Alice Munro,Charles McGrath,and the Shaping of “The Turkey Season”

Using archival evidence of the editorial process behind the publication of the story “The Turkey Season,” this article explores the collaborative literary relationship between Alice Munro and one of her long-time editors at The New Yorker magazine, Charles McGrath. It reveals McGrath’s exceptional contribution to the story—restructuring it by combining the two versions Munro submitted into a composite—and theorizes the composite version’s effects on the epistemological grounding of the story and the narrator’s certainty about her own memory of the events she recounts, both of which are features that are often considered characteristic of Munro’s style in her mature writing.     

Northern Nyasaland

The restructuring of the pulp and paper industry in the European Community is examined. The factors underlying recent restructuring are evaluated in the light of the impending creation of a Single European Market. Two main sets of factors are identified. ‘Pull’ factors relate directly to Europe as a unified market. ‘Push’ factors relate to sources of supply, as well as to markets.     

Restructuring in the Canadian Newsprint Industry

This special issue of the Canadian Geographer presents five articles examining the wave of restructuring and the associated changes in the labour process that have swept through Canada's pulp and paper industry in recent years. The allocation of an entire issue to this topic is, we believe, justified by the importance of the industry to the Canadian economy, by the dramatic restructuring that has occurred to it since the early 1980s, and by the centrality of geography to an understanding of these events. During the period covered by these articles, there have been major changes in the location of pulp and paper operations, in their inputs to production, in the organization and technology of production within the mills, in the relations between production units, in the nature of work and employment, in the products produced, and in the markets served.     

Alice through the looking glass: emotion,personal connection,and reading colonial archives along the grain

This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that I suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that ‘against the grain’ archival readings of BC’s past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading ‘along the archival grain’ as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings.     

Music in factories: a twentieth-century technique for control of the productive self

This paper discusses the historical use of music to produce more efficient, more committed, industrial workers. First emerging in academia early in the twentieth century, psychological interest in the industrial application of music had grown into a topic of popular interest and government investigation by the 1940s. Catalysed by the need for vast increases in production and the desire to cultivate ‘citizenship’ amongst industrial workers which the Second World War produced, consideration of how music could be employed as an affective soundtrack in factories—to raise employees' work rates, to increase their efficiency, to combat fatigue and boredom, to improve morale, to access and manipulate their emotions and loyalties—became a prominent area of psychological research. This paper examines that psychological research and its largest scale application in the BBC radio show Music While You Work, broadcast daily to millions of British factory workers from 1940 until 1967. The paper focuses particularly on conceptualizations of music's affective power and its utilization to exert ‘emotional control’ over spaces of work and the working self. This paper is centrally concerned with the practice of Music While You Work as a programme broadcasting specifically for factory spaces, and how this confronted the BBC's music policies for a national and domestic audience, impacting on the radical nature of the affective soundtrack to work which was produced.     

Seniors’ Long-Term Care in Canada: A Continuum of Soft to Brutal Privatisation

We situate the contemporary crisis of COVID-19 deaths in seniors’ care facilities within the restructuring and privatisation of this sector. Through an ethnographic comparison in a for-profit and nonprofit facility, we explore what we identify as brutal and soft modes of privatisation within publicly subsidised long-term seniors’ care in Vancouver, British Columbia, and their influence on the material and relational conditions of work and care. Workers in both places are explicit that they deliver only bare-bones care to seniors with increasingly complex care needs, and we document the distinct forms and extent to which these precarious workers give gifts of their time, labour and other resources to compensate for the gaps in care that result from state withdrawal and the extraction of profits within the sector. We nonetheless locate more humane and hopeful processes in the nonprofit facility, where a history of cooperative relations between workers, management and families suggest the possibility of re-valuing the essential work of care.     

Placing Transport Workers on the Agenda: The Conflicting Logics of Governing Mobility on Bishkek's Marshrutkas

Transport workers are conspicuously absent from both mobilities and urban studies literature. This paper therefore starts out with a double critique. First, transport workers, primarily drivers, are largely disregarded in mobilities and urban transport research. Second, the literature we find on transport workers—mostly based in empirical settings in the global South—remains outside recent and ongoing debates in critical urban transport studies. Providing empirical insights from post‐Soviet Central Asia, this paper strives to close these gaps and delve into the struggles and cleavages that structure informal transport workers’ positions and livelihoods. We argue that the diverse and contradictory logics that govern urban mobility affect the livelihoods and working conditions of informal transport workers, as well as their choices and motivations. These, in turn, significantly shape mobility provision, in terms of urban transport's (lack of) affordability, accessibility, convenience and safety.     

‘Pounding dirt all day’: labor,sexuality and gender in the British Columbia reforestation sector

In this article, I examine the relationship between sexuality, gender and labor in the context of the British Columbia, Canada, tree planting industry. I examine how sexuality and gender are central to how the labor process of planting trees is organized and ‘experienced’ by workers. I focus on how workers' productivity is managed through the regulation of sexuality while also interrogating the heteronormative character of this process. In addition, I examine the homosocial and homoerotic dimensions of tree planting labor in order to understand the fragile and tremulous nature of sexual boundaries, which, importantly, are bound up with questions of power and gender. My goal is to stimulate debate on the relationship between sexuality and labor, which is an understudied area compared to the attention that has been paid to the gendering of working life.     

From Indenture to “Good Governance”: eMigrate and the Politics of Reforming Global Labour Supply Chains

Contract substitution—in which workers sign one contract but end up working under another—is a common form of fraud faced by Indian low-wage migrant workers working in the Gulf Cooperation Council states. This paper presents a study of workers’ experiences of contract substitution alongside the eMigrate system, which is a digital registration system introduced by the Indian government in 2015. While a stated aim of eMigrate is to protect workers from contract fraud, these practices persist. We explore the colonial genealogies of eMigrate to show that not only has it adapted repertoires of worker protection inherited from the British Empire’s indenture system, but that eMigrate risks facilitating conditions of unfreedom under the mantle of worker protection, much as the British imperial state did during indenture. We contend that recognising how legacies of indentured labour regulation persist through eMigrate has implications for contemporary campaigns for migrant justice.     

Computer dating in the 1970s: Dateline and the making of the modern British single

The British matchmaking industry expanded sharply after 1970. This article focuses on the formative years of its most successful representative, the computer dating agency Dateline. Through attention to Dateline’s marketing in the late 1970s, I explore the ways in which new vocabularies of ‘scientific’ expertise were used to forge a ‘modern’ romantic sensibility. After setting Dateline’s success in the context social–sexual change, I explore its two main claims to authority—the computer and the empirical insights of psychology—suggesting that the invitation to embrace but also to control fate foreshadowed the pressures facing singles into the twenty-first century.     

Abstracts

As visibly extractive industries reliant on the material and semiotic commodification of nature, forestry and mining have come to be popularly viewed as “environmental pariahs.” Yet forestry and mining continue to be successfully profitable enterprises despite a significant increase in environmental awareness and activism in the latter half of the twentieth century. To understand the relative stability and growth of these sectors in the face of overt contradictions arising from their use of the environment, this article revisits the work of regulation theorists who asked similar questions about the persistence and maintenance of capitalism in general. Two case studies are presented—forestry in British Columbia and gold mining in California and Nevada—which demonstrate how the political economy of forestry and mining is subject to contradictions arising out of the technological and organizational mechanisms through which nature is appropriated during production. Analysis of the case studies shows that the regulation of these contradictions is increasingly achieved through the deployment and cooptation of sustainability narratives. The case studies therefore juxtapose the recent proliferation of sustainability narratives within the forestry and mining sectors with the sectors’ persistent challenge to concepts of sustainable development>     

From the ‘new localism’ to the ‘new regionalism’? The implications of regional development agencies for city–regional relations

Throughout the last three decades efforts to regenerate British cities have been based around the construction of new institutional alliances and policy networks supported by a series of urban-based initiatives. Successive Conservative governments premised their intervention on the assumption that cities (and particular parts therein) were the most appropriate geographical level around which to organise policy intervention. In pursuing this city-based agenda, the policies were themselves instrumental in constituting the city as an object of policy: a problem in need of a solution. The aim of this paper, however, is not to explore how certain spaces or scales become constructed through, for example, government policy, political practices or state restructuring. Rather the paper augments work conducted on the socially constructed nature of ‘cities’ and ‘regions’. It explores for regeneration policy and politics the implications of the tendential shift away from a model of ‘new localism’ towards an alternative model of ‘new regionalism’. The origins of the central element of New Labour's emergent regional project — the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) — are established before the paper moves on to examine the likely political relationships between the local state, drawing upon the example of Manchester, and the regional state, drawing upon North West England, under the new institutional arrangements.     

The Cripps mission of 1942: A reinterpretation

In 1926, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was established to foster empire trade without the use of tariffs. It was to simulate imperial preference by redirecting consumer choice away from ‘foreign’ goods and towards the produce of ‘home and empire’. Using newspapers, pamphlets, film, exhibitions and poster displays, the EMB aimed to ‘bring the empire alive’ to British consumers. This paper analyses the presentation of three settler dominions—Australia, New Zealand and Canada—in the EMB's advertising campaigns. The EMB's large visual archive has been the subject of only limited study, most of which has focused on a homogeneous reading of empire. This article argues that the work of the EMB reveals the presence of a separate discourse of empire—a ‘dominion discourse’—that has not been recognised in cultural histories of empire, which, with the recent exception of ‘British world’ studies, have been more interested in mapping and conceptualising the formation of identities in other colonial settings. The ‘dominion discourse’ emphasised the familiar, white and ‘British’ nature of the former colonies of settlement, attributes that are clearly displayed in the campaigns of the EMB, but can also be found in settler culture much more widely. In doing so, the white dominions stressed not only their difference from the dependent colonies, but their similarity to Britain. Though the inter-war period is often associated with the rise of distinctive national identities and the loosening of imperial bonds, the production of these attributes in an imperial and metropolitan context draws attention to both the transnational nature of identity formation and the continuing importance of Britain and empire in the construction of settler culture in this period.     

From expectations to aspirations: State modernisation,urban policy,and the existential politics of welfare in the UK

The form and character of the British welfare state is undergoing another round of reform. Welfare modernisation now focuses on the creation of ‘aspirational citizens’ in deprived areas or communities, individuals, and groups who will ‘better’ themselves and become more like an imagined social ‘mainstream’. Old-fashioned policies that promoted expectations of improvement have been replaced by this focus on encouraging new forms of self-reliant, aspirational citizenship. This paper interrogates the nature of this discursive shift. It argues that an existential politics, built around notions of aspiration, is being rolled-out across the British welfare state and that this has significant material and political implications. It begins by critically assessing the terms aspiration and expectation. It then draws on recent urban and spatial policy agendas to empirically explore the nature of this shift and its wider effects on urban societies, economies, and environments before concluding with a discussion of possible future research directions and agendas.     

MODERNIZATION OF SOVIET AGRICULTURAL MACHINE BUILDING: THE EXAMPLE OF TRACTOR PRODUCTION

The Soviet agricultural equipment industry produces over 40 percent of the world's tractors. It also is a major world producer of combines and other agricultural equipment. Nevertheless, almost three-fourths of the 33 million Soviet agricultural workers are classified as manual laborers. This paper focuses on how the industry is being modernized to address this problem, and how this effort fits into the overall program of economic restructuring. It also briefly examines some of the spatial dimensions of agricultural machinery production, including the distribution of tractor assembly plants within the country and some of their locational factors.     

Settler Life Writing,Georgic Traditions and Models of Environmental Sustainability

The purpose of this article is to reveal that the settler life writing preserves the all-but-forgotten wisdom of traditional mixed-farming methods. My study focuses on the farm logs or journals kept by three members of the Sheppard family, British immigrants who settled in southern Alberta in the late nineteenth century to establish ranches. Pioneers such as the Sheppards imagined the prairies as an Eden where they could lead prosperous lives and radically transformed the prairies, changing the nature of that life form. I explore the Sheppard journals through a lens shaped by Virgil’s Georgics. There is value in the Georgics as a model of sustainability; thus, such analysis reveals a traditional, cyclical agrarian pattern in the journals from which emerges an ethic of sustainability.     

Jewish Refugees in Cyprus and British Imperial Sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1933–1949

This paper focuses on the use of the British Colony of Cyprus as a clearing ground for Jewish refugees on route to Palestine before, during, and after the Second World War. While acknowledging the historiographical consensus underscoring Cyprus’ renewed strategic importance in the context of British post-Second World War imperial retreat in the East, the article argues that Jewish transmigration revealed new potential uses for the island which in turn contributed to confirm British sovereignty in that possession. Drawing on British and Cypriot sources, the article further shows the transformative impact of Jewish transmigration for Cyprus politics as it induced British authorities, who had established an authoritarian regime in the island in the 1930s, to invoke Cypriot reactions in order to stem the flow of refugees to the island. This paved the way for future policies meant to redefine the relations between rulers and ruled. As the management of refugees coming to Cyprus during the period under scrutiny relied on ever more refined instruments of classification, the paper finally highlights the contribution of Empire to the crafting of official categories to designate people on the move—‘refugees’, ‘illegal immigrants’—which still inform European migration policies.     

Ethical dilemmas? UK immigration,Legal Aid funding reform and caseworkers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article considers the kinds of responsibilities anthropologists might have when working on immigration and asylum matters, particularly in the light of recent ‘reforms’ to the funding of legal aid in the UK. The article focuses on a single case study in its context, exploring an interaction between an immigrant applicant and a lawyer/case worker in a not‐for‐profit Law Centre. The paper shows how case workers find themselves caught in the middle, squeezed between increasing financial pressures and their ethical obligation to their clients. In their everyday work they are faced with the contradictory imperatives of giving sympathy and advice to genuinely deserving cases on the one hand while being required to check up on opportunist and possibly deceitful clients on the other. In the context of ‘reform’, they are increasingly encouraged to prejudge the probable outcomes of cases by reference to ‘value for money’. These effects, we argue, have severe consequences given the adversarial nature of the UK's system of law. As anthropologists, our aim was to investigate the day‐to‐day realities of case worker/client interactions, to enable both ourselves and legal practitioners, in conversation, to reflect on our own and each others' interpretations of the situation, and to place these in the public domain.     

Forest as hazard,forest as victim: Community perspectives and disaster mitigation in the aftermath of Kelowna's 2003 wildfires

Situated within the political ecology of hazard, this article is an extended case study of the devastating 2003 wildfires in and around Kelowna, British Columbia (also known as the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire). This article reveals how compliance (or lack thereof) with fire mitigation strategies recommended by provincial, regional, and municipal agencies is complicated by differing social constructions of what constitutes ecologically sustainable forest management and community safety. Three perspectives emerge regarding the urban forests: “nature as hazard”—a volatile force to be controlled; “nature as instrumentally valuable”—a contribution to the character of one's surroundings and subsequent sense of place; and “nature as intrinsically valuable”—a distinct entity to be preserved and protected for its own sake. The article also examines how experiences of disaster influence community perceptions and result in a greater willingness to engage in fire mitigation strategies due to perceptions of heightened vulnerability. Forestry and fire mitigation agencies need to determine multiple courses of action among the varied and valid range of residents’ nature perspectives. The role of human agency in disaster mitigation must be examined, particularly as the risk of fire at the wildland‐urban interface continues to be exacerbated by encroaching human settlements and climate change.     

Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances*

This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. Sustained protest action emerged at the site amidst initiation of test borehole drilling activity by the pipeline company. In this paper, I engage with the potential of geotheorizing children’s relations as a critical response that interrupts dominant understandings of what is seen as appropriate for young children’s curriculum. I consider the effects of refiguring children’s subjectivities through geologic and geontological relations for the normalization and resistance of settler colonialism’s human-centric and extractive structurings.