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The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History
Abstract
How can we get beyond the present socio-cultural versus national-political impasse in Canadian history writing? By a historical practice of re/connaissance, which begins not with the essentialist project of 'rethinking Canada', but rather with the more modest goal of mapping the Canadian state as a project of liberal rule in northern North America. Those who undertake this re/connaissance of the complex moment of liberal hegemony called Canada will have much to learn from the national-political and socio-cultural historians who have come before them. But they will also be doing (and some are already doing) something radically new--because the reconceived category 'Canada' in their work denotes not an untheorized context or an unanalyzable essence, but that socio-cultural project through which liberal order became the national-political 'commonsense' in northern North America.
... Sex education-an extension of the welfare state-was concerned with producing a healthy population in the interest of a liberal-capitalist order. 17 e Ministry of Education, acting on the basis of "enlightened" expert knowledge, progressively introduced sex education in an attempt to ameliorate socio-sexual problems throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century. Sex education-a technocratic solution to such socio-sexual problems as venereal disease and teenage pregnancy-was seen by bureaucrats as the "rational" application of "neutral, objective, and value-free" scienti c knowledge across the student body. ...
... Abortions for both age groups continued to rise. 91 Teenage pregnancy posed serious health risks to mother and child, and among women who had had therapeutic abortions, the frequency of reported complications was highest among the two youngest age groups (10-14 and [15][16][17][18][19]. 92 Abortion, however, was a divisive public issue which elicited heated debate. ...
... This classical liberal framework was hegemonic in Canada from the mid-19thC to the 1940s, according to McKay (2000), but it developed as a "multitude of liberalisms" arising from regional conditions for resource extraction and ongoing challenges (e.g., English-French tensions, the subjugation/assimilation of indigenous inhabitants, proximity to a more powerful United States) in the project of nation building. On the Western Canadian Plains, my original home, the emerging liberal order gradually drew indigenous peoples into the fur trade, culminating in the destruction of their traditional economy (bison hunting, in particular) and eventual displacement from historical lands that the government wanted for agricultural production and immigration (Morgan, 2020). ...
The plurality of nation in this title foregrounds the challenge of teaching a geopolitical entity whose survival depends on building emotional ties of belonging. These ties can be problematic in diverse societies in which collective identities compete for recognition. In Canada, nationhood tied to language and culture is claimed by French‐speaking Quebecers; it is also invoked by many Western‐Canadian politicians to express a growing alienation from Eastern Canada's perceived socio‐economic dominance. In Canada's constitution, the term First Nations represents the indigenous peoples who are the country's original inhabitants. In this context, teaching the nation(s) is indeed challenging. In response, the authors adopt duoethnography as both research methodology and pedagogy in their content‐based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. They first explore their experiences and emotional attachments to nationhood, reflecting on their influences on teaching around language and citizenship. They then provide two EAP assignments as examples: The first is a course assignment in which students critically examine hyphenated national identities through duoethnographic inquiry. The second is called the Get Involved project, which examines service learning and citizenship. Both examples demonstrate the importance of critical affective literacies to expand the pedagogical repertoires of EAP teachers and students in a time of resurgent nationalism.
... However, partly because of a lack of clarity about what was meant by secularization, and also because of the exclusive focus on churches, clergy, and social reformers, I would have to agree with the view of Ian Mackay, that to an outsider the debate seemed "somewhat strained and inconclusive." 9 In retrospect I believe that even in the 1980s and early 1990s, in our approach to secularization as historians, we were still implicitly being influenced by an earlier church culture. We took Christian identity so for granted that we did not clearly define it nor confront the intricate ways that it was part of a wider social, political and economic structuring of daily life. ...
... The first part of this article considers official strategies to build awareness and acceptance of multiculturalism in Canada after the federal government announced an official policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework in 1971. It demonstrates how capital-M Multicultural policies and initiatives were conjoined with the politics of recognition and a dominant discursive regime of small-l liberalism that sought to extend, across time and space, a belief in the epistemological and ontological primacy of the category "individual" (Bannerji, 2000;Chazan, Helps, Stanley, & Thakkar, 2011;Coulthard, 2014;Day, 2000;McKay, 1998McKay, , 2000Mackey, 2002;Thobani, 2007). It draws on the public statements and private correspondence of small-l liberals such as John Munro, the minister for labour responsible for multiculturalism during the seventies; Robin Winks, the author of The Blacks in Canada: A History, which was sent to the Canadian Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism in advance of its official publication in 1971; and Daniel Hill, an African-American immigrant to Canada who, after serving as the director and chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, set up the country's first human rights consulting firm in 1973. ...
Winner of the inaugural Canadian Journal of Communication Editor’s Award for the most outstanding contribution to the field of communication research in 2021.
Background: This article draws on municipal, provincial, and federal archives to examine multiculturalism as an ideology, a government strategy, and a media discourse.
Analysis: The author scrutinizes official and corporate forms of multiculturalism in Canada between 1971 and 2003, and develops case studies of “tempered radicals” who worked with and within small-l liberal institutions and discourses while trying to change them.
Conclusions and implications: The author suggests that the keyword “shy elitism” might be a helpful tool to address the forms of credentialism and anti-intellectualism that have often confined and defined the study of multiculturalism.
Keywords: History; Cultural studies; Multiculturalism; Immigration; Race relations
https://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/4031
... At the heart of such notions and the reform initiatives they underwrote was a belief in the potential of these people to "be modernized"-and a belief that their ongoing place on the land was appropriate and desirable. 24 In the case of the phenology project, there is also the inherent implication that these rural people had knowledge of the natural world that was valuable and legitimate. This stands at odds with the cultural genocide and devaluation of knowledge experienced by the Mi'kmaq, upon whose unceded lands those settlers made their lives. ...
This article explores the social context of a crowd-sourced science experiment to record phenological data in early twentieth-century rural Nova Scotia, run through the provincial school system. It focuses in particular on the interaction between the project administrators and the rural people who participated, bringing non-traditional actors—young rural women and children—to the foreground of the history of science in Canada. These ongoing interactions reveal early twentieth-century efforts to consolidate scientific authority alongside efforts to standardize rural engagements with the natural world. However, participants challenged the project’s scientific ideals, asserting the relevance of local, place-based knowledge in rural Nova Scotia.
... Липсета, один из которых создал теорию фрагментации [Hartz, 1964], а другой -теорию формирующих событий [Lipset, 1989[Lipset, , 1990. В канадской школе возникли четыре основные теории: теория основных экспортных товаров (Staples theory) Гарольда Инниса [Innis, 1956]; теория канадских региональных политических культур Гэда Горовица [Horowitz, 1966]; теория волновой иммиграции Нельсона Вайсмэна [Wiseman, 2007]; теория «структуры либерального порядка» Жана Маккея [McKay, 2000[McKay, , 2006. Эти теории упоминаются в связи с необходимостью проведения сравнительного анализа взглядов Дж.П. ...
... This study heeds Ian McKay's (2000) warning against "attribut[ing] to the entire dominion patterns characteristic only of one of its parts" (p. 638). ...
This study examined 20 th Century Canadian history textbooks authorized in British Columbia, for their portrayals of women. The texts do not adequately reflect feminist scholarship nor societal changes. The nation building narrative of the textbooks precludes the inclusion of women in important ways. In the interwar years, the women who appear in history textbooks are portrayed as parasitic and weak. In the 1950s to 1970s period inclusion requires royal status or fame as a writer. In the 1980s women are often depicted in larger-than-life ways and "filler feminism" is a problem. "UNE BELLE PETITE FEMME POUR RENDRE LES CHOSES PLAISANTES" : PORTRAITS DE FEMMES DANS LES MANUELS SCOLAIRES D'HISTOIRE CANADIENNE APPROUVÉS DANS LA COLOMBIE BRITANNIQUE RÉSUMÉ. Cette étude examine les portraits de femme dans les manuels scolaires d'histoire du Canada au 20 ème siècle, autorisés dans la Colombie Britanni-que. Ces textes ne reflètent pas adéquatement les études feministes et les changements sociaux. Le récit des manuels au sujet de la construction de la nation exclut l'inclusion des femmes de multiples façons. Durant l'entre deux guerres , les femmes qui apparaissent dans les manuels d'histoire sont décrites comme parasitaires et faibles. Des années 1950 à 1970, l'inclusion exigeait un statut royale ou une renommée en tant qu'auteur. Dans les années 1980, les femmes sont souvent décrites de façon « plus large que la vie » et «le féminisme comme dédommagement» est un problème. When Edith Deyell (1958a) used the phrase, "a nice little wife to make things pleasant," in her textbook, Canada: A New Land, she was referring, apparently without ironic intent, to the decision by French fur trader Médard Chouart des Groseilliers to marry (p. 138). We assume that textbook portrayals alter over time to reflect changing societal views and it seems certain that if Deyell were writing today, she would use quite different language. However, the findings of this study indicate that textbook portrayals of women have not changed as much as we might expect.
... 109 According to historian Ian McKay, liberalism was so strong in early twentieth-century Canada that it "vanquished its enemies within and without." 110 So ubiquitous was liberal discourse in promoting human rights that it was even embraced by Indigenous reformers such as Kelly, Sinclair, Calder, and Elliott, whose collectivist values and traditions liberalism has sought to erase. ...
British Columbia (BC) charted its own course in 1949 when it passed legislation permitting Indigenous children to be schooled in provincial public schools. That is, BC's law predated federal legislation allowing integrated schooling by two years. This paper examines how and why BC followed its own policy path with respect to the schooling of Indian children in the years immediately following World War II. It illustrates three key forces propelling BC's integration agenda: policy actors, ideas, and institutional structures. Indigenous and non-Indigenous policy actors were shaped by the discourse of ethical liberalism, an ideology that dominated BC's educational landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. Key policy actors succeeded in implementing integrated schooling in advance of federal legislation due, in part, to Canada's political institutions, which have facilitated regional autonomy in matters such as education. This study highlights the importance of telling regional histories in addition to those of the nation-state.
... By focusing our attention on political development itself-the processes through which "politics in time" durably shape and reshape the Canadian political experience Orren and Skowronek, 2004) -Canadian scholars will be compelled to tackle vital questions in Canadian politics. Was Confederation a moment of genuine political transformation or did it merely entrench the "liberal order" that had already been established earlier in the nineteenth century (McKay, 2000)? What caused the Catholic-Liberal connection to lock into place early in the twentieth century? ...
How “historical” is Canadian political science? This paper sets out to answer this question through an analysis of historically oriented articles that have appeared in this journal from its first volume, in 1968, to 2015. We suggest that historical research in this journal is at once enduring and uneven, a pattern that we then explore in more detail in a case study, spanning forty years, of historical articles that focus on the interconnected themes of the constitution, courts, and federalism. The unevenness of this pattern suggests that the intellectual and methodological foundation of “historical” Canadian political science may not be as firm as it appears. We therefore conclude with a description of some methodological and conceptual tools, originally fashioned within the historically oriented subfield of American political development in the United States, that Canadian political scientists might deploy to probe important and enduring questions of Canadian politics.
... Others in the Marxist tradition, however, have rejected the limited post-1960s successes of Marxist studies in university curricula, challenging "academic Marxism" as dangerously co-optive (Rees, 1998). Gramsci's concept of the "organic intellectual", while widely cited, remains unclearly situated in the modern university setting in liberal democracies (see McKay, 2000). The concept has been adjusted by Edward Said, who identified the specific responsibility of the 'public intellectual' in linking advanced academic scholarship with social organizing (Said, 1996), but there remains little in terms of more general theorization. ...
The analytical relationship between Marxism and feminism has engaged critical scholarship and leftist practice since the time of the foundational contributions of Marx and Engels. Socialist feminist analysis has profoundly advanced contemporary Marxism. However, some strands in Marxist theory and left practice continue to be resistant to feminist contributions. It is this resistance that animates this paper, which is theorized as epistemological dissonance. While not in any way universal, such dissonance is pervasive and suggests an epistemological framing. This is suggested to include four dimensions, regarding: (i) temporality; (ii) idealized masculinities; (iii) specific views of totality in relation to class, race and gender; and (iv) the relationship between activism and the academy. Collectively, these elements maintain and advance not only certain tenets understood as “knowledge”, but also generate a kind of problematic left common sense that can inhibit constructive Marxist and socialist feminist investigation.
The voice of Indigenous intellectuals on the conduct of the European conquerors, whenever and wherever in the Americas it has been recorded, consists of a thoroughgoing critique of the Europeans’ genocidal and ecocide al proclivities. In recent times, the voice has taken on apocalyptic tones, emphasizing that the West’s chronic disregard for nature imperils all of us, with Ayton Krenak’s eloquent appeal for ‘ideas to postpone the end of the world’. An astoundingly similar critique of the Western World based on neuroscience comes from the Scottish psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist whose Divided Brain Hypothesis proposes an explanation for what the West has become: an existential threat to human survival. Others such as Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, Bateson, Harries-Jones, have put forward ideas which align with this hypothesis, but this essay brings these two currents together for the first time and proposes that it was the West’s conquest of the Americas - its people, its natural resources - that was a key factor in normalizing this mindset. To extend the metaphor, the conquest of the American hemisphere normalized the conquest of the right hemisphere by the left.
Keywords:
Indigenous; Divided Brain Hypothesis; Conquest of the Americas; Western mindset
This article is part of the collaborative research project Populist Publics. Housed at Carleton University ( www.carleton.ca/populistpublics ), it applies a data-driven analysis of online hate networks to trace how false framings of the historical past, what we call historical misinformation, circulates across platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. We cull large datasets from social media platforms and run them through a variety of different programs to help visualize how harmful speech and civilizational rhetoric about race, ethnicity, immigration, multiculturalism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights are circulated by far-right groups across borders, noting specifically when and how they are taken up in the mainstream as legitimate discourse. Our interest is in how the distortion of the historical record is used to build alternative collective memories of the past so as to undermine minority rights and cultures in the present. We began with a basic question: To what extent is this actually new? As much as the atomized publics of our current day create ideal conditions for radical ideas to fester and circulate, it was obvious to us that we needed to look for linkages across time, drawing on interdisciplinary methods from the fields of history, media and communication, and data science to identify the tactics, strategies, and repertoires among such groups and individuals. By analyzing German-Canadian relations in particular, what follows is a first attempt to piece together some of these connections, with a focus on far-right hate groups—homegrown and imported—in the settler colonial project that is today's Canada.
The voice of Indigenous intellectuals on the conduct of the European conquerors, whenever and wherever in the Americas it has been recorded, consists of a thoroughgoing critique of the Europeans’ genocidal and ecocidal proclivities. In recent times, the voice has taken on apocalyptic tones, emphasizing that the West’s chronic disregard for nature imperils all of us, with Ayton Krenak’s eloquent appeal for ‘ideas to postpone the end of the world’. An astoundingly similar critique of the modern Western World’s mindset based on neuroscience comes from the Scottish psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, whose Divided Brain Hypothesis proposes an explanation for what the West has become: an existential threat to human survival. Others such as Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, Bateson and Harries-Jones, have put forward ideas which align with this hypothesis, but the present essay brings these two currents together for the first time and proposes that it was the West’s conquest of the Americas – its people and all their relations and onto-epistemes – that was a key factor in normalizing this mindset. To extend the metaphor, the conquest of the American hemisphere by the European hemisphere normalized the conquest of the right hemisphere by the left.
George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti‐nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti‐state ends.
This article seeks to go some way toward shedding light on a certain dimension of Canadian intellectual history, specifically that dimension wherein the changing theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of Canadian political culture is the core subject matter. Canadian political culture will be defined here as that collation of ideas, principles, thoughts and opinions which foster the establishment and continuation of a set of political structures and institutions which are liberal democratic at their foundations. With this as a guiding definition the article examines the “paradigm shifts” in the study of English Canadian political culture that have taken place from the days of “The Makers of Canada,” through the ascendancy of the “Fragment Thesis,” to the more contemporary postmodernism of the “Liberal Order Framework.” The foundational assumption of the article is that debate and discussion about the Canadian experience in such fields as political philosophy, intellectual history, party ideology, constitutional structure, legislative procedure, executive power, judicial authority and local governance will tend to be shaped by the historiographical paradigm which has been most successful in making itself the accepted “orthodoxy” in the academic and intellectual circles of the period.
Established during the cholera epidemic of 1832, Montreal’s emigrant sheds sat on the city’s western fringe and played a vital role in urban governance in British North America for the next twenty years. The site served as a place where migrants could be segregated from the general public until they were deemed to be sufficiently healthy to continue with the process of settlement. Public officials employed at and around the sheds and observers who visited the facility thus used the emigrant sheds as a place to consider strategies of classification and containment. The production of knowledge was central to the work that went on there. This article uses government reports, emigrant handbooks, newspapers, and private correspondence to delve into the workings of the emigrant sheds and to place them in the broader context of the politics of public health and the establishment of carceral institutions. It situates these processes at the centre of the project of settler colonialism in British North America.
This article examines how multiculturalism has overflowed from its governmental and policy articulations into Canadian society and culture more broadly. In doing so, it brings together three fields of research that are often separated and disarticulated from each other. Firstly, it draws on oft-overlooked archival material from agencies, departments and ministries of anti-racism, heritage, human rights, immigration, labour, multiculturalism, race relations, settlement and the status of women between 1971 and 2001. Secondly, it engages with the political and academic careers of “immigrant women” who navigated the credentialism, anti-intellectualism and “shy elitism” that courses through official and corporate forms of multiculturalism, and were recognized by prize-giving institutions for their contributions to Canadian society. Finally, it thinks with and through Black Atlantic intellectuals and an “anti-hierarchical tradition of thought that probably culminates in C.L.R. James’s idea that ordinary people do not need an intellectual vanguard to help them to speak or to tell them what to say” (Gilroy 1993, 79).
https://www.pdcnet.org/clrjames/content/clrjames_2021_0999_12_15_90
Historical accounts of commissions of inquiry in Canada make only passing reference to the seminal 1846 Inquires Act. None explore the provenance of this legislation beyond a few sentences of the most general conjecture. This paper contends that Canada’s first Inquiries Act was a by-product of a political crisis that grew out of the politics and institutional processes integral to the resolution of claims for rebellion losses in Canada during the 1840s. As the events associated with the passage of the 1849 Rebellion Losses Bill would disclose, this crisis posed an existential threat to the viability of the Union. The passage of the Inquiries Act, precipitated by the immediate contingencies of the rebellion losses crisis, marked for Canada a fundamental shift in constitutional authority dating back to 1688. The Act embraced methods of inquiry denied to the Crown since the late seventeenth century. Though created by a democratic legislature, the Inquiries Act revived a Crown-driven inquisitional approach to public inquires long since inoperative in Great Britain. The Act thus marked a shift in the relationship between state and citizen, and opened a new terrain for the long struggle to protect the individual against the all-powerful state.
This article documents how the Indian Act, the historic legal regime structuring settler colonialism in Canada, is being displaced by new statutory law, as nearly fifty federal statutes passed by successive governments between 2005 and 2020 rewrite First Nations land, taxation, resource, and governance regimes. I focus attention on these new laws, asking how they differ in instrument and ideology from the Indian Act. Particularly, I explore how new legislation responds to the Indian Act’s (unintended) affirmation of the unique political status of Indigenous peoples and manages the long-sedimented legal and regulatory differences between reserve and Canadian jurisdictions. Transferring our attention from the Indian Act to actual sites of legislative activity, we are better positioned to perceive, critique, and challenge the evolving formation of settler colonialism in Canada today.
Between November 2017 and May 2018, WSSS had the privilege of working with the community of Conklin, Alberta to help address their homelessness crisis. This work has included completing a qualitative analysis of the crisis, coordinating a community research project, and helping to establish a housing and homelessness committee in the community. In late 2018, using this research, the Conklin Resource Development Advisory Committee (CRDAC) along with Wood Buffalo Housing, submitted a funding application to the Government of Alberta with the hopes that the government will help to address the current homelessness crisis. While the government has placed that program on hold, in January 2020, Cenovus has announced a project that will provide Conklin, and five other Indigenous communities funding to build 200 new houses.
For more information on this project, and others completed by WSSS, please visit www.willowspringsss.com.
This chapter presents how a nationalist conception of secularism, based on a critique of Canadian multiculturalism, is gaining currency in public discourses in Quebec with regard to regulating religious diversity. While retracing the political and legal steps between the debate on the “reasonable accommodations” (2006) in Quebec and the recent Bill 21 (2019), David Koussens underlines the emergence of several types of “nationalistic secularism.” This phenomenon ultimately promotes the interests of the majority’s religion while trying to mask or make invisible the minorities’ religious practices. The situation in Quebec can be perceived as a trend in other liberal democracies since the 2000s, in which Islam becomes a threat to the idea of citizenship and the possibility of belonging to a majoritarian national state.
Since the official promulgation of multiculturalism by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau on October 8, 1971, there has been a concerted attempt to build awareness and acceptance of the policy by recognizing the achievements of individuals from immigrant and racialized groups. This chapter draws on extensive archival research to address the work of key figures who advocated for civil liberties, human rights and race relations in Canada within a context of state-sanctioned multiculturalism that uses prestigious annual awards to advance “harmonious race relations”. It proposes a reading of their strategic interventions in a Canadian public sphere as a form of shy elitism that grants prestigious awards and credentials to ‘accessible’ work that represses material that may appear too elitist or radical for ‘ordinary Canadians’.
The “new political history” can be enhanced and expanded with a focus on human rights. While the “old political history” was often politics abstracted from other elements of the historical experience, as Steven Pincus and William Novak describe, the “new political history” emphasizes structures of power and the use of a broader range of sources. A focus on human rights has the potential to alter how we understand Canadian history. In particular, the study of human rights broadens whom we consider “political actors” and enriches and develops our understanding of the expansion of politics through law, the history of liberalism and its relationship to Canada’s rights revolution, and the influence of human rights principles on foreign policy.
Lord Durham was sent to Canada to investigate the causes of the Rebellions of 1837–1838 and to propose constitutional reforms to restore stability in the province. In his report, presented to the Colonial Office on February 4, 1839, he recommended the legislative union of the two Canadas, as well as the implementation of responsible government. He also noted that the proper functioning of such a government required the creation of a system of municipal institutions. This article offers a new reading of Lord Durham’s recommendations concerning municipal institutions, included in the last section of his famous report. By placing the document in the context of the debates raised by the constitutional and administrative reforms conducted in Britain during the 1830s, it shows that its author understood autonomous municipalities as an essential components of a modern mixed government. Such language was then employed by reformist Whigs in order to justify the policies which they thought were necessary to strengthen the country’s political institutions by adapting them to changing social circumstances. The analysis presented here challenges the interpretation provided by most contemporary commentators on the report. Many of them have concluded that Lord Durham’s understanding of local institutions is based on a liberal conception of political life, found in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These studies tend to reduce early British liberalism to philosophical radicalism. They seek to demonstrate that liberals wish to deprive local communities of their political autonomy by integrating their institutions into the juridical structure of a highly centralized state. By focusing on the rhetoric used by Lord Durham to write his report, this article allows us to appreciate the heterogeneity of the definition of the municipality developed by liberalism.
Art exhibits by the artists Jude Norris and Nadia Myre present Indigenous civic ecology as multifaceted relationships with animals and land. These perspectives translate liberal citizenship and civil society into visions of Indigenous civic ecology conveying related relational practices. Winnebago theorist Renya Ramirez emphasizes emotion, relationships, care work, and vernacular understandings of belonging as gendered aspects of Native citizenship exceeding and troubling liberal logic. Norris and Myre’s art works extend Ramirez’ human-focused discussion into civic ecology frameworks. These works develop Ramirez’s theory of translocal Native citizenship in an Indigenist materialist vein (Kalbfleisch and Robinson 52), while at the same time showing the ways that theories of new materialism in art history and translation studies remain settler colonial when they do not centre Indigenous knowledge.
The ways we think about human agency reflect struggles over the stories available through which we form social identities and learn to read the world. In this chapter, I read scholarship in history education, historiography, and sociology to suggest ways we might more reflexively engage stories about agency's shape, beliefs about being human among others, and, its content, the intentions and motivations we use to explain historical action. Research reviewed suggests that school curricula, textbooks, and teachers tell a commonly privileged story about agency to explain change through time. From both a pedagogical and a disciplinary perspective, reliance on commonplace historical plotlines fails to honor the inter-relatedness of human subjectivity. This chapter ends with a call for a more astute engagement with historical agency and perspective as a present framing to be engaged if educators are to enhance both their and their students’ historical understanding of agency and social change.
Résumé
Cet article propose une nouvelle lecture des recommandations formulées dans le rapport Durham au sujet de la création d'administrations municipales au Canada. Il situe le document dans le contexte des débats soulevés par les réformes constitutionnelles et administratives revendiquées en Grande-Bretagne durant les années 1830. Certaines analyses avancent que Durham s'appuyait sur la conception libérale de la municipalité, que leurs auteurs retrouvent dans les écrits de Jeremy Bentham et de John Stuart Mill. Elles en déduisent que le libéralisme réduit nécessairement la municipalité à une institution intégrée à un État centralisé et hiérarchisé. Cet article démontre que malgré certaines similarités avec le radicalisme philosophique, le rapport présente une conception des institutions municipales qui s'inscrit dans la doctrine de la constitution équilibrée, à laquelle souscrivaient alors les whigs réformistes comme Durham. Ce texte conclut que l’étude du rapport permet d'apprécier l'hétérogénéité de la conception de la municipalité produite par le libéralisme.
Biography has long been ostracized from the academy while remaining a popular genre among the general public. Recent heightened interest in biography among academics has some speaking of a biographical turn, but in Canada historical biography continues to be undervalued. Having not found a home in any one discipline, Biography Studies is emerging as an independent discipline, especially in the Netherlands. This Dutch School of biography is moving biography studies away from the less scholarly life writing tradition and towards history by encouraging its practitioners to utilize an approach adapted from microhistory. In response to these developments, this article contends that the discipline of history should take concrete steps to strengthen the subfield of Historical Biography. It further argues that works written in this tradition ought to chart a middle path between those studies that place undue focus on either the individual life or on broader historical questions. By employing a critical narrative approach, works of Historical Biography will prove valuable to both academic and non-academic readers alike.
This article takes up the debate about Canadian democratization, arguing that Canada was not democratic in 1867 and that the various electoral reforms pursued throughout the late nineteenth century were not part of a democratic agenda. Instead, they were the product of competing political elites seeking to stabilize an emerging liberal order—a form of government responsive to the economically privileged—and to do so in a way that would favour their political party. Previous scholars have mischaracterized the creation of this liberal order as a democratic one, either by assuming that democracy was established in 1867, or mistaking what were essentially struggles over property rights for democratic rights. This has led to a misunderstanding of the factors that have contributed to establishing and reproducing Canada’s limited democracy.
This review provides a critical appraisal of Kubow and Min’s paper. It teases out their conception
of liberalism and argues that the classical notion of liberalism as a political theory that advocates individual
liberty based on assumptions of the unencumbered autonomous individual has lost currency.
This is because over the years liberalism has mutated into a multiplicity of new forms, and there is no
single view that can be said to define what it means to be a liberal. The paper raises methodological
questions with respect to the use of focus group interviews. It implores researchers to first ask themselves
whether they can tell what a person really believes on the basis of a few questions put to him in
an interview.
The purpose of this article is to shed some light on a segment of Canadian intellectual history, in particular the changing theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of Canadian political culture. My working definition of Canadian political culture will be that collation of ideas, principles, thoughts and opinions which foster the establishment and continuation of a set of political structures and institutions in Canada which are liberal democratic at their foundations. Such a definition can open the way to questions of political philosophy, intellectual history, party ideology, constitutional structure, legislative procedure, executive power, judicial authority and local responsibility. In the light of the above definition the thematic and implicit question of the discussion is “has there been true progress in the understanding of Canadian political culture or has it been the case that for every two steps forward there have been one or even more steps back?”
This paper contributes to current debates on the importance of incorporating critical race and intersectional feminist theorizing into canonical academic disciplines such as history. It is my intention to draw a connection between the historical and contemporary position of medical schools and the social, political, and economic context of Canada as a settler colonial, liberal, democratic nation. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of literature, I argue that Canada, a growing capitalist state, can be examined from the perspective of a country built on gender- and race-based hierarchies. Salient to current scholars of social theory, critical pedagogy, medical history, and medical education, I use this lens to reflect on the establishment of and reforms to medical schools as institutions from the pre-Confederation era into the modern paradigm of neoliberalism. This analysis suggests that medical schools are important sites to examine the gendered and racialized divisions of bodies and ideologies. This introspection of medical school history is an important part of making changes in our health systems to move forward global and local projects of health equity.
In this paper, we advance a borderlands perspective to delineate and distinguish the patterns of sporting development across the North Atlantic, with a particular focus on the transmission of lacrosse and basketball from North America to the British Isles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The borderlands perspective and the understanding of the Atlantic as an oceanic borderland allow for a reconsideration of traditional models of diffusion–modernization, which focus on the export of sporting cultures from the UK to the wider world. The borderlands model, with its consideration of the multidirectional character of cultural transference, enables a reorientation of analysis, from the metropolitan to the peripheral, from traditional framed ‘national sports’ to those that are otherwise ignored in non-native contexts by diffusion modelling, from top to down models that service the national narrative to bottom-up understandings that shed light on the activities of ordinary sportsmen and women an...
The inter-war economic crisis was a major fissure in the history of the Welsh nation and has embedded itself in the historical folk memory of twentieth century Wales. Historians, often measured in their responses, seethe with anger when narrating the history of the 1920s and 1930s; none more so than the doyen of modern Welsh history Kenneth O. Morgan. Wales, and particularly South Wales, he writes, ‘plunged unprepared into a depression and despair which crushed its society for almost twenty years and left ineradicable scars upon its consciousness’.3 Just as forcefully, Gwyn Alf Williams likened the effects of the Great Depression on South Wales to the potato famine in Ireland a century before.
Despite remarkable similarities, little attempt has been made to compare the political development of colonial-era Australia and Canada. Both nations were born as British colonies and used violent and non-violent means to agitate for democratic freedoms. Republicanism and Responsible Government explores how these sister colonies transformed the very nature of the British Empire by insisting on democratic self-rule. Focusing on the middle of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Jones explores key points in colonial Australian and Canadian history - Canada's Rebellions of 1837-38 and the Durham Report, and Australia's anti-transportation movement and the Eureka Stockade. Previously, historians have looked to liberalism when explaining radicalism and democratization. Jones, however, contends that Canadian and Australian radicals and reformers were influenced by the ancient political philosophy of civic republicanism, with its focus on collectivism, civic duty, and virtue. William Lyon Mackenzie and John Dunmore Lang, he argues, did not champion republicanism to achieve individual rights but to create a virtuous society free from the corruption they saw in the status quo. Republicanism and Responsible Government challenges traditional interpretations of key events in Australian and Canadian history and shows that even though both nations remain constitutional monarchies, republican ideas have shaped their foundations since the earliest days of settlement.
In Between Raid and Rebellion, William Jenkins compares the lives and allegiances of Irish immigrants and their descendants in one American and one Canadian city between the era of the Fenian raids and the 1916 Easter Rising. Highlighting the significance of immigrants from Ulster to Toronto and from Munster to Buffalo, he distinguishes what it meant to be Irish in a loyal dominion within Britain's empire and in a republic whose self-confidence knew no bounds. Jenkins pays close attention to the transformations that occurred within the Irish communities in these cities during this fifty-year period, from residential patterns to social mobility and political attitudes. Exploring their experiences in workplaces, homes, churches, and meeting halls, he argues that while various social, cultural, and political networks were crucial to the realization of Irish mobility and respectability in North America by the early twentieth century, place-related circumstances linked to wider national loyalties and diasporic concerns. With the question of Irish home rule animating debates throughout the period, Toronto's unionist sympathizers presented a marked contrast to Buffalo's nationalist agitators. Although the Irish had acclimated to life in their new world cities, their sense of feeling Irish had not faded to the degree so often assumed. A groundbreaking comparative analysis, Between Raid and Rebellion draws upon perspectives from history and geography to enhance our understanding of the Irish experiences in these centers and the process by which immigrants settle into new urban environments.
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