Supporting food security for Indigenous families through the restoration of Indigenous foodways

Indigenous families are overrepresented among those within Canada who experience food insecurity. Studies have largely focused on northern populations, with less attention paid to southern and urban communities, including the social, cultural, and geographic processes that challenge food security. In this study, we present findings from a decade‐long community‐based study with the Southwest Ontario Aboriginal Health Access Centre (London, Ontario) to examine family perspectives related to the social determinants of food security. These topics were explored through qualitative interviews (n = 25) and focus groups (n = 2) with First Nation mothers with young children from the city of London, and a nearby reserve community. Interviewees from both geographies identified a number of socio‐economic challenges including household income and transportation. However, some interviewees also shed light on barriers to healthy eating unique to these Indigenous contexts including access issues such as a lack of grocery stores on‐reserve; loss of knowledge related to the utilization of traditional foods; and the erosion of community, familial, and social supports. Resolving these unique determinants of food security for urban and reserve‐based First Nation families will require a range of economic and culturally specific interventions, particularly those that support development and uptake of Indigenous foodways.     

Revealing circumstances of epidemiologic transition among Indigenous peoples: The case of the Keg River (Alberta) Métis

Rates of type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders are elevated among Indigenous peoples; however, no research has examined the origins of these diseases among the Métis. This case study documents a transition in lifestyle and health that affected the Keg River Métis of northern Alberta during the middle decades of the 20^th century. This community began to experience previously absent diseases, including obesity, heart disease, gestational and type 2 diabetes, and preeclampsia. This shift in disease burden appears tied to rapid socio‐cultural and economic change driven by a decline of traditional economic activities, access to government transfer payments and wage labour, an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, and a growing availability of non‐traditional foods. This study points to earlier emergence of diabetes among Canadian Indigenous populations than commonly credited and presents the case for a rapidly evolving epidemic tied to environmental and cultural change. Underlying this were structural changes that emerged out of colonization.     

The Queen as ‘social mannequin’. Consumerism and expenditure at the Court of Isabeau of Bavaria, 1393–1422

Unjustifiably, but often, dismissed as the driest of sources, medieval accounts can be a mine of historical and social information, and those of Isabeau of Bavaria, queen of Charles VI of France, are particularly fascinating. One of the many consequences of the king's lifelong mental instability was the development of an entirely separate financial administration for his wife and children, and this combination of radical innovation and unprecedented levels of expenditure has meant that scrutiny of Isabeau's accounts — the best preserved and most extensive of any medieval queen of France — has been considered fundamental in almost all biographical works. Although this paper looks at what could be regarded as a frivolous topic in Isabeau's wardrobe, the social concept of the royal lady as decorative fashion-plate has been particularly pertinent in recent years, but also has a long-standing pedigree. The necessity and public display of wealth were always an intrinsic element of medieval queenship, and a number of these wider themes will be explored alongside detailed analysis of two example accounts.     

Stigmatized Spaces: Gender and Mobility under crisis in South Sulawesi,Indonesia

The economic downturn in Indonesia (1997‐99) has changed the context of gendered spatial mobility in South Sulawesi. For low-income migrants in the region, the monetary crisis has not only reorganized the labor market, but it has also brought about an intensification of the stigma placed on young women's independent residence in an export processing zone. Household surveys and in-depth interviews with migrants and members of their origin and destination site neighborhoods, both before and during the economic retrenchment, illustrate that ideas about women's sexual morality are a key part of the context within which migration decisions are gendered. The article situates survey and interview findings within an overview of Indonesia's recent development history, economic crisis, and official state gender ideology. The article argues that migrants and their communities have identified the ‘prostitute’ as a female-gendered metaphor for the crisis, and finds that post-1997 narratives of women's mobility increasingly revolve around normative judgements regarding young women's independent mobility and sexual behavior.     

The Carolingian response to the revolt of Boso, 879–887

The decade leading up to the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire in 887–8 is traditionally characterised by historians as a period when royal authority was in terminal decline, crippled by the deaths of three great rulers in the mid-870s and by the attempt of the non-Carolingian rebel Boso of Vienne to seize a throne in 879. This article challenges the conventional view, and argues that Boso's revolt actually inspired the four surviving Carolingian kings to enter into a period of successful and effective cooperation. They came to a sworn agreement which sealed a new mutually guaranteed succession plan and resolved several outstanding territorial disputes. The end of the empire was brought about neither by internal conflict nor by loss of faith in the royal house, but rather by the premature deaths of a series of heirless rulers and the failure of the last emperor Charles the Fat to organize his succession in 887.     

Qualified Toleration: Bermuda and the English Revolution

Central to both the causes and development of the English revolution was the demand for reformation of the Church of England. The question of what shape this reform should take, however, divided English men and women. Debates over the further reformation of the Church of England were also complicated by the emergence of increasingly vocal and powerfully‐placed calls for freedom of religion, ranging from a limited toleration for a certain few to a broader liberty of conscience for all. This article looks at the debate surrounding liberty of conscience during the English revolution in 1644–5, but from a fresh angle: examining the context and rationale for the parliamentary ordered religious settlement of the English Atlantic colony of Bermuda in October of 1645. Integrating the fortunes of this Atlantic colony into the history of the English revolution reconfigures our understanding and analysis of revolutionary religion and politics.     

Seismologies of emotion: fear and activism during domestic violence

This paper explores the relation of fear to activism in private and constrained circumstances of chronic risk and anxiety. Asking how people contest domestic violence, given the intensity of the fear that it generates, the paper reframes their responses as practices of activism. It draws on qualitative research that charts the nature, experience and effects of fear over time. Using seismology as a metaphor for this process, the analysis describes complex and often hidden shifts in emotions over periods of years, as interviewees describe being simultaneously constrained by fear and actively using fear to manage and contest violence. Their practices of resistance are small scale, largely invisible to others, and have a messy and non-linear relationship with the process of leaving that some eventually undertake. Such action is only necessary in a social and political climate which continues to place more emphasis on individual than social responsibility for domestic violence. I examine what this resistance adds to recent accounts of activism, concluding that isolated actions constitute activism when they anticipate or engender collective social and political change at other scales.     

The Bureaucratic Capture of Child Migrants: Effects of In/visibility on Children On the Move

This article investigates the “bureaucratic capture” of migrant children through three technologies of the state: labelling, data production and social services, illuminating the ways visibility and invisibility are constructed and managed in the context of restrictionist immigration regimes. Using the case of unaccompanied asylum‐seeking children, Roma children and undocumented children, we examine how in/visibility is produced; for what purposes, and with what consequences. We demonstrate through the simultaneous broadcasting and disappearance of migrant children, bordering is reconstituted through various performances, rationalities and technologies of immigration governance. The article argues the notion of “best interests” is drawn on when the state can define these interests in accordance with their political aims and resources. The set of cases taken together provide novel insights into how states reconcile conflicting logics and reveals how the implementation of the child rights regime prevents some children from actualising their rights.