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"The authors challenge currently dominant approaches to migration, and offer important ways to move between the individual experience and the structure of the world system."---Alan Smart, University of Calgary --
"This Elusive Land provides an introduction to the literature about women and the environment in Canada. It looks at the ways in which women integrate the social and biophysical settings of their lives, and features a range of contexts in which gender mediates, inspires, and informs a sense of belonging to and in this land. Drawing from geographical, historical, and cultural perspectives, the volume reveals the significance of women's experiences in various landscapes."--Jacket.
This edited collection focuses on global migration in its inter-regional, international and transnational variants, and argues that contemporary migration scholarship is significantly advanced both within anthropology and beyond it when ethnography is theoretically engaged to grapple with the social consequences and asymmetries of twenty-first century capitalism’s global modalities. Drawn from settings across the globe, case studies explore the nuanced formations of class and power within particular migration flows while addressing the complex analytics of a contemporary critical political economy of migration. Subjects include global migrants as capitalists, entrepreneurs and "cosmopolitans," as well as workers and immigrants who are subject to varying degrees of precariousness under intensified competition for profits within contemporary global economies. By re-addressing the question of the relationship between changes in global capitalism and migration, the book aims for a timely intervention into the debates on migration which have come to be one of the most contentious emotionally fraught issues in North America and Europe.
The rapidly changing nature of life in Canadian rural communities is more than a simple response to economic conditions. People living in rural places are part of a new social agenda characterized by transformation of livelihoods, landscapes, and social relations – these profound changes invite us to reconsider the meanings of community, culture, and citizenship. Social Transformation in Rural Canada presents the work of researchers from a variety of fields who explore the dynamics of social transformation in rural settlements across several regions and sectors of the Canadian landscape. This volume provides a nuanced portrait of how local forms of action, adaptation, identity, and imagination are reshaping aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities in rural Canada. Unlike many previous studies, this work looks at rural communities not simply as places affected by external forces, but as incubators of change and social units with agency and purpose, many of which provide exemplary models for other communities facing challenges of transition.
This collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.
An incisive analysis of the transformation of paid and unpaid work in contemporary Canada.
Describes the experiences of daily life for predominantly white, working class women and men during the period of "economic restructuring" begun in the 1980s.
Alan Sears examines education reform in relation to a broad process of cultural and economic change. His book makes the case that education reform is one aspect of a broad-ranging neo-liberal agenda that aims to push the market deeper into every aspect of our lives by eliminating or shrinking non-market alternatives. The author begins by showing that advocates of education reform have had to make the case that the current system is not working. This sets the ground for an examination of the so-called 'Common Sense Revolution, ' a claim that drastic change was required to redesign government policies to fit a changing world. Lean production methods are a crucial component of this changing world, and broader social and cultural change is now required to consolidate the emerging order built on the spread of these methods. Education reform is designed to recast the relations of citizenship, contributing to the cultural and social change promoted through the social policy of the lean state.
Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.
This significant new study contains the work of anthropologists engaged in doing research on gender. The editors argue for the creation of an ethnography-based feminism that, at the same time, pays heed to what women in specific circumstances identify as their concerns and also recognizes contradictions inherent in the goals of a feminist anthropology. These essays grapple with a range of awkward issues, including feminism in international contexts, the invisibility of women's working lives, and the problems of voice and ethnographic representation. Referring to a variety of ethnographic contexts, and working from diverse perspectives, the contributors examine the multiple dilemmas and conflicts of gender and power.A volume which will not only constitute a significant contribution to the social sciences literature both theoretically and substantively, but will also place Canadian feminist anthropology on the cutting edge of global feminist anthropology. I strongly recommend it. Valda Blundell Carleton University