Living on the Other Side of Nowhere Unravelling Meanings of Community in the Context of the TAGS Era

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2001 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, , course: Sociology PhD thesis, language: English, abstract: Much scholarly work has centered around community in Newfoundland and Labrador. However, comparatively little work has focused on meanings of community. This thesis compares meanings of community in everyday life for people living in a Southern Shore community on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, with the meanings found in scholarly literature and in government documents produced in association with The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS). TAGS was a federal adjustment program responding to the moratoria on groundfish fishing in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s. I draw on Dorothy Smith's feminist theory, which starts from "lived experience" as well as the socioeconomic context of that lived experience as an entry point to illuminating the ideological nature of documents and their links to ruling relations. Smith's discussion of ideology and ruling relations are central to my gender-informed and mediated framework. I explore the contrast between meanings of community in TAGS documents and expert texts looking for lines of fault between these texts and meanings of community in everyday life in a fishing community in Newfoundland. I use as well Smith's notions of resilience and emergent consciousness to demonstrate that the historical oppressive practices of the ruling group are re-mobilized in TAGS, reflecting society's patriarchal and capitalist ideology generally, and government ideology more specifically. I show the insight of ordinary social actors into the conditions of their existence. My argument is that these concepts are integrally related to community research and policy development. The research shows that the meanings of community in one community is partly organized by history, geography and gender, and by religious, economic and political regimes. This thesis concludes by exploring the implications of these interpretations for community research and policy development.