Books by Faculty Members 2016-17
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Scientology in Popular Culture This multidisciplinary study of Scientology examines the organization and the controversies around it through the lens of popular culture, referencing movies, television, print, and the Internet―an unusual perspective that will engage a wide range of readers and researchers. |
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Imperial Plots Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies Sarah Carter (History and Classics) University of Manitoba Press, 2017 Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the "spade-work" of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its "surplus" women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation. |
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Mistress of Everything Queen Victoria in Indigenous worlds Edited by Sarah Carter (History and Classics) and Maria Nugent Manchester University Press, 2017 Mistress of everything examines how indigenous people across Britain's settler colonies engaged with Queen Victoria in their lives and predicaments, incorporated her into their political repertoires, and implicated her as they sought redress for the effects of imperial expansion during her long reign. It draws together empirically rich studies from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa, to provide scope for comparative and transnational analysis. The book includes chapters on a Maori visit to Queen Victoria in 1863, meetings between African leaders and the Queen's son Prince Alfred in 1860, gift-giving in the Queen's name on colonial frontiers in Canada and Australia, and Maori women's references to Queen Victoria in support of their own chiefly status and rights. The collection offers an innovative approach to interpreting and including indigenous perspectives within broader histories of British imperialism and settler colonialism. |
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Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective In this volume, leading specialists examine the affinities and differences between the pan-Soviet famine of 1931-1933, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Kazakh great hunger, and the famine in China in 1959-1961. The contributors presented papers at a conference organized by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in 2014. |
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Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States by Susan L Smith (History & Classics) Rutgers University Press, 2017 Toxic Exposures tells the shocking story of how the United States and its allies intentionally subjected thousands of their own servicemen to poison gas as part of their preparation for chemical warfare. In addition, it reveals the racialized dimension of these mustard gas experiments, as scientists tested whether the effects of toxic exposure might vary between Asian, Hispanic, black, and white Americans. Drawing from once-classified American and Canadian government records, military reports, scientists' papers, and veterans' testimony, historian Susan L. Smith explores not only the human cost of this research, but also the environmental degradation caused by ocean dumping of unwanted mustard gas. |
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First World Petro-Politics: The Political Ecology and Governance of Alberta Edited by Laurie Adkin (Political Science) University of Toronto Press, 2016 A wide-ranging and richly documented study of Alberta's political ecology - the relationship between the province's political and economic institutions and its natural environment - the volume tackles questions about the nature of the political regime, how it has governed, and where its primary fractures have emerged. Its authors examine Alberta's neo-liberal environmental regulation, institutional adaptation to petro-state imperatives, social movement organizing, Indigenous responses to extractive development, media framing of issues, and corporate strategies to secure social license to operate. Importantly, they also discuss policy alternatives for political democratization and for a transition to a low-carbon economy. |
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State of Exchange: Migrant NGOs and the Chinese Government ">By Jennifer Y.J. Hsu (Political Science) UBC Press, 2016
Non-governmental organizations have increased dramatically in China since the 1970s, despite operating in a restrictive authoritarian environment. With labour migrants moving to the cities en masse in search of higher wages and better standards of living, the central and local states now permit migrant NGOs to deliver community services to workers in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Engaging a new conceptual framework, Jennifer Hsu reveals how NGOs are interacting with the layers and spaces of the state and navigating a complex web of government bodies, lending stability to, and forming mutually beneficial relationships with, the state.
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Transforming Gender and Food Security in the Global South Edited by Jemimah Njuki , John R. Parkins, and Amy Kaler (Sociology) Routledge, 2016 Drawing on studies from Africa, Asia and South America, this book provides empirical evidence and conceptual explorations of the gendered dimensions of food security. It investigates how food security and gender inequity are conceptualized within interventions, assesses the impacts and outcomes of gender-responsive programs on food security and gender equity and addresses diverse approaches to gender research and practice that range from descriptive and analytical to strategic and transformative. The chapters draw on diverse theoretical perspectives, including transformative learning, feminist theory, deliberative democracy and technology adoption. As a result, they add important conceptual and empirical material to a growing literature on the challenges of gender equity in agricultural production. |
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Living on the Land: Indigenous Women's Understanding of Place Edited by Nathalie Kermoal and Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez (Political Science) Athabasca University Press, 2016 Living on the Land examines how patriarchy, gender, and colonialism have shaped the experiences of Indigenous women as both knowers and producers of knowledge. From a variety of methodological perspectives, contributors to the volume explore the nature and scope of Indigenous women's knowledge, its rootedness in relationships both human and spiritual, and its inseparability from land and landscape. From the reconstruction of cultural and ecological heritage by Naskapi women in Québec to the medical expertise of Métis women in western Canada to the mapping and securing of land rights in Nicaragua, Living on the Land focuses on the integral role of women as stewards of the land and governors of the community. Together, these contributions point to a distinctive set of challenges and possibilities for Indigenous women and their communities. |
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Female Suicide Bombings: A Critical Gender Approach Tanya Narozhna and W. Andy Knight (Political Science) University of Toronto Press, 2016 Female Suicide Bombings critically examines and challenges common assumptions of this loaded term. Tanya Narozhna and W. Andy Knight introduce female suicide bombings as a socio-political practice and a product of deeply politicized, gendered representations. Drawing on a combination of feminist and post-colonial approaches as well as terrorism studies literature, the authors seek to transcend ideological divisions in order to enhance our understanding of how gender, power, and academic practices influence our perceptions of female suicide bombings. |
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J. Michael Dunn on Information Based Logic Katalin Bimbo (Philosphy) Springer, 2016 This book celebrates and expands on J. Michael Dunn's work on informational interpretations of logic. Dunn, in his Ph.D. thesis (1966), introduced a semantics for first-order entailments utilizing the idea that a sentence can provide positive or negative information about a topic, possibly supplying both or neither. He later published a related interpretation of the logic R-mingle, which turned out to be one of the first relational semantics for relevance logic. An incompatibility relation between information states lends itself to a definition of negation and it has figured into Dunn's comprehensive investigations into representations of various negations. The informational view of semantics is also a prominent theme in Dunn's research on other logics, such as quantum logic and linear logic, and led to an encompassing theory of generalized Galois logics (or "gaggles"). Dunn's latest work addresses informational interpretations of the ternary accessibility relation and the very nature of information. |
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Death and Dying in Canada, Third Edition Dying and Death in Canada offers a comprehensive, up-to-date examination of dying, death, and bereavement from a Canadian perspective.
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Re-Orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding by Leilei Chen (English & Film Studies) University of Regina Press, 2016 Featuring analyses of rarely studied writers on post-1949 China, including Jan Wong, Jock T. Wilson, Peter Hessler, Leslie T. Chang, Hill Gates, and Yi-Fu Tuan, Re-Orienting China demonstrates the transformative power of travel, as it changes our preconceived notions of home and abroad. |