Search results for ""University of British Columbia Press""

Sporting Gender is the first book to explore the rise to fame of female athletes in China during its national crisis of 1931-45 brought on by the Japanese invasion. By re-mapping lives and careers of these athletes, administrators, and film actors within a wartime context, Gao shows how they coped with the conflicting demands of nationalist causes, unwanted male attention, and modern fame. Addressing themes of state control, media influence, fashion, and changing gender roles, she argues that the athletic female form helped to create a new ideal of modern womanhood in China at a time when women’s emancipation and national needs went hand in hand. This book brings vividly to life the histories of these athletes and demonstrates how intertwined they were with the aims of the state and the needs of society.

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Aboriginal Justice and the Charter explores the tension between Aboriginal justice methods and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, seeking practical ways to implement Aboriginal justice. David Milward examines nine legal rights guaranteed by the Charter and undertakes a thorough search for interpretations sensitive to Aboriginal culture.Much of the previous literature in this area has dealt with idealized notions of what Aboriginal justice might be. Here, David Milward strikes out into new territory to examine why Indigenous communities seek to explore different paths in this area, and to identify some of the applicable constitutional constraints. This book considers a number of specific areas of the criminal justice process in which Indigenous communities may wish to adopt different approaches, tests these approaches against constitutional imperatives, and offers practical proposals for reconciling the various matters at stake. Milward grapples with the difficult questions of how Aboriginal justice systems can be fair to its constituents while complying with the protections guaranteed all Canadians by the Charter.

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New technologies and the science that created them have transformed our lives, posing challenges as to how technological change can be better integrated in society. Recognition of these issues has led to different ways of engaging the public in the assessment and regulation of emerging technologies. However, there has been no single approach that characterizes the relationship between publics and new technologies.This book puts the subject of publics and their engagement in emerging technologies on a robust theoretical footing. With a strong, though not exclusive, focus on genomic technologies, leading theorists and practitioners in the field provide precise and clear insights into the key issues in public participation studies, including ethics, process, and principles of knowledge distribution in democratic societies. The discussion is particularly pertinent and central to current concerns in health, technology, and public participation at a time when the reform of public and private sector health and social care services are being debated globally.

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In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King presentspivotal works of fiction produced in four key periods of Chineserevolutionary history: the civil war (1945-49), the Great Leap Forward(1958-60), the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and the post-Maocatharsis (1979-80). Taking its cues from the Soviet Union’soptimistic depictions of a society liberated by Communism, the officialChinese literature of this era is characterized by grand narratives ofprogress. Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writersdealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and importedtraditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopianCommunist future to their readers, even as the present took a verydifferent turn. Early “red classics” were followed by worksfeaturing increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later byfiction exposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitraryrule, and suffering – a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.

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In 1992, a preventable explosion at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killed twenty-six miners. More than a decade later, the government introduced revisions to the Criminal Code of Canada aimed at strengthening corporate criminal liability. Bill C-45, dubbed the Westray bill, requires employers to ensure a safe workplace and attributes criminal liability to organizations for seriously injuring or killing workers and/or the public.In Still Dying for a Living, Steven Bittle turns a critical eye on Canada’s corporate criminal liability law. Interweaving Foucauldian and neo-Marxist literatures with in-depth interviews and parliamentary transcripts, Bittle reveals how various legal, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding the Westray bill downplayed the seriousness of workplace injury and death, effectively characterizing these crimes as regrettable but largely unavoidable accidents. As long as the primary causes of workplace injury and death are not properly scrutinized, Bittle argues, workers will continue to die in the pursuit of earning a living.

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The end of the Qing dynasty in China saw an unprecedented explosion of print journalism. By the turn of the twentieth century, not only had Chinese-owned newspapers become more influential than anyone could have anticipated, but it was the supposedly frivolous xiaobao, the “little” or “minor” papers, that captivated and empowered the public.Merry Laughter and Angry Curses reveals how the late-Qing-era tabloid press became the voice of the people. As periodical publishing reached a fever pitch, tabloids had free rein to criticize officials, mock the elite, and scandalize readers. Tabloid writers produced a massive amount of anti-establishment literature, whose distinctive humour and satirical style were both potent and popular. This book shows the tabloid community to be both a producer of meanings and a participant in the social and cultural dialogue that would shake the foundations of imperial China and lead to the 1911 Republican Revolution.

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Aboriginal people in Canada have long struggled to regain control over their traditional forest lands. There have been significant gains in the quest for Aboriginal self-determination over the past few decades, including the historic signing of the Nisga’a Treaty in 1998. Aboriginal participation in resource management is on the rise in both British Columbia and other Canadian provinces, with some Aboriginal communities starting their own forestry companies.Aboriginal Peoples and Forest Lands in Canada brings together the diverse perspectives of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars to address the political, cultural, environmental, and economic implications of forest use. This book discusses the need for professionals working in forestry and conservation to understand the context of Aboriginal participation in resource management. It also addresses the importance of considering traditional knowledge and traditional land use and examines the development of co-management initiatives and joint ventures between government, forestry companies, and native communities.

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Globalization includes complex processes, easy to identify but difficult to explain. Why, for instance, are globalizing processes so unevenly distributed between poor and wealthy countries? What effect does this uneven distribution have on the everyday lives of ordinary people?The contributors to this volume find answers to these questions in the Mediterranean, a region divided between the people of the north shore, who are engaged with Europe and modernized, and their poorer neighbours to the south, who struggle daily to atain the same standards of living and modes of governance as their more Westernized neighbours. In these two regions’ divergent histories, economies, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, education systems, and political structures lead to explanations not only for uneven globalization but also for the wave of demonstrations for political and cultural autonomy that sparked the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Near East.

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For decades, government, industry, and the mainstream media have extolled the virtues of biotechnology, downplaying its negative side effects and claiming that it can improve everything from our health and diet to our environment and economy.Focusing on agricultural biotechnology, Resistance Is Fertile challenges this dominant rhetoric by offering a critical analysis of the role of capital and the state in the development of this technoscience. Wilhelm Peekhaus analyzes the major issues around which opponents of agricultural biotechnology in Canada are mobilizing resistance – namely, the enclosure of the biological commons and the knowledge commons, which together form the BioCommons. What emerges is an empirically and theoretically informed analysis of topics such as Canada’s regulatory regime, the corporate control of seeds, the intellectual property system, and attempts to construct and control public discussions about agricultural biotechnology.

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The spread of Christianity is often told as a story of conquest, of powerful European missionaries waging a cultural assault on hapless indigenous victims. Yet the presence of indigenous men among missionary ranks in the nineteenth century complicates these narratives. What compelled these individuals to embrace Christianity? How did they reconcile being both Christian and indigenous in an age of empire?Tolly Bradford finds answers to these questions in the lives and legacies of Henry Budd, a Cree missionary from western Canada, and Tiyo Soga, a Xhosa missionary from southern Africa. Inspired by both faith and family, these men found in Christianity a way to construct a modern conception of indigeneity, one informed by their ties to Britain and rooted in land and language, rather than religion and lifestyle. Prophetic Identities portrays indigenous missionaries not as victims of colonialism but rather as people who made conscious, difficult choices about their spirituality, identity, and relationship with the British colonial world.

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Interwar Halifax was a city in flux, a place where citizens debated adopting new ideas and technologies but agreed on one thing – modernity was corrupting public morality and unleashing untold social problems on their fair city.In this context, citizens, policy makers, and officials turned to the criminal justice system to create a bulwark against further social dislocation. Officials modernized the city’s machinery of order – courts, prisons, and the police force – and placed greater emphasis on crime control, while residents supported tough-on-crime measures and attached little importance to rehabilitation. These initiatives gave birth to a constructed vision of a criminal class that singled out ethnic minorities, working-class men, and female and juvenile offenders as problem figures in the eternal quest for order.Michael Boudreau’s in-depth study of crime and culture in interwar Halifax, the first of its kind, shows how tough-on-crime measures can compound, rather than resolve, social inequalities and dislocations.

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The cancellation of the CF-105 Arrow in 1959 holds such a grip on the imagination of Canadians that earlier developments in defence procurement remain in the shadows.Randall Wakelam corrects this oversight – and offers fresh insight into the AVRO saga and contemporary procurement issues – by detailing the complexities Canada’s air force faced in buying fighter aircraft and by showing how the RCAF grew by leaps and bounds. Wakelam shows that cabinet members, chiefs of staff, and air marshals were forced to negotiate competing pressures to arm the air force, please allies, and save money. Their decisions resulted in the CF-100 Canuck and the F-86 Sabre, Canada’s front-line defensive aircraft in the coldest years of the Cold War. Although historians assume that the Arrow arrived on the heels of these successes, Wakelam reveals that neither the air force nor the government believed AVRO could manufacture even the CF-100 on budget.

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Despite the popular assumption that wildlife conservation is a recent phenomenon, it emerged over a century and a half ago in an era more closely associated with wildlife depletion than preservation. In Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, Darcy Ingram explores the combination of NGOs, fish and game clubs, and state-administered leases that formed the basis of a unique system of wildlife conservation in North America. However, these early strategies were not as forward-focused as they appear. Ingram traces the emergence of a lease-based regulatory system that blended elite forms of sport and conservation. Applied first to British North America’s prized salmon rivers, this system came to encompass the bulk of Quebec’s hunting and fishing territories. Inspired by a longstanding belief in progress, improvement, and social order based on European as well as North American models, this system effectively privatized Quebec’s fish and game resources, often to the detriment of commercial and subsistence hunters and fishers.

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Critical and postmodern perspectives have been largely underexplored in the field of child and youth care. This book addresses the gap, showcasing cutting-edge approaches to policy, pedagogy, and practice from diverse perspectives and professional settings.The authors of Child and Youth Care challenge deep-seated assumptions about child and youth care by reinterpreting core concepts such as ethics and outcomes and raising questions about underlying goals and premises. Can the ends of practice be separated from the means? For whose benefit are interventions designed? By recognizing a range of social and political influences on children and youth, this volume bears witness to exciting developments in child and youth care.

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The Liberal Party has fallen on hard times since 2006. Once Canada’s natural governing party but now confined to the opposition benches, it struggles to renew itself – presumably without the support of the provincial-level Liberal parties.Drawing on interviews and personal observations in cross-country ridings, Royce Koop reveals that although the Liberal Party, like other parties, disassociated itself from its provincial cousins to rebuild itself in the mid-twentieth century, grassroots Liberals and other partisans continue to build bridges between the national party and the provinces. This insider’s view of Liberal party politics not only challenges the idea that Canada has two distinct political spheres – the provincial and the national – it suggests that national parties can overcome the challenges of multi-level politics, strengthen their ties to provincial politics, and deepen their legitimacy by tapping the activism, energy, and support of constituency associations and local campaigns.

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The extraction of oil and gas from offshore continental shelves represents one of the most dynamic sectors of global petroleum development. It is also one of the most complex. Atlantic Canada is no exception and the history of Scotian Basin petroleum over the past half century reveals a fascinating series of political challenges, accommodations, and settlements.Peter Clancy’s comprehensive analysis of petroleum politics in Nova Scotia demonstrates the complex intergovernmental and intercorporate relationships, ecological concerns, and Aboriginal interests that have complicated offshore development. Among the analytic themes he addresses are institutional adaptation and rigidity, “basin development” as a policy challenge, the strong and weak characteristics of the offshore state, and the shifting shapes of the offshore polity. His incisive analysis of the complex politics at play provides new insights into the unique challenges facing the petroleum industry in Atlantic Canada.

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Canadians share a long history with China. Canada is home to a large Chinese diaspora, it appointed a trade commissioner to Shanghai over a century ago, and it was one of the first Western nations to recognize the People’s Republic of China.This absorbing account of Canadian sojourners in Shanghai, from the arrival of Lord Elgin in 1858 to the closing of the consulate general in 1952, gives a human face to that history. Some Canadians came to save souls, nourish bodies, and educate minds; others sought financial and political gain. Their experiences – which unfolded against a backdrop of civil war, invasion, and revolution in China and were coloured by Canada’s evolution from colony to nation – reflected Canada’s deepening relationship with China and the troubling asymmetries that underpinned it.Although Canadians, like other foreigners, had left Shanghai by the early 1950s, their lives and activities foreshadowed more recent Canadian initiatives in that city, and in China more generally.

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Public concern about worsening global environmental and socialconditions has spurred corporate participation in voluntary corporatesocial responsibility (CSR) programs. Such efforts are promising, butCSR participation has unfolded unevenly across the globe, leading toskepticism about the efficacy of CSR efforts, and to increased pressureon governments to get involved. Corporate Social Responsibility and the State examines CSRgovernance through the lens of forest certification in Canada, the US,and Sweden. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with experts,Lister offers revealing new information on CSR governance, ultimatelydemonstrating the importance of voluntary CSR as a supplement to ratherthan a substitute for strong state regulation. One of the first studies to directly address the role of the publicsector in CSR, this book provides much-needed theoretical and practicalguidance for understanding a vital new governance approach to effectivesocial and environmental stewardship.

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This is the forty-seventh volume of The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, the first volume of which was published in 1963. The Yearbook is issued annually under the auspices of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association (Canadian Society of International Law) and the Canadian Council on International Law. The Editor-in-Chief is D.M. McRae, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, and the Associate Editor is A.L.C. de Mestral, Faculty of Law, McGill University. Its Board of Editors includes scholars from leading universities in Canada. The Yearbook contains articles of lasting significance in the field of international legal studies, a notes and comments section, a digest of international economic law, a section on current Canadian practice in international law, a digest of important Canadian cases in the fields of public international law, private international law, and conflict of laws, a list of recent Canadian treaties, and book reviews.

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In the past few decades, gays and lesbians, along with theirfamilies, have become more visible members of Canadian society,enjoying increasing levels of legal recognition. In the area of legalparenthood, however, significant questions remain unanswered. InTransforming Law's Family, Fiona Kelly explores thecomplex issues encountered by planned lesbian families as they work todefine their parental rights, roles, and family structures within thetenets of family law. While Canadian courts recognize lesbian parenthood in somecircumstances, a number of issues that are largely unique to plannedlesbian families – such as the legal status of known spermdonors and non-biological mothers – persist. Drawing oninterviews with lesbian mothers, this groundbreaking book illuminatesthe changing definitions of family and suggests a model for law reformthat would enable the legal recognition of alternative forms ofparentage. The first empirical study in Canada to address the legal dimensions ofplanned lesbian families, this book makes an important contribution tofamily law, queer studies, and law reform literature.

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Jasper National Park is an international travel destination, world heritage site, and icon of Canadian identity. Although national parks occupy a prominent place in the Canadian imagination, we are only beginning to understand how their visual imagery has shaped and continues to inform our perception of the natural world, ecological issues, and ourselves.In Manufacturing National Park Nature, J. Keri Cronin draws on visual images such as postcards and tourist snapshots to show that popular forms of picturing nature can have ecological implications that extend far beyond the frame of the image. Adopting an ecocritical approach to visual culture, she reveals that packaging Jasper as a series of breathtaking vistas and adorable-looking animals masks the real threats to the park’s ecosystems. In telling the story of how various groups have used photography to shape our ideas about nature, this book sets the stage for a re-examination of protection policies and acknowledgment of environmental damage in national parks.

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The trade principles of Western liberal democracies are at the coreof international trade law regimes and standards. Are non-Westernsocieties uniformly adopting international standards, or are theyadapting them to local norms and cultural values? This volume presents a new conceptual approach – the paradigmof selective adaptation – to explore and explain the reception ofinternational trade law in the Pacific Rim. Building on a conceptualdiscussion of the normative and institutional contexts forinternational law, the contributors draw on examples from China, Japan,Thailand, and North America to show that formal acceptance ofinternational trade standards through accession to the World TradeOrganization and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade does notnecessarily translate into uniform enforcement and acceptance at thelocal level. This book provides compelling evidence that non-uniformcompliance will be a legitimate outcome of the globalization ofinternational trade law.

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In 2004, Jean Chrétien’s Liberals banned unions andcorporations from contributing financially to political parties. In2008, opposition leaders were prepared to defeat the Conservativegovernment over its proposal to eliminate public subsidies toparties. In Money, Politics, and Democracy, Lisa Young and HaroldJansen lead a distinguished group of political scientists in exploringthe issues that led to the showdown. Are publicly funded partiescompatible with democracy? What effect have campaign finance reformshad on the balance of power between parties and donors, on therelationship between national parties and local organizations, onelectoral competition? This timely volume reveals that the financialcentre of gravity for political parties is shifting between nationaland local organizations as individual donors replace unions andcorporations. To survive financially, parties must now maximize theirseats and votes. Contributors show that campaign finance reforms haveshaped party organization and electoral competition, contributing tosuccessive minority governments.

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Many political observers, struck by low turnout rates among young voters, are pessimistic about the future of democracy in Canada and other Western nations. Citizens in general are disengaged in politics, and young people in particular are said to be adrift in a sea of apathy. Others have questioned this bleak assessment, arguing that youth engagement has shifted to newer forms of political and community involvement.In Citizens Adrift, Paul Howe examines past and present patterns of political and civic engagement and concludes that many young Canadians are, in fact, detached from the political realm. Two trends underlie his findings: waning political knowledge and attentiveness and generational changes in the norms and values that help sustain social integration. Putting young people back on the path towards engaged citizenship therefore requires a holistic approach, one which acknowledges that democratic engagement extends beyond the realm of formal politics.

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Human rights violations leave deep scars on people, societies, and nations. Since the early 1990s, international rights groups have argued that resolving the violence of the past through instruments of transitional justice such as truth commissions is a necessary condition for a peaceful future. But how can nations ensure that these tribunals are the best path to reconciliation?The Politics of Acknowledgement develops a theoretical framework of acknowledgement with which to evaluate truth commissions. Rather than applying this framework to successful tribunals, Joanna Quinn uses it to analyze the difficulties encountered and the ultimate failure of two poorly understood truth commissions in Uganda and Haiti. The failure of these commissions reveals that if reconciliation is to be achieved, acknowledgement of past violence and harm – by both victims and perpetrators – must come before goals such as forgiveness, social trust, civic engagement, and social cohesion.

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While the events of 9/11 provoked countless debates about international politics, security, and global order, one question dominates. Should America don the mantle of empire for the sake of world peace, or will peace come through world government? This volume questions the very assumptions of this debate – that the political order is hierarchical, with state and international institutions at the top and groups and individuals at the bottom. Case studies dealing with Canada’s role in the construction and maintenance of global order, both domestically and internationally, reveal that the location of social and political practices creating global order is no longer certain. Rather than taking the state and international system for granted, this book demonstrates that global order post-9/11 is not exclusively American – allied powers are a key component of its hegemony.

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While the events of 9/11 provoked countless debates about international politics, security, and global order, one question dominates. Should America don the mantle of empire for the sake of world peace, or will peace come through world government? This volume questions the very assumptions of this debate – that the political order is hierarchical, with state and international institutions at the top and groups and individuals at the bottom. Case studies dealing with Canada’s role in the construction and maintenance of global order, both domestically and internationally, reveal that the location of social and political practices creating global order is no longer certain. Rather than taking the state and international system for granted, this book demonstrates that global order post-9/11 is not exclusively American – allied powers are a key component of its hegemony.

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The buffalo hunter, the medicine man, and the missionary continue to dominate the history of the North American west, even though historians have recognized women’s role as both colonizer and colonized since the 1980s.Kristin Burnett helps to correct this imbalance by investigating the convergence of Aboriginal and settler therapeutic regimes in the Treaty 7 region from the perspective of women. Although the imperial eye focused on medicine men, Aboriginal women played important roles as healers and caregivers, and the knowledge and healing work of both Aboriginal and settler women brought them into contact. But as settlement increased and the colonial regime hardened, informal encounters in domestic spaces gave way to more formal, one-sided interactions in settler-run hospitals and nursing stations.By revealing Aboriginal and settler women’s contributions to the development of health care in southern Alberta, Taking Medicine challenges traditional understandings of colonial medicine and nursing in the contact zone.

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Constructing Crime examines the central question: Why do we define and enforce particular behaviours as crimes and target particular individuals as criminals?To answer this question, contributors interrogate notions of crime, processes of criminalization, and the deployment of the concept of crime in five radically different sites – the enforcement of fraud against welfare recipients and physicians, the enforcement of laws against Aboriginal harvesting practices, the perceptions of incivilities or disorder in public housing projects, and the selective criminalization of gambling.By demonstrating that how crime is defined and enforced is connected to social location and status, these interdisciplinary case studies and an afterword by Marie-Andrée Bertrand challenge us to consider just who is rendered criminal and why. This timely volume will appeal to policy makers and students and practitioners of law, criminology, and sociology.

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Can the specific concerns of Indigenous women be addressed within current mainstream feminist and post-colonial discussions? Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture proposes that a dynamic new line of inquiry – Indigenous feminism – is necessary to truly engage with the crucial issues of cultural identity, nationalism, and decolonization particular to Indigenous contexts.Through the lenses of politics, activism, and culture, the questions at the heart of this collection – What is at stake in conceptualizing Indigenous feminism? How does feminism relate to Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty? What lessons can we learn from the past? How do Indigenous women engage ongoing violence and social and political marginalization? – cross disciplinary, national, academic, and activist boundaries to explore deeply the unique political and social positions of Indigenous women.A vital and sophisticated discussion, these timely essays will change the way we think about modern feminism and Indigenous women.

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Can the specific concerns of Indigenous women be addressed within current mainstream feminist and post-colonial discussions? Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture proposes that a dynamic new line of inquiry – Indigenous feminism – is necessary to truly engage with the crucial issues of cultural identity, nationalism, and decolonization particular to Indigenous contexts.Through the lenses of politics, activism, and culture, the questions at the heart of this collection – What is at stake in conceptualizing Indigenous feminism? How does feminism relate to Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty? What lessons can we learn from the past? How do Indigenous women engage ongoing violence and social and political marginalization? – cross disciplinary, national, academic, and activist boundaries to explore deeply the unique political and social positions of Indigenous women.A vital and sophisticated discussion, these timely essays will change the way we think about modern feminism and Indigenous women.

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In 1902 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)petitioned the Japanese government to abolish the custom of rewardinggood deeds and patriotic service with the bestowal of sake cups.Alcohol production and consumption, its members argued, harmedindividuals, endangered public welfare, and wasted vital resources. The petition was only one initiative in a wide-ranging program toreform public and private behaviour. Between 1886 and 1912, the WCTUlaunched campaigns to eliminate prostitution, eradicate drinking,spread Christianity, and improve the lives of women. As Elizabeth DornLublin shows, members did not passively accept and propagate governmentpolicy but felt a duty to shape it by defining social problems andinfluencing opinion. Certain their beliefs and reforms were essentialto Japan's advancement, members couched their calls for change inthe rhetorical language of national progress. Ultimately, theWCTU’s activism belies received notions of women’s publicinvolvement and political engagement in Meiji Japan.

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When the UN adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, it brought the negative effect of globalization on the lives of Indigenous peoples to the centre of public debate. The contributors to this innovative collection extend the discussion by asking what can Indigenous peoples’ experiences with and thoughts on globalization tell us about the relationship between globalization and autonomy and the meaning of the concepts themselves? Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy brings together scholars from multiple disciplines and backgrounds who seek answers to this question in grounded case studies. Whether the focus is on sea rights among Torres Strait Islanders, James Bay Cree co-governance, the transformation of East Cree spirituality, or the co-optation of linguistics by Mayan activists, each chapter opens a window to view how Iindigenous people are engaging with and challenging globalization and Western views of autonomy.

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For communities who have been the target of political violence, the after-effects can haunt what remains of their families, their communities, and the societies in which they live. Terrain of Memory tells the story of the Japanese Canadian elders who built a memorial in 1994 to mark a village in an isolated mountainous valley in British Columbia with their history of internment. It explores memory as a powerful collective cultural practice, following elders and locals as they worked together to transform a site of political violence into a space for remembrance. They transformed a valley where once over 7,000 women, men, and children were interned into a pilgrimage site where Japanese Canadians can mourn and also pay their respects to the wartime generation. This is a compelling story about how collectively excavating painful memories can contribute to building relations across social and intergenerational divides.

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The citizen soldier is a central figure in Canada’s social memory of the First World War. But is the ideal of being a citizen first and a soldier only by necessity an unchanging feature of the Canadian identity?This compelling history traces the evolution of the Canadian amateur military tradition in the turbulent years from 1896 to 1921. Before the Great War, Canada’s military culture was in transition as Canada navigated an uncertain relationship with the United States and fought an imperial war in South Africa. Gradually, the untrained civilian replaced the long-serving volunteer militiaman as the archetypal amateur soldier, setting the country down a path leading directly to the battlefields of Flanders and northern France.Militia Myths reveals the history of a military culture that consistently employed the citizen soldier as its foremost symbol, but was otherwise in a state of profound change.

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Quebec women have had the right to vote and run for office inprovincial and federal forums for at least six decades, yet theycontinue to occupy a minority of seats in Quebec’s NationalAssembly and in Canada’s House of Commons and Senate. To explain this situation, Women and ParliamentaryRepresentation in Quebec examines women’s engagement inpolitics from 1791 to the present. It begins by tracing the path thatled to women achieving the right to vote and run for office and thendraws on statistics and interviews with women senators and members ofParliament to complete an in-depth portrait of Quebec women’sunder-representation and its main causes – political parties andthe voting system. This innovative account not only documents thesignificant democratic deficit in Canada’s parliamentary systems,it also outlines strategies to improve women’s access tolegislative representation in Canada and elsewhere.

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It is easy to forget that the death penalty was an accepted aspect of Canadian culture and criminal justice from Confederation until 1976. The Practice of Execution in Canada is not about what led some to the gallows and others to escape it. Rather, it examines how the routine rituals and practices of education can be seen as a crucial social institution.Drawing on hundreds of case files, Ken Leyton-Brown shows that from trial to interment, the practice of execution was constrained by law and tradition.Despite this, however, the institution was not rigid. Criticism and reform pushed executions out of the public eye, and in so doing, stripped them of meaningful ritual and made them more vulnerable to criticism. Comprehensive and absorbing, this groundbreaking study is for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of contemporary debates on capital punishment.

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Since the mid-1950s, successive Canadian governments have grappled with the issue of Canada’s role in US ballistic missile defence programs. Until Paul Martin’s government finally said no, policy-makers responded to US initiatives with fear and uncertainty as they endlessly debated the implications – at home and abroad – of participation. However, whether this is the end of the story remains to be seen.Drawing on previously classified government documents and interviews with senior officials, James Fergusson examines Canada’s policy deliberations during five major US initiatives. He reveals that a combination of factors such as weak leadership and a tendency to place uncertain and ill-defined notions of international peace and security before national defence resulted in indecision on what role Canada would play in ballistic missile defence. In effect, policy-makers have failed to transform debates about the issue into an opportunity to define Canada’s strategic interests at home and on the world stage. Canada and Ballistic Missile Defense is the first comprehensive account of Canada’s response and indecision regarding US ballistic missile defence initiatives, and the implications of this inaction.

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Bertha Wilson’s appointment as the first female justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1982 capped off a career of firsts. Wilson had been the first woman lawyer and partner at a prominent Toronto law firm and the first woman appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Her death in 2007 provoked reflection on her contributions to the Canadian legal landscape and raised the question, what difference do women judges make?Justice Bertha Wilson examines Wilson’s career through three distinct frames and a wide range of feminist perspectives. The authors evince Wilson’s contributions to the legal system in “Foundations,” examine her role in high-profile decisions in “Controversy,” and assess her credentials as a feminist judge and her impact on education and the profession in “Reflections.”This nuanced portrait of a complex, controversial woman will appeal to lawyers, judges, policy makers, academics, and anyone interested in law and women’s contributions to Canadian society.

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Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. But if global environmental changes continue at their present unsettling pace, how will we make sense of time and place when the air, land, and water around us are no longer familiar?Joy Parr, one of Canada’s premier historians, tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past when state-driven megaprojects such as chemical plants, dams, nuclear reactors, transportation corridors, and new regulatory regimes forced people to cope with radical transformations in their work and home environments. In each case, the familiar was transformed so thoroughly that residents no longer recognized where they lived or, by implication, who they were.Sensing Changes and its associated website, http://megaprojects.uwo.ca, make a key contribution to environmental history and the emerging field of sensory history. This study offers a timely, prescient perspective on how humans make sense of the world in the face of rapid environmental change.

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In the late 1990s, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside became the setting for three monuments – Crab Park Boulder, Marker of Change, and Standing with Courage, Strength and Pride. The monuments were grassroots initiatives that challenged the norms of civic art by claiming a place in public space for society’s most vulnerable groups, and each figured in debates about many kinds of violence.This vivid account of the creation of memory-scapes in a marginalized community offers unique insights into the links between power, public space, and social memory and asks us to reconsider what constitutes public art that will “speak for a long time.” Emphasizing the resilience and agency of artists, activists, and residents, Adrienne Burk shows that grassroots activism can give the socially marginalized a visible presence in our urban landscapes.

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British Columbia is Canada’s most ethnically diverse province. Although the presence of Asian religions is felt and discussed in many regions, we know little about the religions that accompanied immigrants from Asia or how they are practised today.Asian Religions in British Columbia brings together fourteen religious studies scholars who offer intimate portraits of local religious groups, including Hindus and Sikhs from South Asia; Buddhist organizations from Southeast Asia; and Tibetan, Japanese, and Chinese religions from East and Central Asia. Although the geographical focus is particular, the conceptual focus is broad – the authors explore each religious tradition in the larger context of Canadian multiculturalism.As the first comprehensive and comparative examination of Asian religions in British Columbia, this book is mandatory reading for teachers, policy makers, scholars of British Columbia history and Asian Canadian studies, or anyone who wants to be well informed about this province and nation.

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Captain James Cook first made contact with the area now known as British Columbia in 1778. The colonists who followed soon realized they needed a written history, both to justify their dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and to formulate an identity for a new settler society.Writing British Columbia History shows how Euro-Canadian historians took up this task, and struggled with the newness of colonial society and overlapping alliances to the British Empire, the United States, and Canada. In explorers’ accounts, promotional literature, “pioneer” histories, and academic studies, they eased these tensions by defining British Columbia as part of a global British Empire, incorporating it into an expanding Anglo-Saxon civilization, and writing it into the empire of history itself.This sweeping study of the role of history writing in colonialism and nation building will appeal to anyone interested in British Columbia history, the history of the Pacific Northwest, or history writing in Canada.

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Thousands of children attended summer camps in twentieth-century Ontario. Did parents simply want a break, or were broader developments at play? The Nurture of Nature explores the history of summer camps and sheds light on a wider phenomenon: the divided consciousness that informs modern assumptions about nature, technology, and identity.Wall examines how two competing tendencies – antimodern nostalgia and modern sensibilities about the landscape, child rearing, and identity – played out in the camp’s interaction with nature, its class and gendered dimensions, its engagement with emerging ideologies of childhood, and in the politics of race inherent in its "Indian" programming.The Nurture of Nature offers a fascinating discussion of the summer camp’s contribution to modern social life that will appeal to students and practitioners of the history of childhood, the natural environment, and recreation or anyone who has been packed off to camp and wants to explore why.

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Caught in the trap of the nation-state and frozen in postwar bloc logic, critical political economy has been found wanting when it comes to problematizing space and scale. Globalization and the rise of world cities and regions have shaken the discipline's foundations and fostered new interest in the concept of scale. Leviathan Undone? brings together leading theorists and scholars from a variety of disciplines to develop a new language to understand the spatial restructuring that has accompanied globalization. By treating scale as the core concept of our time, these innovative, groundbreaking essays bring a new sensibility to classical and contemporary concerns in Canadian and international political economy.

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Caught in the trap of the nation-state and frozen in postwar bloc logic, critical political economy has been found wanting when it comes to problematizing space and scale. Globalization and the rise of world cities and regions have shaken the discipline's foundations and fostered new interest in the concept of scale. Leviathan Undone? brings together leading theorists and scholars from a variety of disciplines to develop a new language to understand the spatial restructuring that has accompanied globalization. By treating scale as the core concept of our time, these innovative, groundbreaking essays bring a new sensibility to classical and contemporary concerns in Canadian and international political economy.

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Surveillance is commonly rationalized as a practice to address existing political or social problems such as crime, fraud, and terrorism. This book explores how surveillance, disguised as managing risk or reducing harm, can cause a range of problems, including poverty, over-policing, and exclusion.The scholars represented in this volume interrogate the moral and ideological bases and material effects of surveillance practices and systems in diverse cultural and institutional arenas: policing, consumerism, welfare administration, disaster management, popular culture, moral regulation, news media, social movements, and anti-terrorism campaigns.Surveillance addresses and asks us to consider the question: How can we ensure a future in which surveillance and its consequences are not accepted as normal, or necessary, features of modern life?

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Between 1916 and 1918, Lance-Corporal George Timmins, a British-born soldier who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote faithfully to his wife, May, and three children back home in Oshawa. Sixty-three letters and four fragments survived.These letters tell the compelling story of a man who, while helping his fellow Canadians make history at Vimy, Lens, Passchendaele, and Amiens, used letters home to remain a presence in the lives of his wife and children, and who drew strength from his family to appreciate life’s simple pleasures, when they were afforded. Transcribed and annotated by Y.A. Bennett, Timmins’s letters offer a rare glimpse into the experiences and relationships, at home and abroad, of a Canadian infantryman. Its story of quiet heroism and the brotherhood of the trenches will appeal to anyone interested in how ordinary soldiers experienced and survived the First World War.

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