstrate how such 3rd party responsibility enabled court and community to negotiate with one another and satisfy their respective jurisprudential and social needs. In effect, I argue that cases of lenociniumreflect a conceptual lynchpin needed to sustain the “court-community symbiosis” previously established in legal and social church court historiography.
My dissertation examines the theme of abstinence through an examination of non-medical intervention and educational campaigns of the twentieth century, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE). Examining abstinence education through the lens of social, medical, religious, and gender history complicates temperance history to trace the medicalization of addiction, religious and gendered consequences and roots of abstinence, and the role sobriety played in a person’s identity as the ideal citizen throughout the twentieth century in Canada and the United States.
My research investigates the creation of canola and its establishment in Canadian prairie agricultural production. It focuses on how canola has changed Western Canadians' relationship with the environment and what this means for agriculture in the 21st century.
Joseph Mays received his MSc in Ethnobotany from the University of Kent researching responses to globalization by the Yanesha of central Peru. Graduating with biology and anthropology degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University, he published a medicinal plant guide for the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve in Ecuador, and he also holds a certificate in Psychedelic Assisted Therapies from Naropa University. After serving as director of the Chacruna Institute's Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative for five years, he became the Program Advisor in 2024, where he continues to partner with Indigenous community organizations throughout Latin America. His current research focuses on the History of Indigenous Movements for Human Rights in the Americas, looking at struggles for community autonomy in the Great Plains, Mexico, and Amazonia. He is interested in how Indigenous political strategies integrate ideas of gift, reciprocity, and relational ontologies reflected in ritual and ceremony, with particular emphasis on their intersection with the psychedelics movement in the Global North.
My thesis aims to explore the role of Metis women in early Canadian commerce via the examination of material culture. In particular, I hope to investigate the role of Metis women's productive labour, with a focus on bead work, in what is now Canada during the Nineteenth Century. Through my research, I seek to shed light on the unique and impactful role of Metis women in trade through the lens of their interactions with material culture.
My dissertation is a legal history project studying the origins and ongoing impact of three Canadian Supreme Court cases during the 1970s and 1980s: Murdoch v. Murdoch (1973), Rathwell v. Rathwell (1978), and Pettkus v. Becker (1981). Through applying legal and historical research methods to the study of these three cases, this project investigates how Canadian women’s experiences of property division at the end of marriage and common-law relationships significantly changed, legally and socially, beginning in the 1970s. Combining case law with popular publications like Chatelaine and The Western Producer, I’m interested in understanding how the ending of three relationships in rural, agricultural Canada impacted living, working, and loving under family property law for all Canadians in the latter twentieth century. I’ve co-authored articles on the histories of gendered labour in Canadian academia in the Canadian Historical Review and London School of Economics Impact Blog
This dissertation contributes to African Environmental History by examining the cocoa trade within the British Empire through a global lens. The study spans three regions connected by the Atlantic: Asante in Ghana, where cocoa beans are produced; London, where the beans are processed into chocolate; and Saskatchewan, where the chocolate is consumed. The project begins in Ghana’s High Forest region where cocoa cultivation was introduced into Asante by migrant Akuapem farmers in the early 1900s. This sparked a boom in the industry, establishing the Gold Coast as a leading global producer of cocoa. In Asante, cocoa became known as the ‘golden pod’, generating lucrative returns that reshaped local economies and landscapes. Across the Atlantic, in London, cocoa beans became a vital trade commodity. Factories there converted the beans into chocolate, maintaining close communication with colonial authorities in the Gold Coast to ensure quality of the bean. This transformation of raw cocoa into chocolate represents a key link in the global supply chain, adding value to the commodity and preparing it for consumers. The story culminates in Saskatchewan, which during the same decades, emerged as a leading producer of wheat while simultaneously developing a taste for chocolate. The arrival of chocolate in this Canadian province demonstrates the far-reaching impact of colonial trade networks and changing consumer preferences where people worked diligently to afford this novel treat, illustrating how global trade influenced local economic behaviours and cultural practices. This project thus becomes a melting pot of interactions within the British Empire, highlighting the relationship between agriculture, commodity trade and environmental changes such as deforestation and land use transformation and also offering broader perspectives into colonialism, globalization and environmental change.
My dissertation contributes to gender and medical history by exploring the historical factors that have shaped the lynching and accusations of older women in Ghana. By engaging a wide range of sources like colonial ordinances and missionary and anthropological discourses on witchcraft, this dissertation aims to examine how the historical evolution of the phenomenon has shaped the African understanding of mental diseases that affect older women. I am particularly interested in how witchcraft became a contested system of knowledge within the Ghanaian colonial space and how this has affected its connotations and meanings for contemporary discourses and policy directions on Aging and Population Health in Ghana.
My thesis seeks to explore the eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic commodity trade, highlighting the lesser know commodities which have been largely overshadowed by the importance of sugar and cotton. Using Historical GIS to focus on the trade of dry ginger between the Caribbean islands and Britain, I will be able to highlight the importance of non-sugar Caribbean commodities in increasing consumption in Britain, and ultimately laying the foundation for the industrial revolution.
My proposed research seeks to look at the work of the first ever Queer Indigenous social activist and wellness group in the United States, Gay American Indians, and where they fit in both in the broad spectrum of North American Indigenous history in their formation, but also where they grow as a national and international organization and effect contemporary Indigenous and Queer politics and the way Academia handles, addresses, reproduces, and includes Queer Indigeneity. I also believe in the importance of recording these stories and histories of Indigenous elders and allies who were involved with GAI to preserve their voices and worldviews for future Indigenous peoples, Queer or otherwise, much as they did with their landmark publication Living the Spirit.
My dissertation research analyses the aftermath of the use of the drug thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s, which resulted in thousands of children born with teratogenic congenital disabilities. The focus of my work is on the changing public perceptions of children born with thalidomide-related congenital disabilities and public trust in the medication. I show that this change was influenced by thalidomide victim activist groups led by both the parents and children affected by the drug. These started as support groups but evolved into activist groups that were instrumental in the agreement of legal settlements with government agencies and pharmaceutical companies. By using media sources published by these groups and correspondence between families and legal agencies, I track the change they made in the eyes of the public regarding their plight for reparations. I work at the intersection of the history of medical experimentation ethics, cultural history, and the history of disability advocacy to frame my research.
My thesis analyses the racialized history of medicine in the United States in order to place the narrative of MDMA prohibition into the greater arc of the American history of drugs and drug prohibition. Some academics have claimed that MDMA is an all white drug. It may have been a -majority- white drug until after its prohibition in 1985, but minority users likely always existed. MDMA began its life as a therapeutic tool in the 70s before being deemed a public health issue. It subsequently received a schedule one controlled substance status even when the molecule had been used in therapy for nearly ten years. This placed MDMA alongside other dangerous substances like cocaine and heroin witnessing the arrest of more minority users and sellers for the first time. Through the prohibition of MDMA, MDMA arrests became another way to fuel the mass imprisonment of BIPOC America. This atmosphere has made it exceedingly difficult to induct this population into MAPS clinical trials. Trauma is prevalent in lower income BIPC communities, but this demographic represents less than 10% of MAPS participants. MAPS clinical trials began in 1996, and while the drug was becoming an elite white veteran therapy treatment for PTSD, it was simultaneously entering the realm of urban drug of the masses. Through increasing the BIPOC participants in these trials, the particulars of how MDMA can be used to treat racial trauma can be explored.
Canadian prairie history is interwoven with heroic narratives of ordinary men. Whether the voyageur, the homesteader, the farmer, or the soldier, these white, Christian protagonists become – much like the “cowboy,” the “outlaw,” and the “pioneer” in the American west – a form of national identity in Canada. However, unlike in American stories where the west is often characterized as “wild,” in Canadian stories the west is “mild.” My doctoral research explains how narratives about the “mild west” and the “heroic” characters that populate these stories helped to create Canada’s “peaceful frontier” in the prairie region. These popular understandings of prairie history have provided Canada with powerful, durable, but above all problematic, identity-shaping narratives. My work challenges these settler nation-building identities and narratives found within private memory and public spaces by repositioning them within the context of settler colonialism and Indigenous displacement.
My project seeks to examine the imagery of the goddess Concordia and how it changes during the later Roman Empire from 235-350 CE.
My PhD dissertation explores the professionalization of African health labor within colonial and Christian missionary biomedical health infrastructures over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This project examines the silenced roles, agency, and contributions of Africans who across various intersectional categories worked to sustain biomedical healthcare in Ghana. It also interrogates the intersection of gender, race and class in the recruitment and training of local labor into the biomedical health service. This project challenges the dominant Eurocentric narratives which place foreign agencies at the center of development and sustenance of biomedicine in Africa. I argue that the work of African labor was central to the success and organization of biomedicine in Ghana. Understanding the type of work, the skills learned, the resilience and limitations of local health workers, all of whom contributed to the success and organization of biomedicine adds to our understanding of global health within local contexts.
