VIURRSpace
The Libraries of Royal Roads University and Vancouver Island University collaboratively offer VIURRSpace to digitally preserve and showcase selected scholarly and creative works of the universities, together with special collections that represent the unique character of the region.
Recent Submissions
Item From Governance to Consciousness: Reclaiming Participatory Agency Beyond Neoliberalism(2026)This thesis argues that today’s ecological and social crises stem from governance built for control, not collaboration. Representative democracy and capitalism have fused into a system that concentrates power, hollows agency, and accelerates environmental collapse. The solution is not better policy, but deeper participation and a paradigm change. An interdisciplinary approach linking systems thinking, neuroscience, and democratic theory, shows that inner sustainability (agency, identity, meaning) and outer sustainability (ecological and social resilience) are inseparable. Through theory and citizen assembly case studies—from British Columbia and Ontario to Ireland, Ostbelgien, and France—it examines how participatory governance can restore both social and ecological balance by inculcating authentic agency. It defines governance as consciousness infrastructure: the collective capacity to sense, deliberate, and act together. The thesis concludes with an anti-model of governance—an open, adaptable framework for transitioning from representation to participation, from competition to collaboration, and from managing citizens to cultivating shared consciousness.Item And by Community Wealth Building, do you mean Land Back? Points of Relation between Land Back and Community Wealth Building(2026)Land Back and Community Wealth Building are two social movements countering extractive wealth accumulation structures and systems that continue to harm people and land while concentrating economic power and assets into the hands of the wealthy elite and away from communities. While vast differences could be exposed between movements, this research unearths points of relation driving and mobilizing movement action centering the themes of community, wealth, land, building and taking back. Through a systematic literature review this secondary qualitative research engages reciprocity through reflexivity and is grounded in Two-Eyed Seeing. Thematic analysis is engaged applying the Indigenous perspective of relationality along with the Western theory of interpretive frames to discuss the relations of people, land, ideas and the cosmos. These relational findings initiate bridges, ignite sparks and offer starting points to understand how relations could be strengthened, and reconciliation and allyship embraced by non-Indigenous settlers to collaboratively re-create a living and thriving future economy.Item Superdiversity as a superpower: honouring IBPOC stories in provincial literacy assessment practices(Electronic version published by Vancouver Island University, 2024)The act of deepened learning is one of the many threads in the fabric of humankind. This fabric is soft and supple as it was woven under the gentle guidance, cooperation and care of a learning community. The material comprising this fabric is culture – stunning in its majesty and as delicate as it is resilient. As culture and the act of deepened learning inevitably intersect, the possibilities of learning are truly boundless. Unfortunately, many neoliberal public educational systems in the world today are focused on unravelling this fabric thread by thread through their obsession with maintaining the modernity perpetuated within the monoculture of high stakes standardized assessments. Throughout my experiences as a life-long learner and educator, I have witnessed the dehumanizing approaches brought forward through high stakes assessment models by educational institutions with the intent of gathering student achievement data. From my perspective, high stakes models of assessment do not honour and often misrepresent the lived experiences of IBPOC learners and this study aims to amplify their superdiverse voices. To practice reciprocity and respect towards the stories shared by the participants, I have included autoethnographical reflections in the form of vignettes within the study. This research is being conducted to hold governmental educational institutions accountable to honour the experiences and stories of all learners in high stakes standardized data-collection methods through the lens of decolonization, anti-racist and holistic mediums and I have provided recommendations for the practice of equitable alternative assessment practices at the conclusion of the study.Item Implementing and Evaluating a New Mental Health and Substance Use Service Model at Island Health: Insights into Organizational Learning and Developmental Evaluation(2025)This action research study followed the simultaneous implementation and evaluation of a new mental health and substance use (MHSU) service model at the Western Communities Service Hub (WC Hub), a Colwood, BC-based program and facility, established by Island Health. Open in 2023, the WC Hub brings the integrated, team-based service model to southern Vancouver Island in seeking to expedite access, improve continuity of care and offer comprehensive close-to-home MHSU services for its clients, based in the fast-growing west shore of Greater Victoria, BC. Components of the service model are closely aligned with BC’s provincial Specialty Community Service Programs (SCSP) framework (BC Ministry of Health, Primary and Community Care Policy Branch, 2018; BC Office of the Premier, 2018) and the national Framework for Mental Health Strategy (Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2009, 2012), that emphasize improved access, flexible care delivery methods, single care plan, contact and responsible person, and patient-centered approaches.This research examined the program and its evaluation, both in developmental stages, happening alongside and in-response to each other, and tracked adaptive organizational learning (OL) (Bohmer & Edmondson, 2001) that a healthcare provider, such as Island Health, undergoes to implement and monitor a novel service model. It also queried whether developmental evaluation (DE) (Patton, 2016; Patton et al., 2015) provided a facilitating environment for that OL to occur throughout the inaugural year of the implementation. The study used the evaluation data in a secondary capacity, reinterpreting stakeholder interviews, surveys, and document analysis, for findings highlighting OL across all stages during the development, launch and monitoring of the WC Hub. Through reflection, the study assessed the larger impacts of the OL to the strategic workings of a healthcare body; and complex intra-organizational evaluative processes and their contributions towards innovating. Additionally, early SCSP implementation impacts were examined in the context of the WC Hub. The research contributes to literature on developmental evaluation in specialty health care and offers insights for organizations seeking to implement and evaluate complex service models.Item The 5 R's of Indigenous research as a framework to co-design and evaluate an outdoor play program in early learning and child care centers: Protocol for the Promoting Early Childhood Outside (PRO-ECO) 2.0 wait-list control cluster randomized trial(JMIR Publications, 2025-12-12)The Promoting Early Childhood Outside (PRO-ECO) 2.0 study is a community-based research partnership with Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and Elders, Indigenous and early childhood organizations, early childhood education faculty, ELCC centers, and families, aiming to expand outdoor play in ELCC centers. This paper provides an overview of the community-based design process, guided by the 5 R’s—Respect, Relevance, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Relationship—and the resulting study protocol for the mixed methods waitlist control cluster randomized trial.
Communities in VIURRSpace
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