Imagining Difference is an ethnography about historical and contemporary ideas of human difference expressed by residents of Fernie, BC – a coal-mining town transforming into an international ski resort. Focusing on diverse experiences of people from the European diaspora, Robertson analyzes expressions of difference from the multiple locations o …

Insiders and Outsiders celebrates the work of Alan Cairns, one of the most influential Canadian social scientists of the contemporary period. Few scholars have helped shape so many key debates in such a wide range of topics in Canadian politics, from the electoral system and federalism, to constitutional and Charter politics, to questions of Aborig …

As globalization restructures agriculture and rural communities, the impacts of increasingly industrialized farming make interdisciplinary analyses of the linkages among the social, environmental, and economic aspects of farming ever more vital. This collection analyzes the reasons for the public’s scrutiny of intensive agriculture and the prospe …

This book is about poor women, many of them single mothers, Aboriginal, or both, who have defied the odds to become apprenticing carpenters. To do so they have juggled child-care schedules, left abusive partners, and kicked drug habits to participate in a unique intensive retraining program. Through the voices of the women participants and their in …

Broader political and economic changes are dramatically reshaping rural and small-town communities in British Columbia and across Canada. Increasingly, however, much of the responsibility for community-based prosperity and survival is falling to communities themselves.

This book is drawn from a three-year participatory research project with four co …

Who has access to higher education today? At what financial and personal cost? Based on what conditions and criteria? How do students describe and interpret their experiences? And how can institutions facilitate and constrain successful participation and completion?

These research studies extend current understandings of what it is to be a student …

In Hometown Horizons, Robert Rutherdale considers how people and communities on the Canadian home front perceived the Great War. Drawing on newspaper archives and organizational documents, he examines how farmers near Lethbridge, Alberta, shopkeepers in Guelph, Ontario, and civic workers in Trois-Rivières, Québec took part in local activities tha …

Social Policy and the Ethic of Care bridges the gap between theoretical and public policy analysis in revealing why Canadian social policy is lacking and how it could be made more effective and robust by the inclusion of an ethic of care. This interdisciplinary text is essential reading for scholars and students of gender or feminist studies, philo …

In the late 18th century, the English jurist William Blackstone famously described property as “that sole and despotic dominion.” What Blackstone meant was that property was an “absolute right, inherent in every Englishman . . . which consists in the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of all acquisitions without any control or diminution, save …

Detention and deportation are the two most extreme sanctions of an “immigration penality” that polices noncitizens, identifies those deemed dangerous, diseased, deceitful, or destitute, and refuses them entry or casts them out. They play a key role in regulating national borders, citizens, and populations. But what determines whether a noncitiz …

This book traces twentieth-century Canadian criminal justice responses to women who kill their newly born babies. Initially, juries were reluctant to convict these women of murder since it carried the death penalty. The current “infanticide” law was adopted in 1948 to impose uniformity on legal practice and to ensure a homicide conviction. Even …

Do Glaciers Listen? explores the conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and cultural histories are objectively entangled in the Mount Saint Elias ranges. This rugged area, where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet, underwent significant geophysical change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which …

A Dynamic Balance illuminates the importance of understanding the social dimension of sustainability as it examines the links between social capital and sustainable development within the overall context of local community development. Looking at case studies in both Australia and Canada, it draws upon lessons that can be learned to reconnect large …

Lawyers often play pivotal roles in building democracies. Pamela Jordan’s engaging study of the Russian bar (advokatura) provides a richly textured portrait of how, after the USSR’s collapse, practising lawyers called advocates began to assume new, self-defined roles as contributors to legal reform and defenders of rights in Russia.

Using the hi …

Shortlisted for 2006 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing

In this remarkable book, author Dennis Brown reviews the history of the West Coast salmon resource with such comprehensiveness and clarity that even those closest to the issue will find themselves viewing it with new understanding. Brown places the reader at t …

UPDATE: Jane Rule has been inducted as a member into the Order of Canada, announced February 20, 2007. In January, Jane also received the Alice B. Toklas Medal (US) for her long and storied career as a lesbian novelist.
Jane Rule's 1977 novel The Young in One Another's Arms is set at the end of the Vietnam War in and around a boarding house in the …

Unable to attend school while she battles cancer, fifteen-year-old Kaleigh Wyse tries to complete her classes online

Developing a science project on astrology, Kaleigh enlists other online learners as study participants. What starts as a collaborative and supportive project based on the scientific method, slowly becomes unwieldy and then flawed when …

Building Health Promotion Capacity explores the professional practice of health promotion and, in particular, how individuals and organizations can become more effective in undertaking and supporting such practice.

The book is based on the experiences of the Building Health Promotion Capacity Project (1998-2003), a continuing education and applied …

Biotechnology Unglued explores this question in a well-considered investigation of the effects of technology on social cohesion. The essays present case studies of how various applications in agricultural, medical, and forensic biotechnology have affected the cohesiveness of agricultural communities, citizens, consumer groups, scientific communitie …

Cape Dorset Sculpture is an extraordinary collection of 71 outstanding works of contemporary stone sculpture, accented with several related graphics, assembled by the Spirit Wrestler Gallery in collaboration with the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset, Nunavut.

This new collection showcases the community that has had the single greatest …

The sacred sites of indigenous peoples are under increasing threat worldwide as a result of state appropriation of control over ancestral territories, coupled with insatiable demands on lands, waters, and natural resources. Of late, First Nations in Canada have taken their fight for these sites to the courts. Informed by elements of a general theor …

News stories of the less fortunate, the socio-economically disenfranchised in North America are too often presented to fascinate or horrify their consumers with a construct of stereotypes which commodify and intentionally erase the real lives of people “covered” by the popular media.
In compiling this collection of seven life stories from Vanc …

The basic assumption of this book is that the organization of a negotiation process matters.

The global negotiations on climate change involve over 180 countries and innumerable observers and other participants, addressing enormously complex and economically vital issues with conflicting agendas. For the UN to create an effective and well-supported …

The BC treaty process was established in 1992 with the aim of resolving the outstanding land claims of First Nations in British Columbia. Two discourses have since become prominent within the treaty negotiations between First Nations and the governments of Canada and British Columbia. The first, a discourse of justice, asks how we can remedy the pa …

The Courts and the Colonies offers a detailed account of a protracted dispute arising within a Hutterite colony in Manitoba, when the Schmiedeleut leaders attempted to force the departure of a group that had been excommunicated but would not leave. This resulted in about a dozen lawsuits in both Canada and the United States between various Hutterit …

Can Aboriginal values be reconciled with Canadian jurisprudence, and what is the role of Aboriginal jurisprudences in the development of treaty and Aboriginal rights? The combination of policy, philosophy, strategy, and legal arguments are valuable as a resource for thoughtful discussion and action on the future of Aboriginal claims. With the persp …

Educational material about the probability of bigfoot and the current best guesses as to its habits and its place in the natural world. Michael Rugg is the curator of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, whose purpose is to educate the public about the probability of bigfoot. Rugg has been collecting information and artefacts and studying unclassified bip …

In 1922, Elizabeth Bethune Campbell, a Toronto-born socialite, unearthed what she initially thought was an unsigned copy of her mother’s will, designating her as the primary beneficiary of the estate. The discovery snowballed into a fourteen-year-battle with the Ontario legal establishment, as Mrs. Campbell attempted to prove that her uncle, a pr …

Discover how rivers were formed, how Raven freed the people, why there are so many mosquitos, and why rabbits hop-at least according to the legends. Written in simple yet informative text that will be especially enjoyed by children. This book tells the Indian legends behind many of nature's wonders. Among the twenty-three tales told, you will disco …

This original anthropological study explores a type of “obedient” autonomy that thrives on setbacks, blossoms as more rules are imposed, and flourishes in adversity and, in conjuction, examines the specialized and highly organized discipline of archaeology in China. It follows Chinese students on their journey to becoming full-fledged archaeolo …

We all have notions of what it means to commit a crime. Most of us are very much aware of the behaviours which, by law, constitute crime. Rarely, however, do we stop to consider why certain activities and behaviours are deemed criminal and others are not.

What Is A Crime? examines how we define criminal conduct in contemporary society, and how we r …

Tournament of Appeals investigates the leave to appeal process in Canada and explores how and why certain cases “win” a place on the Court’s agenda and others do not. Drawing from systematically collected information on the process, applications, and lawyers that has never before been used in studies of Canada’s Supreme Court, Flemming offe …

Western philosophy has long held scientific rationalism in a place of honour. Reason, that particularly exalted human quality, has become steadily distanced from the metaphysical aspects of existence, such as spirit, faith, and intuition.

In Tsawalk, hereditary chief Umeek introduces us to an alternative indigenous worldview -- an ontology drawn fr …

Given the pressures of integration and assimilation, how are people within communities able to make decisions about their own environment, whether individually or collectively? Governing Ourselves? explores issues of influence and power within local institutions and decision-making processes using numerous illustrations from municipalities across C …

In the last twenty years, there has been a growing interest in alternative dispute resolution (ADR), as scholars and practitioners seek more effective, context-sensitive approaches to conflict. Where formerly conflict was tackled and “resolved” in formal legal settings and with an adversarial spirit, more conciliatory approaches – negotiation …

With public confidence in representative institutions dropping to distressing levels, it is time for political theorists to reconnect issues of representation to considerations of justice, rights, citizenship, pluralism, and community. Representation and Democratic Theory investigates theoretical and practical aspects of innovative political repres …

This collection, the first international comparative study of local boundary reform, examines the legal and regulatory procedures involved in municipal restructuring. Case studies from eight nations investigate how and why local governments have been enlarged in scope and reduced in number. Four key aspects are examined: the geography of the local …

Under the emerging void-for-vagueness doctrine, a law lacking precision can be declared invalid. In this first book published on the subject, Marc Ribeiro offers a balanced analysis of this doctrine and its application in the context of the Canadian constitution.

Taking as its starting point a cogent analysis of the fundamental concepts of “legal …

“The red man’s on the warpath! The time has come for him to dig up the hatchet and join his paleface brother in his fight to make the world safe for the sacred cause of freedom and democracy.” -- Winnipeg Free Press, May 1941

During the Second World War, thousands of First Nations people joined in the national crusade to defend freedom and de …

The 2000 case of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Customs Canada provided Canada’s highest court with its first opportunity to consider whether the analysis set out in R. v. Butler – in which the Supreme Court identified pornography as an issue of sex discrimination – applies to pornography intended for a lesbian or gay male audience. …

The Doukhobors, Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived in Canada beginning in 1899, are known primarily to the Canadian public through the sensationalist images of them as nude protestors, anarchists, and religious fanatics – representations largely propagated by government commissions and the Canadian media. In Negotiating Memory, Julie Rak exa …

Along the east shore of Ontario’s Georgian Bay lie the Thirty Thousand Islands, a granite archipelago scarred by glaciers, where the white pines cling to the ancient rock, twisted and bent by the west wind -- a symbol of a region where human history has been shaped by the natural environment. Over the last four centuries, the Bay has been visited …

For the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en peoples of northwest British Columbia, the land is invested with meaning that goes beyond simple notions of property or sustenance. Considered both a food box and a storage box of history and wealth, the land plays a central role in their culture, survival, history, and identity. In Our Box Was Full, Richard Daly e …

Sir John Seeley once wrote that the British Empire was acquired in “a fit of absence of mind.” Whatever the truth of this comment, it is certainly arguable that the Empire was dismantled in such a fit. This collection deals with a neglected subject in post-Confederation Canadian history – the implications to Canada and Canadians of British de …