16 research outputs found
Franchises lost and gained: post-coloniality and the development of women’s rights in Canada
The Canadian constitution is to some extent characterised by its focus on equality, and in particular gender equality. This development of women’s rights in Canada and the greater engagement of women as political actors is often presented as a steady linear process, moving forwards from post-enlightenment modernity. This article seeks to disturb this ‘discourse of the continuous,’ by using an analysis of the pre-confederation history of suffrage in Canada to both refute a simplistic linear view of women’s rights development and to argue for recognition of the Indigenous contribution to the history of women’s rights in Canada.
The gain of franchise and suffrage movements in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are, rightly, the focus of considerable study (Pauker 2015), This article takes an alternative perspective. Instead, it examines the exercise of earlier franchises in pre-confederation Canada. In particular it analyses why franchise was exercised more widely in Lower Canada and relates this to the context of the removal of franchises from women prior to confederation
Chemical Feedback in the Self-Assembly and Function of Air–Liquid Interfaces: Insight into the Bottlenecks of CO<sub>2</sub> Direct Air Capture
As
fossil fuels remain a major source of energy throughout the
world, developing efficient negative emission technologies, such as
direct air capture (DAC), which remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, becomes critical for mitigating climate change. Although
all DAC processes involve CO2 transport from air into a
sorbent/solvent, through an air–solid or air–liquid
interface, the fundamental roles the interfaces play in DAC remain
poorly understood. Herein, we study the interfacial behavior of amino
acid (AA) solvents used in DAC through a combination of vibrational
sum frequency generation spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations.
This study revealed that the absorption of atmospheric CO2 has antagonistic effects on subsequent capture events that are driven
by changes in bulk pH and specific ion effects that feedback on surface
organization and interactions. Among the three AAs (leucine, valine,
and phenylalanine) studied, we identify and separate behaviors from
CO2 loading, chemical changes, variations in pH, and specific
ion effects that tune structural and chemical degrees of freedom at
the air–aqueous interface. The fundamental mechanistic findings
described here are anticipated to enable new approaches to DAC based
on exploiting interfaces as a tool to address climate change