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Are assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) a medical issue or a matter of public policy, subject to restrictions? Francesca Scala employs the concept of boundary work to explain the protracted debates that ensued when Canada appointed a royal commission in 1989 to settle the issue. She reveals that both sides of the debate attempted to secure their position as authorities by challenging, defending, or blurring the boundaries between science and politics. This compelling account contributes to our understanding of the interaction between science and politics, the exercise of social control over science and technology, and the politics of expertise in policy making.
Traditional definitions of public policy in Canada have been challenged in recent years by globalization, the transition to a knowledge-based economy, and the rise of new technologies. Critical Policy Studies describes how new policy problems such as border screening and global warming have been catapulted onto the agenda in the neo-liberal era. The book also surveys the recent evolution of critical approaches to policy studies, which have transformed decades-old issues. Contributors conceptualize the ways in which public policy questions cut across the traditional fields of policy. They cover both topical approaches such as Foucauldian and post-empiricist analysis and new applications of established perspectives, such as political economy. Conventional methodologies reveal new connotations when used to explore such topics as security issues, Canadian sovereignty, welfare reform, environmental protocol, Aboriginal policy, and reproductive technologies. Critical Policy Studies provides an alternative to existing approaches to policy studies, and will be welcomed by scholars, students, and practitioners of political science and public policy.
This edited collection features state-of-the art scholarship by diverse contributors on a contemporary array of compelling and contentious gender and politics concerns.
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Counting Matters examines the ways in which the rise of gender equality measurement contributes to, but falls short of, effective gender equality policy implementation. As technocrats adopt often contextless indices, questions of the theoretical and practical limitations of measurement arise, especially as they pertain to social and cultural relations. The indicators being produced influence the allocation of resources as political decisions but are themselves part of a power regime based on the collection and analysis of data, a regime that obfuscates biases and the agendas behind the statistics. The book’s contributors pose critical questions of the ways in which measurement culture manifests within the field of gender equality, asking how it is measured in different policy areas, how we might improve existing practices, and what is revealed through the examination and critique of the “technical turn” in policies that purport to promote gender equality.
In medieval Europe baptism did not merely represent a solemn and public recognition of the 'natural' birth of a child, but was regarded as a second, 'spiritual birth', within a social group often different from the child's blood relations: a spiritual family, composed of godfathers and godmothers. By analyzing the changing theological and social nature of spiritual kinship and godparenthood between 1450 and 1650, this book explores how these medieval concepts were developed and utilised by the Catholic Church in an era of reform and challenge. It demonstrates how such ties continued to be of major social importance throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but were often used in wa...
This collection brings together leading Canadian scholars working in political science, public policy, and law to explore fundamental questions about the relationship between commissions of inquiry and public policy for the first time: What role do commissions play in policy change? Would policy change have happened without them? Why do some commissions result in policy changes while others do not? --
Gendering the Nation-State explores the gendered dimensions of a fundamental organizational unit in social and political science -- the nation-state. Yasmeen Abu-Laban has drawn together work by both high-profile and emerging scholars to rescue gender from the margins of theoretical discussions on the nation, the state, public policy, and citizenship. Contributors bring the insights of feminist analysis to bear on three relationships central to popular and policy discussions in contemporary Canada and beyond: gender and nation, gender and state processes, and gender and citizenship. Gendering the Nation-State employs a comparative framework and builds on three decades of multidisciplinary work. Nuanced and wide-ranging, the collection crosses and challenges physical, theoretical, and disciplinary borders.
The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York’s unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services “on the cheap,” relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis...
Responding to the most widely read breastfeeding manual, La Leche League's The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, Robyn Lee's The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding explores breastfeeding as an art that must be developed through skillful application of effort and distinguished from a merely natural or physiological process. The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding challenges the dominant understanding of breastfeeding and cultivates an alternative conception as an ethical, embodied practice of the self. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce Irigaray, Lee develops a new understanding of breastfeeding as an "art of living," where the practice is reconsidered in the light of ongoing social inequalities.