Sociology and Legal Studies

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Sociology and Legal Studies.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Judgment and the Order of Passivity: An Investigation of the Banality of Evil in the Cases of the Rwandan and Cambodian Genocides, and Modern Bureaucracy
(University of Waterloo, 2018-11-02) Waterman, Benjamin; Bonner, Kieran
In the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil the discussion of her work has come to recognize that Arendt’s account of the banality of evil is not meant to excuse Adolf Eichmann for serving as the SS officer charged with overseeing the logistical arrangements needed to enact the Final Solution. This writing will examine three case studies – a discussion of the genocides in Rwanda and in Cambodia and a discussion of modern bureaucracy – and consider both to what extent Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil contributes to an understanding of the practices of genocide and modern bureaucracy, and to what extent does an examination of these practices contribute to an understanding of the banality of evil. The argument will be made that Arendt’s use of this phrase refers simply to the willingness to perform activities if they are viewed as being in compliance with the prevailing moral and/or legal order of the society in which they occur. Though this suggests her offering a fairly straightforward message about the “dangers of conformity,” or the willingness to thoughtlessly engage in conventional practices to such an extreme degree, the thesis will seek to demonstrate the complexity of recognizing that this level of conformity is present under these circumstances. The examination of the three cases being discussed will centre both on Arendt’s discussion of the human faculties as well as the form of sociological investigation developed by Alan Blum and Peter McHugh known as Analysis, and the focus of this method upon understanding the merits of human activity. The argument seeks to show that by following the reflexive turn in Analysis an understanding of what is involved in showing a concern for the meaning of human activity is not arrived at “subjectively.” Rather the suggestion will be made that even if the resolution of this meaning is without a definitive outcome its importance is demonstrated through a consideration of the cases examined and the concern shown within each of them for matters such as friendship, justice, the activity of thinking and the nature of evil. Lastly, the argument will use Arendt’s work to suggest that not only the activity of thinking but each of the different human faculties can potentially offer a way to appreciate the “thoughtlessness” that Arendt suggests is indicative of the banality of evil, and which may be encountered in the mundane setting of modern bureaucracy and/or in the extreme situations of genocide.
The reading modality of popular trauma talk from within the province of human practice: A phenomenological hermeneutic perspective
(University of Waterloo, 2017-04-27) Nickerson-White, Sara; Bonner, Kieran
The term trauma occurs on a regular and frequent basis in Canadian newspapers. Contemporary inquiries into the phenomenon of the popularity of the term “trauma” have argued that trauma has become: a term that has drifted beyond its etymological root, a technical concept mistakenly and haphazardly applied, a symbol, and a functional communication tool. Problematically, each advance relies on a secondary approach to language. Specifically, each misses the inseparable connection between language and experience. Differently, the phenomenological hermeneutic approach taken in this dissertation moves beyond the notion of the ‘proper’, by deliberately considering the diversity of popular trauma talk as meaningful and intelligible for social members in the everyday practice of reading (de Certeau, 1984). This inquiry focuses on the modality of reading: that is, how social members actively do a popular trauma reading by modifying and making use of what is written when they establish a relation to what is read from within a particular Worldly existence. This work shows that when the modality of a popular trauma reading is considered in light of the generic and anonymous Worldly existence in which the reading occurs, the full scope of popular trauma talk is an open possibility for an everyday reading experience. This research demonstrates the benefits of adopting a phenomenological hermeneutic approach for understanding how people ‘consume’ cultural content.
Recreating a Taste of Home in Canada: A Radical Interpretive Inquiry into Toronto’s Intergenerational Chinese Food Sharing Networks
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-13) Huang, Celia; Bonner, Kieran
In multicultural Toronto, there is a large and increasing Chinese population. However, only very limited recent sociological research has been conducted on the lived experiences of Chinese immigrants and the children of Chinese immigrants. For many Chinese, one way to cope with the problem of displacement and a sense of homelessness, said to be endemic to the modern life-world, is to recreate the appearance of the order of home in their food sharing activities. My dissertation explores the meanings of “home” from the lived experiences of intergenerational Chinese in Toronto, focusing on Chinese food as an important cultural heritage and everyday practice. By adopting the radical interpretive perspective, which requires the intertwining of theory and methods, I use the theoretical framework combining a relational theoretical perspective (given the cultural significance of guanxi, meaning relationship, for the Chinese), the sociology of the meal, and social construction of reality, as well as a multi-method approach consisting of a unique combination of social network analysis, phenomenology, and reflexive analysis. Through social network analysis, I explore the composition, content, and structure of Chinese food sharing networks across different ages and generations, and through phenomenology and reflexive analysis, I study what these patterns mean both for the participants and for the meaning of culture. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from in-depth interviews with 21 participants in Toronto, who provided information on 209 people. These interviews were conducted in the participants’ first languages, Chinese and English. The research findings show that younger first generation immigrants and second generation immigrants (children of immigrants) have more culturally diverse Chinese food sharing networks than older immigrants, although they all included family and friends in their networks, a lot of whom provided emotional support (87.31%) and practical information (81.73%) but less financial support (25.38%). By exploring the life-worlds of participants, I found that the problem of the first generation immigrants is the loss of home since their taken-for-granted cultural patterns from their countries of origin are often seen as inadequate in the host country. The older immigrants may be able to hold on to their “home world” more by interacting mostly with family, but the younger immigrants are more eager to integrate with Canadian society. In comparison, the problem of the second generation is the divided home because they frequently suffer from negotiating between different and sometimes conflicting cultural patterns. Born and raised in Canada, they take the pluralization of life-worlds for granted and thus come across as more cosmopolitan. For both generations, the meaning of home is essentially a feeling of comfort. There are several interrelated themes under the overall theme of comfort, representing different relations to Chinese food, including nostalgia, familiarity, habit, affective support, and being yourself. I also discuss other possible meanings of home beyond comfort, specifically, celebration and hosting. By critically inquiring into the assumptions of knowledge, I formulate the deep structure of motive to reveal possibilities such as double enjoyment and reversing the host-guest relationship based on participants’ confidence in Chinese food as an intangible cultural heritage containing a taste that reflects values such as artistry, health, variety, authenticity, and playfulness. Overall, radical interpretive inquiry works with and within language to reveal findings about the experience that resonate with more universal themes and possibilities implicated in the relation of home to food, as seen through the prism of Chinese in Canada. The knowledge and insights created by this research not only give voices to the Chinese research participants but also serve as a first step in starting a conversation among recent and long-time immigrants, native-born Canadians, interdisciplinary researchers, policy makers and service providers to improve cross-cultural understanding in our diverse Canadian society.
The Role of Practical Reasoning and Typification in Consumer Analytics Work: An Ethnomethodological Study
(University of Waterloo, 2016-07-07) Clarke, Michael; Bonner, Kieran
Traditional scholarship views quantitative people-categorization in the workplace—i.e. the use of big data to group consumers and categorize their cultures—as primarily a problem of technical and statistical optimization. By contrast, my thesis emphasizes a very different research dimension: namely, the role that practical reasoning plays as workers organize themselves locally to categorize and apply data-based groups. Drawing on the ethnomethodological understanding of practical reasoning, I focus on the way the locally organized talk accomplishes people-categorization as a self-contained activity. Specifically, I will argue that practical reasoning shapes the way workers, through their talk, combine technology, conversation, and everyday practice to render scenes as reasonable and accountable in their attempt to anticipate, understand, and apply consumer preferences, behaviors, and so on. To do this, analysts should go beyond standard empirical methods to adopt a more radically reflexive stance toward workplace discourse. Next, I will argue that the benefits of adopting such an interpretive methodological stance in this setting are threefold: first, this approach will help market researchers and design professionals rethink how they conduct market segmentation and persona development, two important techniques debated in academia, but used extensively in professional settings to design products, processes, and marketing plans. I will show that “practical” actors, through their locally organized practices, make and find in ordinary taken-for-granted ways “market segmentation” and “persona development” as reasonable ways of assembling the world of people-categorization in the workplace. Second, this approach broadens arguments about the “social life of methods” to include professions outside of the academy that apply statistical methods to big data, and to radically consider our relationship with technology. Furthermore, I will argue that part of understanding practical reasoning in the workplace includes identifying the hold that the unquestioned commitment to expanding technology has on discourse. For the latter, I adopt a radical interpretive perspective in order to reveal the irony of our focus on expanding our human powers through technology. To support my claims, I have divided my argument into four main sections, each one given its own chapter. Chapter 1 reviews how digital advertising workers combine big data about groups of people and their culture with other resources to build to a finished technical product. Chapter 2 outlines how these same workers rely on interpretive methods during the conceptual development of big data people segments. Chapter 3 demonstrates how analysts rely on interpretive methods and background expectancies during the process of accessing, extracting, and analyzing big data about groups of people and their culture. These methods can help professionals achieve a richer understanding of consumer culture, and consequently, can help them make better big-data application decisions throughout the design cycle. Chapter 4 takes a radical interpretive case study format and demonstrates how treating digital advertising worker dialogue as discourse reveals important methods for designers, for workers and for social inquirers. In this final Chapter, I show how a very particular example of a stretch of talk about a piece of technology can be examined as a cultural expression of the desire to expand human powers, and I show how the abstract idea of the desire to expand human powers can be critically addressed as a possibility and actualization in its own right. The analysis in Chapter 4 reveals the seen but unnoticed assumption embedded in the culture concerning the unquestioned commitment to expanding technology, which, it can be argued, has undermined our capacity to talk about purpose or point; instead, the talk takes for granted the assumption that there is only one purpose: expanding our human powers. The principle of expanding our human powers through technology does not just have to be assumed; it can and should be critically engaged. This engagement is accomplished by drawing on radical interpretive approaches to modernity, including Grant (1969), and Arendt (1958).

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Browsing Sociology and Legal Studies by Author "Bonner, Kieran"