Afleveringen
-
How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez.
Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Join me for a fascinating conversation with one of today’s leading voices in environmental studies, Daniel Macfarlane, as we explore his new book The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Please see the description of the book below, then tune in to hear Dr. Macfarlane share the insights, research, and stories that shaped this important work.
Lake Ontario has profoundly influenced the historical evolution of North America. For centuries it has enabled and enriched the societies that crowded its edges, from fertile agricultural landscapes to energy production systems to sprawling cities. In The Lives of Lake Ontario Daniel Macfarlane details the lake’s relationship with the Indigenous nations, settler cultures, and modern countries that have occupied its shores. He examines the myriad ways Canada and the United States have used and abused this resource: through dams and canals, drinking water and sewage, trash and pollution, fish and foreign species, industry and manufacturing, urbanization and infrastructure, population growth and biodiversity loss. Serving as both bridge and buffer between the two countries, Lake Ontario came to host Canada’s largest megalopolis. Yet its transborder exploitation exacted a tremendous ecological cost, leading people to abandon the lake. Innovative regulations in the later twentieth century, such as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements, have partially improved Lake Ontario’s health. Despite signs that communities are reengaging with Lake Ontario, it remains the most degraded of the Great Lakes, with new and old problems alike exacerbated by climate change. The Lives of Lake Ontario demonstrates that this lake is both remarkably resilient and uniquely vulnerable.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing costs ensued. In just one city, Vancouver, land prices increased by 600 percent between 2008 and 2016. How much wealth have investors extracted from urban land? In Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis (U British Columbia Press, 2024), Patrick Condon explains how we have let land, our most durable resource, shift away from the common good – and proposes bold strategies that cities in North America could use to shift it back.
Patrick Condon is the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC Urban Design program.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Canada has had twenty-three prime ministers, all with views and policies that have differed as widely as the ages in which they lived. But what were they like as people? Being Prime Minister (Dundurn, 2018) takes you behind the scenes to tell the story of Canada’s leaders and the job they do as it has never been told before.From John A. Macdonald to Justin Trudeau, readers get a glimpse of the prime ministers as they travelled, dealt with invasions of privacy, met with celebrities, and managed the stress of the nation’s top job. Humorous and hard working, vain and vulnerable, Canada leaders are revealed as they truly were.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
In Cormac McCarthy's 1985 Western, Blood Meridian, the story follows infamous scalp hunter John Joel Glanton through the Mexican borderlands in the mid-19th century. How much of this story is myth, and how much history, asks Texas A&M-San Antonio history professor William Kiser. In his new book, The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America (Yale UP, 2025), Kiser argues that scalp hunting, or scalp warfare as it may more accurately be called, was in many ways more brutal, and more nuanced and complex, than popular imaginings often describe. By following the practice from 17th century New France to colonial and early republic New England, through to the southwestern borderlands and finally the California gold rush in the mid-19th century, Kiser uncovers important differences, as well as throughlines, from time to time and place to place. In doing so, The Business of Killing Indians shows that there is no one story of Native-settler relations, and that while structural forces like markets and colonialism matter a great deal, when it comes to violence, the devil truly lies in the details.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed goods. In Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Jennifer Clapp explains how we got from there to here, outlining the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture.
Clapp reveals that the firms that rose to the top of these sectors benefited from distinct market, technology, and policy advantages dating back a century or more that enabled them to expand their businesses through mergers and acquisitions that made them even bigger and more powerful. These dynamics matter because the firms at the top have long shaped industrial farming practices that, in turn, have generated enormous social, ecological, and health impacts on the planet and the future of food systems. Beyond analyzing how these problems have arisen and manifested, the book examines recent efforts to address corporate power and dominance in food systems and assesses the prospects for change.
Among the first works to examine deep roots of corporate power in agriculture, Titans of Industrial Agriculture helps illuminate just how corporate actors have encouraged the “lock-in” of industrial agriculture, despite all its known social and ecological costs.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) by Daniel Coleman is an essential read for Canadians looking to understand our nation’s complicated history. In this NBN episode host Hollay Ghadery talks to Daniel as well as Indigenous artist, writer, and historian Rick Hill about wampum, early settler relations, and how we can use wampum agreements to move forward today.
Grandfather of the Treaties shares Coleman’s extensive study of Haudenosaunee wampum agreements with European nations, which was done in close consultation with many Indigenous scholars, shows how we can chart a new future for everyone living in what we now call Canada—Indigenous, settler, more recent arrival—by tracing wampum’s long-employed, now-neglected past. The Covenant Chain-Two Row treaty tradition models how to develop good minds so that we can live peacefully together on the river of life that sustains us all. It is a philosophy, an ethical system, a way of learning to live as relatives with our human and more-than-human neighbours. This covenant has been called the “grandfather of the treaties,” and is also considered the grandmother of Canada’s Constitution.
About Daniel Coleman:
Daniel Coleman recently retired from being a professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and an associate professor at Six Nations Polytechnic on the Grand River territory. He is a writer who is fascinated by the power of narrative arts to generate a sense of place and community, mindfulness, curiosity and wonder
About Rick Hill:
Rick Hill is a citizen of the Beaver Clan of the Tuscarora Nation of the Haudenosaunee at Grand River. A practicing artist, curator, art historian, writer, and public speaker, who has worked with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and Six Nations Polytechnic here in Ontario, Rick has been involved in wampum repatriation and interpretation since the 1970s.
About Hollay Ghadery:
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the era of Trump. Why do Trump’s border policies resonate with so many despite lower deportation numbers than previous administrations? How are fentanyl, tariffs, and military threats shaping U.S. relations with Mexico and Canada? Andreas explains the performative politics of the border, the historical amnesia around immigration enforcement, and why the lines between legal and illegal economies are blurrier than we think.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appeared to have topped out, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Higher interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with recent federal budget commitments to bring more housing online by 2030, there will still be a shortfall of 3.5 million homes by then.
Gregor Craigie is a CBC journalist in Victoria, one of the highest-priced housing markets in the country. On his daily radio show On The Island he's been talking for over 17 years to local experts and to those across the country about housing. Craigie has travelled to many of the places he profiles in the book, and in his interviews with Canadians he presents the human face of the shortfall as he speaks with renters, owners and homeless people, exploring their varying predicaments and perspectives. He then shows, through comparable profiles of people across the globe, how other North American and international jurisdictions (Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Singapore, Ireland, to name a few) are housing their citizens better, faster and with determination—solutions that could be put into practice here.
With passion, knowledge and vigour, Craigie explains how Canada reached this critical impasse and will convince those who may not yet recognize how badly our entire country is in need of change. Our Crumbling Foundation provides hope for finding our way out of the crisis by recommending a number of approaches at all levels of government. The prescription for how we’re going to house ourselves, and do so equitably, requires not just a business solution, nor simply a social solution, but rather a combination of both, working hand-in-hand with all levels of government, and quickly, in order to catch up with and outpace the needs of Canadians in this ever-intensifying crisis over a basic human right.
Gregor Craigie is the host of On The Island on CBC Radio One in Victoria. He is also the author of the nonfiction work On Borrowed Time: North America's Next Big Quake and the Radio Jet Lag.
Alex Hallbom is a Registered Professional Planner in British Columbia, Canada. He sits on the editorial board of Plan Canada, the professional publication for planners in Canada, and publishes periodically in Plan Canada and Planning West.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians exist on the edge. Renters fear eviction, homeowners feel trapped, and both are vulnerable to becoming homeless with a single stroke of misfortune. Unaffordable housing in Canada is tearing communities apart as long-time residents seek affordable housing elsewhere and businesses shutter because they cannot find staff who can afford to live nearby. For two generations, Canadians have watched affordable housing vanish while other nations have been tackling the problem.
In Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis (On Point Press, 2024), housing expert Carolyn Whitzman reviews the decades of policy that have gotten us into this mess and shows how all levels of government can work together to provide affordable housing where it is needed. Her compelling arguments for policy solutions are backed by ideas from researchers, planners, politicians, developers, and housing advocates at home and abroad.
Home Truths addresses Canada’s crisis from all sides, including exploring what adequate housing looks like, providing ideas on how to resolve homelessness, explaining why nonmarket housing is crucial for Canada, and showing how and why to tackle ever-growing wealth disparities between renters and those who own.
From policymakers, planners, developers, and observers needing to understand Canada’s housing struggles through to Canadians seeking ideas for a new way forward, Home Truths is a critical read for a nation on edge.
Carolyn Whitzman is a leading housing and senior policy researcher. She has authored, coauthored, or lead-edited six previous books, the most recent being Clara at the Door with a Revolver. She has undertaken research for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, and many other organizations.
Alex Hallbom is a Registered Professional Planner in British Columbia, Canada. He sits on the editorial board of Plan Canada, the professional publication for planners in Canada, and publishes periodically in Plan Canada and Planning West.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients.
From this early example of tattooing as work, in Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) Dr. Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Dr. Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career.
Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle. In the podcast we talked about why the relations between Canada and the countries of the Eastern bloc have so far been underreseached, about the large Central and Eastern European diaspora in Canada and their role in shaping foreign policy, and also about Canada’s reaction to the 1956 revolution in Hungary and the 1968 Prague Spring.
You can purchase a physical copy here.
The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.
Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/
Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam (Feral House, 2025) uncovers a forgotten yet fascinating chapter on glam rock music and culture...from Canada. Los Angeles-based multi-disciplinary artist Robert Dayton taps his Canadian roots to reveal mind-blowing stories of musicians fighting to be heard. It's a universal story of determined creators striving to make their voices heard. Dayton has spent years researching and interviewing these ground-breaking musicians trapped by geography, colonial mindsets, and the cultural behemoth that is the United States. There's no denying that glam rock was marginalized in Canada. In fact, RCA almost didn't release the 1973 Bowie-produced Lou Reed album "Transformer" in Canada because they didn't see a market for it.
Of course, they were wrong! Young Canadians, like youth around the world, were rebelling against the oppressive conservative mainstream culture and saw themselves in the anything-goes freedom of glam rock. Cold Glitter gets at the reasons why: nature vs. artifice, old world values vs. new freedoms, and how transgressive actions--including gender play--shook the Canadian art establishment to its core. Filled with stories from musicians about what they did to build a career and fight against the old guard controlling the airwaves and stages. Readers everywhere will find solidarity with the all-too-familiar story of artists who were attacked for appearing outrageous and daring to be different. Within the struggle to be fabulous are mind-blowing anecdotes of fun and mayhem. Readers will be taken back to the seventies as they meet the unknown and infamous musicians and artists who dared to be glamorous. Familiar names like magician Doug Henning, Vancouver band Sweeney Todd and their lead singer and one-hit-wonder, Nik Gilder, and his replacement, Bryan Adams, to underground heroes like the Hollywood Brats to hundreds of musicians who put away their mascara and left their glamorous wild days behind. Cold Glitter is filled with rare (and sometimes outrageous) images throughout and additional chapters on glam fashion, film, and comedy in Canada.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2025) by Gloria Blizzard is a diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion.
In this powerful and deeply personal essay collection, Gloria Blizzard, in an international diasporic quest, moves up and down an urban subway line; between Canada and Trinidad; to and from a hospital emergency room; back and forth in time — and as a descendent of Africa living in the Americas, negotiates the complexities of culture, geography, race, and language. Through food, music, dance, and family history, Blizzard explores the art of belonging — to a family, a neighbourhood, a group, or a country. Using traditional narrative and the tools of poetry, Blizzard’s essays hover at the crossroads, in the spaces where art, science, and spirit collide. The intimate becomes universal, the questions are all relevant, and the answers of our times require a sleight of hand — the holding of simultaneous and overlapping worlds.
About Gloria Blizzard:
Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. She lives in Toronto.
About Hollay Ghadery:
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
In this engaging interview, young scholar Dr, Joel Z. Garrod explains his book's main argument, with a personal touch. In Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022 (U Toronto Press, 2025), Garrod presents a historical analysis of the Royal Bank of Canada, illustrating how Canadian capitalism and the Canadian banking industry have transformed as they have consolidated nationally and expanded abroad. Emphasizing how national institutions and rules are increasingly becoming capabilities for transnational forms of capital accumulation, the book draws on extensive primary and secondary sources to document the transformation of the assemblage of territory, authority, and rights that have supported the bank’s activities over time. Linking the bank’s history to the policy regimes of the welfare state and neoliberalism, Garrod contends that our present period of globalization severely limits the extent to which nation-states can absorb capitalist crises or be a site of successful social reform. Connecting the Canadian experience to the wider transformation of global capitalism, Royal Histories illuminates the effects of globalization and the changing landscape of banking and finance.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2024) examines how successive prime ministers have promoted Canada's national interests in a world that has grown increasingly complex and interconnected. Eleven case studies focus on environmental reform, Indigenous peoples, trade, hostage diplomacy, and wartime strategy illustrate the breadth of issues that shape Canada's global realm. In this lively interview, Asa McKercher offers explains the structure of the book, its main take-way and how Canada has positioned itself in the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
After years of research, journalist Kathleen Lippa has written about the shocking crimes of a trusted teacher who wrought lasting damage on Inuit communities: Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North (Dundurn Press, February 2025). In the 1970s, a young schoolteacher from British Columbia was becoming the darling of the Northwest Territories education department with his dynamic teaching style. He was learning to speak the local language, Inuktitut, something few outsiders did. He also claimed to be Indigenous — a claim that would later prove to be false. In truth, Edward Horne was a pedophile who sexually abused his male students. From 1971 to 1985 his predations on Inuit boys would disrupt life in the communities where he worked — towns of close-knit families that would suffer the intergenerational trauma created by his abuse. In this book, Kathleen examines the devastating impact the crimes had on individuals, families, and entire communities. Her compelling work lifts the veil of silence surrounding the Horne story once and for all.
More about Kathleen Lippa:
Kathleen Lippa is a Canadian journalist, born in Toronto and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Kathleen trained as a professional dancer at The Quinte Ballet School and The School of the Toronto Dance Theatre before embarking on a journalism career. At Memorial University, from which she graduated with a BA (English) in 1998, she worked on the student newspaper, the muse. Following graduation, she worked at a number of Canadian newspapers including The Express (St. John’s) where she won a Canadian Community Newspaper Association award for arts reporting, The Hanover Post (Ontario), a number of newspapers under the corporate umbrella of the Northern News Services, 24 Hours (Toronto), and the Calgary Sun. For Northern News Services, after a short stint in Yellowknife, Kathleen served as Bureau Chief in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Her experience includes writing, editing, page layout and design, and photography. Her Northern experience was in a cross-cultural setting primarily reporting news from Inuit communities. After spending many years in Iqaluit, Kathleen now lives with her husband in Ottawa and St. John’s.
About Hollay Ghadery:
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas.
The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) by Dr. Melanie Dennis Unrau presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.
How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Arts graduate education is uniquely positioned to deliver many of the public good needs of contemporary Canada. For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities (U Alberta, 2024) argues, however, that graduate programs must fundamentally change if they are to achieve this potential. Drawing on deep experience and research, the authors outline how reformed programs that equip graduates with advanced skills can address Canada’s most vexing challenges and seek action on equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization.
In the episode, the authors, Loleen Berdahl, Jonathan Malloy and Lisa Young, chart how current approaches to graduate education emerged and make a data-informed case for change. We also discuss an evidence-based vision for reimagining arts graduate education and actor-specific steps to achieve this potential.
This interview was conducted by Shreya Urvashi, a doctoral researcher of sociology and education based in Toronto, Canada.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
The Allied soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 were faced with scenes of horror and privation. With breathtaking thoroughness, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp (U Toronto Press, 2015) documents what they saw and how they came to terms with those images over the course of the next seventy years. On the basis of research in more than seventy archives in four countries, Mark Celinscak analyses how these military personnel struggled with the intense experience of the camp; how they attempted to describe what they had seen, heard, and felt to those back home; and how their lives were transformed by that experience. He also brings to light the previously unacknowledged presence of hundreds of Canadians among the camp's liberators, including noted painter Alex Colville.
Distance from the Belsen Heap examines the experiences of hundreds of British and Canadian eyewitnesses to atrocity, including war artists, photographers, medical personnel, and chaplains. A study of the complicated encounter between these Allied soldiers and the horrors of the Holocaust, Distance from the Belsen Heap is a testament to their experience.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices - Laat meer zien
