theses
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Japanese Canadian Inheritance: Placing Loss in the Powell Street Neighbourhood and Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
McMaster University, expected completion 2025
Located in the present-day Downtown Eastside, the Powell Street neighbourhood (Paueru Gai [パウエル街]) is the largest historic home of Japanese Canadians. Since their forced removal from the area in 1940s, Japanese Canadians have commemorated the Powell Street neighbourhood—in ways that are, at times, (in)coherent with the low-income Downtown Eastside community’s efforts to resist contemporary displacement and dispossession. Focussing on three commemorative sites, ranging from cherry trees to cultural celebrations and oral histories, this doctoral dissertation investigates that (in)coherence.
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Remaining in Death: A Critical Ethnography of Death, Remains, and Community in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
Queen’s University, 2019
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is a neighbourhood well-known as a site of death and disappearance. These kinds of imaginations of the neighbourhood overwhelmingly depict the dead as simply gone—as if death is the end of the story. Focussing particularly on tenant communities in the neighbourhood’s Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels, this Master’s thesis rethinks such depictions, instead considering the dead of the Downtown Eastside as powerful, enduring forces who continue to shape community today.