Belonging through participation: an exploration of the Caribana, Pride, and Santa Claus parades in Toronto, 1998-2004

This exploratory, qualitative study is anchored in the critical research tradition. It examines three celebratory street parades in Toronto: the Caribana, Pride, and Santa Claus parades within a seven year time period. By considering these parades as informal sites of education, it attempts to address a set of research questions that seeks to understand the role and contribution of these parades to the socio-cultural aspects of parade participants' citizenship. The questions are framed within a problem that sees the lack of a sense of belonging as an impediment, among others, to the realization of full citizenship for 'visible minority' citizens in Canada. Triangulated in data collection methods and aided by visual data, this study finds that each of the parades commands its own ethno-cultural constituency. By providing a participatory space and various forms of utilities, these parades also enrich the socio-cultural dimensions of parade participants' citizenship, and as a result they enhance a sense of belonging for the communities associated with them. The researcher argues in favour of tangible public supports for cultural events such as parades, especially for the events that have marginal groups as their primary constituencies, as an effective means to address the problem of social exclusion. This study identifies five broad processes in the parades that contribute to parade participants' sense of belonging. It also identifies and critically examines the roles and contributions of fifteen major direct and indirect parade components which contribute to the creation of such a sense. In the tradition of critical pedagogy and cultural studies, these findings are expected to contribute to the nearly non-existent field of informal civic education involving ethno-cultural celebratory public events. The stakeholders associated with such events, educators, social justice activists, policy makers, artists, and producers of cultural festivities who wish to facilitate civic participation and social cohesion among people to enrich the socio-cultural dimensions of Canadian citizenship, may use the findings of this study as empowering knowledge in their tasks for designing, evaluating, managing, and improving the civic contributions of these events.

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