University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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Radicalism, Protest Votes and Regionalism: Reform and the Rise of the New Conservative Party
Get PDFFor descriptive and analytical reasons there is an understandable tendency to view political parties as homogenous. Yet it is widely known that most parties, particularly those that compete in single-member plurality systems, are effectively coalitions. This paper explores support for the Reform Party of Canada in part to better understand the character of the current governing Conservative party of which it was a founding component. We find a party that attracted two distinct kinds of supporters: radicals, for whom support reflected the appeal of Reform party policies, its leader and ideology, and protest voters for whom it was mainly an alternative to the then-governing Liberals. These supporters were geographically concentrated; the former in Western Canada, the latter in Eastern Canada. Such diversity describes one of the central challenges confronting all parties operating in Canada’s single member plurality system: sustaining a coalition of supporters in which reasons for attachment to the party vary by region. As with previous governments, it helps to explain the peculiar political demands that confront the current Conservative government as it seeks to maintain this coalition
Across the Barricades: Non-Indigenous Mobilization and Settler Colonialism in Canada
Get PDFRecently, a new body of scholarship on “settler colonialism” has emerged with the goal to analyze the non-Native dimension of Indigenous-settler relations, in Canada and other settler states. This paper will identify two shortcomings of the new literature: first, a tendency to conflate mass-level non-Natives with the state itself; and second, an erroneous, primordial presentation of non-Native norms and identity. The paper examines two case studies of settler political mobilization in opposition to Indigenous peoples, in the contexts of the Indigenous occupations at Ipperwash/Aazhoodena in the early- to mid-1990s, and Caledonia/Kanonhstaton in 2006. The cases reveal consistency in how the mobilization is framed by non-Native participants – as a defense of abstract procedural principles like equality before the law and public order. This normative framework does not resonate with settler colonial theory. They also illustrate the degree to which mass-level non-Natives are autonomous actors in the relationship. During both conflicts, local non-Natives often advanced divergent interests from those of the state, producing a tripartite political dynamic that is not anticipated in the literature
Toxic Pastoral: Comic Failure and Ironic Nostalgia in Contemporary British Environmental Theatre
Get PDFThis article examines the enduring relevance of the pastoral mode and its potential to offer constructive critique of contemporary modes of thinking, writing about, and occupying those spaces marked off as pastoral. In an era characterised by potentially insoluble environmental crises, there is doubt over the relevance of a literary form which promises harmony and prioritises the status quo. However, I argue that two recent versions of the pastoral—Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) and Thomas Eccleshare’s Pastoral (2013)—provide examples of the vitality which literary comic modes can offer to thinking about ecological dilemmas. Both invert and frustrate the conventional pastoral movement, wherein the equalising effects of release, reconciliation, and return are not realised; and subjects the pastoral mode to actual or threatened displacement—in Eccleshare’s play the forest invades the city, whereas Butterworth dramatizes the efforts of civic authority to evict the green man from his wood—making this failure the basis of its exploration of the possibilities available in an eco-comic mode; finally, in contrast to Terry Gifford’s concept of post-pastoral which makes awe its main affective mode, Eccleshare and Butterworth present what I call toxic pastoral: versions of pastoral in which former certainties are degraded, permitting an engagement with and celebration of the ambivalence in human interactions with the more-than-human world. Each play represents a version of pastoral that is alert and able to give form to the ironies, anxieties, and absurdities that inhere in contemporary environmental discourse
Mahapatra, Sitakant. Rotations of Unending Time: Selected Poems of Sitakant Mahapatra. Trans. Sura P. Rath and Mark Halperin. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2013.
No full textReplenishing the Void: Turner’s Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets
Get PDFThe nineteenth-century marine animal is sublime, but J.M.W Turner makes his marine animals beautiful in his watercolour Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets, c. 1836-40. In this essay, I analyse Turner’s depiction of marine animals through the lens of Edmund Burke’s aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful, showcasing both seldom studied sketches and paintings and major pieces. Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets represents a rare aesthetic shift in the period and in Turner’s own work. The watercolour suggests Turner’s awareness of the unsustainable plunder of the ocean, as well as his desire to evoke empathy for the inhabitants of the sea and signal the intimate connection between marine animals and humanity
Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design
Get PDFA prevalent and pervasive view of designing is that it can be modeled using variables and decisions made about what values should be taken by these variables. The activity of designing is carried out with the expectation that the designed artifact will operate in the natural world and the social world. These worlds impose constraints on the variables and their values; so, design could be described as a goal-oriented, constrained, decision- making activity. However, design distinguish- es itself from other similarly described activities not only by its domain but also by additional necessary features. Designing involves exploration, exploring what variables might be appropriate. The process of explo- ration involves both goal variables and deci- sion variables. In addition, designing involves learning: Part of the exploration activity is learning about emerging features as a design proceeds. Finally, design activity occurs within two contexts: the context within which the designer operates and the context produced by the developing design itself. The designer’s perception of what the context is affects the implication of the context on the design. The context shifts as the designer’s perceptions change. Design activity can be now characterized as a goal-oriented, con- strained, decision-making, exploration, and learning activity that operates within a con- text that depends on the designer’s percep- tion of the context
From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ policy design: design thinking beyond markets and collaborative governance
Get PDFPolicy design as a field of inquiry in policy studies has had a chequered history. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the field languished in the 1990s and 2000s as work in the policy sciences focused on the impact on policy outcomes of meta- changes in society and the international environment. Both globalization and governance studies of the period ignored traditional design concerns in arguing that changes at this level predetermined policy specifications and promoted the use of market and collaborative governance (network) instruments. However, more recent work re-asserting the role of governments both at the international and domestic levels has revitalized design studies. This special issue focuses on recent efforts in the policy sciences to reinvent, or more properly, ‘re-discover’ the policy design orientation in light of these developments. Arti- cles in the issue address leading edge issues such as the nature of design thinking and expertise in a policy context, the temporal aspects of policy designs, the role of experi- mental designs, the question of policy mixes, the issue of design flexibility and resilience and the criteria for assessing superior designs. Evidence and case studies deal with design contexts and processes in Canada, China, Singapore, the UK, EU, Australia and elsewhere. Such detailed case studies are necessary for policy design studies to advance beyond some of the strictures placed in their way by the reification of, and over-emphasis upon, only a few of the many possible kinds of policy designs identified by the 1990s and early 2000s literature
Sovereignty and Sustainability in Mohegan Ethnobotanical Literature
Get PDFThis commentary contends that sustainability can be most useful if understood not as an endpoint or condition, but as an epistemology that attends to continually evolving interactions among ecological and human systems. My case study is a carefully delimited Native American literary tradition: the writing of medicine people from the Mohegan tribal nation, located in what is now Connecticut. I present this body of work neither to romanticize “ecological Indians,” nor to explicate the texts’ ethnobotanical content. Rather, I observe that Mohegan medicine people have used, extended and subverted the conventions of post-Enlightenment ethnobotany. They have used writing to preserve their traditional ecological knowledge, but not in ways that simply document that knowledge, which would render it vulnerable to theft and misuse. Instead, these texts emphasize relations of reciprocity—between text and orality, between Mohegans and non-Mohegans, between humans and plants
Krupar, Shiloh. Hotspotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
No full textThe Policy Analytical Capacity of the Government of Quebec: Results from a Survey of Officials
Get PDFThis article complements the work of Howlett et al. on the capacity of Canadian governments for public policy-making. The new public management wave was driven by the notion of a need for improved service delivery to the population. A number of authors, including Metcalfe, pointed out that the government was then neglecting management in favour of "policy advice." It was fashionable to show interest in policy but not in management. After decades spent seeking greater efficiency, have we gone too far in the other direction? Do governments have the capacity to develop public policy? Have those responsible for developing public policy received the training they require? This article addresses the Quebec portion of a set of Canada-wide surveys on the capacity for public policy-making. It complements the earlier analyses by presenting the results of a survey conducted among public servants in Quebec. We place particular emphasis on education and the training of the public servants who work on developing and formulating public policy