‘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.     

The Ideational Dimension of Federalism: The ‘Australian Model’ and the Politics of Equalisation in Canada

This article examines the ideational dimension of federalism and its consequences for the analysis of policy development. With this objective in mind, the article offers an explanation for Canada's rejection of the two main aspects of the ‘Australian model’ of equalisation: the assessment of expenditure needs and the existence of an arms-length commission to determine payments. As argued, the ideological prevalence of provincial autonomy in Canada explains why federal officials opted to reject the ‘Australian model’ as they prepared to establish the country's program and why subsequent reforms never introduced a needs-assessment dimension or created an arms-length agency to administer equalisation. At the theoretical level, this article shows how ideational factors can shape policy outcomes.     

‘It’s a very isolating world’: the journey to HIV care for women living with HIV in British Columbia,Canada

HIV health services research conventionally defines place in terms of proximity to care. However, understandings of place must also include the social spaces that women living with HIV (WLWH) occupy which shape their experience of health and access to care. Drawing on focus group data from the Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study, we explored how 28 WLWH navigate geographic place and social space in attempting to access HIV-related healthcare within and across a range of urban to rural localities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. We describe how existing services, even if physically close, can be socially marginalizing as women confront HIV stigma, racism, and classism, which operate to exclude women from the places and spaces they must access for care. We also emphasize how women enact ‘geographies of resistance’ and succeed in carving out their own safe options for care and support. Finally, we share recommendations identified by women themselves towards developing local and community-driven ‘geographies of change’ that support the health and healing of diverse communities of WLWH. Our findings stress the urgent need to acknowledge and redress socio-spatial barriers to care and to work with WLWH to co-create a therapeutic landscape that reflects women’s diverse identities, localities, emotions, and experiences.     

‘If anything is to be done with the Indian,we must catch him very young’: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia,Canada

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on children's geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors. This paper explores how Aboriginal peoples were doubly confined; firstly, by colonial constructions about children, childhood, and Othered (Aboriginal) peoples and then, secondly, within the material geographies of colonial residential schools.     

Integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of British Arab activists

Immigrant-receiving societies are increasingly emphasizing the need for immigrants to integrate into mainstream life. In Britain, this trend has manifested itself in ‘social cohesion’ discourses and policies. Discussions about social cohesion have often focused on the residential patterns of immigrant and minority groups in British cities, with the assumption that residential patterns are an indication of social integration. Integration, however, is also a socio-political process by which dominant and subordinate groups negotiate the terms of social membership. We explore the ways in which British Arab activists conceptualize their membership in and responsibilities to their places of settlement; we also consider how they reconcile notions of integration with their connections to their places of origin. Our study participants speak of the need for immigrants to participate actively in their society of settlement, but they reject the idea that integration requires cultural conformity or exclusive loyalty to Britain. Their definition of integration as a dialogue between distinctive but equal groups sharing a given place provides a normative alternative to social cohesion discourses.     

‘The Claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the Age of Ambivalent Internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.     

‘The Garrison Mentality’ versus ‘La Survivance’: English‐French relations in lower Canada, 1791–1838

Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution by F. Murray Greenwood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society, 1993. Pp.xvi + 359. £26.00 (hardback); £13.00 (paperback). ISBN 0–8020–0534–8; 0–8020–6974–6.

The Christie Seigneuries: Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760–1854 by Françoise Noel. Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1992. Pp.xiv + 221. £29.95 (hardback). ISBN 0–7735–0876–7.

The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 183 7 in Rural Lower Canada by Allan Greer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp.xiv + 385. £32.00 (hardback); £12.50 (paperback). ISBN 0–8020–2792‐X; 0–8020–6930–4.     

‘Highway to Heaven’: the creation of a multicultural,religious landscape in suburban Richmond,British Columbia

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.     

‘The Absolute Distress of Females’: Irish Abduction and the British Newspapers, 1800 to 1850

Between 1800 and 1850 the British newspapers published over 1,000 newspaper articles concerned with Irish abduction, offering a stark contrast to the little attention devoted to English cases during the same period. This article examines representations of Irish abduction in the British press and considers how this form of sexual spectacle contributed to British perceptions of Ireland during this period. Analysis of a number of particularly heinous abduction cases from the early nineteenth century demonstrates how images of vulnerable and often violated women encouraged unfavourable contrasts between Irish and British masculinity in ways that served to heighten anxieties about the nature of civilisation in Ireland. In so doing, this newspaper coverage of Irish abduction helped to assuage concerns about ‘the Irish question’ and, this article argues, to justify the coercive nature of Britain's imperial presence there.     

‘Caught’ between foreign cultural and development policies: perspectives of German Studies and German as a foreign language in Africa

The promotion of the German language abroad and of German Studies plays a central role in German Foreign Cultural Policy. With regard to Sub-Saharan Africa, otherwise a peripheral region for foreign policy, German as foreign language is firmly established as second language after English. Learners especially in Francophone West and Central Africa have increased over the past decade. Numerous funding programmes and actions are supported by German nongovernmental organizations at college/university levels. But bilateral cooperation between German and African academic institutions are challenged both by negative perceptions of the ‘Global South’ among Western colleagues and by an infrastructure adverse to research and to career development in most African countries. Additionally, North/South relations are traditionally seen in terms of (under-)development by German institutions, effecting cooperation. The paper develops a differentiated picture of African Studies in Africa, and outlines benefits that can be attained through collaboration ‘at eye-level’.     

‘The Danger is Two-Fold’: Decolonisation and Cold War in Anti-Communist Asia, 1955–7

This article examines the intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation in anti-Communist Asia in the 1950s. Drawing on the papers of former South Korean President Syngman Rhee housed at Yonsei University, the article explores both the motivations behind as well as the constraints upon South Korea's efforts to cultivate a military alliance in what it called ‘Free Asia’. Articulating some of the concrete political differences between South Korea and its potential partners in Asia, the article argues that Rhee's hardline views of the Cold War were interwoven with his ambivalence about Japan's reintegration in the post-war world. As a result of this intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation, the South Korean President was unable to achieve consensus with the rest of anti-Communist Asia. In exploring this chapter of South Korean diplomacy, the article calls on Cold War diplomatic history to integrate non-Communist Asia and for the historiography of decolonisation to investigate the legacies of Japan's empire in post-war Asia. It also suggests that scholars ought to reflect more deeply on the interrelationship between the Cold War and decolonisation.     

Patriotism,Self-Interest and the ‘Empire Effect’: Britishness and British Decisions to Invest in Canada, 1867–1914

This paper builds on the growing body of literature on the British World, which has shown that people in the dominions had a strong British identity and their claims to Britishness were recognised by people in the British Isles. It attempts to gauge the extent to which this British World identity influenced the global allocation of British capital. Much of the existing literature on British investment in the dominions dismisses the possibility that the pattern in Britain's capital exports was significantly affected by imperial patriotism. This article will suggest that imperial sentiment did indeed influence the destination of British capital exports. Imperialist sentiment influenced the legal and political institutions of the dominions in ways that encouraged British investment. Moreover, imperial ideology may have influenced investors' decisions in ways that the existing historiography does not adequately explore: at least some British investors may have been willing to accept a lower anticipated rate of return because they valued the psychological satisfaction of investing in territories that happened to be part of the British Empire. This article compares the experience of British investment in the United States, which has an ambiguous relationship with the British World, with that of investment in Canada with a view to understanding the impact of the British World identity on investment patterns.