Ainaz Raiszadeh
DARE Project: Yes In My Backyard…But Not Like That’: Discursive Rebranding of Opposition to New Emergency Shelter Locations in Toronto
Program(s) of Study: Double Major Political Science and Law & Society
Project Supervisor: Trish Lenz
I came into this project wanting to work on housing and homelessness policy, and the summer gave me the methods to do that seriously. I can now build and manage a qualitative dataset, develop and apply a codebook, and defend interpretive decisions against a second coder, which are the core skills behind any critical discourse analysis. Just as important, I learned how a research project is run from the ground up, from framing a question to verifying sources to preparing findings for an audience. That foundation prepares me for graduate study and for applied policy work where the ability to read public language carefully and evidence a claim properly is exactly what the job requires.
Project Description:
Opposition to new emergency shelter sites in Toronto is rarely voiced now in the openly exclusionary terms that once characterized resistance to homelessness services. This project examines how that opposition has been rewritten into a vocabulary of safety, consultation process, service concentration and neighbourhood character. The study uses qualitative critical discourse analysis and works with public deputations submitted to City of Toronto planning committee meetings, retrieved through the Toronto Meeting Management Information System and centred on the sites advanced under the Homelessness Services Capital Infrastructure Strategy.
As the first phase of a longer research agenda, the summer work moved through several stages. We began with a literature review covering NIMBY politics, community safety and well-being frameworks and the siting of homelessness services. We then built the data collection framework, identifying and verifying primary sources, logging each document and organizing the corpus for analysis. Codebook development followed, with coding carried out in Dedoose. We worked as two coders on the same material so that decisions could be compared and interrater reliability tested against a shared benchmark. Analysis and drafting of preliminary findings are now underway, with a research brief and a poster as the closing deliverables.
The Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (DARE) - Undergraduate enables our students to meaningfully engage in research projects supervised by LA&PS faculty members. Find out more about DARE.
