… By Patrick Thompson, 2007
Water color and ink on ledger paper, 0cm x 30cm

… By Pat Thompson, 2007
24cm x 36cm

Mejuan, 2008.
Barcelona, Spain …

… the manner in which economics transcends national borders. Bastian van Apeldoorn (2004: 143) encapsulates this sentiment, writing that “the world of international relations has from the start been inextricably bound up with the expanding capitalist world economy and thus embedded within and shaped by transnational social relations growing out of that globalizing capitalism.” The discussion …

Tags: capitalism, class, democracy, economy, elites, globalization, Haiti, internationalization, political economy, transnationalism

…

Tags: Canada, freight train, travel

… image, 5×25

… of the Story: Labour, Welfare, and Workplace

Periodizing our Current Moment: Work-Well-Fare As a New Mode of Social Regulation
( view paper )
Matthew Lymburner, Political Economy
From Disabled to Dispossessed: CPP Disability Benefits and the Decline of Social Citizenship Rights in Canada
( view paper )
Mary Rita Holland, Public Policy
Gazing Back Into the Closet: Theorizing …

Tags: Canada, citizenship, economy, labour, policy, political economy, regulation, welfare, women

… an overview of the Canada Pension Plan Disability (CPPD) benefits program. CPPD ostensibly serves to provide income security to pension-contributors who find themselves incapable of work due to chronic health conditions. Rising CPPD caseloads during the 1980s and early 1990s coupled with growing debt aversion in Canada led to predictions that the pension well would soon run dry. Such fears …

Author: Mary Rita Holland

Tags: Canada, Canada Pension Plan, citizenship, disability, labour, neoliberalism, policy, welfare state, women

… Reinforcing the ‘Entrepreneurial City’: Labour’s Contradictory Role in the Upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver 
As Vancouver prepares for the upcoming Winter Olympics in 2010, the bid process has dominated urban discourse with its aim to transform Vancouver into a ‘world-class,’ competitive global-city. This essay will use the Olympic Games as an empirical …

Tags: Canada, capitalism, geography, labour, Olympics, resistance, scale, trade, unions

… yourself in a hall of two-way mirrors—undoubtedly, a common experience for queer women who “come out” in the workplace. This paper will attempt to tease out some of the regulatory forces that inform the coming out process for queer women in western states. Access to resources in the workplace takes on specific gendered and heteronormative consequences for those queer women who …

Tags: access, critical theory, gender, labour, queer, surveillance, women

… a side order of mind-numbing “art”
Royal, 2008
Spraypaint on concrete

… relevant to current labor studies – networks, struggle, unions – but one word, or more aptly, one concept, will certainly stand out as peculiar: work-well-fare. What is this concept? What does it mean? I argue that work-well-fare is a tendency towards a renewed class compromise for America; a meeting point for capital and labor to renegotiate balance in politics, in the economy and in …

… Identity and Public Policy

Reading Global Genders: Mapping gender-based struggles in the global geographies of local marginality
( view abstract )
Michael A. Lithgow, Mass Communication
Travelling third class: regulating the transport of farm animals in Canada
( view abstract )
Michelle Barrett, Political Economy
National Identity Examined: A Study of the Quebec Nation
( …

Tags: animal welfare, Canada, class, economy, gender, identity, policy, political economy, risk, urbanization

… Suffering
A public lecture by Fuyuki Kurasawa, given on March 28, 2008 at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

How is visuality — understood here as the mutual constitution of the visual and the social (W. J. T. Mitchell) — implicated in the mediated construction of instances of distant suffering in various parts of the world, and what are the …

Comment by Matthew Lymburner: … the scope out a bit from simply …

… virtual worlds mean for governance, production and identity? What is the relationship between these new spaces and contemporary capitalism? In this paper, I explore some of the political-economic implications of technological transformation and reflect on the social effects of producing, communicating and existing in virtual space. Although the use of online social networking is nothing new, …

Tags: economy, governance, identity, Internet, periodization, scale, technology, virtual worlds, virtualization