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“À la façon du pays”: Country Marriages in the Hudson’s Bay Company - An Affair of Convenience
No full textSince its creation in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) has played a crucial role in colonial Canada’s fur trading industry. Throughout this period, Indigenous peoples, particularly women, have played a significant part in supporting HBC traders. This essay explores the context and circumstances in which marriages between English traders and Indigenous women occurred and the resistance faced by HBC management in London, England. Additionally, it describes how the marriages were economically beneficial and crucial for the survival of HBC employees. It also reflects upon Indigenous women\u27s agency in their marriages. This paper reveals Indigenous women’s desires for European husbands to raise their social status and secure trade for their communities. Presenting the trader-Indigenous relationship as reciprocal challenges the simplistic narrative that Indigenous women were victims in their marriages while also demonstrating that women were active agents in the HBC’s success in North America
Introduction: The Science and Art of Crafting History
No full textReferring to the study of history as a science is of considerable debate by many scholars. While we are not here to debate what history is and what it is not, we can say that our understanding of history is ever evolving and requires critical thinking, investigation, analysis, objectivity, accuracy, reason, and evidence. Bury dares us to think of history as more than a story or grouping of events but rather a method to explore diverse pasts. With Bury’s quote in mind, this year’s volume of The General seeks to provide a platform where historical inquiry is celebrated through the diligent work of ten authors
(Un)making the Case for Human Composting: or living-with the trouble
No full textBringing into conversation material ecocriticism, death studies, ethics, and French ecosophy, this brief, contemplative essay aims to contextualize and highlight the importance and emergence of the green mortuary rite of natural reduction, or human composting. Echoing Haraway\u27s assertion that "we are all compost", a special emphasis is placed in this essay on the praxic side of the theory discussed therein
How to Operate Being a Mushroom? : Possible Futures Through Strategies of Sessile and Vibrating Bodies in Latin American Arts.
No full textIs it possible that fungal existences offer us methodological alternatives to think about other possible futures? How can de-anthropocentering become a strategy that enables operations that allow us other structures of creative thought? What should we forget about our human way of perceiving to think about subjective experiences of otherness? What kind of worlding futures can we create from fungal operations? The act of thinking about otherness from other interpretive frameworks, or in turn speculating what thinking from a place of being an alterity, can help us dismantle current paradigms and articulate other models of conceptualization that are not the binary ones
Walking Together in a Pandemic: Reflections on a Semester of Place, Decolonization, and Classroom Community
No full textIn this co-authored reflection by seven graduate students and one instructor, we revisit the “Apocalyptic Feminisms” graduate class taught in Fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, in which students were asked to engage with interdisciplinary writing on the Anthropocene and to hone their own feminist praxes through going on and documenting their walks. We reflect on the “Walk and Movement Reading Instagram Engagements” assignment, exploring what walking can offer to deepen theoretical, methodological, and praxis-based approaches to environmental and place-based learning. We do this by writing from a cascading voice approach, where each reflection stands on its own and together builds into a whole greater than its parts. Following on an introduction to the course and assignment, we begin with a conceptual outlining of the meanings of place, decolonization, and academic community. Next, each of the graduate student collaborators responds to the following prompt, “How did the walking project on IG [Instagram] influence how you thought about questions of place, decolonization, and classroom community during a pandemic?” Each co-author develops a robust engagement with this question drawing on their own pandemic Fall 2020 semester, their photographs from the course, and the insights and practices they developed in conversation with each other throughout the span of the semester. Together, this reflection offers thoughts on the feminist and place-based utilities of walking pedagogy as well as, through collaboration, challenges the very way in which academic scholarship is done at the site of the late capitalist academy and its topos of success, competition, and meritocracy
“It is just so emotionally and mentally consuming to be a community organizer”: The Emotional Labour of Anti-carceral Activism
No full textSocial justice activism can be an emotional enterprise. While many people become involved due to feelings of anger and frustration about a particular unjust socio-political issue, we contend that these feelings exist in tandem with those of love and care for others (or for a specific community of belonging) and that it is this combination of emotions that helps sustain the desire to work toward positive or transformative social change. We mobilize Hochschild’s (1979, 1990, 2012) concept of emotional labour and extend the literature on the emotional labour of racial justice activists by attending to the emotional and affective politics of grassroots, volunteer, peer-based, and unfunded anti-carceral activist groups in the City of Ottawa, Canada. As most research examines emotional labour in the context of paid social and health care work, our examination of grassroots unpaid activism is a unique contribution. We draw on the qualitative accounts of 25 representatives from 13 Ottawa-based activist groups that were gleaned through focus group interviews held over the course of seven evenings, which provide insight into their emotional motivations for anti-carceral activism, their experiences of emotional burnout, and the strategies they employ to manage the emotional impacts of this work
The Psychology of a Social Justice Movement: Social Justice Feminism as a Case Study
No full textThis article undertakes a case study of social justice feminism through four criteria that influence the psyches of social movement participants: grievance, ideology, efficacy, and social embeddedness. The grievance lay with the Second Industrial Revolution. Social justice feminists used an “entering wedge” strategy to promote and pass women’s labor legislation to eventually secure state protection of all workers in the United States. The ideology of social justice feminism came from a combination of socialist-influenced thought and the promotion of social justice. The most important element of social justice feminism lay in its efficacy, involving social embeddedness
