University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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Leadership, Partisan Loyalty, and Issue Salience: The 2011 Provincial Election in Saskatchewan
Get PDFThis article seeks to provide an understanding of the historic success of the Saskatchewan Party and the historic failure of the NDP in the 2011 Saskatchewan provincial election. Drawing on telephone survey data from the 2011 Saskatchewan Election Study, we argue that leadership, partisan loyalty, and issue salience best explain the Saskatchewan Party’s dominance over the NDP. On election day, the Saskatchewan Party benefitted from the carefully cultivated popularity of Brad Wall, the development of a loyal base of voters who believed in the party’s vision of a ‘New Saskatchewan’, and the confidence of the electorate with the party’s handling of key issues. The NDP’s loss of seats and the drop in its popular vote can be attributed to the unpopularity of the party’s leader, its overreliance on a relatively small base of party loyalists, and its inability to connect with voters on issues that were of most importance to them
Reproducing Neoliberalism: the power of Canada’s poor
Get PDFBased on the varying views of power under neoliberalism, the literature draws divergent conclusions regarding its quality as a policy approach. Neoliberal economic restructuring is generally regarded as positive by the conservative public choice school, as positive by some Weberians and negative by others, and as overwhelmingly negative by Marxians and feminists. Critics usually present restructuring as something that is happening “to” us, that is presented to us as a fait accompli, handed down by bureaucrats and elected officials influenced by international business. This view obscures the role of the average citizen in pushing restructuring forward, not only in allowing it to happen, but also in actively performing it. In response, this paper suggests a global/local intersectional dialectic that locates the expansion of neoliberalism in global and individual sites without obscuring the various oppressions generated by restructuring
The Sprawling Global Lawns of the Emerald Isle: A Dialectical Unfolding
Get PDFThis article explores how the suburban front lawn is a special type of space, where society engages intensely with nature. Involved in this exchange are complex relationships between diverse networks of metabolizing processes. These processes include the natural process of grass growth, the labour process of ‘improving upon nature’, the process of harnessing nature for aesthetic designs and the commoditization process, in which ‘natural’ inputs are bought and brought into the front lawn. It is Marx’s concept of socio-ecological metabolism that allows the analysis to avoid both naturalism and social constructionism as the sole determinants of the grass lawn. Its actual determinant is how these contrasting processes metabolize with each other within the labour process of gardening. Consequently as much as we attempt to dominate nature in our lawn endeavours all we achieve is to thwart some of the natural tendencies of the grass ecosystem, but it’s essential natural laws continue to exist. Thus thwarting is merely concerned with imposing an aesthetic form on this particular type of grass ecosystem we call the suburban lawn. To uncover these complex relationships it is necessary to engage in a dialectical analysis
Ireland and Ecocriticism: An Introduction
Get PDFContemporary Irish history, specifically that of the past twenty years, saw the nature of the relationship between people and land alter dramatically and, in large part, detrimentally. So that while ‘land’ and ‘value’ have always been adjacent concepts – the ways in which land came to be valued and hungrily sought after in Irish society reflected a new alignment in the ‘structures of feeling’ that sustained the relations between Irish people and their surrounding environment. Landscape became commercialized at accelerated, and unsustainable, rates as the value-system of significant, and influential, sectors of Irish society changed and only one declension of ‘value’ became dominant: market value. Any ecocritical retrospective of Celtic Tiger Ireland will focus on the idea of values and valuation, but will, naturally, veer away from crass monetaristic valuation towards a reclamation of a sustainable ecological and cultural ethics of landscape valuation
Literary Milk: Breastfeeding Across Race, Class, and Species in Contemporary U.S. Fiction
Get PDFAlthough all infant mammals require mothers' milk, very little breastfeeding appears in U.S. literature. Why is this ecological and foundational part of early life so frequently backgrounded or made invisible? and why would this topic be significant for feminist ecocritics? To explore these questions, this essay discusses the few texts in 20th century U.S. literature that depict breastfeeding, pairing them by era--John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Meridel LeSueur's The Girl (1939), followed by Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987)--and concludes with a contemporary novel, Emma Donoghue's Room (2010). All of these texts depict breastfeeding in conditions of captivity and restricted freedoms. Under such conditions, breastfeeding and breastmilk take on added urgency as food, as emotional and psychological nurturance, and often as self-worth for the nursing mother, whose milk seems to be the only material she can control. Narrative texts providing examples of free mothers, from diverse races, classes, and species, able to choose whether, where, and how long to breastfeed their own offspring, do not yet appear in U.S. literature, possibly because the conditions for such cultural and economic freedoms have yet to exist
BC political economy and the challenge of shale gas: Negotiating a post-staples trajectory
Get PDFShale gas, a type of natural gas extracted from shale rock deposits deep underground, is poised to become the latest in a long history of staples industries in the British Columbian economy. However, its development poses challenges for the future trajectory of BC’s economy and society. BC’s economy, values, and political imaginary have increasingly turned towards a post-staples trajectory based on economic diversification and a cultural shift towards environmental and cosmopolitan values. In considering what is at stake in the development of shale gas, we locate the industry in the historical context of BC’s economic, regulatory, and political transitions toward a post-staples society, and assess what political, environmental, and economic challenges arise from the disconnect between a staples industry and a post-staples society. We conclude that for shale gas development to be viable and profitable for BC’s economy, the industry must be regulated to ensure the benefits that accrue from shale gas development (in terms of revenue, sustainable employment, and stable northern development) further BC’s nascent post-staples trajectory of development