Moving Toward Understanding: Negotiating Survival and Wellbeing while Living in Poverty

Poverty in Canada continues to be regarded as an individual problem, rather than a set of complex and institutional systemic failures. Moreover, there remains a longstanding and problematic belief that poverty, homelessness, and disenfranchisement can be ‘solved’ by those living in precarity by merely working harder, and that individuals remain in poverty because of their own independent choices and decisions. This is evidenced through dominant neoliberal discourses surrounding personal responsibilities which will be addressed in this dissertation. What these discourses have failed to address are the frameworks, contexts, and spaces within which poverty is structurally and systemically reproduced. Individuals and communities do not stumble upon poverty. Classism, colonialism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and marginalization, which are visible through poverty, lend themselves to the perpetuation of poverty across generations, as well as purposefully disenfranchising particular intersections of people. What endures then, is a both lack of understanding and wilful neglect about the lived experiences of poverty and homelessness, existing realities of risk, how cycles of poverty become reinforced through relational, institutional, and systemic means, and the role that physical activity and movement has on the lives of the poor. In this dissertation, I interrogate how macro level power structures impact the everyday, micro level lives of people experiencing poverty and homelessness. The data collected in this work comes from a nine-month institutional ethnography at Start Me Up Niagara (SMUN), in St. Catharines, Ontario Canada, where I observed, gathered field notes, and conducted interviews with staff and people who used SMUN. In my findings, I explore how individuals navigate health and wellbeing while experiencing poverty. I address the (in)accessibility to public and private spaces and emphasize the important role of care providers in space of care, like SMUN. I highlight throughout my findings how individuals in Canada experiencing poverty and homelessness, fundamentally, suffer from a lack of health justice, spatial justice, and justice of care. This work addresses the goal of eradicating cycles of poverty and injustice in Canada by highlighting the need for policy implementations at all levels of government. Ethical approval was received by the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board (protocol# 35175).

Department dc:contributor.department

Kinesiology and Physical Education

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Hill, Teresa

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Fusco, Caroline

• Ethic of Care
• Exercise is medicine
• Physical Cultural Studies
• Poverty
• Production of Space
• Social Justice

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/130394

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/130394