Search results for ""Queen's University""
McGill-Queen's University Press Maurice
Maurice, James Ivory’s 1987 adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel, follows an Edwardian man’s journey from the awakening of his desire for and love of men to self-acceptance. One of the most politically resistant films of the 1980s, Maurice dared to depict a young man’s coming-out story and a happy ending for its lovers, Maurice and Alec.James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, a couple whose cinema is synonymous with period film adaptation, released Maurice during the first AIDS decade, a time of flagrant transatlantic homophobia. Criticism following its release described Ivory as a superficial and staid director, while the film was received as a regression to the uncinematic and overly faithful style that characterized the early adaptations by Merchant Ivory Productions. Offering a close reading of Forster’s novel and an analysis of Ivory’s distinctive visual style, Richard Robbins’s indelible score, and the performances of James Wilby, Hugh Grant, and Rupert Graves, David Greven argues that the film is a model of sympathetic adaptation. This study champions the film as the finest of the Merchant Ivory works, making a case for Ivory’s underappreciated talents as a director of great subtlety and intelligence, and for the film as one worth recuperating from its detractors.Understanding Maurice as a fully realized work of art and adaptation, this volume offers insight into how a stunning novel of gay love became a classic of queer film.
£14.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Rethinking Decentralization: Mapping the Meaning of Subsidiarity in Federal Political Culture
Federal countries face innumerable challenges including public health crises, economic uncertainty, and widespread public distrust in governing institutions. They are also home to 40 per cent of the world’s population. Rethinking Decentralization explores the question of what makes a successful federal government by examining the unique role of public attitudes in maintaining the fragile institutions of federalism. Conventional wisdom is that successful federal governance is predicated on the degree to which authority is devolved to lower levels of government and the extent to which citizens display a “federal spirit” – a term often referenced but rarely defined. Jacob Deem puts these claims to the test, examining public attitudes in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Deem demonstrates how the role of citizen attachment to particular manifestations of decentralization, subsidiarity, and federalism is unique to each country and a reflection of its history, institutions, and culture. Essential reading for policymakers, academics, and everyday citizens, Rethinking Decentralization re-centres the public to offer a nuanced way of thinking about federal governance.
£30.59
McGill-Queen's University Press The History of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada: Volume 2, 1939–1945
In three volumes spanning centuries, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Jarymowycz recounts the story of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada, the oldest Highland regiment in the country. He traces its history from the roots, when soldiers, settlers, and militia volunteers rallied to defend the southern borders of their adopted country against invasion from the United States. Drawing on diaries, letters, classified documents, and the regimental archive, Jarymowycz weaves the strands of a complex story into an epic narrative of a resolute collective of officers and men.Since its birth in 1862 as the 5th Battalion, Volunteer Militia Rifles of Canada, thousands of citizens have served in the unit. In addition to securing Canada’s borders, Black Watch soldiers have fought in the South African War, both world wars, and the Korean War. They have bolstered NATO operations and United Nations peacekeeping missions, and they provided aid to the civil power during the 1997 Quebec and Eastern Ontario ice storm disaster and the COVID-19 pandemic. The Montreal-based battalion continues to serve Canada in its traditional role as a reserve infantry unit, and to this day, Black Watch soldiers frequently deploy on dangerous missions abroad. In volume 2 we are offered the story of the bloody battlefields of the Second World War, when the Black Watch joined Commonwealth regiments to defeat the Axis Powers. After a quick mobilization in 1939 and a long wait in England, the Black Watch experienced a baptism by fire at Dieppe. Landing in Normandy after D-Day, the regiment fought in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, its distinguished service earning numerous honours. As well as discussing these military engagements, Jarymowycz reveals the many difficulties with recruiting, training, recovering from devastating battles, communicating with higher command, and the quality and scarcity of reinforcements. This monumental history of Canada’s oldest Highland regiment is at once a record of Scottish heritage, a portrait of Montreal rising as an industrial giant, and an examination of the emergence of a military culture from the Western Front.
£60.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Once upon a Time in the West: Essays on the Politics of Thought and Imagination
Western civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky’s trenchant exploration of the root of global cultural and ecological collapse: a way of thinking that is also linked to some of the West’s most noted achievements.The Renaissance merged imperial enterprise with Islamic algebra and recently recovered Greek mathematics to precipitate mechanized industry and resource extraction; these in turn made possible the growth of capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Big Technology. Despite its self-image as objective, Zwicky argues, the West’s style of thought is not politically neutral, but intensely anthropocentric. It has led those who adopt it to regard the more-than-human world as nothing more than timber licences and drilling sites, where value is not recognized unless it is monetized. Oblivious to context and blind to big-picture thinking, it analyzes, mechanizes, digitizes, and systematizes, while rejecting empathy and compassion as distorting influences. Lyric comprehension, in Zwicky’s view, offers an alternative to this way of thinking, and she provides a wide range of examples. Once upon a Time in the West documents how a narrow epistemological style has left Western thought blind to critical features of reality, and how the terrifying consequences of that blinkered vision are now beginning to unfold.
£90.00
McGill-Queen's University Press À tout prendre et Il était une fois dans l’Est
Si la devise du Québec sombre parfois dans l’oubli, ce livre s’impose tel un véritable devoir de mémoire envers les pionniers du cinéma de fiction LGBTQ+ québécois : « Je me souviens » de ce premier et courageux aveu queer de Claude Jutra dans À tout prendre, ainsi que de l’exploration par André Brassard et Michel Tremblay dans Il était une fois dans l’Est d’une faune colorée affirmant son existence dans un quartier modeste de l’est de Montréal. Ce livre commémore et conjugue ces deux fleurons de la cinématographie québécoise qui mettent en scène des représentations gaies, lesbiennes et trans pionnières dans les années 1960 et 1970.Malgré une réception critique empreinte parfois d’homophobie au Québec et un relatif silence à l’intérieur d’un Canada majoritairement anglophone, ce cinéma francophone fera néanmoins entendre sa voix à l’international, en Europe comme aux États-Unis, impressionnant des cinéastes comme Truffaut et Cassavetes. Ces films passent ainsi à l’histoire. Sous la loupe de la sociologie, Julie Vaillancourt analyse ces films au rythme d’événements sociopolitiques marquants, de la Révolution tranquille à la révolution sexuelle, des mouvements de libération homosexuels à ceux des femmes, sans oublier la question identitaire nationale. L’ouvrage présente également un état des lieux plus de cinquante ans après la décriminalisation de l’homosexualité au Canada. Vu l’influence de ces cinéastes auprès de la jeune génération, dont Xavier Dolan, les legs sont nombreux et invitent les comparaisons réaffirmant le caractère novateur de ces deux films pionniers. Ce livre revisite À tout prendre et Il était une fois dans l’Est pour démontrer leur importance artistique et sociale au moment de leur création ainsi que leur héritage durable dans le contexte du cinéma queer mondial.
£99.00
McGill-Queen's University Press A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish
The Elizabethan settlement, and the Church of England that emerged from it, made way for a theological reformation, an institutional reformation, and a high political reformation. It was a reformation that changed history, birthed an Anglican communion, and would eventually launch new wars, new language, and even a new national identity. A People’s Reformation offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the English Reformation and the roots of the Church of England. Drawing on archival material from across the United States and Britain, Lucy Kaufman examines the growing influence of state authority and the slow building of a robust state church from the bottom up in post-Reformation England. Situating the people of England at the heart of this story, the book argues that while the Reformation shaped everyday lives, it was also profoundly shaped by them in turn. England became a Protestant nation not in spite of its people but through their active social, political, and religious participation in creating a new church in England.A People’s Reformation explores this world from the pews, reimagining the lived experience and fierce negotiation of church and state in the parishes of Elizabethan England. It places ordinary people at the centre of the local, cultural, and political history of the Reformation and its remarkable, transformative effect on the world.
£34.19
McGill-Queen's University Press Called Upstairs: Moravian Inuit Music in Labrador
A silent clapboard church on a barren Arctic landscape is more than just a place of worship: it is a symbol that can evoke fraught reactions to the history of Christian colonization. In the Inuit homeland of Northern Labrador, however, that church is more likely to resonate with the voices of a well-rehearsed choir accompanied by an accomplished string orchestra or spirited brass bands. The Inuit making this music are stewards of a tradition of complex sacred music introduced by Moravian missionaries in the late 1700s – a tradition that, over time, these musicians transformed into a cultural expression genuinely their own.Called Upstairs is the story of this Labrador Inuit music practice. It is not principally a story of forced adoption but of adaptation, mediation, and agency, exploring the transformation of a colonial artifact into an expression of Inuit aesthetic preference, spirituality, and community identity. Often overlaying the Moravian traditions with defining characteristics drawn from pre-contact expressive culture, Inuit musicians imbued this once-alien music with their own voices. Told through archival documents, oral histories of Inuit musicians, and the music itself, Called Upstairs tracks the emergence of this Labrador Moravian music tradition across two and a half centuries. Tom Gordon presents a chronicle of Inuit leadership and agency in the face of colonialism through a unique lens. In this time of reconciliation, this story offers a window into Inuit resilience and the power of a culture’s creative expressions.
£38.69
McGill-Queen's University Press the swailing
Here the long edge / of town Low / winter fog / … My breath / my offering We are / our bodies burning Firmly rooted in fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. In these poems human voices whisper through the natural world – a hand turns on a lamp to extinguish the stars; stones outline a sleeping form; a black eye is a storm cloud. Errington stokes vivid images, formal grace, and subtle humour into the flickers of life that hold fast against unforgiving terrain. Here language functions like a controlled burn, one that could at any moment preserve, perfect, or reduce to ash. Urgent, resonant to the bone, the swailing burns to the ember-edge of grief, memory, and control to find the wildness, wilderness, and wonder that remain.
£15.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Indict the Author of Affection: Affectation and Catachresis in Hamlet
Many scholars have touched tangentially on the topic of affectation in Hamlet, but none have yet offered an adequate rhetorical analysis of Shakespeare’s treatment of the concept. Making the claim that affectation is an anomalous affective malady that afflicts nearly everyone in the play, Bradley Buchanan explores the many manifestations of affectation at the court of Elsinore in light of classical rhetorical theory, as well as in the broader context of early modern intellectual culture. Buchanan shows that the special twist in Shakespeare’s depictions of affectation lies in the catachrestic abuse of the older English word “affection” by Hamlet himself (among other characters) to signify the new, foreign concept of affectation. This disturbing conflation of two opposing conditions encapsulates Hamlet’s much-discussed problem: he cannot tell the difference between genuine affection and deceptive affectation. Drawing on a growing field of scholarship engaged in the study of rhetoric in early modern English texts, Indict the Author of Affection explores how Shakespeare’s extensive and self-conscious use of catachresis involves not only far-fetched metaphors but subversive new meanings that can infect familiar words, dramatizing his characters’ psychological conflicts and producing a rich but treacherous instability in language itself.Indict the Author of Affection brings to Hamlet a groundbreaking analysis engaged with the complex, wide-ranging, and contentious discourse concerning affectation as a rhetorical, moral, and aesthetic issue.
£85.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program
If you believed most of what’s said about the Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker program, you might naturally assume that there is a trade-off between workers’ poor experiences with the program and employers’ significant benefits. In reality, the experiences of workers are far worse than is commonly acknowledged, while employers are not reaping as much benefit as the public might suppose.In Enduring Work Catherine Connelly draws on over one hundred interviews with people connected to different aspects of this program, analyzing their experiences from the perspective of organizational behaviour and human resources management. She compares the lived reality of agricultural workers, in-home caregivers, and low- and high-wage workers, showing how and why each group is vulnerable to mistreatment, albeit in different ways. She further explores how employment agencies and immigration consultants contribute to program abuses. Critically, Enduring Work provides the perspectives of employers, distinguishing between the reluctant users of the program who follow the rules and the reckless users who do not.Groundbreaking in its analysis of an issue very much in the news, Enduring Work unpacks the harms within Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program and offers nuanced strategies to improve it.
£25.19
McGill-Queen's University Press The Boundaries of Medicare: Public Health Care beyond the Canada Health Act
While almost all universal health coverage in Canada is provided under the Canada Health Act, there is Medicare coverage that is provided outside of the act. This is the first book to explain the nature of these boundary health services, why they exist, and how to navigate them in practice. The Boundaries of Medicare examines the complex range of public health care services and coverage arrangements that predate or have developed alongside the Canada Health Act. These provisions – including for workers’ compensation, military personnel and veterans, incarcerated persons, migrants, and Indigenous Peoples – are often not well understood, even by those working at policy and delivery levels. Katherine Fierlbeck and Gregory Marchildon aim to improve understanding of these boundary services: why they were established, who is eligible for them, how services are provided, how they are paid for, and how they are managed within a multilevel governance system. They also look at the dramatic increase in virtual health care services since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and their relationship to the Canada Health Act.Explaining the origins, operations, and tensions of government-funded health care outside the Canada Health Act, The Boundaries of Medicare is an essential resource for policymakers, providers, administrators, and patients seeking to navigate Medicare in Canada.
£89.10
McGill-Queen's University Press Under the Weather: Reimagining Mobility in the Climate Crisis
Humans and human mobility, including driving and flying, are entangled with the climate emergency. Fossil-fuelled mobility worsens severe weather, and in turn, severe weather disrupts human mobility. A shift to zero-emission vehicles is critical but insufficient to repair the damage or prepare communities for the coming disruptions severe weather will bring. In Under the Weather Stephanie Sodero explores the intersection between human mobility and severe weather. Anchored in two Atlantic Canadian hurricane case studies, Hurricane Juan in Mi'kma'ki/Nova Scotia in 2003 and Hurricane Igor in Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland in 2010, the book contributes to contemporary cultural and policy discussions by offering five practical recommendations – revolutionize mobility, prioritize vital mobility of medical goods and services, embrace ecological mobilities, rebrand redundancy, and think flexibly – for how mobility can be reimagined to work with, rather than against, the climate in ways that also benefit the health, education, and economy of local communities. This ecological approach to mobilities sheds light on extreme mobility dependency and the impact of mobility disruptions on the ground in Canadian communities.Focusing on the entangled relationship between human mobility and the climate, Under the Weather examines how communities can transform their relationship with mobility to enable greater resilience.
£29.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Looking After Miss Alexander: Care, Mental Capacity, and the Court of Protection in Mid-Twentieth-Century England
In July 1939, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, fifty-nine-year-old Beatrice Alexander was found incapable of managing her own property and affairs. Although Alexander and those living with her insisted that she was perfectly well, the official solicitor took control of her home and money, evicted her “friends,” and hired a live-in companion to watch over her. Alexander remained legally incapable for the next thirty years. In the mid-twentieth century, Alexander was one of about thirty thousand people in England and Wales who were, at any time, legally “incapable” and under the auspices of what is now the Court of Protection. Focusing on the period between the 1920s and the 1960s, Looking After Miss Alexander explains the workings of the court, using Alexander’s unusual case to consider the complexities of this aspect of mental health law. Drawing on Court of Protection archives – some of which were made publicly available for the first time in 2019 – and micro-historical methods, Janet Weston also highlights the role of chance, subjectivity, and uncertainty in shaping how events unfolded then, and the stories we tell about those events today.An engaging and accessible history of mental capacity law, Looking After Miss Alexander examines ideas of citizenship and welfare, gender and vulnerability, care and control, and the role of the state. It also offers reflections on historical research and writing itself.
£99.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries
After a summit in Belgrade in September 1961, socialist Yugoslavia, led by President Josip Broz Tito until his death in 1980, initiated a movement with states in the Global South. The Non-Aligned Movement not only offered an alternative to the Cold War polarization between NATO and the Warsaw Pact but also expressed the hopes of a world emerging from colonial domination.Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement investigates the Non-Aligned Movement both as a top-down, interstate initiative and as a site for transnational exchange in science, art and culture, architecture, education, and industry. Re-invigorating older debates by consulting newly available sources, the volume challenges studies that marginalize the role of socialist Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement. Contributors address topics such as women’s involvement, antifascism and anti-imperialism, cultural and educational exchange, tensions in Yugoslav diplomacy, competing understandings of economic development, the role of the Yugoslav construction company Energoprojekt, Yugoslav relations with Latin America and Africa, and contemporary support for refugees and asylum seekers as a kind of practical and affective afterlife of Yugoslavia’s non-aligned commitments. Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement offers an innovative approach to one of the twentieth century’s most important international movements and confronts issues of economic, social, and cultural rights that remain relevant today.
£98.00
McGill-Queen's University Press James Clarke Hook: Painter of the Sea
Though his father had faced bankruptcy, James Clarke Hook (1819–1907) nevertheless managed to paint himself into country-gentlemanhood, becoming famous for his landscapes of British coastal scenes and his ability to evoke not just the sights but also the sounds and even the smell of the sea.James Clarke Hook, Juliet McMaster’s lively biography of the brilliant but underappreciated Victorian painter, brings the reader through Hook’s rigorous training at the Royal Academy Schools, his travelling studentship in Florence and Venice, and his work as a historical painter, to the discovery of his métier as a painter of contemporary rural and coastal scenes. Part of the secret of Hook’s success was his resolution to paint the final large canvas of his seascapes onsite, braving wind and weather – for which he invented an easel that was adaptable to uneven terrain. McMaster’s research led her to retrace the painter’s footsteps to the rocky headlands and sheltered bays where, over a hundred years ago, Hook had set up his easel to capture the tang of sea. McMaster connects Hook, an academician for half a century, with the major figures and movements of Victorian art – including the Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt, the etcher Samuel Palmer, and the painter and sculptor G.F. Watts.James Clarke Hook worked alongside the fishermen and rural families who populate and enliven his canvases; this book reinvigorates our understanding of his artistic process and unique sense of place.
£36.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Sacred Cyberspaces: Catholicism, New Media, and the Religious Experience
In recent years every major institution has had to adapt to the fast-evolving technologies of the digital age or risk being left behind. Amid a global crisis of faith and declining levels of religious participation in places around the world, the Catholic Church has likewise come face to face with the challenges and possibilities of new media. Sacred Cyberspaces reveals how long-standing conflicts over power, influence, and legitimacy within religious organizations are being waged in the digital realm. Oren Golan and Michele Martini describe the tensions that arise as religious groups seek to reach the faithful in online spaces where traditional clerical authorities have less expertise and control. Focusing on the Catholic world, they examine the rise of devotional digital entrepreneurship and the roles of lay religious webmasters: the video makers, app developers, and web designers who devote their lives to evangelization and who literally run the show. The book also explores the nature of religious experience as it pivots to online platforms: cyberculture, prayer, ceremonies, pilgrimage, proselytization, and the relation to the transcendental.From live-streaming at world-famous sites in the Holy Land to the Instagram feed of Pope Francis, Sacred Cyberspaces evaluates the contemporary media strategies of the Catholic Church and sheds light on the future of religion online.
£26.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Place Matters: Critical Topographies in Word and Image
A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In Place Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape.Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography’s tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place making in such sites as Colonus, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu’Appelle, Donetsk airport, and the island of Lesbos. With contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, and others, the collection examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration, residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge.In his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “Places, like feasts, are moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography.” Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, Place Matters presents critical topography as an approach to analyze, interpret, and reflect on place.
£40.00
McGill-Queen's University Press The Canadian Federal Election of 2021
Media pundits and students of Canadian politics alike have strived to interpret the relevance of the 2021 federal election, held in the midst of a global pandemic and reinforcing the existing parliamentary balance of power. This timely volume explains the election's import, offering an insightful account of Canadian democracy in an age of increasing rancour and polarization and explaining why the Liberals did not win a majority government. In a unique collaboration, some of the country’s most distinguished political scientists, pollsters, and journalists examine the parties, issues, machinery, and media of Canadian electoral politics, teasing out the complexities and nuances of what was seen to be a premature federal election. The Canadian Federal Election of 2021 analyzes the campaigns of the major parties and the patterns of voting behaviour. A special feature of this book is its focus on issues of diversity and difference in the partisan theatre – the voting patterns of gendered, Indigenous, and newly immigrant Canadians, as well as the millennial generation. These chapters offer important lessons for the present and for the election to come.A must-read for students, journalists, those working at affiliated think tanks and institutes, and engaged citizens, this thoughtful exposé will interest international observers and anyone following the Canadian political landscape.
£28.99
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