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Cultural consumption writ large has had a prominent place in the sociological discipline since Pierre Bourdieu. While Bourdieu often considered sport in analyses of culture, there have since been relatively few studies that are focused on considering sport within the broader landscape of cultural consumption. This paper seeks to assess the place of sports participation within the cultural lifestyles of Canadians. To this end, this paper employs multiple latent class analyses of various cultural and sporting variables from a large-scale Canadian government survey. It also employs regression analyses of those latent class groups. The results show three primary groups of consumers, pointing strongly to confirming the omnivore thesis in Canada. The results of the core of the analysis show, however, strong delineations in which sports these different groups consume. Ultimately then, the cultural domain of sports may be an area where omnivores practise more distinctive consumption, eschewing the sports of other consumer groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to growing inter-disciplinary discussion on what and how arts-informed community-engaged research can add to critical engagements with social inequalities. It is based on workshops facilitated by an inter-disciplinary university research group with the Women's Housing Planning Collaborative Advisory in Hamilton, a funded housing project and self-advocacy group in a mid-sized Canadian city. In theoretically informed and carefully crafted exercises, workshop participants performed stories they felt compelled to tell in order to secure resources and empathy from social service professionals. These performances made visible the draining nature and practical limitations of interactions between clients and social service professionals in which only particular affective postures and stories of need qualify clients as worthy of concern. The women then used first-person narrative and image theatre to evoke the worlds they are imagining for themselves and others in their advocacy work. Drawing on feminist, post-colonial, anthropological, and performance studies literature, we describe and analyze how the workshops methods of dramatic 'play' enable nuanced, powerful, and collectively energizing critical engagements with painful norms of social (mis)recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals comparatively with the class structures of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Four hypotheses, which could account for the similarities and differences in class structure, are identified. The first is based on their semi-peripheral status in the world economy; the second, pertaining particularly to Canada, argues for an `Americanisation effect'; the third is based on their similar heritage in the context of dominion capitalism; while the fourth proposes purely endogenous determination. The differences in class structure that the analysis reveals, particularly with respect to the managerial class, can perhaps be more persuasively explained in terms of the different historical circumstances of the three countries rather than by a set of exogenous factors which impact on all of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]