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Worker Protests, the Morning After: 7 lessons from Argentina for the future

By Ethan Earle — Saturday, October 24th, 2009 (Posted in Essays & Articles)

… and media attention.
Their story begins with a sign hanging from a factory gate: OUT OF BUSINESS. LOOK FOR WORK ELSEWHERE. Or else it begins with a letter in the mailbox: WILL NOT PAY FINAL MONTH’S SALARY OR PROCESS REQUESTS FOR SEVERANCE PACKAGES.
Or rather, their story begins earlier, with an owner’s calculation that juicier profits can be scored through some different …




Stop the World Water Forum

By Emma Lui — Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 (Posted in Essays & Articles)

… Divides for Water, kicks off on March 16 th and ends on March 22 nd, 2009 in Istanbul, Turkey. At first glance, the 5 th Forum is an international event for water experts, activists, government officials and water organizations to exchange ideas and develop policies on these and other water issues. Panelists and participants will discuss 100 topics under the Forum’s six themes …




Marx and the current ‘crisis’ of capitalism

By D. T. Cochrane — Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 (Posted in Editorials & Interviews)

… theorist of capitalist crisis.  The actual invocations of Marx have been, in general, tentative and flippant.   For example, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury,  pays Marx a backhanded compliment when he notes that Marx observed capitalism’s capacity for ascribing power to that which is not real and then says that Marx “was right about that, if about little else.”  …




National Identity Examined: A Study of the Quebec Nation

By Rachel Ariey-Jouglard — Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 (Posted in Essays & Articles)

… because it is impossible for all members of a nation to know all the other members as well as the whole territory they belong to (Anderson, 6). However, this does not mean that the nation does not exist. Nationalism, on the contrary, “is one of the most powerful forces in the world,…the most widespread and popular ideology and movement” (Smith, 37).
The specificity of a nation …




From Disabled to Dispossessed: CPP Disability Benefits and the Decline of Social Citizenship

By Mary Rita Holland — Thursday, April 10th, 2008 (Posted in Essays & Articles)

… of public policy discussions. Canadians with debilitating health conditions who are incapable of employment yet who fail to meet the rigid requirements of CPPD suffer even greater social exclusion than the unfortunate individuals who do qualify for benefits. Little follow-up on the health and economic status of failed applicants has been done, leaving one to conclude that public sympathy …




Resisting and Reinforcing the ‘Entrepreneurial City’

By Matthew Nelson — Thursday, April 10th, 2008 (Posted in Abstracts)

… from job promises, to employment equity, and future organizing opportunities.




Gazing Back Into the Closet: Theorizing about Queer Women in the Workplace

By Lesley Vaage — Thursday, April 10th, 2008 (Posted in Abstracts)

… with a brief introduction of the theoretical groundwork that informs my examination of the dynamics of coming out. The paper will move into an explanation of how the heteronormative “gaze” (re)positions the queer woman as an objectified “other”, thereby reducing her to a spectacle. By invoking Foucault’s concept of “self-surveillance”, this essay will then theorize about queer …




Periodizing our Current Moment: Work-Well-Fare As a New Mode of Social Regulation

By Matthew Lymburner — Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 (Posted in Essays & Articles)

… Mostly, work-well-fare is a discursive tendency that certain social actors can seize upon to reclaim a segment of social power long-held by certain capital interests.
And this is what this is really about. I won’t give a genealogy of the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism, for I’m sure they are known to many of you in all too real terms. Suffice to say, as David Harvey has …




From within Canada: Identity and Public Policy

By Cultural Shifts and Benjamin Christensen — Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 (Posted in Reviews)

… ( 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
( view abstract  | view paper )
Rachel Ariey-Jouglard, Political Science
A Prosperous Uncertainty: The Canada Border Services …




Perilous Light

By Fuyuki Kurasawa and Cultural Shifts — Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 (Posted in Audio & Visual Studies, Editorials & Interviews, X-Featured)

Comment by Matthew Lymburner: … people to take part in political …




Governance 2.0: Virtual Space, Virtual Economies

By Eliot Che — Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 (Posted in Abstracts)

… trends in the governing of societies and the self, as well as in the production of goods, services, identities and norms. I argue that a new period of virtualization is emerging, following the era of post-Fordism, and that this shift is bringing about a new regime of accumulation and new modes of social regulation. The transformation is driven by processes of rescaling. Virtual governance is …




Reading Global Genders: Mapping gender-based struggles in the global geographies of local marginality

By Michael Lithgow — Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 (Posted in Abstracts)

… and new struggles over resources and local agency. The struggles which emerge are one of the ways that global capital is instantiated and thus offer rich sites for investigating and documenting the political needs of what is often an abstract and underdetermined phenomenon.
Using a standpoint theoretical framework, this research examined moments of struggle in response to gender …




National Identity Examined: A Study of the Quebec Nation

By Rachel Ariey-Jouglard — Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 (Posted in Abstracts)

… the three components of the nation—the people, the territory or homeland, and a mystical bond between the people and the territory—will be examined separately in order to illustrate the construction of the nation, its need for state-like representational structure and its identity. Secondly, through the Canada-Quebec nexus, the pitfalls of national identity will be identified. Exclusion, …




A Prosperous Uncertainty: The Canada Border Services Agency, risk management, and the not-so-new political imagination of spatially-bound identity

By Christopher Alderson — Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 (Posted in Abstracts)

… identity.




Imagining the Diasporic Link: The Franco-Algerian Media Dialogues on the 2005 ‘Emeutes’ in France

By Irina Mihalache — Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 (Posted in Essays & Articles, X-Featured)

… Algeria, cannot provide for the basic needs of its citizens, one solution to the financial and social hardship is emigration. Just a few pages later, the reader finds out the dramatic incongruence between the dreams of the emigrant and the reality of the immigrant. The same man continues his story, “And what a France I discovered! It wasn’t at all what I expected to find… in our …