A Trip to the Co-op: The Production, Consumption and Salvation of CanadianWilderness

In this paper, I analyze Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) catalogues from1987-2007, in order to examine how they produce wilderness, invite consumption andoffer up their products as a means of salvation for wilderness and for MEC members.My analysis of the MEC catalogues draws connections between how wilderness, andindeed the nation, is understood through the production of a conscientiouseco-consumer. Wilderness is understood as pivotal to Canadian national identity and has beenused to demarcate those imagined within and outside of the nation. I draw attentionto shifts in wilderness discourse in order to see how wilderness has been employedfor economic, political and social uses. I show that images and texts in the MECcatalogues call on familiar wilderness tropes thus making a consumer subject appearboth logical and desirable for its members and for the nation.Dans cet article, nous analysons les catalogues de 1987-2007 de la MountainEquipment Co-op (MEC) afin d’examiner la façon dont elle exalte le milieusauvage, invite à la consommation et offre ses produits comme un moyen de sauver lanature ainsi que ses membres. Nous visons à établir des liens entre, d’unepart, la compréhension de la nature et, par conséquent, de la nation et,d’autre part, la production d’une conscience d’écoconsommateur. La nature qui est considérée comme étant le pivot de l’identité nationalecanadienne est utilisée pour distinguer l’image identitaire véhiculée au seinde la nation de celle véhiculée à l’étranger. Nous prêtons une attentionparticulière à l’évolution du discours sur la nature afin d’étudierl’exploitation de la nature à des fins économiques, politiques et sociales.Nous montrons que les images et les textes dans les catalogues de la MECtransmettent un milieu sauvage familier et rendent, par conséquent, la consommationtant logique que souhaitable pour ses membres et pour la nation

Listen Up! Be Responsible! What Graduate Students Hear About University Teaching, Graduate Education and Employment

What we hear at universities and in public conversations is that there is a crisis in graduate student education and employment. We are interested here in the (re)circulation of the discourses of crisis and responsibility. What do graduate students hear about their education, their career prospects, and their responsibilities? How does work in educational development contribute to these conversations? We explore these questions through an analysis of two data sets: the course outlines for multidiscipline graduate courses on university teaching, and popular and academic press articles on graduate education and employment. Through this discursive analysis, we first examine what graduate students hear through these two archives of writing. We then unpack two key discourses that emerge across the archives: the privileging of practice over theory, and the desire to assign responsibility for how the crisis of graduate education and employment should be resolved and by whom.  Ce que l’on entend dans les universités et en public, c’est que l’emploi et la formation universitaire aux cycles supérieurs sont en pleine crise. Nous nous intéressons à la (re)circulation des discours sur la crise et la responsabilité. Qu’est-ce que les étudiants des cycles supérieurs entendent au sujet de leur formation, de leurs perspectives de carrière et de leurs responsabilités? Comment est-ce que le travail en développement éducationnel contribue à ces conversations? Nous explorons ces questions par le truchement d’une analyse de deux groupes de données : des plans des cours multidisciplinaires de cycles supérieurs portant sur l’enseignement universitaire et des articles de presse populaires et universitaires portant sur la formation aux cycles supérieurs et sur l’emploi. Dans cette analyse discursive, nous examinons d’abord ce que les étudiants des cycles supérieurs saisissent en lisant ces deux types d’archives écrites. Nous déconstruisons par la suite deux discours essentiels qui ressortent de ces archives, soit de privilégier la pratique plutôt que la théorie, et d’attribuer à quelqu’un la tâche de résoudre la crise de l’emploi et de la formation universitaire aux cycles supérieurs

Dear SSHRC, What Do You Want? An Epistolary Narrative of Expertise, Identity, and Time in Grant Writing

The current research climate has heightened expectations for social science researchers to secure research grant funding at the same time that such funding appears to be more competitive than ever. As a result, researchers experience anxiety, confusion, loss of confidence, second guessing, and a lack of trust in the system and themselves. This autoethnographic study provides an insider perspective on the intellectual, emotional, and physical experience of grant writing. A team of scholars document the production of a research grant for their major national funding agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The story is presented through epistolary narrative in the form of a series of unsent letters addressed to the funding agency. The letters foreground themes of expertise, identity, and time as they were shaped through the grant-writing process. The analysis draws attention to unnecessary complexities and challenges that could and should be eliminated from granting processes if the intention is to foster quality research and strengthen research capacity. Implications may prove instructive for other grant applicants, resource personnel employed to support applicants, and potential funders.This work was funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2017-0104)

Accessibility in Teaching Assistant Training: A Critical Review of Programming from Ontario’s Teaching and Learning Centres

It is increasingly understood that university education must be accessible to persons with disabilities. The responsibility to make the university accessible is arguably shared by all of us and yet, the extent to which it has become fully accessible is certainly suspect. By undertaking qualitative, discursive analysis of websites, online texts and other materials provided by Ontario’s teaching and learning centres, this paper seeks to do two things. First, it provides a critical overview of the types of training currently available at Ontario universities for teaching assistants on accessibility and teaching. This review will outline initiatives directed towards compliance with Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requirements, those focused on education and advocacy (as well as areas of overlap) and broader equity training which encompasses accessibility. Second, this paper, considering the content of the reviewed material and informed by critical disability studies, offers up an articulation of future directions for research, writing, advocacy, and training on teaching assistant development on accessible teaching. Il est de plus en plus accepté que l’éducation universitaire doit être accessible aux personnes handicapées. Certes, la responsabilité de rendre l’université accessible est partagée par tous et pourtant, la mesure dans laquelle celle-ci est devenue totalement accessible est sans nul doute suspecte. Après avoir entrepris des analyses qualitatives et discursives de sites web, de textes en ligne et d’autres documents fournis par des centres d’enseignement et d’apprentissage de l’Ontario, on cherche dans cet article à accomplir deux choses. Tout d’abord, l’article présente un aperçu critique des types de formation disponibles à l’heure actuelle dans les universités de l’Ontario à l’intention des enseignants auxiliaires sur l’accessibilité et l’enseignement. Cet examen va décrire les initiatives mises en place en vue de répondre aux exigences de la Loi sur l’accessibilité pour les Ontariens handicapés, ainsi que celles qui se concentrent sur l’éducation et la promotion des intérêts (et sur des domaines qui se chevauchent) et celles qui se rapportent à une formation plus vaste sur l’équité qui englobe l’accessibilité. Ensuite, prenant en considération le contenu des documents examinés et des études critiques sur la situation des personnes handicapées, l’article offre des propositions de directions futures pour la recherche, la rédaction, la promotion des intérêts et la formation en vue du développement professionnel des enseignants auxiliaires en matière d’enseignement accessible

Accessibility in Teaching Assistant Training: A Critical Review of Programming from Ontario’s Teaching and Learning Centres

It is increasingly understood that university education must be accessible to persons with disabilities. The responsibility to make the university accessible is arguably shared by all of us and yet, the extent to which it has become fully accessible is certainly suspect. By undertaking qualitative, discursive analysis of websites, online texts and other materials provided by Ontario’s teaching and learning centres, this paper seeks to do two things. First, it provides a critical overview of the types of training currently available at Ontario universities for teaching assistants on accessibility and teaching. This review will outline initiatives directed towards compliance with Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requirements, those focused on education and advocacy (as well as areas of overlap) and broader equity training which encompasses accessibility. Second, this paper, considering the content of the reviewed material and informed by critical disability studies, offers up an articulation of future directions for research, writing, advocacy, and training on teaching assistant development on accessible teaching. Il est de plus en plus accepté que l’éducation universitaire doit être accessible aux personnes handicapées. Certes, la responsabilité de rendre l’université accessible est partagée par tous et pourtant, la mesure dans laquelle celle-ci est devenue totalement accessible est sans nul doute suspecte. Après avoir entrepris des analyses qualitatives et discursives de sites web, de textes en ligne et d’autres documents fournis par des centres d’enseignement et d’apprentissage de l’Ontario, on cherche dans cet article à accomplir deux choses. Tout d’abord, l’article présente un aperçu critique des types de formation disponibles à l’heure actuelle dans les universités de l’Ontario à l’intention des enseignants auxiliaires sur l’accessibilité et l’enseignement. Cet examen va décrire les initiatives mises en place en vue de répondre aux exigences de la Loi sur l’accessibilité pour les Ontariens handicapés, ainsi que celles qui se concentrent sur l’éducation et la promotion des intérêts (et sur des domaines qui se chevauchent) et celles qui se rapportent à une formation plus vaste sur l’équité qui englobe l’accessibilité. Ensuite, prenant en considération le contenu des documents examinés et des études critiques sur la situation des personnes handicapées, l’article offre des propositions de directions futures pour la recherche, la rédaction, la promotion des intérêts et la formation en vue du développement professionnel des enseignants auxiliaires en matière d’enseignement accessible

Cataloguing Wilderness: Whiteness, Masculinity and Responsible Citizenship in Canadian Outdoor Recreation Texts

This research examines representations of wilderness, Canadian nationalism and the production of responsible and respectable subjects in commonplace outdoor recreation texts from Mountain Equipment Co-op, the Bruce Trail Conservancy and the Bruce Peninsula National Park. Drawing theoretical insights from Foucault’s genealogy and technologies of the self, post-structural feminism and anti-racist scholarship on whiteness, I pose three broad questions: How is nature understood? How is Canada imagined? How are certain subjects produced through outdoor recreation? In this research, I outline five ways in which wilderness is represented. First, I consider how wilderness is produced as a place that is above all else empty (of human inhabitants and human presence). I then examine four ways in which the empty wilderness is represented: first, as dangerous and inhospitable, second, as threatened, third, as sublime and fourth, as the Canadian nation. I link the meanings invested into wilderness with a set of practices or desired forms of conduct in order to articulate how a specific subject is produced. These subjects draw on the meanings attributed to wilderness. The dangerous wilderness can only be navigated by a Calculating Adventurer. The threatened wilderness desperately needs the assistance of the Conscientious Consumer. The sublime wilderness provides respite for the Transformed Traveler. The Canadian or national wilderness is best suited to and belongs to the Wilderness Citizen. The four subjects I examine in this thesis each draw from particular wilderness representations and specific practices in order to be produced as desirable in the context of outdoor recreation. By examining the relationship between wilderness discourse, subjects and practices in everyday texts, I illustrate how masculine and white respectability operate in outdoor recreation. Pointing to subtle shifts in the meanings and values attributed to masculinity, Canadianness and whiteness, I articulate how outdoor recreation texts produce subject positions which are richly embedded in race and gender privilege and assertions about national belonging. In addition to examining whiteness, nationalism and masculinity, this research examines how individualized practices, such as consumer activism, become understood as the conduct of responsible neoliberal citizens concerned with national and environmental interests.Ph

Accountability, ethics and knowledge production: racialised academic staff navigating competing expectations in the social production of research with marginalised communities

Universities, both in Canada and throughout the global North, are predicated on empiricist and positivist understandings of knowledge and knowledge production which are communicated and strengthened through research practices and protocols. Drawn from a larger study exploring research leadership among accomplished academic staff, this paper examines interviews with eight racialised female academic staff who focus on social justice research predicated on co-producing knowledge with marginalised communities. Building on the rich scholarship which conveys the consequences of systemic discrimination for racialised and Indigenous scholars working in Canadian universities, we explore how participants navigate systems that fail to understand their epistemological and methodological orientation towards research and consider what it reveals about research culture and claims of inclusiveness in the Canadian academy. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on performative diversity in academia, we consider how academic structures, protocols and policies associated with research influence the social production of knowledge and resist change toward greater equity and Reconciliation demanded of Canadian higher education.publishedVersio

Conditions for Contingent Instructors Engaged in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

An increasingly large number of courses in Canadian postsecondary institutions are taught by contingent instructors who hold full- or part-time positions for contractually limited time periods. Despite strong commitments to advancing teaching and learning, the labour and employment conditions for contingent instructors affect the incentives and possibilities for them to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Through a collaborative writing inquiry, the 9 authors examine the influences of three key conditions of contingency: institutional knowledge, status, and role; invisibility and isolation; and precarity. Four composite stories demonstrate the ways varied conditions of contingency may play out in contingent instructors’ lives and typically undermine the possibilities for them to pursue SoTL. Institutions present contingent instructors with a mixed message: research and SoTL are desirable and frequently encouraged, yet contingent instructors are often ineligible or hindered from engagement. Dans les établissements d’enseignement post-secondaires canadiens, un nombre de plus en plus élevé de cours sont enseignés par des instructeurs occasionnels ayant des contrats à temps plein ou à temps partiel pour des périodes contractuelles limitées. Malgré les solides engagements pour l’avancement de l’enseignement et de l’apprentissage, les conditions de travail et d’emploi des instructeurs occasionnels affectent les motivations et les possibilités qui pourraient leur permettre de s’engager dans l’avancement des connaissances en enseignement et en apprentissage (ACEA). Grâce à une enquête menée en collaboration, les 9 auteurs examinent les influences de trois conditions clés de ces emplois occasionnels : connaissance institutionnelle, statut et rôle; invisibilité et isolement; et précarité. Quatre témoignages composés montrent les manières dont les conditions variées de ces emplois occasionnels peuvent jouer un rôle dans la vie des instructeurs occasionnels et comment cela affaiblit les possibilités auxquelles ils ont accès afin de poursuivre des activités en ACEA. Les établissements présentent la situation des instructeurs occasionnels avec un message mixte : la recherche et l’ACEA sont des activités désirables et fréquemment encouragées, toutefois les instructeurs occasionnels sont souvent empêchés de s’y engager ou inéligibles