Search results for ""McGill-Queen's University Press""
McGill-Queen's University Press Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept
Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary – is it genocide or not? – a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures.Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups.Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.
£30.59
McGill-Queen's University Press Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History
Colonial Canada changed enormously between the 1760s and the 1860s, the Conquest and Confederation, but the idea of civilization seen to guide those transformations changed still more. A cosmopolitan and optimistic theory of history was written into the founding Canadian constitution as a check on state violence, only to be reversed and undone over the next century. Civilization was hegemony, a contradictory theory of unrestrained power and restraints on that power. Occupying a middle ground between British and American hegemonies, all the different peoples living in Canada felt those contradictions very sharply. Both Britain and America came to despair of bending Canada violently to their will, and new forms of hegemony, a greater reckoning with soft power, emerged in the wake of those failures.E.A. Heaman shows that the view from colonial Canada matters for intellectual and political history. Canada posed serious challenges to the Scottish Enlightenment, the Pax Britannica, American manifest destiny, and the emerging model of the nation-state. David Hume’s theory of history shaped the Canadian imaginary in constitutional documents, much-thumbed histories, and a certain liberal-conservative political and financial orientation. But as settlers flooded across the continent, cosmopolitanism became chauvinism, and the idea of civilization was put to accomplishing plunder and predation on a transcontinental scale. Case studies show crucial moments of conceptual reversal, some broadly representative and some unique to Canada. Dissecting the Seven Years’ War, domestic relations, the fiscal military state, liberal reform, social statistics, democracy, constitutionalism, and scholarly history, Heaman shows how key British and Canadian public figures grappled with the growing gap between theory and practice.By historicizing the concept of civilization, this book connects Enlightenment ideals and anti-colonialism, shown in contest with colonialism in Canada before Confederation.
£31.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Shattering Silos: Reimagining Knowledge, Politics, and Social Critique
Questions first raised by Hannah Arendt in the 1960s take on new urgency in the post-truth era, as political leaders blithely reject facts in the public domain: Is truth politically impotent? Are politics inherently false? Is the search for truth still relevant?Shattering Silos, a companion volume to Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation and Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal, provides a path-breaking response. As in his two previous books, Lambert Zuidervaart challenges the boundaries philosophers set up between epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Knowledge, he argues, takes different forms in various social domains, and all are subject to political struggle. A critique of contemporary society must draw on many social domains of knowledge, including the arts and religion, and should recast politics as a striving for truth in the broadest sense. Proposing a new conception of truth – one that emphasizes the unity of knowledge and truth, as well as their diversity among different social domains – Zuidervaart asks what such holism and pluralism suggest about how we understand politics and society. This book proposes a new understanding of large-scale social change, challenging how most people think about knowledge and truth.Interweaving epistemology, social criticism, and political thought, Shattering Silos aims to help redirect an allegedly post-truth society.
£28.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History
Colonial Canada changed enormously between the 1760s and the 1860s, the Conquest and Confederation, but the idea of civilization seen to guide those transformations changed still more. A cosmopolitan and optimistic theory of history was written into the founding Canadian constitution as a check on state violence, only to be reversed and undone over the next century. Civilization was hegemony, a contradictory theory of unrestrained power and restraints on that power. Occupying a middle ground between British and American hegemonies, all the different peoples living in Canada felt those contradictions very sharply. Both Britain and America came to despair of bending Canada violently to their will, and new forms of hegemony, a greater reckoning with soft power, emerged in the wake of those failures.E.A. Heaman shows that the view from colonial Canada matters for intellectual and political history. Canada posed serious challenges to the Scottish Enlightenment, the Pax Britannica, American manifest destiny, and the emerging model of the nation-state. David Hume’s theory of history shaped the Canadian imaginary in constitutional documents, much-thumbed histories, and a certain liberal-conservative political and financial orientation. But as settlers flooded across the continent, cosmopolitanism became chauvinism, and the idea of civilization was put to accomplishing plunder and predation on a transcontinental scale. Case studies show crucial moments of conceptual reversal, some broadly representative and some unique to Canada. Dissecting the Seven Years’ War, domestic relations, the fiscal military state, liberal reform, social statistics, democracy, constitutionalism, and scholarly history, Heaman shows how key British and Canadian public figures grappled with the growing gap between theory and practice.By historicizing the concept of civilization, this book connects Enlightenment ideals and anti-colonialism, shown in contest with colonialism in Canada before Confederation.
£110.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Corporate Law and Sustainability from the Next Generation of Lawyers
Millennials have come of age in an era when environmental and social crises have defined much of their adult lives, as has the recurrent message that time is of the essence. Future generations will bear the greatest burden created by climate change, pandemics, and inequality, but often they are not in positions of power to make impactful decisions about it.This book gives voice to young lawyers offering new critical perspectives in the burgeoning field of corporate law and sustainability. Climate change is an intergenerational crisis, and the solutions and path forward must include intergenerational voices. Millennials are rising in power at a critical juncture in our climate and corporate history, and their perspectives stand apart from those who have been trained into myopic views of what constitutes change. These essays challenge the status quo across a number of pressing topics, including executive compensation, board diversity, decolonialization, crowdfunding, social media risk, corporate lobbying, shareholder activism, tax avoidance, global supply chain management, and human rights, written with a level of thoughtfulness and urgency that demands attention from policymakers and scholars alike.Edited by Carol Liao, a leading expert in the field, and with a foreword by author and filmmaker of The Corporation and The New Corporation Joel Bakan, this book offers timeless research from a diverse group of young lawyers calling for bona fide corporate accountability within legal and regulatory frameworks, including innovative ideas for reform.
£100.00
McGill-Queen's University Press The Ones We Let Down: Toxic Leadership Culture and Gender Integration in the Canadian Forces
In 2021, a sexual misconduct scandal struck the Canadian military, leading to a profound crisis in leadership. While some more recent allegations came to light before the #MeToo movement, these latest revelations have historical roots in the 1990s, an era known to service members as the “decade of darkness.”Due to drastic budget cuts and allegations of serious crimes perpetrated by its members, the last decade of the twentieth century was a tumultuous time for the Canadian Armed Forces. Amid this period, a human rights tribunal ordered the military to open its combat positions to women and reach full gender integration by 1999. Yet by 2021, women made up only 16.3 per cent of personnel; women and LGBTQ+ service members continue to face sexual harassment and abuse at all levels. In The Ones We Let Down Charlotte Duval-Lantoine looks at failed efforts to achieve gender parity during the 1990s. She reveals an organization unwilling and unable to change, and attitudes held by military leaders that fed a destructive dynamic and cost lives.As the military grapples with its failure to address cultural misconduct and change its culture, The Ones We Let Down reflects on whether the right lessons were learned from the decade of darkness.
£24.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Tigers and the Internet: Story, Shamans, History
The Udege, a small Indigenous group in the Primorsky Krai and Khabarovsk Krai regions of Russia, have a rich oral storytelling tradition. They speak the Udege language, and their religious beliefs include animism and shamanism. Over two decades, Kira Van Deusen travelled across Russia interviewing Udege storytellers in order to record their folktales.Tigers and the Internet recounts individual storytellers’ lives and the stories that they related to Van Deusen. Combining the translated stories with detailed commentary, background information on the storytellers, and historical context to the themes they explore, Van Deusen provides a rich and moving text that allows the reader to travel with her through time and space. She respectfully shares the stories with a wider audience and preserves them in English for future generations. Readers will learn about the folktales of the Udege, but also about their contemporary lives and connections with other Indigenous groups.The Udege are not widely known outside of Russia. Tigers and the Internet provides a valuable collection of first-hand stories that shows this fascinating culture to those interested in folklore, Indigenous histories, and cultural studies.
£26.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Atiqput: Inuit Oral History and Project Naming
"Our names – Atiqput – are very meaningful. They are our identification. They are our Spirits. We are named after what's in the sky for strength, what’s in the water ... the land, body parts. Every name is attached to every part of our body and mind. Yes, every name is alive. Every name has a meaning. Much of our names have been misspelled and many of them have lost their meanings forever. Our Project Naming has been about identifying Inuit, who became nameless over the years, just "unidentified eskimos ..." With Project Naming, we have put Inuit meanings back in the pictures, back to life." Piita IrniqFor over two decades, Inuit collaborators living across Inuit Nunangat and in the South have returned names to hundreds of previously anonymous Inuit seen in historical photographs held by Library and Archives Canada as part of Project Naming. This innovative photo-based history research initiative was established by the Inuit school Nunavut Sivuniksavut and the national archive.Atiqput celebrates Inuit naming practices and through them honours Inuit culture, history, and storytelling. Narratives by Inuit elders, including Sally Kate Webster, Piita Irniq, Manitok Thompson, Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, and David Serkoak, form the heart of the book, as they reflect on naming traditions and the intergenerational conversations spurred by the photographic archive. Other contributions present scholarly insights and research projects that extend Project Naming’s methodology, interspersed with pictorial essays by the artist Barry Pottle and the filmmaker Asinnajaq.Through oral testimony and photography, Atiqput rewrites the historical record created by settler societies and challenges a legacy of colonial visualization.
£29.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Taking Pluralism Seriously: Complex Societies under Scrutiny
In so-called post-factual societies, where public debates are undermined by their false or misleading premises, philosophers who have reflected on diversity and pluralism can offer a critical and clarifying perspective through which to evaluate the statements of politicians and the media.Félix Mathieu offers a theoretical, empirical, and normative analysis of the debates surrounding the accommodation of ethnocultural and societal diversity in contemporary liberal democracies. With a close lens on Canada, he looks at case studies in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to test political leaders’ and analysts’ claims of successful accommodation and pluralism. Taking Pluralism Seriously provides a clear, fair, and helpful summary of the debate so far in order to understand the promises and pitfalls associated with theories of multiculturalism, interculturalism, federalism, and multinational democracy, investigating the conditions that might make it possible for different national communities to become fully empowered, politically and culturally.Taking Pluralism Seriously invites readers to explore questions of pluralism and accommodation and proposes political reforms to meet the challenges arising from diversity, while considering some of the most pressing concerns complex societies are facing today.
£27.50
McGill-Queen's University Press The Limits of Common Humanity: Motivating the Responsibility to Protect in a Changing Global Order
What motivates states to protect populations threatened by mass atrocities beyond their own borders? Most often, states and their representatives appeal to the principle of common humanity, acknowledging a conscience-shocking quality that demands a moral response. But though the idea of a common humanity is powerful, the question remains: to what extent is it effective in motivating action?The Limits of Common Humanity provides an ambitious interdisciplinary response to this question, theorizing the role of humanity as a motivational concept by building on insights from international relations, political philosophy, and international law. Through this analysis, Samuel Jarvis examines the influence the concept of humanity has had on the creation and mission of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) commitment, while highlighting the challenges that have restricted its application in practice. By providing a new framework for thinking about how political, legal, and moral arguments interact during the process of collective decision-making, Jarvis explores the contradictory ways in which states approach the protection of human beings from mass atrocity crimes, both domestically and internationally.In the context of a rapidly changing global order, The Limits of Common Humanity is a timely reappraisal of the R2P concept and its future application, arguing for a more politically motivated response to human protection that moves beyond an appeal for morality.
£27.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada
In the resistance to the violence of gender-based oppression, vibrant – but often ignored – worlds have emerged, full of nuance, humour, and beauty. Correcting an absence of writing about contemporary feminist work by Canadian artists, Desire Change considers the resurgence of feminist art, thought, and practice in the past decade by examining artworks that respond to themes of diversity and desire.Essays by historians, artists, and curators present an overview of a range of artistic practices including performance, installation, video, textiles, and photography. Contributors address the desire for change through three central frames: how feminist art has significantly contributed to the complex understanding of gender as it intersects with sexuality and race; the necessary critique of patriarchy and institutions as they relate to colonization within the Canadian nation-state; and the ways in which contemporary critiques are formed and expressed.Heavily illustrated with representative works, Desire Change raises both the stakes and the concerns of contemporary feminist art, with an understanding that feminism is always and necessarily plural.
£34.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine: Living Conditions, Violence, and Demographic Catastrophe, 1917-1923
Between 1917 and 1923, Ukraine experienced an anti-colonial war for national liberation, foreign invasion, socialist revolution, and civil war simultaneously, resulting in almost unimaginable civilian casualties.In Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine Stephen Velychenko surveys the plight of civilians, details the socio-economic background to the political events that unfolded during this time, and documents the country’s demographic losses. Focusing specifically on two causes of civilian death, deliberate killing and appalling living conditions, Velychenko outlines prewar improvements in living conditions and describes their decline after 1917. He examines governmental culpability in civilian death and notes that while ideologies and the inability of leaders to control subordinates were undeniably causes of violence, there were other factors at play.Velychenko mines previously unused archival sources to create a picture of the social conditions leading up to and during this catastrophic period, combining this data with stories and reports from memoirs of the period. Readers familiar with the explosion of violence against Jews at this time will find here a compelling framework for understanding the context of that violence.
£65.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Inhabited: Wildness and the Vitality of the Land
People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet.Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, Inhabited reflects on the meanings of wildness, wilderness, and natural heritage. As we are introduced to local inhabitants and their perspectives, Phillip Vannini and April Vannini ask us to reflect on the colonial and dualist assumptions behind the received meaning of wild, challenging us to reimagine wildness as relational and rooted in vitality. Over the three years they spent in and around these sites, they learned from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples about their entanglements with each other and with non-human animals, rocks, plants, trees, sky, water, and spirits. The stories, actions, and experiences they encountered challenge conventional narratives of wild places as uninhabited by people and disconnected from culture and society. While it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of wildness as outdated in the Anthropocene era, Inhabited suggests that rethinking wildness offers a better – if messier – way forward.Part geography and anthropology, part environmental and cultural studies, and part politics and ecology, Inhabited balances a genuine love of nature’s vitality with a culturally responsible understanding of its interconnectedness with more-than-human ways of life.
£26.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Shaping the Futures of Work: Proactive Governance and Millennials
The widespread belief that tech-savvy, educated millennials are well positioned to handle the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution is unfounded. It does not fully grasp the reality of a flux society, where relevant technological skills and knowledge are continuously changing: no one is permanently tech-savvy. Millennials, like other generations, face the challenge of needing to continually reskill. This has compounded their struggle to begin their careers at a point when there is no longer any guarantee of lifetime employment or retirement at a set age.Shaping the Futures of Work is a timely sociological exploration of the impact of technological innovations on employment. Nilanjan Raghunath proposes that stakeholders such as states, enterprises, and citizens hold equally important roles in ensuring that people can adapt, innovate, and thrive within conditions of flux. A promising model focuses on collaboration and proactive governance. While good governance includes citizen engagement, proactive governance goes one step further, creating inclusive policies, roadmaps, and infrastructure for social and economic progress. This book reveals that lifelong learning and adaptability are imperative, even for well-educated professionals. Using Singapore and Singaporean millennials as a case study, Raghunath examines proactive governance and delivers research and analysis to elucidate career trajectories, pointing to a work ethic that aims to engage with technological futures.Looking at local and global sociological literature to confirm the need for proactive governance, Shaping the Futures of Work suggests that Singaporean millennials – and professionals around the world – need to better prepare themselves for flux, risk, failure, and reinvention for career mobility.
£65.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840
As fur traders were driven across northern North America by economic motivations, the landscape over which they plied their trade was punctuated by sound: shouting, singing, dancing, gunpowder, rattles, jingles, drums, fiddles, and – very occasionally – bagpipes. Fur trade interactions were, in a word, noisy. Daniel Laxer unearths traces of music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time.Listening to the Fur Trade uses the written record, oral history, and material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before sound recording. The trading post was a noisy nexus, populated by a polyglot crowd of highly mobile people from different national, linguistic, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds. They found ways to interact every time they met, and facilitating material interests and survival went beyond the simple exchange of goods. Trust and good relations often entailed gift-giving: reciprocity was performed with dances, songs, and firearm salutes. Indigenous protocols of ceremony and treaty-making were widely adopted by fur traders, who supplied materials and technologies that sometimes changed how these ceremonies sounded. Within trading companies, masters and servants were on opposite ends of the social ladder but shared songs in the canoes and lively dances during the long winters at the trading posts.While the fur trade was propelled by economic and political interests, Listening to the Fur Trade uncovers the songs and ceremonies of First Nations people, the paddling songs of the voyageurs, and the fiddle music and step-dancing at the trading posts that provided its pulse.
£34.99
McGill-Queen's University Press An Anatomy of Everyday Arguments: Conflict and Change through Insight
Interpersonal arguments carry the potential for defensiveness and hostility, making them enormously distressing and difficult to understand. An Anatomy of Everyday Arguments examines the structure and dynamics of conflict to find new ways forward.Marnie Jull analyzes four personal stories through the lens of the Insight approach, an innovative way to decipher and reshape the direction of everyday conflicts that draws from the theories of Bernard Lonergan. Jull dissects arguments that range from a quarrel about chores to a high-stakes organizational impasse, exploring the internal process of decision-making that shapes conflict behaviour within complex social contexts. Without dismissing the importance of responsible conflict, the Insight approach encourages people in the heat of an argument to engage less rashly with threat. Jull’s entertaining storytelling and meticulous analysis integrate findings from sociology, conflict resolution, interpersonal communication, psychology, facilitation, ethnography, anthropology, and qualitative research methodology.At a time of increasingly polarized global debate, the Insight approach lays the groundwork for new possibilities to emerge. An innovative text, An Anatomy of Everyday Arguments brings new theoretical work on conflict and change to life and demonstrates its practical applications.
£93.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept
Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary – is it genocide or not? – a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures.Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups.Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.
£65.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Late-Life Homelessness: Experiences of Disadvantage and Unequal Aging
Around the world and across a range of contexts, homelessness among older people is on the rise. In spite of growing media attention and new academic research on the issue, older people often remain unrecognized as a subpopulation in public policy, programs, and homeless strategies. As such, they occupy a paradoxical position of being hypervisible while remaining overlooked.Late-Life Homelessness is the first Canadian book to address this often neglected issue. Basing her analysis on a four-year ethnographic study of late-life homelessness in Montreal, Canada, Amanda Grenier uses a critical gerontological perspective to explore life at the intersection of aging and homelessness. She draws attention to disadvantage over time and how the condition of being unhoused disrupts a person’s ability to age in place, resulting in experiences of unequal aging. Weaving together findings from policy documents, stakeholder insights, and observations and interviews with older people, this book demonstrates how structures, organizational practices, and relationships related to homelessness and aging come to shape late life.Situated in the context of an aging population, rising inequality, and declining social commitments, Late-Life Homelessness stresses the moral imperative of responding justly to the needs of older people as a means of mitigating the unequal aging of unhoused elders.
£93.00
McGill-Queen's University Press The Adventurer's Glossary
Adventure is always escapist and often utopian, yet we find solidarity with others and Kafkaesque existential rabbit holes within the words we use to celebrate high-flying escapades. Even when adventures are small in the cosmic scope, the terminology of thrilling exploits promotes a life lived at a high pitch. This go-to glossary for the philosophical explorer delves into these contradictions and insights through more than five hundred terms, from A-OK to zoom. Semiotician Joshua Glenn sourced terms from Shakespeare, military and biker jargon, hip hop and surfer slang, survivalist and gamer subcultures, comic books, extreme sports, and beyond to ask questions about meaning and selfhood. This diverting survey, paired with copious illustrations by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, is introduced by Mark Kingwell in a thought-provoking essay.The Adventurer’s Glossary extends the entertaining and incisive critique found in the trio’s previous books, The Idler’s Glossary and The Wage Slave’s Glossary. This third instalment turns its lens to the language of risk, excitement, and journeying into the unknown, taking readers on their own semantic adventure.
£17.64
McGill-Queen's University Press Portable Prisons: Electronic Monitoring and the Creation of Carceral Territory
The pervasiveness of surveillance, punishment, and control within and outside of spaces such as jails, prisons, and detention centres suggests that the carceral is becoming an increasingly prevalent presence in our lives, going beyond historical standards. The contemporary use of electronic monitoring extends carceral territory beyond prison walls, into people’s homes and everyday lives.Empirically and empathetically driven, Portable Prisons is a telling exploration of the electronic monitoring of offenders based on an ethnographic case study from Scotland. Electronic monitoring must be understood – in both intent and effect – as a carceral practice, an expression of the carceral state and its overreaching punitive capabilities. James Gacek demonstrates that various people experience punishment by means of restrictions around mobility, space, and time in ways that strongly overlap with the reported experiences of interviewed prisoners. Drawing attention to how the neoliberal state outsources the labour of punishment to private corporations and the punished themselves, he also rejects the idea that “soft” punishment is in any way related to the movement for decarceration.Offering an original contribution to our understanding of the geography of incarceration, Portable Prisons is a sophisticated account of electronic monitoring, underlining the growing significance of this field.
£86.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque Design
Canada’s first mosque, the Al Rashid mosque in Edmonton, was built in 1938. In the years since, as Canada’s Muslim population has grown, close to two hundred mosques, Islamic centres, prayer spaces, and jamatkhanas have been built across the country.Beyond the Divide explores the mosques of Canada in their diversity, beauty, practicality, and versatility. From east to west and to the north, Tammy Gaber visits ninety mosques in more than fifty cities, including Canada’s most northern places of worship in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. For nearly a century Muslims have made mosques in a variety of spaces, from converted shops and vacated churches to large, purpose-built complexes. Drawing on site photographs, architectural drawings, and interviews, Gaber explores the extraordinary diversity in how these spaces have been designed, built, and used – as places not only of worship, but of community gathering, education, charitable work, and civic engagement. Throughout, Beyond the Divide provides a groundbreaking analysis of gendered space in Canadian mosques, how these spaces are designed and reinforced, and how these divides shape community experience.The first comprehensive study of mosque history and architecture in Canada, Beyond the Divide reveals the mosque to be a dynamic building type that adapts to its context, from its climate and physical environment to the community it serves. Above all, mosque designs depend on the people who gather in them, and what those people strive for their mosques to be.
£68.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Disputing New France: Companies, Law, and Sovereignty in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663
From the early sixteenth century, thousands of fishermen-traders from Basque, Breton, and Norman ports crossed the Atlantic each year to engage in fishing, whaling, and fur trading, which they regarded as their customary right. In the seventeenth century these rights were challenged as France sought to establish an imperial presence in North America, granting trading privileges to certain individuals and companies to enforce its territorial and maritime claims. Bitter conflicts ensued, precipitating more than two dozen lawsuits in French courts over powers and privileges in New France.In Disputing New France Helen Dewar demonstrates that empire formation in New France and state formation in France were mutually constitutive. Through its exploration of legal suits among privileged trading companies, independent traders, viceroys, and missionaries, this book foregrounds the integral role of French courts in the historical construction of authority in New France and the fluid nature of legal, political, and commercial authority in France itself. State and empire formation converged in the struggle over sea power: control over New France was a means to consolidate maritime authority at home and supervise major Atlantic trade routes. The colony also became part of international experimentations with the chartered company, an innovative Dutch and English instrument adapted by the French to realize particular strategic, political, and maritime objectives.Tracing the developing tools of governance, privilege granting, and capital formation in New France, Disputing New France offers a novel conception of empire – one that is messy and contingent, responding to pressures from within and without, and deeply rooted in metropolitan affairs.
£93.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-citizens
Under the terms of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Canada implemented a vast protocol for acquiring detailed personal information about Chinese migrants. Among the bewildering array of state documents used in this effort were CI 9s: issued from 1885 to 1953, they included date of birth, place of residence, occupation, identifying marks, known associates, and, significantly, identification photographs. The originals were transferred to microfilm and destroyed in 1963; more than 41,000 grainy reproductions of CI 9s remain.Lily Cho explores how the CI 9s functioned as a form of surveillance and a process of mass capture that produced non-citizens, revealing the surprising dynamism of non-citizenship constantly regulated and monitored, made and remade, by an anxious state. The first mass use of identification photography in Canada, they make up the largest archive of images of Chinese migrants in the country, including people who stood no chance of being photographed otherwise. But CI 9s generated far more information than could be processed, and there is nothing straightforward about the knowledge that they purported to contain. Cho finds traces of alternate forms of kinship in the archive as well as evidence of the ways that families were separated. In attending to the particularities of these images and documents, Mass Capture uncovers the alternative story that lies in the refusals and resistances enacted by the mass captured.Illustrated with painstakingly reconstituted digital reproductions of the microfilm record, Mass Capture reclaims the CI 9s as more than documents of racist repression, suggesting the possibilities for beauty and dignity in the archive, for captivation as well as capture.
£28.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Being and Its Surroundings
Gianni Vattimo, one of Europe's foremost contemporary philosophers and most famously associated with the concept of weak thought, explores theoretical and practical issues flowing from his fundamental rejection of the traditional Western understanding of Being as an absolute, unchanging, and transcendent reality. The essays in this book move within the surroundings of Being without constructing a systematic, definitive analysis of the topic. In Being and Its Surroundings, Vattimo continues his career-long exploration of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, in particular his repudiation of metaphysics with its presupposition of the existence of permanent, universal truth, and that of Friedrich Nietzsche, with its promotion of nihilism. One consequence of problematizing the idea of an attainable truth is the relativization of values and cultures. In the face of the death of God – or the absence of a transcendent guarantor of the validity of human judgments – we have the postmodern tendency to see all value systems and assertions of truth as purely subjective, and to suggest that "anything goes," which Nietzsche called passive nihilism. Vattimo advocates a more active response as he challenges all forms of authoritarianism in the world today. He brings his intellectual acumen to bear on such urgent issues as globalization, the clash of civilizations and terrorism, the crisis of democracy, and the relevance of orthodox religion. Rather than endorse dogmatism or indifference and detachment from social engagement in the name of relativism, Vattimo opts for the path of meaningful dialogue and a search for a mediated consensus based on reason, with all its limitations.
£38.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies
Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers had been trafficked or “spirited away” or were sent forcibly by government agencies as criminals, political rebels, or destitute vagrants.In Indentured Servitude Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of these people. The British government, Suranyi argues, profited by supplying labour for the colonies, removing unwanted populations, and reducing incarceration costs within Britain. In addition, it was believed that indigents, especially destitute children, benefited morally from being placed in indenture. Capitalist entrepreneurs who were influential at the highest levels of government made their fortunes from Atlantic trade in goods, indentured servants, and slaves, and their participation in the servant trade contributed to the commercialization of criminal justice. Suranyi breaks new ground in showing how indentured servitude was challenged: once in the colonies, indentured servants adapted resourcefully to their circumstances and rebelled against unfair conditions and abuse by suing their masters, by running away, or through outright revolt.Emerging ideas about race and citizenship led to vehement public debate about the conditions of indentured servants and the ethics of indenture itself, prompting legislation that aimed to curb the worst excesses while slavery continued to expand unchecked.
£99.00
McGill-Queen's University Press The Moral Economy of Welfare and Migration: Reconfiguring Rights in Austerity Britain
Britain's coalition government of 2010–2015 ushered in an enduring age of austerity and a "moral mission" of welfare reform as part of a drive for deficit reduction. Stricter controls were applied to both domestic welfare and international migration and asylum, which were presented as two sides of the same coin. Policy in both areas has engaged a moral message of earned entitlement and invites a sociological approach that examines such policies in combination, alongside their underpinning moral economy.Exploring the idea of a moral economy – from its original focus on popular rebellion at the rising price of corn to more contemporary analysis of measures that seek to impose moral values from above – Lydia Morris examines Britain's reconfigured pattern of rights in the fields of domestic welfare and migration. Those in power have claimed that heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, will promote labour market change and reduce demand for low-skilled migrant workers, often EU citizens, whose own access to benefits was curtailed prior to Brexit. Morris traces related political discourse through to the design and implementation of concrete policy measures and maps the diminished access to rights that has emerged, paying particular attention to the boundaries drawn in defining target groups, and the resistance this has provoked.The Moral Economy of Welfare and Migration considers the topology of the whole system to highlight cross-cutting devices of control that have far-reaching implications for how we are governed as a total population.
£27.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Chekhov's Children: Context and Text in Late Imperial Russia
Anton Chekhov's representations of children have generally remained on the periphery of scholarly attention. Yet his stories about children, which focus on communication and the emergence of personhood, also illuminate the process by which the author forged his own language of expression and occupy a uniquely important place within his work.Chekhov's Children explores these stories – dating from Chekhov's early writings in the 1880s – as a distinct body of work unified by the theme of maturation and by the creation of a literary model of childhood. Nadya Peterson describes the evolution of Chekhov's model and its connection with the prevalent views on children in the literature, education, medicine, and psychology of his time. As with his later writing, Chekhov's portrayals of young protagonists exhibit complexity, diversity, and a broad reach across the writer's cultural and literary landscape, dealing with such themes as the distinctiveness of a child's perspective, the relationship between the worlds of children and adults, the nature of child development, socialization, gender differences, and sexuality. While reconstructing a particular literary model of childhood, this book brings to light a body of discourse on children, childhood development, and education prominent in Russia in the late nineteenth century.Chekhov's Children accords this topic the significance it deserves by placing Chekhov's model of childhood within the broad context of his time and reassessing established notions about the child's place in the author's oeuvre.
£47.61
McGill-Queen's University Press Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation
Although we tend to associate social transformation with major events, historical turning points, or revolutionary upheaval, Revolutionary Routines argues that seemingly minor everyday habits are the key to meaningful change.Through its account of influential socio-political processes – such as the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy, the crafting of new technologies of governance, and the operation of digital media and algorithms – this book rethinks not only how change works, but also what counts as change. Drawing examples from the affective politics of Trumpism and Brexit, nudge theory and behaviour change, social media and the international refugee crisis, and the networked activism of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, Carolyn Pedwell argues that minor gestures may be as significant as major happenings, revealing the powerful potential in our ability to remake shared habits and imaginatively reinhabit everyday life.Revolutionary Routines offers a new understanding of the logics of habit and the nature of social change, power, and progressive politics, illustrating diverse forms of consciousness and co-operation through which political solidarities might take shape.
£28.99
McGill-Queen's University Press In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy
In the early 1970s, a German study estimated that women expended as many calories cleaning their coal-mining husbands' work clothes as their husbands did working below ground, arguably making the home as much a site of industrialized work as factories and mines. But while energy studies are beginning to acknowledge the importance of social and historical contexts and to produce more inclusive histories of the unprecedented energy transitions that powered industrialization, women have remained notably absent from these accounts.In a New Light explores the vital place of women in the shift to fossil fuels that spurred the Industrial Revolution, illuminating the variety of ways in which gender and energy intersected in women's lives in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North America. From their labour in the home, where they managed the adoption of new energy sources, to their work as educators in electrical housecraft and their protests against the effects of industrialization, women took on active roles to influence energy decisions.Together these essays deepen our understanding of the significance of gender in the history of energy, and of energy transitions in the history of women and gender. By foregrounding women's energetic labours and concerns, the authors shed new light on energy use in the past and provide important insights as societies move towards a carbon-neutral future.
£28.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Young Subjects: Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World
Across the metropole, the colonies, and the wider eighteenth-century world, French children and youth participated in a diverse set of state-building initiatives, social reform programs, and imperial expansion efforts. Young Subjects explores the lives and experiences of these youth, revealing their role as active and vital agents in the shaping of early modern France.Through a set of regional case studies, Julia Gossard demonstrates how thousands of children and youth were engaged in the service of the state. In Lyon, charity schools cultivated children as agents of moral and social reform who carried their lessons home to their families. In Paris, orphaned and imprisoned youth trained in skilled trades or prepared for military service, while others were sent to the French colonies in North America as filles du roi and sturdy labourers. Young people from merchant families were recruited to serve as cultural brokers and translators on behalf of French commerical interests in the Ottoman Empire and Siam. In each case, Gossard considers how these youth played, negotiated, and sometimes resisted their roles, and what expressions of individual identity and agency were available to subjects under the legal control of others.As sources of labour, future taxpayers, colonial subjects, cultural mediators, and potential criminals, children and youth were objects of intense interest for civic authorities. Young Subjects refocuses our attention on these often overlooked historical subjects who helped to build France.
£56.17
McGill-Queen's University Press Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900-1940
In the making of the modern Nordic states in the first half of the twentieth century, elementary education was paramount in creating a notion of citizenship that was universal and equal for all citizens. Yet these elementary education policies ignored, in most cases, the language, culture, wishes, and needs of minorities such as the indigenous Sámi.Presenting the Sámi as an active, transnational population in early twentieth-century northern Europe, Otso Kortekangas examines how educational policies affected the Sámi people residing in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. In this detailed study, Kortekangas explores what the arguments were for the lack of Sámi language in schools, how Sámi teachers have promoted the use of their mother tongue within the school systems, and how the history of the Sámi compares to other indigenous and minority populations globally.Timely in its focus on educational policies in multiethnic societies, and ambitious in its scope, the book provides essential information for educators, policy-makers, and academics, as well as anyone interested in the history of education, and the relationship between large-scale government policies and indigenous peoples.
£23.35
McGill-Queen's University Press This Strange Loneliness: Heaney's Wordsworth
This Strange Loneliness is the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth. Peter Mackay explores how Heaney repeatedly turns to the Romantic poet's work for inspiration, corroboration, and amplification, and as a model for the fortifying power of poetry itself, which offers the fundamental lesson that "it is on this earth 'we find our happiness, or not at all.'"Through an in-depth look at archival materials, and at uncollected poems and prose by Heaney, Mackay traces the evolution of Heaney's readings of Wordsworth throughout his career, revealing their shared interest in the connections between poetry and education, the possibility of a beneficial understanding of poetic influence, the complexities of place and displacement, ideas of transcendence, and ultimately the importance of "late style": later poems by Wordsworth might prove a cautionary tale, as well as example, for any poet. Placing Heaney's readings within their political, historical, and poetic contexts the book also explores how he negotiated the complex relationship between Irish and British culture and identity to claim a persistent form of kinship, and forge a strange community, with the Romantic poet.With illuminating readings that reveal new contexts to and currents in Heaney's work, This Strange Loneliness is a powerful evocation of the Irish poet's sense of the "uplift" that poetry can provide.
£29.07
McGill-Queen's University Press Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations
Daughters of Aataentsic highlights and connects the unique lives of seven Weⁿdat/Waⁿdat women whose legacies are still felt today. Spanning the continent and the colonial borders of New France, British North America, Canada, and the United States, this book shows how Wendat people and place came together in Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and how generations of activism became intimately tied with notions of family, community, motherwork, and legacy from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The lives of the seven women tell a story of individual and community triumph despite difficulties and great loss. Kathryn Magee Labelle aims to decolonize the historical discipline by researching with Indigenous people rather than researching on them. It is a collaborative effort, guided by an advisory council of eight Weⁿdat/Waⁿdat women, reflecting the needs and desires of community members. Daughters of Aataentsic challenges colonial interpretations by demonstrating the centrality of women, past and present, to Weⁿdat/Waⁿdat culture and history. Labelle draws from institutional archives and published works, as well as from oral histories and private collections.Breaking new ground in both historical narratives and community-guided research in North America, Daughters of Aataentsic offers an alternative narrative by considering the ways in which individual Weⁿdat/Waⁿdat women resisted colonialism, preserved their culture, and acted as matriarchs.
£26.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Why We Fight: New Approaches to the Human Dimension of Warfare
For decades, the Canadian Armed Forces has used the work of foreign scholars and writers in its professional military education to try to understand the human dimension of warfare: why and how people are motivated to fight, and how they behave once they do fight. Yet the specific Canadian context, experience, and perspective are often lost in favour of appeals to universal truths. The first major Canadian study of combat motivation in almost forty years, Why We Fight redresses this imbalance by presenting some of the best new work on the subject. Bringing together top military practitioners and scholars to discuss some of the most controversial issues of modern warfare, Why We Fight examines the face of battle as experienced by Canadians. It explores sexual violence in war, professionalism, organizations, leadership, shared intent, motivation in extremis, and the toxicity of the "warrior" culture. Its chapters offer key insights on combat motivation theories, the modern operating environment, and the collective and individual identities of the men and women who fight for Canada. Many worry that technology is leading us towards a post-human age, particularly in war. Why We Fight affirms the centrality of the human being in warfare in Canada's past, present, and future.
£26.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Forty Narratives in the Wyandot Language
In 1911-1912, French-Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau spent a year recording forty texts in the Wyandot language as spoken by native speakers in Oklahoma. Though he intended to return and complete his linguistic study, he never did. More than a century later Forty Narratives in the Wyandot Language continues Barbeau's work. John Steckley provides an engaging analysis and fresh translation of the texts in order to preserve the traditional language and cultural heritage of the Wyandot or Wendat people. Leveraging four decades of studying the dialects of Wyandot and Wendat and his role as tribal linguist for the Wyandotte Nation, the author corrects errors in Barbeau's earlier text while adding personal anecdotes to provide readers with a unique comparative work. The stories in this collection, largely drawn from the traditional folklore of the Wyandot people and told in a language that has been dormant for decades, act as a time capsule for traditional tales, Indigenous history, humour, and Elder knowledge. Steckley's new translation not only aids Wyandot peoples of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Michigan in reclaiming their language but also gives researchers worldwide a rich, up-to-date reference for linguistic study. A significant literary record of a people and a language, Forty Narratives in the Wyandot Language is a major contribution to the preservation and revitalization of an Indigenous language in North America.
£32.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Coping with Geopolitical Decline: The United States in European Perspective
How great powers react to their inevitable decline shapes their own destiny as well as the course of international politics. Leaders can decide to engage with others or isolate themselves; to build alliances or initiate war; to stoke up nationalism or invest in innovation; to focus on economic competition or develop their people's soft power. While some of these coping strategies foster cooperation, others provoke conflict with neighbours. In Coping with Geopolitical Decline leading political scientists, historians, and sociologists explore the strategies adopted by leaders and domestic elites to prevent, reverse, or deny the decline of their country. Analyzing four European cases (Byzantium, England, France, Russia) before turning to the contemporary debate in the United States, they argue that geopolitics is not fate. Coping strategies depend on the context, which includes cultural representations of decline, the experience of military defeat, and domestic politics. Whether elites choose to modernize their economy, bolster their diplomatic status, or launch preventive war makes a difference in the extent and speed of a country's decline. By the same token, coping strategies affect world order. A well-managed decline allows for a peaceful power transition. Some strategies, however, may preserve the peace at the expense of a country's standing, while others will stave off decline but encourage imperialist adventures or precipitate military conflicts. As the United States challenges the liberal international order, fights back China's ascendency, and reconsiders its traditional alliances, Coping with Geopolitical Decline analyzes key lessons from Europe's experience and provides comparative insight into the likely dynamics of cooperation and conflict in the twenty-first century.
£90.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Spirit of the Grassroots People: Seeking Justice for Indigenous Survivors of Canada's Colonial Education System
Raymond Mason is an Ojibway activist who campaigns for the rights of residential school survivors and a founder of Spirit Wind, an organization that played a key role in the development of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. This memoir offers a firsthand account of the personal and political challenges Mason confronted on this journey. A riveting and at times harrowing read, Spirit of the Grassroots People describes the author's experiences in Indian day and residential schools in Manitoba and his struggles to find meaning in life after trauma and abuse. Mason details the work that he and his colleagues did over many years to gain recognition and compensation for their suffering. Drawing from Indigenous oral traditions as well as Western historiography, the work applies the concept of two-eyed seeing to the histories of colonialism and education in Canada. The memoir is supplemented by a final chapter in which Theodore Michael Christou and Jackson Pind put Mason's story into a historical and educational context. An essential key to understanding the legacy of Indian residential and day schools, this text is both a documentation of history and a deeply personal story of a human experience.
£19.95
McGill-Queen's University Press Beyond the Finish Line: Images, Evidence, and the History of the Photo-Finish
In the 1880s photographers and sports enthusiasts confidently declared the end of dead heats in sporting competition. Reflecting a broader social belief in technology, proponents of the camera stressed that the device could provide definitive proof of who won and who lost. Yet despite this remedy for the inadequate human eye, competitive races between horses, boats, and bicycles ended too close to call a sole champion. More than a century later, when cameras can subdivide the second into ten-thousandths and beyond, athletes continue to cross the finish line in ties. In this fascinating journey through the history of the photo-finish in sports, Jonathan Finn shows how innovation was animated by a drive for ever more precise tools and a quest for perfect measurement. As he traces the technological developments inspired by this crusade - from the evolution of the still camera to movie cameras, ultimately leading to complex contemporary photo-finish systems - Finn uncovers the social implications of adopting and contesting the photograph as evidence in sport. At every turn empirical obsession intersects with the unpredictability of sports, creating a paradox wherein the precision offered by photo-finish technology far exceeds the realities of human performance and its measurement. Separating athletes by the hundredth, thousandth, or ten-thousandth of a second is often a fiction that comes with significant material and cultural implications. A lively biography of a critical technology, Beyond the Finish Line illuminates the cultural role of the photo-finish in win-at-all-costs culture and warn that in our pursuit for precision we may threaten the human element of sport that galvanizes mere spectators into fans.
£28.36
McGill-Queen's University Press Plants, People, and Places: The Roles of Ethnobotany and Ethnoecology in Indigenous Peoples' Land Rights in Canada and Beyond
For millennia, plants and their habitats have been fundamental to the lives of Indigenous Peoples - as sources of food and nutrition, medicines, and technological materials - and central to ceremonial traditions, spiritual beliefs, narratives, and language. While the First Peoples of Canada and other parts of the world have developed deep cultural understandings of plants and their environments, this knowledge is often underrecognized in debates about land rights and title, reconciliation, treaty negotiations, and traditional territories. Plants, People, and Places argues that the time is long past due to recognize and accommodate Indigenous Peoples' relationships with plants and their ecosystems. Essays in this volume, by leading voices in philosophy, Indigenous law, and environmental sustainability, consider the critical importance of botanical and ecological knowledge to land rights and related legal and government policy, planning, and decision making in Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand. Analyzing specific cases in which Indigenous Peoples' inherent rights to the environment have been denied or restricted, this collection promotes future prosperity through more effective and just recognition of the historical use of and care for plants in Indigenous cultures. A timely book featuring Indigenous perspectives on reconciliation, environmental sustainability, and pathways toward ethnoecological restoration, Plants, People, and Places reveals how much there is to learn from the history of human relationships with nature.
£37.95
McGill-Queen's University Press Net Privacy: How We Can Be Free in an Age of Surveillance
In our digital world, we are confused by privacy – what is public, what is private? We are also challenged by it, the conditions of privacy so uncertain we become unsure about our rights to it. We may choose to share personal information, but often do so on the assumption that it won't be re-shared, sold, or passed on to other parties without our knowing. In the eighteenth century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote about a new model for a prison called a Panopticon, where inmates surrounded the jailers, always under watch. Have we built ourselves a digital Panopticon? Are we the guards or the prisoners, captive or free? Can we be both? When Kim Kardashian makes the minutiae of her life available online, which is she? With great rigour, this important book draws on a Kantian philosophy of ethics and legal frameworks to examine where we are and to suggest steps – conceptual and practical – to ensure the future is not dystopian. Privacy is one of the defining issues of our time; this lively book explains why this is so, and the ways in which we might protect it.
£90.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Language Ethics
Language is central to political philosophy, yet until now there has been little in the way of a common framework capable of bridging disciplines that share an interest in language, power, and ethics. Studies are predominantly carried out in isolated disciplinary silos - notably linguistics, philosophy, political science, public administration, and education. This volume proposes a new vision for understanding the political ethics of language, particularly in linguistically diverse societies, and it establishes the necessary common framework for this field of inquiry: language ethics. Through creative and constructive thinking, Language Ethics considers how to advance our understanding of the human commonalities of moral and linguistic capacities and the challenge of linguistic difference and societal interdependence. The book embraces the longstanding centrality of language to moral reasoning and reinterprets it in a manner that draws on the social and political life of real-world inter- and intralinguistic issues. Contributors to this collection are leading international experts from different disciplines and approaches whose voices add diverse insight to the discourse on ethics and language justice. Exploring social, political, and economic realities, Language Ethics illuminates the complex nexus between ethics and language and highlights the contemporary challenges facing multilingual societies, including the uncertainties, ambiguities, anxieties, and hopes that accompany them.
£28.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Jean Paul Riopelle et le Mouvement Automatiste
Jean Paul Riopelle est surtout connu pour les célèbres toiles abstraites de sa maturité artistique. Toutefois, François Marc Gagnon amorce cette histoire fascinante avec les premières peintures et l'adhésion précoce à l'objectivité, avant de sonder la participation de l'artiste à l'automatisme et l'incidence durable de ce mouvement sur son œuvre. Gagnon retrace les premières étapes du cheminement de Riopelle depuis le style figuratif traditionnel enseigné par Henri Bisson, son premier professeur, jusqu'au virage subjectif inspiré par une exposition itinérante d'art hollandais et, en particulier, des toiles de Vincent Van Gogh, ainsi qu'aux expériences automatistes dans un atelier d'une ruelle de Montréal où le peintre travaille en compagnie de Marcel Barbeau et de Jean Paul Mousseau. Dès 1946, Riopelle est un émissaire de l'automatisme à Paris, où il organise la première exposition collective consacrée à ce style. L'auteur montre que malgré la perception d'un désintéressement idéologique, Riopelle a joué un rôle déterminant dans la publication du Refus global, manifeste dont il a dessiné la couverture et qu'il défendra publiquement, alors que la controverse agite les cercles artistiques et intellectuels du Québec. En 1949, après avoir embrassé la notion automatiste d'une peinture sans préconception, Riopelle adopte un style très personnel, où le hasard tient une place prépondérante. L'auteur retrouve cette démarche dans l'œuvre et les témoignages du peintre lui-même, qu'il fait dialoguer habilement avec les textes de philosophes et de théoriciens sur le rôle du hasard dans la créativité. Il propose en outre une analyse formelle du style et de la technique privilégiés par son sujet au moment où il abandonne définitivement le pinceau pour la spatule. Dans ce premier examen approfondi du rapport de Riopelle à la peinture américaine et à Jackson Pollock en particulier, il remet en question l'idée, pourtant largement acceptée, d'une influence de Pollock, qu'il juge peu probante. Cet ouvrage d'érudition, stimulant et clair, dernier de la longue carrière de l'auteur, est porté comme toujours par une écriture brillante. Il se distingue par son originalité, son intégrité et une connaissance approfondie de l'œuvre et du milieu de l'artiste, ce « trappeur supérieur » selon le mot d'André Breton.
£37.95
McGill-Queen's University Press Identities Under Construction: Religion, Gender, and Sexuality among Youth in Canada
Growing numbers of young adults are either nonreligious or "spiritual but not religious," but this does not signal a lack of interest in religion and meaning-making. Though the lexicon describing sexuality and gender is quickly evolving, young people do not yet have satisfactory language to describe their fluid religious and spiritual identities.In Identities Under Construction Pamela Dickey Young and Heather Shipley undertake a focused study of youth sexual, religious, and gender identity construction. Drawing from survey responses and interviews with nearly five hundred participants, they reveal that youth today consider their identities fluid and open to change. Young people do not limit themselves to singular identity categories, experiencing the choice of one religion, of maleness or femaleness, or of a fixed sexuality as confining. Although they recognize various forces at work in identity construction - parents, peers, the internet - they regard themselves as the authors of their own identities. For most of the young adults in the study, even those who are most traditionally religious, religious opinions and values should adapt to changing social mores to ensure that people are not judged for their sexual choices or identities. Further, they are not judgmental of others' choices, even if they would not make these choices for themselves.Engaging religion and sexuality studies in new ways, Identities Under Construction calls for a new grammar of religion that better captures lived realities at a time when religious choice has broadened beyond choosing a single organized religious tradition.
£24.95
McGill-Queen's University Press The Beautiful Unwanted: Down Syndrome in Myth, Memoir, and Bioethics
Prenatal genetic testing has changed the circumstances under which parents choose what pregnancies to carry to term. Some have predicted that as a result of parents’ choices, people with Down syndrome will disappear from our communities in the near future. Chris Kaposy, a bioethicist who has a son with Down syndrome, reflects on parenting his son in the midst of this supposed disappearance.Writing from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective, Kaposy presents some of the decades-old bioethical controversies involving children with Down syndrome, illustrating a prehistory of disappearance that has shaped current attitudes toward intellectual disability. Layered throughout this history are elements of Kaposy’s personal experience with his son and family. Transcending monograph and memoir, The Beautiful Unwanted draws creatively upon the past and the present, upon myth, history, science, and personal stories, to present the world of families that include children with Down syndrome from a series of uncommon perspectives. This account encompasses the changeling myths of Newfoundland, the “discovery” of Down syndrome by John Langdon Down and Jérôme Lejeune, and the twentieth-century experience of institutionalization, as well as recent advances in reproductive technology.We must recognize that we have some control over the future, Kaposy argues, and we must ask what kind of future we want for those who have intellectual disabilities. The Beautiful Unwanted poses this question in a way that is engaging, often bewildering, and always fascinating.
£24.99
McGill-Queen's University Press The Multiculturalism and Religious Identity: Canada and India
How, and to what extent, can religion be included within commitments to multiculturalism? Multiculturalism and Religious Identity addresses this question by examining the political recognition and management of religious identity in Canada and India. In multicultural policy, practice, and literature, religion has until recently not been included within broader discussions of multiculturalism, perhaps due to worries of potential for conflict with secularism. This collection undertakes a contemporary analysis of how the Canadian and Indian states each approach religious diversity through social and political policies, as well as how religion and secularism meet both philosophically and politically in contested public space. Although Canada and India have differing political and religious histories - leading to different articulations of multiculturalism, religious diversity, and secularism - both countries share a commitment to ensuring fair treatment for the different religious communities they include. Combining broader theoretical and normative reflections with close case studies, Multiculturalism and Religious Identity leads the way to addressing these timely issues in the Canadian and Indian contexts.
£81.90
McGill-Queen's University Press Disaster Risk and Vulnerability: Mitigation through Mobilizing Communities and Partnerships
From the Asian tsunami of 2004 to hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, our century has been fraught with catastrophic natural disasters. Disaster Risk and Vulnerability assesses the human toll and economic losses of natural disasters and reasserts the importance of human collaboration and organization in disaster management. In most cases, policy makers, planners, managers, and regulators who implement disaster risk reduction response planning and management strategies remain detached from local conditions, failing to address them effectively. Presenting case studies from Asia and North America, as well as a broad range of approaches to community mobilization and partnership development, contributors show that local communities, all levels of government, and non-governmental organizations must work collectively in order to reduce the harm caused by disasters. Despite unprecedented progress in science and technology and governments' continued efforts in disaster risk reduction, socioeconomic losses due to environmental disasters continue to rise. Disaster Risk and Vulnerability provides knowledge and information that will benefit anyone working in the fields of environment, disasters, and community mobilization in an effort to reverse this trend.
£33.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece
A collection, translation, and study of poetry - male-authored, female-authored, and anonymous - created for women's voices in ancient Greece
£27.86
McGill-Queen's University Press Social Democracy, Capitalism, and Competition: A Manifesto
Our social democracies and welfare states face economic and governance challenges that threaten their very survival. Against this backdrop, Social Democracy, Capitalism, and Competition argues that a true social democracy requires a clear definition and a refocusing of the roles of the public and private sectors.Using his novel competition-based social democracy and new competition-based capitalism models, Marcel Boyer goes back to the basics. Returning to the foundational characteristics of what social democracy and capitalism are supposed to be, he reimagines how public and social goods and services – such as education, healthcare, and transport infrastructure – can be provided in a way that aligns with citizens’ best interests. Boyer shows how recent decades have witnessed a shift away from competition and competitive processes, toward more bureaucratic control of public and social goods and services and more ironclad protection of state providers against contestation by potentially competitive organizations. This crony capitalism results in loss of purpose, organizational inefficiency, and outcomes that increasingly deviate from their original objectives of social wellbeing. Boyer maintains that productivity gains, economic growth, and prosperity for all actually require a degree of income and wealth inequality.Written with a facility that will appeal to anyone interested in public policy and economic reform, Social Democracy, Capitalism, and Competition is a book all governments should have on their reading list.
£29.99