University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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Women, Animals and Violence: Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain and Lee Yew Leong’s “Honey, I’m Off To Be A Jellyfish Now”
Full text linkThis paper looks at Anita Desai’s novel Fire on the Mountain and Lee Yew Leong’s short story “Honey, I’m Off To Be A Jellyfish Now” in a comparative manner using the framework of materialist postcolonial ecofeminism. I argue that the “other” in the form of women and animals are centred in both the novel and short story, although both women and animals are removed and distanced from society. These writers, through their stories, rework issues of violence, women and animals that are otherwise usually presented from a male point of view. The woman becomes the mediator through which animals can be read. In turn, the identity politics and relationships between men and women are mediated through the figure of the animal. I show that the position of ambivalence is important when discussing the protagonists in both the stories. Within the culture/nature binary, these women neither belong to the cultural sphere nor the natural sphere. They straddle the binary in-between, thus showing their ambivalence to both the culture/nature constructs. There is no romantic or celebratory linking of the woman to nature or animals that puts them in inferiorised positions. Within this framework, the question of violence—towards both women and animals—is key
The Literary Geography of The Japanese Army Camp in Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life
No full textMost studies on Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life heavily focus on questions relating to the diaspora’s Asian-American citizenship and cultural assimilation. However, not many critics have examined the geography of the Imperial Japanese Army Camp in Southeast Asia, particularly in Burma, where the tropical environment is significantly represented in Lee’s novel. This paper discusses Andrew Thacker’s idea of literary geography in the novel in order to engage with historical dynamism and the brutality of World War II through the plight of ‘comfort women’. The novel portrays Doc Hata, a retired Japanese-American medical supplier, whose past experience as a paramedic officer in Burma haunts a problematic relationship in present-day America with his adopted, fallen daughter. The representation of the infirmary, the comfort house, and the clearing epitomises the savagery of the army camp in connection with Doc Hata’s identity crisis. I argue that Lee’s memory of war challenges and resists forms of political ideology and its proprietors that dehumanise the victims. This reveals shame, guilt, and loss, as represented by the savagery in the local landscape, which in turn is embedded in the global historical significance of World War II
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.
No full textLane, Melissa. Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us about Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living. Princeton UP, 2012. 256 pp. Paperback 19.95, Hardcover 45.00.
No full textINTRODUCTION - Ecology and Indigeneity: An Exploration of ASEAN Literatures
No full textThis special issue on ASEAN works of literature seeks to commemorate the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment-Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASLE-ASEAN). An inaugural ASLE-ASEAN conference on Southeast Asian environmental literature and ecocriticism, titled Global in the Local, was organized at the National University of Singapore, in August 2016. Our objective in sharing select papers from this conference, that have been further expanded and revised through this special issue of JOE, is to share ecological concerns regarding the ASEAN region with a larger readership. We wish to celebrate the founding of our organization, as well as record the beginnings of a larger conversation on the interactions between literature and nature within ASEAN
A Sense of Place, a Sense of Home and a Sense of Self: Ecological Imagination in Hoang A Sang’s The Dreams of Chestnut Colour
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to explore the ecological imagination in The Dreams of Chestnut Colour, a prose writing collection by Vietnamese writer Hoang A Sang, using the ecocritical lens and focusing on place, dwelling, home and self. By defining The Woodland and The Urban as localized, symbolic and psychical places, the author exposes the contrast between them, which is related to the urbanization and the cultural conflicts between the minority Tay people and the majority Kinh people. By choosing both memories, dreams and daily life stories to perceive The Woodland and The Urban, Sang describes a metaphorical journey in which he discovers his identity and that of the Tay people
Triple Play: The Ontario 2014 General Election
Full text linkThe 2014 general election in Ontario was the third straight time when the opposition Progressive Conservative party was poised to win, only to find itself returned to the opposition benches. Part of the the incumbent Liberal party's victory certainly can be attributed to strategic choices of the party, positioning itself closer to where voters wanted them to be. However, there is also a case to be made that the PCs squandered their chance to form government. The following articles walks through some of the key points of the campaign, and the context within which it was held
The Politics Prime Ministers Make: Secular and Political Time in Canadian Context
No full textThis paper uses Stephen Skowronek’s framework for the study of presidential politics to detect recurrent leadership patterns in Canada. While institutional differences, most notably variation concerning the incumbent’s time in office as well as the less fragmented institutional architecture of Canada’s Westminster democracy, require some modifications, the paper demonstrates that prime ministers and presidents, in principle, face a similar leadership problem. Depending on the condition of the political regime (vulnerable or resilient) and the respective incumbent’s political identity (opposed or affiliated), Canadian prime ministers – just as presidents in United States – tend to engage different leadership patterns. These insights, the paper concludes, open up interesting opportunities to put the American presidency into a comparative perspective
Studying the generation of alternatives in public policy making processes
Full text linkThe design of alternatives is an essential part of decision making that has been less studied in theory and practice compared to alternatives’ evaluation. This topic is particularly relevant in the context of public policy making, where policy design repre- sents a crucial step of the policy cycle since it determines the quality of the alternative policies being considered. This paper attempts to formalise the decision aiding pro- cess in two real interventions dealing with alternatives’ generation for territorial policy making in Italy. The aim of this research is to understand what generates novelty within the alternatives’ design phase of a decision aiding process, i.e. what allows to expand the solution space and discover new alternatives to solve the problem under consideration. It demonstrates ways in which creativity in decision processes can be supported by Operational Research/Multicriteria Decision Aiding tools. The two case studies are used to answer the following questions: i) Why have new alter- natives arose during the policy making process? ii) How have they been generated? iii) Which consequences did they lead to? and iv) What generated novelty in the process? The results highlight two main reasons that can expand the solution space within a decision aiding process: i) dissatisfaction (of the client, of the analyst or of the relevant stakeholders, especially when dealing with public policies) with respect to the solutions currently proposed to the decision-making problem and ii) opportunity for a change in one of the variables/constraints
Once More, with Feeling: Design Thinking and Embodied Cognition
Full text linkWhile leaders in business and industry maintain their interest in design thinking, academic discussions of the concept have become less common. This article examines design thinking in relation to develop- ments in cognitive science and embodied cognition. We examine an influ- ential theory of metaphor as central to cognition, along with theoretical nuances of the body, perception, and feeling. We argue that some material design practices may augment the creative process. We propose a broad interdisciplinary account for the role that feeling plays in design and cogni- tion both