Nicole Gerarda Power

Rural youth and emotional geographies: how photovoice and words-alone methods tell different stories of place

In this paper we discuss how photovoice and words-alone methods used in a study with young people living in communities on the west coast of Newfoundland, Canada, helped to tell different stories of rurality. Instead of the dominant narrative of rural decline in the focus groups and interviews with youth, through photovoice young people talked more positively about their home places. Drawing on recent work on emotional geographies and combining realist and constructionist frameworks, we argue that the photographs represent culturally accepted and appropriate ways of thinking, talking, and feeling about place, and that these shared affective practices provide a sense of community and continuity in a context of uncertainty in fisheries communities. It is our contention that such shared practices offer a strategy to deal with, indeed to heal, the damaging impact of the near extinction of fisheries stocks by maintaining a stable sense of self and place.

Women and Children First: the Gendered and Generational Social-ecology of Smaller-scale Fisheries in Newfoundland and Labrador and Northern Norway

The resilience of small-scale fisheries in developed and developing countries has been used to provide lessons to conventional managers regarding ways to transition toward a social-ecological approach to understanding and managing fisheries. We contribute to the understanding of the relationship between management and the resilience of small-scale fisheries in developed countries by looking at these dynamics in the wake of the shock of stock collapse and fisheries closures in two contexts: Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and northern Norway. We revisit and update previous research on the gendered effects of the collapse and closure of the Newfoundland and Labrador northern cod fishery and the closure of the Norwegian cod fishery in the early 1990s and present new research on young people in fisheries communities in both contexts. We argue that post-closure fishery policy and industry responses that focused on downsizing fisheries through professionalization, the introduction of quotas, and other changes ignored the gendered and intergenerational household basis of small-scale fisheries and its relationship to resilience. Data on ongoing gender inequities within these fisheries and on largely failed recruitment of youth to these fisheries suggest they are currently at a tipping-point that, if not addressed, could lead to their virtual disappearance in the near future.

Playing in the woods: youth, leisure and the performance of gender relations in rural Newfoundland

Based on qualitative interviews and focus groups with youth (12–24 years) living in rural, coastal Newfoundland, Canada, we examine how leisure practices within this context served to reproduce and naturalize localized gender relations. More specifically, we argue that the participants drew upon dominant discursive constructions of rural leisure to reiteratively enact a binary distinction between the ‘town’ as a space of constraint, youth-adult tensions, and consumerism in contrast to the freedom and privacy of the ‘woods’. This dichotomy was mapped onto gender binaries, where the town was coded as feminine and the woods, masculine. We argue that these constructions served to mark the boundaries of normative gender leisure practices in the production of embodied gender subjectivities.

“The fishery went away”: The impacts of long-term fishery closures on young people's experience and perception of fisheries employment in Newfoundland coastal communities

There is a growing body of research documenting the impacts of fisheries collapses on communities and fisheries workers. Less attention has been paid to the sustainable use of fisheries resources so that future generations have access to these resources, or to the creation of mechanisms that might contribute to the intergenerational continuity of recruitment of fisheries workers and the regeneration of fisheries communities. In this paper we report on young people’s experiences and perceptions of fisheries employment in Newfoundland and Labrador to deepen our understanding of the resiliency of small-scale fisheries. We found that these young people’s experiences of fisheries employment are extremely limited and their perceptions of the quality of fisheries work is primarily negative while, at the same time, they recognize its importance to the vitality of their communities. We argue that stock collapses and subsequent downsizing and regulatory changes in the industry have disrupted intergenerational continuity in fisheries work and shaped how young people view their communities and options.

Stuck between ‘the rock’ and a hard place: rural crisis and re-imagining rural Newfoundland feminine subjectivities

There has been a growing body of research exploring the mobility experiences of rural youth as they migrate in search of work, education and leisure. In this article we contribute to this body of knowledge by examining the mobility experiences of young women (16–24 years) living on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In contrast to dominant constructions of rural crisis that position out-of-the-way places as in decline, dying or dead, we argue that the young women in our study articulated complex, affective relations to place. In so doing, they negotiated localized histories, prevailing social relations, broader discursive constructions and embodied affective connections in forging their emplaced feminine subjectivities. We argue that foregrounding the complex and at times contradictory relationships that the young women articulated with their rural homes is an important step in prying open dominant albeit constraining constructions of the rural, thereby allowing for alternative and more inhabitable imaginings of out-of-the-way places.

Constructing A ‘Culture of Safety’: An Examination of the Assumptions Embedded in Occupational Safety and Health Curricula Delivered to High School Students and Fish Harvesters in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

Abstract Occupational safety and health training is often presented as a primary intervention strategy for reducing the risk of work-related accidents and injuries. Unacknowledged assumptions about the nature of risk, health and safety, as well as assumptions about how best to intervene, are often embedded in such training. In this paper we uncover some of the underlying assumptions in the occupational safety and health curricula targeting two distinct groups of workers in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador: young people at high school and fish harvesters. We use data from two SafetyNet studies, both of which used a mixed methods approach, including content and discourse analyses of textbooks and curriculum guides, observations of the classroom delivery of the occupational safety and health curriculum, qualitative interviews with instructors and key informants, and a review of public documents and media representations. In the analysis we examine the ways in which risk, health and safety are discussed in the print curricula and in the classroom, and we show that occupational safety and health training for both groups is informed by an underlying assumption that workplace-related injuries, accidents and diseases can be attributed mainly to human error or workers’ lack of knowledge. Both curricula tend to prescribe the development of a culture of safety to mitigate occupational risk, focusing on the transfer of expert occupational safety and health knowledge to individual workers, with the goal of changing their attitudes and behaviours rather than encouraging a more holistic approach to prevention. This prescription involves the presentation of occupational safety and health knowledge as technical, objective and transferrable to multiple contexts, thereby shifting the focus away from the social contexts and relations, and the particular work environments that mediate awareness and the ability of workers to use their knowledge to mitigate risks and to work safely.

Correctional Officers in Canada: Interpreting Workplace Violence

The potential for violence in prison shapes how correctional officers (COs) carry out their work. Yet, how provincial COs experience violence remains understudied. Using theoretical insights from the literature on workplace violence in caring and service occupations, we analyze observational data and interviews conducted with COs in eastern Canada. We show that COs carry out their everyday work under increasingly strained conditions (e.g., understaffing) and manage prisoners’ (sometimes violent) responses to deteriorating prison conditions (e.g., overcrowding) by engaging in emotional labor. The COs understand workplace violence as an inevitable “part of the job,” which serves to normalize the experience of workplace violence and deflect attention away from the prison conditions which exacerbate and even produce violence.

Taking Care of Companion Animals

Focusing on local government and non-governmental nonhuman animal welfare organizations, this paper reports survey results on institutional policies, interpretive frameworks, and practices regarding companion animals in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The findings suggested that local governments and animal shelters use different interpretive frameworks of companion animal welfare, with the former taking a human-centric position and the latter focusing on animal well-being. The results showed that most local governments are not well engaged with animal welfare issues. Instead, these issues are more often dealt with by non-governmental organizations that operate on limited budgets and rely heavily on volunteer labor. Whereas federal and provincial governments are responsible for legislating companion animal welfare, practical implementation of animal welfare has been largely the responsibility of non-governmental organizations. Our findings demonstrated that the ways that animal welfare policy is interpreted and enacted at the local level have significant implications for animal well-being more broadly.

Bodies at work: insights from marine and coastal OSH research

Abstract There have been few attempts to bridge the literatures on the social science of the body and the social science of occupational safety and health. Bridging this divide requires a reconciliation of the conflicting treatments of the body found in these literatures — the social body in the literature on the social science of the body and the invisible, taken-for-granted, naturalised or medicalised body in the other. In this paper, we contribute to this neglected area of research by using Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’, ‘field’ and ‘capital’ — as well as Wacquant’s concept of ‘bodily capital’ — to interpret findings from two SafetyNet research projects: a study of perceptions of risk among a sample of male fish harvesters and a study of the quality of life impacts of snow crab occupational allergy and asthma among a sample of primarily female processing workers in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Our comparative case studies of fish harvesters’ and crab processing workers’ habitus and bodily capital, and their relevance for how they played the health and safety ‘game’ in the context of industrial restructuring and asymmetrical power relations, show us how health and safety can be mediated by tensions between embodied competencies and dispositions, and the disruptions caused by changing work environments, limited employment options and, in the case of these particular crab processing workers, illness and disease. Analysing the ways male fish harvesters and female crab processing workers talk about their bodies at work, including how they experience and deal with the risk and reality of injury and occupational disease in fields of asymmetrical power relations, can help us see where the social body fits within the social science of occupational safety and health, and its relevance for occupational safety and health research and policy more generally.