Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

My Masters research will explore how “community” is conceptualized in various discourses and linked to existing concerns in community-based health care services. By uncovering the multi-layered dynamics of “community,” I intend to explore the link between community discourse and the consequences of privatization. The following two questions will take priority: What is meant when we discuss “community-based care”? and What can we learn from the existing critiques of how the shift towards community-based care has materialized in the Canadian context? Given the recent social and structural transitions of the community under neoliberal regimes, I am interested in how the notion of community manifests itself at the policy level and how that translates into everyday practice for community-based health care systems. Furthermore, I will explore how the powerful, more comforting narratives of community-based organizing have been co-opted by the neoliberal agenda to make privatization more palatable to the public. There is evidence that the positive intentions of community-based approaches, rooted in context-specific and collaborative models of care, are being implemented in health care plans across Canada (Muzychka, 2007; Grant, 2010; Sawyer, 2008). Despite this interest, the conceptualization of “community” remains under-theorized and highly contested. The current health care reform model under neoliberal regimes, through overt and subtle acts of privatization, is effectively thwarting efforts to establish a comprehensive system (Henderson & Petersen, 2002; Armstrong, 2012). In order to improve social wellbeing, we must replace the ‘market justice’ ideology of health care with an ideology of just community (Beauchamp, 1976; Couto & Eken, 2002). What is unclear, and what my research will uncover by building on existing critiques of privatization (Armstrong, Armstrong, & Connelly, 1997; Latimer, 2005), is to what extent the rhetoric of “community” is obscuring the consequences of privatization. My research will employ qualitative methods to explore subjective conceptualizations of community. Having already established working relationships with two community-based mental health care organizations in New Brunswick, I will have access to service providers, community members, and policy documents to conduct ten semi-structured interviews and a content analysis of policy documents. The larger goal of this study is to take a narrative analytical approach (Riessman, 2008; Froggett & Chamberlayne, 2004) to understand how organizational actors conceptualize and make sense of “community” as it relates to my questions. I am an ideal candidate to carry out this research as it builds on my undergraduate honours thesis, for which I conducted an environmental scan of community-based mental health services in Moncton, New Brunswick. Ultimately, I found contradictions in the concerns about the effectiveness of community-based approaches when access to adequate material resources is compromised. Informed by both classical and contemporary theory, my honours thesis has enhanced my skills in developing research questions and conducting in-depth interviews. It has also provided me with experience analyzing quantitative and qualitative data and in using analytical software.