Over the past two decades, the oil sands region of northeastern Alberta has been the site of unprecedented levels of development. Alberta's Lower Athabasca Basin tells a fascinating story of how a catastrophic ice age flood left behind a unique landscape in the Lower Athabasca Basin, one that made deposits of bitumen available for surface mining. L …

Fewer Canadians than ever are lacing up skates, swimming lengths at the pool, practicing their curve ball, and experiencing the thrill of competition. However, despite a decline in active participation, Canadians spend enormous amounts of time and money on sports, as fans and followers of sporting events and sports culture. Never has media coverage …

Over half a century ago, in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Marshall McLuhan noted that the overlap of traditional print and new electronic media like radio and television produced widespread upheaval in personal and public life:

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Even without collision, such co-existence of technologies and awareness brings …

When citizens take collaborative action to meet the needs of their community, they are participating in the social economy. Co-operatives, community-based social services, local non-profit organizations, and charitable foundations are all examples of social economies that emphasize mutual benefit rather than the accumulation of profit. While such g …

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. She sought an escape from the suffocation she felt under the cultural rules of her country and the future her family had envisioned for her. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in February of 1979, …

Online discourse has created a new media environment for contributions to public life, one that challenges the social significance of the role of public intellectuals—intellectuals who, whether by choice or by circumstance, offer commentary on issues of the day. The value of such commentary is rooted in the assumption that, by virtue of their tra …

Prior to May 2015, the oil-rich jurisdiction of Alberta had, for over four decades, been a one-party state. During that time, the rule of the Progressive Conservatives essentially went unchallenged, with critiques of government policy falling on deaf ears and Alberta ranking behind other provinces in voter turnout. Given the province’s economic r …

Art historians, biographers, and other researchers have long drawn on Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence—more than eight hundred letters—for insights into both his personal struggles and his art. But the letters, while often admired for their literary quality, have rarely been approached as literature. In this volume, Patrick Grant sets out …

In 1990, Gerald Conaty was hired as senior curator of ethnology at the Glenbow Museum, with the particular mandate of improving the museum’s relationship with Aboriginal communities. That same year, the Glenbow had taken its first tentative steps toward repatriation by returning sacred objects to First Nations’ peoples. These efforts drew harsh …

To understand how the legal system works, students must consider the law in terms of its structures, processes, language, and modes of thought and argument—in short, they must become literate in the field. Legal Literacy fulfills this aim by providing a foundational understanding of key concepts such as legal personhood, jurisdiction, and precede …

Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of th …

When he died at the age of thirty-seven, Vincent van Gogh left a legacy of over two thousand artworks, for which he is now justly famous. But van Gogh was also a prodigious writer of letters—more than eight hundred of them, addressed to his parents, to friends such as Paul Gauguin, and, above all, to his brother Theo. His letters have long been a …

Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field’s immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initi …

Macrosociology—the study of large-scale social structures and the fundamental principles of social organization—was the style of sociology practiced by the founders of the discipline. Today, the social theories of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Herbert Spencer (among others) are commonly studied as part of the history of the field, …

Established in 1913, the New Brunswick Federation of Labour is the second oldest provincial federation of labour in Canada. Its history began in early campaigns for workers’ compensation and union recognition and continues today in the latest battles to defend social standards, secure employment, and union rights. Active initially in the port cit …

In this sequence of essays, Ian Angus engages with themes of identity, power, and the nation as they emerge in contemporary English Canadian philosophical thought, seeking to prepare the groundwork for a critical theory of neoliberal globalization. The essays are organized into three parts. The opening part offers a nuanced critique of the Hegelian …

Connecting Canadians represents the work of the Community Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN), the largest national and international research effort to examine the burgeoning field of community informatics, a cross-disciplinary approach to the mobilization of information and communications technologies (ICT) for comm …

Despite the market triumphalism that greeted the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed initially to herald new possibilities for social democracy. In the 1990s, with a new era of peace and economic prosperity apparently imminent, people discontented with the realities of global capitalism swept social democrats into power in …

“…aspirations to perfection awaken us to our actual imperfection.” It is in the space between these aspirations and our inability to achieve them that Grant reflects upon imperfection. Grant argues that an awareness of imperfection, defined as both suffering and the need for justice, drives us to an unrelenting search for perfection, freedom, …

The post-war period witnessed dramatic changes in the lives of working-class families. Wages rose, working hours were reduced, pension plans and state social security measures offered greater protection against unemployment, illness, and old age, the standard of living improved, and women and members of immigrant communities entered the labour mark …

Digital communications technology has immeasurably enhanced our capacity to store, retrieve, and exchange information. But who controls our access to information, and who decides what others have a right to know about us? In Controlling Knowledge, author Lorna Stefanick offers a thought-provoking and user-friendly overview of the regulatory regime …

Through Feminist Eyes gathers in one volume the most incisive and insightful essays written to date by the distinguished Canadian historian Joan Sangster. To the original essays, Sangster has added reflective introductory discussions that situate her earlier work in the context of developing theory and debate. Sangster has also supplied an introduc …

Day care in Alberta has had a remarkably durable history as a controversial issue. Since the late 1950s, disputes over day care programs, policies, and funding have been a recurring feature of political life in the province. Alberta’s Day Care Controversy traces the development of day care policies and programs in Alberta, with particular emphasi …

The West and Beyond explores the state of Western Canadian history, showcasing the research interests of a new generation of scholars while charting new directions for the future and stimulating further interrogation of our past. This dynamic collection encourages dialogue among generations of historians of the West, and among practitioners of dive …

To Know Our Many Selves profiles the history of Canadian Studies, which began as early as the 1840s with the Study of Canada. Professor Dirk Hoerder discusses this comprehensive examination of culture by highlighting its unique interdisciplinary approach, which included both sociological and political angles. Years later, as the study of other ethn …

Trail of Story examines the meaning of landscape, drawn from Leslie Main Johnson’s rich experience with diverse environments and peoples, including the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en of northwestern British Columbia, the Kaska Dene of the southern Yukon, and the Gwich’in of the Mackenzie Delta.With passion and conviction, Johnson maintains that our …

Accessible Elements informs science educators about current practices in online and distance education: distance-delivered methods for laboratory coursework, the requisite administrative and institutional aspects of online and distance teaching, and the relevant educational theory. Delivery of university-level courses through online and distance ed …

What does Canadian popular culture say about the construction and negotiation of Canadian national identity? This third volume of How Canadians Communicate describes the negotiation of popular culture across terrains where national identity is built by producers and audiences, government and industry, history and geography, ethnicities and citizens …

Books and articles on instructional design in online learning abound but rarely do we get such a comprehensive picture of what instructional designers do, how they do it, and the problems they solve as their university changes. Power documents the emergence of an adapted instructional design model for transforming courses from single-mode to dual-m …

Canada and the United States. Two nations, one border, same continent. Anti-American sentiment in Canada is well documented, but what have Americans had to say about their northern neighbour? Allan examines how the American media has portrayed Canada, from Confederation to Obama’s election. By examining major events that have tested bilateral rel …

Within most disciplines, there are those who are recognized by their colleagues as being exceptionally competent practitioners. These individuals do their work in such a remarkable way as to become a model for others. This book is based on a study of the beliefs, actions, and interactions of a group of extraordinary oncology nurses—the people the …

As the first collection of literary criticism focusing on Alberta writers, Wild Words establishes a basis for identifying Alberta fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction as valid subjects of study in their own right. By critically situating and assessing specific Alberta authors according to genre, this volume continues the work begun with Melnyk's …

A groundbreaking study of urban sprawl in Calgary after the Second World War. The interactions of land developers and the local government influenced how the pattern grew: developers met market demands and optimized profits by building houses as efficiently as possible, while the City had to consider wider planning constraints and infrastructure co …

In Hot Thespian Action! Robin Whittaker argues that new plays can thrive in amateur theatres, which have freedoms unavailable to professionalized companies. And he proves it with ten relevant, engaging playscripts originally produced by one of Canada’s longest-running theatres, Edmonton’s acclaimed Walterdale Theatre Associates. This collection …

In Northern Love, Paul Nonnekes proposes a conception of love suggestive of a distinctive model of Canadian masclinity. He pursues debates in psychoanalysis and cultural theory in relation to two representative male characters in novels by Rudy Wiebe (A Discovery of Strangers) and Robert Kroetsch (The Man from the Creek).

This unfamiliar territory is the borderlands of women’s histories traversing the American and Canadian Wests. Specialists in women’s history, settler societies, colonialism, storytelling, education, and native and borderlands studies introduced by Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus pool their distinct contributions toward forging the very fir …

Sarah Carter reveals the pioneering efforts of the government, legal, and religious authorities to impose the “one man, one woman”model of marriage upon Mormons and Aboriginal people in Western Canada. This lucidly written, richly researched book revises what we know about marriage and the gendered politics of late 19th century reform, shifts o …

An investigation of the meanings and iconography of the Stampede: an invented tradition that takes over the city of Calgary for ten days every July. Since 1923, archetypal “Cowboys and Indians” are seen again at the chuckwagon races, on the midway, and throughout Calgary. Each essay in this collection examines a facet of the experience—from t …