Showing papers in "Canadian Journal of Sociology in 2013"

Gendered Violence, Cultural Otherness, and Honour Crimes in Canadian National Logics

Abstract: . Honour-based violence, and the honour crime in particular, have assumed a central place in Canadian national discourse and consciousness. Understood within mainstream Canadian discourses as a uniquely dangerous form of violence, the honour crime has been linked to recent waves of migration and culturally specific notions of honour. Imagined as a foreign and imported phenomenon brought to Canada by immigrants who fail to assimilate to national and “western” ideals of gender equality, the crime is also viewed as an extreme form of violence that must be managed and ultimately expelled. Discourses sur- rounding the honour crime now inform various key social, racial, and cultural debates across national and transnational scales. By analyzing the discursive strategies used to construct and disseminate dominant discourses on honour killings, this article maps the heightened official state and public media interest in honour-based violence and crimes.

Fort McMurray, Wood Buffalo, and the Oil/Tar Sands: Revisiting the Sociology of "Community"

Abstract: Community, it seems, is a passport to both Arcadia and Utopia. (Schofield 2002) In the first decade of the 21st century, more than one hundred billion dollars were poured into the business of extracting bitumen at increasingly higher rates from the third largest known deposit of oil and by some estimates the largest industrial mega-program in our planet's history --the Athabasca Oil Sands formation in northeast Alberta. Fort McMurray is the urban service area that sits at the heart of the Florida-sized region under which these deposits lie (for a series of maps, see http:// www.fortmcmurraychamber.ca/faqs.html). It has also become a Canadian and even global household name that conjures the whole of the oil/ tar sands, invoking larger than life scales of work, money, opportunity, destruction, development, environment, "the North." For many who live there it represents home and history, while for many others it represents work-but-not-home. For one network of transnational actors, it invokes a behemoth that must be stopped, or at least slowed down, and for yet another transnational network, it invokes a lucrative if sometimes risky investment opportunity. It is this particular political and cultural economy that prompts us to take the oil/tar sands region and Fort McMurray (Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo), Alberta as a case through which to interrogate the sociology of "community." Indeed, it was just before and during the same period in which the oil/tar sands industry rose to global prominence and infamy that sociology and a related range of social science and humanities disciplines began grappling anew with the meaning and prevalence of "community" in official, popular, and academic discourses. The term was revived for a broad range of scholarly interests, from its significance to new technologies of power, government, and affect (Rose 1999; Lamer 2000; Joseph 2002; Ahmed 2004) to its alleged demise in the face of heightened consumerism and individualism (Putnam 2000; McBride 2005); and from its intensified and restructured geospatial relations with circuits of capital, technology, and people (Gustafson 2006; Graham and Healey 1999) to its political potentialities across the differences of identity implied by these intensified relations (DeFilippis 2004; Etzioni 2007). Whatever the locus or direction of interest in "community" --whether a nostalgia for what is lost, a suspicion of what is excluded or occluded, or a hope for what could be--one thing is sure: "community acts as a powerful code word in the organization of contemporary society" (Pandey 2006:255). It is thus essential, as Creed (2006:4) has asserted, "to look inside this seemingly transparent term and discover the associations that are, as it were, hidden in plain view." For the pivotal anthology that Creed edited, and for this special issue, discourses and practices of community must be understood alongside shifting relations of state and market, public and private, society and economy. (The original call for papers for this special issue was entitled "Community 'between' State and Market.") There are, of course, divergent epistemological and disciplinary approaches to assaying these broad dynamics. We could, for example, ask in broad strokes about how shifting political and economic forces entail, produce, and/or take up particular concepts or discourses of community (Rose 1999; Joseph 2002; Watts 2006). From quite a different paradigmatic vantage point we could ask how those shifting forces transform, enhance, squeeze, and/or eviscerate the lived possibilities of community and community well-being (DeFilippis 2004; Putnam 2007; Turner and Brownhill 2004). We think it is important to consider these as cousin paradigms whose relationship is crucial but fraught. Making claims to community depends on some similitude between what is imagined and what is recognized in experience (Amit 2002); community requires conscious symbolic and identity work, but the idea of it can only be achieved if such a community is felt to preexist (Rose 1999:177). …

Youth, Dirt, and the Spatialization of Subjectivity: An Intersectional Approach to White Rural Imaginaries

Abstract: . Canada’s rural idyll is embedded within the colonial legacy of a white settler society; however, little research has examined how class and gender uphold this articulation of rurality and whiteness. This article draws on ethnographic research with white, working-class rural youth to develop an intersectional analysis of rural imaginaries. The analysis shows how youth construct their own rural identities through racialized representations of urban and global “others.” I argue that these racist place-narratives must be understood in the context of competing discourses of rurality in Canada: the romanticized pure white rural of colonial history, and the pathologized poor white rural of a cosmopolitan future. Even as youth locate their gendered performances within the rural idyll, they are marked as “dirts” by their classed, rural status. By inscribing racist discourses onto others, youth resist the classist imagery projected onto their community and thereby re- claim a pure white rural idyll.

In the Shadows" Exploring the Notion of "Community" for Temporary Foreign Workers in a Boomtown

Abstract: The rapid expansion of the oil sands in northern Alberta in the early 21st century led to the use of significant numbers of temporary foreign workers. These foreign workers became a part of the region’s so-called “shadow population.” This paper examines how the presence of foreign workers affects conceptions of community and social cohesion through the experiences of foreign workers employed in oil sands construction. The study finds foreign workers are excluded from the life of the community due to their differential exclusion, vulnerable and precarious connection to the labour market, experiences of discrimination, and conflicted transnational community identities. The paper discusses the shortcomings of community and social cohesion approaches in addressing temporary foreign workers and considers the policy limitations of a widespread temporary foreign worker program.

Buzz as an Urban Resource

Abstract: The global rise of arts and culture is transforming local politics. Though new to many academic urban analysts, this is a commonplace for many mayors and local policymakers around the world. We seek to overcome this divide by joining culture and the arts with classic concepts of urban politics. We offer an analytical framework incorporating the politics of cultural policy alongside the typical political economic concerns in the urban politics and development literatures. Our framework synthesizes several research streams that combine in global factors driving the articulation of culture into city politics. This frames our studies of the local processes through which this articulation occurs on the ground in Toronto and Chicago.

Settler Governmentality and Racializing Surveillance in Canada's North-West

Abstract: . Examining archival materials from the mid-1880s, this article details practices of racializing surveillance carried out in the North-West. I focus on the reports from an undercover agent from the Department of Indian Affairs named Peter Ballendine. Contributing to literature on Foucauldian interpretations of race and racialization, Ballendine’s correspondence reveals a campaign of covert surveillance and infiltration that imbued indigenous leaders with characteristics of dangerousness, abnormality, and deviance, translating indigenous demands for rights and dignity into threats to security of the budding Canadian settler state. Stressing that settler colonialism follows a structured logic of elimina- tion, I use the concept of settler governmentality to stress that the rationalities of colonial governance in the North-West approached indigeneity — especially expressions of counterconduct — as threats to the health, prosperity, and legit- imacy of settler society.

George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (20th Anniversary Edition)

Abstract: George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: 20th Anniversary Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013, 237 pp., $46.00 paper (978-1-4522-2669-9). Over the past few decades, George Ritzer's work on McDonaldization has effectively become a franchise operation in its own right. Since his initial formulation of the term in a short article in the Journal of American Culture in 1983, the so-called "McDonaldization thesis" has spawned a score of related books and academic articles by Ritzer and others, generated an extensive secondary literature, become a pedagogical staple in countless university courses, and established itself as part of the popular lexicon in ways that few sociological concepts ever have. The recent publication of a special 20th anniversary edition of Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society presents us with an opportunity to reflect appreciatively but critically upon this impressive legacy, and to assess how well Ritzer's long-established theoretical framework has been able to adapt to or withstand the shifting winds of intellectual and historical change. Although this seventh edition of Ritzer's classic text has updated its range of topical references and ventured to address a range of new issues, it is also--somewhat counter-intuitively--notably shorter and more concisely argued than the previous edition. Ritzer's decision to condense and combine previously separate chapters and to significantly pare back his analysis of topics such as globalization threatens to amplify the book's preexisting tendency toward intellectual simplification and overgeneralization, but it arguably enhances the book's already considerable appeal as an undergraduate teaching text. While his fellow professional scholars might understandably wish that Ritzer had afforded himself the space to reformulate and defend the McDonaldization thesis with greater nuance, precision, and responsiveness to his critics, it would be remiss of them not to appreciate his unique ability to make otherwise daunting theoretical material accessible, relevant, and exciting for a lay audience. Indeed, in the context of undergraduate sociology courses in which many students often remain quite suspicious of or outright hostile to the ostensibly musty and irrelevant domain of "theory," Ritzer's book provides an excellent initiation into the sweep and excitement of theoretical thinking. Drawing upon a broadly conceived version of the Weberian theory of rationalization, all editions of this book have helped students to draw vital connections between far-flung historical events such as the emergence of modern state bureaucracy and the development of Taylorized factory production, the fast food industry, and the "McDonaldizing" tendencies at work in education, leisure, travel, sports, religion, family life, shopping, popular entertainment, the news media, social work, and many other spheres of contemporary social life. While acknowledging the quasi-democratic and populist appeal of many McDonaldized institutions and experiences, Ritzer--as ever--retains a strong emphasis upon the irrational, destructive, disenchanting, and dehumanizing consequences of formally rational systems. This provides him with a means of establishing a common thread between an array of pressing social, environmental, psychological and health-related risks and pathologies in contemporary society. Ritzer's basic conceptualization of McDonaldization as an insidious, tentacular, and ultimately irrational social process driven by the pursuit of maximum efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control remains intact in this latest edition of his book; he is, however, is at pains to freshly address a variety of recent social, cultural, economic, technological, and intellectual developments that seem to either validate or challenge the ongoing salience of this process. In the first instance, this entails addressing McDonald's own ongoing efforts to rebrand and reposition itself in an era of economic uncertainty, insurgent competition from other restaurant chains, and growing public disaffection with the fast food sector, understood as both the chief emblem of an unhealthy, unsustainable, and morally suspect industrial food system, and as a powerful symbol of the malaise of consumer capitalism more generally. …

China's Confucius Institutes and the "Necessary White Body"

Abstract: . Confucius Institutes (CIs), modelled on similar European organizations, promote China’s official national language and culture abroad. Unlike their European counterparts, however, the interactions between CIs and Canadian audiences are haunted by complex histories of a racialized “Oriental Other” in Canada and “Western Other” in China. Through ethnographic research on the Confucius Institute in Edmonton and the CI Headquarters in Beijing, this paper explores racialized representations of China and Chinese culture, as well as racialized understandings of the desired Western audience, in both locations. I argue that representations of Chinese culture are caught between two competing logics which I term reorientalism and reorientality. Reorientalism attempts to reclaim definitions of Chineseness and redress misunderstandings about China while simultaneously making China comprehensible and ultimately marketable through reorientality, or a use of familiar Orientalist tropes. Canadians (most often imagined and represented as white) are encouraged to engage with this reorientality through their own performance and embodiment of Chinese culture (a conceptually distinct process I call re-orientality) as a means of understanding the project of reorientalism. However, the spectacle of Chinese culture through CIs resonates with Canadian multiculturalism in ways that may unintentionally reproduce a social landscape that normalizes whiteness and the consumption of ethnicized Otherness.

Cautionary Tales: Making and Breaking Community in the Oil Sands Region

Abstract: I consider data from Cree and Metis history, ethnology, and mythology to focus on three transformative modes (integration, disintegration, and media- tion) in relation to concepts of community. I develop an allegorical fantasy of oily monsters, tricksters, and their appetites arising from liquid commodities, in opposition to more integrative ritual practices that have historically underpinned community in the oil sands region of northern Alberta. Specifically, I suggest that (petro)-capitalism can be compared to the monstrous Windigo (not a trick- ster) with respect to its uncontrolled appetites and growth, and also that various proposed technical remediations resemble the vain adventures of the hubristic, foolish, and acquisitive Amerindian Trickster.

Racial-Nationalism and Representations of Citizenship: The Recalcitrant Alien, the Citizen of Convenience and the Fraudulent Citizen

Abstract: This paper traces racial-nationalism through three recent sites of controversy relating to citizenship: the banning of face coverings while swearing the citizenship oath, the evacuation of Canadians abroad and the revocation of the citizenship of 1,800 alleged to have gained citizenship through fraudulent means. Racial-nationalism is an architecture of race-thinking defined by (1) cultural racism, which operates as a strategy of “sorting out” outsiders from insiders and (2) expulsion or what Hage refers to as the logic of pure exclusion. Through an interrogation of online reader commentary responding to news reporting, this paper examines three allegorical figures at the core of public discourses representing citizenship: the recalcitrant alien, the citizen of convenience and the fraudulent citizen.

Community by Necessity: Security, Insecurity, and the Flattening of Class in Fort McMurray

Abstract: High wages in the oil sands well exceed the Canadian average, making complex class differences less apparent here than elsewhere. This lends itself to a homogenizing narrative of community despite differences in wages, background, citizenship status, and so on. Wolf’s useful counter-framework outlines specific processes by which workers are situated, and by which they situate themselves, in labour hierarchies within the accumulation process. Drawing on interviews and participant observation involving two groups (university-educated immi- grant professionals and high-school educated mine labourers and tradespeople from Newfoundland), we argue that layers of precariousness in both these groups thrust them into “community by necessity.” The unsettling nature of work in the oil sands emerges as a story within a story. In the larger narrative, where “Fort McMurray is jobs,” community is invoked as a place in which household financial security is possible. Inherent in that security, however, is a story of pervasive insecurity wrought by the possibility of injury on the job, paternalism, or redundancies created through company restructuring and economic crises. “Community” is necessary to keep people in place (literally and metaphorically) and at the same time elides ongoing struggles against dispossession.

"Since When Did We Have 100,000 Tamils?" Media Representations of Race Thinking, Spatiality,and the 2009 Tamil Diaspora Protests

Abstract: . Beginning in mid-2008, the Tamil diaspora around the world organized in extraordinary activism against the escalating violence in northern Sri Lanka. Responses to the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests in Canada provide a unique case study to examine a contemporary moment of resistance, when race thinking and spatiality intersected within and beyond national borders. Using critical theories of representation, I conceptualize Canadian print media coverage of the protests as representations of a “strange encounter” with the other. I explore the media’s production of the other and its conflation of the Tamil protester-terrorist through constructions of space. I also examine how scale operates through underlying national values to conceptualize a precarious structure of belonging. Through these discursive moves, I demonstrate how the resulting figure of the “other,” the “outlaw,” and the “outsider” came to represent and delegitimize the racialized/ spatialized Tamil protest(er).

Bourdieu in the North: Practical Understanding in Natural Resource Governance

Abstract: Natural resource management (NRM) analyses often avoid understanding environmental governance as arising from and shaped by social practices and power relations in resource conflicts, contested property rights, and political-economic strategies. I examine a northern Canadian Aboriginal community’s experience of a structured yet dynamic socio-cultural response to a period of social and political change. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of social practice I suggest that a diffuse, or less-determinist, theory of practice may help explain how power relations are interwoven throughout yet applied differentially in NRM governance. Drawing on ethnographic research on northern watershed management and protection of Aboriginal cultural landscapes, I propose the notion of practical understanding to explain the ways government resource managers and community leaders challenge and negotiate one another’s conceptions of environmental governance in a duel process of cooperation-conflict.

Can Breastfeeding Solve Inequality? The Relative Moderating Impact of Breastfeeding on Poverty Gaps in Canadian Child Cognitive Skills

Abstract: Research has clearly shown that poverty has a negative impact on children’s cognitive skills. Much evidence points to the importance of family environment as an important moderator of this gap. One factor within the family environment, however, that has received comparatively little attention within Sociology is breastfeeding, despite the fact that a large body of literature has shown that breastfeeding is positively correlated with child cognitive skills and negatively correlated with poverty. Nonetheless, based on these correlations, many breastfeeding promotional materials and some public health research studies assume and argue that breastfeeding can remedy cognitive skills inequalities; although, these assumptions have never been empirically addressed. Thus, in this paper, I assess whether breastfeeding can address poverty gaps in cognitive skills in Canada using cycles 6 through 8 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth.

John Gilliom and Torin Monahan, eds., SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society

Abstract: John Gilliom and Torin Monahan, SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, 188 pp., $22.50 paper, (0226924440) Surveillance studies is a new area of research and intellectual inquiry drawing from numerous scholarly disciplines including sociology, political science, and communications. Many books and articles have recently been published on surveillance practices, though not many of these monographs have been aimed toward first year students or other nonspecialist audiences. SuperVision provides an accessible introduction to issues in surveillance studies, assessing the pervasive growth of surveillance practices across the globe today. SuperVision is organized around ten "big ideas" that each chapter takes up to varying degrees. First, Gilliom and Monahan argue that established terminology such as privacy and Big Brother are no longer helpful for understanding how surveillance operates today. Second, not all surveillance is bad. Some of it, they argue, makes aspects of our lives more convenient and efficient. Third, not all surveillance is state surveillance. Private players are equally prominent on the surveillance stage. Fourth, surveillance not only entails us being watched by others but involves us watching others, which in turn shapes our sense of self. Fifth, not all surveillance is forced upon us. Some of it is participatory. Sixth, surveillance allows information to go many places faster than ever before, which in effect shrinks time and space. Seventh, surveillance is resisted. Not everyone participates in it or thinks it is a good thing. Eighth, surveillance can extend and intensify social inequality. To explain this point, Gilliom and Monahan focus on racism and discrimination in some chapters of SuperVision. Ninth, surveillance systems today involve cutting-edge technology. But elaborate and expensive monitoring systems fail as often as they work well. And finally, formal organizations are hungry for information. Collection and analysis of personal information is something that all formal organizations do. The first chapter in SuperVision examines the relationship between surveillance and the self, arguing that the kinds of surveillance we are subject to and participate in shape us as people. In the words of the authors, "cell phones are the perfect symbol of the surveillance society" (p. 11). They collect and relay information about us almost endlessly to an array of organizations, at the same time as they shape how we think of ourselves, who we communicate with, and what we know. …

Sustainable Consumption and the Importance of Neighbourhood: A Central City/Suburb Comparison

Abstract: This paper applies urban and environmental sociological theory to survey data on self-reported sustainable consumption practices, using a matched sample of central city and suburban residents in Edmonton, Alberta. We use cluster analysis to create an ordinal typology of four types of consumers, conduct an analyses of variance to characterize the resultant clusters, and perform logistic regression to predict the net effect of urban and neighborhood context on sustainable consumption practices. We find that neighborhood and environmental attitude are the strongest predictors of sustainable consumption practices. We conclude by arguing many sustainable activities are more difficult to incorporate into daily routine when residing in the suburban neighbourhood. While suburban residents may feel strongly that they should consume less, their geographic location appears to significantly constrain their ability to meaningfully reduce their own consumption. This urban Canadian case study has implications for middle class environmental practices in other North American urban and suburban settings.

Grey's Anatomy goes South: Global Racism and Suspect Identities in the Colonial Present

Abstract: . This article explores the biometric documentation of civilians by coalition forces in the battle zones of the “war on terror.” With the growth of population-centric operations, harvesting body data is a key dimension of efforts to divide the population between civilians and insurgents, and also serves as a general strategy of population management over life perceived to be potentially dangerous. This article examines how these dividing and governance tactics are part of a global racism that is manifest in North-South conflict. The racism that underpins biometric technology is reflected in the racial dynamic of Western-led counter-insurgency operations, in which the US and its allies expand control over southern populations. In so doing, the insecurity of said populations is deepened and the political dimensions of global inequality are accentuated.

Robert A. Stebbins, The Committed Reader: Reading for Utility, Pleasure, and Fulfillment in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: Robert A. Stebbins, The Committed Reader: Reading for Utility, Pleasure, and Fulfillment in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2013, 143 pp., $40.00 paper (9780-8108-8596-7). I was at once intrigued by the title of Robert Stebbins' The Committed Reader, especially having received the book for review in the midst of reading undergraduate final exams. The full title, suggesting a focus on the various types of reading we engage in and encounter in the 21st century, deepened my interest. After all, most of what we sociologists do involves the varieties of reading included in the subtitle: our research and teaching spread across reading for utility, pleasure, and fulfilment; we strive to teach our students how to go beyond the mere Google-style of reading to engage with texts; and our plans for sabbatical almost always, if unofficially, include finally reading "for pleasure." It is unfortunate, then, that the lead of the title regarding the "committed reader" ends up disappearing in this work, leaving it more encyclopaedic in its approach to reading and readership than "committed." Stebbins' approach in this work derives from a combination of library and information studies and the application of his own "serious leisure perspective." That perspective, which starts from a definition of leisure as "uncoerced, contextually framed activity engaged in during free time, which people want to do and, using their abilities and resources, actually do in either a satisfying or a fulfilling way (or both)" (p. 24), is then opened up to classify three approaches to leisure activity (casual leisure, serious pursuits, or project-based leisure). After briefly addressing casual and project-based forms of leisure, Stebbins goes on to break down the category of serious pursuits into "serious leisure," with three subcategories (amateur, volunteer, and hobbyist), and devotee work. The rest of the work of this book reflects the application of Stebbins' serious leisure perspective to the "contact points" between a variety of sociological factors and the types of reading mentioned in the title. So, for instance, Stebbins' analysis of pleasure reading engages with a variety of purposes for reading, including entertainment, imaginative play, as a trigger for conversation, for sensory stimulation, for relaxation, and for information or knowledge. Included in the discussion of each of these purposes are a range of sociological touch points, including the classification of forms of fiction and nonfiction pleasurable reading materials, the roles of entertainment and "edutainment" in society, and the social-psychological and societal benefits of pleasurable reading. Most of the data that provides the basis for the analysis here is drawn from either governmental surveys and censuses or from a wide range of secondary research in the sociology of culture and library and information studies areas. The approach to the three other forms of reading proceeds in a similar manner. It should be noted that I would call Stebbins' serious leisure perspective taxonomic rather than phenomenological for one very important reason--this work is oriented more to the identification of various types and constitutive elements of action (in this case, reading) rather than the subjective experience of those actional forms. This work reads more akin to a Weberian approach, a la his analysis of the ideal-types of social action, or the work of Diderot and the Encyclopedists, rather than approaching its topic in a manner closer to Merleau-Ponty or Schutz. It is precisely in this approach that I believe both the strength and the weakness of Stebbins' work lie. Its strength is this taxonomic effort. For readers who are interested in such a breakdown of the various approaches to the act of reading and their sociological and social-psychological touchpoints, this work will be a very useful contribution to their libraries. The intersection of Stebbins' serious leisure perspective and library and information studies will also be of interest to LIS scholars, as it could present a useful guide for understanding and analyzing the approaches readers bring to bear on the act of reading and, to extrapolate wildly, of potentially reorganizing institutional and informational resources so as to meet the needs of readers more effectively. …

“Mr S, you do have sexual fantasies?” The Parole Hearing and Treatment of a Sex Offender at the Turn of the 21st Century

Abstract: How does the Parole Board decide a sex offender is rehabilitated and can be released into the community? This case study of a parole hearing reveals the significance the Parole Board gives to a sex offender’s management of his arousal as a clear sign of his rehabilitation. To explain the Board’s preoccupation with a sex offender’s sexual fantasies and arousal, I draw on a prison ethnography of a sex offender treatment program. Rehabilitation as risk management relies on the development of a crime cycle and relapse prevention plan designed to grasp the connection between fantasies, arousal and offending. I argue the parole hearing and treatment program exist in a symbiotic relationship that fabricates the sex offender into a species larger than life, one at risk of offending all the time. Key words: rehabilitation, sex offenders, parole, sexual fantasies, ethnography, prison.

Where is Fort McMurray? The Camera as a Tool for Assembling "Community"

Abstract: In response to the global mythology spawned by visual representations of Fort McMurray, Canada, this article examines a critical, collaborative youth project that sought oblique entry points to prevailing storylines of “community” and to what it might mean to live in the shadow of one of the world’s largest resource extraction complexes. Building on visual methodologies where participants are encouraged to produce representations of home and place, we explore the two-way dynamic of the camera as a catalyst for assembling a temporary research collective and, by the same token, as a tool for composing and assaying the contours of “community.” The project under consideration encouraged participants to learn skills of photography and to dynamically engage with other participants, researchers, and the place(s) of Fort McMurray around the creation and public display of images in both on-line and off-line spaces. Where possibilities of “community” are polarized, occluded, and/or overdetermined by the visual narratives of rapid resource development, collaboration around the camera helps to discern and speak back to the fault lines of community — including as they play out in the everyday lives of youth. Specific photos and the narratives around them are used to illustrate how the camera created and revealed iterations and relations of community across multiple scales, from the microcosm of the photography research group to the regional infrastructure of oil sands production.

Epilogue: Through the Forest of Time

Abstract: This essay poses three questions with regard to the studies presented in this special issue. What lessons regarding class politics do we draw from these studies of community and its crisis in Wood Buffalo? How are we to assess and understand the prolixity of the rhetoric of community in this context? How do the crises and contradictions of tar sands development in Fort McMurray, Alberta enable us to retheorize the concept of community itself? Bringing into critical juxtaposition postcolonial studies on subalternity with the alterglobalization literature on the multitude, this essay searches for the historical content of the truth that binds political rhetoric enabling various social movements to act in solidarity in opposing tar sands development, and interrogates the community of politics that this politics of community seems to promise. In doing so, the essay argues for the importance of an Utopian social poetics of mediation to the project of a sociology of absences.

Muslim Ceutíes, Migrants, and Porteadores: Race, Security, and Tolerance at the Spanish-Moroccan Border

Abstract: . This article analyzes the differential problematizations of “Muslim Ceuties,” “migrants,” and “porteadores” (carriers) in the Spanish border town of Ceuta located on the south shore of the Gibraltar Strait in North Africa. I argue that convivencia, a local discourse and practice of tolerance meaning “living together,” can be analyzed as a regime for governing differences premised on tolerance, and nevertheless contributing to the reproduction of a racialized and unequal social order. I also discuss the securitization of the border and argue against considering desecuritization and depoliticization as antidotes to securitization. I suggest that these strategies are complementary components of a flexible regime for managing the supposed threat posed by migrants in Ceuta. I further substantiate the thesis of a flexible regime for governing risks at the border by showing how various border crossers are framed and governed in Ceuta.

Relations of ruling in the colonial present: An intersectional view of the Israeli imaginary

Abstract: This article presents a categorical framework for the interrogation of power relations in the study and analysis of Israeli colonialism in Palestine. Following critical anti-racist feminist approaches, I highlight the relationality between race, class, and gender constructions that are crucial to colonial rule. Extending Chandra Mohanty’s (1991) reading of Dorothy Smith’s “relations of ruling”, I outline six intersecting categories of colonial practices to examine Israel’s particular colonization forms and processes. These categories include: racial separation; citizenship and naturalization forms and processes; construction and consolidation of existing social inequalities; gender, sexuality, and sexual violence, racialized and gendered prisoners; and “unmarked” versus “marked” discourses. Understanding colonial experiences as heterogeneous and plural, I conclude by arguing for the furthering of decolonial and anti-racist feminist analyses from within specific sites of resistance.

Richard Biernacki, Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables

Abstract: Richard Biernacki, Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 199 pp. $30.00 paper (978-1-137-00727-8). A social methods course is a mandatory degree requirement for college and university students studying sociology; oftentimes, it is a class that students bemoan, temporarily endure, and, upon completion, quickly push from their minds. Biernacki approaches the topic of social inquiry in an interesting, dynamic way while offering a timely, if controversial, rethinking of current sociological methodology. In Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry, Biernacki contends that sociocultural coding does not generate empirical facts; rather, coding is a ritual practice that misguidedly converts "regenerating meanings into an isolated token, a datum label" (p. 11). Biernacki challenges how sociology has come to think about systematized coding and the generation of "facts." Using a positivist perspective to interpret texts measures attributes that "cannot leave intact the system-like relations that let us generate meaning from a text" (p. 137). Throughout the text, Biernacki offers several concrete examples of what he calls the superficiality of social scientific coding processes. Biernacki's problematizes the positivistic, analytical nature of social scientific coding, instead advocating for a more hermeneutical, interpretive approach. Biernacki states that he has "mocked the pretensions of a cross-dressing social 'science,' not those of conventional natural science, whose clothing sociologists try to wear as their own by presenting 'large-N' coding results" (p. 154). Social scientists should understand that decontextualized fragments of text have no meaning separate from the surrounding text--and that texts have no meaning separate from the cultural milieu in which they were produced. Biernacki emphasizes that interpretive approaches are better suited than analytical techniques to the understanding of textual and cultural evidence. Organized into five chapters, the text begins by problematizing the use of positivist methods in sociocultural inquiry, specifically, the protocols of natural sciences that "authorize coders to isolate facts from their individually meaningful contexts and then throw these bits into an independent diagram that challenges our imagination" (p. 3). Biernacki argues that social scientists engage in a ritual process of coding, whereby they misguidedly transform scientifically gathered "facts" into sociological "ultimate meanings." The term ritual is used in a Durkheimian sense, describing a "distinct mode of communication and performance that reconfirms timeless models by which people can regenerate their social relations or professional roles" (p. 10). In Chapter 1, Biernacki argues that social scientific coding is the incarnation of a ritual, not a systematized, scientific procedure. This ritual is akin to "fitting the world to a condensed map rather than examining the world to see if the map represents anything" (p. 151). The decontextualization and selective recontextualization of meaning reinforces preexisting ideas under the guise of employing empirical foundations. These sociocultural coding rituals purport to be "scientific," but are, in actuality, less rigorous than humanist approaches that acknowledge the limitations of induction. Humanist approaches acknowledge the "gift of an acute trial, the insurance of shared documentation, and the transformative power of anomalies" (p. …

Karen R. Foster, Generation, Discourse, and Social Change

Abstract: Karen R. Foster, Generation, Discourse, and Social Change. New York and Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2013, 175 pp., $105.00 hardcover (ISBN 13:978-0-415-81766-0) Generation, Discourse, and Social Change is a welcome addition to the Routledge Advances in Sociology book series. It is small book --seven chapters and three short technical appendices--but punches above its weight and volume in its substantive contribution to sociology and to workers/workplaces. The book opens with an oft-heard statement about younger people "They want more. They always want more" (p. 1). This is uttered by a respondent in Foster's study of generational discourse in workplaces, but could have been said by any number of "people of a certain age" about younger generations. Yet, as the author points out, the picture of generational discourse, in reality, is messy. Management, psychology, and society in general seems to "know" about different generations and their approaches to work and life, yet little sociological research has actually directly and critically interrogated what is assumed to be true. Foster sets out to change that. By way of introduction, Foster lets readers know, in a sociologically nuanced way, that she will take the commonly framed presumptions about generations at work and check them against work-life stories of real people she interviews. In this way, she seeks to find "what's going on" with generations and discourse at work. Her focus is on discourse, specifically on two levels: generation as discourse, by which she means that which constructs generations as meaningful in human life; and generational discourses, the way certain discourses such as those about work and earning, are linked to the idea of generation. In Chapter 1, the question of what we think a generation is, is engagingly poked and prodded from the vantage point of extant sociological and philosophical literatures. Foster sets out then to let the concept emerge from her interviews. Chapter 2 lays down the parameters of her qualitative study, the central research questions, the data collection process, and the methodological approach which is carefully designed to match the sociological goal. Everything is questioned in this study: what work is, whether generational differences exist, what matters, what can be generalized, and what generations mean to sociology. The study draws on narrative accounts to enable insights to emerge from the stories told. The range of working people interviewed is impressively diverse. It includes: hotel maids, CEOs, fishers, and ad writers, amongst others. In fact, the list is even longer than the 52 people interviewed since many have had more than one career or job. This is in the Studs Terkel tradition of what he called "rogue sociology" that led him to profound insights into working lives. Chapter 3 develops how generation as discourse emerges from the narrative accounts in two ways. First, generation as an axis of difference emerges when beliefs are expressed about older and younger people at work having different attitudes toward work and earning. An example of this is one respondent who seized on the concept of "credential arrogance," by which he meant that younger workers seem to think that their degree is sufficient to confer seniority at work. Second, generation as discourse calls upon historical time differences in relation to technology, shifting gender expectations, and a whole slate of sociohistorical changes. An example here is one older respondent who began many of his points with "In our day ..." suggesting that the present day was not his day. At the end of this chapter, the intriguing question is posed: how do the respondents' perceptions about generation map onto their working realities? Three generational narratives emerge from the stories respondents tell: ambivalence, faithful relations to work, and disaffection. …

Mascarenhas, Michael, Where the Waters Divide: Neoliberalism, White Privilege, and Environmental Racism in Canada.

Abstract: Mascarenhas, Michael, Where the Waters Divide: Neoliberalism, White Privilege, and Environmental Racism in Canada. Toronto: Lexington Books, 2012, 161 pp., $60.00 (978-0-7391-6827-1) In Where the Waters Divide, Michael Mascarenhas has provided a detailed set of case studies which explore the racial structure of water governance in Ontario. The great strength of this book is that it systematically names and explores how neoliberalism is a racial formation highlighting not simply how water policy disadvantages First Nations communities but also how concomitant water practices privilege the environmental and social conditions that most white Canadians take for granted. Mascaren draws on the literatures regarding environmental justice, social reproduction, and critiques of neoliberal reform, and incorporates ethnographic interviews with twenty-seven participants, most of whom work in or with six First Nations communities in southern Ontario. The author highlights the history of dispossession, water diversion, and dam projects that have characterized Canadian-First Nations relationships, while demonstrating how contemporary technologies of administration, expertise, and entrepreneurialism are reinscribing deeply hierarchical racial inequalities. Through four case studies (from the dispossession of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation on the St. Lawrence River to the contemporary practices of technoscientific knowledge that remove issues of power and equity from broader environmental concerns) Mascarenhas shows how neoliberal water policy enacts a form of "racism without racists" insofar as it ensures that poor, minoritized, and especially Indigenous communities carry the burden of being unable to access clean and safe water. Mascarenhas' research was inspired, in part, by a little reported but key finding from the Walkerton reports which observed that First Nations reserves had some of the poorest quality drinking water in the province. The question driving the book is how the stunning inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in their access to clean water has been normalized, or to use a phrase from W.E.B. Dubois, has come to be viewed with a kind of "peculiar indifference" (Dubois 1899:157 quoted on p. 145). I highlight two examples to illustrate the major themes and contributions of the book. Statistics from the Minister of Supply and Services Canada confirm, "most of the water treatment plans on First Nations reserves in Ontario are in need of repair, upgrading or replacement" (p. 21). While the regulatory regime governing water quality on reserves is structured through multiple and overlapping departments, the primary branch responsible for drinking water services is Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC). Through analysis of the Walkerton reports and interviews with First Nations water technicians Mascarenhas details INAC's approach to this widely acknowledged, yet stubbornly persistent problem. His analysis suggests that INAC fails to consult with the very people most responsible for water management on reserves, and often takes years to approve applications to repair failing infrastructure. As federal and provincial departments have been cut back, audit type practices have become a common strategy for monitoring water quality in municipal and reserve contexts. However, many of the most experienced First Nations water operators believe that this shift from "service provider" to "service supervisor" modes of governance has less to do with the improvement of water quality and "more to do government's efforts to distance itself from what they saw as highly political and racial decisions that border on dereliction of government responsibility" (p. …