Engagement in a Public Forum: Knowledge,Action, and Cosmopolitanism

Facing challenges to the civic purpose of higher education, some scholars and administrators turn to the rhetoric of engagement. Simultaneously, the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism has gained intellectual favor, advocating openness to the lived experiences of distant others. We articulate linkages between these two discourses in an extended case study, finding that a cosmopolitan ethos of engagement in a rural context can improve (1) understanding among people ordinarily separated by spatialized social‐ecological differences, (2) prospects for longer term environmental sustainability, and (3) the visionary potential of collaborative inquiry. Despite globalization of food systems and neoliberal shifts in fishery management, an annual fisheries forum facilitates coalitions that overcome dichotomies between technocratic and local knowledge, extending benefits to fishing communities, academia, and public policy. Iterative and loosely structured capacity building expands informally through affective processes of recognition and care, as decentralized leadership supports collective mobilization toward alternate futures.     

Stability amid Change: Ontario’s Religious Schools and Canada’s Regime of Secularism

Canada’s religious landscape has changed a great deal over the last forty years and, in most provinces, educational institutions have changed to accommodate this social shift. The articles reviews the divergent ways in which educational regimes have responded to this change and then turns to an examination of the one province in which little has changed regarding religious schools, Ontario. Ontario’s educational structure, which has continued to publicly support only a secular and Roman Catholic separate school systems in one of the most religiously diverse jurisdictions on the planet, is a surprising example of institutional rigidity in the face of societal change. This article highlights the peculiarity of this outcome, attempts to explain this surprising example of institutional continuity, and considers its implications for Canadian secularism more broadly.     

Materializing a form of urban governance: when street building intersected with city building in Republican Canton (Guangzhou), China

In the early twentieth-century China, the imperial court collapsed and modern cities emerged. How did a new form of governance become materialized, conceivable, and understandable? This article presents a case study of street building Canton (present-day Guangzhou) in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on discussions of material power, infrastructures, and governmentality, it attends to the role of material artifacts in creating the modern Chinese city. In particular, it illustrates the entangled emergence and development of modern streets and urban governance, a new form of governance essential to fashioning the Chinese nation-state and Chinese modernity. The unstable, evolving process of creating a new built environment provided specific, material reference points for various stakeholders to imagine and think about the modern city as governable space. This case analysis suggests an alternative perspective to urban history in China, and contributes to the broader discussion on the symbiotic relationship between urban politics and infrastructure.     

Tourism and cross-border regional development: insights in European contexts

This paper aims to structurally analyse the role of tourism in regional development processes in European cross-border regions with different historical development paths. Departing from an institutional perspective, the research is based on comparison of the position of tourism in region-building processes in the newly developing German–Czech cross-border region and the more ‘mature’ German–Belgian borderlands. Results indicate that the development of local cross-border tourism projects is no guarantee for positive destination-wide regional development impacts. In some cases, these projects may even reinforce asymmetrical socio-economic development directions of neighbouring borderlands. Rather, the socio-spatially equitable distribution of tourism benefits in cross-border contexts depends on several process-based aspects. These include the presence of ‘thick’ (cross-border) institutional arrangements, multi-scalar representation of tourism stakeholders in decision-making processes and a transversal position of tourism in regional development strategies. However, both with cross-border institutional ‘under-mobilization’ (Germany–Czech Republic) and with institutional ‘over-mobilization’ (Germany–Belgium), the informal network position of institutional brokers proved key for safeguarding the integrative character of tourism in the inevitably complex cross-border region-building process.     

Harnessing the hijab: the emergence of the Muslim Female Footballer through international sport governance

The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and other international sport governing bodies have recently been involved in contestations concerning the allowance of the hijab in sport. This article interrogates how these institutions participate in the regulation of Muslim women, and the relationship that these actions have with colonial and imperial constitutions of race. Drawing on critical race feminist theorizing, this article argues that the regulation of women who wear the hijab is a technology of power that frames these sport governance bodies as benevolent actors operating within the ‘best interests’ of female footballers. This hijab that has become a cause of concern in sport is hegemonically understood through Western colonialisms and racial grammars that have historically constituted the figure of ‘The Muslim Woman’ as in need of protection. The recent contestations represent a new moment in a global field, however, as notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equal rights’ are being invoked to now allow the hijab, albeit under conditions that insidiously reinscribe white patriarchal authority.     

The just city for whom? Re-conceiving active citizenship for lone mothers in Canada

In this article we argue that the ‘just city’ is one that enables individuals to exercise their citizenship, including making choices to participate (or not) in communal existence. However, inequities in resource distribution encountered by lone mothers on income assistance threaten not only individual sustenance and survival, but also the foundational fabric of our society. The implication that an active citizen is one who exercises their rights and responsibilities in a balanced way is problematic, and has the potential to add blame to poverty, justifying exclusion rather than inclusion. Using qualitative data from a longitudinal study of lone mothers in extreme poverty in Vancouver, British Columbia we illustrate how macro-processes within cities (i.e., delivery of affordable housing, food security, childcare, transportation) impinge upon the micro-processes of these women's lives (i.e., impacts on health, economic security, social mobility). Focusing on citizenship as a set of constrained choices challenges the policies and practices of social planning to consider how the scope of citizenship can be expanded by shaping key urban opportunities. Grounding the vision of a just city in the potential for personal agency suggests that policymakers and planners have a key role in shaping citizenship for the most marginalized and oppressed through a combination of providing supports and enabling opportunities in the urban environment.     

对区域社会和谐发展问题的思考

实现区域社会和谐发展是构建社会主义和谐社会的基础。我国地域宽广,不同区域在经济社会发展程度、自然资源、生态环境、历史文化传统及其所面临的问题等方面,都有自身的特点。从民主法治、公平正义、诚信友爱、安定有序、充满活力、人与自然和谐相处等六个方面入手,结合区域自身特点,切实解决区域社会和谐发展中面临的现实问题,不断推进区域社会和谐,进而由每一个区域的社会和谐,走向全社会的和谐,这可能是构建社会主义和谐社会合理的路径选择。     

Tomorrow’s Country: Practice-oriented principles for Indigenous cultural fire research in south-east Australia

First Nations peoples are revitalising diverse cultural fire practices and knowledge. Institutional and societal recognition of these practices is growing. Yet there has been little academic research on these fire practices in south-east Australia, let alone research led by Aboriginal people. We are a group of Indigenous and settler academics, practitioners, and experts focused on cultural fire management in the Victorian Loddon Mallee region. Using interviews and workshops, we facilitated knowledge sharing and discussion. In this paper, we describe three practice-oriented principles to develop and maintain collaborations across Aboriginal groups, researchers, and government in the Indigenous-led revitalisation of fire on Country: relationships (creating reciprocity and trust), Country (working with place and people), and power (acknowledging structures and values). Collaborations based on these principles will be unique to each temporal, social, cultural, and geographic context. Considering our findings, we acknowledge the challenges that exist and the opportunities that emerge to constructively hold space to grow genuinely collaborative research that creates change. We suggest that the principles we identify can be applied by anyone wanting to form genuine collaborations around the world as the need for social–ecological justice grows.     

基于美丽乡村建设的农户参与生态环境治理行为机制

乡村生态环境治理是美丽乡村乃至美丽中国建设的重要任务,而农户主动参与是乡村生态环境实现根本性治理的关键。本文构建了农户参与生态环境治理行为发生机制研究框架,运用结构方程模型,对农户调查数据进行实证检验,分析了农户参与生态环境治理行为的驱动因素及影响路径。结果表明：(1)农户行为遵循“认知—感知—响应”的发生路径模式,生态环境治理认知是驱动农户行为的基础性变量,生态环境治理感知是认知正向驱动农户行为的中介变量;(2)环境社会资本、环境影响敏感度、农户行为自觉等因素分别是制约生态环境治理认知、生态环境治理感知及生态环境治理响应的主要因素;(3)在美丽乡村建设及生态环境治理过程中,政府发挥了主导性作用,多主体参与的社会监督、社会组织等社会资本建设尚待加强,以农户为中心的多主体参与模式和体制机制有待健全。