Canadian Sociologists in the First Person 9780228007746

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Acknowledgments

C A NA D IA N S OCIOLOGIST S IN T HE FIR ST PER SON

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Canadian Sociologists in the First Person

EDITED BY STEPHEN HAROLD RIGGINS AND NEIL M c LAUGHLIN

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0670-1 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0671-8 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0775-3 (epub) isbn 978-0-2280-0774-6 (epdf) Legal deposit third quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received by the Memorial University Publications Fund.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Canadian sociologists in the first person / edited by Stephen Harold Riggins and Neil McLaughlin. Names: Riggins, Stephen Harold, 1946– editor. | McLaughlin, Neil, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210156155 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210156171 | isbn 9780228006701 (cloth) | isbn 9780228006718 (paper) | isbn 9780228007746 (epdf) | isbn 9780228007753 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Sociologists—Canada—Biography. | lcsh: Sociology— Canada—History—20th century. | lcsh: Canada—Intellectual life— 20th century. | lcgft: Autobiographies. Classification: lcc hm478 .c36 2021 | ddc 301.092/271—dc23

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

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Contents

Introduction 3 Stephen Harold Riggins and Neil McLaughlin PA RT O NE

P RO F E S S ION A L S OC I OLOGY

1 Marginality, Structure, Agency: A Slow Learner Confronts Sociology 33 Robert J. Brym 2 Adventures of a Chronic Meanderer 49 Axel van den Berg 3 The Contested Profession: A Sociological Autobiography 78 Scott Davies 4 Choices and Non-Choices: Waltzing with the Micro/Macro in Sociology 99 Susan A. McDaniel PA RT T WO

P O L I C Y S O C I OLOGY

5 A Career Based on Coincidence 125 Ralph Matthews 6 Not All Who Wander Are Lost: Interdisciplinary Travels of a Political Sociologist 157 Daniel Béland 7 Studying the War in the Woods and Other Environmental Controversies from the Left Coast 176 David B. Tindall 8 From West Coast to East Coast, from Activism to Academia 200 Mark C.J. Stoddart

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Contents P O L I T I CA L E C ON OM Y

9 Reflections on a Sociological Career: An Academic Autobiography 225 Wallace Clement 10 How Do We Know What We Know? A Feminist Life and Times in Canadian Sociology 246 Meg Luxton 11 From Ugly American to Critical Sociologist – in Five Decades 268 William K. Carroll 12 Learning Sociology: A Participant’s Perspective 295 Pat Armstrong 13 Social Contexts, Social Networks, and Becoming a Sociologist Reza Nakhaie PA RT FO UR

S O C I A L AC TI V I S M

14 My Favourite Problems 345 Metta Spencer 15 From Residential School to University Professor 369 Cora J. Voyageur 16 “I Know You Are, But What Am I?”: Race, Nation, and the Everyday 395 Sarita Srivastava 17 “What the ___ Are You Going to Do with Sociology?”: Race, Community, and Professional Life 417 Carl E. James PA RT F I VE

E T H NO GRAP HY A N D C U LTU R A L STU D I E S

18 On Becoming a Professional Stranger 447 Will C. van den Hoonaard 19 Before Cultural Studies Became a Buzzword 463 Stephen Harold Riggins 20 In a Strange Nation in My Nation Itself Jean-Philippe Warren Index 509

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The Backstory

C A NA D IA N S OCIOLOGIST S IN T HE FIR ST PER SON

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On the House

Introduction Stephen Harold Riggins and Neil McLaughlin

GUIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is a pioneer volume documenting the Canadian “sociological imagination” through personal recollections of a lifetime of experiences. The contributors connect the unique and shared features of their careers to broad social dynamics while providing a guide to their own research and contributions to their universities, profession, and broader society. Our book is not a snapshot of the Canadian scene today. It is a history. The emphasis is on sociologists who began their teaching career in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Only two of the twenty contributors began their teaching career in the twenty-first century. Our book is also a contribution to the sociology of sociology and broader Canadian intellectual life. Several volumes of memoirs devoted to the careers of American sociologists have appeared (citing only two examples: Horowitz 1969; Sica and Turner 2005). But the English Canadian equivalents are typically short articles scattered in diverse places and concentrating on a narrow range of professional or personal activities (e.g., Brym 2006; Burnet 1981; Burns 1992; Davis 1991, 1993; Felt 2012; Frank 1991; Helmes-Hayes 2003; Hughes 1973, 1977; Mann 1996; Porter 1993, 1995, 2008, 2019; Pullman 1983; Riggins 2003, 2019; Smith 1992, 1994, 2014; Spencer 1994, n.d.; Tremblay 2014). Sociologists often invoke C. Wright Mills (1959) in their textbooks, and feminists have taught us that the personal is political; however, the truth is that autobiographical reflections tend to be frowned upon by the discipline. Structural quantitative empirical sociologists who

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believe in social science are deeply sceptical of studies with an N of 1, informed, as they must be, by individual subjectivity and the selectivity of memory. Critical theorists influenced by Foucault and Bourdieu are also deeply sceptical of psychological reflections and intellectual profiles but for different reasons. Foucault has taught us to look for discourses that create subjects, and Bourdieu’s influential notion of a reflexive sociology involves being critical of an individual’s field position and analytic categories while leaving individual experiences, lives, and psychology out of our sociological perspective. Nonetheless, Foucault (1988) gave autobiographical interviews and Bourdieu (2007) published Sketches for a Self-Analysis. This volume is consequently an effort to push the discipline in Canada to explore competing perspectives on the role of autobiographies in a self-understanding of our craft. Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is devoted primarily, but not exclusively, to sociologists who have specialized in the study of Canada and who have spent most of their careers teaching here. Most of the contributors were awarded Canadian PhDs. The selection of contributors reflects the co-editors’ long participation in the Canadian Sociological Association, although we do not represent the association nor are we claiming that we have a sample that accurately reflects Canadian sociology in general. Our contributors are drawn from across the country; teach in a range of different types of institutions; are prominent in the discipline and in their specialization; and certainly represent significant and diverse intellectual currents, political perspectives, and life-career experiences. We aim to start a broader conversation about what sociology and the academic profession look like in Canada from a first-person perspective. Perhaps the closest equivalent in English-language Canadian sociology to the kind of chapters we have solicited is Steven Kleinknecht’s (2007) interview with the symbolic interactionist and ethnographer Robert Prus. The way Kleinknecht probed for autobiographical dimensions in the interviewee’s research is exemplary, but we wanted to encourage contributors to write their own intellectual profiles because this gave them more control over the text. Eleven of the twenty contributors were born outside the country (the number includes one Newfoundlander born before Confederation with Canada). A few potential contributors hesitated to accept our call for papers partly because of the prevailing sociological habitus. We were pleased to see that many semi-reluctant contributors

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soon realized that an intellectual profile could be an effective way of reflecting on their own careers and getting a message across to readers about lessons learned from their sociological practice. The editors did not impose a set of questions or topics on contributors but were instead open to and encouraging of spirited position taking and reflections. However, we did caution that, in our opinion, it was possible to recount the suffering, failures, and political battles characteristic of all careers while retaining a degree of privacy and showing respect towards opposing individuals and perspectives. We played an encouraging and intellectual role in editing these chapters to the extent that the genre might be called “guided autobiography.” This may actually be true of the American volumes as well, but the editors say little about their role in their introductions. In our opinion, to say that we have helped shape the chapters of Canadian Sociologists in the First Person, some more than others, is simply confirming the role of a good editor. (The term “guided autobiography” is sometimes associated with James Birren at the University of Southern California. The friendly advice we gave contributors with PhDs should not be confused with Birren’s praiseworthy classes for the public.) The economics of publishing also played a role in shaping these chapters. Contributors were obliged to be more concise than Riggins and McLaughlin wanted. Social life, for sociologists, is always a collective process and product, and so it was with this book, even though all the authors ultimately attempted to capture their own subjective experiences, perspectives, and lessons. Although sociologists stress collective processes and group dynamics in an overall theoretical worldview, autobiographical reflections do have a long history in our discipline. Among the nineteenth-century founders of the social sciences German sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey was probably the scholar who was most impressed by autobiography as a suitable source of valid information. Autobiography is the highest and most instructive form in which the understanding of life confronts us … Autobiography is merely the literary expression of a man’s reflection on the course of his life. Such reflection, though it may be limited in extent, is frequently made by every individual … [Autobiography] alone makes historical insight possible. The power and breadth of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them are the foundation of historical vision. It alone enables us to give life back

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to the bloodless shadows of the past. Combined with an infinite desire to surrender to and lose one’s self in the existence of others, it makes the great historian. (Dilthey 1961, 85–7) Both Dilthey in the nineteenth century and C. Wright Mills in the twentieth century can be seen as sociology’s cautionary reflexive voice in the background of the field, reminding us of the dangers of scientism, something poststructuralists and feminists would do again after the 1960s. Life writing, in one form or another (diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, confessions, interviews, life histories, profiles, self-portraits, etc.) has, of course, a long history, stretching back at least to Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (398–400 AD), but modern autobiographical consciousness is relatively new (Chansky and Hipchen 2016). The requirements seem to be the cultivation of individualism, a belief in the possibility of authenticity, and an honest intention to tell the truth. It is possible that these preconditions for modern autobiography first became widely held ideals in the late 1700s or early 1800s. According to Anderson (2001, 7), the word “autobiography” was coined either in the late 1700s (by the political radical and man of letters William Taylor) or in 1809 (by the poet Robert Southey). Eventually, it became acceptable for obscure people – like university professors – to publish autobiographies. The first ambitious publication of intellectual autobiographies by academics was Felix Meiner’s Die Wissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (Present-day knowledge in self-portraits), which dates from the 1920s. There are an astonishing twenty-seven volumes in the series. Unfortunately, only one is by a sociologist – Leopold von Wiese (Popkin 2009). The best examples of autobiographies by Canadian sociologists are the work of Quebeckers: Récit d’une émigration by Fernand Dumont (1997) and Entre les rêves et l’histoire by Guy Rocher (1989). Our previous list of autobiographies was restricted to publications in English. Strictly speaking, Rocher’s book is a collection of interviews. However, the boundaries of autobiography as a genre are vague because most forms of life writing have autobiographical dimensions. Consequently, we are willing to consider interviews as autobiography if they contain a sufficient amount of information about an interviewee’s personal life. The person asking questions does not have total control over an interview.

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It is not possible to do justice to Dumont and Rocher in a couple of paragraphs, but we want to give an impression of these books with the hope that this will encourage more anglophones to read them. The books are especially interesting for Rocher’s and Dumont’s perspectives on the so-called Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the path to “modernization” in Quebec, nationalism, the sociology of religion, and the authors’ involvement in left-wing versions of Roman Catholicism. Given that he referred to sociology as “une science parasite” (Dumont 1997, 105), the diversity of Fernand Dumont’s career should not be a surprise. He was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and sociologist. The word “emigration” in the title of his book refers to a cultural journey rather than to a geographical one. It was an emigration from a typical Quebec village in the 1920s and 1930s to the wider, intellectual world of Quebec City and Paris. The book contains an evocative account of his childhood and a very detailed history of his early education within Roman Catholic institutions in Quebec. He was awarded his first doctorate at the University of Paris in 1967 and, later, a second doctorate in theology. When he arrived in France, he thought it was important to expand his education in psychology. While the book includes pleasant memories of his education abroad, he did note the poor quality of education in the crowded classrooms of the University of Paris (89). Lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales were more stimulating. His teachers at the University of Paris and the École included the psychologists Ignace Meyerson and Daniel Lagache, the sociologist of knowledge Georges Gurvitch, the Marxist economic historian Pierre Vilar, and the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. Outside the classroom, his discovery of the vitality of popular culture in working-class districts of Paris was most important for his future research. About his return to Canada, he wrote: “Je quittai la France sans regret … Mon attachement à la culture française avait grandi, était devenu moins livresque. J’étais plus conscient que jamais de la nécessité pour le Québec de maintenir des liens étroits avec elle. Mais je n’éprouvais aucune envie de demeurer en France ni de vivre dans mon pays comme un exilé de l’interieur” (98). His book Le lieu de l’homme: La culture comme distance et mêmoire received the 1968 Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. Guy Rocher entered graduate school at Harvard in 1950 because he wanted to study with Talcott Parsons. Even for a reader who is critical of Parsons’s theoretical perspective, the highlight of Entre les rêves et l’his-

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toire is likely to be the author’s enthusiasm for Parsons as the ideal model of an inspiring teacher (Rocher 1989, 118–26). The sociology Rocher knew when he arrived at Harvard was the French School, primarily Durkheim and the Durkheimians. It was through Parsons that he became acquainted with Max Weber’s historical research, crucial for his future studies of Quebec. Parsons is reputed to have said that Rocher’s small book on his sociological theories is one of the best introductions to his work in any language. The title of the English translation is Talcott Parsons and American Sociology (Rocher 1975). However, Rocher was more than just a fan. He was convinced that Parsons was influenced too much by German sociology and Protestantism to understand Quebec history and to see the positive aspects of the Roman Catholic Church. Rocher was instrumental in developing the language laws, which guaranteed the survival of the French language in Quebec and the reform of the Quebec educational system. His Introduction à la sociologie générale is one of the most widely read introductions to sociology written by a Canadian. For someone with a limited knowledge of French, Entre les rêves et l’histoire may be the more enjoyable of the two books. Rocher’s work is also closer than Dumont’s to mainstream sociology. Both Rocher and Dumont, as teachers, researchers, and public intellectuals, were active in the professionalization of sociology at Quebec universities in the years before “la paperasserie administrative” reached the university (Dumont 1997, 102). Dumont was one of the founders of the journal Recherches sociographiques; assisted in creating a series of methodology courses at Laval; and taught political sociology, economic sociology, and the history of sociology. Judging these authors by the yardstick of the sociology of sociology, readers will probably find that Rocher and Dumont, despite their obvious appeal, are a little too discrete about their academic colleagues and the backstage of sociology departments and university administration. This is an unfair evaluation according to Jean-Philippe Warren (personal communication to Riggins): “Fernand Dumont and Guy Rocher had an impact on their society English Canadian sociologists can only dream of. They don’t talk about their sociological colleagues: they were too busy changing society.” For an appreciation of Dumont that differs from what one might hear in a sociology class, see Fernand Dumont: A Sociologist Turns to Theology by Gregory Baum (2015). A German-born Canadian priest and theologian who taught at the University of Toronto, Baum frankly admitted that it took him a while to see Dumont’s originality.

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THE HISTORICAL ERAS OF CANADIAN SOCIOLOGY

Not all historians define the eras of Canadian sociology exactly as we do in this volume.2 We offer here a framework that we believe helps make sense of the generational experiences discussed in this book. We highlight key features of five eras of Canadian sociology but warn that this does not comprise an exhaustive list. The twenty contributors to Canadian Sociologists in the First Person range in age from their midforties to their late eighties. Except for the youngest, their careers have typically straddled two of the last three of the five eras of Canadian sociology: years of expanding job opportunities and optimism (ca. 1947–75, the third era); years of austerity, neoliberalism, and disappointment over the difficulty of attaining a tenure-stream teaching position (ca. 1976–95, the fourth era); and years of technological change and anxiety about the future of Canadian universities (ca. 1996 to the present, the fifth era). These five eras are shaped by societal-wide events (wars, economic depressions, demographic curves, etc.) that directly affect the lives of young people and the public perception of the desirability of university education. Consequently, expanding and contracting opportunities for academic employment set the boundaries of the eras comprising the history of Canadian sociology since its introduction as a university subject circa 1890. Note that it is easier to identify the characteristics at the heart of an era than to establish the cut-off points for its beginning and ending. Dates in the following summary are thus approximations. Historical eras might be understood as consisting of two “units” (Corsten 1999, 259). No era can be homogeneous because people experience major social events at different points in their lives. It is important to distinguish between people born at the borders of an era and those born at the centre because their experiences will not be identical. For example, at the time of the 1960s counterculture, the third era included teachers who were probably more conservative than their students and the two groups saw each other as antagonists. Now there is widespread speculation that sociology teachers are more left wing than their students, something that has some support in the literature on the politics of professors (Nakhaie and Adam 2008; Nakhaie and Brym 1999). Sociologists professionally active in the years we call the first era (ca. 1890–1929) were influenced by the left-wing activism of the Social Gospel and by a papal encyclical on social justice (Riggins

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2012). Publications dating from these years are typically applied research about social reform related to poverty and the Canadianization of immigrants. This period ended with the founding of the first Canadian Department of Sociology at McGill University in the mid-1920s (a major step towards professionalization) and the onset of the Great Depression. The second era (ca. 1930–46) was characterized by academic stagnation due to the Depression and the Second World War. For these reasons, there is a missing cohort of Canadian sociologists in the second era, although some valuable research was undertaken. The third era of Canadian sociology (ca. 1947–75) began with optimism due to anticipated prosperity following the Second World War. A wave of veterans entering university inaugurated the era, although tenure-stream teaching positions did not expand much until the mid1950s. For the first time Canadian university students enjoyed the benefit of policies that eased the financial burden of university education (e.g., government-backed student loans). There were similarities between the youth cultures of the late 1940s and early 1950s and then the late 1960s and early 1970s in that veterans of the Second World War felt confident enough to challenge some of the perceived juvenile and pretentious practices of traditional university life. In these years, graduate students normally obtained tenure-stream positions before completing their PhD dissertation and quickly advanced through the bureaucratic ranks at their universities. This optimistic outlook lasted as long as university enrolment and hiring continued to expand. For both intellectual and practical reasons, sociology was first introduced to Canadian universities in the context of multidisciplinary departments. Canadian universities did not have enough faculty members to offer BA degrees with a major in sociology. Once the faculty expanded, many of these multidisciplinary departments split (Riggins 2017). A large percentage of sociologists appointed in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s were American immigrants with little knowledge of their new host society. There was no practical alternative to hiring American sociologists because the discipline was so underdeveloped in Canada. This provoked reactions. The Canadianization of academic departments in the social sciences and humanities was part of a broader concern about American influence in the Canadian economy and society (Cormier 2004). Signs of an emerging professionalization were the founding of the first Canadian sociology journal, the creation of

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the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (along with some regional associations), and government funding for research. There was also a trend towards common academic standards in training and administration across North American universities. However, conflict within sociology departments was intense during the latter years of this era and the early years of the fourth era. Disagreements were most likely to be about the influence of Marxism and feminism as well as the criteria for hiring (“academic excellence” versus Canadian citizenship and Canada-focused research). The Canadianization movement was strongest in the early years of the fourth era, although it arose in the third. In the academic year 1956–57, there were thirty-two full-time university professors teaching sociology in Canada. Twenty years later the number had risen to 917 (Brym and Fox 1989, 20). Given the maximum size of the student body and government concerns about financing education, a perpetual expansion of universities was not possible. Thus, the defining characteristic of the beginning of the fourth era (ca. 1976–95) was the difficulty of finding jobs in university teaching. Tenure-stream positions were occupied by professors who had a long way to go before retirement and there was little room for new positions. Due to increased competition and a maturing faculty, professors started concentrating on their own “careerist micro-world” (McMurtry 2010, 19). Since competition raised the bar for access to employment, the successful applicants for tenured positions had normally either completed their PhD or were on the verge of completion. In a region such as southern Ontario, which has several universities, the low salaries of sessional instructors could require working simultaneously at different campuses of the same university or working simultaneously at more than one school. The fifth era (ca. 1996 to the present) began with the replacement of the generation of academics influenced by the Canadianization movement (Guzman and Silver 2018; Lachepelle and Burnett 2018; Wilkinson et al. 2013). More courses are now taught by non-tenured faculty members in order to save money, and the percentage of “traditional” students has declined (those who live on campus, rarely work in paid employment, and are single or childless). An added source of funding is out-of-province students and foreign students who pay higher tuition fees. The internationalization of the student body has been driven as much by financial considerations as by an appreciation of diversity and globalization. National and internation-

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al competition among universities has increased, and distance education has made it more difficult for universities to recruit local students. The standards for judging scholarships have become so demanding that even graduate students are expected to have a publication record. Consequently, students have to make early commitments to a career and stay on that path if they hope to succeed in a crowded field. Late bloomers are forced out of the market. Due to greater public scepticism about the societal benefits of university education, government subsidization of higher education has declined since the 1970s and administrators have been forced to turn to alternative sources of funding. Administrators look to business models of management. So-called performance indicators measuring publications, community service, and success in teaching have been introduced, and public relations offices on campus have expanded. An added source of funding is out-of-province students and foreign students who pay higher tuition fees. Teachers and administrators have become more diverse in terms of gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity, although this trend has not gone far enough. This restructuring of the organization of higher education is still under way and is the cause of anxiety. It is thought to be the most dramatic change in the financing and administration of higher education since the emphasis on faculty research introduced at the end of the nineteenth century (Brownlee 2015; Chan and Fisher 2008; Collini 2012; Holt and Anderson 1998; McLaughlin 2005; Milian and McLaughlin 2017; Newson and Polster 2010). However, change is most noticeable in the natural sciences, engineering, and in business schools. The restructuring has also progressed further at the more elite universities. Sociology has not been at the forefront of restructuring because the production of knowledge in the social sciences is not very profitable. An emotional debate about the health of sociology at Canadian universities has appeared. Some praise the intellectual diversity and openness to interdisciplinary research within the discipline, which they view as its strength (Carroll 2016). Others are critical because they think some new intellectual approaches and the increasing politicization of scholarship undermines the distinctiveness of disciplines (e.g., Brym 2002, 2003; McLaughlin 2005). And this spirited debate within the discipline is increasingly connected to broader societallevel political movements against anti-Black racism, and continuing struggles over the underrepresentation of women and LGBTQ2S+ in

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sociology. Most of the contributors to this book were major figures in the field well before the fifth era of Canadian sociology. The analysis you will read in a number of chapters in this volume about sexism, racism, and anti-Indigenous bigotries in our departments will take you back to old issues that have not yet been fully addressed and certainly have not yet been resolved. Sociology was mostly white and largely male in those years, and this is reflected to some extent in the mix of authors in our book. The diversity of political views and approaches to sociology presented here, however, points to continuing debates about how best to address historical injustices and different intellectual views about what sociology’s future should look like. The current debate about sociology can only be improved by an honest account of its past. We think we have contributed to this debate in a modest way. In 1970, when David Coburn reflected on the state of Canadian sociology, it was typical of the times that he was concerned almost solely with the Canadianization of the discipline (Coburn 1970). Attention to the underrepresentation of women and representatives of the nation’s increasing ethnic and racial diversity came later. But even in 1985, only 12 per cent of Canadian university professors were women (CAUT 2008). Before immigrating to Canada, Dorothy Smith was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Hired as a lecturer at Berkeley in the late 1960s, she was the only woman among forty-five instructors. “I waited to be told I existed and when the call to exist didn’t come, I didn’t realize that I could announce my existence myself” (Smith 1992, 50). In this volume, Meg Luxton (chapter 10) and Pat Armstrong (chapter 12) describe similar situations at Canadian universities. Readers seeking information about the contemporary situation of non-white professors in sociology, in addition to Voyageur (chapter 15, this volume), Srivastava (chapter 16, this volume), and James (chapter 17, this volume), should consult The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities (Henry et al. 2017), an essential text for the movement to build a more racially diverse and decolonized discipline. For information about the perceived marginality of academics from working-class backgrounds, see Waterfield et al. (2019). In the 1970s, John Alan Lee, at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, might have been the first openly gay academic sociologist in Canada. An essential source for understanding the situation of gay and lesbian academics in the midtwentieth century is Edward Sagarin’s blandly titled The Homosexual

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in America: A Subjective Approach, published under the pen name Donald Webster Cory (1951). Sagarin wrote from a perspective shaped by symbolic interactionism and University of Chicago-style research on minority groups. Twenty-years ahead of his time, he publicized a discourse of equality, which would have been known only within LGBTQ2S+ communities. THE CANADIAN SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is organized into five types of sociology defined according to the perceived thrust of the investigator’s research: professional sociology, policy-oriented sociology, public sociology, political economy, and ethnography and cultural studies. This broad categorization of the contributors is somewhat arbitrary but provides an interpretive frame that goes beyond strictly personal dimensions. Contributors have published in more than one area, used different research methodologies, and, over the years, changed their minds about things. For all of these reasons some contributors might legitimately be classified differently. We have organized the book in this way in order to give the volume coherence rather than to pigeonhole the authors. Professional Sociology In a well-known address, Michael Burawoy (2005) argues that, at the most basic level, there are four types of sociological practice (professional, critical, policy, and public) and that the health of the discipline requires a balance among these types. Exactly where the balance should be is a matter of taste and politics and, thus, dispute. The experiences of many sociologists encompass all of these types of work at various times in their careers, and maybe even at different hours of a day (Michalski 2016). What is at stake in Burawoy’s categorization is the type of knowledge produced, the venue in which it appears, and the targeted audience. This introduction is not the appropriate place for discussing the extensive literature on Burawoy (see, e.g., Creese et al. 2009; McLaughlin and Turcotte 2007; van den Berg 2014), but we believe this widely debated framework is a helpful heuristic.3 Professional knowledge is created by and for academics. Professional sociology thus provides the foundational training for the other types of sociology. Professional sociologists are preoccupied by theo-

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retical, ethical, and philosophical issues within the social sciences rather than with social activism and shaping public opinion. To identify work as “professional” should not be understood as implying that the other varieties are amateurish in comparison. It is clear that, in their self-understanding, some scholars highlight their professional role more than their public or policy roles. And because the core and most prestigious element of what sociology is today in Canada is a professional practice rooted inside and grounded by the modern research university, we begin this book with selections from self-identified professional sociologists. Robert Brym’s initial venture in sociology was a dissertation about Jewish intellectuals in Russia. His chapter shows how an individual’s research projects evolve over time due to the pressures of employment and promotion, and unexpected opportunities. His diverse research topics have come to include social movements in Atlantic Canada, the history of Canadian sociology, Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, and the future of Canadian society. On several occasions, Axel van den Berg has written about the inadequacies of “Grand Theory” with regard to assisting empirical research, and he has consequently been unfairly labelled a social theorist who dislikes theory. He writes about rational choice theory and labour market policies as well as comparative welfare and employment policies. Scott Davies, a specialist in the sociology of education, candidly discusses the breakdown in civility in some sociology departments in the 1970s and 1980s. He might be classified as a policy-oriented sociologist because his studies of educational institutions are influenced by policy concerns. His chapter concludes with a discussion of the social and institutional forces influencing sociology’s contested professionalism. Susan McDaniel is a demographer who has published articles about the societal impact of reproductive choices, aging, and the conceptualization of generation as a performance. Her chapter emphasizes the impact of feminism on her research and the continuing importance of sociologists in debunking false or simplistic commons-sense ideas. Policy-Oriented Sociology Policy sociologists are more oriented towards shaping debates outside rather than inside the university and the discipline. Some policyoriented sociologists work for clients, perhaps voluntary associations or government agencies, but they may also try to shape public opin-

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ion through independent policy analysis. This section of Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is devoted to sociologists whose careers have dealt with issues concerning the environment, social justice in First Nations communities, regionalism, and welfare reform. Ralph Matthews was not born in Canada but in Newfoundland when it was still an independent country. This accident of birth has influenced his choice of research topics throughout his career, but it especially influenced his early interest in state-sponsored modernization. He turned to political economy for an understanding of Canadian history. Based in Ontario and then British Columbia, he has written about regional disparity, management of the fisheries, and resource management. Daniel Béland, trained in Quebec and France, has investigated pension and welfare reform, health policy, sub-state nationalism, how collective threats are perceived by politicians, and the role of ideas and interests in shaping policy. David Tindall is our only contributor who taught for a long period outside a social science department. He was affiliated with a faculty of forestry, and his specialties are environmental sociology, social movements, social networks, and forestry management. His chapter includes thoughtful reflections about conflicts between social scientists and natural scientists. Mark Stoddart, the youngest contributor to this volume, was awarded an Early Investigator Award from the Canadian Sociological Association. He writes about outdoor recreation from an environmental perspective, industrial forestry practices, tourism, and comparative environmental policies. Public Sociology The contributors in this section do empirical research and policyoriented research but they also play prominent roles as public intellectuals – roles that take them significantly beyond their professional scholarship, often in connection with social movements. The term “public intellectual” should not be reserved for nationally famous pundits who reach the public through commercial mass media: sociologists can be well-published scholars and committed critical intellectuals while being public intellectuals at the local level (e.g., in their dealings with counter-publics such as Indigenous, environmental, and anti-racist or peace movements (see Hanemaayer and Schneider 2014; Hatfield 1990; Helmes-Hayes 2014; Hoecker-Drysdale 1990; Panayotidis 2006; Warren 2003, 2014). The following authors expand our

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understanding of which publics matter in mainstream politics and in the public sphere, an important role for what Burawoy calls “organic public sociologists.” Metta Spencer is best known as the author of a popular introductory textbook in sociology and the founder of Peace Magazine. Throughout her career she has been interested in political sociology. She has written extensively, both as a scholar and an activist, about nuclear warfare, ethnic nationalism, democracy in Russia, and combating group humiliation. She was a member of the network of American and Canadian sociologists associated with Harvard University who came to the University of Toronto in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Cora Voyageur was the only Indigenous tenure-track professor when first appointed to the University of Calgary. She reflects on her experiences in university administration before there was a critical mass of Indigenous scholars. Her research concerns Indigenous experiences in Canada: leadership, employment, economic development, women’s issues, and health. Sarita Srivastava worked as a national spokesperson for Greenpeace, which led to her exploring the political inconsistencies in egalitarian and progressive organizations. An important theme in her chapter concerns how, despite organizers’ intentions, anti-racist actions can be counterproductive. Carl E. James, a critical race theorist, offers a vision for anti-racist sociology and a more democratic and open system of higher education. His chapter is a first-hand account of interactions between professors from minority groups and their colleagues, administrators, and students. Political Economy Wallace Clement (2001) defines political economy as the study of the way societies are created and sustained through a holistic and materialist understanding based on a long historical perspective emphasizing social tensions and contradictions. The intellectual sources of Canadian political economy include Marxism, quantitative research methods developed by American sociologists, and a deep social conscience rooted in left-wing social movements and the New Left of the 1960s. A uniquely Canadian influence was Harold Innis’s staples theory, which involves historical studies of how resources (such as timber, fur, and fish) were exploited in Canada and marketed in more developed countries. Each staple is assumed to have imposed a certain form of infrastructure on the Canadian economy.

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Wallace Clement is one of the foundational figures in Canadian political economy. He writes about his relationship with John Porter, author of the 1960s classic The Vertical Mosaic. His chapter concludes with an overview of his contribution to the new tradition of Canadian political economy. Although Meg Luxton was awarded a doctorate in sociology, her political education was largely acquired outside the classroom from informal study groups, friends, and revitalized progressive movements. She discusses women’s collective efforts to add more subtle notions of household and family relationships to neoMarxism through concepts such as social reproduction and through demonstrating how a privatized family form contributes to capitalism. William Carroll has applied political economy to the social organization of corporate power, collective agencies of resistance, and social justice. He was one of the leaders at the University of Victoria in creating the Interdisciplinary Social Justice Program. Pat Armstrong is a feminist political economist who has published extensively in the areas of women’s work and health care. She helped establish the Women’s Studies Program at York University as well as the York Institute for Health Studies, and she served as director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. Reza Nakhaie was influenced by contemporary Marxism. His chapter is a first-person account of the sacrifices many young academics had to make in order to establish secure careers at a time of precarious employment. A racialized immigrant from Iran, he gives examples of the challenges he encountered and overcame to become a successful sociologist. Nakhaie is Canada’s major expert on the politics of professors and has written extensively on voting, immigration, and stratification. Ethnography and Cultural Studies The contributors in this section might have been grouped under professional sociology, but they define their work, at least to some extent, in opposition to mainstream sociology in that they focus on qualitative research. The term “loyal opposition” (in relation to standard sociology) was popularized by Nicolas C. Mullins (1973) when he described how the organizational and intellectual nature of symbolic interactionism was opposed to that of structural functionalism. We think it is useful to expand this term to include some practitioners of cultural studies. Despite methodological and substantive differences with mainstream sociology, neither symbolic interactionism nor cul-

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tural studies has ever been in a position to dislodge mainstream sociology. Few sociologists would argue that only their variety of sociology is legitimate. But symbolic interactionism and cultural studies remain on the margins of the field, as do scholars who emphasize the reflexive practice of the sociology and history of sociology itself. Cultural studies arose from neo-Marxism and literary studies, and it offers useful socio-linguistic tools for analyzing texts. Ethnography (or participant observation) has declined in popularity since the early and mid-twentieth century – something recently debated in the pages of the Canadian Journal of Sociology (Helmes-Hayes and Milne 2017; Low 2016; McLaughlin 2017). Works that focus on biography and other narratives – histories of sociology, disciplines, intellectuals, and academic cultures – tend to be left on the margins of sociology. Nonetheless, these specialties are profoundly sociological. Will C. van den Hoonaard is best known as an authority on research ethics. He has, however, written about many subjects straddling sociology and anthropology. His chapter is a personal account of the way ethnographers were trained in the 1970s and of the changing perceptions of qualitative research in Canadian sociology. One theme in Stephen Harold Riggins’s chapter concerns the difficulty that confronted sociology students who were interested in the fine arts and popular culture before cultural studies was a well-established specialty. The pressures of looking for a tenure-track position led to his abandoning the sociology of the arts and specializing in race and ethnicity as well as in research combining symbolic interactionism and socio-semiotics. He is the only contributor who experienced a “commuting relationship,” a common pattern in two-career households. Jean-Philippe Warren is an academic and public intellectual who studies Quebec society from the self-avowed perspective of an “inner stranger.” He regards this combination of distance and intimacy as a perspective imposed by his ethnicity. He self-identifies as Jewish, Catholic, Palestinian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, French, British, Scottish, and a francophone-EnglishQuebecker-Canadian. A REFLEXIVE OVERVIEW

Stories about the consequences of marginalization due to class, gender, race, sexual orientation, immigrant status/national origin, colonization, region, personality, rejection of religious and traditional values, and politics run through most of these chapters. We are sampling

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on the dependent variable, as quantitative sociologists say, so there is no way for this kind of data to tease out and isolate the factors that allowed these scholars to overcome challenges and carve out meaningful careers. They were on the edge of things but “optimally marginal” (McLaughlin 2001) since they often had links to prestigious institutions, powerful mentors, peer groups, and social movements that sustained them and – one theme that came up a number of times – important teachers who were often marginalized themselves but somehow managed to inspire, support, and encourage new and creative ideas. The issue of when marginalization can lead to new insights that move scholarship forward is something we leave for another time, but it is obvious that the examples of our contributors offer interesting and important lessons upon which to reflect and to study more systematically in the future. If our sample can be considered representative, this volume suggests that Canadian sociologists tend to come from working-class and lower-middle-class families, and that their ancestral families are in some ways unique. Typically, the contributors remembered a family tradition of political activism, childhood sensitivity to social inequality and injustice, and awareness of cultural differences from neighbours because of their having moved or immigrated. These experiences seem to have compensated for the cultural limitations of their families. Several contributors experienced economic hardships in their young lives. (Readers should consult Timothy Haney’s [2015] statistical study of professors from working-class families.) The history of political activism in the contributors’ ancestral families includes relatives elected as mayors of small and medium-sized cities, serving as chief of a Dene band in Alberta, and participating in movements of national liberation. In other families, parents were certainly interested in contemporary politics but appear not to have gone beyond the level of talk. Also influential in choosing an occupation was the knowledge that at least one parent’s career aspirations had been frustrated and that parents appreciated higher education despite knowing little about the occupational realities of academia. John van Maanen (2011) defines three common types of stories: realist, confessional, and adventure. A realist story is a documentary style of writing that presents apparent facts and interpretations in a no-nonsense manner. Reality is assumed to exist independently of the author, and little in the text calls attention to the presence of the author as observer. The implied message is that anyone would come

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to similar conclusions. Realism is consistent with the objectivity and distance of the natural sciences. That our contributors write in a realist vein is surely a sign of the limited influence of postmodernism, cultural studies, and symbolic interactionism in contemporary Canadian sociology – perspectives sceptical of the scientific pretentions of sociology. These chapters offer realist stories sprinkled with a few anecdotes that van Maanen refers to as confessional stories. This genre conveys a sense of intimacy with readers as authors insert themselves into the text and admit their early misperceptions, mistakes, setbacks, and failures. In this volume confessional stories are generally offered as character-building experiences. Adventure stories also appear in these chapters. The narrator or hero in an adventure story claims special status after overcoming a series of hurdles, sometimes thanks to the assistance of mentors. Narrative stages in adventure stories that would intensify moments of tension and uncertainty are rarely adopted here, perhaps because such tales might be interpreted as too egotistical (a common criticism of life writing). “Autoethnography,” a term coined by David Hayano (1979), has been defined as an “approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experiences” (Ellis et al. 2011). The key phrase here is “systematically analyze.” Contributors to Canadian Sociologists in the First Person rarely generalize beyond their own experiences other than to give practical advice to readers. Only van den Hoonaard refers to himself as any sort of ethnographer, and only Riggins published an article with the word “autoethnography” in the title. Professors have to concentrate on the literature directly relevant to their specialties. Time is short. Judging from the references, few contributors are reading the methodological literature about autoethnography or literary theory about life writing (e.g., articles found in journals such as Life Writing and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies). This observation should not be read as a criticism; it does, however, help explain some of the qualities of these chapters. Historian Jeremy D. Popkin (2007, 36) believed that, in their autobiographies, professional historians present their decision to becoming a historian as a defining moment in their lives. Many chapters in Canadian Sociologists in the First Person read this way. Contributors entered university with the intention of majoring in psychology, business, or education and discovered that the appeal of sociology was the social activism the discipline encouraged, the benefits it seemed to

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offer a community with which students identified, and its potential for contributing to self-understanding. Popkin also noted that historians are rarely disloyal to their discipline in their autobiographies. Professors who have invested nearly a lifetime in an academic career have an incentive to overlook what Bourdieu (2004, 71) calls the “vanity of academic things” (see also Gingras 2010, 627). Max Weber had a similar opinion of “the arrogance of the ‘intellectual’ and learned vocations” (Weber quoted by Mitzman 1970, 66). A dilemma arising in autobiographical accounts concentrating on any type of career is how one can be truthful “without appearing smug about one’s accomplishments, bitter about one’s frustrations, jealous of the rewards reaped by others … and at the same time … make the story stimulating” (Popkin 2005, 183). The most believable story may not be the most captivating. Perhaps this dilemma is not so apparent in Canadian Sociologists in the First Person because readers are assumed to be motivated by education more than by the search for entertainment. One thing we know from broader sociological studies is that children of parents who work in higher education have a tremendous advantage if they decide to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Among the twenty contributors, three have at least one parent or step-parent who was a university professor. Other ancestral links to educational institutions, broadly defined, include a parent who was a librarian, a grandmother who taught Sunday School, and a mother employed as a secretary for a school board. However, some contributors are children of parents who did not complete primary school. The unrealistic discourses of a unique and consistent self are difficult to avoid in autobiography. The conventions of storytelling distort reality; statements that at first glance appear to be facts are more likely interpretations; and memory is fallible. The boundary between truth and fiction is indeed blurry even in realist stories. Without life writing, in one form or another, it is not possible to fully evaluate the scientific claims of sociology. As Alvin Gouldner (1970, 26) so eloquently argues: “Sociologists must surrender the human but elitist assumption that others believe out of need whereas they believe because of the dictates of logic and reason.” Life writing is not science, but neither is it narcissism. Done well, it can yield insights into the reasons for personal commitment to social theories, research agendas, and the very projects of sociology and, indeed, of social science itself.

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A final note about sociology’s past and its future. When our contributors began their scholarly quests, not all the topics they chose to study were trendy. This is a lesson upon which a passionate young scholar of today should seriously reflect. Many of the contributors also faced more challenges and suffered more setbacks as under-employed young scholars than the conventional image of the early experiences of now successful academics sometimes conjures. This is an important point, and we would like to emphasize it while recognizing the very real differences between the precarious academic labour market today and that of earlier generations. You can’t know in advance what issues and ideas will lead to a successful career five, ten, or twenty years in the future. All you can do, as these scholars did, is draw on the sociological imagination, do your best work, and follow your own vision for being a sociologist, scholar, and citizen. The world is in transition and crisis as we finish this volume, but sociology is likely to be even more relevant in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and its economic consequences. Now is an exciting, if challenging, time to begin a lifetime of committing to sociology, of creating your own sociology in the first person. The discipline is very different today, and universities are changing rapidly and are in crisis. Clearly, questions of the decolonization of our intellectual life, trans rights, anti-Black racism, and climate change will be central to Canadian sociology in ways that, with some notable exceptions, they generally were not for the generations represented in this volume. Economic conditions are very different now and are rapidly changing in the wake of the 2020 pandemic; modern research universities are in crisis; and right-wing populism and new forms of fascism have emerged. These issues were not among the issues of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Questions of artificial intelligence, the rise of Chinese capitalism and the power of the Chinese Communist Party, and the social consequences of the digital revolution pose challenges. When combined with the questions discussed above, they may well be as, if not far more, difficult to address than were the issues of the Vietnam War; the Quiet Revolution; the Black, feminist, and gay liberation struggles of the 1960s; and the Kanesatake (Oka) rebellion for the contributors to this book. Tough but exciting times lie ahead for those who wish to commit sociology.

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NOTES

1 See “Itinéraires sociologiques” (1974) for brief autobiographical reflections by seventeen Quebec sociologists. 2 Harry H. Hiller (1982) has published an excellent periodization of Canadian sociology organized around the major collective achievements of four eras. “European transference” was the major achievement of the early years (late nineteenth century to the end of the First World War). “Environmental adaptation” (1920 to the 1950s) was the refashioning of the ideas of the European founders of sociology to make them more appropriate for Canada. Our first two eras are basically similar to Hiller’s concept. The major difference is in the dating of the periods. Hiller (1982, 20) classifies the 1950s as an “interstitial phase” between the second and third periods. Hiller emphasized the difference between the 1960s and 1970s, which is ignored in our periodization. For Hiller, “discipline differentiation and specialization” were the prime achievements of the 1960s. Sociology became distinct from the similar disciplines of anthropology, economics, and history. Then in the 1970s “consolidation,” typically around Marxist political economy, occurred (see Helmes-Hayes 2010; Hiller and Di Luzio 2001; Nock 1993; Riggins 2014; Shore 1987). 3 The one term from Burawoy we have not used is “critical sociology.” In our opinion, sociologists in this category, depending on the topic and approach of their research, are either professional or public sociologists. REFERENCES

Anderson, Linda. 2001. Autobiography. London: Routledge. Baum, Gregory. 2015. Fernand Dumont: A Sociologist Turns to Theology. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2004. Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brownlee, Jamie. 2015. Academia, Inc.: How Corporatization Is Transforming Canadian Universities. Halifax: Fernwood. Brym, Robert J. 2002. “Canadian Sociology: An Introduction to the Upper Thirteen.” American Sociologist 33 (1): 5–11. – 2003. “The Decline of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28 (3): 411–16. – 2006. “How High School Drama Helped Me to Become a Sociologist: An Essay in the Sociology of Autobiography.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 31 (2): 245–57.

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Brym, Robert J., with Bonnie J. Fox. 1989. From Culture to Power: The Sociology of English Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “2004 ASA Presidential Address: For Public Sociology.” American Sociological Review 70 (1): 4–28. Burnet, Jean. 1981. “Minorities I Have Belonged To.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 13 (1): 24–36. Burns, Janet M.C. 1992. “Caught in the Riptide: Female Researcher in a Patricentric Setting.” In Fragile Truths: Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada, ed. William, Carroll, Linda ChristiansenRuffman, and Raymond Currie, 171–82. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Carroll, William K. 2016 “Critical Nexus or Chaotic Discipline? Re-visioning Sociology Again.” Canadian Review of Sociology 53 (2): 244–52. CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers). 2008. “The Tenure Gap: Women’s University Appointments, 1985–2005.” CAUT Equity Review, September. https://www.caut.ca/sites/default/files/the-tenure-gapmdash-women-rsquo-s-university-appointments-1985-2005-sept -2008.pdf. Chan, Adrienne S., and Donald Fisher, eds. 2008. The Exchange University: Corporatization of American Culture. Vancouver: UBC Press. Chansky, Ricia Anne, and Emily Hipchen, eds. 2016. The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Clement, Wallace. 2001. “Political Economy’s Legacy for Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (1): 405–20. Coburn, David. 1970. “Sociology and Sociologists in Canada: Problems and Prospects.” In The Future of Sociology in Canada, ed. Jan J. Loubser, 36–59. Montreal: Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. Collini, Stefan. 2012. What Are Universities For? London: Penguin Books. Cormier, Jeffrey. 2004. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Corsten, Michael. 1999. “The Time of Generations.” Time and Society 8 (2): 249–72. Cory, Donald Webster (Edward Sagarin). The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach. New York: Arno Press. Creese, Gilliam, Arlene Tagar McLaren, and Jane Pulkingham. 2009. “Rethinking Burawoy: Reflections from Canadian Feminist Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 34 (3): 601–22. Davis, Arthur K. 1991, 1993. Farewell to Earth: Selected Writings of Arthur K. Davis. Vol. 1. Adamant, VT: Adamant Press.

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– 1993. Farewell to Earth: Selected Writings of Arthur K. Davis. vol. 2. Adamant, VT: Adamant Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1961. Pattern and Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society. New York: Harper and Brothers. Dumont, Fernand. 1997. Récit d’une émigration. Montreal: Boréal. Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. 2011. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Historical Social Research 36 (4): 273–90. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “The Minimalist Self.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other Writings 1977–1984, 3–16. New York: Routledge. Felt, Lawrence F. 2012. “Travelin’ Man: The Journey of a Reluctant Sociologist.” Sociology on the Rock: Newsletter of the Memorial University Department of Sociology, issue 9. Frank, Arthur W. 1991. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gingras, Yves. 2010. “Sociological Reflexivity in Action.” Social Studies of Science 40 (4): 619–31. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Avon Books. Guzman, Cinthya, and Daniel Silver. 2018. “Replacing the Canadian Generation: An Examination of Faculty Composition from 1977 through 2017.” Canadian Review of Sociology 55 (1): 40–66. Hanemaayer, Ariane, and Christopher J. Schneider, eds. 2014. The Public Sociology Debate: Ethics and Engagement, Vancouver: UBC Press. Haney, Timothy J. 2015. “Factory to Faculty: Socioeconomic Difference and the Educational Experiences of University Professors.” Canadian Review of Sociology 52 (2): 160–86. Hatfield, Leonard F. 1990. Sammy the Prince. Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press. Hayano, David M. 1979. “Auto-Ethnography: Paradigms, Problems, and Prospects.” Human Organization 38 (1): 99–104. Helmes-Hayes, Rick, ed. 2003. Forty Years, 1963–2003: Department of Sociology University of Toronto. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. – 2010. Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2014. “Coral W. Topping, Pioneer Canadian Public Sociologist: ‘A Veteran Reformer for Prison Reform.’” In Hanemaayer and Schneider, 175–202. Helmes-Hayes, Rick, and Emily Milne. 2017. “The Institutionalization of Symbolic Interactionism in Canadian Sociology, 1922–1979: Success at What Cost?” Canadian Journal of Sociology 42 (2): 145–96. Henry, Frances, Enakski Dua, Carl E. James, Audrey Kobayashi, Peter Li,

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Howard Ramos, and Malinda S. Smith. 2017. The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities. Vancouver: UBC Press. Hiller, Harry H. 1979. “The Canadian Sociology Movement: Analysis and Assessment.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 4 (2): 125–50. – 1981. “Nationality, Relevance, and Ethnocentrism: An Essay in the Sociology of Canadian Book Publishing.” Social Forces 59 (4): 1297–307. – 1982. S.D. Clark and the Development of Canadian Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hiller, Harry H., and Linda Di Luzio. 2001. “Text and Context: Another ‘Chapter’ in the Evolution of Sociology in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 487–512. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan. 1990. “Women Sociologists in Canada: The Careers of Helen MacGill Hughes, Arleen Dansken Ross, and Jean Robertson Burnet.” In Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, ed. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, 152–76. Montreal: Véhicule. Holt, Mara, and Leon Anderson. 1998. “The Way We Work Now.” Profession 192–203. Horowitz, Irving Louis, ed. 1969. Sociological Self-Images: A Collective Portrait. Beverly Hills: Sage. Hughes, Helen MacGill. 1973. “Maid of All Work or Department Sister-inLaw: The Faculty Wife Employed on Campus.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (4): 5–10. – 1977. “WASP/Woman/Sociologist.” Society 14 (5): 69-80. “Itineraires sociologiques.” 1974. Autobiographical reflections by seventeen Quebec sociologists. Recherches sociographiques 15 (2–3): 201–312. Kleinknecht, Steven. 2007. “An Interview with Robert Prus: His Career, Contributions, and Legacy as an Interactionist Ethnographer and Sociological Theorist.” Qualitative Sociology Review 3 (2): 221–88. Lachapelle, Francois, and Patrick John Burnett. 2018. “Replacing the Canadianization Generation: An Examination of Faculty Composition from 1977 through 2017.” Canadian Review of Sociology 55 (1): 40–66. Low, Jacqueline. 2016. “Whither Symbolic Interactionism in Canada? A Response to Helmes-Hayes and Milne’s ‘The Institutionalization of Symbolic Interactionism in Canadian Sociology.’” Canadian Journal of Sociology 42 (2): 197–203. Mann, Edward. 1996. A Mann for all Seasons: A Memoir. Toronto: Lugus. McLaughlin, Neil. 2001. “Optimal Marginality: Innovation and Orthodoxy in Fromm’s Revision of Psychoanalysis.” Sociological Quarterly 42 (2): 271–88. – 2004. “A Canadian Rejoinder: Sociology North and South of the Border.” American Sociologist 35 (1): 80–101.

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– 2005. “Canada’s Impossible Science: Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis in Anglo Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 30 (1): 1–40. – 2017. “Movements, Sects and Letting Go of Symbolic Interactionism.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 42 (2): 203–9. McLaughlin, Neil, and Kerry Turcotte. 2007. “The Trouble with Burawoy: An Analytic, Synthetic Alternative.” Sociology 41 (5): 813–28. McMurtry, John. 2010. “Beyond Market Self-serving: Recovering the Academy’s Vocation.” In Academic Callings: The University We Have Had, Now Have, and Could Have, ed. Janice Newson and Claire Polster, 19–25. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Michalski, Joseph H. 2016. “The Epistemological Diversity of Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 41 (4): 525–56. Milian, Roger Pizarro, and Neil McLaughlin. 2017. “Canadian Sociology for Sale? Academic Branding in the ‘Neo-liberal Age.’” American Sociologist 48 (2): 172–91. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitzman, Arthur. 1970. The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mullins, C. Nicholas. 1973. Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology. New York: Harper and Row. Nakhaie, M. Reza, and Barry Adam. 2008. “Political Affiliation of Canadian University Professors.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 33 (4): 873–98. Nakhaie, M. Reza, and Robert J. Brym. 1999. “The Political Attitudes of Canadian Professors.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 24 (3): 329–53. Newson, Janice, and Claire Polster. 2010. Academic Callings: The University We Have Had, Now Have, and Could Have. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Nock, David A. 1993. Star Wars in Canadian Sociology: Exploring the Social Construction of Knowledge. Halifax: Fernwood. Popkin, Jeremy D. 2005. History, Historians, and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 2009. “The Origins of Modern Academic Autobiography: Felix Meiner’s Die Wissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, 1921–1929.” Rethinking History 13 (1): 27–42. Porter, Marilyn. 1993. “Cuckoo in the Nest? A Feminist in Sociology.” In Limited Edition: Voices of Women, Voices of Feminism, ed. Geraldine Finn, 286–300. Halifax: Fernwood.

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– 1995. “Call Yourself a Sociologist – and You’ve Never Even Been Arrested?” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 32 (4): 415–37. – 2008. “The Accidental Sociologist.” Sociology on the Rock: Newsletter of the Memorial University Department of Sociology, issue 2. http://www.mun.ca/soc/newsletter/issue2/rock-2-04.html. – 2019. “The Edge of Experience: Coming to Newfoundland in the 1980s.” In Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience, ed. Stephen Riggins and Roberta Buchanan, 268–77. St. John’s, NL: ISER Books. Pullman, Douglas R. 1983. “Roadside Notes: Parts I, II, III.” Society/Société 7, (1): 4–7; (2): 2–4; (3): 12–14. Riggins, Stephen Harold. 2003. The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, a Life. Toronto: Insomniac Press. – 2012. “‘A Square Deal for the Least and the Last’: The Career of W.G. Smith in the Methodist Ministry, Experimental Psychology, and Sociology.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 27 (2): 179–222. – 2014. “Memorial University’s First Sociologist: The Dilemmas of a Bureaucratic Intellectual.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 29 (1): 47–83. – 2017. “Sociology by Anthropologists: A Chapter in the History of an Academic Discipline in Newfoundland during the 1960s.” Acadiensis 46 (2): 119–42. – 2019. “Married Bachelor in the Department of Sociology.” In Riggins and Buchanan, eds., 278–90. Riggins, Stephen Harold, and Roberta Buchanan, eds. 2019. Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience. St. John's, NL: ISER Books. Rocher, Guy. 1975. Talcott Parsons and American Sociology. New York: Barnes and Noble. – 1989. Entre les rêves et l’histoire: Entretiens avec Georges Khal. Montreal: VLB éditeur. Shore, Marlene. 1987. The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sica, Alan, and Stephen Turner, eds. 2005. The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1992. “Remaking a Life, Remaking Sociology: Reflections of a Feminist.” In Fragile Truths: Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada, ed. William, Carroll, Linda ChristiansenRuffman, and Raymond Currie, 125–34. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

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– 1994. “A Berkeley Education.” In Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists, ed. Kathryn P. Meadow-Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace, 45–56. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. – 2014. “Sociology as a Vocation: Lineages of Institutional Ethnography.” Global Dialogue 4 (2). https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/sociology-asa-vocation-lineages-of-institutional-ethnography-2/. Spencer, Metta. 1994. “On the Way to the Forum.” In Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists, ed. Kathryn P. Meadow-Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace, 157–71. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. – n.d. 100 short autobiographical videos. Video archive. mettaspencer.com. Stortz, Paul, and E. Lisa Panayotidis. 2006. Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tremblay, Gaëtan. 2014. “Journey of a Researcher.” Canadian Journal of Communication 39 (1): 9–28. van den Berg, Axel. 2014. “Public Sociology, Professional Sociology and Democracy.” In Public Sociology and Ethics: Premise, Profession, Pedagogy, ed. Ariane Hanemaayer and Christopher J. Schneider, 53–73. Vancouver: UBC Press. van Maanen, John. 2011. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Warren, Jean-Philippe. 2003. L’engagement sociologique: La tradition sociologique du Québec francophone, 1886–1955. Montreal: Boréal. – 2014. “The End of National Sociological Traditions? The Fates of Sociology in English Canada and French Quebec in a Globalized Field of Science.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 50: 87–108. Waterfield, Bea, Brenda L. Beagan, and Tameera Mohamed. 2019. “‘You Always Remain Slightly an Outsider’: Workplace Experiences of Academics from Working-Class or Impoverished Backgrounds.” Canadian Review of Sociology 56 (3): 368–88. Wilkinson, Lori, Janine Bramadat, Rachel Dolynchuk, and Zoe T. St. Aubin. 2013. “Are Canadian-Trained PhDs Disadvantaged in the Academic Labor Market?” Canadian Review of Sociology 50 (3): 357–70.

The Backstory

PA RT ONE

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1 Marginality, Structure, Agency: A Slow Learner Confronts Sociology Robert J. Brym

EASTERN PASSAGE

As a child, I did not fit in. Elsewhere, I have explained why, so I won’t offer details here (Brym 2006). In brief, I grew up in a poor immigrant family in Saint John, New Brunswick, speaking Yiddish. Weakly integrated in the English- and Irish-origin majority and the tiny, middleclass and (in my eyes) assimilated Jewish community, I was unhappy and rebellious. Marginality also made me feel powerless – a product, not an agent, of my circumstances. People make sense of their lives by imposing narratives with recognizable or at least plausible story lines. My story line is this: my work set out in a deterministic, structural direction consistent with my feeling of powerlessness. Maturation brought a growing sense of agency that is reflected in my research and writing. I caught a glimmer of what it meant to act rather than be acted upon in high school, where I was heavily involved in an extraordinary drama program. However, I matured slowly, as did my work. My delayed development becomes clear as I think about the forty-eight years since I completed my undergraduate studies. Neither of my parents completed primary school, but they took for granted that I would pursue postsecondary studies; I recall being repeatedly disappointed when my father informed me that I could not have the electric train I so badly wanted because we needed to save for my education. When it came time for me to plan my escape from

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Saint John, it never occurred to me that the route would lead anywhere other than university. When I arrived at Dalhousie University in 1969, I elected to major in philosophy and minor in drama on the way to a law degree. However, after reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and a Penguin paperback edition of The Dialectics of Liberation, I decided to join the revolution. By the end of my first year, I had taken courses in political science, economics, and psychology, avoiding only sociology because it seemed like thin gruel with uncertain ingredients. Then, in the summer of 1970, Don Grady arrived. A buzz preceded his arrival. Don had apparently been exiled because his politics had gotten him into trouble at Guelph and McMaster. He was said to possess the Irish gift, a rumour I verified after enrolling in one of his sociology courses, then in another. He used general systems theory to bludgeon structural functionalism, but his real message was anarchism. “Buck a norm for Don Grady,” he would admonish us at the end of a deviance lecture. He was not joking. Don was inspiring, but he was no researcher. Once, he showed me his incomplete PhD dissertation – a densely argued theoretical armamentarium running to hundreds of pages followed by a line reading, “Insert data here.” He may have been a casualty of his advisor at Princeton, Marion J. Levy, who tried to steer him away from studying the Muslim Brotherhood in North Africa, forecasting that the movement would soon wither into irrelevancy. (Insert gasp here.) Probably more important was the fact that Don was above all an activist – he had risked his life in the American civil rights movement, once helping to remove schoolchildren from a bus set alight by anti-integrationists. No cause was too minor for him to champion. His anti-authoritarianism was inspiring. However, he was temperamentally disinclined to scholarship. In contrast, by the time I left Dalhousie for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to complete the last third of my Honours BA, I had developed the conviction that sociologists need to find a point of balance between advocacy and analysis, between values and science. I disputed the idea that values can and should be removed from analysis, just as I disputed Don’s rejection of analysis in favour of advocacy. Instead, I held that values inevitably inspire theoretical formulations, but I also insisted that conjectures should be scrapped if they could not withstand empirical testing. I found it exhilarating to walk the knife’s edge between (1) conviction and (2) the danger of being wrong or the thrill of discovering a new verity, and to this day my dis-

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content with some sociologists stems from their failure to seek that point of balance. In 1973, I entered the PhD program in sociology at the University of Toronto (U of T). I still have mixed emotions about that decision because I also had an offer from Wisconsin, then arguably home to the world’s best Department of Sociology. I was offered a partial tuition waiver and had been awarded a Canada Council scholarship that would have allowed me to study there, but I concluded that I was not up to the task. Saint John had taught me well. Toronto may be the top Department of Sociology in Canada today, but it wasn’t in 1973. The University of Alberta, Carleton, McMaster, and York all had bigger stars and better reputations. Nonetheless, the future seemed bright at U of T because Irving Zeitlin had just been hired as chair. Adding to the lure of Toronto was the fact that my girlfriend was going to study fine arts at York, just forty-five minutes by public transit from downtown. Finally, the Wisconsin program seemed too laden with requirements that didn’t interest me. I thought it was too restrictive, too professional (as opposed to “intellectual”). I didn’t want to be trained; I felt that I needed to be let loose. Toronto gave me all the freedom I craved, and then some. After I finished my PhD, I found it necessary to make up my deficiencies in research design, statistics, and survey methods. However, U of T allowed me to develop a plan of study that I probably would not have been permitted to follow elsewhere. Even at Toronto, however, it was touch and go. During my three years in the PhD program, I was influenced mainly by a professor who was nearly as marginal as Don Grady, although more successful as a published scholar. Steve Berkowitz was a chainsmoking network analyst who boasted intimate familiarity with nearly every branch of human endeavour yet failed to achieve tenure at U of T. Many students and faculty members found him obnoxious, but I discovered that underneath the bluster lay a keen mind and a big heart. Steve took the trouble to teach me the meaning and the importance of social structure, and he showed me how to rein in my floral writing. What emerged from our discussions and debates was the kernel of an idea for a dissertation. My plan was to develop a theory explaining how radical intellectuals choose political ideologies. A common claim in the literature was that cultural and structural marginality breeds intellectual radicalism because it frees intellectuals from social constraint when choosing

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one ideology over another. I sought to challenge that point of view by seeking to discover the social-structural roots of ideological divergence. Moreover, I wanted to strengthen my argument by following the logic of Emile Durkheim’s Suicide and Robert Michels’s Political Parties. Durkheim studied suicide because he wanted to show that social forces influence even behaviour that most people regarded as asocial. Michels studied the German Social Democratic Party because he wanted to show that his iron law of oligarchy operated even in what was purportedly the most democratic organization in the world. Analogously, I figured I could most convincingly make the case that social structure influences intellectuals’ ideological choices by studying ideological divergence among a group of radical intellectuals long regarded as the most marginal or socially rootless of them all: leftwing Russian-Jewish intellectuals who, between 1890 and 1905, split into Bolshevik, Menshevik, Bundist, and Labour-Zionist factions. My dissertation chair, Irv Zeitlin, was sceptical. The first problem was language. I could speak Yiddish but had never learned to read it. I had conversational Hebrew but my ability to read scholarly works in that language was largely untested. (In Jerusalem I had taken Hebrewlanguage courses in sociological theory and statistics, but most of the readings were in English.) Most worrisome of all, I didn’t know Russian, not even the Cyrillic alphabet. The second problem, according to Irv at least, was that there would likely be little interest in an arcane topic like mine. At best, he warned, I might get an article out of the dissertation in a specialized Jewish studies journal. Irv’s admonition did nothing to cool my resolve. I learned to read Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian passably well and collected detailed biographical information on 207 leading Jewish radical intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Russia. When I submitted a draft chapter containing a discursive footnote running to eight single-spaced pages, Irv said it was a distraction. He insisted that I delete it. I did as he asked but promptly sent the text to the Journal of Social History, where it became my first journal article. In due course, I was able to offer a strict structural explanation of how the social roots of radicalization and ideological divergence are located in intellectuals’ diverse patterns of social mobility due to changing opportunity structures in economic, educational, and political institutions. It became my first book (Brym 1978a). We needed to recruit an external examiner for my dissertation defence. Audaciously, I suggested that we invite Tom Bottomore, a

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renowned British student of social stratification and sociological theory and president of the International Sociological Association. He happened to be spending the year at Dalhousie, on leave from Sussex. To my surprise and delight, he accepted. The night before the defence, at a reception in his honour, Mary Bottomore, Tom’s wife, took me aside, apparently noticing the worry lines on my brow, and whispered ten of the sweetest words I have ever heard: “Robert, you have nothing to worry about. Tom likes it.” As I learned the next day, Tom was as gentle and generous as his wife. When the defence was over, he shook my hand and said that if I needed help getting the dissertation into print, he’d be pleased to put in a good word with his publisher. About six months later, after revising the dissertation, I accepted his offer. In the following years, Tom invited me to write a more general book on intellectuals and politics – for a series he was co-editing (Brym 2010 [1980]) – and to collaborate on a study of capitalist classes in rich democracies (Bottomore and Brym 1989). Tom died suddenly in 1992, shortly after his retirement, leaving a rich intellectual legacy. He also left a model of warm collegiality that, unfortunately, was emulated for only a couple of years after I completed graduate school. DEPARTMENTAL POLITICS

During the 1960s and early 1970s, enormous expansion took place across the Canadian system of higher education. There were not enough Canadians to fill the thousands of new academic positions, so wholesale recruitment of Americans and others was necessary. By the time I entered the PhD program at the U of T, the period of growth was coming to an end. Many graduate students were anxious that it would not be possible to secure a tenure-stream position – or any position – after graduation. Responding to that threat, I became president of the Graduate Sociology Students’ Union and joined the ranks of those who supported a Canadian-first hiring policy backed by student parity on all departmental committees, including the staffing committee. The move made me unpopular among many faculty members, at least one of whom, Lewis Feuer, stopped saying hello to me in the hallways. S.D. Clark had already taken a dislike to me back in my Dalhousie days, when he was a visiting professor in Halifax, because of my association with Don Grady. When I started applying for jobs, he called

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around to warn acquaintances in departments across the country that they were asking for trouble if they hired me. I got wind of this from Arthur Davis at the University of Alberta, and Clark later acknowledged his intervention when Irv Zeitlin asked him about it. Apparently, Professor Clark’s reach did not extend to Newfoundland and Labrador, where I began my professional career in 1976. At Memorial University, I found an exceptionally congenial and cosmopolitan intellectual environment, more European than North American. My closest friends in the Department of Sociology were émigrés: Volker Meja from Germany, Judy Adler from the United States, and Victor Zaslavsky from the USSR. Victor and I would go for long walks, braving the strong Newfoundland winds. Early on I asked him why he kept looking over his shoulder as we discussed the mechanisms of Soviet social control. “Old habit,” he half-smiled. Victor and I were soon working together. I helped him translate into English an article or two that later became part of his first book in English. He helped me with my Russian. We wrote a well-received article on the functions of elections in the USSR (Zaslavsky and Brym 1978) and later undertook a book-length study of the Soviet-Jewish emigration movement that was then making world headlines (Zaslavsky and Brym 1983). Unfortunately, Victor and I lost contact over the years. To my sorrow, I did not manage to congratulate him before he died in his early seventies, shortly after the publication of his award-winning Class Cleansing: The Katyn Massacre, a study of the 1940 execution of all twenty-two thousand members of the Polish officer corps by Stalin’s NKVD. Despite my fondness for Memorial’s Department of Sociology and the bond I had formed with Victor, Judy, and Volker, I wanted to return to Toronto. In 1978, S.D. Clark retired, and a position became available at U of T for a specialist in the study of Canadian society. Ironically, I applied to become Clark’s replacement. (Thirty-seven years later, Irv Zeitlin was quick to point out the additional irony.) I was shortlisted, but I could tell that most of the faculty had no appetite for my return. The giveaway was that I was not asked to give a real job talk or go for a meal with members of the staffing committee. Instead, I was told to present a paper at a conference that was being organized by the Department of Sociology. Members of the staffing committee would be present to evaluate me. And, oh yes, the only other presenter in my session would be Charles Tilly, arguably

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the most eloquent and learned sociologist of our time. At least they let me speak first. In the event, I received a job offer, undoubtedly due less to my performance than a time-bomb that had been planted a few years earlier: the staffing committee was composed of faculty members and graduate students in equal number, and all the students plus a single faculty member voted in my favour. I may be wrong, but I sensed that the chair low-balled my salary offer as the only remaining chance of blocking me: in inflationadjusted terms, I was offered about one-third less than a starting faculty member would receive today. I pointed out that I could earn more in St John’s, even though the cost of living was significantly lower there than in Toronto. The next day I was offered a 2.7 per cent top-up – and immediately accepted. It is perhaps not coincidental that the department’s parity committee structure was revoked shortly thereafter. At U of T I never experienced the kind of warm welcome I had enjoyed in St John’s. My earlier involvement in student politics probably prevented many of my new colleagues from accepting me with open arms. But beyond that stood three additional barriers. First, I came from an Eastern European working-class family, and my first job had been in an internationally diverse, multilingual setting. I arrived in a department that consisted almost completely of unilingual, North American colleagues of middle-class origin. It is now more diverse, but in the late 1970s and 1980s I just did not feel at home there, and little or no effort was expended to help me feel at ease. The second barrier was the Canadian-American distinction. The U of T Department of Sociology was (and still is) American-oriented in its hiring practices and its aspirations. However, since I was a graduate student I have sought to help establish a sound Canadian sociological tradition, and I have never been especially eager to publish in the United States. I don’t think it’s coincidental that a list the U of T colleagues with whom I’ve been friendliest over the years consists of six Canadians and only two Americans. Nor is it by chance that, when I was selected to become S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, three esteemed colleagues objected vociferously: two Americans and an Americantrained Canadian who is, as they say, more papist than the pope. The third barrier was scholarly. Sir Isaiah Berlin distinguished hedgehogs, who try to know one important thing well, from foxes,

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who try to know many things – inescapably, more superficially. The distinction is akin to the difference between professionals and intellectuals. Professionals are trained in a relatively well-defined set of methods to conduct research in a narrow substantive area. They are expected to develop their focused capabilities throughout their career and to become experts in their field. In contrast, intellectuals tend to regard such training and single-mindedness as something of a straightjacket. They range widely over many subjects and employ whatever methodological tools suit the problem at hand. U of T’s Department of Sociology consists mostly of professionals, many of them of high calibre. I am expert in nothing. Some of my colleagues may think of me as a dilettante because I stay with a subject only until something else catches my fancy. I consider this trait a strength. If the barriers I’ve mentioned kept me marginal to the department, they did have advantages. By eventually removing myself from departmental affairs I could spend a lot of time helping to raise my children and writing, the two activities that gave me boundless pleasure. I could also do outside work as editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Current Sociology, and East European Jewish Affairs. I enjoyed editorial work, and it was excellent training for future projects. CANADA , RUSSIA , AND THE MIDDLE EAST

I knew that my doctoral research focused on a topic that was abstruse in the Canadian context. So, influenced by the left nationalism of the mid-1970s, and realizing that conducting research on a Canadian topic would likely improve my chances in the job market, I started working on a side project before completing my PhD. Seymour Martin Lipset’s Agrarian Socialism and C.B. Macpherson’s Democracy in Alberta had encouraged me to think about the glaring political differences between radical, left-wing Saskatchewan and radical, rightwing Alberta; and between the Prairies and my Loyalist home province, where names like Irving, McCain, and Oland were uttered with gratitude if not reverence. Following Werner Sombart, I wondered why there was no socialism in New Brunswick. What eventually emerged from this curiosity was a series of articles that linked variation in the strength of pre-Second World War protest movements among primary producers to (1) their degree of commercialization and (2) differences in the way their work was organized (e.g., Brym 1978b). In pre-Second World War Atlantic Canada, protest

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movements had emerged among heavily commercialized primary producers. The market increased their economic and political resources and their awareness of a common class enemy – namely, the merchants and bankers who sought to maximize profit while buying their produce, selling them the necessities of life, and lending them money. However, intense commercialization was much less widespread in Atlantic Canada than on the Prairies, where wheat farming and cattle ranching thrived, so protest movements were smaller and more short-lived down east. Moreover, left-wing protest movements predominated in Saskatchewan’s wheat economy and right-wing movements in Alberta’s ranching economy mainly because wheat production then required a high level of cooperation among farmers while ranching was individualized work. Wheat farmers and ranchers both resented the railways, the banks, and the federal government that, they argued, conspired to exploit them, but their protest took different ideological forms because of the way their work was socially organized. Again, I offered a strict structural explanation. I continued to work on a variety of Canadian topics throughout my career (e.g., Brym with Fox 1989). However, in 1993, an unexpected twist occurred. Ontario’s deficit-fighting New Democratic Party under the leadership of Bob Rae imposed a wage freeze and mandatory unpaid days of leave on civil servants, including university professors. My salary had perhaps recovered from its low starting point, but my wife, Rhonda Lenton, earned only a modest salary because she had started her career less than seven years earlier. Moreover, she was about to give birth and go on maternity leave. We had a Toronto-sized mortgage. Our eldest daughter needed orthodontic work that was only partly covered by our insurance plans. What to do? One possibility emerged at the annual meetings of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association that summer. I was browsing the book displays when a publisher’s representative asked me what I taught. I mentioned that I enjoyed teaching intro, among other subjects. Something like the following conversation ensued: “Which textbook do you use?” “I don’t. I find intro textbooks boring. They don’t communicate the excitement of inquiry and the value of sociology. The slightly better textbooks lack Canadian content. I assign a variety of readings instead.” “Do you think you could do better?” “I guess, if I put my mind to it.”

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“So why don’t we meet for lunch and talk about that back in Toronto?” I had been motivated to teach intro for the preceding fifteen years, partly because I felt that by doing so I was performing a public service, partly because I realized that large classes came with teaching assistants who would do grading, which I detested. However, just two months after my conversation with the sales representative I took my commitment a step farther by signing a contract for a black-and-white contributed collection. The first edition did well (Brym 2020 [1995]). However, Canada’s bestselling intro text was an adaptation of an American book. It was full-colour, a decided marketing advantage, so a year later I proposed to the publisher that, for the second edition, we go full-colour too. The quick response was that, given existing technologies, economies of scale made it possible to produce a Canadian adaptation of an American book in full colour but not a Canada-only book. And so I proposed writing a full-colour book for the American market that would subsequently allow us to produce a full-colour Canadian adaptation. The publisher arranged to have me flown down to head office in Fort Worth, Texas. I presented my ideas. They were well received, but I was told that I had to have an American co-author, making me feel a bit like a red ghostwriter during the McCarthy era. I recruited John Lie, then chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We signed a contract, and, in due course, our textbook was born, though not without birth pangs. I had grossly underestimated the scale of the job; I did little original research as I worked on the project for the better part of three years. Compass won some enthusiastic adopters in the United States and went through seven American editions in a decade. Then it was cancelled because some reviewers regarded it as “too political” – code for “too left-wing.” The publisher decided, correctly, that, given the political culture of the United States, it could never become a bestseller. The Canadian edition did much better proportionately (Brym, Strohschein, and Kampen 2021 [2003]) , as did adaptations in Australia, Brazil (in Portuguese), and Quebec (in French). I was especially pleased with the Brazilian adaptation, spearheaded by Cynthia Hamlin at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Cynthia had done her PhD at Sussex under William Outhwaite, Tom Bottomore’s prize student, and she visited Toronto in 2003. We hit it off instantly, and with-

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in a year I was in Recife for a couple weeks working with the team she assembled to write the Brazilian adaptation. In the following years we also wrote two theoretical articles together. During our work, Cynthia introduced me to the work of Raymond Boudon and Margaret Archer, whose writings on social action and human agency exerted a profound influence on me. Canadian research and textbooks aside, my focus remained Russia until the early 2000s. I had planned to move on after completing my work with Victor Zaslavsky in the early 1980s, but just when I thought I was out, the collapse of the Soviet Union pulled me back in. I conducted the first Western survey of Jews in the former Soviet Union, investigating their complex ethnic identities, perceptions of anti-Semitism, and emigration potential (Brym with Ryvkina 1994). The book that came out of this project was followed up by surveys of a Moscow-region sample of business leaders and a national sample of Russian adults’ attitudes towards political and economic change. At the time, the dominant narrative in the West held that the former Soviet Union would quickly transition to liberal democracy and capitalism. The argument seemed simplistic and ideological to me, and I sought to show as much in my analyses of survey data (e.g., Brym 1996a, 1996b). Specifically, I argued that the incumbents of political and criminal institutions were gaining control of the economy and that the population was prone to xenophobia and more likely to support an authoritarian leader than a liberal democrat. A subsequent study of Russian state bureaucrats documented the corruption and ossification that pervades the civil service (e.g., Brym and Gimpelson 2004). That pretty much ended my research on Russia. For a long time, I was reluctant to write anything about Israel although I had been following Middle East events closely since high school. I was a member of a Zionist youth movement from the age of seven and had attended Zionist summer camps between the ages of fourteen and twenty. My Zionism was of the type espoused by Martin Buber, the philosopher whose work I studied intensively while a student in Jerusalem (Brym 2015). Buber and others formed a small political party in 1942 favouring the creation of a binational confederacy, with the country divided into territories where Jews and Arabs could erect their own educational and cultural institutions. Such a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may never have been realis-

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tic. However, it grew ever more remote when the Likud under Menachem Begin came to power in 1977 and Israeli settlements started being built in the West Bank and Gaza in earnest, the First Lebanon War broke out in 1982, and the second intifada erupted in 2000 – three events that did most to shape my current attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the early 2000s, as I watched news reports of young Palestinians martyring themselves and Israeli victims dying by the score, my desire to finally conduct research and speak out on the conflict grew. Unfortunately, I lacked Arabic and had no Palestinian contacts with whom I could work. In 2004, a solution presented itself. I received an e-mail from Bader Araj, a Palestinian with a BA in sociology from Birzeit University in Ramallah. He had recently arrived in Toronto after spending several years working in the United States while his wife was in graduate school. Now it was his turn to study. He wanted to discuss entering the graduate sociology program at the U of T. It emerged that Bader was driven, well informed, and well connected, having been politicized as a teenager during the first intifada, when he had spent time as a guest of the Israeli state for throwing rocks at soldiers. We talked often and intensively. I started reading the literature on suicide bombers, developing ideas about how we could contribute to the field and drafting a grant proposal. We both felt that we could not wait a year until Bader was admitted to the program. We started work immediately to explain the timing and severity of acts of state and collective violence during the second intifada. The dominant schools of thought on the subject held that the pattern of violence was an expression of rational self-interest on the Israeli side and, on the Palestinian side, some combination of religious fanaticism, suicidal impulses, and efforts on the part of various political factions to win support from the Palestinian population at large by “outbidding” opposing factions through ever more violent acts. It was not difficult to find examples confuting these generalizations, but we knew well that “data” is not the plural of “anecdote.” We needed to do systematic research. Our plan involved creating a database describing the characteristics of all acts of state and collective violence during the second intifada. To that end, we took information from existing databases and newspaper accounts in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. We drew a 25 per cent ran-

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dom sample of all suicide bombers during the second intifada. Bader then visited the West Bank and Gaza to interview immediate family members and close friends of the bombers about their backgrounds and motivations. In addition, he interviewed several high-ranking officials from each Palestinian political faction about their organizational rationales for suicide bombing. Finally, I recruited a Jewish-Israeli PhD student to interview seventy-five leading strategic thinkers who had served in the Israeli intelligence and defence establishments during the second intifada. These key informants provided information about the decision-making process that led to state-directed assassinations of Palestinian leaders and other forms of state repression. Altogether, the data we collected enabled us to determine the timing, precipitants, and severity of acts of violence on both sides of the conflict as well as the motives and organizational rationales of their agents. The upshot of our research was a series of articles that tested, reformulated, and in some cases refuted extant arguments about patterns of Israeli-Palestinian violence (e.g., Brym and Araj 2006, 2008, 2012; Gazit and Brym 2011). Along the way we found that Palestinian suicide bombers did not express suicidal impulses before they were politicized and were only rarely in a state of mind that might be characterized as clinical depression. We discovered that inter-factional outbidding fails to account for patterns of suicide bombing during most of the second intifada. It became evident that Israeli officials ordered the assassination of Palestinian political leaders not because they were “ticking bombs,” as the Israelis put it, but because Israeli decision makers viewed assassination as a means of fomenting political chaos among Palestinians and thereby preventing the creation of a Palestinian state. We also learned that suicide bombers were most frequently motivated to act because they witnessed and were enraged by specific acts of Israeli repression. Our main theoretical conclusion was that, while fixed utility-maximizing principles informed the violent actions of Palestinian insurgents and Israeli state officials throughout the second intifada, they explain only part of the variation in patterns of violence. Also important were the culturally grounded, historically contingent justifications for violent action – the “subjectively good reasons,” to use Boudon’s phrase, that each side deployed. Said differently, we found evidence of tit-for-tat violence, but we also found evidence that the cultural definition of what constitutes tit-for-tat violence changed over time, depending on identifiable, historically con-

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tingent circumstances. Thus, for subjectively goods reasons, identical provocations by one side at different time points could result in different reactions by the other side. Three decades into my academic career, human agency finally appeared. The Arab Spring offered opportunities to undertake survey research in the wider Middle East and to demonstrate the degree to which structural, cultural, and agentic factors influenced the course of the movement (e.g., Brym et al. 2014; Brym and Andersen 2011). Thus, my body of work over the past two decades illustrates a significant shift in my thinking. I now regard my early research as overly deterministic. At the outset of my career, I viewed the ideological directions that intellectuals and entire movements take as the outcome of interactions between rational self-interest and structural opportunity. My thinking changed in the early 2000s as culture and agency entered my causal vocabulary. APOLOGIA

Sometime around 2005 I taped a cartoon by Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, to my office door. It showed a family of aliens standing in their kitchen, the refrigerator door ajar, and a mess on the floor. The parents were gigantic and stern. The children were tiny but unapologetic. “Society did it,” they pleaded. The cartoon poked fun at the way I had thought for three decades. The notion that “society did it” was always at the ready. It took me a long time to appreciate the significance of historical contingency and the independent effects of culture and human agency on social action. And so I arrive at my latest discomfort. Throughout the discipline, I find a strong and growing bias against structural explanations and an increasing emphasis on the subjective side of social action. Yet I find myself swimming against the mainstream by trying to develop a more balanced approach, showing how the independent causal weights of structure, culture, and agency vary by social context (Brym 2010; Brym et al. 2018; Brym and Hamlin 2009; Brym, Slavina, and Lenton 2020; Hamlin and Brym 2006; Slavina and Brym 2020). In my judgment, it is wrong to make a priori decisions about causal weights in advance of empirical analysis. I suppose my resistance to the mainstream repeats an old story: notwithstanding my escape from structural determinism, I apparently still feel comfortable only in an intel-

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lectually marginal position, to a degree persisting in seeing the world through what Shakespeare, in Macbeth, called “the eye of childhood.” REFERENCES Bottomore, Tom, and Robert Brym, eds. 1989. The Capitalist Class: An International Study. New York: New York University Press. Brym, Robert. 1978a. The Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism: A Sociological Study of Intellectual Radicalism and Ideological Divergence. London: Macmillan. – 1978b. “Regional Social Structure and Agrarian Radicalism in Canada: Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 15 (3): 339–51. – 1996a. “The Ethic of Self-Reliance and the Spirit of Capitalism in Russia.” International Sociology 11 (4): 409–26. – 1996b. “Revaluating Mass Support for Political and Economic Change in Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies 48 (5): 751–66. – 2006. “How High School Drama Helped Me to Become a Sociologist: An Essay in the Sociology of Autobiography.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 31 (2): 245–57. – 2010. “Breaking the Iron Triangle of Sociological Causation: Structural, Cultural and Agentic Influences on Fatah and Hamas during the Second Intifada.” In Society, History, and the Global Condition of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Irving M. Zeitlin, ed. Zaheer Baber and Joseph Bryant, 87–104. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. – 2010 [1980]. Intellectuals and Politics. London: Routledge. – 2015. “Bread and Salt: What a Jewish Cemetery in Poland Taught Me about an Arab Cemetery in Israel.” Jonah Magazine 2. http://jonahmagazine .com/category/memoir/. – ed. 2020 [1995]. New Society: Sociology for the 21st Century, 9th ed. Toronto: Nelson. Brym, Robert, and Robert Andersen. 2011. “Rational Choice and the Political Bases of Changing Israeli Counterinsurgency Strategy.” British Journal of Sociology 62 (3): 482–503. Brym, Robert, and Bader Araj. 2006. “Suicide Bombing as Strategy and Interaction: The Case of the Second Intifada.” Social Forces 84 (4): 1965–82. – 2008. “Palestinian Suicide Bombing Revisited: A Critique of the Outbidding Thesis.” Political Science Quarterly 123 (3): 485–500. – 2012. “Are Suicide Bombers Suicidal?” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 35 (6): 332–43.

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Brym, Robert, with Bonnie Fox. 1989. From Culture to Power: The Sociology of English Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Brym, Robert, and Vladimir Gimpelson. 2004. “The Size, Composition, and Dynamics of the Russian State Bureaucracy in the 1990s.” Slavic Review 63 (1): 90–112. Brym, Robert, Melissa Godbout, Andreas Hoffbauer, Gabe Menard, and Tony Huiquan Zhang. 2014. “Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising.” British Journal of Sociology 65 (2): 266–92. Brym, Robert, and Cynthia Hamlin. 2009. “Suicide Bombers: Beyond Cultural Dopes and Rational Fools.” 2: 83–96. In Raymond Boudon: A Life in Sociology, ed. Mohamed Cherkaoui and Peter Hamilton. Oxford: Bardwell Press. Brym, Robert, Lisa Strohschein, and Karen Kampen. 2021 [2003]. Sociology: Compass for a New Social World, 7th ed. Toronto: Nelson. Brym, Robert, with the assistance of Rozalina Ryvkina. 1994. The Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk: Identity, Antisemitism, Emigration. New York: New York University Press. Brym, Robert, Anna Slavina, and Rhonda Lenton. 2020. “Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination of Jews from the former Soviet Union in Canada and the United States.” Contemporary Jewry 40 (3): 367–85. Brym, Robert, Anna Slavina, Mina Todosijevic, and David Cowan. 2018. “Social Movement Horizontality in the Internet age? A Comment on Castells in Light of the Trump Victory.” Canadian Review of Sociology 55 (4): 624–34. Gazit, Nir, and Robert Brym. 2012. “State-Directed Political Assassination in Israel: A Political Hypothesis.” International Sociology 26 (6): 862–77. Hamlin, Cynthia, and Robert Brym. 2006. “The Return of the Native: A Cultural and Social-Psychological Critique of Durkheim’s Suicide Based on the Guarani-Kaiowá of Southwestern Brazil.” Sociological Theory 24 (1): 42–57. Slavina, Anna, and Robert Brym. 2020. “Demonstrating in the Internet Age: A test of Castells’ Theory.” Social Movement Studies 19 (2): 201–21. Zaslavsky, Victor, and Robert Brym. 1978. “The Functions of Elections in the USSR.” Soviet Studies 30 (3): 362–71. – 1983. Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy. London: Macmillan.

2 Adventures of a Chronic Meanderer Axel van den Berg

GROWING UP WITH POLITICS IN AMSTERDAM

I was raised a populist, as unappealing as that may sound these days. My mother grew up in rural northeastern Switzerland, the daughter of a small businessman whose real calling was local politics. My grandfather was a committed classical liberal democrat and, as my mother tells it, almost every evening there was fierce political debate around the kitchen table or in the local pub, enlivened by liberal quantities of mosht, the local version of cider. She brought the politics and the contentiousness with her when she moved to the Netherlands in 1950, the year I was born, to join her new Dutch-Jewish husband, my father. Some of my earliest memories have to do with politics: animated arguments around the dinner table, huddling around the radio to catch the latest news about the Hungarian uprising and the Suez Crisis in 1956. But my mother’s “populism” was of a particular kind. It consisted mostly of vociferous condemnations of the pretensions of the Dutch upper class, of politicians telling ordinary Dutchmen what was good for them, of their evident fear of the vox populi in rejecting the referendum as a way to settle political issues, and, most of all, of the sheer absurdity of the institution of the Dutch monarchy. There is no doubt that her general perspective – however vigorously we argued about the particulars once I found my own political voice – had a profound impact on me. Another major factor helping to determine my professional trajectory is that I have had the good fortune of benefiting from a succes-

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sion of amazingly inspiring teachers, starting with elementary school. My teacher for the last three years of elementary school was Mr Ben Jolie, whose charisma was only surpassed by his irreverence for the standard curriculum. Much to the chagrin of many parents and the school’s administrators, he taught Dutch history the way it should be taught: by making a mockery of the chauvinistic pieties and myths that populated our standard Dutch history text. I adored the man, and the feeling was at least partly mutual. In fifth grade, he encouraged some of us to start a class newspaper and put me in charge. We had a ball writing articles about events at school and in the city of Amsterdam and developing photographs that we glued onto every copy of “the paper” in makeshift dark rooms, and Mr Jolie encouraged me to write about political subjects as well. When the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba happened, he thought that would be a good topic. So I wrote a piece criticizing the American invasion, which I took home to show my mother. We had a fierce argument. As a result, I went to school the next day with a draft that took a quite different slant. But after Mr Jolie argued with me some more, the final version came out as decidedly anti-American. Once my fellow pupils’ parents got hold of that issue of our paper all hell broke loose. An emergency meeting of the parent-teacher committee was called, and it was decreed that I was to stop writing about political issues – at the ripe old age of eleven. I wrote one more piece, on the introduction of the five-day work week, and then the paper folded. It was an interesting lesson about the risks of “incorrect” politics, but it was an even more interesting lesson on how to navigate and understand diametrically opposed views: my mother’s cold-war liberalism versus Mr Jolie’s banthe-bomb leftism. Mr Jolie urged my parents to let me go to the gymnasium for my secondary schooling, something that was far from assured for kids with less than sterling upper-class credentials in those days. The gymnasium was truly an elite institution in every sense of the term. Teachers commonly had doctorates and were leading lights in their fields. And the children were, well, mostly from Amsterdam’s upper-crust. My start at the Vossius gymnasium was far from auspicious. My Latin teacher, a much-feared matron by the name of Miss Ribbink, quickly sensed that I was not quite of the same pedigree as her other pupils, and she let me feel it. Her criticisms of my “sloppy” handwriting and her accusations that I “must have” cheated on an exam when I did better than she felt I was capable of, made it clear to me that I

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didn’t quite belong. But gradually things got better as I encountered several remarkable teachers of history, Greek, and Dutch literature who had a slightly higher opinion of me and whose lectures I found fascinating. There was our Greek teacher, who regularly disappeared to manage his archaeological digs in Palestine – we learned only much later that he was a world authority on Zoroastrianism. Another Greek teacher decided to dispense with the prescribed rote translations of Homer and Xenophon and taught us Greek philosophy instead. I was spell-bound by each and every one of his lectures. And then there was Mrs Van Tricht, my favourite teacher, whose constant encouragement gave my self-confidence an enormous boost. She was also an accomplished novelist under her maiden name, Elizabeth Keesing, and a dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast. Her advice on how to read critically was to start with the assumption that the author is dead wrong about everything. Then, she said, if anything is left standing after you’re finished, it was a good book or article. It’s a piece of advice I still give my students to wean them off their reverence for the authority of the printed word. While I continued to feel a bit out of place among the scions of the upper class throughout my six years of gymnasium, what really riled me was some of the snobbery and, especially, the pretentiousness that some of them displayed. At one point, I wrote a short story lampooning some of that, with the characters being clearly recognizable classmates. Mrs Van Tricht loved the essay and made me read it out loud in class. It was awkward, to put it mildly, but it probably also helped to reinforce my nascent distaste for pretentious gobbledegook, which has stayed with me ever since. For my Dutch essay for my final exam I chose the topic “Greece, the cradle of democracy.” In the essay I argued, contrary to the thesis implied in the title, that the rise of Protestantism was the major factor accounting for the emergence of modern democracy. I had not yet heard of Max Weber but had been exposed to my mother’s and grandmother’s pronouncements on the fundamental differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, in my grandmother’s case with the obvious intent of dissuading me from dating a local Catholic girl. I was awarded a prize for the essay – a book or books of my choice. I asked for the three volumes of Das Kapital, but Mrs Van Tricht thought that might be a bit too difficult for me. The books I ended up getting were three volumes of studies on the causes of war published by the new and, at that time, much-heralded Institute of War Studies.

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They were so boring I couldn’t get past page ten. When I finally did read Capital for my PhD dissertation, on the other hand, I was most pleasantly surprised by its many lucid and entertaining passages. The 1960s were heady times in Amsterdam. There was the Provo movement, a precursor of the later hippies and student movement, which proposed the famous “white bicycle plan” providing free whitepainted bicycles to the citizenry. There was much agitation for “direct” democracy. A new political party, Democrats 66, appeared on the Dutch political scene, proposing major reforms of the electoral system, the introduction of regular referenda and, somewhat more sotto voce, the possibility of abolishing the monarchy. I was strongly attracted to its democratizing proposals and its generally left-liberal program. I reported on the party’s founding congress for my school paper and interviewed one of its founders, Hans Gruijters, whose combination of smarts and common sense made a great impression on me. To this very day, I vote Democrats 66 in Dutch elections. The climax of the decade’s growing political excitement was reached in 1968, of course, the year in which I graduated from the gymnasium. The events of May ’68 in France and the Prague Spring were electrifying. My friends and I were swept up in the enthusiasm for direct democracy and “socialism with a human face.” We were convinced that a new era of anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical politics lay ahead. Then came the shock of the 21 August Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. That certainly put a dent in my illusions about “socialism with a human face.” STUDENT ADRIFT

I missed out on the subsequent radical ferment in Amsterdam, culminating in the May 1969 occupation of the principal administrative building of the University of Amsterdam, the Maagdenhuis, because I was away that year. My first inclination had been to study philosophy at the university. My businessman father did not think that was a particularly practical idea and encouraged me to apply for a fellowship to study in the United States for a year. He thought the Americans might beat some sense into the head of that dreamer of a son of his. I got the scholarship, administered and arranged by the Holland-America Institute, and while some of the others who also got it that year ended up going to places like Chicago and Los Angeles, I was sent to a place called Dickinson, North Dakota, to study at Dickinson State College,

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the local teachers’ college. I arrived there at the end of August 1968. To say that my arrival there produced a mutual culture shock would be a gross understatement. During the week before course registrations, the student dormitory was inhabited by the members of the football team and – me. Those bulldozers of guys made it quite clear that they were not pleased with my appearance, especially my hair, which ever so slightly covered the tips of my ears and was deemed much too long by this crew-cut crowd. It was a rather uncomfortable week. But after a few more only slightly less awkward weeks my fellow students and professors started to get used to me. For some reason, I was confident that they would adjust to me rather than the other way around. I am not sure where that bit of chutzpah came from. Maybe it was the long summers I had spent at my grandmother’s in rural Switzerland, learning how to turn my big city boy status to my advantage without offending the local kids. At any rate, my confidence proved justified and I quickly rose to the status of one of the cooler guys on campus – a status that came with all kinds of advantages, as you might imagine. But, more important, my lucky streak of exceptional teachers continued. I took all the classes I could from Professor Russell Veeder, another historian-iconoclast. I still remember his lecture on the shootout at the O.K. Corral in his history of the American West course. He meticulously dismembered every myth about that famous incident, attributing the fact that only two participants got killed while the two sides were only twenty feet apart during the entire episode to the incredible lack of accuracy of the firearms at the time. After class I regularly followed Professor Veeder all the way to his office, arguing with him about all sorts of things, but mostly politics – clearly to his delight. These were the days of the infamous Democratic Convention in Chicago and the Chicago Seven. Veeder was a staunch Democrat, which was rare enough in that part of the world, but a Humphrey supporter. I still remember the nearly fist-banging arguments we had, all of which merely cemented our friendship. He was a wonderful mentor. At the end of my year in Dickinson, though cured of my desire to study philosophy, I still did not know what exactly I wanted to major in upon my return to Amsterdam. All I knew was that I wanted it to be broad enough to accommodate my increasingly catholic interests. I wrote to my closest friend from high school for advice and, without even checking back with me, he registered me in a program called

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General Political and Social Sciences. It was precisely what I was looking for. Originally designed for future journalists, it offered a marvellous range of courses in history, politics, economics, sociology, philosophy of science, research methods, law, and even accounting (to teach us how to read national accounts). Like many of my fellow students, I did not take my studies all that seriously, only occasionally showing up at the odd lecture and exam. We had better things to do. The student movement in Amsterdam was still going strong and was divided into all manner of groups and cells, most of them subscribing to some variant of Marxism: Maoists (recognizable by the “ML” suffix, for “Marxist-Leninist”), Trotskyists, and even self-proclaimed Stalinists. The university was in a state of perpetual upheaval. A group of hard-line student activists and allied junior lecturers effectively took over my department. The professor, the professor in the European tradition, went on strike against his own department, together with four or five of his loyalists. In terms of my politics and philosophical outlook, such as they were, I felt much closer to Professor Hans Daudt, a respected social democrat, than to my more radical fellow students and lecturers. For some time I needed to carefully manoeuvre my way through the program to avoid getting into trouble with the more doctrinaire Marxist teachers. I still remember vividly how, when I went in prepared to take an oral literature exam, I found out that my regular teacher had been replaced by one known for her unyielding Maoism. She started the exam by questioning why I had chosen to put Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology on my list, her eyebrows raised in a manner that left little to the imagination. It took a considerable amount of squirming and ingenuity to get myself out of that one. Much time was spent in all kinds of meetings in those days. In a major reform of its governance structures, the university had adopted a system of councils in which students had parity with faculty members. In addition there was a plethora of “extra-parliamentary” groups and grouplets incessantly calling meetings to decide what the “correct” proletarian line was on everything from the curriculum and university governance to the “class struggle” waged by groups like Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Brigate Rosse. I was still somewhat under the spell of the ideal of direct democracy in those days. I remember how profoundly inspirational I found Christian Bay’s The Structure of Freedom (Bay 1965). But my experiences with the grassroots “democracy” in the student movement severely shook my

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faith. Meetings tended to be either excruciatingly tedious or patently manipulated by whichever doctrinaire cabal had managed to infiltrate the meeting in larger numbers or proclaimed its proletarian credentials the loudest. The groups that most vigorously asserted their commitment to bottom-up democratic decision making – usually the Trotskyists – were by far the most unscrupulous and ruthless in rigging the debates and voting procedures. Participatory democracy clearly wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. There were lessons here that I would not forget. Luckily, many of my courses were taught by teachers from other departments, and we were still able to take courses from Professor Daudt’s small group of loyalists. Those courses tended to firm up my belief in the importance of empirical evidence and the need to try to distinguish, to the extent possible, between one’s ideological commitments and the facts of the matter. I remember being particularly impressed by the excruciatingly methodical case for “scientific value relativism” in Arnold Brecht’s Political Theory (Brecht 1959), a required text for Daudt’s students and one vilified as nothing but “bourgeois” apologetics by his Marxist foes. In retrospect, I think reading Brecht in that context helped convince me that the commitment to pursue, as best we can, a principled value-neutral empiricism is a necessary defence against the totalizing, and ultimately totalitarian, impulses of those who think they’re in possession of “The Truth.” Seeing my Marxist and marxisant fellow students contemptuously dismiss Brecht on the basis of their supreme confidence in their own “scientific” certainties about what was correct and false, and what was right and wrong, just strengthened my conviction that he was on to something fundamental. It was a bit of a pity that he ended up on a rather odd slide into religiosity at the end of the book, but that part was not required reading. As I progressed to smaller and smaller seminar-style courses, another of my already apparent tendencies was strongly reinforced as well: my deep aversion to pretentious gobbledegook. As I tried to avoid the seminars that were likely to be dominated by doctrinaire Marxists, I ended up mostly taking courses in which a softer, more philosophical kind of gobbledegook held sway, particularly offered by admirers of Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School. In an evident effort to impress our teachers, the most annoying of my fellow students would hold forth on the profundities of critical theory in a manner that convinced me they had no idea what they were talking about. This was

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“the cult of un-understandability” that Karl Popper ridiculed so effectively in his reply to Adorno et al. in The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology (Popper 1976, 294). Luckily, not all my teachers were as impressed by this cult as were the German professors Popper lampooned. Some of them actually encouraged me to go against the pretentious fashions of the day. But I could see already – although I had by no means yet decided that I wanted to become an academic – that they did not hold enough sway to effectively back me on my way towards a PhD. For in that world divided into sectarian and personal fiefdoms, you clearly needed an influential sponsor if you were to have any prospect at all of making it to the PhD and beyond. Then again, at that time such questions did not yet preoccupy me. Upon my return from the United States, I had run into an old school buddy who persuaded me to join him in organizing the Cinestud ’70 student film festival, at the time the biggest of its kind. Organizing the festival was a great experience, but the aftermath was even better. It turned out that Cinestud drew a large number of Eastern European participants whom we had to put up and feed because they came with barely any hard currency. In return, in the course of the ensuing years they invited us to all kinds of small film events throughout Eastern Europe. We spent an inordinate amount of time, far more than we spent in the university’s lecture halls, travelling in our old beat-up Citroën 2CVs to places like Budapest, Cracow, Prague, Székesfehérvár, Poznan, and many other destinations in the east, moving from one tiny 16mm festival to another. For many of us it was quite an eyeopener. Although we were invariably treated like kings, the eerie searches at gunpoint at the borders, the sheer bleakness of the places we visited, and, most of all, the sense of utter demoralization we encountered everywhere cured even the most leftist among us of whatever lingering illusions we might still have entertained about the nature of “really existing socialism.” You could just see it crumbling around you, both physically and morally. While some of my friends still tried to play down the evidence before us, it seemed obvious to me that the Soviet Empire was going to collapse all by itself, sooner or later. I wish I had had the nerve to write something to that effect at the time. Through friends I got a job as a barman in one of Amsterdam’s famous “brown cafés” (after the colour of the smoke-stained walls), which was as lucrative as it was absorbing. And it offered a welcome

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relief from my father’s constant reminders that I was relying on him for financial support. There was a girl from Quebec, Sylvie, who worked in the café’s kitchen while she was taking courses at an art school in Amsterdam. We fell head over heels for one another and I moved into her cramped dormitory room right next door to the Anne Frank House and across the canal from the café. We had lived together for less than two years when tragedy struck her family back in Montreal and she had to move back to take care of her much younger sister. This was my cue to start thinking seriously about what I wanted to do when I grew up. LANDING ON MY FEET: GRADUATE STUDIES AT MCGILL

If I was going to go for a PhD, I thought, I might as well try to do it in North America, given my limited prospects in Dutch academia. It was not so much that I was fully committed to pursuing an academic career yet as that the alternative – getting permanently stuck in the bar scene in Amsterdam – did not seem all that attractive in the long run. So I decided to follow Sylvie and apply for admission to a PhD program at McGill University, the only Canadian university that I had heard of. I came to Montreal for a couple of months in the winter of 1976 to be with Sylvie and to gauge my chances at McGill. I presented myself at the Department of Political Science first. I learned from one of the professors there that the program basically had two streams: comparative government and political theory. Our chat was as short as it was excruciatingly unexciting. Since I was taking what amounted to a minor in sociology in Amsterdam, I decided to try my luck a few flights of stairs up in the Department of Sociology. There I was told to go see a Professor Donald Von Eschen, who happened to be in his office at the time. It was a memorable encounter. After the barest of introductions we launched into an intense conversation about Marxism, world-systems theory, the student movement, the Soviet Empire, and much, much more that seemed, in possibly slightly distorted hindsight, to have lasted several hours. I came out of there in a state of utter intellectual exhilaration – and determined to switch to sociology. Initially, McGill’s Department of Sociology was not prepared to risk any tangible resources on me. I was offered no funding whatsoever. So I decided I had better get permanent resident status in Canada so I

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would be able to find a way to support myself. After a seven-month period of filling out paperwork and doing interviews, I was told by the Canadian embassy in The Hague that my application had been rejected. “Mr van den Berg, Canada really doesn’t need any more political scientists,” the consular official told me. But if I were to marry Ms Thibodeau, he added, they would have no choice but to grant me the immigrant visa I was seeking. So Sylvie and I decided to get married before we both moved back to Montreal permanently in September 1976. It was an uncharacteristically far-sighted decision on my part. And, in case you’re wondering, we’re still married today. Having been accepted into the PhD program at McGill I now needed to finish my MA work in Amsterdam, in a hurry. I took a whole series of exams in quick succession and started to work seriously on my MA thesis. My plan was to empirically compare the conflicting accounts of liberal democracy of the then much-vilified neopluralist Robert Dahl with those of his radical critics, from C. Wright Mills to Ralph Miliband. To take Dahl seriously was a bit of an act of defiance, given the climate at the time. But the harder I looked at the seemingly conflicting claims made by the two sides the less I was able to identify any empirical matters on which they actually disagreed. While much of the debate was couched in terms that seemed to refer to empirical matters, in fact they didn’t differ substantially on the realities they were describing. They mainly differed in their evaluations of those realities. And these evaluations, in turn, appeared to rest on entirely unexplicated counterfactual criteria: Dahl’s assessment implicitly drawing on a comparison of the less-than-perfect reality of “polyarchy” with its far worse contemporary totalitarian and historical authoritarian alternatives, while his critics took some vague notion of “socialism” (complete equality or even “reason” [Habermas]) as the implicit standard by which to evaluate “bourgeois democracy.” This was also the first occasion for me to tackle the dubious notion of “false consciousness,” which was based, mostly implicitly (though in Habermas’s case a little more explicitly), on only vaguely articulated utopian alternatives, the realism of which was, to put it mildly, questionable. It is a theme that I have ended up returning to time and again. My experience as a student at McGill was in every respect the opposite of what it had been in Amsterdam. I was shocked at first at the huge amount of reading and writing we were expected to do each week, compared to the leisurely pace I was used to in Amsterdam. But it was

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also enormously exciting to be reading, and passionately debating, all these “great books,” week in and week out. Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System, Howard Becker’s Outsiders, Charles Tilly’s From Mobilization to Revolution – the list went on and on. And my cohort consisted of a group of wonderfully argumentative fellow students who turned every seminar meeting into a thrilling debating fest, which often continued on well into the night, fuelled by copious quantities of the affordable beer and wine served at the graduate centre. The basic philosophy of social science that I encountered at McGill suited my temperament perfectly. There was no such thing as a traditional graduate seminar in sociological theory. Instead, Roger Krohn ran a “great books” seminar to which other faculty members came to present what they considered to be the most important recent books in their respective subfields. Theory, according to this approach, is something that should be taught as part of the various subfields, as in the “theory of revolution,” or the “theory of capitalist development,” and so on. The kind of “theory” that is taught in the traditional sociological theory courses, Krohn told us, was little more than the “debris of nineteenth-century philosophy.” A nice way of summing up the department’s commitment to a resolute, theory-driven empiricism. I could hardly do anything but thrive in an environment like that! During my first semester at McGill, in the fall of 1976, I started having regular discussions with Michael Smith, whose course on the sociology of work I was taking. I was mostly humbled by his relentless insistence that I back up whatever argument I was making with solid evidence and logic. I may have been committed to empiricism in the abstract, but with his invariable question, “how do you know that?,” he taught me a thing or two about the real concrete meaning of the term. At this time I was becoming interested in the then much-celebrated new Marxist theories of the “capitalist state,” which supposedly exposed the modern welfare state as a doomed attempt to legitimate “late capitalism.” I thought that, in my PhD dissertation, I might be able to test those theories by looking at whether and how they might apply empirically to the case of the rise of the Canadian welfare state. In preparation for that project I wrote a paper in which I originally intended to analyze the then popular theory of the coming “legitimation crisis” as espoused by Claus Offe and Jürgen Habermas. But instead (recognize a pattern?) I ended up with a detailed critique of Habermas’s attempts to establish the objectively valid “substantive reason” with which to

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criticize the “irrationality” of modern capitalism, and the “positivism” that served as its philosophical prop, but that had eluded the first generation of the Frankfurt School “critical theorists.” Habermas, I argued, ran afoul of what I initially called “Schumpeter’s dilemma.” In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Schumpeter (1950) famously criticizes Rousseau’s conception of democracy for assuming that somehow the volonté de tous, the empirical will of the people, would naturally produce a volonté générale, the true public good. But what if, Schumpeter asked, a democratic majority approved “the persecution of Christians, the burning of witches, and the slaughtering of Jews” (Schumpeter 1950, 242)? Not exactly an academic question in 1942 when these words were written. But Schumpeter’s point was clear: either we know what is good for “the people,” and then there is no point really in asking their opinion, or we leave it up to them to decide, but then we must accept the decision even if it strikes us as repugnant. We can’t have it both ways. But Habermas insisted that there were objectively valid reasons for declaring the apparent consensus supporting the late capitalist status quo to be “distorted.” Yet he also argued that the final demonstration of those valid reasons would have to await an unconstrained consensus among all concerned, produced by an “ideal speech situation” in which only the force of reason prevails. In other words, rather than solving the dilemma Habermas ends up merely restating it, wavering between the arbitrary, and potentially authoritarian, claim of having privileged insight into which values are “correct” and which are “distorted,” on the one hand, and the liberal-democratic claim that it is up to all of us to decide which is which. I submitted the paper as my final term paper for Roger Krohn’s seminar. Roger was not impressed. He felt I was wasting my energy on outdated philosophical quandaries. On the other hand, Richard Hamilton, the one professor at McGill whom I had until then found slightly intimidating, asked me for a copy as he was curious to learn what these Frankfurt characters had been up to. After reading it he suggested I send it somewhere for publication. Out of chutzpah or sheer ignorance, or probably a bit of both, I sent the paper to the American Journal of Sociology (van den Berg 1980). Within weeks I got a letter from the editor announcing that the American Journal of Sociology was going to publish the paper as the lead article in one of the next issues of the journal! The letter came with two referee reports, one consisting of three pages of single-

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spaced praise and the other a hand-written note saying “would be good if shortened somehow,” or words to that effect. The first referee had only one suggestion, that I replace “Schumpeter’s dilemma” with the catchier “dilemma of democratic radicalism,” in emulation of Parsons’s famous “utilitarian dilemma.” I followed that advice, shortened the paper a bit, and that was that. Regrettably, the “dilemma of democratic radicalism” proved to be less catchy than the referee in question thought, but the article certainly caught some attention. In the weeks that followed its publication I received an amazing stream of “fan mail” from a virtual who-iswho in the discipline: Daniel Bell, Irving Horowitz, Dennis Wrong – the list kept on growing. For weeks the highlight of my day was to rush to my mailbox at the department to see what new surprises were awaiting me. It was pretty exciting, intoxicating even, to suddenly be corresponding on a regular basis with the big-wigs of the discipline! And I hadn’t even started working on my dissertation proposal yet. BECOMING AN ACADEMIC

At some point during the spring of 1981 I got a call from the University of Alberta, asking me whether I would apply for a job there. I was a bit hesitant, having never travelled further west than Toronto and still mindful of my experiences in Dickinson, North Dakota. I tried to stall them, using the fact that I was slowly recovering from a rather nasty ski accident as an excuse. But by September I had run out of excuses and the calls from Edmonton became more insistent. I was also running out of funding as my doctoral Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) scholarship was ending. I managed to screw up the job interview pretty badly, first by missing my flight to Edmonton, which forced my hosts to cancel a planned dinner with the dean, and then by giving a less than stellar talk about my dissertation. But I am not sure any of this mattered much. It so happened that Niklas Luhmann, the famous German systems theorist, was in the audience as he was a visiting professor there at the time. After the talk he joined us for dinner and was most charmingly complimentary about the talk I had given. I accepted the job offer without too much hesitation. I would be appointed at the faculty lecturer rank, pending completion of my dissertation, after which I would be promoted to the rank of a regular tenure-track assistant professor. I was confident I’d have my disserta-

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tion done by the end of the summer of 1982 or soon thereafter. That was quite a miscalculation. My teaching load was five one-semester courses, all new preparations. My only teaching experience consisted of having been an occasional teaching assistant at McGill. I basically spent all my waking time scrambling to prepare for my courses during my first year. There was little or no time to work on my dissertation. By the time I left Edmonton to take my job at McGill two years later I was still struggling to finish the dissertation. The atmosphere at the University of Alberta was quite different from what I had come to know at McGill. Instead of the sometimes fierce debates before a consensus was reached, department meetings in Edmonton were brief and mostly consisted of voting on various proposals. Whereas there was a strong sense of a basic shared philosophy at McGill, in Edmonton it was live and let live. But then the relative cohesiveness of McGill’s small department was the outcome of a nasty civil war that had raged and been settled just before I arrived there as a student.1 The department in Edmonton, on the other hand, was a sprawling collection of thirty-plus individualists, each doing his or her own thing. Yet, interestingly, there was a much livelier social life among faculty members in Edmonton than among those at McGill. I was still not quite done with the dissertation when we moved back to Montreal at the end of the summer of 1984. It had been a long and winding road. As with my MA thesis I had started out with the idea of doing something empirical: to “test” neo-Marxist theories of the “capitalist state” on the case of the rise of the Canadian welfare state. This seemed to make sense. While there was a whole series of such theories being debated at the time (from Miliband’s “instrumentalism” to Poulantzas’s “structuralism,” from the Marxized systems theory of Claus Offe and James O’Connor to the “class struggle” theory of Gøsta Esping-Andersen and Fred Block), they all implied that the rise of the welfare state was something of a ploy, a “prophylactic” against more radical change, as Miliband once put it, rather than a truly progressive development. So I set out to read everything I could get my hands on relating to Marxist theorizing about politics in capitalist “social formations” as well as on the history of the Canadian welfare state. After having collected many boxes of index cards (in those days!) with notes and references I set out to review those neo-Marxist theories in order to draw from them the relevant empirical predictions that I could then test

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against the actual events that produced welfare reform in Canada. But the closer I looked at those theories the harder I found it to extract any implications from them that could be used to assess their empirical validity. Poulantzas’s Althusserian “structuralist” theory, widely touted as the epitome of neo-Marxist theoretical sophistication at the time, turned out to be little more than a web of tautologies designed to immunize the “theory” against even the possibility of falsification. The “instrumentalist” alternatives, on the other hand, were barely distinguishable from neopluralist accounts of the politics of advanced industrialized societies, except for their unexamined counterfactual assumption that the welfare reforms that did occur had served as an effective “prophylactic” against the much more radical change that would have occurred in their absence. In other words, despite my best intentions I ended up with a conclusion much like the one I had come to in my MA thesis. But the peculiarity of the Marxist position was that the implicit counterfactual could not even be openly discussed because of Marx’s famous explicit taboo against considering “recipes for the cookshops of the future.” Consequently, the Marxist argument crucially relied on a belief in the feasibility of a utopian alternative that was, at the same time, held to be entirely beyond rational inspection. In the end this paradox within Marxism as a whole became the main argument of the dissertation. It was a good thing the purely theoretical character of the dissertation only became apparent by the time it was almost completed, for such theses were frowned upon at McGill, particularly by my supervisor, Mike Smith. But once finished my professors, now my colleagues, were happy enough with the result. Once again, Richard Hamilton encouraged me to submit it to a respectable publisher. As I had done with my piece on Habermas, I first went for the top: Princeton University Press. But this time things didn’t go so smoothly. The anonymous reviewer for Princeton was clearly a fan of the theories I was criticizing. He or she tried very hard to rubbish the manuscript in the eyes of the press’s editors. I wrote an excruciatingly detailed rebuttal to every one of the reviewer’s criticisms but to no avail. The back and forth took at least a year, maybe two. Finally the press decided against publication. But then Richard stepped in once more and instead brokered a publication contract with De Gruyter, where a former student of his, James Wright, was editing a book series. When the Princeton editors got wind of this, they changed their minds and offered to publish the book after all. In

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the end, it finally got published in 1988, three years after I had finished the dissertation. By 1988 the neo-Marxist wave that started in the 1960s had run its course. I realized it was time to get out of the criticizing-Marxism business. I wrote one more piece on the intra-Marxist debate about the “correct” location of the new middle class – arguing that it, too, was implicitly based on the counterfactual of who would and who would not be on the side of the “proletariat” when the revolution would finally arrive – which took a great deal of hustling and time to finally get published (van den Berg 1993). Time to consider what to do with the rest of my life. THE

“ SWEDISH

PROJECT ” AND AFTER

Sometime in 1986 I attended a talk by Sweden’s deputy minister of labour, Berit Rollén, who was visiting McGill. She spoke eloquently about how Sweden’s active labour market policy did not just protect Sweden’s workers from the ill effects of structural change in the economy but also helped accelerate such change by reducing its cost to those workers, rendering them much less likely to resist it. During her talk it occurred to me how completely opposite the social-psychological assumptions underlying her argument were to the standard free-market assumption that a sense of security just encourages workers to resist and obstruct in the face of change. During the question and answer period, I pointed out that there were two diametrically opposite sets of assumptions about how workers are likely to respond to employment (in)security. I asked whether the deputy minister knew of any research showing that the one underlying the Swedish approach – that workers respond to greater security with a greater willingness to accept change – was correct. She answered that she was not aware of such research. Here was my next project. Comparing Swedish and Canadian workers’ responses to economic and technological change appealed to me on a number of levels. First, after having argued for so long that Marxism’s Achilles heel consisted of its refusal to allow its implicit alternative to be examined, taking a closer look at socialism as it was practised in Sweden seemed an obvious next step. Second, with two so diametrically opposed yet so obviously plausible theories to test, we were bound to produce spectacular results, whatever we would end up finding. Third, as pedestrian as the central research question might sound, answering it would have

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major implications on a whole range of levels of sociological theorizing, all the way from fundamental concerns about the viability of a (Durkheimian?) social contract to practical issues of how to implement technological change in industry. Fourth, I had my first sabbatical coming up and spending it in Sweden sounded like a pretty attractive proposition. I broached the idea with my friend Joseph Smucker of Concordia University, a well-respected Canadian industrial sociologist. We got a couple of small seed grants that allowed me to travel to Sweden during the summer to look for research partners and to prepare a massive SSHRC grant proposal. I was amazed at how easy it was to get hold of all sorts of high-ranking Swedish officials and famous academics. And all this while my operating base consisted of the telephone on the reception desk of a Stockholm youth hostel, the only place we could afford to stay. The Swedish response to my research proposal was overwhelmingly positive. Not so much in Canada. Our grant proposal went nowhere, to my great embarrassment vis-à-vis my very supportive Swedish hosts. Frustratingly, we were getting two kinds of completely opposite negative reactions: economists tended to dismiss our project as pointless because it was obvious that the neoclassical behavioural assumption was correct, while sociologists dismissed it as equally pointless because the alternative Swedish assumption was obviously far superior. It took several attempts to finally get some modest Canadian funding that we could then leverage to obtain complementary funding in Sweden. But in the end we managed to put together quite an impressive team: Joe Smucker, Mike Smith, and Tony Masi in Canada; and Bengt Furåker (who was then professor of sociology at the University of Umeå and later at the University of Gothenburg), his graduate student Leif Johansson, and myself in Sweden. We worked on parallel quantitative and qualitative research in three matched industries in both countries. The labour market economists I had contacted at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (Institutet för Socialforskning, or SOFI) of the University of Stockholm graciously invited me to spend my 1988–89 sabbatical as their guest. But once there I also befriended the reigning sociologists, Robert Erickson and Walter Korpi, as well as their then doctoral students. They soon found out about my sideline as a critic of grand theory. At the time, I was trying to flog two pieces that had started as commandeered book reviews of the first volume of Haber-

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mas’s Theory of Communicative Action and Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice, respectively, but that had gotten out of hand and they were now hard to get published. I presented both of them in the institute’s weekly seminar, much to the delight of the empirically oriented sociologists associated with SOFI but to the chagrin of the members of the sociology department who were rather more enamoured with the likes of Habermas and Bourdieu. The end result was that I was offered funding to stay an additional year at SOFI while earning the enmity of some of the sociologists in the department. Altogether, Sylvie and I spent almost three wonderful years living in Sweden, the third year financed through one of our Swedish research grants. The research itself proceeded by fits and starts as I, the project’s coordinator, had to deal with a fair amount of conflict among ourselves over methods, procedures, and funding issues. In addition, the project was almost scuttled entirely in 1991 when officials at Statistics Canada, because of a question about members’ trust in their union leaders, suddenly refused to proceed with their part of the survey questions we had commissioned to be attached to the Labour Force Survey. In the end we managed to publish a series of specialized papers in reasonably respectable venues (Smith et al. 1995, 1997; Smucker and van den Berg 1991; Smucker et al. 1998; van den Berg and Smucker 1992; van den Berg et al. 1998, 2002) and a book reporting on the project as a whole (van den Berg, Furåker, and Johansson 1997). Our main result was rather surprising: we found no evidence supporting either the theory linking worker flexibility to (the threat of) labour market insecurity or the reverse. Instead, the most important difference between the ways change was handled in industry between the two countries had to do with the institutional differences in their labour relations regimes. Sweden’s unions might have had the power to resist change, but they turned out to be quite cooperative in managing it and its consequences, while Canada’s unions took a far more obstructionist position, which, however, was routinely ignored by management. While I was working on our book in Sweden, Richard Swedberg contacted me to tell me that he and Peter Hedström were organizing a high-powered conference on “social mechanisms” in which they wanted to showcase the merits of analytical sociology, the straightshooter middle-range approach to sociology. He asked whether I would be willing to write a critical piece for the conference on the four grand theorists of the day – Habermas, Bourdieu, Giddens, and

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Alexander. It was an invitation I couldn’t resist. Analytical sociology was pretty much my kind of sociology. My argument was, simply put, that these four grand theorists have little to offer us workaday sociologists in our efforts to try to explain social phenomena. Instead, they offer up grand syntheses that turn out to be failed attempts to transcend or resolve the eternal philosophical conundrums of voluntarism versus determinism, understanding versus explanation, objectivism versus subjectivism, and so on, all of which the rest of us sociologists who actually would like to explain something out there can safely ignore. After I was done talking, Tom Schelling, the Nobel-prize-winning economist, was visibly miffed. “Could things be really that bad in the discipline of sociology?” he wanted to know. “They sure can!” was the immediate answer he got from political philosopher Jon Elster, or words to that effect. Framing our Swedish-Canadian project in terms of conflicting economic and sociological behavioural assumptions triggered my interest in the renewed attacks by sociologists and political scientists on the pretentions of rational choice theory as “the most promising basis presently available for a unified approach to the analysis of the social world by scholars from different social sciences” (Becker 1993, 403). With my background in at least some basic economics I never felt quite as hostile to rational choice theory as did most of my fellow sociologists (e.g., Etzioni 1988; Green and Shapiro 1994). On the other hand, at least since the writings of Herbert Simon, even hard-nosed economists had to admit that engaging in the purely calculative behaviour postulated by the notion of homo economicus was, to put it colloquially, easier said than done in most real-life social contexts. I decided to devote my sabbatical of 1997–98 to trying to figure out where I stood in this seemingly never-ending debate. We spent the sabbatical in the Netherlands, mostly to allow our kids, then three and six years old, to get to know their relatives and to learn the language once and for all. My old friends in Amsterdam advised me to request the brand-new, ultra-prestigious Amsterdam School for Social Science Research to host me as a visiting research fellow. As I walked through the corridors of the new “School” for the first time and looked at the names on the office doors, I don’t think I encountered a single one that I did not remember from the mid-1970s! Under the energetic leadership of Johan Goudsblom in particular, the Amsterdam School had become a major centre for followers of Norbert Elias, a trend that had already started at the time I left in the

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1970s. While I thought Elias’s work was quite interesting, the sheer devotion many there displayed towards him always struck me as slightly sectarian. In any case, my work on rational choice theory was theoretically quite alien to my hosts. I argued that both the economic rational choice approach and its sociological, cultural-normativist alternatives tended to take the type of action motivation they emphasized too easily for granted. Neither purely rational calculation nor culturally or normatively motivated action was, I argued, a self-evidently natural default. Both require considerable expenditure of energy and thought. Instead, I proposed habitual behaviour as the obvious fallback for action in most everyday situations. Taking habit as the “natural state,” so to speak, I argued that what really requires explanation is when, where, and how people deviate from their habitual patterns of behaviour, either in the direction of rational calculation or in the direction of normative commitment. To be sure, I had a good and productive time at the school and was treated well by my hosts. But the experience certainly did not make me doubt the wisdom of my move to Canada. I may return to the topic someday as I keep stumbling on work that, in one way or another, comes to very similar conclusions (e.g., Beckert 1996). Quite accidentally I got involved in another project during this period – one that was totally off topic for me. Sometime in 1993 David Pariser, an old friend who teaches art education at Concordia University and is an expert on children’s art, told me about a study done by Jessica Davis, a student of famous developmental psychologist Howard Gardner at Harvard. Supposedly, Davis had demonstrated that the level of artistic creativity of very young children was as high as that of mature artists while it was much lower for older children and non-artistic adults. This was known as the “U-curve” theory of artistic development, according to which small children are spontaneously very artistic but then end up being socialized into conformity with boring, conventional aesthetic norms that only those destined for true artistry manage later to shake off. This was grist for my populist mill. I was extremely sceptical about the possibility of measuring “artistic quality” in any objective manner and strongly suspected that the findings reflected the modernist aesthetic sensibilities of the art-educated judges rather than anything inherent in the drawings they had evaluated. Pariser used his contacts in the Montreal educational system to solicit 165 drawings from children of different age groups as well as

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adult artists and non-artists. He had the brilliant idea of having the drawings evaluated by two pairs of judges – two art-educated judges from the Davis team and two artists from the Montreal Chinese community – on the assumption that this would enable us to assess whether the former’s evaluations rested on some kind of modernist aesthetic bias. His second brilliant idea was to have the judges use both the original scoring method, which employed seemingly sophisticated categories like “metonymic or metaphoric reference between symbol and referent,” and a simple sorting of the drawings into a “best,” “worst,” and intermediate pile in order to elicit the judges’ own aesthetic criteria. My job was to be the “statistician” on the project – a source of much amusement among my colleagues and students – recording, coding, and entering the data and conducting some simple statistical tests. The results of the pilot were spectacular. First, the two evaluation methods produced exactly the same results. In other words, the supposedly more “scientific” Davis protocol turned out to be entirely superfluous. But, more important, while the Davis judges produced the exact same U-curve that Davis herself had found, our “Chinese” judges produced a much more linear pattern, with the youngest kids’ drawings at the bottom and the adult artists’ drawings at the top. After the evaluation exercises David interviewed the judges about the aesthetic criteria they had applied, and, as we suspected, drawing skill loomed large in the evaluations by the “Chinese” judges. I don’t think I have ever seen any research findings that so conclusively appear to refute a cherished academic theory (Pariser and van den Berg 1997a, 1997b). This led to an invitation from another leading art education researcher, Anna Kindler of the University of British Columbia, to join forces for a larger, multi-country project. We obtained SSHRC funding for a massive project involving the collection of over fourteen hundred drawings from different age- and skill-groups in Taiwan, Brazil, and Canada, which we had evaluated in each country by four groups of judges who were also drawn from those different age- and skill-groups. Our principal finding remained the same. While I was spending my sabbatical in the Netherlands our book on the Swedish-Canadian project came out. I made some tentative efforts to advertise it among my colleagues there. The SISWO/Social Policy Institute in Amsterdam – now unfortunately defunct – was an organization with a very interesting mandate: to bring together social scientists from different universities and help them formulate collab-

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orative research projects. Nick van den Heuvel, one of the Institute’s research directors, invited me to join an international research project called TLM.net. The network was led by German economist Günther Schmid of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and focused on assessing his theory of “transitional labour markets.” Schmid’s ideas clearly had some affinities with the work we had been doing in Sweden. After I had presented our Swedish-Canadian results at an early TLM.net conference, it was, if I remember correctly, Schmid who suggested that I might give a hand in writing up their final report on the policy implications of the network’s research findings and perhaps get involved in the preparation of its next multi-country grant application to the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme. Nick thought we might even have a chance of getting an EU Marie Curie Fellowship that would free me up for an entire year to work on these two assignments. We applied and, to my great surprise, I got the fellowship. So in 2004 I was back in Amsterdam, this time as the guest of SISWO and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies. SISWO director Erik de Gier and I wrote the TLM.net policy report together (de Gier and van den Berg 2006). I then went to work helping to put together a new multi-national collaboration based on the old TLM.net network and to write a new grant proposal to be submitted to the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme in the fall of 2005. It was a massive undertaking, involving twenty institutions in thirteen countries and a budget of more than eight million euros. The final proposal was about 230 pages long, much of it written by a team of researchers in France, the UK, and the Netherlands. All in all, I worked on it for close to a year and a half. The final few weeks before the submission deadline were the most frantic of my career. Then came the deadline, one day in October of 2005. Our application was to be submitted online by 5:00 p.m. Brussels time. We all sat at our computers in our respective countries (I was back in Montreal by then) and waited. About half an hour passed. No news. Then came the shock: the overall project coordinator managed to miss the deadline by five minutes due to a computer crash! After we recovered from the shock we tried everything, absolutely everything, to persuade the Commission to let our proposal through, but it was all for nought. I parlayed my involvement with the Europeans into leverage for obtaining new research funding in Canada. At a conference in Ottawa I ran into my old acquaintance Paul Bernard, professor of sociology at the Université de Montréal and well known for his work on the wel-

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fare state and inequality in Canada. Paul suggested we do something together on comparative welfare and employment policies. We wrote a pair of grant applications together proposing to analyze social and employment policies and their outcomes in Canada’s major provinces as compared to a selection of European countries and the United States. We framed the project partly as complementary to the European network, which I am sure helped us get funding from both SSHRC and the Ministère du développement économique, de l’innovation et de l’exportation du Québec, starting in 2008. We gathered a group of talented PhD students and went to work on building an inventory of the principal provincial policies and programs likely to affect social outcomes, such as employment and poverty patterns, in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. We spent a couple of years gathering data and drafting papers presenting our early results when, quite suddenly, Paul was diagnosed with bone cancer. He stoically underwent a series of increasingly invasive treatments, insisting on attending each and every one of our team’s meetings, which he had enjoyed so much from the beginning. But by February of 2011, barely a year after he had been diagnosed, he had to give up and passed away. We were in disarray for some time after his death, missing his enthusiasm and encouragement at least as much as his conceptual and statistical acumen. But eventually we pulled ourselves together, feeling that we needed to complete the project to honour his memory. We soldiered on and the project eventually turned into a book about Quebec’s somewhat exceptional – by North American standards – approach to combating poverty (van den Berg et al. 2017). With that project finally completed, I think I can fairly say that I have paid my dues to empirical research and am entitled to return to my first love: sociological theory. Obviously my relationship with much of what is written and taught under that label is, to say the least, complicated. In fact, someone (I think it was Jeff Alexander) once called me “the theorist who doesn’t like theory.” And there is some truth in that. I certainly dislike the “post-positivist” consensus that the overwhelming majority of self-declared sociological theorists seem to have taken for granted in recent decades. By this I mean the almost universal rejection of the epistemological underpinnings of “positivist” social science: universal validity, objectivity, realism, scientism, value neutrality, and causal determinism. To be sure, not all self-proclaimed post-positivists necessarily subscribe to all of these, but the postpositivist consensus includes most of the following philosophical posi-

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tions: a profound scepticism about the possibility of attaining objectively valid sociological knowledge; repudiation of the possibility and desirability of “value free” social science; rejection of the nomothetic ambition to uncover the universal “laws” of social life; critique of “scientism,” the equation of “true” science with the methodology of the natural sciences; rejection of quantification and generalization as the primary methods and goals of sociology; insistence on the power of human agency and the consequent indeterminacy of social life; and insistence on the primacy of interpretation of meaning over causal explanation in the human sciences. While there has been some non-post-positivist pushback on these issues, by Jonathan Turner, or proponents of “analytical sociology” or “critical realism,” for instance, their counter-arguments strike me as a bit too simple, much like Samuel Johnson’s famous “refutation” of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a rock. The underlying issues are fundamentally philosophical (my very first love!), of course, and possibly largely irresolvable. However, I do believe that, in the long run at least, how we end up dealing with them is of enormous importance for how we as social scientists see ourselves and will be seen by the general public. And I do think that on the main issues – interpretivism versus causal explanation, agency versus structure, facts versus values, social constructivism versus realism, qualitative descriptivism versus quantitative abstraction – it is possible to work out a persuasive “post-postpositivist” position that does a little more than simply kick that rock. After I came back from Sweden I returned to teaching the current sociological theory seminar at McGill – what had once been Roger Krohn’s course – and reorganized it along the philosophical themes I had identified. Teaching that course has been enormously helpful in allowing me to sharpen my views on them. And now, after having taught it almost two dozen times, I feel ready to start to do some serious writing on those topics. Maybe I am “the last positivist” fighting “a rear-guard action” for “a disappearing position,” as Michael Burawoy (2011) condescendingly said of Piotr Sztompka in response to his criticism of Burawoy’s call for a “public sociology.” I certainly seem to be swimming against the current. But it is also clear to me that there are plenty of colleagues out there who would be quite happy with a strong but sophisticated answer to the current post-positivist orthodoxy. And, in any case, it will be fun to do and I figure I’m entitled to have some fun at this point in my career.

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IN RETROSPECT

After reading other chapters in this volume, and in particular the accounts by Béland (chapter 6), Stoddart (chapter 8), Carroll (chapter 11), Nakhaie (chapter 13), Srivastava (chapter 16), James (chapter 17), and van den Hoonaard (chapter 18), I now realize my trajectory hasn’t been anywhere near as unusually circuitous as I had imagined. Looking back on this meandering career of mine, I can see several factors that were important in helping determine where I ended up. These would include a remarkable succession of gifted and inspirational teachers, starting from grade school and especially at the gymnasium. Second, surely, there was just sheer luck, or at least happenstance, although there was a fair bit of bad luck as well. Third, I am forced to observe in retrospect that there was some measure of obstinacy and occasional flashes of chutzpah that would have made my father proud. Reflecting back I also see now that there are some general features running through much of my work. For all the combativeness with which I tend to present my arguments, particularly in my work on sociological theory, my actual positions are almost always attempts to find a compromise between seeming opposites. I have always been particularly interested in figuring out what the underlying taken-forgranted assumptions are that drive conflicting perspectives. And, as I try to convince my students, the main legitimate role of “theory” in social science is to bring those underlying assumptions out into the open so that we may be able to separate the empirical issues (which can be peacefully resolved, in principle, by pointing to what’s “out there” in a mutually satisfactory manner) from moral-ideological disputes (which are much harder to settle in such a way). My commitment to the importance of the empirical in social science is not only related to a (possibly subconscious) desire on my part to help to resolve disputes “reasonably,” it is also part and parcel of a commitment to what might be called a “democratic epistemology” (van den Berg 2014). After all, the realm of “facts” is one in which everyone is in principle able to judge for him/herself what is true and what is false, and where dispute resolution is either possible by means of an unforced consensus or not possible at all. By contrast, in the realm of values (Weber’s “demons”) we must follow authority (the Pope, the Koran), or bow to the stronger party (might makes right), or agree to disagree. The most brilliant defence of this position, as well

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as the most sophisticated treatment of the fact-value issue that I know of, is made by Leszek Kolakowski (1977), to whom I am greatly indebted. This view may sound a bit naïve in the era of Trumpian “alternative facts,” but the new world of “fake news” only makes the task of defending it more urgent. This is why I have always objected most strenuously to theorists who claim somehow to be able to transcend these three options with respect to values disputes – that is, theorists who claim “objectively” – that is, authoritatively – to be able to resolve such disputes, while at the same time wishing to retain their democratic credentials (Habermas, Burawoy, etc.). Such theorists, it seems to me, simply try to circumvent the democratic process of arguing things out among fellow citizens – as opposed to theorists or sociologists or academics – until we either find a consensus, or a pragmatic compromise (such as, for instance, accepting the view of the majority), or manage to somehow agree to disagree (e.g., by declaring it a “private matter,” as we do nowadays with many – but by no means all – religious beliefs and practices, sexual preferences, etc.). In my view, such theorists, whether they realize it or not, try to short-circuit that process by positing themselves as moral-ideological authorities above the fray. Fortunately or otherwise, not many sociological theorists command enough respect among the general public to be able to do much damage, but that does not make such a claim to authority any less undemocratic. I have to admit that my commitment to empiricism has always been more of a moral obligation than a passion or even a pleasure. I have enjoyed arguing for the fundamental importance of empiricism much more than I have enjoyed practising it. But, as noted, doing so has repeatedly put me at odds with the main drift of sociological theory. So I have always been torn between doing reasonably competent empirical research that was relatively easily publishable, and for which I was able to get funding for many years but which I never found particularly exciting, and work on issues in contemporary theory, which does get me all worked up but which leaves me in the position of being the odd man out in the field. It has made me wonder sometimes, with a non-trivial degree of anxiety, whether there really is any specialty in sociology to which I “belong.” Only now do I realize the extent to which I have floated in a number of different directions following my own intellectual curiosity. All things considered, it is an incredible privilege to be able to do that and to get paid quite a good salary for it besides. But it also comes at

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a cost. If I had been willing to stick with one clearly defined field of interest, I might have spared myself the hassles of trying to get my work published and the anxiety of never feeling quite on top of the field in question. On the other hand, if I had followed a narrower path I might have ended up terribly bored – or worse, a university administrator. In the end I guess I chose the right end of the trade-off for me, but I understand that it is obviously not for everyone. Yet the very fact that such choices are available to us means that, as sociologists or academics, we have an awful lot to be thankful for, even as we face the current anti-intellectual populist revolt.

1

NOTES Let me concede, in passing, Warren’s assertion (chapter 20, this volume) that the overwhelming majority of sociology professors at McGill earned their PhDs in the United States. Nevertheless, I do think he exaggerates a bit when he says this “accentuates their already strong propensity to pretend their university is located on the other side of the border” (499). After all, the authoritative work on the academic Canadianization movement, the book by the late Jeffrey Cormier (2004), was the product of a dissertation written at McGill, under the supervision of yours truly, no less. I am gratified to see so many references to Jeff’s book in this volume. REFERENCES Bay, Christian. 1965. The Structure of Freedom. New York: Atheneum. Becker, Gary S. 1993. “Nobel Lecture: The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior.” Journal of Political Economy 101 (3): 385–409. Beckert, Jens. 1996. “What Is Sociological about Economic Sociology? Uncertainty and the Embeddedness of Economic Action.” Theory and Society 25: 803–40. Brecht, Arnold. 1959. Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burawoy, Michael. 2011. “The Last Positivist.” Contemporary Sociology 40 (4): 396–404. Cormier, Jeffrey. 2004. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. de Gier, Erik, and Axel van den Berg. 2006. Managing Social Risks through Transitional Labour Markets: Towards an Enriched European Employment Strategy. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis/Transaction Publishers. Etzioni, Amitai. 1988. The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics. New York: The Free Press.

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Green, Donald P., and Ian Shapiro. 1994. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kolakowski, Leszek. 1977. “The Persistence of the Sein-Sollen Dilemma.” Man and World 10 (2): 194–233. Pariser, David, and Axel van den Berg. 1997a. “Beholder Beware: A Reply to Jessica Davis.” Studies in Art Education 38 (3): 186–91. – 1997b. “The Mind of the Beholder: Some Provisional Doubts about the U-Curved Aesthetic Development Thesis.” Studies in Art Education 38 (3): 158–78. Popper, Karl. 1976. “Reason or Revolution?” In The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, ed. Theodor W. Adorno, 288–300. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row. Smith, Michael R., Anthony C. Masi, Axel van den Berg, and Joseph Smucker. 1995. “External Flexibility in Sweden and Canada: A Three Industry Comparison.” Work, Employment and Society 9 (4): 689–718. – 1997. “Insecurity, Labour Relations, and Flexibility in Two Process Industries: A Canada/Sweden Comparison.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 22 (1): 31–64. Smucker, Joseph, and Axel van den Berg. 1991. “Some Evidence of the Effects of Labour Market Policies on Workers’ Attitudes toward Change in Canada and Sweden.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 16 (1): 51–74. Smucker, Joseph, Axel van den Berg, Anthony C. Masi, and Michael R. Smith. 1998. “Labour Deployment within Plants in Canada and Sweden: A Three-Industry Comparison.” Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations 53 (3): 430–57. van den Berg, Axel. 1980. “Critical Theory: Is There Still Hope?” American Journal of Sociology 86 (3): 449–78. – 1993. “Creeping Embourgeoisement? Some Comments on the Marxist Discovery of the New Middle Class.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 12: 295–328. – 1998. “Is Sociological Theory Too Grand for Social Mechanisms?” In Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, ed. Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, 204–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2014. “Public Sociology, Professional Sociology and Democracy.” In Public Sociology and Ethics: Premise, Profession, Pedagogy, ed. Ariane Hanemaayer and Christopher J. Schneider, 53–73. Vancouver: UBC Press.

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van den Berg, Axel, Bengt Furåker, and Leif Johansson. 1997. Labour Market Regimes and Patterns of Flexibility: A Sweden-Canada Comparison. Lund: Arkiv. van den Berg, Axel, Anthony C. Masi, Michael R. Smith, and Joseph Smucker. 1998. “To Cut or Not to Cut: A Cross-National Comparison of Attitudes toward Wage Flexibility.” Work and Occupations 25 (1): 49–73. van den Berg, Axel, Anthony C. Masi, Joseph Smucker, and Michael Smith. 2002. “Manufacturing Change: A Two-Country, Three-Industry Comparison.” Acta Sociologica 43 (2): 139–56. van den Berg, Axel, Charles Plante, Hicham Raïq, Christine Proulx, and Samuel Faustmann. 2017. Combating Poverty: Quebec’s Pursuit of a Distinctive Welfare State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. van den Berg, Axel, and Joseph Smucker. 1992. “Labor Markets and Government Interventions: A Comparison of Canadian and Swedish Labor Market Policies.” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 29 (1–2): 9–46.

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3 The Contested Profession: A Sociological Autobiography Scott Davies

An academic career in Canadian sociology is a struggle over competing professional loyalties. Sociologists like Burton Clark (1986) saw such tensions as inherent in the very organization of higher education. Clark noted that university administrators have an acute problem of control. On the one hand, professors are creatures of academic disciplines, which serve as academe’s major organizational unit when they form departments. Scholars are recruited into academe mainly through disciplines. They teach courses that reflect categories of disciplinary knowledge. They are rewarded for upholding disciplinebased standards that typically demarcate the major journals, conferences, and presses in their field. A key benchmark for tenure is recognition from discipline-based peers for contributions to the field. This reward structure encourages scholars to identify with their discipline. But, as Clark noted, at the same time administrators have direct authority over professors. Universities – not disciplines – pay salaries, set job descriptions, and promote professors through the ranks. Naturally, administrators want employees to be loyal to their organization – the university – first and foremost, and care somewhat less about their particular discipline. They want academics to work for them, embracing tasks that might otherwise be unpleasant, such as being a department chair. Before the great expansion of higher education that began in the 1960s, administrators could wield their authority in closed, secretive, arbitrary, and non-consultative ways. But the “academic revolution” of the 1960s (Jencks and Riesman 1968) mostly changed this. That revo-

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lution raised the status of scholars within the university, granting them far more professional authority in academic decision making, and hoisting discipline-based peer review as a core arbiter of standards. It granted academics more autonomy over their tasks. And it encouraged scholars to approach their work as a calling or vocation. Over time, administrators themselves adapted to these disciplinedbased incentives. If a professor was invited to be editor of an academic journal, for instance, an administrator would ideally support that appointment, seeing it not as an extra burden on scarce faculty time but, instead, as a trinket that might bring prestige to the university and contribute to its academic mission. By the late 1980s, when I entered graduate school, university administrators had ceded much decision making to professors. Being academics themselves, they could empathize with notions of disciplinary loyalty. But in this chapter, I argue that Canadian sociology has been marked by its struggles with competing loyalties. From the vantage point of my career in Canadian sociology, I offer two twists on Burton’s analysis. First, I contend that politics have represented a third basis of competing loyalty in many Canadian sociology departments, including the two in which I spent lengthy periods of time. I describe how the fallout from explosive ideological battles lingered for many years in ways that damaged the professional climate of those departments. Second, I observe that university administrators have recently reclaimed some of the authority they had ceded to academics fifty years ago and that this may be undermining some of sociology’s professional authority. I conclude, nevertheless, that mainstream sociology in Canada mostly remains resilient and vibrant, despite these challenges. The next section recounts a series of personal experiences throughout my academic career. I take a classic “biography-meets-history” approach à la C. Wright Mills (1959), which sees individual life courses as embedded within a series of larger-scale trends. In the case of academe, this approach places private experiences, interpersonal relations, group dynamics, and collective meanings within larger historical shifts in universities. I’m particularly interested in how broader academic trends play out in local settings as actors seize or avoid emerging opportunities, and how their actions can reshape organizational structures such as academic departments. Having logged over thirty-five years as an undergraduate, a graduate student, a sessional instructor, a post-doc, and finally a professor,

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my recollections speak to a theme of “contested professionalism” in sociology, tensions between discipline, institution, and politics. Sociology has long occupied an uneasy position in the Canadian academy, unsettled by its internal politics, the shifting attitudes of administrators, and challenges to its knowledge base. As a result, two elements of its professionalism – sociology’s academic authority at a structural level and its norms of civility and decorum at an interpersonal level – have been strained and challenged over the years. My chapter describes those challenges at an experiential level. In my rendering, professionalism is not simply an abstract stance of rationality, distance, and dispassion but is also a calling, one that imbues careers with meaning, fuels curiosity, and inspires a sense of duty. Some might fault me for dwelling on incidents of departmental discord, but I feel it would be disingenuous to ignore incidents that proved to be influential, both personally and collectively, and that affected the basic functioning of those units. My storyline does not follow the political economy/feminist narrative that is prominent in histories of post-1960s Canadian sociology, a narrative that ignores much of the mainstream sociology in which I have been embedded. I avoid discussing personal relationships and, instead, prioritize experiences in professional networks and organizations. MY BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

I was born 1962 in Toronto and grew up in nearby Ontario towns that were then called Cooksville and Limehouse. Cooksville was a small town that was later suburbanized and incorporated into the city of Mississauga. Limestone was a village surrounded by farm country near Georgetown. My father, from Liverpool, England, had finished eight years of formal schooling before volunteering for the Royal Air Force near the end of the Second World War. After serving with the Allied occupying forces in the immediate postwar years, his family found a job for him in Wales’s coalmines. No thanks, he said, and soon moved to Canada, becoming an accountant in the 1950s. My mother grew up in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood, receiving a commercial (non-academic) diploma, the first in her family to finish high school. She worked throughout her life as a secretary. In retrospect, both may have inadvertently piqued my interest in the sociology of education. My father was accepted into a chartered accountancy program despite lacking any high school certifications. He told offi-

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cials that records from his local high school had been destroyed by bombs during the war. While true, he neglected to mention that he himself never attended that school! His subsequent success in accounting probably primed me for credential theory, which emphasizes the sizeable gaps between schooled knowledge and job performance in many fields. My mother ended her career as an executive secretary for a school board and around the dinner table told off-hand stories about the politics of a growing educational body. My academic career began in 1981 as an undergraduate at the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto, then known as Erindale College. It was a humbler place than it is now, with sparser buildings, fewer shimmering glass exteriors, and no corporate sponsors on its various schools. Erindale’s enrolments were then expanding, but they were doing so amidst cost pinches. Some buildings and landscaping remained long unfinished; most of my classes were held in cavernous lecture halls without supporting tutorials or seminars. Erindale’s social climate was also different back then. The student body was both “whiter” yet less economically privileged than it is now, then consisting mostly of “first generation” students like myself. The student culture seemed relatively populist and egalitarian, even innocent, compared to now. My first major was in business. I absolutely hated it. So I eventually switched to a double major in psychology and sociology. Those disciplines spoke to different sides of my personality. The former spoke to my inner scientific nag, which demands tight reasoning and empirical rigour; the latter spoke to my creative side, pondering elements of the social world that evade easy measurement and empirical verification. At the end of my undergrad days, I settled on social psychology, seeing it as a hybrid of the two disciplines. My initial exposure to professional research came in the summers of 1985 and 1986, when I had research assistantships in – of all places – an ant lab. Yes, an ant lab. A professor with a joint appointment in zoology and psychology hired several students in those summers to collect, house, and feed slave-making ants. I kid you not. As far removed from sociology as it was, the job was very enjoyable and gave me a taste for research. The lab was quite collegial. Our softball team was called “The Psychouts.” We played euchre during breaks. We even travelled to central Quebec to collect rare species of ants. But despite getting better grades in psychology, my creative side won out, and I decided to apply to graduate programs in sociology.

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Upon graduating from Erindale in the spring of 1986, I entered the MA program in sociology at McMaster that fall. My former neighbours

thought I was continually mispronouncing the term “social work” when I told them of my new field. My MA year was intensive, exposing me to lots of new thinking, particularly various branches of neoMarxism but also the sociologies of work and occupations, organizations, and methods. The influence of Marxism was telling. Several graduate courses did not even mention other sociological frameworks, relegating them to a vast, inglorious category called “nonMarxism.” Yet my classmates and I were open-minded and eager to learn, even if the social environment in the department was mixed. Students were friendly with one another, with only a little judgmental tension here and there. We formed soccer and softball teams in the summer, naming ourselves “Dynamo Socpol” (don’t ask) and “The Outliers,” respectively. Among graduate students, there was a fairly nice sense of camaraderie. But the atmosphere among the faculty was tense. Many were still reeling from the aftershocks of an infamous conflict that had erupted five years earlier. After a brief “takeover” by a few students and faculty over the issue of student parity, the department had gone into “receivership” and was run by the dean (who later became the university’s president for fifteen years). That conflict saddled the department with a miserable reputation within the university and triggered the first of two external chair hires. The first external chair, Alf Hunter, did an excellent job. By the time I got there, the department was starting to get on with things, and we graduate students were helping that cause. The 1987 Learned Societies Conference, now known as the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, was held at McMaster. Most of the department’s graduate students then had their first encounter with an academic conference. Sessions were a mixed bag in terms of quality, but two incidents are still seared into my memory. In a criminology session, the organizer began not by introducing the panellists but by reciting an open letter to someone he called “Johnny-Boy,” who in real life was Canada’s most famous criminologist and who was at the University of Toronto. The organizer angrily relayed how he, a professor at another prominent university, had not been short-listed for a position that would have allowed him to move to Toronto. He castigated Johnny-Boy for preferring a “dustbowl number-cruncher” over a Canadian criminologist. Many of us students in the audience

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thought, “Wow! Welcome to the Learneds.” In the other session, several well-known Marxists and Marxist feminists were discussing their project relating to Canadian workers and unions. During the question period, an eminent qualitative sociologist posed a simple query: Why didn’t any presenter consider other perspectives, such as symbolic interactionism? The presenters looked askance; none actually answered the question. One simply laughed. In the fall of 1987, I began a PhD at the University of Toronto. It was exciting to live downtown, initially in a graduate residence that was later torn down (bye, bye cockroaches!) and then in various houses in the West End. The sociology department was then housed in the Borden Building, named after the milk company. Yes, the building was a former dairy. It had been barely renovated since the early twentieth century. The folklore was that the administration kept the department in that building as punishment for its political volatility during the previous decade. The U of T sociology department in the early 1970s, like many other sociology departments in Canada, had a strong left nationalist, anti-American, radical movement. Sometimes this resulted in textbooks with titles like Sociology for Canadians (Himelfarb and Richardson 1982). But sometimes it exploded into heated conflicts. In 1972, Irving Zeitlin, hired as an external chair of the Department of Sociology at the U of T, was greeted by a picket line decrying that a Canadian had not been hired. In UBC’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology during the 1970s, warring factions placed duct tape on the floors of some hallways to mark boundaries over which the opposing side could not cross (for other examples of conflict, see Cormier 2004). I did a post-doc in that department twenty years later. Though thankfully the duct tape was long gone, one could sense stilllingering tensions. Shifting back to Toronto: whatever the motive of U of T’s administration, the Borden Building was probably the most eccentric venue for any sociology department anywhere. It had strangely shaped rooms and corridors, and a sort of upper perch in which an undergraduate lived for a while before being kicked out. No one knew what was housed in its basement until one day an overwhelmingly foul stench forced an evacuation. Rumour had it that a zoologist had long preserved dead birds in barrels of formaldehyde and that one of those barrels had somehow spilled. But despite the strange setting, U of T’s doctoral program exposed me to a range of thinking, from Bourdieu to sociology of work to sundry social stratification approaches to quantitative methods.

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Course work and comps were broadening my interests. The department then offered a mix of American Sociological Associationoriented and “home-grown” courses on various Canadian themes. That mix stirred some tension among U of T’s faculty. Indeed, some graduate students found it difficult to form committees, hearing that so-and-so would never work with so-and-so. Fortunately, I had no such difficulties. But the U of T did have more divisions among its graduate students than did McMaster. Just two years before I arrived a small clique, mostly living in the same house, controlled the graduate student association and expelled a student who did not tow its party line. That incident was part of a series that led to the abolishing of student parity on hiring committees, a practice that had long been a source of division and acrimony in that department. Several former department chairs have recounted the rise and fall of student parity as a painful and drawn out episode that left deep scars (for their recollections and for a flavour of sociology’s departmental politics in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, see Rick Helmes-Hays’s [2003] short edited book Forty Years, 1963–2003). By the time I arrived at the U of T in the fall of 1987, things were changing, if only partially. Parity was a dead issue. The old faction of radical graduate students had loosened its grip on the graduate student association, but it was still around, some of its members retaining a cult-like intensity. I and other newbies joined the association; I was even nominated as co-chair a few years later. To be truthful, our association didn’t accomplish very much in a political sense. It mostly served as a venue for students to socialize, vent, and sometimes conspire against one another. While I was co-chair, one radical student wanted a palace revolt. He telephoned twelve of his closest revolutionaries to set up a meeting. But no one showed. My elected co-chair and I privately dubbed his party of one “The People’s Republic of Dave Williwams (a pseudonym). Otherwise, any pretence of student revolt was long gone, and we worked far more pragmatically to enhance graduate student life within the department. In the early 1990s, the department moved to a nondescript low-rise office building at 203 College Street. While unglamorous, those digs were newer and more functional, and had fewer mice to boot. A member of my dissertation committee let me use her office, giving me good working digs, a sense of belonging, and a certain serendipity. In the early 1990s, many researchers were still using old mainframe computers and printers to conduct statistical runs. I ran all of the statistics for

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my dissertation using that office’s connection to the U of T’s mainframe. Many runs, particularly those using logistic regression, would take one to two hours to compute, forcing me to wait idly. With considerable time on my hands between runs, I started to read the journals, like Contemporary Sociology, that lined the office shelves. That expansive reading informed many of the theoretical issues in my dissertation and offered a breadth that proved helpful later in my career. Reading American journals made attendance at the annual meetings of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association a somewhat ambivalent experience. My network of graduate students not only felt obligated to attend our national meetings but also hoped to further build Canadian sociology. But the 1990s was the start of a period of decline for those meetings. Some of the association’s sessions were overly doctrinaire and strident. Many senior sociologists grew disinterested. Attendance dropped, which some linked to a lack of professionalism in the association (Brym 2003; McLaughlin 2005). My dissertation committee – Julian Tanner, Bonnie Erickson, and Lorna Marsden (then a part-time Liberal Party senator and later president of Wilfrid Laurier and York universities) – provided great support, timely and useful feedback, and much friendly encouragement, not to mention research assistant opportunities. I thrived in the program, winning scholarships, supplemented by plentiful teaching assistantships, and surrounded by many good classmates, some of whom remain friends to this day. It was easy to find a comfortable social niche in that department, not to mention a solid professional apprenticeship. My dissertation addressed a question that had possessed me since my undergraduate days and whose answers remain elusive to this day: What social mechanisms produce class inequalities in school outcomes? In high school several of my working-class friends, despite having ample ability, seemingly lost interest and discounted the pursuit of higher education. I did reading courses on the broad topic during my undergraduate and master’s years but felt unsatisfied. To my sensibility, the prevailing explanations seemed motivated more by political purity than by realism. They placed too much weight on things like teacher discrimination, curricular bias, and lack of financial resources, and not enough on cultural processes. I suspected that, rather than evidence and practical impact, moral pressure and what is now known as “virtue signalling” – the conspicuous expression of sen-

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timents that demonstrate one’s good character and moral superiority – were underlining strident dicta against “blaming the victim” and “deficit thinking.” As a graduate student, I read Paul Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labour, a chart-busting hit through the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But again I was ambivalent: while its vivid description of the “lads”’ school rebellion was engaging, its Marxist interpretation seemed phantasmagorical, at least to my Canadian eyes. Willis’s fame seemed to rest on an unspoken rule: one shall not invoke any notion of “culture” to explain any kind of inequality unless one portrays that culture as “resistant” to various oppressions, in this case, capitalism. Otherwise, cultural analyses are verboten. Implicitly recognizing this rule, I decide to engage the issue empirically, naively thinking: Wouldn’t it be great to test Willis’s thesis with Canadian surveys that measured class background, student outcomes, and various attitudes towards school? I found suitable Ontario data and honestly anticipated finding at least some support for Willis’s thesis. And while I confirmed that class background was an important predictor of school outcomes, as John Porter and many others had found previously, my measures of “resistance” didn’t mediate those outcomes. Resistance to school was rooted more in gender than in class. Boys had more negative attitudes towards schooling, independent of their class background (see also Tanner et al. 1999). Armed with those findings, I presented at several conferences and wrote journal articles. But the reception of my message was polarized: mainstreamers welcomed it, one likening it to a breath of fresh air (an editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology even sent me a handwritten thank you note). But some anonymous reviewers were hostile. One accused me of falsifying my findings; others deemed them artefacts of survey methods that were incapable of detecting the radicalism that surely lay deep in the hearts of workingclass youth. Still others took the philosophical high road, claiming that Willis’s epistemological profundity insulated him from empirical test and that I ought to simply accept his higher truth. But back to September 1992. My defence was somewhat nerve wracking, like almost everyone’s. There was solid support around the table – except for that external. He was a very well-known sociologist, hailed as a straight-up empirical researcher of social stratification. But he was clearly irritated by my central findings and dismissed them as artefacts of “shit” measures of student class background. One of my internals stuck up for me, voicing his doubts that any more intricate

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measures would make any difference. While that gesture further displeased the external, he agreed to pass me with only a few minor additional footnotes. We all went to lunch afterwards, where we gladly changed the topic of conversation. I was gratified when the following week the chair of the department mentioned that he found my concluding chapter to be one of the better pieces of sociology he had read for a while (it was later the basis of an article in the American Journal of Sociology, see Davies 1995a; see also Davies 1994a, 1994b, 1995b). I graduated in the fall of 1992. By that time, the mainstream American Sociological Association-oriented faction in the U of T Department of Sociology had gained the support of the university administration, soon bringing many new hires, mostly from the United States, along with fancier digs in a newly renovated wing of another building. The face of the department was changing. Sociology was no longer a poor cousin of the U of T. But I didn’t share in those new resources, at least not initially. At that time, none of my post-doc or job applications (perhaps twenty in total) were successful, nor were my bids for short-term sessional teaching positions in nearby universities (one chair literally laughed when I inquired about teaching opportunities, ruefully describing her department as a “closed shop”). Having nothing lined up, in August 1992 I suddenly received phone calls from both the U of T and Ryerson. At Toronto, a new faculty hire had negotiated a teaching reduction, leaving a full-year course in sociology of work and occupations. At Ryerson, a professor applied at the last minute for maternity leave. Two versions of introduction to sociology needed to be filled. I gladly accepted their offers. But I didn’t know they would be an entrée into what is now known as the academic “precariat.” The previous year I had made more money with a graduate scholarship and teaching assistantship. Now, for teaching a combined three-two course load (a full load at most universities) I was paid a whopping $16,500. No office. No benefits. No security. No recompense for research. Mercifully, my service in the precariat was short-lived. Those courses were somewhat difficult to teach. My ratings were good, but it was challenging to keep students engaged, particularly at Ryerson, which was considerably smaller then, having only recently transitioned from a polytechnic into a university. Sociology was largely a service department. It gave instructors pre-fab course outlines with guidelines for evaluation, readings, and length of classes. Some instruc-

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tors still took attendance. Classes were not supplemented by PowerPoint or Blackboard as they are today; then we used only overheads, from which (some) students madly scrambled to take notes. Compounding those conditions was the additional stress of applying for full-time jobs while, at the same time, attempting to publish articles. Fortunately, my statistical skills were passable by the standards of Canadian sociology circa 1992. I landed interviews for two quantitative methods positions that winter: one at the University of Sterling in Scotland and another at a university in British Columbia. Again I was unsuccessful. So, by February 1993, with nothing lined up for the next academic year, I awaited the results of my application for a SSHRC postdoc. I originally planned to do it with Michele Lamont, then at Princeton, but for family reasons decided to remain in Canada, and asked Neil Guppy to supervise me at UBC. One February morning when I was feeling particularly self-pitying, Dave Tindall, a friend from the U of T, phoned with news that he had received a post-doc (also at UBC). He gave me SSHRC’s telephone number, which I nervously dialled. When I was told that I too was successful, I jumped three feet in the air, with lots of hang time. Hasta la vista sessional courses! So in May 1993, armed with $30,000 of post-doc funds, I drove from Toronto to Vancouver. Neil Guppy kindly let me live in his basement for a month while a new faculty and staff residence was being completed. It was a gratifying year; Neil was a fantastic mentor, incredibly generous with his time. We collaborated on several papers (e.g., Davies and Guppy 2013). UBC’s sociology department is located in a beautiful setting with spectacular vistas overlooking sea and mountains. A far cry from a former dairy! I continued to write and, for the first time, attended the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association. Neil introduced me to new institutional theory and material on world culture and globalization. To supplement my income, I taught a full-year course called “Canadian Society” – does this course still exist anywhere? It was an enjoyable year; without it, I might have remained stuck on the sessional treadmill. In the spring of 1994, I headed back onto the job market. Unlike the 1960s, when many Canadian sociology departments enjoyed rapid “wild west” rates of hiring, the number of new PhDs was far outpacing the number of tenure-stream openings. Because Canadian sociology was entering a period of contraction, I thought it best to apply for tenure-stream positions, even though I had another year of post-doc funding remaining. In April I was shortlisted for a quantita-

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tive methods position at McMaster. I was ambivalent, tempted by the lure of a second post-doc year and then retrying the job market the following year. But, again for family reasons, I pursued the job. The interview went fairly well, and a few weeks later, McMaster offered the position, which I accepted. But to be frank, that job had a rough start. Okay, really rough. In previous years, Alf Hunter had been a great chair of that department, bringing a semblance of peace, order, and standards. He played the proverbial “bad cop,” firm and demanding, while his associate chair played the “good cop,” appeasing and calming anyone who might cause trouble. But Alf unfortunately died a year before I arrived. I had previously known the incoming chair from my MA days; he was gracious, and even shared his gym locker with me. But, during negotiations, he said he was being pressured to low-ball me in the name of gender equity. So, I did not receive any start-up money. Nor did I receive sufficient funds for moving across the country, nor salary credit for two years of teaching and publishing since earning a doctorate, nor even the requisite teaching reduction for new faculty. He actually assigned me an extra course above the regular load. While negotiating, the dean sternly advised me: “if you get an offer elsewhere, take it.” To be fair, that dean later warmed up to me and was quite supportive during the years before his retirement. But his tough bargaining reflected the negative climate in the department and its repute in the university. At the June meeting of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association in Calgary, a couple of months before I moved to McMaster, the associate chair greeted me warmly, saying, “You won the vote almost unanimously – congrats.” But he added: “Three or four people in the department are really out to get you. I won’t do anything about that. You’ll have to deal with them on your own.” When I arrived at McMaster late in the summer of 1994, most colleagues were friendly, though a few would not even acknowledge me in the hallway. During the first faculty meeting of the fall term, one declared that “the department had hired very badly” the previous year (uh, that would have been me, of course) and “needed to do better.” No colleague said anything in my defence. Several months later, in the first faculty meeting of the winter term, the same faculty member repeated that admonition and was again greeted with silence. But otherwise, many faculty members seemed hopeful that the department climate was moving past the tumult of the 1980s. Most were friendly, except for the “three or four,” and I socialized easily with everyone else.

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But the three or four did try hard. At the end of my first full academic year, I had accumulated enough credits to be assigned a regular course load for the following year. Or so I thought. One day the department secretary told me that a faculty member (now a high-rank administrator at another university) announced that she had decided to “cancel” my teaching credits – and no one else’s – for the following year. For reasons unknown, she felt entitled to change rules at whim despite not having any official authority to do so. I suspected she had also cajoled the previous chair to low-ball my job offer the previous year. Fortunately, the new chair of the department quickly overturned her “decision.” That episode, though seemingly minor, did reflect a lingering climate in the department. During the mid-1990s, despite fifteen years having passed since the infamous takeover, one could still feel a negative undertone. Most daily interactions in the department were cordial, but it was not uncommon in meetings, in hallways, or in public emails for a faction of faculty to engage in putdowns, insults, and namecalling, and sometimes even scream at others. That faction hinted that it was secretly meeting with upper administrators to trade unflattering gossip about the department and aimed to turn it into some sort of service unit. Indeed, many important decisions were made in backrooms rather than in open collegial deliberation. I personally witnessed official choices for hiring, teaching, and committees later get revoked without any public explanation. This tolerance for unprofessionalism among administrators was puzzling. McMaster sociology faculty were not particularly ideological by the standards of our discipline, and administrators seemed to grant most departments in the university a modicum of respect. But, with twenty-twenty hindsight, it appears that a new perfect storm was hitting the department. There were no disciplinary consequences of the takeover of the early 1980s, and so the main faction of professors felt emboldened to do whatever it pleased. Other faculty, though displeased by public bouts of rudeness and aggression, seemed to accept them as facts of departmental life and looked the other way, perhaps to avoid coming under attack themselves. But most important, it appeared that administrators had struck a Faustian bargain with that rising faction: they tolerated interpersonal shenanigans in exchange for treating the department as a cash cow. I’ll return to this theme at the end of this chapter. Other aspects of McMaster were enjoyable, however. A sizeable minority of our undergrads was bright, engaged, smart, literate, yet

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also humble and unassuming, without the feelings of entitlement that many colleagues now recognize in their students. Several colleagues helped create a vibrant intellectual atmosphere. Many graduate students went on to excellent academic careers, and I had the great fortune of working with several of them. By the late 1990s, the hiring of some like-minded intellectual compatriots brought a sense of collegiality. I became more of a specialist in the sociology of education while applying to it tools from other areas of the discipline, including the study of social movements and organizations (Davies 1999, 2002, 2012; Davies and Rizk 2018; Davies et al. 2006, 2014; Mehta and Davies 2018). I became increasingly connected to the sociology of education section of the American Sociological Association. I was initially a total outsider, but its members were welcoming, inviting me to editorial boards and to mini-conferences, where I met heroes like Francisco Ramirez and John Meyer. In 2000 I arranged my first sabbatical at Stanford, a wonderful setting with an amazing visiting scholar community. But back home, a new storm was brewing that year in the department. There was an uptick in behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by a faction of the faculty. Announcing that “everything was political” these faculty members readily complied with administrator dictates that sapped the department’s resources, sometimes rationalizing their actions as advancing the cause of interdisciplinary studies, declaring that disciplines (like sociology) were dead. Then the department was hit with a negative external review. It described our graduate program as “aimless,” our senior faculty as unproductive, and our students as disgruntled. But rather than try to fix those problems, administrators buried the report. Behind the scenes they blamed its negativity on the department’s three junior faculty (of which I was one), claiming we had somehow tricked the reviewers with disinformation. The further impact of the buried report was to starve the department of needed resources. Our class sizes for lecture courses quickly expanded, vacated positions went un-replaced, and undergraduate seminars grew from fifteen to thirty-five students. Sociology faculty-student ratios became upper outliers in the university. Some colleagues handled the situation largely by withdrawing from the administrative life of the department, focusing instead on research and graduate mentoring. But that choice had consequences. A few years later, when it was time to select a new chair, only one faculty member wanted the job. And he happened to be one of the pro-

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tagonists of the massive conflict from the early 1980s. In disbelief, the dean initially refused to accept that appointment and begged the department to find someone else. But no one would volunteer, and so a new chair was acclaimed. Things went all right for the department during the first year of the new regime, but they soon unravelled. After several faculty members left the department, the dean wanted to discuss the issue with the chair and scheduled a meeting on a non-statutory religious holiday. Rather than simply asking to reschedule, the chair immediately filed a human rights grievance. The dean responded by declaring her nonconfidence in the chair. The chair responded in turn by angrily resigning. The dean responded to that by quickly forming a search committee for a new chair. The chair responded yet again by withdrawing his resignation. And on it went. This week was not entirely atypical for the department that year. Thankfully, administrators forced the chair to retire a few years later. In 2006–07, I escaped some of that turmoil by taking a sabbatical at Harvard University. Like my previous leave, it was a wonderful experience. I loved living in Cambridge and met many great scholars there. And in 2008, I got a further, unexpected, reprieve: I was asked to join McMaster’s Offord Centre for Child Studies, a unit that was led by child psychiatrists and that was becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. The centre had recently won an Ontario Research Chair in Educational Achievement and At-Risk Students, and it was looking to fill the position. Its first search was unsuccessful, so I applied and eventually landed the position. The mandate of the chair was to work with a variety of community stakeholders in education and to conduct policy-oriented research. That chair leveraged my career into the policy domain. The social climate in Offord was, in a word, professional. People had keen intellectual curiosities. Even though almost no one else was formally trained in sociology, several professors conducted research in “social psychiatry,” which I found to be quite sociological. Several faculty members were knowledgeable about sociology, and so I collaborated on some projects with my new colleagues. But most important, the position pushed me into the policy world. Fewer hours of my days were spent reading abstract theoretical treatises and more were spent connecting with superintendents from school boards, leaders of nonprofits, or functionaries with ministries. While time-consuming, it was exciting to bring sociology to people with an array of important

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responsibilities outside the university. I used my new title as a pretence to contact policy bodies in my field, each with its own acronym: EQAO, LNS, HWDSB, TDSB, HEQCO, EDU, TCU, among others. Ah, the world of policy. In 2009, to an audience of provincial deputy ministers, I presented a “wish list” of research projects that I hoped to conduct. At the top of my list was a study of summer learning, similar to those conducted in the United States by Barbara Heyns, Karl Alexander, and Doug Downey. Its rationale was to test whether early literacy gaps between advantaged versus disadvantaged youth tend to grow in the summer time, when children are out of school and when family resources are likelier to determine children’s learning opportunities (Davies and Aurini 2013). In the audience was the deputy minister of Ontario’s Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. She expressed interest in my planned research, and months later we designed a small pilot study. The next year, Ontario’s Ministry of Education invested millions of dollars in summer learning interventions, and Janice Aurini and I received a SSHRC grant to evaluate those interventions. We received a follow-up grant a few years later and are still analyzing data to this day. We generally confirmed American research by finding that socioeconomic status gaps in literacy and numeracy diverge in the summer and that summer interventions can attenuate parts of those gaps. Since our study was conducted in schools throughout the province, we travelled widely, meeting a wide variety of stakeholders. So my research chair leveraged my career in a more policy-oriented direction, making it less purely academic. My involvement in the American Sociological Association became more sporadic. I missed its regular meetings and intellectual community but found it gratifying to actually apply sociology in real-world settings. Indeed, after a decade with a foot in the policy world, I am convinced that mainstream sociology has much to offer society. In 2011, I was eligible for another leave and went to the University of Pennsylvania, where I met one of my sociological heroes, Randall Collins, and cleared my head for a new round of research. Upon my return, change was afoot. In the summer of 2013 a friend at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) called to ask if I might consider coming to OISE if they secured a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in “Large Scale Data Analysis in Education.” I said sure, and a job ad appeared that fall. By coincidence, an ad for a similar CRC appeared at another university. As my work over the preceding sever-

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al years fit these ads, I was offered both, to my good fortune. I accepted OISE’s offer, though both were generous and tempting. In August 2014, I joined OISE’s Education Leadership and Policy Program with a mandate to conduct policy-oriented research. My CRC was confirmed the next year, and I won Canadian Foundation for Innovation funds to build a data lab. One of the most pleasant surprises of my career has been the quality and level of engagement of our program’s graduate students. They combine a practicality with a refreshing intellectual engagement. The atmosphere in my program is relaxed and friendly, with a “do-your-own-thing” vibe. Faculty and students hail from a range of disciplinary backgrounds but commonly work with policy bodies and community groups. As at the Offord Centre, our program is nested in a policy community, thus creating a scholarly context quite different from that of a purely academic discipline like sociology. CONCLUSION

So that’s my academic story to date. This final section returns to the theme of Canadian sociology’s professionalism. From my vantage point, that professionalism has been squeezed in some ways but has been resilient in others. The academic revolution of a half century ago served to strengthen disciplinary norms, buffering individual professors from some of the arbitrary dictates of administration. Those norms provided a set of principles that, ideally, even administrators had to abide by. In retrospect, the old battles over student parity and radical democracy at McMaster and the University of Toronto probably had a mixed impact on sociology’s professionalism. On the one hand, students and faculty did successfully challenge administrative authority. They recognized that old styles of university governance – arbitrary decision making concentrated among a few senior professors – had to go. Its time was up. Their activism served to enhance the professional autonomy of departments by redistributing some power from upper administration to faculty and, to a lesser extent, to graduate students. It helped to enshrine academic freedom and devolve more authority to professional colleagues. But in other ways those heated battles harmed sociology’s professionalism. Over the decades, several Canadian sociology departments were forced into “receivership,” run temporarily by external administrators. Those incidents damaged their image within the wider uni-

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versity and fuelled interpersonal tensions within them. Few of my older colleagues have fond memories of the battles of the 1960s and 1970s, recalling mostly acrimony, incivility, and divisiveness. Some of those divisions took decades to heal, despite substantial faculty turnover. The reason, I think, was that those old conflicts eroded our professional culture. Whereas a shared disciplinary culture can forge departmental unity, collective pride, and shared vision, tensions can tempt faculty with competing allegiances, and some might identify more with administrators than with their fellow sociologists. The past two decades have remade the relationship between sociology and administration. Across the university, the ranks of deans, consultants, and various offices have expanded, while numbers of fulltime faculty have contracted (Ginsberg 2011). Many sociology departments now teach more students with fewer faculty members. Administrators have had more direct influence on faculty hires by funding interdisciplinary units that compete with sociology for resources and by creating research chairs. This redirecting of authority can be a problem for politically weak units like sociology departments. Chairs housed in sociology departments do not always pursue sociologically defined research or have sociological training (Siler and McLaughlin 2008). Hiring categories have gradually shifted from those rooted in disciplinary norms (e.g., sociological theory, research methods, sociology of work) to those with other roots (e.g., social theory, social justice; see Davies 2009). Interdisciplinary units and research chairs are not necessarily bad things – I can vouch from experience – but they can relegate sociology to being a service department for other units. Administration is also recruiting differently than it once did. During my student days, many sociologists had antagonistic relations with administrators, seeing the latter as stodgy and tradition-bound villains. But, unlike their predecessors, today’s administrations strive to appear socially progressive. My impression is that, as a result, an inordinate number of “critical” academics are joining the ranks of administrators. Marxists, feminists, postmodernists, Foucauldians, and gender scholars are becoming consultants, chairs, deans, provosts, and even presidents –and not in trivial numbers. This trend is partly understandable: administrators quite reasonably want to diversify their teams. But there’s more. Administrators have embraced the language of social justice – diversity, inclusion, and equity – as the lingua franca of their realm. They use its stock vocabulary and catchphrases

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to signal their responsiveness to a rapidly changing world, while at the same time engaging in private fundraising, government and corporate lobbying, and the wooing of big-name donors. There’s the rub: critical sociologists, once at odds with administration, seem to be at home in this new and bulging bureaucracy. At the same time, good ol’ mainstream, professional sociology doesn’t seem to be any more welcome than it was thirty years ago. We describe empirical realities that are complex and messy, with scores of qualifications and caveats, and thus do not provide reliable fodder for emerging narratives. When today’s administrators seek consultation on matters of diversity, inclusion, or equity, they seem uninterested in mainstream sociology. They may be less hostile than they once were, but they don’t see us as being relevant to their exercise of authority. I do not want to overstate these worries, however. Although mainstream sociology in Canada has lost some faculty numbers over the past few decades, it remains healthy in many quarters. Several departments that suffered in the past now seem healthy and are recruiting effectively. Many are producing solid scholarship with little internal discord. A new generation of sociologists seems uninterested in reliving battles of the past. Our two national journals are in good shape, with solid leadership. The Canadian Sociological Association has listened to its members and changed with the times. And administrators in most Canadian universities are less dismissive of sociology than they once were. Well, let’s hope so – long live professional sociology! REFERENCES Brym, Robert J. 2003. “The Decline of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28 (3): 411–16. Clark, Burton. 1986. The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cormier, Jeffrey. 2004. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Davies, Scott. 1994a. “Class Dismissed? Student Opposition in Ontario.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 31 (3): 421–44. – 1994b. “In Search of Resistance and Rebellion among High School Dropouts.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 19 (3): 331–50. – 1995a. “Leaps of Faith: Shifting Currents in Critical Sociology of Education.” American Journal of Sociology 100 (6): 1448–78. – 1995b. “Reproduction and Resistance in Canadian High Schools: An

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Empirical Examination of the Willis Thesis.” British Journal of Sociology 46 (4): 662–87. – 1999. “From Moral Duty to Cultural Rights: A Case Study of Political Framing in Education.” Sociology of Education 71 (1): 1–21. – 2002. “The Paradox of Progressive Education: A Frame Analysis.” Sociology of Education 75 (4): 269–86. – 2009. “Drifting Apart? The Institutional Dynamics awaiting Public Sociology in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 34 (3): 623–54. – 2012. “The Stratification of Universities: Structural Inequality in Canadian and American Higher Education.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 30 (2): 143–58. Davies, Scott, and Janice Aurini. 2013. “Summer Learning Inequality in Ontario.” Canadian Public Policy 39 (2): 287–307. Davies, Scott, Janice Aurini, and Linda Quirke. 2006. “Institutional Theory Goes to the Market: The Challenge of New Forms of Private Education.” In The New Institutionalism in Education, ed. Heinz-Dieter Meyer and Brian Rowen, 103–22. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Davies, Scott, and Neil Guppy. 2013. The Schooled Society: An Introduction to the Sociology of Education, 3rd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Davies, Scott, Vicky Maldonado, and David Zarifa. 2014. “Effectively Maintaining Inequality in Toronto: Predicting University Destinations of Toronto District School Board Graduates.” Canadian Review of Sociology 51 (1): 22–53. Davies, Scott, and Jessica Rizk. 2018. “The Three Generations of Cultural Capital Research: A Narrative Review.” Review of Educational Research 88 (3): 331–65. Ginsberg, Benjamin. 2011. The Fall of the Faculty. New York: Oxford University Press. Helmes-Hayes, Rick, ed. 2003. Forty Years, 1963–2003: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Himelfarb, Alexander, and C. James Richardson. 1982. Sociology for Canadians: Images of Society. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Jencks, Christopher, and David Riesman. 1968. The Academic Revolution. New York: Doubleday. McLaughlin, Neil. 2005. “Canada’s Impossible Science: Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis in Anglo-Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 30 (1): 1–40. Mehta, Jal, and Scott Davies, eds. 2018. Education in a New Society: Renewing the Sociology of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Siler, Kyle S., and Neil McLaughlin. 2008. “The Canada Research Chairs Program and Social Science Reward Structures.” Canadian Review of Sociology 45 (1): 93–119. Tanner, Julian, Scott Davies, and Bill O’Grady. 1999. “Whatever Happened to Yesterday’s Rebels? Longitudinal Effects of Teenage Delinquency on Education and Occupational Outcomes.” Social Problems 40 (2): 250–74. Willis, Paul E. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough, UK: Saxon House.

4 Choices and Non-Choices: Waltzing with the Micro/Macro in Sociology Susan A. McDaniel

EARLY INFLUENCES

Irish-born author William Trevor once remarked that he was fortunate the accident of his birth placed him on the edge of things. Like Trevor, I have had the same good fortune, although for all of my coming-of-age years I hardly saw it as good fortune! As a consequence of being “on the margins” parental support was less a factor in my academic success than it likely was for others. In fact, it was non-support, or constrained support, that drove me. As noted in one of the talks I was honoured to give when receiving the Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research at the University of Alberta in 1999, my mother actively discouraged my insatiable reading. She would say, invoking her ancestral Québécoise practicality, “Susan, you will get nowhere with your head all the time in a book.” Her comment was less about gender than about the impracticality of book learning for charting a life course. Her attitudes may have driven me, in the perversity that is adolescence, to keep my head even more in books. I thrived in biographies about all kinds of people, not just about the famous or noteworthy. It may be that my appreciation of the life course perspective took on its early shadowy outlines in that interest in people’s lives, although I hardly knew the term “life course” at the time (McDaniel and Bernard 2011). My abiding fascination was how life events, transitions, and relations with others shaped them, what kinds of people they became.

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Being on the edges offers many advantages to a budding sociologist. I became a fascinated and intense observer of all things social, big and small – always wondering and asking why society and people were as they were and how it all worked. This insatiable curiosity still drives my research agenda, my teaching, and the policy advising that I do. It can also prove difficult socially, however, when I listen to multiple conversations at once in restaurants and at parties! One of the first truly sociological books I read, while a young high school student, was David Riesman’s (1950) The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, although I read it long after it was published. Perhaps attracted by the oxymoronic title, I read it while on breaks from my part-time summer job as a telephone operator. The other operators, all adult women and mainly “lifers” having little education and families to support, would ask me what I was reading. That necessitated a summary explanation of why this big hardcover book was as interesting as the romance novels or gossip they enjoyed. I replied, loosely recalled, that it was a story of how we come to see those around us as people we would like to be or be with. Perhaps this is the origin of my desire to make sociology intelligible and enticing to students and policy-makers. I did not read Riesman with sociological eyes. As a teenager barely of working age, I had never heard of sociology. It was pure curiosity and insatiable attraction to books and where they could take me that led me to The Lonely Crowd. I may have, as a sometimes quiet studious sort of teen, identified with being lonely in a crowd. Or it might have been that I fancied myself a young intellectual with a hardback library book in my hands rather than a pulp fiction paperback with a lurid cover. I also at that time read both Molière and Proust in the original French, such was the depth of my curiosity. With the hindsight of a sociological lens, I can now see that Riesman opened a window of fresh insight for me – the social could actually be studied. I don’t think it was clear to me as a curious high school student that a career could be made of studying people and society. I had intentions of studying mathematics. Riesman introduced me as well to the idea of analytical categories that can provide answers to that nagging “why” question I had been asking. In essence, he put forward ideal types – a kind of emotional landscape of information – ranging from tradition-directed communities reliant on unquestioning responses to the ways things have always been done; to inner-directed communities reliant upon what people like its

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members do; to other-directed communities, in which one’s ancestral line matters less than one’s contemporary peers (or those one thinks of as peers). Hence some of the origins of middle-class consumerism, suburbanization, and “keeping up with the Joneses.” Innerdirected communities remain, such as Indigenous peoples for whom tradition has been revived as community-centring. As well, upperclass families of means tend to remain inner-directed to a large extent. The middle-class, however, in being other-directed, has become muddled as, over the past four decades, salaries have stagnated and inequalities have risen. My interest in sociological reflections on the types of classes and perspectives outlined by Riesman and by Peter Berger (1963) in Invitation to Sociology was not only intellectual and not only the desire to project my teenaged self as a serious reader. It was also personal. The unusual aspect of my childhood is that I spent time in three socioeconomic classes. That accounts, in large part, for my marginality. My father came from a privileged but dysfunctional family. My mother was raised in deprivation, also in a dysfunctional family. Neither of them had parenting “genes” or any firm concept of what a parental relationship entails. Nor, for that matter, did they have any similar sense of what spousal relationships involved. Both had their expectations of each other and of marriage shattered by the time they divorced. This schooled me in the idea that not all adults were sculpted in the mould of the 1950s Father Knows Best ideal, as we are sometimes led to believe, but are individuals making different choices, even in what is often portrayed as a socially homogenous time. Our parents are perhaps the most challenging of sociological subjects, even more challenging than turning a sociological lens on ourselves. We know them not as full persons but only relationally, how they act towards us as their offspring. We also know our parents, or pretend to know them, comparatively, how they are relative to other parents, to friends, to parental figures in the media, in idyllic situations. Mine compared badly and were badly matched. As Donna Tartt notes in her brilliant novel The Goldfinch (I paraphrase), we don’t get to choose the parents we have or the people we are. I have come to dispute the latter from self-reflection and self-creation, but she is clearly right on the non-choice we have with regard to our parents. When a shift occurs and we step away from early influences and seize agency (in my case, by the throat), we begin the processes of self-construction, of creating an adult identity different from that we had in the places

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where our lives began. Those processes, for me, were premised on sociological understandings. I now clearly hear the echo of Riesman’s insights in the 2016 American presidential election. Arlie Hochschild (2016), in the bestselling sociological study Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, finds a deep sense of resentment among Trump-supporting, working-class Louisianans of those groups (women, African Americans, immigrants/refugees) who are seen as stepping ahead in the perceived justice queue of entitlement, leaving self-described deserving others behind. Echoing and resonating with this class resentment is the deeply held personal resentments of the billionaire president himself, who, despite his wealth, sees himself as not being accepted by the billionaires’ inner group. That Hochschild’s study of Trump supporters in the deep American South was a bestseller suggests a public craving for the kind of explanations sociologists offer. This accessible writing is something we sociologists should do more often. In my early years, marginality was a function of moving often, of being in multiple social classes at different stages of childhood, and of being a child who observed closely, often from the edges. My sense of social justice led me to analysis rather than only to advocacy, a road others with the same sense of social justice might have taken. Those quests for “why” led, in a kind of virtuous circle, to the promotion of policies to benefit society, families, women, and disadvantaged people (McDaniel and Um 2015). One particularly formative experience when I was a child of maybe six or seven involved taking a passenger train through the eastern parts of the United States to Florida. It was my first experience of the southern United States. The Spanish moss on the trees looked foreboding to me, but I really enjoyed the southern fried chicken! From train windows, a lot is visible to travellers that is not so apparent from super highways with homogenous rest stops and cookie-cutter gas stations. Poor people, and particularly poor African Americans, then lived by the train tracks (and still do in the American South). I was shocked by the living conditions and even more shocked to see, at various train stations, “Colored Only” drinking fountains and bathrooms. Of course, being a curious little girl, I asked everyone I met why these signs were there. The common answer was that different people should be kept separate – an answer that never satisfied me. My social justice radar was turned up high. Donald Clairmont (1974),

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in Africville: The Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community, recounts how a vibrant but poor Black community in Halifax was uprooted and destroyed in the interest of “urban renewal.” George Sefa Dei (2017), a Canadian sociologist with many deep theoretical insights into race, argues that “Black” as a label gained meaning only through encounters with Europeans. He suggests – compellingly – that racialized dichotomies are political and historical constructs suited to those in power. With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), public conversations about how historical and present-day colonialist views constructed the relations of settlers and Indigenous populations deepened. Contemporary Indigenous poverty and social challenges must be understood in the context of the colonialist reserve system, residential schools created “to take the Indian out of the child,” and longstanding negative labelling of Indigenous peoples and their cultures. As well, in recent years, with discussions of cultural appropriation, racism against Indigenous peoples in Canada is more widely recognized and, one hopes, beginning to be reduced as our understanding of historical wrongs increases. LIFE IN THE TRENCHES AS A YOUNG SOCIOLOGIST ( OF THE FEMALE PERSUASION )

When women were largely curiosities, even if as undergrads we were not in short supply, it was an adventure to carve out a career as a sociologist. A woman graduate student in another field invited me and my then boyfriend to dinner with her and her PhD student boyfriend. It was a gourmet multicourse feast, very unlike the usual grad student fare. When I complimented her, she replied that it was her “As,” meaning her equivalent of the PhD comprehensive exams! She was working to pass a “Mrs” exam instead of a “PhD” and was, shockingly to me, very upfront about it. Male professors tended to see the small group of female graduate students as either potential wives or mistresses, sometimes for them and sometimes for the male grad students, or as playthings to tease, sometimes to touch, but not to take too seriously. Navigating the gender game to achieve one’s career goals required sociological insight, a cool stance, and the negotiating skills of a diplomat. Things were said that, in retrospect, are hilarious: “So, a little girl like you wants a PhD,” making me feel like a toddler in rompers.

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“Not a bad idea – for a girl.” (Female adults only became known as women later.) “You should wear your hair like that all the time. You look like Veronica Lodge” (a cartoon character in the Archie comics). (Is this supposed to be a compliment?) And when, as a junior faculty member in an all-male department, I dealt with comments like these: “You did all this? Are you trying to show me up?” “How come you write in all these squigglies?” “Squigglies,” I figured out, were statistical equations with some Greek symbols. The most negative long-term aspect of this gendered environment was that I never received any mentoring on how to be an academic, perhaps because it wasn’t expected that I, as a woman, would be pursuing a serious academic career. It may well be that the male graduate students never received mentoring advice either, but it did appear that they were more likely to be “taken under the wings” of their supervisors. Sometimes, they went for TGIFs with faculty, to which women were not generally invited. On occasion, these TGIFs were even held at strip clubs or bars that engaged scantily clad female dancers or servers. My experience resonates, to a large degree, with Dorothy Smith’s (1992, 1994) autobiographical reflections, in which she brilliantly articulates how she was trained in sociology, first in the United Kingdom and then in the United States, to be part of a colonializing elite, in both perspective and method. At the same time, she recognized that, as a woman, she was also colonized by a male standpoint, which was so taken for granted that it was invisible. The concept she coined – “standpoint feminism” – is intensely powerful and holds that feminist sociology (and indeed all social sciences) should be practised from the point at which women and subgroups of women see and observe. I took this concept into my doing of sociology, most notably in my 1992 article “Alice in Demographyland,” but also in subsequent work (for two examples, see McDaniel 2003, 2004). The biggest challenge for me, without mentoring for developing an academic career, was discovering on my own that failures and rejections are an important part of the academic enterprise and are crucial to furthering one’s education and socialization as an academic. No one had told me, for example, about the frequency of rejections of submitted papers and how to handle those experiences constructively. After being a super successful undergraduate and graduate student,

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it came as a huge shock and surprise to receive my first rejection from a journal, as it does to most graduate students and post-docs even today. I was ready to give up on academia and take up plumbing! I learned only by talking openly with others how to strategize in submitting papers; how to deal effectively with rejections, with revise and resubmits; and, crucially, how to learn and benefit from the process. I am very glad indeed that I did not give up on academia. I now regularly offer mentoring sessions for my post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and junior faculty who seek my advice on learning and mastering the real “ropes of academe.” Success is a very poor teacher. It is only in failures and rejections that we learn and harden our thin skins in academia, as in life. And the experience of having our papers rejected is the only way to build a successful academic career: this is because rejections are markers of taking risks. It is ultimately an act of humility, not hubris, to submit our work for publication, BECOMING A SOCIOLOGIST

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AN ONGOING PROJECT

Gustave Flaubert, in one of his letters, says that he may not be the writer he wished to be. I am not fully the sociologist I wish to be either – at least not yet. But perhaps my ambitions are less lofty than Flaubert’s. Doing sociology is as illuminating to me as is life itself. In fact, it is for me a life quest and is life affirming. I suppose this might be true of all academics who take up this nunish/monkish life to pursue “truths” and to unlock the mysteries of various universes. The difference is that sociologists tend to be myth-busters, or disruptors of the taken-for-granted sense of everyday life. Busting myths in the social world in which we all live and think of ourselves as experts, since most of us have successfully navigated our social worlds, is not necessarily the best way to make friends and influence people. It is the fun of doing sociology, but also the peril. When our research takes life outside of academia and scholarly journals, we are both pleased and surprised, almost taken aback. It is very challenging to trace a direct route from a piece of research to realworld policy, measurement, or social change. A report from the Federation for Humanities and Social Sciences (2017, 16) notes that impacts in the humanities and social sciences are diverse and hard to track, yet we “can share exciting success stories that have gone untold for too long.” For some of my sociological work the line from page to real-world stage is distinctly labyrinthine and has considerable lag

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time (Van Roosmalen and McDaniel 1992). The Harper government suggested that looking at the root causes of crime or terrorism was “committing sociology” and was not where the prime minister wished politics and policy to go (see, for example, Matthews 2014)! Yet, commit sociology we must! What enticed me about sociological questions was a paradox. When aggregated, how do individual actions, choices (or non-choices), and behaviours create an entirely new, sometimes counterintuitive, web of connection, relationality, and causality? How do public actions and/or meta- or mesosocio-economic changes connect to individual actions, choices, and behaviours and their aggregated consequences? The conundrum of the first question is most visible in demography. Individuals or couples, for example, do not make decisions about fertility, which is either an abstract demographic concept or an equally abstract medical concept with different meanings; rather, they make decisions about having children, about having a family, about the love they wish to share with a child, about the joy of having a new life with all the hopes and dreams that entails. Their decisions are made on the basis of deeply held values, desires, and hopes as well as on the basis of concerns about finances, housing, and a myriad of other micro-level personal factors. Yet, if many people of childbearing age decide to have children at the same time, a baby boom results. The aggregated decision making on the part of many couples creates policy challenges across society. It starts with carefully considered individual actions but results in an unintended social phenomenon. The micro morphs into a counterintuitive macro phenomenon. Similarly, if many couples decide to have fewer children at once, maybe for the same well-considered individual reasons, the societal result is population aging. In deciding whether to have another child a couple would never say, “Let’s have a smaller family so that population aging will occur in the future!” Think of a population pyramid with back-to-back bar graphs for males and females, with the youngest ages at the bottom and the oldest at the top. Chipping away at the bottom of the pyramid, as does a declining birth-rate, means that the average age of the population increases. This is population aging, and the main contributor to it, contrary to popular belief, is declining birth-rates rather than increasing longevity, although increasing life expectancy also plays a small role. This is another counterintuitive socio-demographic insight. Exploring these insights is like pulling the rug out from under seemingly established under-

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standings, which, to me, is a fundamental tenet of the best pedagogy, the best sociology. The second question in the above paradox asks how public actions and/or macro- or mesosocio-economic changes affect individual behaviours and their aggregated consequences. Policy advisors (who are often economists) think in terms of incentives or disincentives built into economic and social policies as means to motivate desired behaviours. Sociologists tend to look more deeply to examine how socio-economic changes, policies, and structures may affect individuals and groups in unintended ways or how policy concepts can transcend politics. An example of the latter is a study I did with then PhD student Amber Gazso, comparing the evolution of social assistance restructuring from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s in three western Canadian provinces, each with a different political party in government (Gazso and McDaniel 2010). What we found was staggering. Despite governments in power that ranged from left to right politically, the dimensions of restructuring social assistance ultimately converged into a larger project of solidifying market citizenship through making employability or employment a condition for qualifying for social assistance. Even the words and phrases used in the reformed policies were similar and at times identical. It was no longer sufficient to be a citizen falling on tough times to qualify for help; instead, neoliberal market logic was superimposed on non-market facets of everyday lives such as parenting and caregiving, requiring parents, usually lone mothers, to move into market labour even if they had babies or pre-school children. This research revealed that globalization, not as a series of actions or pacts but as a way of thinking, had not only transcended political ideologies and approaches but had also reached into the intimate lives of Canadians and their families. Adam Smith’s hand is not the only invisible hand in our lives. The concept of “acting your age” has always puzzled me. How can the year of birth create clear behavioural and opportunity expectations? When I first heard this as a child, I found it empirically unjustified since the fellow students I knew were all over the board on various scales of maturity/immaturity. Indeed, upon self-reflection, I, too, was all over the board on various scales. This is age determinism, and it is not only empirically unjustified but also often harmful. Those who are developmentally challenged can be essentially penalized and stigmatized for not “acting their age.” Even those who are advanced in grades can be stigmatized for being socially out of step with their

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classmates. Age determinism can be pernicious and dreadful for those experiencing it. Once age determinism is translated into age benchmarks, it can lead to the over-medicalization of children and despair in adults. Children who “fail” (and that is indeed the terminology applied even to babies!) to meet age benchmarks are fretted over and too often medicated into age-specific norms. It is well known from life course and child development research that not all children develop at the same pace, yet age determinism tends to force them into conformity by birth date. Age determinism continues into adulthood as young adults feel pressure and experience subsequent depression if they do not fit agedetermined scripts. This is particularly constraining for women, who are often repeatedly told that their biological clocks are ticking while they are busy working to establish careers and long-term unions. Agedeterminist rhetoric can result in women forming bad unions or leaving jobs they love. Not long ago, our female relatives had children well into their forties without having to deal with such age-determinist worries. Of course, at that point in their lives they were often on to their fourth or fifth child; however, all the same, their worries were not age-determinist. Another example from my research builds on the highly influential work of American sociologist Glen Elder (1974) on children of the Great Depression. I patterned my Canada Research Chair in Global Population and Life Course research program on his path-breaking life course paradigm. The large multi-method research project that I conducted on Canadians and Americans aging from mid- to later life in the Great Recession of 2008+ is built largely on his pioneering conceptual framework. This research also builds on my own concept of generation as a social process, as gender is now seen – that is, as something enacted through social interaction rather than existing as a static category (which is how the term is often used in the media) (McDaniel 2004). Findings from the large project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council reveal that, as a macro-level socioeconomic phenomenon, the Great Recession has had deep and lasting effects on the ways we enact generation, on the aspirations not only of those in mid-life but also of their offspring. Key is the intersection of biography and history, a concept developed in The Sociological Imagination, written by C. Wright Mills (1959), a social theorist I deeply admire and whose insights have textured my sociology. We found that

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the same socio-economic event or crisis, in this case the financial crisis beginning in 2008, had very different life course effects depending on where one was in one’s life course when it hit. And those effects are largely invisible without a life course lens. For example, the common media-expressed belief was that the Great Recession of 2008+ affected older and younger people more deeply than middle-aged people, which is true cross-sectionally. However, those in mid-life were the ones most caught up in the recession’s consequences as they looked after young and old, even as they attempted to keep their homes, jobs, and pensions. The consequences for those in mid-life are still being felt and will continue to be felt as they age. Conceptualizing generation as an active process, a performance (McDaniel 2002), productively builds on feminist theory, an inspiration and cornerstone of much of my work. Perhaps surprisingly, my sociological development initially benefited less from feminist theory than from a deeply embedded sense of social justice. Inequality was a lived experience for me as a budding sociologist in what was then a male-dominated field. I became interested in reproductive choice not, at first, as an intellectual but from the realization that I could not do or become what I wished if faced with an unwanted pregnancy. This realization led to a ground-breaking study, undertaken when I was a “salad days” graduate student, on what would happen if legal access to abortion was no longer an option (McDaniel and Krotki 1979). What we found by means of an innovative research methodology was that rates and numbers of illegal/backroom abortions would increase substantially while live births would not. This paper proved influential in changing reproductive choice policies in Canada as well as elsewhere. At a reception in Ontario after this research had been widely cited, the pro-choice advocate Dr Henry Morgentaler surprised me by coming up to thank me for it and to offer me a warm hug. This is an example of how the personal motivation for sociological research can have implications far beyond academia. I often counsel graduate students to choose a research question that they are passionate about answering and not to be surprised if their research takes them in completely unexpected directions The influence of feminism on my sociological work has been profound. For me, this influence began in the 1970s when I closely observed feminist activism. My strongly honed sense of social justice was awakened by claims of injustice in the workplace, in marriage and families, and on the streets, all of which I had seen and experienced.

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In Edmonton in the 1970s I participated in activism with respect to women’s reproductive rights. And in the 1980s, at the University of Waterloo, I participated in an academic women’s group that worked very hard to secure equality for women faculty and graduate students. This was a far from easy endeavour, given the gender structure at that time at Waterloo and its heavy focus on the male-dominated disciplines of computer science, engineering, and mathematics. Male standpoint thinking was rampant, with some male faculty openly wondering why daycare was needed for faculty, the presumption being that faculty were not only male but also had wives who could look after children. Our two focal issues were (1) equal pay for work of equal value – an ongoing struggle in universities, with adjustments still being made in women’s faculty salaries – and (2) daycare for faculty and graduate students with children. Sociology, I reflected in the late 1970s, needed to catch up with popular feminist movements on matters of gender injustices. As a junior untenured professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, I had been actively discouraged by my senior male colleagues from doing feminist research. As soon as I had tenure, I developed several research programs focused on feminist questions and infused with feminist theories and methodologies. One was a study of sexual harassment in universities that is still widely cited (McDaniel and Van Roosmalen 1999). This was around the time of the infamous case of Clarence Thomas (who was nominated for the US Supreme Court) and Anita Hill (who accused him of sexual harassment) and long before sexual harassment in academia was acknowledged or studied. Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court, despite the sexual harassment allegations, and serves to this day. Another was a long-term study of biases and contradictions in demographic approaches and methodologies that came from a male standpoint (see, for example, McDaniel 2003), the culmination of which was an award-winning article that looks at demography through a feminist lens (McDaniel 1996). One of my early feminist articles was titled “Alice in Demographyland: How It Looks from the Other Side of the Looking Glass” (McDaniel 1992). Since then, almost all of my research has had a feminist angle, although not always overtly. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I began teaching a sociology course at the University of Waterloo titled “Sex Roles.” The construct “sex roles” was badly conceptualized, as was Talcott Parsons’s functionalist theory of the division of labour in work and family, which

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everyone in sociology in that era was taught. Roles are something ready-made that we wriggle into and act according to scripts. Bells and whistles went off, although not the catcall whistles to which all women seem subjected, even now! Something better was needed. I began teaching about gender, its complexities and its fluidities. It took longer for the course title to change. Bureaucracies in academia tend to lag behind ideas. After this visceral awakening I turned actively to feminist theory and sociology. Those whose ideas influenced me were largely Canadian: Dorothy Smith, Thelma McCormack, and Margrit Eichler. These three women are immigrants who have spent their most productive years in Canada. Smith is from the UK, McCormack from the US, and Eichler from Germany. Dorothy Smith’s scholarship has influenced many young sociologists, as evidenced by her lifetime achievement award from the American Sociological Association. What compelled me most was Smith’s (1997) concept of the “relations of ruling,” although her institutional ethnography also appealed to and influenced me. Relations of ruling are, in short, the largely invisible institutional power arrangements that work to control our everyday lives and endeavours. Her excursus on how this works in families of the corporate elite, where worth and merit are not readily quantifiable, resonated with me, as it has with generations of students with whom I have shared her insights. Her insights reveal in startling simplicity how gender is not a role but is enacted/performed in multi-layered relations of ruling contexts. Thelma McCormack (1921–2016) was a professor of sociology at York University and a force in feminist sociology, indeed in all sociology, in Canada. She was an expert on censorship and pornography, angering some feminists with her anti-censorship stance. Her pioneering sociological expertise in these areas served her well as an expert witness in several cases related to gay literature and publications. She was founder, along with others, of the Graduate Program in Women’s Studies at York as well as York’s Centre for Feminist Research. She was also a president of the then Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. She inspired my sociology, not specifically in her areas of interest, which were not mine, but in her public engagement and her fearless commitment to having sociological research make a better world. Margrit Eichler, an emeritus sociologist at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, now part of the University of Toronto, worked

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briefly in sociology at the University of Waterloo and was a colleague of Dorothy Smith’s at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Two aspects of her work influenced my sociological endeavours. The first was her pioneering discussions of family as fluid and dynamic, a concept now taken for granted in sociology but, at that time, a new way of thinking (Eichler 1988). Both my own research approaches and publications in family sociology, including my text Close Relations (2018), co-authored with Lorne Tepperman (with Sandra Colavecchia added for the latest edition), benefited from her path-breaking concepts of families. The second aspect of her work that influenced my sociology was her central role in developing, and lobbying for, gendersensitive analyses of grant applications and policies that made all social scientists think more deeply about their unspoken biases (Eichler and Lapointe 1985). The gender-sensitive approaches she developed are now in place in all three granting councils in Canada and in federal government departments. Eichler’s sociology and policy advocacy changed the way we address unspoken gender biases in social sciences research and policy development. Her influence has been widely felt, and it made me realize that my sociology could also be of public and policy interest. The 1987 publication “Doing Gender,” by Candace West and Don Zimmerman, had a spectacular and paradigm-shifting influence on all sociologists who study gender. It, in essence, represented a paradigm leap for feminists in search of something to replace the outmoded concept of sex roles. The notion is simple only in retrospect, as most seemingly simple notions are. Gender, West and Zimmerman (1987) argue, must involve the agency of actors, not only the central casting of socially interpreted biological dualisms or of the systems of capitalism or patriarchy. This article changed the way feminist theory and research was done and opened a wide door for subsequent scholars such as Judith Butler and other feminist theorists. The concept of “doing gender” is now central in feminist sociology and became salient in my own research and teaching. In my article “Generationing Gender: Justice and the Division of Welfare” (McDaniel 2004), I argue that the concept of generation is both under- and mis-theorized. When cast into the economistic paradigms of neoliberalism, generation becomes the “iconography of actuarial justice.” Instead, I put forward the concept of “doing generation,” of generationing, premised on the idea that generation, like gender, has agency. I proposed a new analytical frame, understanding that

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generation as a dynamic concept enables deep sociological exploration both from the outside in, countering globalist and neoliberal views of generation as competing cohorts, and from the inside out, seeing generational solidarity and intergenerational transmission, which, ultimately, are at the heart of the social commons. In other words, generation as a relational, dynamic concept is both life-course based and life-long, routinely changing in relationality but constant in other ways. One remains a daughter, for example, in relation to a mother, but the daughter-mother relation is in constant flux as both traverse their life courses. Generationing as a social relation may be best expressed in the literary wisdom of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince: “The planet is [indeed] borrowed from our children, not given by our parents.” BEWARE THE HUNCHBACKS

Poet, novelist, and editor Jana Prikryl (2016) describes in an audio broadcast the best advice she ever received. A fictional character expresses horror at seeing in the distant desert a group of identically disabled, hunchback children. He leaps to the conclusion that the children may have been exiled from their communities and that perhaps something horrid in the water, food, or air is causing their terrible deformities. It is only when he observes each child remove a bowl from under the back of his or her shirt that he realizes his conclusion was completely unfounded. Hence, beware of the hunchbacks. My sociological adventure involves constantly observing and deconstructing those distant hunchbacks. It is an ongoing enterprise of mythbusting. And myth-busting has never been more needed than now, in the era of fake news and social media conspiracies. Most, but not all, of my attention to the hunchbacks and the mistaken conclusions they can evoke has been in the realm of population aging and its supposed trickle-out effects. This began long before the sociology of aging or demographic aging were of interest in sociology or in policy. I was invited to write the inaugural book in the prescient Butterworths’ series on aging (McDaniel 1986). My book and subsequent books in that series into the 1990s became the “go to” books for issues related to aging. This series spawned the subfield known as the sociology of aging, which saw growing interest in the 1990s and into the present. Still, the sociology of aging struggled to be seen by self-designated “true” sociologists as a legitimate sociological

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enterprise. Many saw it, and still do, as applied sociology or gerontology. In part, this can be attributed to the preoccupation of early sociologists of aging with empirical surveys, usually small-scale, that were often limited or lacking in theoretical framing. My curiosity about issues of aging did not come from the inside, from personal issues or observed social justice issues, as was the case for my interest in gender. I was, as a colleague at the time remarked, “much too young [at the time the Butterworths book came out] to be occupied by aging.” But my interest in aging was, and remains, at the macro-level in population aging and its relation to social policies. The hunchbacks in aging are those we see every day: (1) population aging is causing, and will increasingly cause, health care burdens and rising costs; (2) population aging will diminish productivity; and (3) population aging is creating workforce shortages that will perplex employers and further compromise Canada’s economic well-being. All have been found to have bowls on their backs, and yet they persist. The fun for me has been to be invited to speak to policy-makers and to expose these mistaken hunchbacks. At times, I am believed. One instance involved a speaking tour related to a study of population aging and potential labour shortages. I led a SSHRC-funded knowledge-synthesis study with Lloyd Wong and Bonita Watt-Malcolm (see McDaniel, Wong, and Watt 2015). In summary, we found that, at present, there are no national labour shortages and that there will be none in the foreseeable future, although there are some regional and sectoral shortages (as there always have been in Canada). No economy grows evenly, hence some growth sectors and regions may experience short-term labour shortages. In essence, the belief that population aging is leading to labour shortages is a myth. This research is an example of how my scholarship has led directly to policy changes. At the time that the study was made public, prior to its publication as a journal article, the Harper government had been under pressure to change the temporary foreign workers program. This research contributed to the changes that were made in that program. At other times, sociological research is contested, sometimes hotly contested. It is rather like the current debate over whether or not the science on climate change is “settled.” What “settled” means in science or social science is never clear. At what point was it settled that Einstein’s theories were correct? At what point was it firmly settled that

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the world was not flat but round? These theories took years to become established wisdom. Research and the credibility of researchers have always been pitted against strongly held popular beliefs and vested interests. The messenger is blamed for bringing complexities or doubts that some would prefer to disappear. Population aging is readily accepted as a cause of public policy challenges since it is seen as immutable, moving like tectonic plates or, as insurance declarations tend to say, like an “act of God.” Both policymakers and the public can only react, but we did not create population aging. If the problems with health care funding are instead located in spending scarce health care dollars on highly paid practitioners to prevent labour unrest or allotted to expensive acute care when home care is needed, then prior policy decisions may be debated and policy-makers perhaps held accountable. If rising health care costs are simply attributed to population aging, poor decision making and the makers of those decisions are off the hook. Population aging is thus an easy escape clause. The consequences of policy acting on a widely held belief, as if it were true, can be serious and can lead to further problems. In sociology, we are familiar with the concept of consensual validation, whereby a number of people agree that X or Y exists, is real or will happen, and others chime in, thereby confirming the belief by false validation. This is what seems to be happening with the spectre of population aging. I predicted that population aging would become the dominant policy paradigm in Canada long before it happened (McDaniel 1987). It is gratifying to be right now and again! But it is not easy getting a prediction published in a contested area of policy, even if the prediction ultimately turns out to be accurate. The reviews for this paper contradicted each other: one said that the paper made unlikely predictions and that it would be perilous to accept it for publication. The second reviewer was so enthusiastic about the paper that he/she offered to co-author it! A wise editor overlooked the first reviewer. BIGGEST CHALLENGES

One of the central challenges of my career has been incorporating sociological insights into academic institutions where sociologists tend to work. This may sound paradoxical. The challenge as I have come to see it is that knowledge once learned seems obvious, as if all

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academics should know it. What is known is like a one-way door: it cannot be unknown again. It is still jarring to me, for example, coming out of a class where I was teaching the latest on gender discrimination and what sociological research shows about how to engage more women in organizations when the evidence is clear that time alone will not solve the problem, to then hear a university administrator say, without any self-reflection or evidence, that time will solve the inequities! Decades of sociological research, starting with Jessie Bernard (1964) more than fifty years ago, have made it clear that special efforts must be taken to recognize the unspoken assumptions that work to exclude women and make their accomplishments less visible. The response that time will solve the challenge was heard when the first round of nominations for Canada Research Chairs was made and very few women were nominated. That subsequently led to a court challenge, which was won. Some administrators then replied that there might have been women to nominate, they just hadn’t thought of them. This is reminiscent of Jessie Bernard’s much cited earlier work, in which she asks scholars to name the top people in their fields and almost all initially come up with male names. When she mentioned some very well-known women in their fields, many responded: “Oh yes, you’re right. I hadn’t thought of her.” So little has changed in fifty years! Similarly, it has been difficult to have so much sociological knowledge about power dynamics and yet at times be challenged to navigate the layers of “power over” that universities deny but possess in abundance. It is particularly challenging when seriously underaccomplished academics become deans, vice-presidents, and presidents of universities. In using the term “under-accomplished” I am referring to scholarly work and academic excellence. These people may or may not be highly talented administrators in the corporatized university, where talent and skills seem to matter less than fundraising capability. And of course there are good examples of accomplished academics who have become university administrators: but this is not always the case. I recall a situation where faculty were asked to provide input on potential candidates for a major administrative post. This was before these appointment processes were closed to collegial input, taking on the practices of private corporations. A curriculum vitae was sent out by e-mail. I responded that I would have preferred to have seen the whole CV. There was no evidence of grants

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or of graduate supervision, and only a very short publication list. The response: “What you have is the whole CV.” Existing challenges of “power over” are exacerbated in the context of the growing corporatization of universities, where administrators have more and more power over faculty and administrative pay has grown exponentially. The stage is set for contestations over the bases of knowing. Is it power descended from those in administrative posts that gives entitlement to judge merit and at times to discipline what is seen as lack of merit or problematic? Or is the right to judge faculty given by virtue of one’s status as an academic colleague? Do as I say you must, even though I myself don’t do what I expect you to do – or do as I do so I can lead you by example? My experience in five universities is that leading by example carries more credibility and results in more overall success for faculty or university, but this is very rare. CARRYING ON

I have often thought, as I watched colleagues grow old in the same departments they joined right out of graduate studies, that it might be fun to encourage exchanges of faculty among universities to shake out the cobwebs. In some departments, the same arguments go on for twenty years or more and are fomented by the same warring factions. Thankfully, that is changing – but ever so slightly as some sociologists are recruited elsewhere and move on. The Canada Research Chair Program contributed, to a degree, to increased mobility, but early in that program there seemed to be an unspoken understanding that “poaching” people from other universities was not a good idea. Instead, CRCs were often nominated from outside Canada (a return to the older approach, which saw foreigners as superior to those who were Canadian-trained) or internally. The program is still male-dominated, particularly at the tier 1 level, but serious attempts have been made by some universities to nominate more women. I sit on the national adjudication CRC committee and have observed firsthand that not all universities are trying equally hard to nominate women. In fact, so deep and long-standing is this tendency not to nominate women that then minister of science Kirsty Duncan announced in May 2017 that if universities do not develop clear strategic plans to nominate more women as CRCs, their funding for the chairs might be curtailed.

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The Canadianization movement began in 1968 at Carleton University (Cormier 2004; Symons 1978) and sought fair treatment of Canadian scholars by Canadian universities. From there, it broadened to position papers and, ultimately, to the legislated policy for hiring in Canadian universities in all disciplines to search for Canadians first. It was a kind of affirmative action program for Canadians, surprisingly essential in our own country. This was thought necessary because previously hired American-oriented sociologists were largely in charge of subsequent hiring and tended, in many instances, to hire in their own image (i.e., empirical positivists). That began to change in two directions in the late 1980s and 1990s. One change was substantive – the refreshing movement into sociology of other kinds of perspectives and other ways of doing research, from history, cultural studies, music, and the arts as well as from computer science, neuroscience, geography, and climate science. I found these developments exhilarating and consistent with historical realities of a sociology that was not walled off from other disciplines, that was part of the real world of social challenges and problems, which do not come neatly packaged in disciplines. I recall the issue of hiring Canadians being a hotly debated topic in the CAUT Bulletin in the 1980s. It seemed to be an emotional issue for many, cloaked, of course, in academic justificatory language. I wrote a letter to the CAUT Bulletin in that period that resulted in highly inflammatory responses, largely from academics with PhDs from outside Canada. Alas, the issue of Canadian hiring remains contested, as a 2017 letter in University Affairs attests (Musial 2017). The writer states, “those hiring for Canadian academic positions value a US PhD over a Canadian PhD” and adds that this is something “we’ve always known to be true.” The composition of sociology departments changed during this period, with more women and a few more minorities coming aboard, the latter still being vastly underrepresented in Canadian sociology. Canadianization opened an ongoing debate about Canadian sociology – about what it is and what it should or could be. McLaughlin (2005), for example, in a highly engaging piece, argues that AngloCanadian sociology, in failing to engage the core of sociological theory, has not optimized its potential. Others, such as Clark (1973–76) and Matthews (2014), compellingly argue the case for Canadian sociology to focus on the uniqueness of Canada and on how Canada

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responds differently to contemporary macro-forces. These important debates will likely never end, and perhaps they shouldn’t. Sociology, the best of which is subversive and myth-busting, has never been more necessary than at present. The need is great for evidence-based understandings and insights into inequalities, into what constitutes the public good or the good life, into social cohesion, into demographic realities, including immigration and aging. Sociology, through its lenses of agency/structure, choice/non-choice, and micro/macro, enables the taken-for-granted to be upended, to be seen afresh. The critical, historical, comparative stance taken by many, not all, Canadian sociologists, including me, is well suited to offering evidence and new analytical frames for contemporary social challenges. In 2020, there is strong encouragement to innovate and to engage in knowledge mobilization (i.e., to make our research widely available). Both, in some ways, necessitate being subversive, doing or saying something new, something that goes against what was previously known or thought. That is the shiny bit that attracts public and media attention – and it is innovation. It can be fun for an enterprising sociologist – I have had a lot of fun with this. Yet we work in institutions that are truly archaic in their practices (consider convocation ceremonies), their hierarchies, and their divisions into little fiefdoms called departments that typically compete for resources rather than collaborate. It is said that, as the #metoo movement goes forward, the entertainment world is slow to change. The same can be said of restaurant work cultures. Both are sticky with secrets and lies, as we are discovering. Academe is no different, and sociologists, no matter how innovative, productive, or knowledge mobilizing, are governed by powerful overlords (truly most often still lords and not ladies) who seldom give us credit for doing exactly what they say they want: committing sociology. REFERENCES Berger, Peter L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. Boston: Anchor. Bernard, Jessie. 1964. Academic Women. New York: New American Library. Clairmont, Donald H.J. 1974. Africville: The Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Clark, S.D., ed. 1973–76. Canadian Society in Historical Perspective. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

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Cormier, Jeffrey. 2004. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dei, George J. Sefa. 2017. Reframing Blackness and Black Solidarities through Anti-Colonial and De-colonial Prisms. Cham, CH: Springer International. Eichler, Margrit. 1988. Families in Canada Today: Recent Changes and their Policy Consequences. Toronto: Gage. Eichler, Margrit, and Jeanne Lapointe. 1985. On the Treatment of the Sexes in Research. Ottawa: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Elder, Glen H. 1974. Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. 2017. Approaches to Assessing Impacts in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Ottawa: Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Gazso, Amber, and Susan A. McDaniel. 2010. “‘The Great West ‘Experiment’: Neo-Liberal Convergence and Transforming Citizenship in Canada.” Canadian Review of Social Policy 63/64: 15–35. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press. Matthews, Ralph. 2014. “Committing Sociology: Developing a Canadian Sociology and a Sociology of Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology 51 (2): 107–27. McDaniel, Susan A. 1986. Canada’s Aging Population. Toronto: Butterworths. – 1987. “Demographic Aging as a Guiding Paradigm in Canada’s Welfare State.” Canadian Public Policy 13 (3): 330–6. – 1992. “Alice in Demographyland: How It Looks from the Other Side of the Looking Glass.” Canadian Studies in Population 19 (2): 233–9. – 1996. “Towards a Synthesis of Feminist and Demographic Perspectives on Fertility.” Sociological Quarterly 37 (1): 601–22. – 2002. “Women’s Changing Relations to the State and Citizenship: Caring and Intergenerational Relations in Globalizing Western Democracies.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 39 (2): 1–26. – 2003. “The Demographic Category as Leaky Gender Boundary.” Women’s Health and Urban Life: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 2 (1): 4–21. – 2004. “Generationing Gender: Justice and the Division of Welfare.” Journal of Aging Studies 18 (1): 27–44. McDaniel, Susan A., and Paul Bernard. 2011. “Life Course as a Policy Lens: Challenges and Opportunities.” Canadian Public Policy 37: S1–S13.

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McDaniel, Susan A., and Karol J. Krotki. 1979. “Estimates of the Rate of Illegal Abortion and Effect of Eliminating Therapeutic Abortion: Alberta, 1973–74.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 70 (6): 393–8. McDaniel, Susan A., Lorne Tepperman, and Sandra Colavecchia. 2018. Close Relations: An Introduction to the Sociology of Families, 6th ed. Don Mills, ON: Pearson Canada. McDaniel, Susan A., and Seong-gee Um. 2015. States and Markets: Sociology of Public Policy in Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. McDaniel, Susan A., and Erica van Roosmalen. 1999. “Sexual Harassment in Academia: A Hazard to Women’s Health.” Women and Health 28 (2): 33–54. McDaniel, Susan A., Lloyd Wong, and Bonita Watt. 2015. “Aging Workforce and the Future Labour Market in Canada.” Canadian Public Policy 41 (2): 97–108. McLaughlin, Neil. 2005. “Canada’s Impossible Science: Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis in Anglo-Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 30 (1): 1–40. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Musial, Jennifer. 2017. “Jobs Might Make Us Stay.” Letter to University Affairs, 5 April. Prikryl, Jana. 2016. “An Interview with Jana Prikryl.” Paris Review, 21 June. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/21/surrendering-to-yourown-maneuvers/. Riesman, David. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday. Smith, Dorothy E. 1992. “Remaking a Life, Remaking Sociology: Reflections of a Feminist.” In Fragile Truths: Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada, ed. William K. Carroll, Linda ChristiansenRuffman, Raymond F. Currie, and Deborah Harrison, 125–34. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. – 1994. “A Berkeley Education.” In Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists, ed. Kathryn P. Meadow-Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace, 45–56. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. – 1997. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Symons, T.H.B. 1978. To Know Ourselves: Report on the Commission of Canadian Studies. Toronto: Book and Periodical Development Council. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth

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and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Van Roosmalen, Erica, and Susan A. McDaniel. 1992. “Adolescent Smoking Intentions: Gender Differences in Peer Context.” Adolescence 27 (105): 87–105. West, Candace, and Don Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society 1: 125–51.

The Backstory

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5 A Career Based on Coincidence Ralph Matthews

BECOMING A CANADIAN

My awareness of social processes did not begin when I took my first sociology course in 1960, but in my childhood – and here geography and space are particularly relevant. I was not born in Canada. I was born in Newfoundland, then a British colony off the east coast of Canada that is as close to Europe as it is to western Ontario. Through my early years, Newfoundland was a patron-client barter society based on fishing. Merchant elites in St John’s supplied regional merchants with provisions from England to trade for salted codfish in remote outports. As these merchants set the prices for both supplies and fish, rural residents saw credit and debt but little actual money. The Great Depression and poor governance bankrupted Newfoundland and almost a third of the population lived on a near starvation “dole” of six cents per day in food rations (Newfoundland Royal Commission 1934). Newfoundland asked England to “take back” its right to local responsible government and, beginning in 1933, became a British protectorate under a British appointed “Commission” – a condition that persisted until it joined with Canada in 1949. The Second World War brought dramatic changes. Newfoundland was strategically located as a potential advanced fortress should Germany attack North America. Through an agreement between the UK (then in control of Newfoundland) and the United States, four American air and naval military bases were built in Newfoundland. One of these (Fort Pepperell) was less than five kilometres from my parents’ home in St John’s. These American bases brought cash jobs and an

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escape from peasantry for thousands of local workers, while the brash presence of thousands of young American servicemen had other more personal impacts on Newfoundland society – for example, reportedly up to forty thousand Newfoundland women married American servicemen (Durnford 1998), including one of my aunts and one of my cousins. My youthful memories are mixed. Although I grew up in the small city of St John’s, my earliest memories are of aspects of a less developed society: the hen house under our back porch and the vexatious crow of the rooster at daybreak, the iceman with his tongs regularly delivering a sawdust-covered block for our icebox, the jingling bells on the butcher’s horse and sleigh. But, by my pre-teens, I was also listening to radio broadcasts of VOUS, the Voice of the United States Armed Forces Overseas, broadcasting Amos and Andy, The Shadow, and Jack Benny from the nearby military base. In short, the transition of society from traditional dependency to modern cash economy and the changing culture associated with this was my lived experience. This accelerated after 1949, when Newfoundland joined Canada and transformed into a social welfare state with socio-economic benefits such as family allowances and old age pensions. I also experienced the hubris and often subsequent despair associated with development and modernization. Then the polio scare came. I never got it, but my life was affected by it. Dr Jonas Salk had yet to invent his vaccine, and every summer this deadly and debilitating disease attacked thousands of teenagers in North American cities. St John’s was no exception as it now received many migrants “come from away.” The only possible way to avoid polio was to escape to places as remote as possible. I was sent away! My maternal uncle was a regional merchant in Notre Dame Bay and White Bay, many kilometres from the closest roads. He operated village stores and had a schooner travelling to even more remote communities, bringing supplies for the winter and collecting the dried salt fish. He and my aunt had two sons and a daughter. From age fourteen to fifteen, I was sent to live with this family during the summer. These were exciting times for me. I was an only child, my home was a formal environment, and my life in St John’s was essentially suburban. In contrast, my summers were spent in the warm and easy-going household of my relatives and in close contact with the broader society of rural people living economically and geographically on the edge. My cousins and I travelled on the fish collection schooner

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through one of the most remote populated regions of North America. I became conscious of socio-cultural differences in a way that I had never done before. I also came to experience the strengths that can exist in a way of life in which people must care for one another to survive. I saw first-hand that a lifetime of hard physical work was little guarantee of well-being or healthy old age. For the first time, I saw what a different culture was like. Back in St John’s, I did well in high school but did not excel in any subject. There was a prize for coming first, second, and third in any year. I finished fourth – fourteen terms (nearly five years) in a row. I did not excel in any subject and never won the coveted English, maths, physics, or chemistry prizes. I was incapable of athletic achievement and could not draw in art class. However, I did win a televised citywide high-school debating contest. As high school education in Newfoundland then ended at grade eleven, I was only sixteen when I finished high school and entered nearby Memorial University. I had little idea what I wanted “to become” and had few role models to guide me. No one on either side of my family had gone to university and few had completed high school. My father (Ralph Matthews, Sr) quit school during the Depression. He had worked as a “shareman” on a fishing boat before migrating to St John’s, where he ultimately worked supervising the manufacture of Coca-Cola. My mother had a high school education but she died when I was twelve. My father remarried within a year. My British stepmother had an msc in mathematics from the University of London and had come to Newfoundland to serve as principal of a St John’s girls school. She was kind and supportive. However, we both quickly realized that I was dismal at mathematical thought. My father, with the reasoning of someone who had survived the Great Depression, wanted me to become an accountant. In his words, it was a field “where you will never be out of a job.” I leaned towards becoming a lawyer. In Newfoundland, many lawyers were outspoken public political figures and I knew how to score points in debate, so it seemed an ideal profession to me. However, bowing to my father’s wishes, I registered in the Bachelor of Commerce program. As my one elective course in first year, I enrolled in introductory sociology. Sociology opened a new world for me. I was previously unaware that there was a field of study that could analyze my experiences in a changing Newfoundland. I devoured it. It was not just the subject matter that captured me: I was captured by sociology’s intellectual

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stance. When people in later years asked me why I became a sociologist, I often answered that it was “because I can think in grey.” In replying this way, I am referring to the fact that much of social science reasoning is relativistic rather than reductionist. We do not deal in facts – for the meaning of facts is always subject to the frames of reference that we bring to them. My intellectual strength, as I have come to realize over the years, is that I can sense “stories” in empirical data that other people may have trouble seeing. Sociology does not make things up, but it does provide interpretative understandings. When I entered Memorial University, it had approximately 1,450 students, about four times the size of my high school. The sociology and anthology department had two people, a British anthropologist (Ian Whitaker) and a young American sociologist (Roger Krohn) who was joined by another (Noel Iverson) a year later. In anthropology, I was exposed to Whitaker’s (1955) analysis of the Sami people in Scandinavia; Evans-Prichard’s studies of the Nuer of (now) South Sudan; and Malinowski’s, Ruth Benedict’s, and Margaret Mead’s studies in the South Pacific. Beyond introductory sociology, my knowledge of the field was esoteric by most standards associated with core undergraduate sociology. For example, in the sociology of work and organizations, instead of learning about work, economic, educational, and health organizations, I studied Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society as an exemplar of social organization. My course on urban sociology did not cover modern cities but their historical rise as depicted in such works as Fustel de Coulanges’s Ancient Cities: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome and Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities. However, it was Roger Krohn’s social theory and social psychology courses from which I derived both my love of conceptual thinking and an approach within sociology that focused on role behaviour more than social structure. As a result, from then to now, my approach to sociology has been actor-centred and action-focused. I am less concerned with issues of social structure than with the social bases of human motivation. My most formative experiences during my university years occurred not in university but in my job as a summer welfare officer. When Newfoundland entered Canada, many of its social workers had only a high school education. In the post-Confederation period, they were offered summer upgrading courses in St John’s while university students were hired to replace them in their districts. For three summers I was sent to ever more remote areas, first Bell Island (the site of

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a recent mine closure), where I was trained in a three-person office, and then on my own to Western Bay, Tors Cove, and Red Bay, Labrador. In that role I was responsible for the administration of ablebodied food relief for many indigent families; child welfare support; the travel of unmarried pregnant girls to birthing facilities; and basic “relief” for the multiple maladies that affect the poor, the feeble, the old, and those without social support. Unlike my “polio summers,” during which I was an onlooker, now I was partly responsible for the survival of the most vulnerable. There were also crisis events. When the departing Western Bay welfare officer brought me to my boarding house on a warm summer evening, the glow in the western sky was not from the setting sun. The whole interior of the peninsula was ablaze and was a threat to some thirty communities. When the wind changed, all those on one side were evacuated to the other side around the forty-eight-kilometre-long fire zone. The entire population of the coast was in danger and I was responsible for their emergency relief. The departing officer handed me keys to every church, church hall, and service club lodge along the coast in case emergency shelters were needed. His more chilling gift was the radio contact signals for three vessels waiting offshore in case inhabitants of some communities were driven into the sea. I now had command of a flotilla! I was eighteen years old. The following year, Red Bay, Labrador, provided even more stark responsibility. I travelled there in mid-May on the Northern Ranger, the first coastal boat out of St John’s in the spring. We quickly encountered heavy pack ice and for nearly two weeks moved cautiously only by day. In Bonavista, Twillingate, and other communities, “floater fishermen” came aboard, headed to Labrador to fish there during the summer. They had no money for bunks and slept body to body on the floor. I had grown up hearing how my great-grandfather and grandfather had similarly “gone to the Labrador” as young men. Indeed, my great-grandfather (Oliver Matthews) died of a heart attack at age forty-six en route to Labrador. The boat would not turn and bring him home as that would have ended the crews’ fishing season and threatened the very survival of their families through the coming winter. Instead, they put his body in a barrel and covered it with the salt used for curing fish. His mummified remains were returned to his unsuspecting widow when the boat returned in the autumn. On this voyage, I came face to face with the privation that was my heritage.

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In contrast, I had a private cabin right under the wireless operator. One night I heard much shouting in the wireless officer’s room. In the morning I learned that our sister ship, which we had passed only hours earlier on its return journey, had been crushed by the ice and sank during the night. The awareness that this could happen to us became poignantly real when the captain announced that he would go no farther than St Anthony, which we reached that afternoon. Soon after debarking, the regional welfare director in St Anthony, Cal Reynolds, had me flown on the Grenfell Hospital emergency floatplane over to Red Bay. There, for nearly three months, I travelled by open boat and pickup truck to the other communities in my district. I quickly became aware that life on coastal Labrador in the early 1960s was often harsh and short. The week after I arrived, the small son of the local merchant (in whose house I was boarding) died when severely burned. No medical assistance could reach the community due to intense fog and crushing ice. A few weeks later, in another community, a married couple drowned while out at sea, leaving five or six children orphaned. I was the government agent responsible for the future well-being of those children. I interviewed their extended families and learned that their uncles and aunts wished to raise them with their own children but needed welfare assistance to do so. However, the long-resident local priest was vehement that the boys should be sent to Mount Cashel orphanage in St John’s for better educational opportunities and the girls to convent schools in St John’s. In those days, there were no telephones and no telegrams available in southern Labrador. Urgent messages could be communicated over a short-wave radio “net” using the lighthouse-keepers in Point Amour and Battle Harbour as wireless transfer points to the rest of Canada. The priest chose that medium and was fulsome in his objections to my actions. Local residents tuned in to hear such messages, so all knew the dispute between the priest and me. I, on the other hand, could not send private government business that way but had to send my report on the next coastal boat to Corner Brook, where it was transferred by train to St John’s. I waited the next two weeks in anticipation, as did many in the community. I assumed I was likely to be removed for opposing the established local church authority. To my surprise, the director of child welfare in St John’s, presumably knowingly, used the public wireless system to issue a public statement concerning the matter. I can repeat his words verbatim even to this day: “In no circumstances will the word of the parish priest be taken over

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that of my representative in the district.” It was an astonishing statement. Although only weeks in the district and a seasonal employee at that, I was supported over the parish priest by the Newfoundland director of child welfare Gerald O’Brien – whose own religious affiliation was obvious in his name. These responsibilities and decisions were mine – at age nineteen. I could not anticipate that they would provide background and confidence that have been fundamental assets for much of my later life. They also provided me with the social interaction skills that have been of much use in my research, enabling me to build trusting relationships with resource workers, First Nations members, and rural community leaders. Back at Memorial in my final year, for my honours thesis I wrote an empirical paper titled “Summer Suburbia” that documented the clique formations of St John’s upper-middle class (of which I was a part) around the yacht club, where they had summer cottages. My professors were intrigued by this window onto a closed society that they had difficulty entering. In response to them, I became intensely committed to becoming a sociologist. The two sociologists who were my mentors had both completed their doctoral dissertations under the supervision of Don Martindale at the University of Minnesota. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and anticipation to be accepted by Minnesota’s Department of Sociology for graduate study there. I was age twenty. GRADUATE SCHOOL : IDENTIT Y SHOCK

I drove from St John’s to Minneapolis, approximately thirty-one hundred kilometres, in my Vauxhall sporting Newfoundland licence plates advertising “Come Home Year.” One indicator of the social distance that accompanied that journey was that I passed through what I came to think of as the Xerox frontier. In my first week as a teaching assistant, Professor Joan Aldous asked me to take a document for Xeroxing. I had not heard the word before and needed the process explained to me. Most people probably place the university faculty as the dominant force in their graduate student experience. For me, it was the other graduate students. The sociology department reportedly had over two hundred registered graduate students. Many of them were well versed in the foundations of American social theory, particularly symbolic

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interactionism, and had read many contemporary sociological studies of American life. My knowledge of Nuer, Trobriand, and feudal societies was irrelevant! Moreover, most graduate students seemed imbued with self-confidence and high verbal skills and did not see analysis as subject to the formal rules of debate. I was overwhelmed! My previous anticipation turned to dread. I desperately wanted to be a sociologist, but I could not even understand what much of the seminar discussion was about. My sense of incompetence was exacerbated by something I have kept secret for many years. In my second month in the MA program, I received a letter from a corporation that had developed a well-known admissions test often required of applicants to many graduate programs (but not Minnesota). I had been randomly chosen from firstyear MA students nationally to complete the version to be administered to applicants for the next academic year in order to establish baseline standards. I could take the exam for free and then use that record should I apply to another university for PhD studies. I took the test. Two months later, I received a letter from the president of the corporation. He stressed that he personally wanted me to know that he was aware that I had deliberately tried to lower the standards by giving incorrect answers to most questions and that they had removed my results from their calculations. I had not! I just did not know the American sociological literature on which it was based and had never experienced an “analogies test” based heavily on American cultural examples. I was devastated. I was ashamed. By March of my first year, I was beginning to break the “code of concepts” so artfully bandied about by other students. Over fifty years later, I remember my gratification when I dared to make a comment in a seminar and Professor Greg Stone praised it. In addition, Martindale agreed to be my thesis supervisor, and we settled on a project for a historical thesis examining the relationship between French and English in Quebec, from conquest to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, using Weber’s theory of “guest-host relations” as a framing perspective. To my surprise, I was offered advancement into the PhD program. In hindsight, I realize that this was a pre-emptive move by the department to keep its students from applying elsewhere for their PhD studies. No matter – I accepted with gratitude. However, while some programs allowed a student to advance without completing a master’s degree, this was not the case at Minnesota. In my second year, I was expected to complete all twelve required PhD courses, complete

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my MA thesis (which I had yet to start writing), and serve as a teaching assistant (TA) for several seminars per week (which entailed grading hundreds of papers and exams). However, before that, I had to find summer work and was relieved to be chosen as a summer intern at Statistics Canada in Ottawa. TAs were frequently approached by failing male students pleading for passing grades. Failure would lead to the removal of the student’s educational draft deferral, and draftees stood a strong chance of being sent to fight in Vietnam. For a Canadian opposed to the war in Vietnam, this was a significant moral dilemma. When I review the autobiographies of other sociologists, they seem replete with descriptions of faculty in the departments at which they studied and what they learned from them. So, in similar style, let me state that I did benefit greatly from a year-long methodology seminar with Reuben Hill and Joan Aldous, in which we completed all stages of a community interview survey. These are the skills I continue to use as I describe myself as an “interview sociologist.” Doctoral students were required to have multiple courses in two “minor” areas, and for one of these I took four graduate courses in statistics. These were the days before computers and statistical packages. All statistical analysis had to be done using a desk calculator. Though laborious, the advantage was that I learned, step-by-step, the inner workings of various statistical tests, and this increased my appreciation of how inference is derived from data. My recollections of the Minnesota sociology department are paralleled by two assessments of the department by faculty members – namely, Martindale’s (1976) acerbic The Romance of a Profession, and Fine and Severance’s (1985) historical review. The Martindale book was largely a personal rebuke for all the perceived slights that he had received from colleagues and is of little value as an objective statement. The Fine and Severance work is an overview that does not focus on the student experience and, to this writer, bears little resemblance to how life as a student in the department was experienced. Indeed, the only mention of specific graduate students is a listing of those during the period of the 1960s who are deemed to have achieved significant later careers. This writer is not listed among them. Fine and Severance refer to the “dust bowl empiricism” that they imply was the core of the Minnesota approach in the period I was there as a student. If that means a tradition of descriptive case and communities studies, certainly some remnants could be found in the

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theses of many students, particularly those who worked with Martindale. However, the intellectual hub of the Minnesota Department of Sociology in the mid-1960s centred on symbolic interactionism – with Arnold Rose, Greg Stone, and Don Martindale (1960) articulating different interpretations. Rose’s approach, focused on “covert culture,” was quite culturally deterministic and was seen by students as somewhat stereotypical. Stone’s was by far the more popular interpretation among graduate students, with his strong emphasis on theories of the self that derived from G.H. Mead. Martindale, who had a strong basis in German idealism (cf. Dilthey) and the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, also had a following. The department saw itself as the bulwark of a midwest tradition of symbolic interactionism usually described as the “Chicago School” (as opposed to the Iowa School, which had a more quantitative approach to symbolic interactionism) and opposed to the dominant structural-functionalist approaches common in American sociology at that time (e.g., in the works of Parsons, Merton, and Homans). I was not immune and, even today, I focus relatively little on social organization, generally taking an actor-centred approach. In doing so I define sociology as “the study of why people behave as they do in social interaction” – the latter three words distinguishing sociological social psychology from the great bulk of psychology studies. I also lean much on the idealist epistemology at the centre of Martindale’s social theory, in which he traces a progression of thought from Kant through Dilthey and Rickert to Weber. As both idealist philosophy and symbolic interaction deal with the nature of cognition and meaning, a central question of epistemology for me is: “How does the mind make sense of experience?” I am intrigued by recent sociology, which deals with what is called “the social brain” (Matthews 2017), because the perspective links the biological and social dimensions of cognition as the basis of cognitive interaction. In sum, largely due to my graduate training, my focus has always been on interpretative understanding rather than on the constraints of structure or, as the British economist and journalist Walter Bagehot called it in the 1870s, the “cake of custom.” In the intervening years, I had become aware of the knowledge gaps in my graduate education. Marxist and dialectical perspectives were never mentioned, even in sociological theory courses and despite their currency in European and Canadian sociology. Similarly ignored were

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the political-economy perspectives, such as those from South America, that later developed into dependency theory. While graduate school gave me the conceptual and methodological perspectives that I still largely hold, the actual subject matter of my research career has been determined mostly by events outside my academic programs. The prime example occurred in the spring of my second year at Minnesota when I received a telephone call from Noel Iverson, one of my undergraduate instructors at Memorial. He invited me to join him in the summer of 1966 as a co-investigator for a study of the Newfoundland Resettlement Program. Agreeing to do so gave me a primary focus for my research and writing for the next decade. In particular, it gave me a career-long interest in the study of public policy, which I conceptualize as a means-ends schema. The dominant policy research question is, thus, whose values set the ends (goals) and determine the appropriate means for achieving them (Matthews 1975). THE RESETTLEMENT STUDY

In the early 1960s, the government of Newfoundland undertook a program known as “centralization.” Its declared aim was to eliminate isolated communities by moving their inhabitants to other locations that were said to have more opportunities, services, and jobs as well as better education for children. A similar perspective dominated the newly created federal Department of Regional Economic Expansion. Whereas the provincial interest was largely with cost saving and better opportunities for rural residents, the federal focus had conceptual underpinnings. It incorporated a theory that economic development occurs at “points de la croissance,” where geography and economy coincided to produce “growth centres” containing necessary infrastructure and an available workforce. From such a perspective, Newfoundland’s dispersed population was an impediment to economic development, and the two levels of government combined to create the Newfoundland Resettlement Program with the declared aim of closing up to seven hundred communities and moving their populations to identified growth centres. Even at the time, the underlying assumptions seemed problematic in the Newfoundland context. The Resettlement Program was based on the assumption that building larger centres of unemployed people would be a significant attraction for industry. This was unlikely given the distance of Newfoundland

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from any major market and the lack of advanced education and skills that industry would need. The result was that thousands were moved from areas where they were engaged in meaningful part-time work in fishing into larger communities where they remained unemployed. To monitor this program, the Newfoundland government provided funding to Memorial University’s new Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER). Iverson and I were the chosen recipients and our task was to carry out the study. I remain grateful to Noel Iverson for inviting me to join him on this project. I benefited greatly from his judgment and his broad knowledge of how to understand links between history and culture. My own previous experiences in remote Newfoundland fishing communities proved of particular relevance in the development of the interview questions, the selection of communities, and the interpretation of data. In part due to those experiences, in our final report we were able not only to speak about rural residents but for them. Our report argued that lack of adequate information combined with the spread of rumours contributed to mob characteristics of collective behaviour. Those who had moved almost universally informed us that they did not want to move but felt forced to do so “because everyone else was going.” Our report, Communities in Decline (Iverson and Matthews 1968) published by ISER Books, was followed by a major workshop in St John’s at which academics, government officials, and politicians were in the audience. Indeed, the “Iverson-Matthews Report” was a subject of provincewide controversy, and I participated in many television and radio interviews (an hour-long one is available on YouTube). The report was featured in local newspaper articles and in editorials in the St John’s Telegram. Moreover, it was deemed of sufficient sociological significance that the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology published a lengthy review of it, the first book review ever to appear in that journal. For me, this was a heady experience, different from those in my other world, in which I was a graduate student struggling to complete my MA thesis and was being threatened with dismissal for my tardiness. In the following two years, I somehow managed to complete my MA thesis, take a required complement of eighteen courses, sit for written comprehensive exams in seven different areas of sociology, and pass a two-hour long comprehensive oral examination. All while being a half-time teaching assistant. When I hear our current graduate stu-

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dents complain about a doctoral load of four courses and two comprehensive area exams, I am not sympathetic. Even though I had one year left on a SSHRC doctoral fellowship, I chose to leave Minnesota after only four years (two MA and two PhD) with the intention of writing my doctoral dissertation while being fully employed. After all, I was already twenty-four and, to me, four years seemed a long time to be in graduate school. I reasoned that my PhD dissertation would use the data collected for the resettlement study in an expanded analysis of regional development and public policy. I interviewed for and was offered positions at several universities in the United States and Canada but chose to accept a tenurestream position at Memorial University that offered half-time teaching and half-time research, the latter funded by Memorial’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. Then the symbolic dimensions of space and place played a role in that I was drawn back by my strong identification as a Newfoundlander. THE EARLY YEARS : MEMORIAL UNIVERSIT Y , 1968–71

In retrospect, my appointment at Memorial University was destined to be problematic. I had barely begun to write my dissertation but was already feeling pressure to complete it. Martindale contributed to this by sending monthly one-sentence letters: “I’m still waiting!”; “I hope you aren’t ill”; “I hope you are feeling better now and can work again” (Note: I had never been ill). I dreaded these monthly missives, and I completed the dissertation largely because it was the only way to end them. I defended it back in Minneapolis at the end of my first academic year. There I re-entered a world that had remained unchanged. Students were on strike to protest the Vietnam War. I had to cross a picket line to get to my dissertation defence. No matter my personal views of that war, my career hinged on that defence. I pushed through the picket lines and was hit in the back by a thrown rock as I pushed through the police line and reached the safety of the entrance. In comparison, the defence itself seemed benign. While I had been working on my doctoral dissertation, anthropologist Robert Paine, director of research at ISER, made it abundantly clear that half my appointment required that I undertake new research for ISER. Instead, I spent the summer between the two years of my appointment completing my doctoral dissertation. My relations with Paine

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became very tense and personally acutely stressful. In retrospect, I can see his point. He had a limited budget and much of it was spent on me. Thankfully, with my PhD now awarded, I received a further oneyear appointment as assistant professor in sociology, and I used the summer preceding it to complete the data collection for the ISER project – seeking, somewhat in retrospect, to accomplish what I had been already paid to do. In my application, I had proposed to undertake a sequel to the previous resettlement study, focusing on the small handful of communities that had resisted intense internal and external pressure to resettle. I sought to identify the social dynamics that had enabled such communities to withstand pressure to move when hundreds of others had not. During that second summer, I identified sample communities, developed an extensive interview guide, and carried out the necessary interviews in three widely dispersed and remote communities. I had returned to Newfoundland with a personal commitment to ensure that no future Memorial University sociology student would enter graduate school elsewhere as unprepared as I felt I had been. For me this was akin to a crusade, and I have no doubt that my courses were demanding. Those were in the days before course evaluations, but I remember having no problems with undergraduate classes. However, I do remember one graduate seminar on sociological epistemology in which a student flatly refused to read the introductory chapters of Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery because, so he claimed, it “could not be read.” While I was aware that this student came from a distinguished Newfoundland family with strong ties to Memorial University, I was blunt in my assessment that the material was accessible to those who could perform at a graduate level. I was preparing for the first class of my third year at Memorial when my department head asked to see me. His message was that the dean did not intend to renew my contract for a further year and was giving me plenty of time to seek employment elsewhere. This shocked me to the foundations of my being. He reported to me that the dean had heard that I “had difficulty communicating with students.” With the exception of this one graduate student, I had never received any negative feedback. However, in that era one did not even think of seeking further information from the dean or eliciting the support of the Faculty Association. And, after all, I was on a one-year contract so was not being “dismissed,” I was just not being rehired.

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Having come to Newfoundland after being called by a need to serve, I was now told that my service was not needed. For all of my life, being a Newfoundlander had been a foundation of my identity, but I could no longer work there as a sociologist. The lesson that I took away from this experience was that one always needs to be employable elsewhere should the need arise. In those days, publication was the only sure way to establish one’s marketability. I also developed a more discursive style of teaching – a style more akin to storytelling than to pontification – in which I often “unpack” my life experiences to demonstrate the applicability and utility of sociological concepts. However, my last year at Memorial was one of great turmoil for me. I survived the year emotionally largely because of the support provided by George Park (an anthropologist) and his wife Alice. I spent many Friday evenings in the warm companionship of their home. I also retained my close and continuing friendship with sociologist Bob Chanteloup and his late wife Mary. I vividly remember that night in late August 1971 when I sat alone, getting colder in the biting wind swirling around the rear deck of the William Carson (the ferry from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia). I waited and watched alone in the cold for over an hour until the lights of Newfoundland finally disappeared, leaving only blackness in our wake. THE MIDDLE YEARS : M C MASTER UNIVERSIT Y , 1971–97

When I read the autobiographies of sociologists dealing with the 1960s and early 1970s, they almost uniformly make comments such as, “My generation of academics has been a privileged one.” This was an age of university expansion in both the United States and Canada, and there were many more jobs available than qualified scholars to fill them. Thus, it was not hubris that led me to apply to only two of the larger Ontario universities and one American one. After all, I had completed my doctorate at a major American university, co-authored a book that had been well reviewed, had already taught three years, could present a job-talk on a further project for which I had completed the data collection, and was still only twenty-seven. I liked the young colleagues I met at McMaster University and accepted its offer to start there in September 1971.

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In 1968, when I had started teaching at Memorial, Canadian sociology was just overcoming its infancy and expanding rapidly with the growth of Canadian universities. There was a previous generation of distinguished anglophone and francophone Canadian sociologists: Porter, Blishen, Clark, Jones, Guindon, Breton, and Rocher provided a foundational body of empirical and conceptual sociological analysis in Canada. There were also two Americans, Hughes and Lipset, who made an important contribution to both English and French sociology in Canada. If not fully “present at the creation” of the field of sociology in Canada, I was at the beginning of the next generation. During my three years at Memorial, I have no memory of ever having a discussion about the direction of Canadian sociology or the possibility of developing a distinctive Canadian approach to the discipline. There are probably two reasons for this. First, all of us sociologists were American-trained, and the idea that the sociological explanation of Canada might require a different perspective from that dominant in the United States likely had not occurred to us. Second, Memorial had a combined sociology and anthropology department, in which the anthropologists focused on Newfoundland and Labrador’s rural culture, largely contrasting it to similar fishing cultures in northern Europe. Canada was still a far off place – sociologically and analytically. In 1971, when I began to teach at McMaster, the field of sociology projected a very different cultural milieu than what I had experienced in my three years at Memorial. I quickly became immersed in a debate about the distinctiveness of Canada and the approach needed to understand it. While the social sciences frequently seek broad explanations, each society has its unique cultural habitus that shapes the lives of its members. Understanding Canada in its own terms had become a significant issue for Canadian social scientists. This was frequently connected to the issue of the “Americanization” of Canadian universities. A widely cited book of the time, The Struggle for Canadian Universities (Mathews and Steele 1969), argued that the influx of Americans into Canadian universities was leading to the marginalization of Canadian literature and history. Social scientists expressed a similar concern, both about the Americanization of their fields and the tendency to seek explanations that were little more than comparisons with the United States according to dimensions that were important to that society but that did not contextualize the distinctive historical and social experience of Canadians. Even as established a

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sociologist as S.D. Clark (1976, 131) argued that Canadian scholars needed “to concern themselves … with those characteristics of their society that [were] distinctive” and admonished: “If one looks for nothing different, one is not likely to find anything different.” There was also a worry that, once in Canada, those educated at American universities might favour American-trained persons for new hires, thus making it difficult for persons trained at Canadian universities to get academic positions. It is of relevance that, up to that time, Canadian sociology departments had a different historical experience from American ones. While American departments had long been free-standing entities, many Canadian sociology programs had, until recently, been in combined departments with such disciplines as history, political science, economics, religious studies, and social work, and many were still linked with anthropology. Perhaps as a result, the study of Canada had developed a strong interdisciplinary and historical focus. There was also a strong intellectual influence from economist Harold Innis (1930, 1940, and 1946), who linked economy, polity, and social structure in his analysis of Canada as a staples economy with a historically distinct political economy based on resource extraction. A complementary perspective was found in the work of another economist, Kari Levitt (1970), whose Silent Surrender cogently demonstrates that Canadian resource and industrial development was largely a dependant “branch plant” process dominated first by British interests and more recently by American ones. Ironically, these works, while remaining somewhat peripheral to mainstream Canadian economics, had the effect of radicalizing the emergent sociological community. Whereas the sociologists of the 1960s had documented the social class structure of Canada, the sociologists of the 1970s were beginning to investigate and study the historical patterns of political economy, which both supported that class structure and was its product. Economic imperialism and its social consequences were now very much part of the lingua franca of Canadian sociological rhetoric. This perspective was influenced by Marxist and Leninist theories and their derivatives. Of particular importance were dependency theories, which were developed by leftist sociologists from Chile and Brazil who described how the underdevelopment of their nations was not the result of their lack of resources or skilled capacity but, rather, of relationships of exploitation on the part of outside economic interests (cf., Cardoso 1972; Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Dos Santos 1970,

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1973). Scholars from elsewhere were similarly arguing that underdevelopment was largely class-based imperialism in which the dominant class of more central economic regions drained peripheral regions of their resources and capital, often with the assistance of local elites who were dependent on the process (cf., Galtung 1971). This political economy perspective was very relevant and appealing to me based on my experience of growing up in Newfoundland, and, by the mid-1970s, I was transforming myself intellectually. I wrote a series of papers about the political economy of Newfoundland’s development since Confederation with Canada in 1949 (Matthews 1974, 1975, 1979). These were deliberately interdisciplinary works. In them, I brought a regional perspective to the same political economy issues that were dominating sociologists in central Canada. On the other hand, I specifically sought to incorporate a more voluntarist perspective than the prevailing social determinist (neo-Marxist) one. Influenced by the debate about the need to produce a distinctive Canadian sociology, I have generally sought out Canadian publication outlets for my work in the belief that, if we are to build a reputable field of Canadian sociology, our best works have to appear in our own journals. In this age of the importance of citation indices, that may not have been a professionally wise strategy as those outside Canada rarely read Canadian journals. In those early years in Ontario, I had given little thought to the data I had collected about Newfoundland communities that refused to resettle. However, my past came back. About three years after I moved to Ontario, I received a dinner invitation from Robert Paine, who was on sabbatical in Toronto. I surmised that one purpose of the invitation was to try to convince me to re-engage with my Newfoundland data. The other dinner guest was Sandra Wallman, a British-based anthropologist visiting at the University of Toronto. She had recently accepted the editorship of a new Canadian Experience series of ethnographic Canadian studies to be published by Peter Martin Associates (PMA Books). Wallman was in search of manuscripts, and I mentioned my resettlement study as the basis for such a volume. Over the succeeding months, I developed a prospectus for a book and received a contract. Paine’s dinner had rekindled my interest in my Newfoundland data, though it was something of a Pyrrhic victory for him as I would not be publishing it with ISER Books. There’s No Better Place Than Here: Social Change in Three Newfoundland Communities was published by PMA Books (Matthews 1976).

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Though written about three communities’ struggles to remain where they were, the core story of There’s No Better Place Than Here was the fundamental difference between the values and outlook of community residents and those of government planners. In it, I created a distinction between “economic viability,” a term used by government planners, and “social vitality,” a term used by community residents. Whereas the planners, from an economic perspective, saw these communities as lacking any viability, their residents described the dearly loved social-support systems of rural life. To them, their communities had enormous vitality: the only problem was that there were few jobs. They spoke of their fear that planners, who were operating with criteria better suited to a different way of life, would drive them from a support system that could maintain them through the hard times. Though not written within the tradition of Canadian political economy, the book spoke to some of those who held such an approach. It captured wide public and academic attention. The comparative criteria of economic viability versus social vitality began to appear in planning texts, where it soon lost any reference to the source and simply became an accepted template for policy analysis and design (cf., Bowles 1981). The book remained in print for well over a decade and sold more than ten thousand copies. Of more significance, the public concern it engendered in Newfoundland and elsewhere contributed to government decisions to end the Resettlement Program. Forty years later, my resettlement studies are still cited, albeit primarily by historians who also interview me as a surviving eyewitness of a significant public policy experiment from a bygone era (Webb 2015; Loo 2019). With the Newfoundland studies finally behind me, by the 1980s the focus of my research was primarily the larger issues of regional disparity in Canada. I pitted a sociological perspective deriving from dependency theory against the theories of regional dependency developed by Canadian economist Thomas Courchane, who argued that equalization policies and economic transfers were keeping excess populations in peripheral regions that couldn’t support them and that these people should be encouraged to resettle. In contrast, I argued, from the perspective of sociological dependency theory, that the problem of unemployment and dependency in peripheral regions of Canada was more the result of class interests that drained resources and capital out of such regions (Matthews 1981). I developed these ideas both in a series of essays and in my book, The Creation of Regional Dependency (Matthews 1983). Mine was one

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of several similar attempts by Canadian sociologists to employ theories derived from dependency theory and similar analyses of capitalism, imperialism, and class relations to understand the nature of uneven development in Canada and other countries (cf., Clement 1978; Cuneo 1978; Frank 1969, 1970). In contrast to these other works, mine took a more voluntarist perspective, recognizing not only the role of class interests but also the role of individuals in working out their own accommodation within the structural constraints within which they find themselves. In so doing, I paid homage to Anthony Giddens’s (1979) work, in which he articulates a dialectical relationship between agency and structure (Matthews 1983, 6–7). Though this approach did not sit well with those committed to a more neo-Marxist political economy perspective on regionalism in Canada, the work was received positively by a broader audience. A 2001 paper seeking to determine the most frequently cited Canadian sociological works published to that time identified my regional dependency book as the third most cited Canadian sociology book in Canadian sociology journals and the thirteenth most cited book by a Canadian sociologist in the world scholarly literature (Nock 2001). At McMaster, I also conducted research on couples undergoing infertility treatment; the career aspirations and successes of nurses from Pakistan; and common property resources in the east coast fishery – an institutional analysis that was published as Controlling Common Property (Matthews 1993). When I joined the McMaster sociology department it had three full professors (two Canadian and one American), five or six tenured associate professors (all American), and approximately a dozen untenured assistant professors (almost all Canadian). As this distribution demonstrates, the department was part of the recent major expansion of Canadian universities and it was hiring approximately four new faculty members per year. The senior professors were very much from the earlier tradition of Canadian sociology. They were not particularly aware of a political-economy perspective on Canadian society and were opposed to any form of neo-Marxist analysis. They sought to build a department around traditional sociological perspectives, such as empirical social class analysis (Frank Jones and Peter Pineo) and classical social theory (Howard Brotz). The coterie of associate professors had shown little interest in studying Canadian society. The untenured Canadian assistant professors had to navigate this field of competing paradigms while attempting to establish their careers.

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To complicate things further, many of the graduate students and some of the junior faculty espoused Marxist and Leninist perspectives and treated the Department of Sociology as a forum in which to wage a form of social class confrontation. There was intense lobbying, usually on ideological grounds, particularly around hiring, which became a means of enhancing one side or the other. This situation became more fraught when, in a bitter department meeting, graduate students were allocated the same number of votes as faculty members on all department decisions, including hiring and tenure. Once given, this right could not easily be taken away. On all department decisions, the graduate students voted as a block and, inevitably, in the interests of a radical perspective. It only required support from one or two faculty members for the radical position to win all decisions. Tenure decisions became particularly problematic as those not favoured by the most radical students were often denied departmental support. This happened in my case. Though turned down at the department level, that decision was reversed at the Faculty of Social Science and university levels. It was a time of much stress for me. Ironically, in an about-face a few months later, the same department supported my promotion to associate professor. To be fair, there was malice on both sides, and some of the radical action was in response to oppressive measures from the senior and more conservative faculty in the department. As an example, in a public tenure rejection hearing involving one of my colleagues, two of the untenured assistant professors testified under oath that they had been threatened with future denial of tenure if they did not vote as directed by the head. In various forms, this situation continued over several years. Matters came to a head when those of a more radical bent (and for reasons I no longer remember) blockaded stairwell and elevator access to the department and, in so doing, cut elevator access to other floors. Ultimately, when negotiation did not work, the senior administration brought in the police, who climbed six flights of stairs and used a battering ram to break open an access door. The sociology department was placed in what was termed “receivership” under a head appointed by and reporting directly to the dean. Based on my experience at McMaster, I reversed an Aristotelian aphorism and described sociology departments as “the only social groups in which the parts are greater than the sum of the whole.” So why did I stay? First, I did get tenure. That was hard to get and hence something not lightly risked. Second, I found the wider uni-

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versity generally to be supportive and caring. I continued to publish well, and my teaching received supportive student evaluations. I also engaged in a range of university service activities. I was elected to Senate and, when the time was appropriate, I had no difficulty receiving promotion to full professor. Later I became associate dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and served for two terms. Within the department, I began to attract good graduate students to work with me. I learned later that the “word” among students was that I got my advisees through their programs and into good jobs – the ultimate criterion for most graduate students. Importantly, the situation in the department evolved into a state of quiescence and became tolerable. I would undoubtedly have remained at McMaster through to retirement, but an opportunity to move to ubc arose unexpectedly in 1997. THE LATTER YEARS : UNIVERSIT Y OF BRITISH COLUMBIA , 1998–2017

In 1997 my wife, Anne Martin-Matthews (2019), interviewed for and was offered an academic-administrative position at UBC. In conjunction, I was accorded the opportunity to be considered for a “spousal appointment” on condition that I interview and give a job talk. In the words of the provost as reported to me, “some department has to want him.” Interviewing for the first time in twenty-six years was stressful. If I was rejected, Anne would not go to UBC without me, and so I could essentially lose both our prospective jobs. Thankfully, after something akin to a tug-of-war between two deans, I received an offer as professor (with tenure) in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. As the dean of arts put it: “Don’t think you can bargain. This is the only offer you will get. However, in view of the interest in you from other units, you may teach one course per year in any other unit on campus, at your discretion.” At McMaster, my research interests in fisheries, regionalism, environment, and resource management were regarded as rather esoteric in comparison with labour and urban studies – fields befitting a major steel-making city. However, they were central to the strong resources focus of British Columbia, where fisheries, forestry, mining, and natural gas development were central to the economy and society. Within my first months, I had invitations to lunch from two provincial deputy ministers (fisheries and rural development, respectively). At UBC, I

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quickly developed affiliations with the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES); the Fisheries Centre; the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR); and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS). Whereas McMaster was administratively centralized, resources at UBC were largely distributed. There were significant advantages to being affiliated with multiple units. One of my first meetings at UBC was in the Senate and Board Meeting Room. Above the door was the university’s mission statement (since revised): “To be one of the world’s great universities.” I had never before been part of a university with such blatant ambition. In my first months at UBC, I developed draft outlines for three research projects. Each required that I travel to remote parts of the province to develop contacts at the community and local government levels. Largely on a whim, I sought an appointment with the acting vicepresident research (VPR) to introduce myself and perhaps get some seed funding for travel and other expenses. Shortly after my conversation with the VPR began, he invited his associate VPR to join us. I had a sense that they were both shocked and somewhat elated that a new faculty member, and a sociologist at that, had the temerity to come seeking direct financial support. I left with the promise of seed funding for each project for the following three years. I was astonished. When I arrived in 1998, sociologists were buried in a combined department of anthropology and sociology. Relations were not acrimonious, but anthropology was definitely dominant. Nowhere was this more obvious than in periodic evaluations by external reviewers. Each review committee included an anthropologist, an archaeologist, and a sociologist. Their reports focused on the significant research contributions of anthropology and archaeology, while sociologists received praise for their teaching. This despite the growing strength of the publication record and research grants received by sociologists. In 2005, the two fields received permission to separate when we demonstrated that, in fifty years of togetherness, a department anthropologist and sociologist published only one paper jointly. The reality was that, intellectually, anthropology and sociology had always been separate entities. Shortly after sociology became a separate department, the new dean of arts required all departments to change their hiring practices from what might be called the “Canadian schedule” to one paralleling the “American schedule.” In the Canadian schedule, advertisements for new positions were made in the late autumn and appointments were

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made in the spring. In contrast, American universities advertised in summer and completed their hiring by December. This meant that many of the best sociology candidates from American universities had already been hired when UBC began to interview. This simple change of moving hiring into the early part of the academic year led to our receiving hundreds of applications for most new job postings. This development now meant that American citizens applied in large numbers for the positions we advertised. However, the increasing importance of international rating scales for universities and fields means that universities seeking global prominence focus as much or more on international quality than on citizenship. For example, both the UBC university website and that of its Department of Sociology proclaim their world standings, and most of those interviewed are from what are considered “top-tier” universities. This does not imply that we do not consider Canadian citizenship in hiring. In fact, about half of UBC sociology’s hires in recent years have been Canadians. However, most of these are graduates of American rather than Canadian programs. I would suggest that this is, at least in part, the product of differences in the two countries’ respective training processes. Many of the best students from the most prominent American departments have opportunities to work on large research projects from which they get their dissertation data and several (albeit co-authored) publications in first-tier journals with high impact factors. Graduates from Canadian doctoral programs often have less opportunity for diverse research experiences and fewer publications in major outlets. Soon after my arrival I began to develop BC-focused research proposals. These were extensions of my earlier work on communities and resource development. However, they reflected my growing interest in conceptual developments related to social capital and trust as these affected both community resilience and regional social and economic development. Similarly, my focus on oceans and fishing resources expanded to look more generally at new perspectives in environmental sociology. A few months after my arrival, an e-mail announcement from SSHRC brought news of a major new funding initiative for research on social cohesion, a concept closely related to social capital. I remember my dismay because it seemed to be an ideal funding opportunity for my proposed research. I had not yet had time to develop the necessary community contacts that would turn my ideas into successful pro-

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posals. In what seems akin to an act of Divine Providence, within hours after I received the SSHRC announcement, I received an e-mail from Norman Dale, band manager of the Nuxalk First Nation in Bella Coola, British Columbia. The following is my reconstruction of its contents: In a meeting earlier today, my chief and council concluded that they need more research done on their social and economic development and instructed me to find someone who could best do it. I remembered that, when I was in a graduate planning program at Dalhousie University, I read your book There’s No Better Place Than Here. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of book I would like to write … If you ever want to work with a First Nation, there is one in coastal British Columbia that would be interested in working with you. Mr Dale told me about an organization called the Coastal Communities Network (CCN). Its annual meeting brought together most coastal community mayors and civic councillors. Some First Nations chiefs and band council members from coastal communities also attended. In addition, almost all the provincial and federal elected representatives whose districts included any of the BC coast attended, as did the BC-based federal senators. The next annual gathering was the following week, and Mr Dale was on its executive. He said that, if I put together a brief outline of what I wanted to do, he would present it for consideration at their business meeting to see if I could garner CCN support. Two weeks earlier, I had not known a single coastal community leader. I was now in close contact with a whole network of them – including both settler and First Nation leaders as well as federal and provincial elected representatives. Is there any wonder that I have entitled this chapter a career built on coincidence and serendipity? I remained closely involved with the CCN for several years. With the support of these community leaders and the active engagement of a team of UBC faculty from history, resources management, education, and sociology, we were successful in getting a grant to study social capital in coastal communities. We published several papers out of our data. Two findings stand out. The first is that fulltime employment may be socially dysfunctional for resource workers, particularly women, in remote communities. Most survive by engag-

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ing in a culture of exchange of goods and services with their neighbours. Full-time employment reduces the available time for such activities. As full-time employment is also precarious in remote areas, those laid off may find themselves without their previous levels of social support and exchange. The second, and perhaps counterintuitive finding, was that distrust, as much as trust, may be an important factor in social engagement in such communities. For example, we identified six communities that, according to their responses on mailed questionnaires, had high levels of social engagement. We carried out intensive interviews in these communities. In doing so, we hoped to home in on the social dynamics linking social capital and community resilience. In one of those communities, we discovered that people engaged in community organizations and activities not out of trust but out of distrust of some of their neighbours. Respondents repeatedly divided local residents into three groups: the “Reds” (the homesteaders or rednecks), the “Greens” (the young environmentally active newcomers), and those they frequently described as the “CAVES” (Citizens Against Virtually Everything). Despite the literature that suggests that trust and social capital are linked, distrust may also be a motivation for community engagement. This may be particularly the case in First Nations communities where clan politics play a notable role. My aquaculture studies also came about unexpectedly. I did not know that a team of fisheries biological researchers from across Canada was assembling a network of centres of excellence (NCE) application to study all aspects of the aquaculture industry. The team had concluded that it needed a social and economic theme leader. Apparently, someone mentioned me as a possible person to fill that role, and so I met with George Iwama, then a professor of marine biology at UBC, about my interest in and suitability for the project. I joined the group, and AquaNet NCE received funding about a year later. I soon immersed myself in the study of one of the most contentious scientific debates in resource management. I attended many industry and science meetings where a common assertion was that those opposed to aquaculture practised “voodoo science.” My own research here employed Anthony Giddens’s (1991) analysis of late-modern society, in which he argues that science is no longer trusted as a provider of solutions for environmental problems. Working with (then) doctoral student Nathan Young, we compiled a list of all persons in Canada claiming to have “knowledge expertise” in aquaculture. We identified several hundred.

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We interviewed a sample of these from all backgrounds. In addition, we developed a web-based questionnaire, and ultimately two-thirds of those whom we had identified answered it. Our book based on these data, The Aquaculture Controversy in Canada (Young and Matthews 2010), explores what we call contested science. In it, we show that, on a scale of some thirty dimensions about how to engage in science research, there is almost unanimous agreement among those from industry, university, government, and environmental groups. It was not some strange voodoo science that produced differences of opinion among scientists but, rather, different perspectives on the meaning of the scientific data. In recent years, I have been engaged in several other projects that deal with scientific innovation. In the wake of the “tainted blood” inquiry in Canada, a group of UBC faculty members formed the Centre for Blood Research. They wished to have all faculties represented and approached me to become a member. As is my usual response, I accepted and immediately searched for funding sources. My (then) sociology colleague Andre Smith and I applied to the Bayer Foundation and received funding to carry out a study of the role of social capital in blood donation. In 2010, I received a phone call from the Alberta Prion Research Institute (APRI) asking me to sit on its International Research Advisory Committee. I knew vaguely that prions had something to do with mad cow disease because I had lived in England when on sabbatical and, as a result, could no longer give blood in Canada. I spent the next eight years as the only Canadian and only social scientist on the APRI Research Advisory Committee. Even without the technical scientific knowledge needed to evaluate the science in proposals, I was often able to contribute to discussions of their efficiency and the validity of their research design. APRI had its research meetings with PrioNet – an NCE led by Neil Cashman, a medical neurologist at UBC. Over the course of several joint meetings, I got to discuss relevant social research issues with him, and sometime later he asked me to serve as the social policy and practice theme leader for PrioNet. In due course, Nathan Young and I submitted successful proposals for parallel studies of the transmission of scientific knowledge from two prior labs in Canada – one in western Canada and the other in Quebec. Again somewhat serendipitously, I became involved in two other “contested science” projects. One was to develop a social science research

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thrust as part of a Genome Canada/Genome BC application dealing with the genomics of Coho salmon. My work was originally couched as a study of knowledge mobilization. My interviews led me to considerations of the biological reconstruction of nature in terms of “what is wild.” The other project is one I recently completed with the director of Neuroethics Canada at UBC, in which we focus on issues of “brain health” in a new subfield that we call “Environmental Neuroethics.” I see this research as related to a new field of sociological analysis termed “the social brain.” Recent work on brain plasticity in neurology particularly related to environment (i.e., epigenetics) has demonstrated the potential and lasting impacts of environmental change on brain health (cf. Matthews 2018; Tesluk, Illes, and Matthews 2017). SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In his longitudinal study of scientists’ careers, Hermanowicz (2009) describes how institutional settings affect academic careers. Similarly, I have tried to demonstrate that the three university settings in which I spent my career were quite different and affected my career in notably different ways. These universities and the different opportunities that they offered frequently changed my research interests and focus. I sometimes wonder whether professors who have spent all of their careers in one university have any idea how this may limit their ability to see alternatives and to strategize their career trajectories. For them, the road seems given. For me it definitely was not. Simply put, my career at every stage was shaped by events that I did not anticipate. Almost all aspects of my career developed through some kind of coincidence. If there is a take-away message, it might well be that Canada, at the level of university careers, is a small country and that one’s performance in one context is widely known and can affect invitations to engage in many others. Put negatively, it does not pay to make too many enemies! Of course, my career is also the consequence of my response to these unanticipated occurrences. I could have easily seen them as obstacles; instead, I have almost always embraced them as opportunities. There are, I think, two distinct strategies to career development. One can continue on the same path, resisting the lure of being redirected and waiting for the “right” opportunity. This has some obvious advantages in that, every time one makes a choice to go in a particular direction, this likely forecloses what might otherwise have come one’s way. Alterna-

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tively, one can seize almost any opportunity that comes one’s way, perhaps because it seems particularly interesting but also because one might not get other interesting opportunities in the future. There is no doubt that I fit the latter alternative. I have stuck to the side of my office filing cabinet a magnet with a quotation from John Lennon’s song Beautiful Boy: “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” Though there is no single linear direction to my career, there is an underlying theme of a sort – what I would refer to as “service.” I have seen my role as largely as using my sociological skills in the service of my discipline, my university, and society. I sometimes call myself a “policy sociologist” because so much of my analysis has been focused on the way in which public policies, from resettlement to issues associated with the application of scientific knowledge, are central to my research. Those who engage in policy research and analysis frequently focus on the big issues and the broad questions associated with it. My research focuses on the more specific consequences of policies for the individuals and groups affected by them (see Matthews 2014a, 2014b). In all, I was in the ranks of professors for fifty-one years – three at Memorial University, twenty-six and a half at McMaster University, and twenty-one and half at UBC. Perhaps this is a record in Canada, which had compulsory retirement at age sixty-five until just months before I would have had to retire. While not without controversies and setbacks, overall these have been interesting and rewarding times. I am thankful for being a passenger on my personal train of life. NOTES This is a substantial revision of a chapter that first appeared in Stephen Harold Riggins and Roberta Buchanan, eds., Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience (St John’s: ISER Books, 2019). REFERENCES Bowles, Roy T. 1981. Social Impact Assessment in Small Communities. Toronto: Butterworths. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique. 1972. “Industrialization, Dependency and Power in Latin America.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17: 79–95. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto. 1979. Development and Dependency in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clark, S.D. 1976. “The American Takeover of Canadian Sociology: Myth or Reality.” Dalhousie Review 53 (2): 205–18.

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Clement, Wallace. 1978. “A Political Economy of Regionalism in Canada.” In Modernization and the Canadian State, ed. Daniel Glenday, Hubert Guindon, and Allan Turowetz, 89–110. Toronto: Macmillan. Cuneo, Carl. 1978. “A Class Perspective on Regionalism.” In Modernization and the Canadian State, ed. Daniel Glenday, Hubert Guindon, and Allan Turowetz, 132–56.Toronto: Macmillan. Dos Santos, Theotonio. 1970. “The Structure of Dependence.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings of the Eighty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association 60: 231–6. – 1973. “The Crisis of Development Theory and the Problem of Dependency in Latin America.” In Underdevelopment and Development in the Third World Today, ed. Henry Bernstein, 57–80. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Durnford, Ryan. 1998. “Marriage between Americans and Newfoundlanders.” Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador. http://www.heritage.nf.ca /articles/society/american-marriages-stephenville.php. Fine, Gary Alan, and Janet S. Severance. 1985. “Great Men and Hard Times: Sociology at the University of Minnesota.” Sociological Quarterly 26 (1): 117–34. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1969. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. – 1970. Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press. Galtung, Johan. 1971. “A Structural Theory of Imperialism.” Journal of Peace Research 8 (1): 81–114. Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. – 1991. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hermanowicz, Joseph C. 2009. Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Innis, Harold. 1940. The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. Toronto: Ryerson Press. – 1946. Political Economy in the Modern State. Toronto: Ryerson Press. – 1956 [1930]. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Iverson, Noel, and Ralph Matthews. 1968. Communities in Decline: An Examination of Household Resettlement in Rural Newfoundland. St John’s, NL: ISER Books.

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Levitt, Kari. 1970. Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Loo, Tina. 2019. Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Postwar Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Martin-Matthews, Anne. 2019. “Of Time and Serendipity: Sociological Roots and Surprising Swerves.” Sociology on the Rock 17: 2–8. https://semioticon .com/sio/files/dlm_uploads/2019/07/XVII_Sociology-on-the-Rock.pdf. Martindale, Don A. 1960. The Nature and Types of Social Theory. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. – 1976. The Romance of a Profession: A Case History in the Sociology of Sociology. St Paul, MN: Windflower. Mathews, Robin, and James A Steele. 1969. The Struggle for Canadian Universities. Toronto: New Press. Matthews, Ralph. 1974. “Perspectives on Recent Newfoundland Politics.” Journal of Canadian Studies 9 (2): 20–35. – 1975. “Ethical Issues in Policy Research.” Canadian Public Policy 1, no. 2: 204–216. – 1976. “There’s No Better Place Than Here”: Social Change in Three Newfoundland Communities. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates. – 1979. “The Smallwood Legacy: The Development of Underdevelopment in Newfoundland 1949–1972.” Journal of Canadian Studies 13 (4): 89–108. – 1981. “Two Alternative Explanations of the Problem of Regional Dependency in Canada.” Canadian Public Policy 7 (2): 268–83. – 1983. The Creation of Regional Dependency. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1993. Controlling Common Property: Regulating Canada’s East Coast Fishery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2014a. “Committing Canadian Sociology: Developing a Canadian Sociology and a Sociology of Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology 51 (2): 107–27. – 2014b. “Committing More Sociology: Responses to the Commentary on Committing Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Review of Sociology 51 (4): 409–17. – 2018. “Reimagining the Sociological Imagination: Including the Brain, Environment and Culture.” In Reading Sociology, ed. Patrizia Albanese, Lorne Tepperman, and Emily Alexander, 11–15. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Newfoundland Royal Commission. 1934. Report of the Newfoundland Royal Commission (the Amulree Commission Report). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office.

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Nock, David A. 2001. “Careers in Print: Canadian Sociological Books and Their Wider Impact, 1975–1992.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 469–86. Tesluk, Jordan, Judy Illes, and Ralph Matthews. 2017. “First Nations and Environmental Neuroethics: Perspectives on Brain Health from a World of Change.” In Neuroethics: Anticipating the Future, ed. Judy Illes, 455–76. New York: Oxford University Press. Webb, Jeff. 2015. Observing the Outports: Describing Newfoundland Culture, 1950–1980. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Whitaker, Ian. 1955. Social Relations in a Nomadic Lappish Community. Oslo, NO: Norsk Folkemusem. Young, Nathan, and Ralph Matthews. 2010. The Aquaculture Controversy in Canada: Activism, Policy and Contested Science. Vancouver: UBC Press.

6 Not All Who Wander Are Lost: Interdisciplinary Travels of a Political Sociologist Daniel Béland

OVERTURE

When I moved to Calgary to take a tenure-track position in early summer 2001, I was so anxious to be on campus on 1 July, the first day of my contract, that I showed up on that date and headed to the library. It never crossed my mind that the buildings on campus might be closed on Canada Day. I still spent most of that day on campus, happily reading a book on the grass. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I grew up in francophone Quebec, where Canada Day is observed with far less fanfare. In Quebec, 1 July is the traditional moving day for tenants! Also, I had lived abroad most of the previous six years, which made me less aware of Canada Day. I think some general social dynamics at work in the trajectory of my early career are relevant to young scholars today, despite the need to remember that all careers are shaped by unique chance events and social realities, an individual’s character, and specific people one meets, gets to know, and is influenced by. Although I have a tendency to plan everything and my career has ended up reasonably successful, I sometimes make uninformed and even outright stupid decisions, something that is apparent in the story I am about to tell. My academic path has been anything but straightforward, despite my early decision to become an academic and my clear understanding from the beginning that publishing in scholarly journals was essential. The

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themes in my story are the role of luck, the importance of mentors and collaborators, and the desire to act as a mediator between different disciplines, countries, regions, and, ultimately, people. First, on the theme of luck, I entered the job market just as academic positions started to multiply, something clearly beyond my control. Recognizing the role of luck in one’s life is compatible with the “sociological imagination” because it suggests that broader factors – factors that you seldom control – shape your personal path. Second, academia is a collaborative enterprise, something abundantly reflected in my story. Without people like John Myles, who told me to take a more global perspective and always compare Canada with other countries, my career path would have been different and my intellectual life poorer. Third, as a francophone from Quebec who, for several years, built his career in western Canada, I have frequently been asked to explain Quebec to people from the Rest of Canada (ROC), and explain the ROC, especially the west, to people in Quebec. Simultaneously, as someone who travels a lot, supervises graduate students from all over the world, and has lived in France and in the United States, I tend to take a comparative and global perspective on the topics I study, which, I hope, helps to improve mutual understanding. Finally, from a disciplinary standpoint, as a sociologist who collaborates with people from other disciplines and works in a political science department, I am especially interested in forging interdisciplinary dialogues. YOUTH

I was born in Montreal in 1971. My mother Louise stayed at home to raise her three children (my older brother Sylvain, my younger sister Véronique, and me in the middle) before going back to work as a salesperson in a local shopping mall. My father Rémi, an electrician by training, worked for Hydro-Québec. He agreed to move with his family to Gaspé and Baie-Comeau, where, despite lacking a university degree, he found a way to climb up the corporate ladder to become a white-collar worker. We later moved back to the Montreal area, to Laval, where I spent my teenage and early university years. My parents never went to college, but they pushed their three children to attend university, and we all did in the end. My father always resented the fact that the lack of a university degree constituted an obstacle to moving further up the corporate ladder. Moreover, the contrast between our

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economically comfortable family and the poverty in which many of our relatives lived motivated me to understand these contrasted socioeconomic conditions. Another important formative experience involved the four years I spent working at McDonald’s, where for the first time I interacted with people from truly diverse ethno-cultural backgrounds. Working there part-time also allowed me to save money and pay for tuition on my own as my parents did not support me in that respect. Yes, I lived with my parents until the age of twenty-four, which helped me remain debt free while at school. I was an average student in high school and CEGEP (pre-university college), only excelling in history and a few other related fields. When the time came to pick a major at university, I was not too sure whether to choose history, political science, or sociology. I do not know exactly how I made up my mind in the end, but I did pick sociology. My brother had enrolled at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), which is probably why I decided to go there instead of applying to the more elitist Université de Montréal. UQAM is known as a bastion of student activism, but I spent my undergraduate years concentrating on my studies. During my first year there I fell in love with sociology, which is a broad discipline as it deals with so many aspects of human life, and, three years later, I graduated with a near-perfect grade point average. I spent a lot of time reading during my BA years and I started to develop a taste for big research questions concerning social and political order, and I had a particular passion for theory, something that has remained with me ever since. Because of this burning passion, early on during my BA I decided I would like to do a PhD and, with some luck, become an academic. My favourite professors at UQAM included Gilles Bourque, Michel Freitag, Yves Gingras, Micheline Labelle, and Jacques-Alexandre Mascotto. Although twenty-five of the thirty classes I had to take were in sociology, I was pushed by these instructors and others to read widely across disciplines. Freitag and Mascotto especially emphasized what the French call “general culture,” a term that sounds a bit pedantic in English but that remains widely used in France. In any case, I spent my undergraduate years reading not only the work of Bourdieu, Durkheim, and Weber but also that of philosophers and historians like Hannah Arendt and Georges Duby. At the time, like most of my classmates, I knew very little about the rest of Canada and, although American sociology was on my radar, most of the authors I read were

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European, especially French. This was no accident, as many of my professors had been trained in France. I completed my BA in sociology in April 1993, and in September that year I began my MA in sociology at the same institution. I was interested in so many things that finding a topic for my thesis was extremely difficult. In the end, I wrote a long thesis on the advent of civic justice and political citizenship in ancient Greece (“Justice, individu et société en Grèce antique: L’avènement du politique et le problème de la solidarité civique”) under the guidance of Professor Mascotto, who frequently supervised students who worked on idiosyncratic topics. It was my supervisor who advised me to work on this unusual yet fascinating topic, which I approached from a sociological perspective centred on the concept of solidarity, which was borrowed from Émile Durkheim. I had already taken a history class on Ancient Greece as an undergraduate student, and I loved the idea of spending more than a year reading and writing about it. However, I knew from the start that I would not work on Ancient Greece after graduation, and I was right. TRAVELS

Initially, I had applied to do a PhD in anthropology at the University of Montreal under the supervision of Bernard Bernier, a well-known specialist on Japan. I had long been interested in Japan and, at the time, I wanted to become a specialist on that country. This is why I audited a Japanese history course at the University of Montreal while I was completing my MA in sociology at UQAM. Although I had been admitted to the PhD program in anthropology, in the end, I decided not to accept that offer as I was unsure of the validity of my choice to take the Japanese studies route – in part because the task of learning the Japanese language from scratch seemed daunting. A few months later, I received a doctoral scholarship from the Quebec government (FCAR: Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche, now known as the FRQ -SC) and, because I did not want to miss this opportunity, I decided to go to France, where they took PhD applications until the late spring. In the end, I was admitted to the PhD program in political sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. My PhD supervisor was French scholar and public intellectual Pierre Rosanvallon, who is known for his work on democracy and his essays on inequality and social policy reform.

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The scholar that would have the most direct influence on my intellectual development at the EHESS, however, was Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who held a visiting chair at my school in 1996–97. Auditing his seminar helped me discover historical institutionalism, a theoretical approach associated with authors such as Theda Skocpol and that stresses the impact of state capacities and political institutions on the development of public policies over time. Skowronek’s seminar also introduced me to a research area I knew little about: American politics and public policy. This experience led me to study in that area, in part to distance myself intellectually from my supervisor, who was well known for his controversial public interventions in French social policy, notably during the French strikes of December 1995. Millions of people descended on the streets of Paris and other major French cities to protest a controversial pension reform proposal initiated by then prime minister Alain Juppé. Working on an American topic helped me craft my own niche, but it was also a most paradoxical decision for a francophone Canadian scholar to focus his research on the United States while studying in France. Fortunately, as part of an exchange program with my school, I was able to obtain a visiting fellowship from the University of Chicago in 1997–98 and, the following year, a Fulbright scholarship that allowed me to spend a full year in Washington, DC (George Washington University and the National Academy of Social Insurance). Before I went to Chicago, both my oral and written English were rather mediocre, and it took me years to be able to write fluently in what was, to me, a second language (we spoke French at home and my mother still knows very little English). In DC, I met Angela Kempf, a young Texan who later became my wife. At the time, she was working on her master of arts in art history at George Washington University, where we met in a library during a snowstorm! Angela has always supported me over the years, and I am extremely grateful for that. In the late fall of 1999, I returned to Paris, where I successfully defended my dissertation on the history and politics of pension reform in the United States (“Une sécurité libérale? Fédéralisme et politique des retraites aux États-Unis”). I will never forget the day of my defence: I was extremely nervous for weeks, but in the end it went very well. French PhD defences are open to the public, and they can be quite contentious. My defence ended up being fun and surprisingly relaxed due, in part, to Canadian sociologist John Myles being the external examiner. Myles (1989) is a wonderful person and scholar

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known especially for his work on aging and pension reform. One of the things he told me that I will never forget is that, if you ever work on Canada, you have to take a comparative perspective and draw extensively on the international literature, both to understand what is specific about Canada and to reach a broader audience outside that country. This comparative approach to Canada was not hard for me to adopt as I was already becoming a specialist on the United States. I turned to the study of Canada only after I had defended my PhD. John’s advice on adopting a comparative perspective on Canada is something that I still share with my graduate students and post-docs. In retrospect, with the notable exception of Stephen Schecter, an anglophone who taught sociology at UQAM, John was probably the first English-speaking Canadian professor I ever encountered. He helped me grasp academic life in English-speaking Canada, and his recommendation letters certainly helped me succeed on the labour market. Alongside such strong support, luck also played a significant role in my unfolding academic journey. LUCK

Since I had spent nearly five years abroad, I was clueless about how to find an academic job in Canada. Although one of my PhD committee members wanted me to stay in France, the job market there was rather bleak and the working conditions were not as appealing as in Canada. In the hope of engineering a smooth return to Canada, I had applied for a SSHRC post-doc on federalism and social policy to finance a two-year research stay at Queen’s University. When I applied, I thought I would get a post-doc because I had received a SSHRC doctoral fellowship for the last two years of my PhD studies. In the end, however, I did not get the SSHRC post-doc that year. I was really in shock when I received the rejection letter and I asked myself, what can I do next? I had no clear plan B as I had put all my eggs in one basket. Luckily, at about the same time, in the computer room of the EHESS, I met Linda Cardinal, a University of Ottawa faculty member then on sabbatical in Paris, who explained to me that I should look for jobs in Canada in the magazine University Affairs (yes, I had never heard of University Affairs). That spring, I applied for a number of academic positions, most of them limited-term teaching contracts. One late afternoon in May, I returned to my tiny room (chambre de bonne) in

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Paris after a day at the library and I found a message on my answering machine: without any interview, Concordia University offered me a limited-term appointment in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Although it entailed teaching six classes (including four new classes) in two semesters, I accepted the offer right way. It was my only option. In hindsight, getting a teaching position was most helpful, as I had simply no teaching experience whatsoever when I completed my PhD. (The EHESS is a graduate school and there are no sessional or teaching assistant positions available to students.) Before moving back to Montreal, however, I had the opportunity to teach one history course at a summer school in Northwestern University in Arles in southern France. Teaching that history class in English on the subject of the French Third Republic was very useful. It forced me to teach outside my research area, something I would also have to do at Concordia, where, for example, I had to teach a course on the sociology of deviance, a topic I knew very little about before the semester began. My year at Concordia University was extremely important to my development as an academic largely because it allowed me to improve both my teaching and English-language skills (although French is my mother tongue, I have never taught in that language). At Concordia, I was somewhat isolated from the main campus as I taught at the Loyola Campus located in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, west of downtown. My office neighbour was sociologist Guy Lecavalier, who provided sound advice and encouraged me to apply all across the country and not only in Quebec. Mobility is a great asset in academia, he rightly stated. GOING WEST

In November 2000, I had a job interview at the University of Calgary. To prepare, in the Chronicle of Higher Education I read a lot about the process of academic job interviews. In other words, I started to rely less on chance and more on actually learning what I should do on the job market. The Calgary interview went very well, and it also allowed me to travel west of Ontario for the first time in my life. For francophone Québécois, Alberta is a rather “exotic” destination. So this francophone from Quebec who did his PhD in France and had never spent time in western Canada moved to Calgary in early summer 2001.

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You might wonder how, despite my limited teaching experience and initially poor knowledge of the job market, I landed a tenuretrack position the first time I really tried. The first factor is that the academic job market had improved dramatically and positions were available across the country. Luckily, this situation would last more than half a decade due to the relatively good economic climate; the creation of the Canada Research Chairs Program; and, later, the “double cohort” of high school graduates that came about when grade thirteen was abolished in Ontario. Unfortunately, for younger people who completed their PhD in the late 2000s and early 2010s, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the academic job market deteriorated. So timing played in my favour. In fact, when I was finally offered a SSHRC post-doc in late March 2001, I did not accept it as I had a tenure-track position waiting for me in Calgary. The second factor in my ability to land a tenure-track position is that, despite all the mistakes and random decisions I made, I started to publish extensively during my PhD years. Becoming a published scholar took much effort. I published my first journal article in May 1997, exactly two and a half years before my dissertation defence. Several people helped me improve that manuscript in French, and I revised this piece many times before publication. The following year, after many revisions, I published my second article in French with Randall Hansen, a Canadian Oxford PhD student whom I had met at the House of Canadian Students in Paris. It is also with him that I published my first article in English in 2000. This article was rejected once before appearing, and we made major changes before resubmitting it to another journal, which accepted it after requesting major revisions. As time passed, I became better at coping with criticism and rejection, both of which are so common in academic publishing. At first, I also struggled to write in English, but I did publish my first single-authored article in that language in 2001. Since then, most of my publications have appeared in English. My dissertation appeared as a book in France in 2002. My early research concentrated on social policy, with a particular focus on pension reform. This is an important topic in societies that are rapidly aging. Assessing how key political factors, such as existing policy legacies and the struggle between pro-market and solidaristic ideas, mediate and filter these demographic pressures and thus shape pension reforms helps us grasp both the opportunities for, and the obstacles to, welfare state reform in contemporary societies. More gen-

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erally, my work on pension suggests that population aging is a social and political construction rather than a purely objective reality to which societies mechanically “adapt.” This is why my close attention to the role of ideas and discourse and my interest in aging and pension reform meshed early on in my research. At the same time, I also wrote about the 1996 American welfare reform and the failed Clinton Health Security proposal. In 2002, I applied for a SSHRC standard research grant with André Lecours from the University of Ottawa to study the relationship between sub-state nationalism and social policy in Belgium (Flanders), Canada (Quebec), and the United Kingdom (Scotland). We were successful in getting it the first time we applied, but of course the success rate at the time was twice as high as it is today. Out of this project we published half a dozen papers and a monograph that Oxford University Press published after a long review process and several waves of revisions (Béland and Lecours 2008). The main argument of this book is that sub-state nationalist ideas and actors located in jurisdictions like Flanders, Quebec, and Scotland have directly affected welfare state development at both the state and the sub-state levels. Simultaneously, the book shows that existing economic, political, and policy institutions have shaped the nature of sub-state nationalist mobilizations in federal and devolved states. Like some of my other publications, this book stresses the interaction among actors, ideas, and institutions in social policy development across different countries. Along with Alex Waddan (e.g., Béland, Rocco, and Waddan 2016; Béland and Waddan 2012), a British scholar I met in DC, André Lecours became one of my most frequent collaborators (e.g., Béland and Lecours 2014; Béland and Lecours 2016). I continue to publish with Alex and André, who have both become good friends. Like social life in general, academia is largely about collaborations and personal relationships. In addition to the work on nationalism and social policy, which later led to collaborative research with Lecours on fiscal federalism and territorial politics more generally, my Calgary years saw my work focus on two main issues: (1) the politics of insecurity (how perceived collective threats are framed by politicians and addressed by the state) and, especially, (2) the role of ideas in institutional and policy change, a topic for which I am particularly known. The study of ideas in sociology can be traced back to Max Weber, who wrote extensively about the distinction between “ideas” and “interests” (see Eastwood 2005). In my own work, I have come to acknowledge that interests are not pure-

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ly material in nature but, in fact, are shaped in part by the historically constructed ideas of political and social actors. In this, I am following the path of scholars such as Mark Blyth (2002), John L. Campbell (2004), Colin Hay (2011), and Vivien Schmidt (2011) while developing my own institutionalist framework on the role of ideas in public policy. This framework stresses the interaction of both domestic and transnational actors and processes in policy change. I first sketched elements of this framework in my PhD dissertation and further developed it in my publications of the mid-2000s (Béland 2005a; Béland 2007a; Béland and Hacker 2004). In 2005, for instance, I published two theoretical pieces on each of these topics: one on insecurity, globalization, and state protection in Sociological Theory; and one on ideas and welfare state change in Social Policy and Administration. The Sociological Theory piece explores the multiple facets of what I call state protection, which can improve the lives of citizens but can also turn against them when political actors use perceived threats to legitimize oppressive domestic policies or misguided wars like the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. The Iraq war forced me to think more systematically about the ambiguous nature of state power and the social construction of collective insecurity (Béland 2007b). Writing the Sociological Theory piece was especially exciting because I engaged directly with Charles Tilly (1985), who provided feedback on my first draft by e-mail in less than twenty-four hours (Béland 2005b). I was so impressed by the man’s kindness that I paid him a visit at his office during a short trip to New York City the following year. It was only then that I discovered that he was battling cancer, a situation that did not prevent him from publishing a large amount of influential scholarship while still taking the time to help junior scholars who contacted him out of the blue. Scholars like John Myles and Charles Tilly are the very people who made me so fond of academia as a coterie of genuine scholarly communities. The Social Policy and Administration piece discusses the debate over the respective roles of ideas and institutions in policy change (Béland 2005a). The main argument is that historical institutionalist scholars should pay closer attention to the ideas of policy actors in order to provide more compelling explanations of policy change in contemporary welfare states. The article argues that the failure of these scholars to account for transformative social policy change stems directly from their neglect of the economic and social ideas that shape the politics of welfare state reform. I have since expanded my analysis of

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the role of ideas beyond the field of welfare state research to the politics of policy change more generally. Across multiple areas, this more recent work stresses the role of transnational processes and asymmetrical power relations in the politics of ideas and policy change (Béland 2009). For some reason, this article became my most cited piece by far – this despite the fact that Sociological Theory is a more widely cited journal than Social Policy and Administration. This example shows that publishing in top journals is not the only thing that matters as you have little control over what people do with your work. Certainly, the success of my 2005 Social Policy and Administration article pushed me to write more on policy change as well as on the role of ideas at both the national and the transnational levels (e.g., Béland 2009; Béland and Cox 2011). Junior scholars should monitor citations of their work in part to find out what academic readers are interested in and what they do with their work once it is published. More important, they should not be afraid to get their work out there where it can contribute to ongoing academic conversations, even if doing so might at first appear intimidating. While at the University of Calgary I realized how much I enjoyed supervising graduate students. I helped four MA students pick their own topics instead of forcing them to work on my current research projects. Their topics were quite diverse, to say the least: urban policy in Bangladesh, pension reform in Canada, post-conflict reconstruction in Ghana, and oil policy in Venezuela. My very first day of teaching as a tenure-track faculty member was a sunny September morning. I arrived at my office at the University of Calgary at 9:30 a.m., about ninety minutes before my first lecture. Then, out of the blue, Angela called me from Washington, DC, where she was still living. She told me that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and that another one had crashed into the Pentagon, not so far from where she worked. In the classroom later that morning, the students and I discussed the potential consequences of the events of 11 September 2001. It took me a while to start attending scholarly conferences on a regular basis. At first I wrongly believed academic conferences were essentially a waste of time. It was only in 2003, under pressure from John Myles, that I started to attend them regularly. What I discovered then is that conferences are a great way to meet new people with whom you can later collaborate. In fact, some of my research projects

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emerged as a direct consequence of conversations I had at conferences, sometimes with people I had never met before. One venue in which I have participated extensively since the mid-2000s is the annual conference of Research Committee 19 of the International Sociological Association (RC19), which is devoted to social policy. I became secretary-treasurer of RC19 and was later elected president. I had my first taste of paid sabbatical leave in 2004, when I took a six-month leave to attend the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The stay gave me an opportunity to meet Franck Dobbin, Christopher Jenks, Michelle Lamont, and Theda Skocpol. Yet I did not fall in love with the place, in part because I had no one there with whom to work. I suppose spending time at Harvard was a dream of mine, but, in the end, like most dreams, it was not as exhilarating as I had expected. Ultimately, what matters is the scholarship you do and what you learn from it rather than the institution for which you work. This is something I realized early on, and it has remained a leitmotiv of my academic life. LAND OF THE LIVING SKIES

In the first half of 2007, I was head hunted by both the Department of Sociology and the School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan. Interestingly, these two units contacted me separately, without any coordination. In the end, both units put my name forward for a Canada Research Chair (CRC), which was ultimately allocated to the School of Public Policy with the possibility of a crossappointment in the Department of Sociology. Because I was entitled to a six-month sabbatical at Calgary, the University of Saskatchewan offered me a paid leave until June, which allowed me to spend five months at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. My wife Angela and I moved to Saskatoon in June. For Angela, an art historian by training, the timing was good as she had recently left the Calgary International Film Festival, where she had been working. In Saskatoon, she struggled a bit to find appropriate work, but she eventually went into development at the university before moving back to the arts sector five years later and took a position with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra. My wife’s support and flexibility and the fact that we have no children enhanced my professional mobility, something I realize other colleagues do not have.

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The appointment at the University of Saskatchewan came with a full professorship and the opportunity to apply for a CRC Tier 2, which was granted to me in the fall of 2008. My contract with the University of Saskatchewan also stated that I could apply for a CRC Tier 1, something I successfully did four years later. I was honoured to be able to seize this opportunity while still in my early forties. As I stated in my farewell letter to my colleagues, “I leave Calgary because I received such a generous offer, not because of any unhappiness with my situation at the University of Calgary.” In addition to having new colleagues, the biggest change that came with my University of Saskatchewan appointment was the move to an interdisciplinary policy school with an associate membership in the sociology department. This meant that public policy became my main academic pursuit as I became part of what is now known as the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. This school is genuinely interdisciplinary, but most faculty members had a background in economics and political science, and I was the only sociologist. I was well prepared to work in a policy school because I was a political sociologist and had collaborated with political scientists. However, engaging with economists was more of a challenge at first, in part because sociology and economics have long competed for public legitimacy. Yet I have now published with economists and have learned a great deal from them, even though I fundamentally disagree with their core assumptions about human behaviour. One advantage of being in a policy school is that it facilitates direct contact with policy-makers. For instance, twice a year on average, I participated in a one-day workshop for Saskatchewan civil servants on comparative public policy, something I enjoyed doing, especially because I co-teach this workshop with a practitioner, which is always fascinating. When you work on the state, knowing how people involved in designing and implementing policies actually think is always helpful. In 2004, with the help of one of my students, I published an article on pension reform in China. With the help of several collaborators, I have published more on this topic in recent years. Studying public policy in an authoritarian country such as China or in low-income countries such as Ghana forces me to adapt existing theoretical frameworks to new social and political environments instead of simply mechanically applying these frameworks to all the regions of the globe. Theories developed to study rich liberal democracies are also

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relevant to analyzing policy stability and change in other parts of the world, but we have to remain aware of their limitations while adapting them to new contexts and changing circumstances. Our school spent a lot of energy on outreach and media relations, so we had a much higher public profile than would a traditional disciplinary department. I gave many media interviews and I participated in public meetings and roundtables. Overall, being in a policy school gave me a platform from which to advocate for policy change in key areas like public pensions and poverty reduction not only on my own but also in collaboration with civil society actors and government officials. One perk that typically comes with a CRC is a reduced teaching load. In my case, this meant teaching only two half-courses a year, the vast majority of them at the graduate level (only graduate students enrol in the school). At the University of Saskatchewan, the graduate course I taught regularly was social policy, which is my main research area. I had already written two social policy textbooks so teaching that class was easy. I also taught a policy theory seminar, which was based on the interdisciplinary comps lists used by all our PhD students in public policy. I enjoy teaching at the graduate level but I sometimes miss the contact with undergraduate students, who tend to be more passionate about social and political issues than graduate students, whose perspective is generally more academic as most want to pursue a research career. Indigenous peoples represent about 15 per cent of Saskatchewan’s population, the highest percentage in Canada (along with Manitoba). Thus, I became more knowledgeable about Indigenous issues. At the same time, I did not think I had the knowledge or authority to write on the topic – this is something I leave to others. I like graduate supervision even if it can be time consuming. In France, I met my PhD supervisor only twice a year on average, which was the norm there at the time. This is obviously not the way things work in North America. The expectation is that supervision will be more active, which, in my experience, is better for students. In part because I supervised and published with several graduate students and one post-doc who conducted research in Ghana (Foli and Béland 2014; Kaye and Béland 2009; Wireko and Béland 2017), I came to develop a strong research interest in African social policy, and this has led to a number of collaborative research projects. Like some of my other research, this collaborative scholarship on African social policy stresses the role of both ideas and institutions as well as the interac-

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tion between domestic and transnational actors (e.g., Kpessa and Béland 2012). This scholarship would not have happened had I not taken on the role of graduate supervisor. If you are open-minded and flexible enough regarding with whom you decide to work, graduate supervision can lead you to expand your intellectual horizons. I particularly enjoy working with post-docs. Fully trained and already interested in your work, which is why they seek to work with you in the first place, post-docs can, in my experience, become close collaborators and life-long friends. Beginning in 2009, I hosted a weekly classical music show on CFCR, Saskatoon’s community radio. I have loved classical music since my late teenage years, and hosting a radio show allowed me to share my passion. It was actually one of the things I enjoyed the most about my life in Saskatoon, where community radio is a major institution. Because I advertised for concerts on campus and trained several University of Saskatchewan music students to host the show in my absence, this pursuit was, in a way, related to academia. To me, classical music is what my former Calgary colleague Bob Stebbins calls “serious leisure.” Even academics need “serious leisure” that is not closely related to their work. BACK HOME

In January 2019, I moved to McGill University to become the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Considering my career path, the fact that I am now in charge of an interdisciplinary institute is hardly surprising. Yet an interesting twist is that, at McGill, my tenured appointment is with the Department of Political Science rather than with the Department of Sociology (where I hold an associate membership). The shift to political science is related to institutional factors within McGill, but it is consistent with the interdisciplinary travels that have characterized my career since day one. The move to McGill comes with two major shifts for me: I am now a university administrator and I have a higher national and international media profile. On one hand, administration is something I am discovering, but my job is primarily about organizing events and bringing people together, something I have long enjoyed; on the other hand, my arrival at McGill has allowed me to increase my media profile both in Canada and abroad. In my first year at McGill, I gave more than 350 media interviews. Although I started to grant a large

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number of media interviews in Saskatoon, most of them reached a mainly provincial or regional audience. From a more personal standpoint, the McGill appointment also means that I return to Quebec after so many years living abroad and in western Canada. The province has changed a lot since I left Paris in 1995 and even since I spent a year at Concordia in 2000–01. Being at McGill is also interesting because it is so different from both Concordia and UQAM, the two Montreal universities that helped kick off my career. McGill, too, has changed in recent decades (we are currently celebrating its two hundredth anniversary), and the number of francophone faculty and students has increased over time. Being at McGill is very helpful in terms of symbolic and social capital, but I still feel a bit like an outsider, although I may have always felt like an outsider in academia because of the unusual path I have taken. Thirty years ago, as a francophone teenager living in the Montreal area, I would never have thought about doing an undergraduate degree at McGill. Three decades later, I am a James McGill Professor at that same institution, and I still feel a bit awkward, but generally in a good way. VARIATIONS

As I write, I am in my late forties, which is relatively young by academic standards. One of the good things about academia is that you “age” more slowly than you do in other professions! Looking at my CV, people regularly ask me how I have been able to publish twenty books and more than 160 journal articles in less than two decades. Apart from the fact that I absolutely love what I do for a living, one of my secrets is that I have many collaborators. The reason for this is very simple: scholarship is a collective endeavour. Even when you work alone, you engage with the writings of other people in order to make a contribution to knowledge. In the end, scholarship is largely about building interpersonal relationships. Social capital does matter, but the trick is not just to know people but to actually work in a team and treat them the way you would like to be treated. This is not rocket science, but in my experience it is the way it is. Academics tend to think that life is so complicated, but sometimes a good dose of common sense (regardless of what Bourdieu might have argued) is what is most needed. As in many other professions, you can find insecure people who may resent the very existence of younger, more prolific scholars. Here the important thing is

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to avoid resentful people and to craft your own path by collaborating with those who treat you with respect and kindness. Once again, basic common sense should prevail. I have developed the following rule, which I use when my articles are rejected multiple times before finally seeing the light of day: do not give up on a paper unless the cost of revision is higher than the cost of writing a new piece from scratch. I am a white man, a situation that has removed some potential obstacles from my path. I have seen colleagues facing racism and sexism, and I do think these are major issues for a number of junior scholars. As far as I know, the fact that I am a francophone working in English-speaking universities has never been a source of discrimination. The fact that English is not my mother tongue, however, was an obstacle, at least in the first few years of my work as a university professor teaching in English-speaking universities. To me, the scene from the documentary Sociology Is a Martial Art, in which Pierre Bourdieu struggles with his English as he gives a video conference talk at the University of Chicago, rings true. CODA

Writing an autobiographical essay without being complacent and naïve is not an easy task, something that sociologists like Bourdieu (2008) warned us about. Looking back at my own career, there is something both extremely planned and quite random about it. I do feel like a mediator of some sort. Trying to bridge different approaches, disciplines, and peoples is what I like, and my job allows me to do that. Even at the theoretical level, I do try to bridge different approaches in building my framework on the relationship between actors, ideas, and institutions in the politics of policy change at both the national and the transnational levels. I feel blessed by my work, especially because I know that things could have been different if, for instance, I had been born a few years earlier or later. So yes, I am privileged and lucky in many ways, and I feel for junior scholars who struggle to do what they really want in what is now a much more competitive academic labour market. This is why I try to help as many junior scholars as possible to make better decisions than I did in my early academic years. After all, scholarship is a collective project and, to quote former president Obama: “we are all in this together.” So we must help one another, especially when we are in a good institutional position to do so.

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ACKNOWLED GMENTS

I would like to thank Julie Kaye, Angela Kempf, André Lecours, Neil McLaughlin, John Myles, and Stephen Riggins for their comments and suggestions. Special thanks to all my collaborators and former students, including Tyler Koebel, who suggested that I use J.R.R. Tolkien’s line “Not all who wander are lost” in my title. I also acknowledge support from the Canada Research Chairs Program. A few paragraphs from this chapter are adapted from my entry to the online Dictionary of Eminent Social Scientists: Autobiographies (Mattei Dogan Foundation). REFERENCES Béland, Daniel. 2005a. “Ideas and Social Policy: An Institutionalist Perspective.” Social Policy and Administration 39 (1): 1–18. – 2005b. “Insecurity, Citizenship, and Globalization: The Multiple Faces of State Protection.” Sociological Theory 23 (1): 25–41. – 2007a. “Ideas and Institutional Change in Social Security: Conversion, Layering, and Policy Drift.” Social Science Quarterly 88 (1): 20–38. – 2007b. “Insecurity and Politics: A Framework.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 32 (3): 17–340. – 2009. “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Change.” Journal of European Public Policy 16 (5): 701–18. Béland, Daniel, and Robert Henry Cox, eds. 2011. Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research. New York: Oxford University Press. Béland, Daniel, and Jacob S. Hacker. 2004. “Ideas, Private Institutions, and American Welfare State ‘Exceptionalism’: The Case of Health and OldAge Insurance, 1915–1965.” International Journal of Social Welfare 13 (1): 42–54. Béland, Daniel, and André Lecours. 2008. Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2014. “Fiscal Federalism and American Exceptionalism: Why Is There No Federal Equalisation System in the United States?” Journal of Public Policy 34 (2): 303–29. – 2016. “Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Federalism and Territorial Redistribution.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 49 (4): 681–701. Béland, Daniel, Philip Rocco, and Alex Waddan. 2016. Obamacare Wars: Federalism, State Politics, and the Affordable Care Act. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

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Béland, Daniel, and Alex Waddan. 2012. The Politics of Policy Change: Welfare, Medicare, and Social Security Reform in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Blyth, Mark. 2002. Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2008. Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, John L. 2004. Institutional Change and Globalization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eastwood, Jonathan. 2005. “The Role of Ideas in Weber’s Theory of Interests.” Critical Review 17 (1–2): 89–100. Foli, Rosina, and Daniel Béland. 2014. “International Organizations and Ideas about Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Poverty and Public Policy 6 (1): 3–23. Hay, Colin. 2011. “Ideas and the Construction of Interests.” In Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, ed. Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox, 65–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaye, Julie, and Daniel Béland. 2009. “The Politics of Ethnicity and PostConflict Reconstruction: The Case of Northern Ghana.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 27 (2): 177–200. Kpessa, Michael W., and Daniel Béland. 2012. “Transnational Actors and the Politics of Pension Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Review of International Political Economy 19 (2): 267–91. Myles, John. 1989. Old Age and the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Public Pensions. Rev. ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2011. “Reconciling Ideas and Institutions through Discursive Institutionalism.” In Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, ed. Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox, 47–64. New York: Oxford University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169–91. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wireko, Ishmael, and Daniel Béland. 2017. “Transnational Actors and Health Care Reform: Why International Organizations Initially Opposed, and Later Supported Social Health Insurance in Ghana.” International Journal of Social Welfare 26 (4): 405–15.

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7 Studying the War in the Woods and Other Environmental Controversies from the Left Coast David B. Tindall

BEGINNINGS

In 1993, over 850 people were arrested for blockading the logging roads into Clayoquot Sound, a large area of pristine temperate rainforest in British Columbia. The protest – sparked by the government’s decision to allow logging in three-quarters of the area’s ancient rainforest – was the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history and a seminal event in the history of the environmental movement in the nation. The protests, which attracted media attention around the world, were largely successful in preventing wide-scale industrial logging in the area, which has not resumed to any significant level. Stories like this have fascinated me as long as I can remember. Why do people mobilize to protect ancient forests? What factors shape their participation in such movements? These are some of the questions I have sought to answer in my research. I have had a strong connection to nature since childhood, camping and fishing with my dad and being a Cub Scout. As an adult, I go wilderness backpacking when I get the opportunity. Recently I embarked with my daughter on a hike of part of a seventy-five-kilometre wilderness trail, the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island. This was the fourth time I had hiked the trail. On a previous trip I was accompanied by my son.

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My parents, Gary Tindall and Carol (Marks) Tindall, grew up mostly in the Greater Victoria area, where they met and married. Born in 1962 in Vancouver, I was the oldest of their three children. We moved to Victoria when I was around eight years old. My current office at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is just a few blocks from one of the elementary schools I attended. I am literally a child of the sixties. I have fragmented memories of many cultural and historical events of the 1960s, the music of the time, aspects of political protests, and the space race. Some of these events influenced my later interests in social movements and science. I really did orient myself to the 1960s and, even as a teenager in the 1970s, tended to hang around people a bit older than myself and pepper them with questions about the previous decade. As a child, I was also precocious in soaking up news and popular culture from the 1960s. My enthusiasm for science occurred in part because it was an important part of the zeitgeist of the 1960s, related to the space race and fuelled by the Cold War. Some of these events led to my developing a taste for classic rock – which some of my associates see as a personality defect. My parents purchased a subscription to a paperback series of science books. I received one or more small books every month on a scientific or applied scientific topic, complete with photograph stickers to attach to the pages. My younger brother Blair and I built a crude reconstruction of the Apollo command module under the stairs of the house where we lived in Victoria. We would go through the whole sequence of the stages of a mission from countdown to lift off. In high school, I took some science courses, but with the exception of one excellent chemistry teacher (Denis Simair) I was saddled with a series of mediocre teachers, which likely explains why I did not follow a scholarly trajectory in science. However, I have been a long-time reader of popular science writers such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Dawkins. My undergraduate degree was in psychology, which at the time was a discipline obsessed with being scientific. These are factors that probably coloured my perspective on “scientific” sociology. Also, later on, my academic appointment – for twenty years – was partially in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC, and in this context I was mostly surrounded by people trained in science or applied science. Victoria was (and still is) a mostly middle-class and upper-middleclass town. It does not have the same sort of working-class and under-

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class neighbourhoods as one finds in Toronto and Vancouver, two other cities in which I lived. While I did not have the knowledge to understand the significance of this, I witnessed on television a number of events related to injustices in the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., educational advertisements promoting equality, protests against the Vietnam War, etc.). This seemed to be at odds with the materialism and/or retreatism I perceived in Victoria. On the other hand, Victoria and British Columbia were also more politically progressive than much of the rest of Canada. This probably shaped my long-standing centre-left political sensibilities. When I was in elementary school, a New Democratic Party government took power in British Columbia. Although I have described residents of Victoria as being rather materialistic and as retreating from social and political issues during my youth, because Victoria was a centre of government it was also a hotbed of progressive social movements. There was some polarization between the socially and politically unengaged and the progressive left. Of course a politically engaged right also existed. In my opinion, the strength of the environmental movement in British Columbia is rivalled only by that in Quebec, although the dominant organizations and issues are somewhat different in the two provinces. One reason for the strong focus on environmentalism in British Columbia is that there is more pristine nature to contend over in this province than in most places. While First Nations peoples modified the landscape to a certain degree, their footprint was relatively small. British Columbia was the last province in Canada to be significantly colonized by Europeans, and it is larger than many European countries. Additionally, as anyone who has flown across the province on a clear day will know, it is made up of one mountain range after another. The ocean is also important. Along the coast, the ocean plays an important role in providing conditions that allow big Sitka Spruce, Cedar, and Douglas Fir trees to live to be over one thousand years old and to be taller than a football field is long. It is not so surprising, then, that British Columbia has been an epicentre for environmental politics. Greenpeace was created in Vancouver in 1970. (Sources provide different dates, from 1969 to 1971. Dates vary because commentators refer to different events as the beginning of the organization.) In 2011, Canada’s first Green Party MP was elected in British Columbia, and in 2013, Canada’s first Green provincial representative was elected in this province. Environmentalist David Suzuki – number five on

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the list of most influential Canadians of all time – was born and raised in British Columbia. As I was preparing this chapter, the New Democratic Party had just taken power in a minority government in which the Green Party held the balance of power in the provincial legislature. One significant aspect of my family history concerns religion. One branch of my family became fundamentalist Christians around my pre-teen years. For a short period, I flirted with some aspects of Christianity, but, after a relatively short time, I utterly rejected religion and became a rather militant non-believer – a position that I have maintained to the present day. Nevertheless, I think this experience affected me. The more charitable alleged teachings of Jesus probably stuck with me and influenced my political views (e.g., empathy towards the poor, an orientation towards peaceful rather than aggressive social relations). Also, in a few intertwined ways, my interactions with that branch of my family provided some insights that later probably played a role in my path to social science. Even as a relatively young person, I could see that a lot of what certain members of my family believed was demonstrably empirically and/or logically untrue. But their views on various issues were also highly predictable. Without having the theoretical framework, this was my introduction to the social construction of reality. Further, it convinced me that there were regularities to human behaviour, something that later made the idea of social science more plausible. On the other hand, my reaction against religion made me reluctant to fully embrace some of the normative aspects of Marxism, which, as philosopher Bertrand Russell (2004) has noted, has some parallels with religion. My grandfather, Bill Tindall, was a local politician in Victoria. He was a long-time city councillor and then mayor of Victoria from 1979 to 1981. Perhaps surprisingly, he did not talk politics with me. He was part of a generation that embraced the notion that children were to be seen and not heard (at least that was my perception). Also, over time, we became more or less estranged. However, I think his role in politics prompted me, when I was quite young, to pay more attention to politics than most children. I have been an avid consumer of newspapers and mass media since an early age. I read newspapers regularly as a teenager. That my family always subscribed to a newspaper was a significant factor in my trajectory as a sociologist. One reason for this interest in my early life was that I probably wanted to see if there was anything in the local newspaper about my grandfather’s political career.

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My father received commerce and law degrees from UBC. He was the first person on either side of my family to receive a university degree. I became the second. For part of my childhood we lived the lifestyle of a middle-class family; however, shortly after I started university, my parents went bankrupt and we lost our family home. My student years were at times quite precarious financially. My family paid the tuition for my first year, but that was it. Lawrence and Ruth Chambers, a family whose farm I worked on for a few summers, graciously provided some funding towards tuition in my latter undergraduate years. I worked at various jobs throughout my university studies. Indeed, I worked so much that my grades suffered. At one point during my master’s program I lived in a rooming house. I only started having sufficient funding to support my studies during the third year of my PhD program. After I completed my doctoral degree, my wife’s family (the Walkers) helped pay off my student loan. My experiences of precarious situations have shaped my understanding of social issues. I have a bit of a quasi left-libertarian streak (or perhaps a contrarian streak) to my personality in that I resist ideological groupthink and refuse to engage in ideological solidarity for solidarity’s sake. I realized early on that the right-wing libertarian notion of people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps does not provide an accurate description of social reality. To the extent that I have been successful, I realize that my success has been made possible by the assistance of others. Due to this combination of factors, I am often more persuaded about the desirability of progressive social policies on empathetic grounds than on ideological grounds. BECOMING ENMESHED IN A NET WORK OF SOCIAL NET WORK SCHOLARS

My enrolment in university was somewhat happenstance. I do not recall a strong push from my family to go to university, but there may have been an absence of barriers, at least initially. My recollection is that our high school counsellor Olivia Barr filled out application forms to the University of Victoria for the students who had sufficient grades to go on to university. My application was submitted and I was accepted. I attended the University of Victoria mostly because going back to school in the fall was my habit. During high school I got good grades, but I also focused a lot of my energy on sports. I suppose I was identified as a jock to some extent.

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My undergraduate degree was in psychology at the University of Victoria, where I focused primarily on social psychology. As a discipline, psychology has historically been concerned about its status as a science. Hence, in my early academic career I was exposed to research and theorizing that was of a general nature. I did not develop the allergic reaction that many of my sociological colleagues have to general theorizing. While I view this influence in positive terms, I nevertheless think that psychologists often overstate their claims to “scientific” status and the generalizability of their knowledge claims. At the University of Victoria I took my first sociology course with William Carroll, someone I was to cross paths with numerous times over the years. I unofficially audited several of Carroll’s classes in the latter stages of my undergraduate program, including a course he taught on the sociology of corporations, which introduced me to his network research on corporate interlocks. Indeed, I would probably not be writing this chapter if not for a chance conversation with Carroll during the final year of my undergraduate degree. He suggested that I apply to the MA program in sociology at the University of Victoria, and, as I did not have any concrete plans for the future (a theme in my life), I took his suggestion seriously, applied – and was accepted! Later, when I became an MA student, I benefited from many informal conversations with him – no doubt burning up his valuable time, although I do not recall him complaining. In hindsight I chalk this up to his generosity. David Gartrell was the central influence on me at the University of Victoria. I took David’s third-year course, individual and society. This course ignited an interest in social science in general and sociology (and social psychology) in particular. In David’s class I was introduced to Mark Granovetter’s (1973, 1978) “strength of weak ties” thesis and his ideas on threshold models of collective action. Granovetter developed a counter-intuitive theoretical account that weak ties (e.g., ties to acquaintances) are crucial for various social processes (such as success in a job search or linking together isolated cliques in a community and hence facilitating collective action). Based on the principles of balance theory, weak ties are thought to stretch further in social space than strong ties and to be more likely to be sources of novel information. This contrasts with conventional thinking, which tends to emphasize the importance of strong ties. Threshold models of collective action refer to the idea that individuals assess the actions of others in deciding whether or not to contribute to collective action.

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This type of approach allows analysts to consider the extent to which participation in collective action can be considered a “rational choice.” In Gartrell’s class, I was also introduced to Stanley Milgram’s (1967) empirical work on the “small world problem,” which Granovetter incorporated as part of the basis for his strength of weak ties thesis, and Stark and Bainbridge’s (1980) research on the role that social networks play in the recruitment of individuals to religious cults. Later, I was greatly influenced by Gartrell’s (1987) work on social comparison and social evaluation. These approaches were general explanations, not fixed to particular times or places. This excited me and shaped the theoretical accounts that interested me. Richard Ogmundson took over the direct supervision of my MA thesis when Gartrell went on sabbatical, and he successfully guided me across the finish line. Robert Gifford is a leading environmental psychologist, and he taught a third-year course on environmental psychology during my time at the University of Victoria. This was my entry into environmental studies. Here, I learned about social science approaches to the tragedy of the commons: the notion that there is a tension in the payoff matrix between acting in one’s self-interest and acting in the collective interest (with greater incentives for the former) with regard to the natural environment. If enough actors choose self-interest, the commons is diminished for everyone, and everyone will be worse off in the long run. Later I undertook an extended social psychology project, supervised by Lorne Rosenblood, in which I developed a computer simulation in which student subjects fished for computerized fish under varying conditions. This was later developed further and combined with survey research of sport and commercial salmon fishers in British Columbia to constitute my master’s thesis. In some of my research I have utilized media data either to study social processes or to study media processes or both (e.g., Cormier and Tindall 2005; Malinick et al. 2013; Stoddart and Tindall 2015). A person who influenced my early focus on media as an object of academic study, and not just as a source of data, was Aaron Doyle (now at Carleton University), whom I originally met when we both worked with the BC Public Interest Research Group at the University of Victoria. Doyle later became a PhD student at UBC. Prior to his entry into the UBC sociology graduate program, Doyle had worked as a journalist and thus was knowledgeable about the technical features of news stories. While he was at UBC, he influenced me to think of media processes as being an object of study as opposed to simply being a

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source of data about other processes (e.g., social movement protest). He pushed me to be more nuanced about the coding of media texts, to pay attention to the distinctions among the genres of articles, their position in the paper, types of writers, and the influence of the editorial process. I applied to the PhD program in sociology at the University of Toronto mostly because the department had a reputation for its strength in the area of social network research. At Toronto I worked primarily with Bonnie Erickson and Barry Wellman, but I also had support from a number of other people, including Robert Brym and John Hannigan, who were on my dissertation committee. I wrote a directed studies paper for Bob, which later became my dissertation proposal. John was a fantastic source of knowledge about environmental studies. I also had significant interactions with William Michelson through a graduate course on environmental sociology, and I served as a teaching assistant for several years for his course on research methods, an experience that I later drew upon for my own teaching. Generally, the University of Toronto was a good experience for me (for comparable experiences, see Brym, chapter 1, this volume; Davies, chapter 3, this volume; and Riggins, chapter 19, this volume). However, I did not receive adequate funding during the first year, and, at the beginning of my second, I had an opportunity to teach at the University of Victoria. I took a one-year leave of absence to teach. When I returned to Toronto, I received several scholarships and assistantships and thus was in a better position financially for the rest of my studies. At the time, the University of Toronto probably offered the only graduate program in Canada that included courses and a comprehensive exam on social network analysis. It may also have been the only graduate program in Canada offering a course in environmental sociology. Sociologists often think about social networks in terms of methods, but the University of Toronto courses on social network analysis were more focused on substantive and theoretical issues. Bonnie Erickson’s course emphasized a whole-network approach, and Wellman’s focused on an ego-network approach. Network analysts can focus on all of the relations among actors in a network or on the pattern of ties that surround particular individuals. In both of these courses students were encouraged to write articles, using data, in the style of relevant academic journals For Wellman’s course, I worked on a paper using his East York dataset, which examined changes in peoples’ personal network ties

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over time.1 I also worked on this dataset as a research assistant and later wrote it up for a couple of conference presentations. The resulting paper was later published as a multi-authored article in the journal Social Networks and is my most cited paper (Wellman et al. 1997). Both Erickson and Wellman offered research assistant opportunities, which provided valuable experience and skills. They also provided funding and mentoring to attend conferences, especially the Sunbelt Social Network conference, and introduced me to people there. They were very generous in sharing their SSHRC research grant proposals. I have been involved in the Sunbelt meetings ever since, organizing sessions and presenting papers, and have recently started to give workshops on social network data collection using surveys. A great deal of credit for my later success with SSHRC applications should be given to Erickson and Wellman for sharing their proposals and tips. As my PhD supervisor, Erickson was generous in commenting on my manuscripts. Her work on social network diversity was particularly influential. Erickson has examined the consequences of ties to different social locations, such as varied occupations, classes, and ethnic backgrounds (Erickson 1996). She has found that people with more diverse ties in terms of occupations and classes – a form of social capital – have greater diversity in cultural capital. In other words, they have more varied cultural knowledge. She has also examined the relationship between social network diversity and ethnic/racial tolerance. Erickson’s work and academic advice led me to examine the relationship between diverse ties that environmentalists have to different environmental organizations and their level of identification with environmental movements. Her work played a role in my examination of the extent to which participation in social movement activities lead people to form ties to individuals in different occupations. In terms of social capital, this is the indirect benefit of being a social activist (Tindall et al. 2012). Working as a research assistant on Wellman’s East York project provided me with valuable experience, especially with regard to data analysis and writing. This resulted in co-authored publications, and Wellman’s overall prominence in the social sciences probably helped me get additional recognition through these publications. Barry also influenced me significantly in his thinking and writing about social networks – especially the notion that the social network perspective is really a paradigm about relational sociology: it is much broader

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than just a set of methods (e.g., calculations of centrality or density), a set of substantive problems (diffusion of information, social capital), or particular theories (e.g., structural holes). Barry is a gifted writer and storyteller. On a number of occasions as a graduate student I found myself working on data analyses related to the East York project when the results seemed mundane to me. But I would give the results to Wellman, and he would weave a truly interesting narrative. To twist an old sociological saying, Wellman has a good “social network imagination.” Harvard is an important aspect of my scholarly autobiography. On the surface, this is surprising because I have neither attended nor visited Harvard. However, the Harvard Department of Social Relations (later the Department of Sociology) has indirectly had an important influence on me. A number of people I worked with during my university studies were trained there. The department was interdisciplinary, involving sociology, psychology, and anthropology. It was formed in 1946 and persisted until about 1972, although an interdisciplinary culture linking the individual disciplinary departments continued throughout the 1970s. Harrison White was one of the key figures in social network analysis and structural analysis. He developed a number of important theoretical ideas (e.g., vacancy chains – if someone exits a position in a social structure this has systemic consequences for other positions) and methodological approaches (e.g., block modelling, which compares actors based on their pattern of ties to others), and supervised a number of top North American sociologists. Harrison White was Bonnie Erickson’s dissertation supervisor. Barry Wellman had a close relationship with Harrison White and worked as a research assistant for him (personal communication). My primary MA thesis supervisor, David Gartrell, worked closely with Mark Granovetter, whose dissertation White supervised. Harrison White might be considered one of my academic grandparents. The other major figure associated with the Harvard network who indirectly influenced me was Charles Tilly. Wellman had a close relationship with Tilly and worked as a research assistant for him. He would have been Wellman’s dissertation supervisor at Harvard, but Tilly did not get tenure, as is the fate of most junior professors at Harvard. Consequently, S.D. Clark was able to recruit Tilly to the University of Toronto, and he in turn brought Barry Wellman and William Michelson to Toronto. Tilly was at the University of Toronto from

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1966 to 1969. He was one of the two or three most important social movement scholars, and he was also a key structural analyst. In terms of people outside the Harvard network, social movement scholar Doug McAdam has been a central influence on my scholarship. His influence has not been so much in terms of his best-known work (e.g., political process theory, the dynamics of contention perspective, field theory) but, rather, in terms of some of his work on social networks and social movements (e.g., McAdam 1986), on social movement identity, and on gender and social movements. I first met McAdam at my dissertation defence in the fall of 1993, where he was the external examiner. Mario Diani is probably the researcher with whom I have the most scholarly overlap in terms of my interest in social networks, collective action, and in the environmental movement. Another influential figure is Riley Dunlap, although I did not study with him and he is not part of the Harvard network (see also Stoddart’s [chapter 8, this volume] reflections on Dunlap). I was introduced to Dunlap’s work in Michelson’s graduate course at the University of Toronto. At the time, Michelson and Dunlap (2002) were editing the Handbook of Environmental Sociology. Dunlap is one of the founders of environmental sociology. In his early work he argues that mainstream sociology is overly anthropocentric and that a new ecological paradigm needs to be developed in which the physical environment and natural world are taken seriously and incorporated into mainstream sociology rather than just treated as background variables that are of interest to specialists. He argues that the efforts of the founders of sociology to define the discipline through an emphasis on social facts and the exclusion of biology greatly delayed the relevance of sociology for inquiries into solving environmental problems. DEVELOPING A MODEL OF THE SOCIAL NET WORK BASES AND CONSEQUENCES OF MICROMOBILIZATION

Both academic and popular understandings of participation in social movements often highlight the importance of values, beliefs, and attitudes, and stress the idea that people join or support a movement because they sympathize with the cause. It is argued that individuals become involved in an environmental movement because they are concerned about pollution or protecting animal habitat. At the same time, many structurally oriented social movement scholars claim that, while having a pro-movement ideological orientation might be a nec-

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essary condition for participation, it is not a sufficient one. For example, Klandermans and Oegema’s (1987) study of the peace movement in the Netherlands found that, while the vast majority of respondents to a survey of the general public supported the ideals of the peace movement, only a very small proportion of the population became involved in movement activities. What mattered was whether individuals had ties to other movement participants and were asked to participate through these networks. While support for a movement’s goals is a necessary condition for participation, individuals also need to be structurally linked to other members of the movement through social network ties. Social networks facilitate and/or constrain social processes. At the individual level, the more connected one is to other movement participants, the more opportunities there are to communicate about social issues. Communication is a key for several processes. Information is often diffused through informal interpersonal networks. As a result, people learn about issues and events and are likely to become more concerned about issues and to attend events. Influence shaped by social ties underlies relationships between networks and participation. Social networks are also important as vehicles through which individuals are targeted for recruitment for participation in events. Finally, where movements involve higher levels of risk and cost, networks can provide important sources of social and emotional support. Identification refers to the cognitive association a person has with particular groups. Some explanations consider movement identification to be a key explanatory variable for understanding participation. Identities tend to be associated with bundles of values, beliefs, normative expectations, and responsibilities. People who identify with particular social movements are more likely to participate in these movements. By acting, they are validating their identities. My research has developed and verified aspects of this theoretical model by using samples of environmental movement participants in the wilderness preservation movement based in Greater Victoria (Tindall 2002, 2004), in the context of a nationwide survey of members of environmental organizations (Tindall et al. 2014), and in a sample of members of Friends of Clayoquot Sound (Tindall and Robinson 2017). I have argued that we should expect reciprocal effects among some variables. In the literature on social networks, scholars distinguish between social influence and social selection. The former effect occurs when people participate because of pressure from their net-

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work contacts; the latter occurs, for example, when people choose to form ties with those who attend environmental movement events (because of shared values). While activism in time 1 arises in part from network embeddedness, in time 2, network embeddedness arises partly from earlier participation in activism. Other reciprocal effects include people who identify more strongly with the movement and who will form more ties with others in the movement. People who are more active will reflect on this and identify themselves more strongly as members of the movement. And people who identify more strongly with the movement will be motivated to communicate more about environmental issues with other people. Ties that form outside the movement – as a result of movement activities – can serve as a type of social capital. Movement participants can utilize social capital for goals outside the movement, for example, by searching for a job or running for political office (Tindall et al. 2012). In a further extension of this idea, Georgia Piggot and I (Tindall and Piggot 2015) analyzed nationwide survey data collected on the general public to examine the extent to which there was a social influence effect as a result of members of the general public having ties to people belonging to environmental organizations. Results showed that members of the general public who did not belong to an environmental organization were significantly more likely to have a plan to deal with climate change if they had ties to members of environmental organizations. JOINT APPOINTMENT IN THE UBC FACULT Y OF FORESTRY

In 1994, I was appointed to the UBC Faculty of Forestry and the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. The appointment was two-thirds in forestry and one-third in sociology. I remained in this appointment until July 2014. Supposedly, the Faculty of Forestry was looking for someone who had strong quantitative skills, assuming that he or she would have more sophisticated knowledge of the natural sciences than would someone without such skills. I more or less fit this bill. I was hired just after the “War in the Woods” around Clayoquot Sound, the conflict over the protection of the ancient rainforests (Tindall and Robinson 2017). I was initially given the impression that the protest presented a puzzle and that the Faculty of Forestry wanted to hire someone who understood the social dimensions of this issue.

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Although it was never explicitly stated, I soon realized that, rather than having an autonomous social scientist in their midst, what at least some inside the faculty really wanted was an expert in public relations, someone who could advise colleagues about how to give the forest industry a better image. I did not see this as my academic role, and, over time, it caused a great deal of friction. While I had great relationships and exchanges with a number of faculty members and students (and worked on research and publications with them), for much of my time in the Faculty of Forestry I was poorly treated by the administration and my experience was agonizing. For a long time I looked for ways of transferring out of my appointment, and I considered applying for jobs at other universities. In 2014, through fortuitous circumstances, and initiative on the part of the dean of arts, I was able to transfer full-time into the Department of Sociology.2 The silver lining of my time outside sociology is that it gave me unique experiences and insights I might not have developed otherwise. I learned about various aspects of ecology, forest ecosystems, the forest industry, forestry communities, and issues related to First Nations and the environment (Tindall et al. 2013) in ways and in a depth that would not have been possible if I had been ensconced solely in a department of sociology. This experience also shaped my thoughts about science, interdisciplinary work, the relationship of the university to the private sector, and tenure. A number of my forestry colleagues made it clear to me that, in comparison to the natural sciences, they saw sociology as rightly having low status. From my interactions with professors in the natural sciences, my observation is that they tend to have a bi-modal perception of the nature of the social sciences. Either they see them as essentially the same as the natural sciences though weaker (a view held by a minority) or they see them as completely different, basically akin to creative writing. This insight sharpened my perceptions of key issues. One is that most natural scientists look for precise answers to questions and assume that, in principle, one can talk with some level of confidence about measuring phenomena within certain parameters. Because much social science research cannot do this, it is seen as being “soft.” This is often stated as a put down. But natural scientists do see sociology as a soft science because of its lack of precision in measurement, explanation, and prediction. Thinking about sociology while being surrounded by natural scientists also prompted me to reflect on the distinction between

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descriptive and normative explanations. I have long maintained that it is possible to analytically separate these things within sociology even though they are sometimes symbiotically related. While from time to time I engage in normative debates, mostly in terms of public sociology, I see my research as driven by descriptive theory. Somewhat painfully, I have increasingly realized that by holding this view I am an outlier in Canadian sociology. I do not think inquiry is completely determined by positionality and instrumentality. Scholars can be motivated to pursue research by curiosity. Curiosity-driven research is something that has historically been quite common in the natural sciences. I am not dismissing normatively guided research, but I would assert that a distinction can be maintained between curiosity-motivated investigation and normatively driven research. The assumption of most people is that the natural sciences are primarily descriptive, whereas a lot of the social sciences are normatively oriented. During my career, I have been surrounded by faculty members who conducted applied natural science research – in particular, academics who were trying to facilitate the goals of the forest industry. I realized after a while that, in the natural sciences, much applied research has a significant normative component. For example, some colleagues in my former department specialized in the engineering of logging roads. This type of work is predicated on the assumption that logging, which focuses on timber production and the exchange value of trees, is an appropriate use of relatively scarce and ecologically unique ten thousand-year-old, old-growth forests that would otherwise contribute to animal habitat, biodiversity, and ecosystem services such as producing clean air and water, and serving as a carbon sink. During my time in forestry, outside of NSERC and SSHRC, most of the funding available for forestry research from the provincial government and some federal programs was for applied research. There was next to nothing for social science research on forestry issues unless it was in the service of timber harvesting. The exceptions were some pools of money for research related to First Nations communities. But again, this was mainly for work in the service of promoting economic uses of forest resources. In my opinion, this excludes many interests that the public has in forests (e.g., recreation, culture, education, science, health and well-being, spirituality, artistic inspiration).

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Colleagues have sometimes challenged me on my stance regarding sociology as a scientific endeavour and have pointed to the perception that science has created a lot of the environmental problems we are currently experiencing. It is applied science – not science per se – that has led to technology that has created environmental problems. How science is applied depends on ideology and values. This insight also applies to some of my own research on collective action related to environmental issues. Research on this topic could be applied just as easily in campaigns against as in campaigns for the environmental movement. Nevertheless, I concede that core ideas in environmental science and environmental sociology – like “sustainability” and the “new ecological paradigm” – are partly normative, but this is no different from medical science, whose scientific status is rarely questioned. To give what some might think is an outlandish example, it seems to be an assumption of most people that it is appropriate for medical science to pursue ways to allow people to live longer. This is a normative position. Most of us would personally desire to have a longer lifespan, but this has some negative consequences, such as the economic costs for supporting people in their old age, and the fact that many younger people are blocked from entry into, and advancement within, employment structures. Another impact is the increased devastation of other species created by the negative externalities of human societies magnified by longer life spans. My experience, gained through being in a joint appointment and being engaged in numerous interactions between social and natural scientists, has suggested that interdisciplinary work is vital but also challenging. Some key challenges include lack of knowledge of other disciplines, inequality in power and status, and differential access to resources. Most natural scientists have only a cursory knowledge of the social sciences. The reverse is also true. There are very significant differences in terms of power and status between natural scientists and social scientists, both in the university and in the wider society. Natural scientists generally have more prestige than social scientists and usually have more influence in university affairs and public policy. One possible exception is the outsized influence that economists have in terms of policy. At universities, natural scientists receive significantly higher salaries. This difference is echoed, perhaps magnified, in the

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private sector. The access of natural scientists to research funding is probably about tenfold what is available to social scientists. Natural scientists usually have lighter teaching loads at universities. They also have a different culture of research, which relies more on teams and delegation of research tasks to graduate students and post-docs, short multi-authored publications, and additional financial support for running labs. Thus, on a practical note, it is nearly impossible for a social scientist to compete professionally in a natural science environment. This has consequences for merit, promotion, and influence. But, more important, this imbalance has implications for collaborations. One problem I have observed both from afar and close up is that, in collaborations, natural scientists often want to define the research question and the research design. And they are usually able to do this because they have more power and access to resources. Social scientists are the poor stepsiblings of natural scientists. With regard to applied problems, natural scientists often think they already understand the problem and the solution. But they commonly feel that social scientists are needed for public relations and educational purposes, the role implicitly proposed for me in my forestry appointment at UBC. Occasionally, funding opportunities also require interdisciplinary teams, which can result in token roles for social scientists. With regard to environmental issues at least, social scientists often formulate the problem differently than do natural scientists (e.g., perhaps social inequality is part of the problem, perhaps understanding people’s perceptions and behaviour requires analyzing the social construction of the issue) and see different causes (e.g., perhaps capitalism drives the problem, as has been described by Schnaiberg’s “treadmill of production” model [Schnaiberg and Gould 2000]) and different solutions (e.g., educational campaigns or public relations campaigns that focus on individual actions are probably inadequate because collective solutions are often needed and, frequently, structural or systemic processes contribute to problems). Social scientists are more likely to recognize social structures and social actors that are barriers to proposed natural science solutions. One example of a collaborative mismatch based on my experience involves a situation in which a colleague tried to persuade me to collaborate with him on a project. He was modelling forest growth over a period of about one hundred to 150 years, and he wanted me to model how British Columbia society would change over that time. I

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told him I thought it was not possible to do this in a rigorous way because of the unpredictable consequences of new technologies, the uncertainty of the occurrence of key historical events, and the unpredictable drivers of social change (e.g., the rise of social movements, shifts in values and public opinion, and shifts in immigration patterns). He was not satisfied with my response and went off to look for another collaborator. In my position in the Faculty of Forestry, I developed a reputation for being untrustworthy with regard to meeting the needs of natural scientists, and, after a while, many colleagues purposely avoided me even when they needed help in areas in which I was an expert. Instead, they relied on academics with no social science expertise to conduct social science research for them. Later in my appointment I was routinely excluded from hiring (and other) committees – even when, because of my expertise, I was a logical choice as a committee member. True interdisciplinary approaches to empirical research, which includes both meaningful natural science and social science variables (and explanatory mechanisms related to both perspectives), are relatively rare. Sadly, I have to admit that for the most part I have not risen to this challenge. Within the social sciences, a lot of research uses the environment as a context and then fairly traditional social science analysis is undertaken, focusing primarily on social science variables. My environmental movement research mostly falls into this category. However, my work on climate change policy networks (the COMPON project, described briefly by Stoddart, chapter 8, this volume) aspires to link carbon emission outcomes to social processes. Some researchers have mixed environmental measures with social measures in their analyses of climate change and other environmental issues. One approach to this, at various scales, utilizes data on topics like social inequality, consumption, production, and ecological/carbon footprints. Other examples incorporate measures of weather and climate into sociological analyses. More work like this is needed. My experience in a department outside of sociology magnified my exposure to issues involving the academy in general. A couple of these involve the corporatization of the university and the importance of tenure. When I was in the Faculty of Forestry, all of the classrooms were named after forestry companies and corporate forestry benefactors. At one point, I was involved in a group conversation in which someone suggested that, since we had a new undergraduate conservation program, maybe we should name a room after a prominent con-

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servationist. The response from a senior administrator was: “When David Suzuki donates a million dollars to the faculty, we’ll name a room after him.” This is but an anecdote, but in the faculty we were constantly pushed to think in terms of corporate culture. On the one hand, I think there is a role for collaboration with the corporate world on campus; on the other, professors in the humanities and social sciences who rail against the corporatization of the university see only the tip of the iceberg of corporate influence. Recently, at a conference, a member of the audience accused me of being a “pluralist.” This term, of course, has several meanings. However, to the extent that it means “I don’t think all social phenomena can be explained as a function of class relations,” I am a pluralist. Nevertheless, class interests are often a potent explanation for things, as my UBC predecessor Patricia Marchak observes in her book, In Whose Interests. Class interests are relevant for understanding the incursions of the corporate world into the university. Marchak (1979, 14) quotes Grant in stating: “the objective of science as it is undertaken in North American universities, ‘the motive of wonder’ becomes ever more subsidiary to the motive of power.” As Marchak notes, the primary goal of corporations is profit. My former joint appointment provided me with an accidental comparative case study. The culture of my two departments and faculties were very different, with sociology and arts being relatively more collegial academic cultures (though not without their own pathologies), and forestry having a very corporate culture, seemingly influenced by ties to the private sector. The UBC Faculty of Forestry has a forestry advisory council which, as stated in its annual report, “provides advice to the Faculty on curriculum matters and research priorities.” Typically, the majority of the members of this body are from private-sector companies. Therefore, it is not surprising that faculty are frequently pushed to examine ways in which their research and teaching can be relevant to private-sector interests (such as timber production) versus public-sector interests (such as protecting forests for ecological and recreation values). The distinction between actors motivated by public interests versus private interests is, of course, a long-standing concern of sociology and an important theme of the social movements literature (e.g., Kriesi 1989). The Faculty of Forestry is not unique in having a private-sector-dominated advisory board. Though it might also be useful to note that the faculty is relatively small in terms of members and students, and it is likely that the main reason that it is

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a faculty rather than a department has to do with the influence of industry actors. The Faculty of Forestry had roughly the same number of faculty members as did the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Arts. Similar processes of private-sector influence happen at a number of locations in university governance, such as at the level of the Board of Governors (BOG). In British Columbia, the University Act states: “The management, administration and control of the property, revenue, business and affairs of the university are vested in the board.” As a graduate student, I was an elected student member of the BOG at the University of Victoria. The majority of members, however, were appointed by the provincial government. It was my observation at the time that these were typically patronage appointments rather than appointments that were related to any particular expertise. (The reward was status and the associated prestige rather than money.) Typically, these members come from private-sector organizations that were supportive of the governing party or perhaps they had made donations to the university (though their affiliation depended to some extent on the ideology of the political party heading the provincial government). Interestingly, in British Columbia at least, the appointed members of the board outnumber the elected student, staff, and faculty members. And, as described in the University Act, unlike the appointed members, the elected members can be fired by the university president (who, in turn, is appointed by the board). So the appointed members have the ultimate say. Several years ago at UBC, the culture clash between the corporatism of the board and the culture of academic freedom of the academy resulted in a well-publicized controversy that resulted in the resignation of the BOG chair (Proctor 2015). Another trend in private-sector linkages concerns graduate training. In recent years there have been pushes to tie graduate training more closely to private-sector funding (e.g., Mitacs). A recent UBC president allegedly had this objective as one of his implicit strategic goals for the university. Another trend is the move in some quarters towards “professional graduate degrees,” with higher tuition fees and lower entry standards. Again, this is a direction that is likely to privilege private interests (something I was pressured to support in forestry). While linkages to entities outside the university (including the private sector) are important for a number of reasons (including accountability and exposure to different perspectives), in my view, the more strongly universities are tied to the private sector, the more

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likely it is that teaching and research programs will be oriented towards benefiting private over public interests. We risk ending up with the Ferengi University. (This is a little Star Trek joke: at such institutions, the criterion for evaluating truth statements is whether they are profitable.) Tenure is more precious than many academics realize. A common view is that tenure is not necessary to support academic freedom and that academics actually argue for maintaining it primarily for job security. I contrast this view with my experience outside of sociology. For example, one senior colleague told me that industry representatives in the past had pressured the dean to fire him because corporate actors were unhappy with his research and scientific opinions. The dean at the time did not cave to the pressure. But this sort of thing is not just imaginary. In my own case, I received considerable pressure from administrators and colleagues to work on different topics, to publish in different venues, and to teach different material. In my view, I was at times harassed and bullied. For the most part, this was of a minor to moderate level compared to what some scholars face, especially women and minorities. But it did intensify at times. (See James, chapter 17, this volume; Voyageur, chapter 15, this volume.) I faced hostilities on various fronts. At one point, a student e-mailed me and told me to stick a giant redwood tree up a certain part of my anatomy. The possessor of the e-mail account later wrote to me and said that their e-mail account had been hacked by someone else. I did not bother reporting this. On occasion, I received similar types of comments on teaching evaluations. Also, from time to time, I receive hate mail when I engage in public sociology or give interviews to journalists. Again, I have the impression that women and minority scholars face more intense harassment. Near the end of my stint in forestry, members of the administration engaged in dozens of tactics to make my life miserable. My perception was that they wanted me to make a decision to leave voluntarily. They arbitrarily moved me from the office I had occupied for twenty years (which was in the main corridor of the department) to a small temporary shared office (used by visiting faculty members) down a side corridor. I also had to arbitrarily move again shortly after this. By coincidence, I ended up sharing an office with a visiting faculty member from a university in Asia. This scholar told me that they found my work to be extremely interesting and in fact had earlier requested to

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the administration that I be invited to do some visiting presentations and teaching at their university. I had not previously heard about this. Reportedly, a senior member of the administration told the visiting scholar that this would not be possible because the faculty viewed me negatively. I have many other anecdotes like this. But for me, one lesson is the importance of tenure: I am not sure I would have survived without it. At the same time that I was being treated belligerently in forestry, I was receiving different signals from my other department and faculty, who informed me that my work was outstanding. I continue to work on issues related to the environmental movement, environmental politics, and climate change. I do this partly because these issues are important. Admittedly, I am influenced somewhat by normative beliefs. But I also find the science of endeavouring to understand social mechanisms to be fascinating. It is hypothetically possible for some scholars to study these processes in a disinterested way, purely motivated by curiosity, as human civilization continues its relatively quick march to ecological apocalypse. NOTES 1 In this relatively famous and ground-breaking study, Wellman examines the personal networks and “personal communities” of East York residents. The project involved several waves of data collection. Wellman reoriented the notion of community to emphasize social networks and examined how different types of ties and structure are related to differential social support. An exemplary work is Wellman (1979). 2 When I was hired in 1994, anthropology and sociology functioned as a joint department, although sociology operated semi-autonomously. I was one of the main agitators pushing my colleagues, and the Faculty of Arts, to split the two disciplines into separate departments, which took place in July 2006 (see Matthews, chapter 5, this volume). REFERENCES Cormier, Jeffrey J., and David B. Tindall. 2005. “Wood Frames: Framing the Forests in British Columbia.” Sociological Focus 38 (1): 1–24. Erickson, Bonnie H. 1996. “Culture, Class, and Connections.” American Journal of Sociology 102 (1): 217–51. Gartrell, C. David. 1987. “Network Approaches to Social Evaluation.” Annual Review of Sociology 13: 49–66. Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–80.

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– 1978. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology 83 (6): 1420–43. Klandermans, Bert, and Dirk Oegema. 1987. “Potentials, Networks, Motivations, and Barriers: Steps towards Participation in Social Movements.” American Sociological Review 52 (4): 519–31. Kriesi, Hanspeter. 1989. “New Social Movements and the New Class in the Netherlands.” American Journal of Sociology 94 (5): 1078–116. Malinick, Todd E., David B. Tindall, and Mario Diani. 2013. “Network Centrality and Social Movement Media Coverage: A Two-mode Network Analytic Approach.” Social Networks 35 (2): 148–58. Marchak, Patricia M. 1979. In Whose Interests: An Essay on Multinational Corporations in a Canadian Context. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. McAdam, Doug. 1986. “Recruitment to High-risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer.” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1): 64–90. Michelson, William and Riley E. Dunlap. 2002. Handbook of Environmental Sociology. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Milgram, Stanley. 1967. “The Small-World Problem.” Psychology Today 1 (1): 61–7. Proctor, Jason. 2015. “UBC Chair John Montalbano Resigns after Report Finds Academic Freedom Not Protected.” CBC News. 15 October. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ubc-chair-johnmontalbano-resigns-after-report-finds-academic-freedom-not-protected1.3272776. Russell, Bertrand. 2004 [1946]. History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge. Stark, Rodney, and William Sims Bainbridge. 1980. “Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects.” American Journal of Sociology 85 (6): 1376–95. Stoddart, Mark C.J. and David B. Tindall. 2015. “Canadian News Media and the Cultural Dynamics of Multilevel Climate Governance.” Environmental Politics 24 (3): 401–22. Tindall, David B. 2002. “Social Networks, Identification and Participation in an Environmental Movement: Low-medium Cost Activism within the British Columbia Wilderness Preservation Movement.” Canadian Review of Sociology 39 (4): 413–52. – 2004. “Social Movement Participation over Time: An Ego-network Approach to Micro-mobilization.” Sociological Focus 37 (2): 163–184. Tindall, David B., Jeffrey Cormier, and Mario Diani. 2012. “Network Social Capital as an Outcome of Social Movement Mobilization: Using the Posi-

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tion Generator as an Indicator of Social Network Diversity.” Social Networks 34 (4): 387–95. Tindall, David B., and Georgia Piggot. 2015. “Influence of Social Ties to Environmentalists on Public Climate Change Perceptions.” Nature Climate Change 5: 546–49. Tindall, David B., and Joanna Robinson. 2017. “Collective Action to Save the Ancient Temperate Rainforest: Social Networks and Environmental Activism in Clayoquot Sound.” Ecology and Society 22 (1): article 40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26270088.pdf. Tindall, David B., Joanna L Robinson, and Mark C.J. Stoddart. 2014. “Social Network Centrality, Movement Identification, and the Participation of Individuals in a Social Movement: The Case of the Canadian Environmental Movement.” In Quantitative Graph Theory: Mathematical Foundations and Applications, 407-423, edited by Matthias Dehmer, and Frank Emmert-Streib. Oxford, UK: Chapman and Hall/CRC. Tindall, David B., Ronald L. Trosper, and Pamela Perreault, eds. 2013. Aboriginal Peoples and Forest Lands in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Wellman, Barry. 1979. “The Community Question: The Intimate Networks of East Yorkers.” American Journal of Sociology 84 (5): 1201–31. Wellman, Barry, Renita Yuk-lin Wong, David Tindall, and Nancy Nazer. 1997. “A Decade of Network Change: Turnover, Mobility, and Stability.” Social Networks 19 (1): 27–50.

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8 From West Coast to East Coast, from Activism to Academia Mark C.J. Stoddart

QUEBEC , 1974–92

I was born in 1974 and grew up across the river from Ottawa in the Outaouais region of Quebec. My upbringing reflected the generational mobility of many Euro-Canadian families in post-Second World War Canada. My mother, Dolores Recoskie, is of Polish background and comes from Barry’s Bay, Ontario, a traditionally Polish rural community in the Madawaska Valley. Her mother died quite young, of cancer. She and her siblings were raised with the help of various relatives. She moved to Ottawa with her older sister and father, who worked for Canada Post following his service in the Second World War. My father, Gary Stoddart, is of Irish and Scottish background. His family has deep ties to the city of Ottawa, where connections trace back to the Irish migrations of the 1850s. My parents came from working-class families, but we became increasingly affluent as I grew up with my younger brother and sister in a suburban home in Aylmer. My parents met and married in Ottawa, then moved across the river to the (then) small town of Aylmer. My father was a chartered accountant and started a career with the government of Canada. However, he soon left to become coowner of the Orientique chain of stores, a 1970s–80s Ottawa fixture specializing in Asian imports. Searching for mentions of the store, I found a discussion thread on the “Lost Ottawa” Facebook page, where people have posted stories about favourite head shops in

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Ottawa. This business was followed by success in real estate and other investment as well as being an owner of Carlos and Pepe’s, a Mexican restaurant and popular McGill student hangout in Montreal. My father, with his working-class Irish Catholic roots, used an accounting background and what might now be viewed as cultural appropriation to create a family environment of economic mobility. At the same time, my youthful awareness of ethnic difference was limited to growing up as an Anglo-Quebecois among the political tensions between Quebec and Canada of the 1970s and 1980s, played out as minor scuffles among French and English kids on playgrounds or schoolyards. My parents’ class backgrounds were not a core part of our family identity, which I experienced more through the lenses of Irish Canadian or Polish Canadian ethnicity, Roman Catholic religious affiliation, or being an anglophone in Quebec. However, this did shape my sense of the world in several ways. Our class mobility was also made visible by my father. He would occasionally tour us through neighbourhoods in which he had grown up, where his parents and their seven children lived in close quarters in various rental houses. We were told stories about the challenges they grew up with, such as the necessity for the boys in the family to have paper routes to contribute to the family income. The point of these stories, I think, was to emphasize the good fortune that my siblings and I grew up with and to assert the possibility of class mobility through a mix of talent, education, hard work, and luck. My childhood was largely organized around appetites for novels (mostly horror, fantasy, and science fiction), superhero comics, and Star Wars and Star Trek. When I look at the current abundance of superheroes, science fiction, and fantasy in film and television, it feels like the media landscape is being devoured by the nostalgic tastes of my generation of geeky, largely suburban, white men. From around the age of ten, my youth was also marked by a passion for music, which was sparked by seeing bands like Van Halen, Twisted Sister, and Mötley Crüe on the show Video Hits after school. This also led to an interest in playing music: a couple of years of piano, then electric guitar, before settling into electric bass, inspired by Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris and Metallica’s Cliff Burton. My parents separated around 1985. Throughout high school, my siblings and I cycled between my mother’s house in Aylmer and my father’s house in rural Luskville, Quebec. Despite this, I don’t think of my teenage years as particularly

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turbulent or stressful. I was absorbed in playing and listening to music, mostly hard rock and heavy metal, to the point at which my high school grades were mediocre outside music, English, and communications classes. Throughout these years, I also worked for my father, doing basic assistant bookkeeping tasks for his businesses. From his perspective, I imagine this had the value of cultivating a work ethic and numeracy. While my youth was oriented around music, two key events had a profound influence on my later interests in social movements and sociology. This relates to what Mannheim (1952) describes as “political generations,” or the common experience of major political events that define a generation. The first of these was the 1990 Gulf War in Iraq. By this time, I was not hanging around just with other metal heads but also, increasingly, with friends who had more artistic and political leanings. When I skipped class to go to an anti-war rally on Parliament Hill, it was the first time I participated in a protest. The second event was the 1990 standoff between Mohawk protesters and police at Kahnesatake (Oka). This is counted as one of the key events in Indigenous protest that “entered even the broader non-Indigenous consciousness as place names where Indigenous peoples have defended their lands against resource extraction and colonial settlement” (Coburn and Atleo 2016, 184). As a high school student, I had one teacher who complained about the protesters because they disrupted his commute to and from work. By contrast, I remember my music teacher telling us that he was devoting time on weekends to supporting the Mohawk protesters. As an act of symbolic protest, he refused to conduct our high school band in playing “O Canada” for school assembly. He also gave a provocative guest lecture to my history class that challenged Indigenous representation in Quebec history textbooks of the time, which limited it to an opening chapter on Indigenous societies and early contact with French settlers. These events instigated a process of questioning my otherwise taken-for-granted faith in dominant Canadian social institutions and my place in Canadian society. Being provoked by them into reflecting on dominant social norms and structures, it is unsurprising that it was around this time that I also began encountering ideas about atheism, Taoism, and Buddhism. This led to a lasting shift in my personal identity as an ex-Catholic and atheist.

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FROM MUSIC TO ACTIVISM

I finished high school in 1992 and left Ottawa-Gatineau to go to the Musician’s Institute, a music school in Los Angeles. After completing the one-year program, a soon-to-expire student visa forced a move back to Canada. As an aspiring musician, Ottawa felt too small. While I always liked Montreal as a city, my French-language skills felt inadequate. As I knew I did not like Toronto, I moved to Vancouver after a naïve, youthful process of elimination. I spent a year or so teaching bass lessons and playing pick-up gigs with a few different bands. My first secure music job was in a live backup band for a burlesque show. I spent several months touring bars, mostly in smaller towns and cities in British Columbia and Ontario. Playing three or four sets a day, five or six days a week, was a good learning experience. Travelling British Columbia through work was also a great way to get to know the province beyond Vancouver. However, I also learned that I was not cut out to be one of the last people out of the bar every night. I have since been on a PhD supervisory committee for a dissertation concerning the sociology of music. David Chafe’s (2017) research examines music careers and draws on a rich set of interview data. In his dissertation, “Becoming a Musician in St John’s, Newfoundland: Narratives of Rock, Traditional and Classical Musicians,” he devotes a chapter to leaving the profession, which resonates strongly with my own experience. Reading this work, I see that my departure from music as a profession was partly due to a failure to appreciate that music is a profoundly relational field. At the time, I lacked the patience and persistence to engage in the slow work of network building needed for a music career. Like others whose social movement participation helped steer them towards sociology (e.g., see Armstrong, chapter 12, this volume), my engagement with the 1990s protest cycle in British Columbia was a significant influence on my becoming a sociologist. I moved to Vancouver in September 1993, in the middle of a dynamic period of environmental opposition to the industrial clear-cutting of British Columbia’s remaining old-growth forests. This was during the “Clayoquot Summer,” which saw hundreds of environmentalists arrested in acts of civil disobedience against industrial forestry in the Clayoquot Sound region of western Vancouver Island. I soon found myself regularly attending protest rallies in Vancouver or Victoria. As

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David Tindall’s (2002) research on social movements and social networks might have predicted, my pathway to environmental activism was through my social networks. A good friend of mine from high school had also moved to Vancouver. Through him, my first social contacts in Vancouver included several environmentalists. Additionally, I grew up with an interest in outdoor recreation, mostly downhill skiing, with occasional hiking and camping around Gatineau Park in Quebec. Becoming an increasingly committed avid hiker and skier, and spending leisure time in the mountains and forests of British Columbia, worked in parallel with a burgeoning interest in environmental politics and protest and in social-ecological relationships more broadly. During my first several years in Vancouver, a growing interest in environmental and social justice issues led me to participate, though never as a core member, in a range of social movement and alternative media projects, including Spartacus Books (a collective bookstore), Vancouver Co-op Radio, and Food Not Bombs!, as well as to attend protest rallies for a range of issues. In the fall of 1997, I participated in protests against the Vancouver APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit, which received national media attention when police were recorded pepper-spraying protesters. I also spent a few weeks in northern California supporting tree-sit protests to protect old-growth redwood forests. Castells (2004) uses the term “project identity” to describe the way in which dedicated activists often make their participation in a social movement a defining feature of their identity. At this point, I was invested in the project identity of environmentalism, particularly in its more radical and social justice-oriented forms. My transition from aspiring musician to emerging sociologist took place throughout this period of increasing activism. At the same time, I had not excelled in high school, so my next steps were to upgrade my high school equivalencies at Vancouver Community College. The return to school also became an incentive to read and further explore ideas that were coming out of conversations at places like La Quena café, a gathering place for radical environmentalists, socialists, feminists, and anarchists in Vancouver’s East End. My personal reading list at this time was heavy with anarchist writers like Emma Goldman; debates between deep ecology and social ecology; and other critical voices, such as Black Panther activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal’s prison writings. (Jamal was convicted of the

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murder of a Philadelphia police officer, but problems with his conviction have been highlighted in campaigns by human rights organizations.) At the time, my interest in science fiction literature was also expanding into the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, who often incorporated ideas from 1960s and 1970s counterculture and political philosophy. By 1998, I was feeling exhausted by the large city of Vancouver. A few friends had been moving to the rural West Kootenay region, which includes the small city of Nelson. The West Kootenays have a long history as a place that has drawn various political and cultural outsiders. These have included Russian Doukhobor immigrants, Quakers, American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War, back-tothe-landers, and various others interested in sustainability, communal living, New Age practices, and/or outdoor sports in the surrounding mountains, lakes, and rivers. Writing about the legacy of successive waves of countercultural migrations, Rodgers (2014, 153) notes, “Indeed, people continue to be attracted to the region precisely because of the enduring collective identity in which alternative lifestyles are promoted and tolerated. In this regard, the counterculture was important in the West Kootenays because it normalized and even institutionalized experimentation and dissent.” This social dynamic was a large part of what drew me to the region. I moved to the Slocan Valley and lived for several years in a cabin on a mountainside near the small town of Winlaw. This is where I completed my BA degree, with a major in sociology, from Athabasca University. I remained active in environmental groups concerned with industrial forestry practices and the protection of watersheds. I was also active in community-based alternative media, such as the Barter Times (a Nelson-based alternative newspaper) and Kootenay Co-op Radio. FROM ACTIVISM TO ACADEMIA

I grew up in a family experiencing significant intergenerational economic mobility. However, going to university highlighted the gap between economic capital and academic capital. My parents strongly supported intellectual and creative interests but had limited exposure to academic life. My father earned a chartered accounting degree through a Queen’s University distance education program long before the advent of the internet. Around the time of my parents’ separation in the mid-1980s, my mother enrolled at the University of Ottawa as

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a mature student and started but did not complete a BA degree. University degrees, especially graduate degrees, are unusual on both sides of my extended family, and I became the first to obtain a PhD. Though I received a great deal of family support for my education, I entered my BA with a vague understanding of different disciplines. As such, I became a sociologist haphazardly. I picked undergraduate courses that appealed to my interests in environmental issues, social movements, and media studies, which most closely added up to a sociology major. At the time, I saw my BA primarily as providing an intellectual toolkit and credentials to work in the NGO sector. Michael Gismondi’s environmental sociology course – my first exposure to the subdiscipline – helped me gain a better understanding of how environmental problems and conflicts are bound up with culture, social institutions, and structures of power and privilege. This was helpful for demonstrating the value of taking a sociological perspective on environmental conflicts, which pushed me deeper into environmental sociology through graduate studies. My experience as an activist culminated in the summer of 2000 during my BA studies. I was one of several activists arrested that summer for various acts of civil disobedience in protest against watershed logging in the Slocan Valley. The arrest was for disobeying an injunction given by the court to the forestry company that allowed police to remove protesters from a worksite. I went to trial, was found guilty of contempt of court, and spent a couple of weeks on a whirlwind tour of Corrections BC, with a couple of days in Nelson cells, a few days at the now-defunct Rayleigh facility in Kamloops, followed by several days in a minimum-security facility north of Kamloops. Contempt of court charges were used routinely in British Columbia during the 1990s, giving police the power to remove protesters on behalf of forestry companies. Through this mechanism, protesters were arrested, tried, and punished for contempt of the Crown, but the reasons for committing civil disobedience (grievances against forestry companies) were rendered legally irrelevant to the charges. I attempted to make sense of this experience through my sociology education. For a fourth-year directed studies course, I used the British Columbia Supreme Court Reasons for Judgment database to examine judges’ narratives in cases in which activists were on trial for civil disobedience. What emerged was a recurring narrative from Supreme Court judges that all laws must be respected and obeyed, regardless of whether individuals perceive them as just.

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Rather than activists being punished for interfering with forestry companies (or other corporations), they were punished for displaying a lack of appropriate respect for the authority of the Crown. The main argument of this work was that the legal system translated conflict between environmentalists and forestry companies into a conflict between environmentalists and the state. As a result, the ecological or social sustainability of forestry practices was bracketed out of allowable discussion. Based on trying to interpret this activist experience through a sociological lens, I agree with Doherty and Hayes’s (2015, 27) assertion: “[It is] surprising … that the study of social movements has so far afforded relatively little place to analyzing and understanding the role, forms and outcomes of criminal prosecutions in the trajectories of movements and the fates of the individual activists that constitute them.” While I had a gap of several years between high school and university, once I entered academia, I moved through my degrees in quick succession. I went to the University of Victoria for my MA because I did not want to leave British Columbia and did not yet feel ready to move back to the larger city of Vancouver. While this logic for choosing a graduate program is something I discourage among students, this naïve choice worked out extremely well. As a supervisor, Bill Carroll was very good at listening and providing space to talk about my work as it was unfolding. He would ask productive questions and I would always leave our meetings with a new idea to explore. His approach was not directive in the sense of trying to steer my work to mimic his own research program; rather, he was supportive of my intellectual curiosity and provided the necessary encouragement and advice to help me follow my research interests to the best of my ability. I also gained quite a lot from having Martha McMahon as a committee member and from doing her courses in qualitative methods and environmental justice. She encouraged deeper reflection on the impacts of mainstream environmentalism and its frequent aversion to connecting environmental issues to questions of power and social justice. My MA thesis research was a discourse analysis of how forest policy debates under provincial NDP and Liberal governments were represented in the Vancouver Sun, a provincial legacy media outlet. The theoretical standpoint for this research, which reflected Bill Carroll’s mentorship, was oriented around the work of Gramsci, Foucault, and Stuart Hall. This theoretical framework emphasizes the cultural

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dimensions of social power and conflict, and the importance of media access and framing for groups that want to make change. This work resulted in three early publications. One of these was in a special issue of Local Environment on environmental justice in Canada (Stoddart 2007). Along with the edited volume Speaking for Ourselves (Agyeman et al. 2009), these volumes highlighted that the Americanbased environmental justice framework, focused as it is on racialized exposure to environmental risks and harms, is not readily transportable to the Canadian context. Rather, environmental justice in Canada is often bound up with questions of Indigenous rights and reconciliation. This research helped steer me away from an aspiration to use academia to move into a professional activist position. In 2008, the move to the PhD program at UBC also signalled a shift in my research interests. One thing I learned from doing an MA on forestry policy and conflict in British Columbia was that this was an already-crowded research field, with many people doing excellent work in the area. Instead, I turned my attention to the environmental politics of skiing in British Columbia. At the time, I saw little academic engagement with outdoor recreation from an environmental sociology perspective. Environmental discourse often positioned outdoor recreation and tourism as sustainable alternatives to industrial forestry, with little critical reflection on the impacts of these alternative forms of development. I also started skiing when I was five years old, and it was something I had done throughout my life, so there was a personal interest in treating skiing as an object of sociological inquiry. The environmental politics of skiing presented ecological and social contradictions that I wanted to understand. This project was published as the book Making Meaning out of Mountains: The Political Ecology of Skiing (Stoddart 2012). This work approaches the environmental politics of skiing along three dimensions: first, the ways the ski industry frames its use of mountain environments through discourses of nature, wilderness, and sustainability; second, the ways skiers interpret their recreational experience of mountain environments; and third, how environmental and Indigenous movements disrupt ski developments that are framed as problematic, such as the conflict over the Jumbo Glacier Resort in the West Kootenay region. The main argument is that, although skiers and the ski industry position themselves as pro-environmental users of mountain environments, skiing is bound up in ambiguous rela-

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tionships with mountainous environments and environmental sustainability. The book was among the few examples of research bridging environmental sociology and the sociology of sport. By doing so, it added complexity to common understandings of tourism or outdoor sport as environmentally and socially benign alternatives to natural resource extraction. My PhD work was based on qualitative research, combining interviews, field research, and textual analysis. The theoretical standpoint for the project was influenced by actor-network theory and political ecology (through Bruno Labour’s work), science and technology studies (through Donna Haraway’s work), the mobilities paradigm (through John Urry’s work), and discourse analysis (through Michel Foucault’s work). What these approaches share is an emphasis on the ways social life is accomplished through our interactions with nonhuman environments and forms of life as well as mediated by technologies and objects. This theoretical framework points to the interplay between culture and discourse, and the materiality of nature and technology. This was a useful framework for analyzing skiing as a practice that connects human participants, a range of technologies (from skis and boots, to chairlifts and lodge buildings, to cars and highways), mountain environments and their inhabitants, and the discourses circulated by ski magazines (as well as by ski companies or social movement websites). This project evolved through conversations with supervisory committee members Thomas Kemple and Brian Wilson as well as a range of other UBC faculty. David Tindall was my supervisor and mentor at UBC. I learned a great deal from him, both in terms of his input into my work and by working as an assistant on his environmental movements research. As a faculty member, I try to implement the best of what I experienced in our working relationship. I benefited from Tindall’s openness to working with students with divergent methodological and theoretical interests and from finding that I could articulate the value of my theoretical or methodological choices to someone who did not share the same perspectives. I was also encouraged to work with Tindall’s data and take the initiative to lead collaborative writing projects. This resulted in several papers that have a different approach than the work we produce separately. Our collaborative work reflects Tindall’s sense of analytical precision, background in quantitative methods, and affiliation with American fields of environmental sociology and social movements research as well as

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my greater affiliation with qualitative research and European social theory. We share an interest in a research paradigm that David Morgan (2007) terms “methodological pragmatism,” which attempts to circumvent qualitative/quantitative research dichotomies without getting caught up in epistemological debates about the superiority of one approach over the other. Our ongoing collaborations allow us to go beyond our respective comfort zones and to be more methodologically omnivorous. Tindall also invited me to join one of the first meetings of the COMPON (COMparing climate change POlicy Networks) project, convened by Jeffrey Broadbent. Since 2007, COMPON – which examines climate change media discourse networks and policy networks – has evolved into a transnational project with case studies in seventeen societies. After two unsuccessful bids for SSHRC support, we were successful on our third attempt to secure funding. I have since heard the advice that it is worth giving a research idea three tries before giving up on it. The eventual success of our three-year effort to get the Canadian COMPON project off the ground supports this view. It also underscores that academic success is grounded in long processes of revising and resubmitting work, which requires persistence, a thick skin, and trying to hear and incorporate criticism instead of becoming defensive or giving up in disappointment. Tindall led the policy network analysis (supported by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant), while I led the media discourse network analysis (supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant). The media discourse phase resulted in several papers, while we are wrapping up data analysis on the policy networks phase (Stoddart et al. 2016; Stoddart and Smith 2016; Stoddart and Tindall 2015). While much of my research program has a regional focus on social-environmental well-being, COMPON is a venue for pursuing research with a national and international scope. Throughout my PhD, and through Tindall’s influence, I also began to realize the importance of academic conferences as social fields for mentoring and network building. While conferences may have utilitarian value for making one’s work visible to colleagues, their greater value is in the working relationships and friendships that evolve over time. After a few years of taking a more omnivorous approach to trying out different conferences, I gravitated towards the two fields that felt like the best fit: the Canadian Sociological Asso-

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ciation and the International Sociological Association (particularly RC24: Environment and Society), which make up the core of my conference time. I met John Urry at the 2008 International Sociological Association meetings in Barcelona. Work by Urry and his co-authors had influenced my PhD work. He is a key figure in the “mobilities paradigm,” which examines the ways in which vehicles (cars, buses, trains, airplanes), infrastructure (highways and roads, gas stations, parking lots, airports), and people (drivers and passengers) work as social-technological systems that enable and constrain mobility, and which have ecological consequences in terms of resource costs (e.g., oil and minerals) and pollution and carbon emissions (Sheller and Urry 2006). His work is also prominent in the sociology of tourism and emphasizes how the built and natural environments are structured and remade to produce tourist experiences (Urry and Larsen 2011). Furthermore, in connecting these two areas through the lens of “tourism mobilities,” Sheller and Urry (2004) emphasize that seemingly localized tourism sites and experiences are tied to much broader networks of transportation and media communication. Throughout our correspondence, I was repeatedly struck, despite being an unknown, emerging academic, by how quickly and generously he responded to my inquiries. Conversations with John led me further into the sociology of oil, including beginning to teach the oil and development course at Memorial University. They also helped lay the conceptual groundwork for my current five-year project, The Oil-Tourism Interface and Social-Ecological Change in the North Atlantic. The period from 2008 to 2010 was marked by change and the multiple moves that are typical of academic employment-related geographical mobility. After finishing my PhD in the summer of 2008, I was failing to get most things for which I was applying. This reinforces the notion that an implicit criterion for succeeding in academic work is an ability to persist despite disappointment, rejection, and frustration. Fortunately, I was able to continue as a research assistant for David Tindall for a few months and then got work as a sessional instructor at the University of Victoria (UVic). It was great to return to UVic for my first teaching experience, where I taught introduction to sociology and social inequality. It was during this year as a new teacher that the lessons of music school re-emerged. Time spent on

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stagecraft, the regular experience of being in front of an audience, and voice classes all felt relevant in a way I had not anticipated when I left music as an aspiring professional. Of more personal significance, I began dating Kumi Sakai in the winter of 2008. We married in Victoria in the spring of 2009. I spent the last year of my PhD living back in the West Kootenay region and occasionally travelling to UBC. Kumi is originally from Japan, near the city of Nagoya, and had moved to British Columbia several years earlier. She finished the Early Childhood Education Program at the College of the Rockies and was working at a daycare in Nelson. We met though aikido, a Japanese martial art that, for many years, was a significant part of my life outside academia. She is a kind, generous, and supportive partner who helps me maintain a work-life balance by sharing interests in art and culture, outdoor recreation, and travel. FROM WEST COAST TO EAST COAST

While working as a sessional instructor at UVic, I was putting out job and post-doctoral applications, the bulk of which was unsuccessful. This reflects, at least in part, the competitive level of the academic job market since the 2008 economic crisis, coupled with the removal of mandatory retirement and ongoing shifts towards more contractual rather than tenure-track hiring. Although this is a common experience for many of my academic generation, it is not a new phenomenon. As Carroll (chapter 11, this volume) reminds us, those who entered the job market in the early 1980s were likewise entering a field characterized by recession and “a period of seemingly endless austerity” (see also Riggins, chapter 19, this volume; and Nakhaie, chapter 13, this volume). For many within my academic generation, it is normal to move across multiple short-term positions – often involving repeated moves between cities or provinces – before landing a permanent position (an uncertain outcome). As Béland (chapter 6, this volume) notes, “mobility is a great asset in academia,” but it is also an expectation of the contemporary academic career path. As Matthews (chapter 5, this volume) aptly demonstrates, this is not a new phenomenon. It has been characteristic of academic work for multiple generations. When I went on the market, I hoped to stay in British Columbia or else to relocate to Atlantic Canada. I consider myself

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lucky to have been able to land a job within these parameters. Since then, I have repeatedly seen grad students grappling with these expectations of geographical mobility. As mentors, I believe we can better communicate to our grad students that contemporary academic life comes with the expectation that they are willing to be geographically mobile. Fortunately, I landed a Killam post-doctoral fellowship, with Howard Ramos at Dalhousie, for the 2010–11 academic year. Howard and I met at the 2007 Canadian Sociological Association conference, where he was a discussant on a paper David Tindall and I presented. His comments were useful, and the encounter left a positive impression. When I approached Howard about serving as a post-doc supervisor, he was supportive and generous with his time and input. In the summer of 2010, shortly after our wedding, Kumi and I drove a U-Haul from Victoria to Halifax. This meant leaving British Columbia after sixteen years. During my time at Dalhousie, I extended my PhD research into a comparative study of two episodes of social movement mobilization around outdoor recreation: Jumbo Glacier Resort ski development in British Columbia and off-highway vehicle use in the Tobeatic Wilderness Area of Nova Scotia. At Dalhousie, I once again found myself as a primarily qualitative researcher (with affinities for actor-network theory, the mobilities paradigm, and – increasingly – Castells’s approach to social networks and communication power) working with a supervisor whose orientations were more quantitative and empirical. These working relationships and their productive tensions have brought me to an omnivorous and pragmatic approach to theory and methodology. Embracing mixedmethods research collaboration and a standpoint of methodological pragmatism is an outcome of my mentoring experience. At the same time, this approach is consistent with a tendency I see among my academic generation to be less concerned with internecine battles over quantitative and qualitative research epistemologies (something that previously characterized Canadian sociology). I landed a tenure-track job at Memorial University in 2010. I count myself fortunate that I was able to get a tenure-track position after two years of short-term appointments as a sessional instructor and post-doc, though this required moving from British Columbia to Nova Scotia and then to Newfoundland and Labrador. Nevertheless, I see my work incorporating cosmopolitan and local threads from both factions of the department (see Riggins’s chapter, this volume).

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During my first years at Memorial, my research program had two main parallel streams. One was the COMPON project (described above); the other was based on a SSHRC Standard Research Grant project titled “Puffins, Kayaks and Oil Rigs: Shifting Modes of Society-Environment Interaction on the Newfoundland Coast.” This project focuses on the way nature-based tourism is changing social conceptions of how communities live with, and make a living from, coastal environments. As the tourism industry has become increasingly important, tourism promotion emphasizes spectacular coastal landscapes, wildlife, national parks, and outdoor recreation alongside more established discourses that focus on the history and perceived authenticity of rural outport culture (Stoddart and Sodero 2015; Stoddart and Graham 2016). However, while tourism discourse relies heavily on nature imagery, and often invokes notions of sustainability, network ties between the tourism sector and environmental organizations are weak (Stoddart and Nezhadhossein 2016). Tourism-environmentalism alignments are not well developed, though they do emerge through specific projects, such as opposition to resource extraction projects (e.g., the Old Harry proposed oil exploration project in the Gulf of St Lawrence, off the west coast of the island). This line of research grew to incorporate nested case studies focused on the Labrador Straits and Burin Peninsula regions of the province as well as collaborative research on the Shorefast Foundation, social enterprise, and tourism development on Fogo Island. More recently, I have been working on a five-year SSHRC Insight Grant project titled “The Oil-Tourism Interface and Social-Ecological Change in the North Atlantic.” This project examines how societies across the North Atlantic – Denmark, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Norway, and Scotland – navigate the relationships and points of tension between offshore oil and nature-based tourism as development pathways. In attending to the various “contact points” between offshore oil and nature-based tourism sectors, as well as environmental movement engagement across these sectors, this project draws inspiration from a theme that has intrigued me in Bill Carroll’s work: his dual interest in studying both the economically and politically powerful as well as social movement mobilization around issues of social justice and sustainability (see Carroll, chapter 11, this volume).

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The oil-tourism interface project knits together different interests that characterize my previous work. First, it brings together an interest in environmental conflicts related to extractive resource economies and an interest in the social dimensions of outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism, which Timothy Luke (2002) refers to as “attractive economies.” Second – and the more challenging part of the project – is trying to balance grounded, regional research and work that has a broader comparative scope with fieldwork carried out in a range of sites across the North Atlantic. Recently, I have been working on elaborating a theoretical standpoint initially defined as “networked political ecology” (Stoddart and Graham 2018; Stoddart and Nezhadhossein 2016), which my collaborators and I are refashioning as “relational political ecology” in our current book project (Stoddart et al. 2020). Broadly speaking, political ecology is a theoretical orientation that attends to entanglements between non-human nature, technologies, culture and discourse, and political and economic forces. However, while political ecology is useful as an overarching orienting perspective, it can be overly abstract in terms of providing specific theoretical concepts and methodological tools for analyzing the processes and networks that make up these entanglements. Relational political ecology highlights the utility of networkoriented theoretical and methodological approaches as tools for ad-vancing political ecology. Influences on this approach include socialnetwork analysis, actor-network theory, the mobilities paradigm, Castells’s approach to networks and communication power, and the players and arenas approach to social movement studies. Despite their differences, these approaches share an emphasis on relationality among social groups, technologies, environments, social structures, and discourses, and may be categorized as part of a broader shift towards what is being called “relational sociology” (Crossley 2011). Furthermore, while grounded in sociology, relational political ecology incorporates transdisciplinary influences, especially from geography, political science, and history. This approach is useful because it provides a complementary set of conceptual and methodological tools that strengthen the analysis of the complex relationships among politics and governance, social movement engagement, ecological systems, political economy, and cultural representations and discourses. Given my interest in relationships between extractive and attractive economies, relational

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political ecology is productive for examining when and how contact points between different modes of development emerge and evolve. Conversely, it helps explain why modes of development that share ecological space may be treated as silos in cultural or political arenas until moments of contention arise. FROM ACTIVISM TO ACADEMIA , REVISITED

I make a regular practice of preparing non-academic summary reports from my research projects, which can be shared with key stakeholders as well as research participants. In the recent debate over the possibility of fracking (hydraulic fracturing) near Gros Morne National Park, the report from the Puffins, Kayaks and Oil Rigs project was submitted to the Newfoundland and Labrador Hydraulic Fracturing Review Panel. Our work was cited in its final report in the recommendation that any discussion of fracking in western Newfoundland must ensure the integrity of Gros Morne as a key tourism attractor for the province. Catherine Potvin, a biologist and Canada Research Chair at McGill University, invited me to join the Sustainable Canada Dialogues project. This is a transdisciplinary network of over sixty environmental scientists and social scientists. The project initially grew out of a collective frustration with the Harper government’s poor performance on climate change as well as its attitudes towards environmental science. The project was a non-partisan intervention in the lead-up to the 2015 federal election and Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) climate meetings. Through a consensus process, we articulated ten “policy orientations” that were shared with all the major parties. The initiative received quite a bit of mass media attention, particularly in Quebec, where Potvin has become an important public intellectual. Our most recent project was a report on low-carbon energy transitions prepared for the Generation Energy initiative of Natural Resources Canada (see Potvin et al. 2017). Media attention can have a negative side. A few years ago, I got a series of hostile, aggressive e-mails, tweets, and direct messages. This caught me off guard, and it took a bit of web searching to figure out where this was coming from. One of the papers from my PhD research on skiing, which concentrated on gender, place, and sport (Stoddart 2011), was attacked in a couple of anti-academic blog

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posts as an example of feminist analysis run amok. The authors of the blog did not appear to have read the article but instead translated the title and abstract into an oversimplified claim that “ski slopes are sexist.” I ignored the trolls, and the incident passed after a couple of days. However, a few months later, it resurfaced in the Globe and Mail in one of Margaret Wente’s annual attacks on the perceived absurdities of academia. The couple of sentences on my work read as a quick summary of the blog posts, with no real engagement with my work or the broader context of the significant research literature on gender and sport. The episode was embarrassing and unnecessarily distracting. However, I did not want to waste more mental energy defending an article published in 2011 based on research carried out in 2006–08. Adopting a strategy of non-response to this episode is not to downplay the potential seriousness of having our work misrepresented in the public sphere. Not long after the Wente column appeared, Vic Satzewich (2015), sociology professor at McMaster, had his Porter Prize-winning book, Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets In, publicly misrepresented by Conservative Party leadership candidate Kellie Leitch. She misrepresented Satzewich’s research to support her adversarial stance on Canadian immigration policy. Looking beyond Canada to the United States, mass media discourse of a post-factual political terrain, as well as attempts by the socalled “Alt-Right” to document and monitor radical academics, illustrates the reputational and professional risks for researchers who engage in public sociology. Another worrisome trend is that personal statements made in the public spheres of social media may also be used to undermine academics and may have professional repercussions for those who engage in public debate. While my sociological practice remains oriented towards research more than towards public engagement and media-work, I believe these different orientations can be connected in productive and enriching ways, while also having political efficacy. At the same time, I am wary of the stance of the activist academic, which I define as using our academic positions or platforms to engage in activism that is detached from our research expertise. In other words, I see the activist academic orientation as putting activism first and academic research second. I am mistrustful of this stance because the strength of academic participation in the public sphere rests on our perceived

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credibility and independence. When we use our academic platforms to advance our personal opinions and agendas that are not grounded in research expertise we risk undermining that credibility. CONCLUSION : AXIOMS FOR SOCIOLOGY AS A PRACTICE

In 2014, a few months before turning forty, I was honoured to receive the Early Investigator Award from the Canadian Sociological Association. Around the same time, CBC Radio 3 gave Joel Plaskett, a Halifaxbased musician who is about the same age as me, a Lifetime Achievement award. Having made the move from music to sociology, it struck me that it is good to be in a field where forty years old is viewed as being early in one’s career. Recognizing the hubris of trying to offer any lessons from my current vantage point, I will conclude with four axioms that reflect my current understanding of sociology as a practice. Sociology is performative. How we present our work matters, and being attentive to the interests and communication styles of different audiences is important. Research articles, non-academic reports, opeds, media interviews, conference presentations, grant proposals, and teaching are discrete genres of communication and require different types of performance as well as different skills to perform them well. Being a musician and a sociologist are in some ways similar. Sociology is relational. This is one of the main themes taken up by Daniel Béland (chapter 6, this volume). Through our social network ties, we gain a great deal of insight from the mentoring of senior colleagues, from discussion with our peers, and from being generous with our time with students. The social networks in our field also help us acquire a broader understanding of what is going on outside the narrow confines of our own research agendas. They can lead into productive collaborative relationships and new research directions we never imagined. This also includes opening our networks beyond our own disciplines. John Robinson (personal correspondence), an environmental sustainability researcher, has described himself as “undisciplined.” I like this phrase, though it may seem oxymoronic to those familiar with my personal work habits, which are highly structured. Similarly, Stewart Lockie (personal correspondence), an environmental sociologist at the James Cooke Institute in Australia, has wryly observed that what’s lacking in sociology is not new or better theory but more respect for other disciplines.

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Sociology is collective action. By doing solid research and making it visible beyond our disciplinary spheres, we can have social relevance and political efficacy. Thinking of sociology as collective action also points to the institutional contexts of our universities and professional associations as the “arenas” that facilitate or constrain this work (Jasper and Duyvendak 2015). Our institutional contexts provide access to resources and privileges that can be leveraged to do solid research with social relevance. At the same time, an engaged sociological practice can be challenging while navigating the professional and institutional expectations of the job within the context of an increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized system of higher education. Sociology is social learning. We have the potential to keep learning from collaborators and colleagues, students, and research participants throughout our careers. These interactions are often supportive and reaffirm the value of what we do. However, this includes the uncomfortable tasks of learning from criticism. We can also learn a great deal from talking with government, social movements, community organizations, and media workers. It is important to keep a curious and exploratory attitude towards research and teaching. I see this characteristic in those senior colleagues I look to as a model for my sociological practice over the coming decades. REFERENCES Agyeman, Julian, Peter Cole, Randolph Haluza-DeLay, and Pat O’Reiley, eds. 2009. Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Castells, Manuel. 2004. The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Chafe, D.B. 2017. “Becoming a Musician in St. John’s, Newfoundland: Narratives of Rock, Traditional and Classical Musicians.” PhD diss., Memorial University. Coburn, Elaine, and Cliff (Kam’ayaam/Chachim’multhnii) Atleo. 2016. “Not Just another Social Movement: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence.” In A World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-Hegemony, ed. William K. Carroll and Kanchan Sarker, 116–94. Winnipeg, MB: ARP Books. Crossley, Nick. 2011. Towards Relational Sociology. London: Routledge. Doherty, Brian, and Graeme Hayes. 2015. “Criminal Trials as Strategic Arenas.” In Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged, ed. Jan Willem Duyvendak and James M. Jasper, 27–51. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Jasper, James M., and Jan Willem Duyvendak, eds. 2015. Players and Arenas: The Interactive Dynamics of Protest. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Luke, Timothy W. 2002. “On the Political Economy of Clayoquot Sound: The Uneasy Transition from Extractive to Attractive Models of Development.” In A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound, ed. Warren Magnusson and Karena Shaw, 91–112. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1952. The Problem of Generations. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge: Collected Works, vol. 5, ed. Paul Kecskemeti, 276–320. London: Routledge. Morgan, David L. 2007. “Paradigms Lost and Pragmatism Regained: Methodological Implications of Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 1 (1): 48–76. Potvin, Catherine et al. 2017. “Stimulating a Canadian Narrative for Climate.” FACETS 2 (1): 131–49. Rodgers, Kathleen. 2014. Welcome to Resisterville: American Dissidents in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press. Satzewich, Vic. 2015. Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets In. Vancouver: UBC Press. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2004. “Places to Play, Places in Play.” In Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play, ed. Mimi Sheller and John Urry, 1–10. London: Routledge. – 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning, A 38 (2): 207–26. Stoddart, Mark C.J. 2007. “‘British Columbia Is Open for Business’: Environmental Justice and Working Forest News in the Vancouver Sun.” Local Environment 12 (6): 663–74. – 2011. “Constructing Masculinized Sportscapes: Skiing, Gender and Nature in British Columbia, Canada.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 16 (1): 108–24. – 2012. Making Meaning out of Mountains: The Political Ecology of Skiing. Vancouver: UBC Press. Stoddart, Mark C.J., and Paula Graham. 2016. “Nature, History, and Culture as Tourism Attractors: The Double Translation of Insider and Outsider Media.” Nature and Culture 11 (1): 22–43. – 2018. “Offshore Oil, Environmental Movements, and the Oil-Tourism Interface: The Old Harry Conflict on Canada’s East Coast.” Sociological Inquiry 88 (2): 274–96.

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Stoddart, Mark C.J., Randolph Haluza-DeLay, and David B. Tindall. 2016. “Canadian News Media Coverage of Climate Change: Historical Trajectories, Dominant Frames and International Comparisons.” Society and Natural Resources 29 (2): 218–32. Stoddart, Mark C.J., Alice Mattoni, and John McLevey. 2020. Industrial Development and Eco-Tourisms: Is Co-Existence Possible between Oil Exploration and Nature Conservation? Basingstock, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoddart, Mark C.J., and Elahe Nezhadhossein. 2016. “Is Nature-Oriented Tourism a Pro-Environmental Practice? Examining Tourism-Environmentalism Alignments through Discourse Networks and Intersectoral Relationships.” Sociological Quarterly 57 (3): 544–68. Stoddart, Mark C.J., and Jillian Smith. 2016. “The Endangered Arctic, the Arctic as Resource Frontier: Canadian News Media Narratives of Climate Change and the North.” Canadian Review of Sociology 53 (3): 316–36. Stoddart, Mark C.J., and Stephanie Sodero. 2015. “From Fisheries Decline to Tourism Destination: Mass Media, Tourism Mobility, and the Newfoundland Coastal Environment.” Mobilities 10 (3): 445–65. Stoddart, Mark C.J., and David Tindall. 2015. “Canadian News Media and the Cultural Dynamics of Multilevel Climate Governance.” Environmental Politics 24 (3): 401–22. See Sustainable Canada Dialogues. http://www.sustainablecanadadialogues.ca/en/scd. Tindall, David B. 2002. “Social Networks, Identification and Participation in an Environmental Movement: Low-Medium Cost Activism within the British Columbia Wilderness Preservation Movement.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 39 (4): 413–52. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Los Angeles: Sage.

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The Backstory

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9 Reflections on a Sociological Career: An Academic Autobiography Wallace Clement

THE EARLY DAYS

I was born in 1949 and raised in Niagara-on-the-Lake during the postwar “baby boom” within proximity to the United States. This shaped my early life. My father only achieved grade eight and went to work on local farms, in canneries, and to do high-steel work before joining the army on 6 November 1942. He was discharged on 5 April 1946. He had been a “semi-professional” hockey prodigy, playing throughout Ontario as a youth. He signed with the Detroit Red Wings for $500 before the war, but, due to medical difficulties while overseas, his hockey career was cut short. My mother’s family, which crossed the border with the United States, moved to upper-state New York from Niagara when my mother entered high school. Against significant family pressure, she insisted on remaining in school and graduated with commercial skills. At the end of the war, my parents met at a Niagara fruit-canning factory where she worked in the office and he did line maintenance. My parents moved into a newly constructed veteran’s home they initially rented and later purchased. My father, Harold, worked for a home bread delivery company (Mammy’s Bread), later transferring to a home milk delivery company (Avondale Dairies), where he remained until his retirement. As a youth, I regularly worked with him during weekends and holidays. My mother, Marjorie (née Howarth), worked part-time as a bookkeeper (at a local coal delivery company and, subsequently, a local hardware store) and, later, as the first female

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school bus driver in the Niagara area. I have two brothers, Jack and Tom, both younger, and when they left home, my mother attended Niagara College to obtain a library assistant’s diploma. She then worked for several years in the local library system. My father’s mother, Violet (née McPhee), ran a small boarding house while caring for my grandfather, Norton, who had suffered a stroke, which paralyzed his right side when he was sixty-one, forcing them off the farm. My grandfather taught himself to paint left-handed following his stroke. He produced a significant output of fine paintings, reproducing local scenes and the Halliburton highlands (near Algonquin Park) where my grandmother’s family lived. He lived another seventeen years. My mother’s mother, Mona Wilson, worked as a cook and housekeeper at various local wealthy homes and, for a while, as cook at the local golf club. This gave me some direct “downstairs” access to (as well as insight into) “local wealth.” In Niagara, this meant wealthy families who summered from Buffalo (an example being the Rand Estate) and (later) from Toronto. There was a clear upper class, but, in Niagara, it was primarily “on vacation” or retired. The town itself was mainly a service centre, with vibrant shops and services, for the surrounding agricultural community. During the 1960s, the Shaw Festival arrived and the invasion of the Toronto middle class followed. These people transformed both the residential market and the commercial spaces. During American prohibition (1920–33), Niagara thrived as a recreational destination. Many hotels were built and prospered. When prohibition ended, these hotels declined. Not until the early 1970s, after I had left for university, was Niagara revitalized as an international tourist destination and retirement place for many Torontonians. My father, besides being a deliveryman, was also a local politician. First on the town council, then on the regional council, and finally on some provincial boards such as those governing the Niagara Park’s Commission and the Bruce Trail. He was conservative in many respects, and he was also a pioneer “tree hugger” conservationist devoted to protecting old trees, green spaces, and parks. He also dedicated a good deal of his time to creating recreational leagues and facilities for the community. His heritage was United Empire Loyalist, and he took pride in being a veteran. At some point in my youth, he undertook a course of study with Dale Carnegie on “how to win friends and influence people,” during which he gained some confidence with regard to public speaking.

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Not until well after I left town and he passed did I understand what an impact he had had on community building. In 2010, I attended an unveiling of a plaque in his honour in the newly created community centre, which he had initiated. I heard about a man I did not recognize – articulate, persuasive, and dedicated to the community. I did know about his dedication to community, but at home he said very little. Ours was a female-dominated household, always full of family (mainly aunts) with a multitude of stories. My father was someone who did things with you – took you places or to activities – but he was not much for small talk. Only when my sons were teenagers did I hear from them what he had done during the war. All I knew about his wartime experiences was that he played hockey to entertain the troops. The war was still too close for him when I was young, but he felt at ease telling my sons about his time in the war zone and his job as a courier between camps and the front line. I had never heard about or thought about university while growing up. School was very functional for me – passing was adequate. I took joy in sports and other aspects of life. Not until about grade ten, when our class went on a field trip to McKinnon’s (a General Motors plant) and the Ontario Paper Company, did I realize that I did not want to work at these places that employed so many of the local men. I already knew I did not want to be a farmer or deliveryman. I asked a teacher what one did to get other kinds of work, and the response was: “Go to university, but you need the grades.” Only then did I apply myself and systematically improve my grades. I decided to go to the University of Western Ontario to study “business,” not knowing about other options. It turns out that there was a university experience in my family background. I only became aware of Uncle Fred in my mid-teens (F.M. Clement 1969). He was my grandfather’s younger brother. Fred had left the farm and gone to the Ontario Agriculture College in Guelph from 1907 to 1911 (only in 1964 did it become known as the University of Guelph). After working at the Ontario Horticulture Experimental Station in Vineland as director, then as a staff member at Macdonald College, Fred travelled west to Vancouver where, as a professor of horticulture, he become one of the founders of the University of British Columbia. For many years, he was dean of agriculture and was commissioner for the Dyking, Drainage, and Irrigation Commission Report (December 1916, 2 vols.) and the Report of the

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Royal Commission Investigating the Fruit Industry (1930, 2 vols.). He retired as dean the year I was born. I met Fred once when he made a trip to Niagara in the 1960s. I was impressed. OFF TO UNIVERSIT Y

My background had no direct impact on my decision to attend university, but several of my best friends, both growing up and in high school, also went on to university. Wayne Marino, my closest friend before high school, went to McMaster University and eventually became a professor of kinesiology at the University of Windsor. Two other close friends, brothers Steve and Bill King, went to university: Bill to Queen’s to become a lawyer and Steve with me to Western, eventually going on to the University of Bristol for graduate studies in English drama. We were a new era in which working-class young men saw university as a way to a different life. I benefited greatly from the Ontario student loans plan. My parents were not capable of providing any financial support. The first $600 of government support was an interest-free loan (until six months after leaving university) and the rest was a grant. I married and we had our first son during my first year of studies. My wife, Elsie (née Andres), was a Mennonite. We were from “different sides of the track,” and staying in Niagara was not a lifestyle option. Did this background shape my pursuit of sociology? Not initially. As I said, I was intent on business school. In my first year at Western I took the usual business course and a series of electives. I enjoyed my business studies and performed exceptionally well. The case study format fit my skill set. I could read the case and then tell a compelling story based upon its elements. I felt less comfortable with my fellow students, mainly men whose fathers were from business. My home life, based on storytelling that came from my mother’s side, was an asset. The sociology course I took was a full year and had five core books. We were to write essays on each book, the most memorable of which was John Porter’s The Vertical Mosaic (TVM). Remember, this was 1968 and TVM was just published in 1965. What good fortune! I had a mature teaching assistant for my sociology course, and he took me to meet the professor: together they advised me to change universities if I wished to pursue sociology. Western was known at the time for demography, and they recommended either Carleton or McMaster. I

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chose McMaster, largely because my friend Wayne was there and it was closer to Niagara. McMaster provided me with an excellent foundation in sociology, both classical and critical. I had solid foundations in theory and methods with Peter Pineo and Frank Jones. I learned a great deal from two religion courses taught by J.J. (Hans) Mol, an eminent international sociologist of religion. I also took several excellent courses in political science, including one with Robert Agger, author of The Rulers and the Ruled. My main critical influence was one Dusky Lee Smith, a disciple of C. Wright Mills. Dusky helped me read the classics of American sociology with a critical eye. He was a rebel and had used the term “sunshine boys” in a 1964 article describing leading American sociologists (Smith 1971). This followed Mills’s use of “sunshine moralists” to describe a primary tendency of this group in his 1959 classic The Sociological Imagination, a book that shaped my intellectual career. It was his The Power Elite, published in 1956, that gave me a research direction for my graduate studies. GRADUATE SCHOOL AT CARLETON

When I looked to graduate school, Carleton was the obvious choice: although I received a generous offer from McMaster, I went to Carleton even though it offered less funding. In my fourth year I turned to TVM and appendix 2, “The Concentration of Economic Power,” to find that the data were compiled for 1951, the first study of the many drawn together in TVM. I put together a proposal to replicate the study for the current period. In the spring of 1972, I went to Ottawa to visit with Professor Porter, who was most gracious and welcoming. He gave me a copy of “Research Biography of a Macrosociological Study: The Vertical Mosaic,” which he had published in 1970 (Coleman et al. 1970). By the time I entered the master’s program at Carleton in September 1972, I hit the ground running. John Porter was my supervisor and Dennis Forcese my committee member. John passed on to me his set of edge-notched McBee cards, complete with the notching tool and search needles for the Canadian economic elite of 1951. These are needle cards with text, each representing a member of the economic elite. I replicated his data for 1972, having the enormous advantage of tracing patterns over time. Since the essence of sociology is the study of social change, this enabled me to gain a key perspective. Between

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1951 and 1972, a great deal of change occurred in the Canadian economy, especially in terms of the tremendous rise in foreign, mainly American, investment. That became the starting point for my account and explanation. It also ventured into the realm of Canadian political economy. I defended my master’s thesis in August of 1973. I immediately entered the doctoral program at Carleton, having briefly flirted with the idea of attending the University of Chicago or the London School of Economics (LSE). In the first term of my doctoral program, while John Porter was a visiting professor at Harvard, Dennis Forcese recommended I submit my master’s thesis to the Carleton Library Original series. I was doing a study of the media elite for a course and decided to include it in the book, shifting from the economic elite to the corporate elite. This irked Porter because I stressed the overlap of these two elites while he preferred a plural elite model. In his foreword to The Canadian Corporate Elite, he challenged my perspective on relations between elites as being influenced by but distinct from C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite (the primary difference being around the place of the military in American society as part of what Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex”). John was less upset with me than with the radical critiques that had been mounted against TVM: “Wallace Clement is not wholly in the company of the carpers. He is radical in that, like many of us, he does not see the key to human welfare lying within the institutions of modern capitalism, but he has the good sense to realize that social change depends upon the accumulation of evidence that leads us ineluctably to conclude that we must bring it about.” He generously concludes his preface with: “Clement’s work is impressive and it pleases me that he has found my work a place from which to take off and to make his singular contribution” (Porter 1975, x–xi, xv). I entered the PhD program with Porter as my supervisor and Forcese as a committee member. I added Leo Panitch from political science, who had recently joined Carleton after having studied with Ralph Miliband at LSE. Leo was an important influence at Carleton in that he introduced recent Marxist authors, such as Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, and Antonio Gramsci. I have previously told the story about being introduced to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Clement 1979b), which had been translated from Italian only in 1971. When I took my new discovery to Porter, he recounted how he had been

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introduced to Gramsci’s work while in Italy during the Second World War and had considered translating Gramsci before being drawn to TVM as his doctoral project. During my doctoral program, I began publishing some articles and chapters. My first publication, “The Changing Structure of the Canadian Economy,” appeared in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology (Clement 1974). This was the context piece from my master’s thesis, to be followed shortly by “Inequality of Access: Characteristics of the Canadian Corporate Elite” (Clement 1975). I also entered into the Canadian political economy debates with a chapter titled “The Canadian Bourgeoisie: Merely Comprador?” in Imperialism, Nationalism and Canada (Clement 1977a). My most significant chapter was the one in The Canadian State, edited by Leo Panitch (Clement 1977c). This book was an assemblage of the items in a speaker’s series on the topics, which strongly influenced my approach and introduced me to life-long friends and colleagues like Rianne Mahon. This experience became foundational for my Canadian political economy contributions (more later). I decided to build on my master’s project for my dissertation by doing a comparison between the Canadian and American economic elites. From the outset it was more than a comparison: it was also supposed to show their connection. John never wavered in his support for my project. While he was at Harvard for the year of my course work, we carried on a correspondence. He returned for my three comprehensive examinations, which I defended early in my second year. By this time, I was becoming somewhat well known. On the coat-tails of TVM, The Canadian Corporate Elite’s sales soared, aided by being reviewed in an op-ed piece by Ed Broadbent, then leader of the New Democratic Party, and inspired by the rumoured merger of Power Corporation (Paul Demarais) and Argus Corporation (Conrad Black). This provoked the call for the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration and provided a good deal of publicity for my master’s thesis. I tried to avoid the distraction and focus on my dissertation. Later, I published a critique of the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration (Clement 1979a). When I was in the doctoral program, the expectation was that all doctoral candidates in residence would attend a regular doctoral seminar. Second-year candidates presented their own work. My course paper, “Macrosociological Approaches toward a ‘Canadian Sociolo-

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gy,’” for the doctoral seminar in sociology led by John Porter and Zbigniew Jordan (a Weberian theorist), became the opening article in the first edition of the department’s graduate student journal Alternate Routes (Clement 1977d). Presented at the Learneds, John Porter was the commentator and the panel included Hubert Guindon from Concordia University, who became a friend and an inspiration for me, and Patricia Marchak from the University of British Columbia, who became a great friend and colleague. John was generous towards my paper. Indeed, he was beginning at this point to move back into a macrosociological approach and away from the large-scale survey research, which characterized much of the post-TVM phase of his life. My closest colleague during my doctoral studies was Dennis Olsen (1980), the author of The Canadian State Elite, whose dissertation was also done under John Porter’s supervision. Together, Dennis and I explored a lot of questions on macrosociology and power studies. We did a reading course with John Porter on this topic. Dennis was a great teacher who had worked for many years as a Bell Canada lineman before returning to university. I worked as a teaching assistant for Dennis in his Canadian society course and learned much from him about the craft of teaching. Later, I taught Canadian society as a summer course prior to moving to my first job. Other students who worked with John included Maria Barrados, who went on to be president and chair of the Public Service Commission of Canada; Hugh McRoberts, who went on to a career as assistant auditor general; and Angus Reid, who also worked with Bruce McFarlane and went on to do some polling and became the chair of the Angus Reid Institute. My doctoral dissertation was defended in August of 1976 and soon thereafter was published as Continental Corporate Power: Economic Elite Linkages between Canada and the United States (Clement 1977b). I was proud of this study: it was more refined and better edited than The Canadian Corporate Elite. My only regret was the title. After it was in press (literally months following its defence as a dissertation), Mel Watkins, who had been one of my examiners, suggested the title Unequal Alliance. That title really did capture the key argument. I focused not only on a comparison but also on the unequal continental power structure. The book’s dedication read: “To John and Marion Porter for their contribution to Canadian social science and their kindness.”

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My PhD dissertation defence was unique and worthy of some commentary. Because the document is not widely available, I will cite at length from an address I gave at Carleton in 1989, called the Davidson Dunton Research Lecture (Clement 1990), recounting my dissertation defence story. (Every graduate student needs one of these to contribute to the lore of academic life.) When I submitted the final draft, the committee decided to ask Mel Watkins, renowned professor of economics at the University of Toronto, to be the external examiner since the dissertation was on continental corporate power relations and he was an acknowledged expert in the area. I told John Porter that I had no objection, although, in a Waffle-inspired journal called Ontario Report, Watkins had been critical of aspects of The Canadian Corporate Elite on the grounds that it was insufficiently nationalist. I had only met Mel once at this point (at the inaugural Political Economy Sessions of the Learned Society Meetings in Quebec City in May 1976) but respected his opinion. When his name was sent forward, the dean of graduate studies, Gilles Pacquet, saw “red.” There had been some tensions between Dean Pacquet and the department, completely independent of me (I was teaching at McMaster University by this time), and he did not see eye to eye with his fellow economist Professor Watkins. Dean Pacquet took the extraordinary action of appointing an additional external examiner, Dennis Wrong, professor of sociology, Harvard University. Professor Wrong had been an appraiser of the department some years earlier, was born in Canada (moving to the United States with his diplomatic family), and was an expert on theories of power. I objected to the examining board on the grounds that it was improperly constituted. John Porter invited me to his cottage on Constance Lake prior to the defence and gave me “the talk”: “You know this area better than anyone else and can defend yourself; do not be concerned about the petty politics behind the external examiners; answer the questions any way you wish; I will support you if the need arises, and I believe the dissertation to be entirely defensible or we would not be going forward.” Since then I have given variations of this same talk umpteen times to my students on the eve of their orals. When the “big day” arrived in August of 1976 there was a huge examining committee, including the two external examiners and Dean Pacquet, who arrived to chair the proceedings himself. The room was

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packed. Mel Watkins led off the questions, asking much what I had expected in terms of the relative power of Canadian capitalists within the continental context and whether their continental position made them more or less potent vis-à-vis Canadian workers. We had an interesting exchange during which (according to my version – and this is my story after all) Mel was convinced of my position and we have since become life-long friends. Next was Professor Wrong. Well, as it turns out, when the Faculty of Graduate Studies appointed Professor Wrong, it directed the departmental chair, who was Dennis Forcese, to send him a copy of the dissertation. Dennis packed a copy of The Canadian Corporate Elite along with the unbound doctoral dissertation. Professor Wrong assumed they were the same document in two forms and only read the published master’s thesis, never having looked at the unbound doctoral dissertation. Little matter, because he regarded his turn more as a platform than as an opportunity to question the candidate and proceeded to tell us about his early days at Upper Canada College – an anecdote that had been prompted by my discussion of elite boys’ private schools. (Once again, this is my version, or at least recollection, of events.) Everyone else then had their opportunity to ask their questions, and, after a few hours, the exam was winding down. Dean Pacquet, however, decided to remove himself from the chair and proceeded to ask his own questions – something about my failure to define capitalism, if I recall correctly. By then I was on a roll and had no compulsion about speaking my mind. But enough – all went well. I escaped without revisions. The dissertation was already in the hands of my editor at McClelland and Stewart and appeared as a book a few months later (Clement 1977b). FIRST JOB AT M c MASTER

In July 1975, I moved to McMaster University as an assistant professor. I interviewed at both McMaster and the University of Toronto, receiving offers from both. In making my choice, I primarily consulted John Porter, Frank Vallee, and Bruce McFarland. John had had an unsatisfactory experience at U of T, while Frank and Bruce had had positive experiences at McMaster. My interview at U of T was mixed. I met many people whom I liked, including S.D. Clark and some vibrant graduate students. I did get stuck for lunch with a junior faculty member who had yet to defend his dissertation but had a cultlike student following. McMaster was simpler, and the chair, Peta

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Tancred-Sheriff, certainly made me feel welcome. When the offer came from the U of T, it said: “whatever McMaster offers plus a thousand dollars.” My turning down that offer prompted a call from the chair, Irving Zeitlin, who said my reasons must be political because I was the first Canadian who had been offered a position in the department among the previous ten offers. I answered, “No, but had I known that, it would have confirmed my decision.” I never regretted the move to McMaster, although it did end all too soon in 1980 on a difficult note (which I will get to shortly). While at McMaster I began my series of resource industry studies. I decided to shift from “elite” studies to relational “class” studies. This resulted in two major research projects, the first on mining and the second on fisheries. I intentionally sought projects that would take me into more rural areas and away from central Canada and so expand my horizons. The mining study’s theoretical foundations are outlined in “The Subordination of Labour in Canadian Mining” (Clement 1980b), in which transformations in the relations of production and the property relations underlying class analysis are explored. This resulted in Hardrock Mining: Industrial Relations and Technological Change at INCO (Clement 1981a). I did intensive fieldwork and interviewing in Sudbury (Ontario), Thompson (Manitoba), and Port Colborne (Ontario) on both underground and surface operations. Underground operations were being transformed by mechanization and surface operations by automation. It proved to be a rich source of knowledge for understanding class dynamics. I particularly noted the differences between the formal and real subordination of labour. The second case study, the one on fisheries, has its theoretical foundations outlined in “Canada’s Coastal Fisheries: Formation of Unions, Cooperatives and Associations” (Clement 1984). First, I identified the puzzle of what accounted for the complex politics of organizations engaged in the fisheries, which was made evident by exploring the various organizations representing fishers on both coasts. Then I performed a relational class analysis that revealed the underlying property relationships, also shaped in part by issues of heritage and gender. This concluded in The Struggle to Organize: Resistance in Canada’s Fishery (Clement 1986). In many ways this was my most insightful case study. I was able to combine ideological postures, political actions, and economic behaviour into a rather neat explanation. The problem was, I failed to consider the environment. A few years following my study, the cod fishery collapsed for ecological reasons, and this funda-

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mentally shook the industry. The focus of my class analysis had not prepared me to take this rather consequential factor into account – a powerful lesson about blind spots. While working on these case studies, I also produced two collections of class-based papers from my own essays: Class, Power and Property: Essays on Canadian Society (Clement 1983) and The Challenge of Class Analysis (Clement 1988). These were mainly mini-studies of areas around the mining and fisheries projects, including, for example, an analytical critique of H.A. Innis and theoretical discussions of property relations, including simple commodity production. As an example, I used class analysis to provide a critique of cooperatives in farming and fishing, based upon my theoretical insights from the fisheries project. The foundational chapter is “Class Cleavages and Canadian Political Economy,” which reviews a variety of class traditions and offers an account of how class has been examined within Canadian political economy (Clement 1988, 165–203). I departed McMaster for a variety of reasons, including the call back to Carleton and other changes under way at McMaster as identified by George Grant. Foremost was the case of a colleague, Marylee Stephenson, a feminist sociologist. She had been broadly supported for tenure at the departmental level but was opposed by a few senior faculty members. Marylee was denied tenure at the dean’s level and launched an appeal. I was designated as the departmental delegate to the appeal (being tenured myself). A tribunal was struck and some dozen witnesses called from across the country. The case hung on whether feminism was scholarship. She was an exceptional teacher and published the requisite volume of work but in what were considered by some to be unconventional (i.e., feminist) scholarly sources. Marylee was ably represented by a lawyer, Harriet Sachs. At the conclusion of the hearing I convinced myself the case had been fairly presented and heard. I was prepared to accept the verdict of the tribunal. Quite some time passed before the decision against her was finally rendered. I disagreed with the conclusion but accepted the decision. Shortly thereafter, a member of the tribunal invited me to their office. I was told the tribunal had initially found in her favour and transmitted the result back to the original dean’s tenure committee, which had denied her tenure. The dean wrote back to the tribunal that if that was how they valued tenure, they should reconsider their own positions. I was astonished. That evening, my wife and I met socially with Harriet Sachs and her husband, Clayton Ruby, and

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discussed what I had been told. On the spot, Clayton declared he wanted the case. I provided sworn testimony to the court. The document from the Dean’s Office was subpoenaed and, indeed, it was a detailed, lengthy condemnation of the “independent” tribunal’s original decision. At the Supreme Court of Ontario Clayton warned us the judges might take months to respond. They never left the bench, finding in Marylee Stephenson’s favour and calling for a new tenure hearing. At this point, she was in no condition to go through the process again. Clayton turned the case over to a contract lawyer for a settlement. I understood she ended up working for Parks Canada and never sought another university position. A recent Google search reveals she is now a sociocomic, “the only lesbian comic with a PhD” as she bills herself, based in Vancouver. It is wonderful to know she landed on her feet, as did I. BACK TO CARLETON AND THE PASSING OF JOHN PORTER

I had been regularly contacted to return to Carleton, but with John Porter’s untimely death the requests intensified, led by Dennis Forcese, then the dean of social sciences. I agreed to rejoin Carleton. Coincidentally, at the same time as I announced my departure Professor George Grant, the esteemed philosopher of Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire fame, also announced his exit. This was newsworthy. I knew George through mutual friends, but when reporters asked him why he was going they failed to comprehend his account. He was frustrated, he told them,“for the same reason as Clement.” They came to me. George’s reasons had to do with the shift in university culture and priorities resulting from the new McMaster medical school. It did have the effect of escalating the impact of my departure in the local press. The premature passing of John Porter at fifty-eight years of age in June of 1979 prompted a series of reflections on his career. It began when Marion, John’s wife, asked me to finalize the publication of a collection of his essays, The Measure of Canadian Society: Education, Equality and Opportunity (Clement 1987). This was a particularly revealing collection that spanned his career, including new preambles to each paper reflecting upon what he was thinking at the time and what he thought now. I say “revealing” because he reproduced his

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thinking, warts and all. As he says in the preamble to “The Future of Upward Mobility”: “Some would say that I would reprint the following paper only on a dare because it contains a ‘ghastly error’ of social science prediction and analysis,” going on to declare his overly optimistic view of the education system and the post-industrial economy (Clement 1987, 65). The final chapter, “Education, Equality, and the Just Society,” was based on two lectures delivered at York University in 1977, which significantly reassess his earlier work – namely, his conclusions regarding the failure of the mission of education in furthering equality and the revealing of flaws in the “upgrading thesis” of post-industrial thinkers. In summary, neither “equality of either condition or opportunity” was advanced by the educational system or post-industrial transformations (Clement 1987, 278). There were a series of papers I wrote shortly after John’s passing (Clement 1980a, 1980b). Two others are worth noting. Rick HelmesHayes had come to Carleton to do a post-doctoral fellowship under my nominal supervision from 1986 to 1988. The project expanded, and Rick ended up doing extensive interviewing and archival work, not to mention a great deal of background work on the places and times Porter experienced. It turned into a brilliant analysis: Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter. Rick invited me to write a foreword (Clement 2010). Five years later, the University of Toronto Press decided to re-issue The Vertical Mosaic on its fiftieth anniversary. Rick and I were invited to write a foreword to the new edition (Clement and Helmes-Hayes 2015). I think I learned as much reflecting upon John Porter’s life work as I did directly from him. From him I learned about open-mindedness and the value of critical scholarship; from his writing I learned about the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of his own scholarship. Both have been career shaping for me. RESOURCES , PROPERT Y , AND CLASS

Back at Carleton in 1980, I continued my resource writing on fisheries. As mentioned, the fisheries studies began with an analysis of class and property relations, seeking to explain the puzzling practices of various fisheries unions, cooperatives, and associations. Then I began my comparative class structure period. The Struggle to Organize was written while on sabbatical in Sweden at the Arbetslivscentrum (Swedish Centre for the Study of Working Life) in 1984–85. Just

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before my first sabbatical leave, Carleton promoted me to full professor. While in Sweden, I began my comparative class analysis in earnest. It occupied me through to my next sabbatical, once again at Arbetslivscentrum in 1990–91. Between sabbaticals I did some writing on technological change in Canada, viewed through the lens of Swedish experiences (Clement 1988, 33–45). I began some writing specifically on Sweden (Ahrne and Clement 1992; Clement 1994; Clement and Mahon 1994). Just prior to departure on my second sabbatical I had the honour of being invited to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1990 and am now, over thirty years later, a life member. COMPARATIVE CLASS ANALYSIS

My work on Sweden complemented the comparative work undertaken in partnership with John Myles. My time with John culminated in Relations of Ruling (Clement and Myles 1994). It was an intensive project requiring a great deal of collaboration and negotiation. Based on extensive quantitative national datasets, we sought to communicate complex ideas around class and gender in the context of post-industrial transformations. We wished to mediate between detailed statistical analyses and communicating with an educated audience. We succeeded, winning the 1995 Harold Adams Innis Book Prize awarded by the Social Science Federation of Canada. Relations of Ruling was part of the Comparative Class Structure Project initiated by Eric Olin Wright from Madison, Wisconsin. (Eric sadly passed away on 23 January 2019 at the age of seventy-one). We joined the project just after other groups from Sweden and Finland, and around the same time as Norway. Our contribution was a massive national Canadian survey. We received $418,056 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for 1982–84 and another $51,906 for 1984–86, followed by $49,384 for 1987–90 and $63,000 for 1990–93. These were large sums for those times. I learned a great deal from John about managing large-scale research and training doctoral students, and was drawn into great circles of research spanning the globe. It was a rewarding but demanding undertaking. In theoretical terms, my main contributions were around class and gender. I developed an innovative way to designate classes relationally (Clement 1990). For me, the project concluded at an Australian meeting that resulted in the next generation taking over the project.

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My contribution was published in an important collection, Reconfigurations of Class and Gender (Clement 2001b). This represented a key transition to the final area of my research on comparative intersectional class analysis (Clement 2001a, 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2009a, 2009b). THE CANADIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY TRADITION

My contribution to the new Canadian political economy was really launched, as mentioned, with The Canadian State collection. Parallel to that was the work of developing the journal Studies in Political Economy in 1979. Mel Watkins and I wrote the “editorial statement” for the first issue. It read, in part: “Simply put, political economy refers to an interdisciplinary blend of the history of economic, political and cultural relations. In Canada, political economy has established meaning, referring both to an indigenous liberal, yet unorthodox tradition (in which the name Harold Innis looms largest) and to a smaller but highly creative Marxist tradition (as evidenced most powerfully in the work of C.B. Macpherson, H.C. Pentland and Stanley B. Ryerson)” (Anon. 1979, iv–vi). I do wish to note two other interventions in the tradition. One is a journal paper I was invited to contribute to the millennium issue of the Canadian Journal of Sociology (Clement 2001a). This was an important paper for me because it reinforced the development of the discipline of sociology within Canada. It illustrates the transformative place this tradition has had in making Canadian sociology distinctive in the world. It combines, for me, the elements of insight garnered from the legacy of John Porter and the insights of key Canadian thinkers, like C.B. Macpherson and Harold Innis. The other is a paper that began as a bit of a satirical jibe at my dear friend Mel Watkins on his retirement from the University of Toronto. I delivered the paper in the wry tradition of Mel’s dry humour. Much to my surprise, I was later approached by some of Mel’s former students, who put together a collection of his key writings, Staples and Beyond (Clement 2006). I was honoured to have my paper included alongside Mel’s insights. We have come a long way since he participated in my doctoral defence. He was a treasured friend, sadly passing away on 2 April 2020. My most notable interventions into the revival of this tradition, known generally as the “new Canadian political economy,” has been in editing three major collections. The first, in 1989, was co-edited

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with Glen Williams and gave a nod to the foundations, especially reviving the wealth of insights from classic Canadian political economy and pointing to new fields of study (Clement and Williams 1989). This was followed by a second volume, which focused on the new breadth and depth of the tradition (Clement 1997). The last and most dynamic edition, published in 2003, was co-edited with Leah Vosko (Clement and Vosko 2003). These three editions were meant to solidify core texts to be used in senior undergraduate teaching and as foundations for graduate students. It is my impression that they have served this purpose well. The new Canadian political economy tradition is alive and well, stirred daily by the world’s puzzles, which are crying out for explanation and action. This legacy has not ended. Now published is a fourth volume, which I did not edit but to which I contributed an introductory chapter (Clement 2019). I will end by returning to the conclusion of my 2001 Millennium Legacy paper. There I claimed: Sociology’s strength has been its theoretical richness and methodological rigor, neither construed in narrow terms, which produces critical analytical skills. Sociology pays attention to motives: what motivates researchers to seek the motives (and assumptions) of others. For sociology, research is self-consciously motivated both theoretically and substantively; that is, sociology is in the “business” of explanation, asking both how and why questions about issues deemed to be relevant to the society at large. Sociology contributes to political economy the value of its attention to evidence and the logic of the research process. Sociology insists upon the connections between levels of analysis that require theoretically informed and methodologically cautious research practices. It also insists upon the social construction of the political and economic with a rich dose of the cultural and ideological (meanings and explanations). It is the breadth of sociology which political economy enriches along with its relevance for the societies we inhabit. To paraphrase C. Wright Mills, there is the difference between objectivity and detachment: we should aim for the former but should not be restricted by the latter. Political economy seeks out tensions within society as they produce struggle and resistance. To know how societies are and can be transformed is the primary goal of the new political economy. The “new” Canadian political economy, as a tradition, is becoming more engaged and hence

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more relevant for understanding and changing Canadian society. This can only be for the enrichment of sociology. (Clement 2001a) Nearly twenty years later, I believe this has been the case for a significant part of Canadian sociology. The new Canadian political economy tradition has enriched and enlivened our discipline. It has kept it engaged, relevant, and distinctive within international sociology. ACKNOWLED GMENTS Leo Panitch (3 May 1945–19 December 2020) passed away while this chapter was in production. I dedicate it to him and to Mel Watkins (15 May 1932– 2 April 2020). REFERENCES Ahrne, Göran, and Wallace Clement. 1992. “A New Regime? Class Representation within the Swedish State.” Economic and Industrial Democracy: An International Journal 13 (4): 455–79. Anon. (Wallace Clement and Mel Watkins). 1979. “Editorial Statement.” Studies in Political Economy 1 (1): iv–vi. Clement, Frederick Moore. 1969. My Thoughts Were on the Land: Autobiography of Fred Clement, Virgil, Ontario. White Rock, BC: Davies the Printer. Clement, Wallace. 1974. “The Changing Structure of the Canadian Economy.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology (special issue: Aspects of Canadian Society): 2–27. – 1975. “Inequality of Access: Characteristics of the Canadian Corporate Elite.” Canadian Review of Sociology 12 (1): 33–52. – 1977a. “The Canadian Bourgeoisie: Merely Comprador?” In Imperialism, Nationalism and Canada, ed. Craig Heron and John Saul, 71–84. Toronto: Hogtown Press. – 1977b. Continental Corporate Power: Economic Elite Linkages between Canada and the United States. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. – 1977c. “The Corporate Elite, the Capitalist Class and the Canadian State.” In The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power, ed. Leo Panitch, 225–48. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1977d. “Macrosociological Approaches toward a ‘Canadian Sociology.’” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 1: 1–37. – 1979a. “An Exercise in Legitimation: Ownership and Control in the Report of the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration.” In Perspectives on the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration, ed. Paul K.

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Gorecki and W.T. Stanbury, 215–36. Montreal: Butterworth and Company, Institute for Research on Public Policy. 1979b. “Foreword.” In The Measure of Canadian Society: Education, Equality and Opportunity, by John Porter, xi–xv. Toronto: Gage. 1980a. “Searching for Equality: The Sociology of John Porter.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 4 (2): 97–114. 1980b. “The Subordination of Labour in Canadian Mining.” Labour / Le Travail 5: 133–48. 1981a. Hardrock Mining: Industrial Relations and Technological Change at INCO. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1981b. “John Porter and the Development of Sociology in Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 18 (5): 583–94. 1983. Class, Power and Property: Essays on Canadian Society. Toronto: Methuen. 1984. “Canada’s Coastal Fisheries: Formation of Unions, Cooperatives and Associations.” Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1): 5–33. 1986. The Struggle to Organize: Resistance in Canada’s Fishery. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1987. “Foreword: The Measure of John Porter.” In The Measure of Canadian Society: Education, Equality and Opportunity, by John Porter, xi–xxxv. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. 1988. The Challenge of Class Analysis. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. 1989. The New Canadian Political Economy, ed. Wallace Clement and Glen Williams. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 1990. “Comparative Class Analysis: Locating Canada in a North American and Nordic Context.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 27 (4): 462–86. 1994. “Exploring the Limits of Social Democracy: Regime Change in Sweden.” Studies in Political Economy 44 (1): 95–123. 1997. Understanding Canada: Building on the new Canadian Political Economy, ed. Wallace Clement. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2001a. “Canadian Political Economy’s Legacy for Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 405–20. 2001b. “Who Works? Comparing Labour Market Practices.” In Reconfigurations of Class and Gender, ed. Janen Baxter and Mark Western, 55–80. Palo Alto, CA: Standard University Press. 2003a. “Comparing Households, Labour Markets and Welfare States in Canada, Japan and Beyond.” Journal of Economics Quarterly 51 (1): 43–57.

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– 2003b. “Flexible Workforces and the Class-Gender Nexus.” In Studies in Political Economy: Developments in Feminism, ed. Andrew Caroline, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Wallace Clement, and Leah Vosko, 117–24. Toronto: Women’s Press. – 2004. “Revealing the Class-Gender Connection: Social Policy, Labour Markets and Households.” Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 4: 42–52. – 2006. “Introduction: Mel Watkins and the Foundations of the New Canadian Political Economy.” In Staples and Beyond: Selected Writings of Mel Watkins, ed. Hugh Grant, and David Wolfe, xiii-xxv. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2010. “Foreword.” In Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter, by Rick Helmes-Hayes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2019. “Locating the New Canadian Political Economy.” In Change and Continuity: Rethinking the New Canadian Political Economy, ed. Mark P. Thomas, Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, Olena Lyubchenko, 25–40. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Clement, Wallace, and Rick Helmes-Hayes. 2015. “Foreword: Locating The Vertical Mosaic.” In The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (50th Anniversary Edition), by John Porter, vii–xvi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Clement, Wallace, and Rianne Mahon. 1994. “Swedish and Canadian Perspectives on the Swedish Model.” In Swedish Social Democracy: A Model in Transition, ed. Wallace Clement and Rianne Mahon, 1–12. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Clement, Wallace, Sophie Mathieu, Steven Prus, and Emre Uckardesler. 2009a. “Locating Precariousness in the New Economy: Using Comparative Intersectional Analysis.” In Gender and the Contours of Precarious Employment, ed. Leah Vosko, Martha Macdonald, and Ian Campbell, 240–55. London: Routledge. – 2009b. “Restructuring Work in the New Economy: Four Processes.” In Interrogating the “New Economy”: Restructuring Work in the 21st Century, ed. Norene Pupo and Mark Thomas, 43–64. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Clement, Wallace, and John Myles. 1994. Relations of Ruling: Class and Gender in Postindustrial Societies. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Clement, Wallace, and Leah F. Vosko. 2003. Changing Canada: Political Economy as Transformation. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Clement, Wallace, and Glen Williams, eds. 1989. The New Canadian Political Economy. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Coleman, James S., Amitai Etzioni, and John Porter. 1970. Macrosociology: Research and Theory. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Olsen, Dennis. 1980. The State Elite. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Porter, John. 1970. “Research Biography of a Macrosociological Study: The Vertical Mosaic.” In Macrosociology: Research and Theory, ed. James S. Coleman, Amitai Etzioni, and John Porter, 149–81. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. – 1975. “Foreword.” In The Canadian Corporate Elite: An Analysis of Economic Power, by Wallace Clement, ix–x. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Smith, Dusky Lee. 1971. “The Sunshine Boys: Toward a Sociology of Happiness.” In Radical Sociology, ed. J. David Colfax and Jack L. Roach, 28–44. New York: Basic Books.

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10 How Do We Know What We Know? A Feminist Life and Times in Canadian Sociology Meg Luxton

Wondering – why is the world the way it is? Wondering – what other ways of living are possible? Growing up, I moved back and forth between England and Canada. In England, where I was born in 1946, we lived with my maternal grandmother and my mother’s aunts, my great-aunts. In Canada we lived the 1950s lifestyle of a white, heterosexual nuclear family. The English household of four women and me (plus my father when he could join us) moved often to be near my great-aunt’s job, which kept the household going. We always moved to small cramped rural rentals surrounded by exquisite countryside and landed estates. My great-aunt worked as a secretary to a bank in the estate settlement division. When a landowner died, the bank had to do an inventory of the holdings, a task that took months. During that time, employees and their families were housed in workers’ cottages on the estate. Her job and our accommodation in these cottages on the estates made class differences starkly obvious. The Toronto household my parents and I moved into was one of only two houses on York Mills Road, a rural farm community that rapidly became one of Toronto’s first suburban neighbourhoods as new houses replaced the fields and trees. The English household was solidly postwar working class and poor, but the women had the strong and supportive ties to each other so effectively described by Michael Young and Peter Willmott (2007) in Family and Kinship in East London, ties that provided powerful social

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relations and mutual support that helped them cope with their economic insecurity. The Canadian household conformed to the middleclass family described by Talcott Parsons (1955) in Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. They argued that the success of American industrial society depended on “isolated” heterosexual nuclear families based on strict binary sex differentiation, where men as husbandsfathers were income-earners and women as wives and mothers were housewives. Parsons (1955, 22) linked sexual attraction, love, adult maturity, and occupational differentiation: A mature woman can love, sexually, only a man who takes his full place in the masculine world, above all its occupational aspect, and who takes responsibility for a family; conversely, the mature man can only love a woman who is really an adult, a full wife to him and mother to his children, and an adequate “person” in her extrafamilial roles. Looking back, I think my mother’s experience may have echoed the constrained and often isolated lives of middle-class women described by Betty Friedan (1963) in The Feminine Mystique. My working-class relatives were openly bitter about their lives, angry that in two wars they had made sacrifices for their country with no apparent reward, quick to complain that they had worked hard all their lives with little to show for it, and resentful of the extreme economic inequality in their society. Although middle-class suburban Canadian life was more comfortable, it was also rigidly conventional, intellectually and emotionally stultifying, especially for girls, who were eventually expected to devote their lives to husbands and children. Once I started high school in 1960, our trips to England were limited to school holidays and I was encouraged to do well at school. My parents encouraged me to read. Thoughtful discussions were a family pleasure. My mother, who aspired to produce a middle-class daughter, urged me to get a “good” education, just in case (heaven forbid) I should fail to get married or my marriage failed. My grade twelve guidance counsellor encouraged me to go to secretarial school as, he said, there were lots of jobs for clerical workers. However, in high school I worked as a file clerk after school for three years, a dreary, gruelling experience that persuaded me that I wanted something more. In grade eleven, I read Bronisław Malinowski’s

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Family among the Australian Aborigines: A Sociological Study and realized that there were other ways of living, other societies, and I wanted to know more. From this background I emerged in the mid-1960s with a profound knowledge of the centrality of class in shaping people’s lives and a strong sense of the injustice of working-class exploitation and poverty. I had a clear recognition of two distinct options for women – paid employment or marriage, family, and domestic labour – and an idea that neither was very satisfying. I also had a vague sense that the collective life of my English experience was somehow preferable to the isolation and vulnerability of the privatized nuclear family of my Canadian experience. I was also deeply aware of the cultural differences between my two worlds. Despite the obvious similarities between England and Ontario, I constantly stumbled over the differences. I remember my embarrassment when I told a Canadian friend I would knock her up in the morning, meaning I would wake her up, not remembering (or maybe not knowing) that for her I was proposing to make her pregnant. I came to appreciate how overwhelming it must be for people who move between two cultures that don’t share the close history mine have. While I had a clear sense of being part of a Scottish-EnglishCanadian ethnicity, I had no sense of being “white” and no appreciation of what it means to be racialized or part of a colonial society. As a young adult, I found the world I lived in troubling and often unattractive. I struggled with questions: Why is the world the way it is? What other ways of living are possible? Those questions prompted me to enrol in the BA program in social and philosophical thought at the University of Toronto in 1965, a program that included courses in sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology. As incoming students, we were told that sociology promised ways of understanding the world we lived in, while history and anthropology offered us visions of actually existing alternatives. Philosophy taught us how to think logically and make effective arguments. And we began to learn about doing research, theorizing, and writing in the social sciences. I was hooked. I didn’t realize at the time that in sociology I was learning positivism and American structural-functionalism while anthropology was immersing me in British structural-functionalism and philosophy was indoc-trinating me in Anglo-American rationalism. It was clear from the beginning that our professors were either from the United States or Britain and that they assumed their coun-

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try of origin was significantly superior to Canada. Our sociology professor repeatedly referred to “our president” and “congress” despite our insistence that Canada was a different country. Our social anthropology professor told us American anthropology had little to offer and appeared to know nothing about Canadian contributions. There were few references to anything relating to Canadian society except occasional comments about “Indians” and “Eskimos.” It was 1965. Canadian nationalism was in the air, and I began to resent the pervasive imperialist attitudes. I began to want to know about Canadian society from the new perspectives I was learning. I also began to see the sexism of the social sciences. In one of my second-year classes, the professor refused to answer questions from female students because he did not think women should be in the university! We read the famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1936, 283) and no one commented about his assertion: “The entire village left the next day in about 30 canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses.” My initial application to graduate school was rejected because, as a woman, I would have no career plans. (For a detailed study of sexism and racism in Canadian universities in the 1960s and 1970s, and feminist struggles to disrupt both, see Robbins et al. 2008.) LEARNING : THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

In a second-year sociology course I was introduced to critical ways of thinking that challenged the prevailing ideas I was learning in other courses. One of the central arguments of authors like C. Wright Mills (1959, 4) in The Sociological Imagination is that people are “seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history,” with the result, he insists, that they are rendered politically immobilized – they do not understand that their personal troubles are often the result of historical changes and institutional contradictions. Mills argues that neither “the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” (3). He insists that the social scientist’s task is to make clear the reasons for the unease and indifference in modern societies. For Mills, this could be realized by the promise of the sociological imagination: “an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities” (15).

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These arguments helped explain why I found the world I lived in troubling and unattractive. They validated my sense that the social sciences could offer ways of understanding that world and provided both a critique of, and an alternative to, the version of the social sciences I was being taught. My commitment to the sociological imagination and its promise was confirmed. I was eager to find out about those larger social realities and intrigued by the idea of a related intellectual and political task. I was also lucky to be a student at a particular historical moment and in a place where I had access to political movements that gave voice and shape to my aspirations (Beauvoir 2011). During the 1960s and 1970s, global politics disrupted the complacency of mid-twentieth-century social sciences by introducing new perspectives and different knowledge. There was an explosion of critical thinking produced by militant activism and revitalized international progressive movements (Kostash 1980; Rowbotham 2000; Palmer 2008; Moss 2014; Bloom and Martin 2014; Coulthard 2014). Anti-colonial national liberation struggles challenged both communist and capitalist assumptions about government, economics, and ways of organizing social life. A revitalized New Left produced critiques of the capitalist military-industrial complex and of the authoritarian regimes of actually existing communism. All over Toronto, small groups formed to explore these ideas and to encourage political activism (e.g., see Pat Armstrong, chapter 12, this volume; and Bill Carroll, chapter 11, this volume). It was easy for me, as a University of Toronto student, to make connections. There was a vibrant revival of Marxism that taught me how to think critically and gave me a political and analytic framework for understanding capitalism and confirmation that the capitalist world is troubling. I became close friends with one of the administrators in my department. Her parents had been members of the Communist Party; she was a Trotskyist and introduced me to the history of communism and socialism, and to contemporary left-wing politics and the value of collective organizing. The emerging critiques of “the system,” of capitalist exploitation and private profit, of consumer society, of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism – their theories and practices of political organizing, and their visions of a liberating future for all – transformed the way I understood the world and my place in it. The women’s liberation movement revealed as systemic the sexism and misogyny I had

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experienced as personal provocations; gave me language to describe the sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault I experienced; engaged me in an ongoing political project; and created a community that sustains me to this day. Socialism provided an analysis of class, imperialism, colonization, and a historical tradition of struggle and aspirations that continue to inspire me. None of this new knowledge was initially available to me in the university. I received my political education by being part of the radicalization of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I learned it in informal study groups, from my friends, from activist publications, and the chants, banners, buttons, and signs at demonstrations (see Rise Up! A Digital Archive of Feminist Activism, riseupfeministarchive.ca/). I discovered Third World Books, a store crammed to the rafters with publications about Third World liberation struggles, Black activism, and Marxism. I went there regularly for years and spent hours sitting on the floor reading. I bought what I could afford, and, after a while, owner Leonard Johnston started suggesting writers such as Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon. He let me listen in on the conversations with visiting activists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I came to admire their passions and sacrifices and learned about liberation struggles and about their impact on the lives of activists. The Marxist Institute helped me read Marx and introduced me to Marxist speakers and writers such as Tariq Ali (see Ali n.d.; Heron 1977). The Cinema of Solidarity, a weekly film show and discussion, taught me about struggles around the world, and when the Western Guard fascist group tried to silence it, I started to understand the horror of right-wing mobilizations (Swift 1993). In the Women’s Press collective, we read Marx’s Capital together, simultaneously deepening our knowledge of Marxism and developing critiques of its failure to analyze women (Women’s Press n.d.). Intellectually and politically, these were heady times for me. At the same time, in the women’s movement we collectively organized childcare, feminist publishing, abortion clinics, rape crisis centres, communal living arrangements, and coalitions such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. The experiences of discussing social issues collectively, identifying shared concerns or problems, talking through possible solutions and then implementing our plans taught me the power of collective activism. They also gave me insights into ways to analyze social organization and social relations. My political activism and my research were, and continue to be, closely related.

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For a brief period, we were able to mobilize collectively to make noticeable changes (Luxton 2014, 2015). For example, after the University of Toronto informed us that university was no place for a childcare centre, we occupied a building and set up a worker-parent co-op day care. During the seven months of the occupation we lived together; took care of each other; explored ideas about child rearing, collective living, and socialism; provided shelter for refugees fleeing Chile after the 1973 coup; and established a good childcare centre that continues to this day. I moved from wondering about why the world is the way it is to critiquing the way it is and envisioning an alternative. I, like many around me, became a passionate socialist feminist (Rowbotham 1972, 1974, 2000). I still find the Marxist feminist political vision and goals of the 1960s women’s liberation movement an inspiration (Luxton 2014, 157). POLITICIZING : SOCIALIST FEMINIS M AND FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY

The academic world of the early 1970s was somewhat reluctantly transformed by the upheavals of the New Left and the women’s movement. There were intense struggles over what counts as legitimate formal knowledge. New scholarship documented the lives of those previously “hidden from history” (Rowbotham 1971) and began to reflect the perspectives of women, workers, slaves, racialized, and Indigenous peoples. Academic Marxism was revived, developed, and flourished. Other perspectives, informed by anti-capitalist, decolonizing, feminist, and anti-racist political movements, generated critical studies of systems of inequality, of oppression, and of exploitation that seriously challenged the status quo. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the women’s movement gained momentum, one of its central claims was that women’s subordination was anchored by the dominant sex/gender division of labour and prevailing family form. Both restricted women to a limited range of jobs in the paid labour force and made them primarily responsible for most of the unpaid labour involved in managing a home and caring for people. Women’s subordination was also sustained and intensified when they were unable to form families, keep their children, and maintain households either because their incomes were insufficient or because government legislation and practices prohibited them from doing so. The destruction of Aboriginal families by the residen-

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tial schools policy is one of the most horrific examples of this (LaFrance and Collins 2003). As activists, feminists raised a series of by now familiar demands: pay equity, access to jobs, paid parental and caregiver leaves, affordable high-quality child care and after-school programs, pensions for housewives, income sharing for stay-at-home wives, financial recognition for women’s unpaid work in the home, support for single mothers, women’s right to choose if and when to have children, and their rights to keep their children with the supports needed to provide for them well. Many also campaigned for lesbian and gay rights, for an end to discrimination against all LGBTQ2S people and their families, including their rights to retain custody of their children, to adopt, and to same-sex marriage. We also tried hard to live our daily lives in ways informed by our politics. I lived collectively, in a household of eleven adults and two children, learning new ways of dealing with interpersonal relations, of sharing the cares, labour, and responsibilities of daily life. It wasn’t easy, trying to live “against the grain,” but those experiences consolidated my appreciation of the ways in which what is considered “normal life” under capitalism is neither inevitable nor the best possible. They consolidated my commitment to trying to live in ways that prefigure the world I aspire to – one in which the goal is based on the recognition that unless everyone is free, none of us is free. The initial research for my PhD dissertation in social anthropology was prompted by questions posed by the women’s liberation movement and my interest in learning about Canada. Why, feminists asked, are women in most societies subordinate to men? Why are women in most places discriminated against because they are women? In Canada in the early 1970s, the majority of adult women worked unpaid in the home as wives and mothers. I wanted to know what that work involved, how it related to women’s subordinate status, and what impact women’s domestic labour had on their participation in the paid labour force and in public life. I also wanted to understand how class shaped people’s lives. What are the implications of the dependency on wage labour? I conducted a study of full-time housewives whose husbands worked in the mines in a northern town in Manitoba. The anthropology department complained about a focus on Canada (not a typical site for anthropology) but balked at the idea of studying housewives. “If you must study women’s work,” I was told, “at least study real work like nursing or teaching.” My supervisor told me my

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proposal was finally accepted only because they knew that, as a woman, I would never have a serious academic career – so they let it pass! Both my anger at their cavalier attitudes and the support of my community kept me going through the various trials of my PhD research. New knowledge projects like mine began to demand recognition in the universities as legitimate academic fields of study. In the face of growing pressure from students, in 1970 the University of Toronto accepted a proposal from a collective of graduate students to develop and teach several women’s studies courses in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program; I taught there as a sessional for eight years. Our courses were popular and a women’s studies program was implemented – but most of the sessionals who started it were eventually replaced by faculty members already appointed in disciplinary departments. I completed my study of working-class housewives (homemakers) and their work and graduated with a PhD, although one of my committee members told me after my defence that the department was embarrassed by my work. The dissertation became a book, More Than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home (1980), now a widely accepted academic study (see also Luxton 1983; Maroney and Luxton 1997). The debate and controversy around legitimate knowledge, discipline boundaries, and the proper criteria for organizing knowledge into disciplines intensified. There were also battles over resources – faculty appointments, access to journals, and research funding. More significantly, these various struggles were closely linked to struggles to transform the population of university students and faculty – from elite, white, Euro-North American men – to better reflect the actual population of Canada by increasing the proportions of faculty, staff, and students who are women, racialized and Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and people from working-class backgrounds. The outcome was an explosion of new fields, often identified as area studies, based on geopolitical regions such as South Asian or Latin American studies or on topics such as women and gender studies, cultural studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, and, more recently, trans studies. Most of these new fields were based on the insistence that the pre-existing disciplines were inadequate for serious investigation of their areas; proponents called for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, simultaneously encouraging the disciplines to integrate the new knowledges. Most of them were also fields that had

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been excluded from academe, and the human beings related to those fields were people who had been previously excluded from the universities. These developments meant that universities, their populations, and their knowledge projects changed significantly (Luxton and Mossman 2012). Sociologists navigating these new demands and challenges reworked their theories and methods in myriad ways. Some established faculty had always been sympathetic to progressive ideas. After all, the founding fathers of sociology had been shaped by the revolutionary upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe; Marx was acknowledged as one of them. Most sociologists were committed to researching social problems, so the issues of the period were of obvious interest. At the same time, student demand for these new fields was high, putting pressure on departments to hire faculty able to teach courses related to these new issues. I was hired in 1979 at McMaster University to teach two sociology courses: on women and on the family. Those first few years were difficult. The department had hired me because it needed faculty to teach its courses. I had a PhD and a book coming out, and eight years of sessional teaching experience. But most of the senior faculty were wary of my socialism and hostile to my feminism. Some didn’t like women. As a pre-tenured assistant professor in the Department of Sociology in 1983, I was asked to defend my study of women’s work in the home. The department could accept a study based in Canada but was troubled by my Marxist feminism and even more by my critique of the nuclear family. What was the basis for my claim that what housewives did in their homes was work that should be considered a contribution to the Canadian economy? How did I think that a study of housewives constituted an appropriate contribution to sociology? Why, I was asked by my chair as I prepared to apply for tenure and promotion, had I not relied on Talcott Parsons’s definitive work on the family? In 1955, Parsons published “The American Family: Its Relation to Personality and to the Social Structure.” His work illustrates the prevailing norms and values that confronted the newly emerging feminist sociology of families. Parsons’s vision of the heterosexual nuclear family and its strict sex/gender division of labour was the prevailing, almost hegemonic, perspective in not just the United States but also in much of the Euro-North American world of the mid- to late twentieth century.

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However, the experience of women living in such family households and being subject to that division of labour was one of the motivating forces behind the reanimation of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Oakley 1974; Luxton 1980). The discrimination faced by women living outside that family form, either by choice or by circumstance, and the experiences of poor, workingclass, Aboriginal, and racialized women who were prevented from forming such families or other families of their choice fuelled not only the women’s movement but also the anti-colonial, anti-racist, and working-class struggles of that period. In their organizing activities, in their political analyses, and in their scholarly theorizing, feminists and their allies confronted both the widespread conviction that such heterosexual nuclear family forms and divisions of labour were ideal and the dominance of arguments such as those presented by Parsons. In trying to develop our analyses of women’s experiences in such family forms, and in developing critiques of the ways in which poor, racialized, and Aboriginal peoples were denied their families, the challenge for feminists was to develop effective counter-arguments and compelling alternate analyses and practices (Fox 2014). My research was informed by such concerns and served as a rejection and critique of Parsons’s ideas. Advancing that alternative involved a difficult struggle. At one point, under the guise of giving me good advice, the department chair told me that my critique of Parsons’s analysis was insignificant and meant that I was an inappropriate candidate for tenure. Some of the senior colleagues insisted that a feminist analysis was “too political” for good scholarship. And there was the endless sexism designed to let me know I was unwelcome and at risk: the stony silences if I mentioned my children while male colleagues who left meetings early were praised for “babysitting” their children; the blatant sexual harassment and the subtle contempt of colleagues who simply ignored me when I spoke at meetings; the recurring ridicule aimed at my studies of housewives (Luxton 2008). This painful undermining was resolved for me personally when I was offered a job in Atkinson College at York University as part of an initiative to set up a women’s studies program. While my 1984 appointment at York was to an interdisciplinary department of social science, and later to the newly formed Women’s Studies Program (now the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies), I was cross-appointed to sociology, and

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the scholarship unfolding under its rubric informed and shaped my work. My early experiences at York provided an opportunity for me to engage in a wonderful project that integrated my research, teaching, and politics. Faculty involved in setting up the Women’s Studies Program of Atkinson College at York knew that many adult women had never imagined themselves going to university. Some were told explicitly that women were not smart enough to study. As young women, many had been told that, as they were destined to be wives and mothers, they had no need of university degrees. As a result, many lacked the entrance requirements, were insecure about their abilities, and had major demands on their time from family and job obligations. Despite those constraints, there were many women who were interested in getting a degree. Atkinson Women’s Studies faculty designed a bridging program to offer women a non-credit course in women’s studies. If students passed with a B or better, they could enrol as a regular student at York. Course content examined the situations of women in Canada; course pedagogy was designed to build confidence and academic skills and to provide students with an understanding of the forces that had kept them out of the university. We offered the courses in community centres and workplaces, and women flocked to them (Newman and O’Reilly 2006; see “Bridging Program for Women – School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies” n.d.). Many went on to complete degrees. Their passion and delight were inspiring and made teaching exciting and worthwhile. Two stories stand out for me. One was the woman who, after fifteen years, was ready to graduate. We asked if her husband and teenaged children were coming to her graduation. She looked down and then explained that she had taken courses only on Monday nights as her husband thought she was on a bowling team. She believed he would forbid her to continue if he knew she was at university, and her degree was important enough for her to defy him. The second was the Black student who had dropped two previous courses because she considered the courses and the classes to be racist and the professor did nothing when she complained. She told me I had to make sure she did well in school as she was there because she had two young sons who were Black. They were just starting school and she needed to get an education so she could help them get ahead despite the racism she knew they would experience. Feminist sociol-

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ogy gave me the tools to help such students understand their own circumstances in order to change them. I came to understand that working in the universities to foster progressive scholarship, a diversity of people as faculty and students, and decent working and learning conditions is a vitally important aspect of efforts to make the world a better place. One of the strengths of sociology is its relative openness to any field that strengthens the sociological imagination. Although many of the senior men in sociology remained intransigent, the discipline of sociology was dramatically transformed in relationship to the new knowledges. Sociology was one of the first disciplines to encourage women practitioners, to accept feminist scholarship, and to support women’s studies. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, November 1975, was one of the first special issues of an academic journal to focus on the new scholarship on women. A 1987 study of faculty teaching women’s studies found that more had degrees in sociology than in any other discipline (Eichler 1994). One of the most significant changes was the reworking of analyses of “the family” generated by feminist scholarship and activism. As David Cheal (1991, 18) has pointed out, feminism produced a “basis for new sociological theorizing” about families that challenges earlier non-feminist approaches, which tended to be “descriptive and problem focused.” The kind of research I was doing began to acquire legitimacy (Robbins et al. 2008). While these new ways of knowing were intrinsically exciting, they also connected me to an extensive, international community of scholars and activists. One highlight was the 1995 Fourth United Nations Conference on Women and the related NGO Forum in Beijing, China (Roberts 1996). Over fifty thousand people, mostly women, from many countries attended the combined events so there were endless opportunities for meetings, lectures, and planning future events. For me, the most exciting was the opportunity to work with other women to lobby the UN delegates, encouraging them to promote UN support for efforts to measure and value women’s unpaid work in the home. The inclusion of related recommendations in the UN Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action, adopted unanimously by 189 countries, was a political triumph and provided those of us working on the issue with strategies and tactics for future initiatives and research (see UN Conference on Women n.d.).

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One of the things I find most intriguing is how we come to know what we know. One outcome of the collective efforts to develop critical analyses was the development of a new theoretical perspective and methodological approach – feminist political economy (Andrew et al. 2003; Bedford and Rai 2010). I have participated in its development and I am fascinated by the project of trying to determine what led to its emergence and of analyzing its possibilities and constraints. The English-language version of feminist political economy that developed in Canada has proved to be particularly sophisticated and complex, reflecting its roots in the Canadian women’s liberation movement on one hand and its ties to Marxism and the “new Canadian political economy” on the other. One focus of my work examines the interplay between politics and theory and its impact on what is recognized as “knowledge.” In 1987, Heather Jon Maroney and I edited Feminism and Political Economy, a book that presented a range of scholarship on women in Canada. It aspired to make political economy attractive to feminists. Much of my work since then has continued both those efforts: a 1997 follow-up essay, “Gender at Work” (Maroney and Luxton 1997), and two co-edited books, one with Kate Bezanson (2006), which examines a central concept of feminist political economy (i.e., social reproduction), and one with Susan Braedley (2010), which looks at the impact of neoliberalism on political economy and everyday life. Susan Braedley and I are currently writing a book titled Doing Feminist Political Economy: Practitioners and Practices. I argue that feminist political economy is shaped by the complex interplay of feminist activism and scholarship, both of which reflect their broader context. The politics of the women’s movement reflected key features of Canadian political life. The divisions between federal, provincial/territorial governments; the unresolved political status of Quebec; the linguistic divide between French and English; the colonial subordination of Indigenous societies; and the waves of immigrants who continue to face systemic racism have prompted different constituencies of women to organize around their particular concerns, coming together in coalitions to work for specific goals. As Hamilton and Barrett (1986, 4) argue, “a belief in undivided sisterhood was never very marketable in Canada.” Canadian politics was also more open to Marxism than was politics in the United States and was less dominated by traditional Marxism than was politics in

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Britain. Social democracy and socialism had more legitimacy in formal politics in Canada than in the United States but were centred in popular movements rather than chiefly in the labour movement, as was the case in Britain, meaning that Canadian political movements were more open to feminist and anti-racist activists. As a result, socialist feminism was a significant current within the Canadian women’s movement, with some of its activists playing important leadership roles (Luxton 2006). Feminist political economy in Canada also developed in reaction to critiques of Marxism and other forms of political economy for their narrow focus on class, specifically for their failure to address the ways in which class positions and relations are always part of and shaped by the complex interactions of imperialism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and other systemic hierarchies of domination and oppression (Braedley and Luxton 2010; Rai and Waylen 2014). This is the typically stated goal of feminist political economy; however, in practice, its success has been uneven. Despite an explicit commitment to integrate gender, race, and class, few studies to date have realized this goal. One of the interesting and important debates concerns the relationship between feminist political economy and “intersectionality” (Collins and Bilge 2016). Canada had a well-established English-language tradition of political economy that was a unique blend of liberal, socialist, and Marxist traditions. In the 1960s and 1970s, young (mostly male) scholars developed this approach into what they called the “new” Canadian political economy (see Clement, chapter 9, this volume; Armstrong, chapter 12, this volume), which offered exciting perspectives on social theory and Canadian society, its politics and economics. From its inception, feminist political economy has encouraged feminist theory to take historical materialism into account and has struggled to make political economy take gender and anti-racist analyses seriously. In doing so, it has evolved into an innovative theoretical and methodological approach. Its central commitment is to reveal and critique the ways in which sectors of the world’s population are subordinated, exploited, and oppressed. In its analyses of capitalist societies, feminist political economy expanded the focus from the production and consumption of goods and services in markets to include the relationships between production and social reproduction – that is, how people make a living and how they care for each other on a day-to-day basis and inter-

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generationally (Maroney and Luxton 1987; Bezanson and Luxton 2006; Collins 2002; Collins and Bilge 2016). It examines the ways in which people produce and reproduce the material necessities of life and investigates “who does what.” It asks what those divisions of labour mean for the people involved and for their environments. Who benefits from those divisions and from the actual labour? Who bears what costs? How did such social divisions come into being and what sustains them? How are they changing and what might make it possible to change them further? These questions inspired me and my colleagues June Corman, David Livingstone, and Wally Seccombe to do a study of households in Hamilton, Ontario, where one adult worked as a steelworker at Stelco, the largest steel company in Canada. It looked at the impact of economic restructuring, documenting daily life in the workplace, at home, and in the community; revealing the dynamics of the sex/ gender divisions of labour between domestic labour and paid employment; and showing how these dynamics changed when women entered paid employment and when men were on strike or laid off (Livingstone and Luxton 1989; Luxton and Corman 2001). It revealed how ordinary daily life is significantly shaped by forces often unknown to the people dealing with them. We showed how that lack of knowledge hampered their ability to protest the challenges and inequalities they faced, while those who did have a sociological imagination were more successful at resisting and challenging the oppressive forces shaping their lives. We also showed that women’s unpaid work in the home is not just a personal service for their families but is also a socially necessary labour that contributes to the production of labour power, the essential commodity of capitalist economics, on a daily and generational basis. As Kate Bezanson and I and our contributors show in Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neoliberalism (2006), social reproduction refers to the processes involved in biological reproduction (conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care), in the daily maintenance of the current and future generation of workers. “It encompasses as well the transmission from one generation to the next of a historical legacy of skills, knowledge, and moral values” and also includes “the construction of individual and collective identities and the maintenance across generations of culture” (Cameron 2006, 45–6). Responsibility for various aspects of social reproduction fluctuates historically and cross-culturally between

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households, markets where people can buy services such as childcare or education; and states, which provide public services such as health care or education (O’Brien 1981). But, as feminists point out, the family household, and usually women, are always responsible for providing all of the work not available elsewhere (Elson 1995; Bezanson and Luxton 2006). From this perspective, women’s unpaid work in the home, by contributing to the production of labour power, serves as an unrecognized subsidy for the private profit-making essential to capitalism. The more resources are allocated to social reproduction (as higher wages, benefits, or social services) the less is available for private profit and capital accumulation; for the competing interests, the stakes are high (Picchio 1992; Razavi 2007; Luxton 2018). While this explains the opposition of wealthy elites to allocating more resources to social reproduction, it leaves unanswered the question of why there isn’t more political organizing to protest the deteriorating living conditions so many are experiencing and to demand better support for all. This question has preoccupied me recently. MORE QUESTIONS , FUTURE CHALLENGES

Lingering questions take me back to C. Wright Mills. Why in the early twenty-first century do the unease and indifference that Mills identified remain so prevalent in Canada? All my research, now spanning forty years, has convinced me that many people in Canada, like my English great-aunts and like me, live with contradictions we can’t easily resolve. Skilled at making the best of things, we get by. We know things could be worse; we wish things were better. Some, in their workplaces, unions, communities, and neighbourhoods, work hard to make life a bit better for themselves and others. Many take for granted the way the world is and wish they could change it. They are mostly resigned to the way it is. Their dreams of alternatives are cautious and limited (Luxton 2010). I was lucky at the start of my sociological career in that I was predisposed to welcome, and positioned to experience, a period of progressive global political mobilizations. That context gave me a supportive community and made new knowledge and alternative visions vibrant and possible for me. It created a space to live and work that fostered my political learning. I worry about the current context and

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what it means for progressive scholarship and activism. The intellectual and political gains of the earlier period remain in place, but Marxism has only a fragile hold on legitimacy. Bonnie Fox made this point in her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, warning that progressive left-wing scholarship is always vulnerable to silencing, repression, and amnesia. I have watched with alarm as right-wing populist parties have gained strength in many countries; and, in the late 2010s, in Canada, governments advocating policies that promote greater social inequality won provincial elections in Quebec (Legault 2018), Ontario (Ford 2019), Saskatchewan (Moe 2018), and Alberta (Kenney 2019). I yearn for a renewed political mobilization based on critiques of the existing world and a socialist vision for the future. I hope for a renewed community of people coming together to bring that new world into being. But I continue to struggle with Mills’s (1959, 13) challenge: “the social scientist’s foremost political and intellectual task … to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference.” Trying to figure out how to do that continues to motivate my work. ACKNOWLED GMENTS

I thank editors Stephen Riggins and Neil McLaughlin for the invitation to participate in this collection, for their thoughtful support during the writing, and for their careful and helpful editing. Marilyn Porter, Ester Reiter, and Bonnie Fox, who were actively involved in developing feminist sociology in Canada with me, read and commented on earlier versions of this chapter; I appreciate their ongoing support. Kathryn Petersen has been a friend and comrade in our life-long efforts to live our politics in a hostile world. Jane Springer was involved in the women’s liberation movement with me and gave me detailed comments that helped strengthen the chapter and excellent editing that made my writing clearer. I also thank Michelle Campbell for her willingness to challenge my thinking while offering endless support. REFERENCES Ali, Tariq. n.d. Tariq Ali. http://tariqali.org/. Andrew, Caroline, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Wallace Clement, and Leah F. Vosko, eds. 2003. Studies in Political Economy: Developments in Feminism. Toronto: Women’s Press.

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Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011 [1953]. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage. Bedford, Kate, and Shirin Rai. 2010. “Feminists Theorize International Political Economy.” Signs 36 (1): 1–18. Bezanson, Kate, and Meg Luxton, eds. 2006. Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. 2014. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press. Braedley, Susan, and Meg Luxton, eds. 2010. Neoliberalism and Everyday Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. “Bridging Program for Women – School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies.” n.d. Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. York University. http://bpw.gsws.laps.yorku.ca/. Cameron, Barbara. 2006. “Social Reproduction and Canadian Federalism.” In Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neoliberalism, ed. Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton. 45–74. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Cheal, David. 1991. The Family and the State of Theory. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2002. “Gender, Black Feminism and Black Political Economy.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (1): 41–53. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eichler, Margrit. 1994. “Women’s Studies Professors in Canada: A Collective Self-Portrait.” Atlantis 16 (1): 6–24. Elson, Diane. 1995. Male Bias in the Development Process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fox, Bonnie, ed. 2014. Family Patterns, Gender Relations, 4th ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell. Hamilton, Roberta, and Michele Barrett. 1986. The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism and Nationalism (Questions for Feminism). London: Verso. Heron, Craig. 1977. Imperialism, Nationalism, and Canada: Essays from the Marxist Institute of Toronto. Toronto: New Hogtown Press. Kostash, Myrna. 1980. Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada. Toronto: James Lorimer.

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LaFrance, Jean, and Don Collins. 2003. “Residential Schools and Aboriginal Parenting: Voices of Parents.” Native Social Work Journal 4 (1): 104–25. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1936. “Contribution à l’étude de l’organization sociale des Indiens Bororo.” Journal de la Société des Americanists de Paris 28: 269–304. Livingstone, David, and Meg Luxton. 1989. “Gender Ideologies at Work: Concepts of the Male Breadwinner and the Sex/Gender Division of Labour among Steelworkers and their spouses.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26 (2): 240–75. Luxton, Meg. 1980. More Than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home. Toronto: The Women’s Press. – 1983. “Two Hands for the Clock: Changing Patterns in the Gendered Division of Labour in the Home.” Studies in Political Economy 3 (12): 27–44. – 2006. “Feminist Political Economy in Canada and the Politics of Social Reproduction.” In Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism, ed. Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton, 11–44. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2008. “Women’s Studies: Oppression and Liberation in the University.” In Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship in Canada and Quebec, 1966–1976, ed. Wendy Robbins, Meg Luxton, Margrit Eichler, and Francine Descarriers, 268–74. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press. – 2010. “Doing Neoliberalism: Perverse Individualism in Personal Life.” In Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, ed. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton, 163–83. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2014. “Marxist Feminism and Anticapitalism: Reclaiming Our History, Reanimating Our Politics.” Studies in Political Economy 94 (1): 137–60. – 2015. “Reclaiming Marxist Feminism: A Response.” Studies in Political Economy 95 (1): 161–72. – 2018. “The Production of Life Itself: Gender, Social Reproduction and International Political Economy.” In Handbook of International Political Economy of Gender, ed. Adrienne Roberts and Juanita Elias. Cheltenham, UK: Edwin Elgar Publishing. Luxton, Meg, and June Corman. 2001. Getting by in Hard Times: Gendered Labour at Home and on the Job. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Luxton, Meg, and Mary Jane Mossman, eds. 2012. Reconsidering Knowledge: Feminism and the Academy. Winnipeg: Fernwood. Maroney, Heather Jon, and Meg Luxton. 1987. Feminism and Political Economy: Women’s Work, Women’s Struggles. Toronto: Methuen. – 1997. “Gender at Work: Canadian Feminist Political Economy since

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1988.” In Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy, ed. Wallace Clement, 85–117. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Moss, Glenn. 2014. The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Newman, Ruby, and Andrea O’Reilly, eds. 2006. You Can Get There From Here: 25 Years of Bridging Courses for Women at York University. Toronto: York University, School of Women’s Studies. Oakley, Ann. 1974. The Sociology of Housework. London: Allen Lane. O’Brien, Mary. 1981. The Politics of Reproduction. New York: Routledge. Palmer, Bryan. 2008. Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1955. “The American Family: Its Relation to Personality and to the Social Structure.” In Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, ed. Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales, 3–33. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Picchio, Antonella. 1992. Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of the Labour Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rai, Shirin, and Georgina Waylen. 2014. New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy. London: Routledge. Razavi, Shahra. 2007. The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context: Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options. Gender and Development Programme Paper 3. United Nations Research Institute of Social Development, Geneva. Robbins, Wendy, Meg Luxton, Margrit Eichler, Francine Descarriers, eds. 2008. Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship in Canada and Quebec, 1966–1976. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press. Roberts, Barbara. 1996. “The Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 21 (2): 237–44. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1971. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight against It. New York: Pantheon. – 1972. Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World. New York: Pantheon. – 1974 [1999]. “Search and Subject, Threading Circumstance.” In Threads through Time, History and Autobiography, 13–38. London: Penguin. – 2000. Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. London: Penguin. Swift, Richard. 1993. “TCL’d Pink: 20 years of Solidarity.” Southern Africa Report 8 (3–4): 9–13. http://kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/50/304/32-1302266-84-sar0803_04.pdf.

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United Nations. n.d. World Conference on Women. http://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/intergovernmental-support/world-conferences-on-women. Women’s Press. n.d. “About Us.” Women’s Press. https://womenspress.canadianscholars.ca/. Young, Michael, and Peter Willmott. 2007 [1957]. Family and Kinship in East London. London: Penguin Classics.

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11 From Ugly American to Critical Sociologist – in Five Decades William K. Carroll

In Social Thought from Lore to Science, Howard P. Becker and Harry E. Barnes (1961, 141) argue that social science’s secular-cosmopolitan outlook has been facilitated, both in history and in the biography of individuals, by “mental mobility”: intercultural experiences (often arising out of actual migration) that unsettle local traditions, exposing their constructed character. As I reflect on my own career, this idea resonates, along with a parallel insight from Dorothy Smith: that the world we experience can be problematized, revealing how it has been made while suggesting how it might be remade. In “Remaking a Life, Remaking Sociology,” Smith (1992, 125) explains how, in the early 1970s, her engagement with the Canadianization and women’s movements problematized the mainstream sociology she had learned in the 1960s at Berkeley. She underwent “a major personal and intellectual transformation,” out of which flowed her distinctive approach to sociology. In this chapter, I focus on my own personal and intellectual reconstruction beginning in the 1960s and extending into the 1980s, and briefly trace the ramifications in the sociological practice I have since pursued. BEGINNINGS

I was born in 1952 in Washington, DC, but my formative years were lived in the northeastern United States: on suburban Long Island, until the age of twelve; then in rural Pennsylvania, north of Philadel-

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phia, until my family moved in 1968 to London, Ontario. In these settings I became a white, cis-male, middle-class teenager and, to invoke one more key identity marker, an American. My mother was an educator, having earned a master’s of education at Penn State in the late 1940s, but, within the ideological code of our Standard North American Family (Smith 1993, 50), her possibilities were confined to childrearing and housework as she grappled unsuccessfully with what Betty Friedan (1963) called “the problem that has no name.” Yet she did take great pleasure in encouraging academic excellence in her children. My father was managing editor of Electronics magazine and author of several books on electrical engineering. He earned a PhD in industrial engineering in 1964 and became an academic in the emerging field of computer science at Lehigh University, his alma mater. The product of a strict upbringing followed by service in the navy during the Second World War, he was an emotionally distant workaholic. These influences led me to become a good though by no means brilliant student, with an interest in reading beyond the set curriculum. In this setting of material and cultural advantage, I took in the cognitive and moral templates of Americanism and Fordism (Gramsci 1971) at the high tide of American hegemony and consumer capitalism. Our neighbourhood was lily white, except for the African American live-in maids, who were part of an ongoing migration stream from the Deep South. Outside of the domestic master-servant relation (in which our household participated), racialized minorities were nowhere to be found. Part of the Americanism I absorbed early on was a belief in white supremacy. Another part was an abiding faith in the American dream – and thus in capital and state as institutions of freedom and democracy arrayed against the ever-present threat of Soviet totalitarianism. I recall reading, as core curriculum, What You Should Know about Communism and Why (Mestrovic 1962), touring a military base on a field trip, marvelling at the nuclear-tipped Minuteman ICBMs that could be launched against the enemy at a moment’s notice, and planning a family fallout shelter (which never got built). This was the era of the Protestant Establishment (Baltzell 1964), so among WASPs the othering practices of everyday life also targeted the Jews and Catholics among us. Coincidentally, my two best friends in the early 1960s happened to be Jewish and Catholic, respectively. My close relationships with them began to sow seeds of doubt in the

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ethnocentric narrative that my mother would occasionally champion while driving me to playovers. This was also the formative era of televisual popular culture and celebrity. Although I watched my share of cartoons, sitcoms, and old B movies, what stands out retrospectively are a couple of unsettling mediatized events. In 1962, my socially conservative Aunt Sally (a Daughter of the American Revolution) took me to see West Side Story. Stunningly directed and choreographed, the film addressed big urban and racial issues. On our leaving the cinema, Sally apologized for intruding on my blissful childhood. For me, the film was exhilarating and deeply affecting in its tragic but even-handed portrayal of ethnically based gangs a rather short distance away from my own neighbourhood. I identified strongly with characters entirely removed from my affluent WASP lifeworld. More unsettling still was the meteoric rise of Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali), who became “heavyweight champion of the world” in 1964, a few months before my family moved to Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. Clay/Ali was a media sensation – full of wit, bravado, and athletic prowess. He became and stayed a hero of mine, through our respective political evolutions, as Ali, refusing the draft in 1966, famously declared: “I ain’t got nothing against no Viet Cong; no Viet Cong never called me nigger.” The investment in white supremacy I had unwittingly made from an early age was further subverted. I began to question received points of view and prejudices. While all this was happening, my parents’ marriage fell apart, unsettling the notion of family as a natural unit. In the contentious process, my mother, vulnerable through economic dependence and social isolation, suffered a nervous breakdown, leading to my father’s custody of my siblings (two brothers) and me. In this difficult circumstance, I identified and empathized with my mother, yet felt an overwhelming impotence. This was an early brush with social power centred in the gendered division of labour and backstopped by law and psychiatry. I think my identification with the underdog left a trace, an incipient structure of feeling, and set up an elective affinity for underdog sociology, and for feminism, which I came to embrace years later. My four years in rural Pennsylvania coincided with adolescence and with the ferment of the mid- to late 1960s – an urban-centred convergence of social movements and progressive cultural currents that was again conveyed to me televisually. I identified strongly with the youth culture of the time, taught myself guitar, and began to write the

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odd very forgettable song. It was a time when a lot of conservative traditions were under attack and the New Left was in full flower. At the same time, the move to rural Pennsylvania pushed me beyond the bubble of affluent Long Island and into a world of farmers and Mennonite communities. But the bigger shift came in 1968, as my father became an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario. To a well-socialized American, at first this did not appear to be much of a shift at all. Notwithstanding the comparatively small differences between the American northeast and southwestern Ontario (Baer et al. 1993, 13), my initial experience of Canada was that of an Ugly American. In the Cold War political novel that bears that name (Burdick and Lederer 1958), the reference is to Americans living abroad who are insensitive to local culture and refuse to integrate. This phenomenon is structurally rooted in the dominant position that, since the mid-twentieth century, the United States has held in the transnational circuitry of capital, in popular culture, and in geopolitical relations – to wit, American imperialism. But it is conditioned by class selectivities regarding who gets to travel and live abroad: middle- and upper-class Americans, who take their affluence for granted and view the rest of the world through a lens that exalts the United States as the greatest society in history. Life in suburban London was comfortable and similar to suburban life in the American northeast but not quite “up to speed,” and all the “important” events of interest to me – youth culture, the student movement – seemed to be centred south of the border. By the time I (barely) made it through Ontario’s weird rite of passage – grade thirteen (an international outlier only abolished in 2003) – I had absorbed many of the ideas circulating in Canadian popular and political culture: a critical take on American imperialism, a late1960s scepticism towards corporate power, and a do-your-own-thing libertarianism – which meant shedding aspects of my American nationalism while gravitating towards New Left critiques of authority and establishment. This process, which continued throughout my undergraduate education and then intensified as I turned to Marxism and socialist feminism in graduate school, involved a deeper “remaking of self.” Shedding nationalism is a different process from that involved with primary socialization into a national culture. In the latter case, nationalism becomes doxic – part of one’s habitus – and not easily problematized. For me, abandoning American nationalism was a

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process that coincided with my becoming a sociologist. As ideology, nationalism constructs a privileged, imagined community and positions us to support one state and segment of humanity against others. If one grasps this, as I did through my study of sociology, it is only through self-deception that one could trade one national identity for another. Instead, shedding one national identity points in a cosmopolitan direction, and in this I took counsel from Marx’s famous declaration: “I am a citizen of the world; I am active wherever I am” (Lafargue 1890). BECOMING A SOCIOLOGIST

When I arrived at Brock University in September of 1971, I had no idea what sociology was, and certainly no intention of making its study my life work. Parental influence was pushing towards law, management, or natural science. I had little interest in these, but in my first term I took a biology course for non-majors that, to my good fortune, focused on a topic that had gained profile since the publication of Silent Spring (Carson 1962) – ecology and living systems. Among the lessons I took from that class, which also provided a rigorous account of the natural origins of life, was a final and irrevocable escape from deism. In disenchanting the world, as Weber put it, fullfledged atheism tears away a comforting set of illusions and leaves one without any preordained purpose. Meaning, including what matters and what is worth fighting for, has to be crafted. In the same few weeks of my first term at Brock, I began my sociological journey by happenstance and process of elimination. I had originally enrolled in business administration, but the first couple of lightweight lectures on marketing left me cold. I dropped the course and picked up a full-year, introductory sociology course, Sociology 190, “Man and Society,” co-taught by Morris Berkowitz and Brian Betley. There was no textbook but tons of reading: original works in sociology, emphasizing the Chicago School. I remember tackling Durkheim’s doctoral dissertation, The Division of Labor in Society, and writing a term paper on Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum in first term. Intellectually challenging, the course obliged students to engage and produce from the start. That course drew me into sociology. Part of the attraction was the challenge, but most of it was the subject matter. Today, across North America, introductory sociology classes tend to be well subscribed, as eighteen- and nineteen-year-

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olds grapple with the identity issues that are so salient to them. The same was true in 1971. Unlike anything else on offer (including psychology, which at Brock hewed mainly to the positivism of rats and stats), sociology presented a dazzling array of perspectives from which I could locate my life in the stream of history – as in C. Wright Mills’s conception of the sociological imagination. The course was not only demanding, it was deeply unpopular; hence, sociology attracted few majors. The self-selected few were showered with attention from professors, and honours students (three in my graduating class) were treated like graduate students in a small program. Morris Berkowitz became my mentor and got me a summer job after my second year as a research assistant on Project Plan, a survey of local attitudes and practices around recreation in nearby Niagara Falls. The sociology on offer at Brock was mainstream, but, as Steven Buechler (2008) has argued, all sociology offers an evidence-based critique, rooted in the Enlightenment, which debunks authoritarian claims to knowledge and power while questioning the selfproclaimed reasons for any social arrangement. These ideas resonated powerfully with my own sensibilities. It was in my second year at Brock that I really dug into sociological theory, mainly of a social constructivist sort. Our guide was Lloyd Gordon Ward, an assistant professor with an encyclopaedic grasp of symbolic interactionism and related formulations, and a dialogical pedagogy. I had been attracted to Brock for its small class sizes (total enrolment in 1971 stood at about twenty-two hundred), which meant that I learned theory in a seminar context. Ward taught the course without any formal lectures and without the standard potted-theory texts. Each student was required to read three original theory books and to prepare from each a “condensation by excerption only” – typing out the key passages into a new document that would be photocopied for each student in the class. All students were responsible for reading all the condensed works, which were discussed in clusters as they became available. Students were rewarded with a point towards the final grade each time they made an insightful remark based on the readings. The final, take-home exam consisted of such searching questions as: “What is it to be human?” We read a rather select, even esoteric literature – Marx, Durkheim, and Weber were conspicuously absent; G.H. Mead’s Mind, Self and Society was a canonical text, along with works of William I. Thomas,

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Charles Horton Cooley, Georg Simmel, Herbert Blumer, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, John Dewey, Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, Suzanne Langer, Ernst Cassirer, Lev Vygotsky, Muzafer Sherif (a pioneering social psychologist who had been Ward’s mentor at Oklahoma State), and others. This literature reached beyond sociology proper and converged on a view of the social as an ongoing, practical, communicative accomplishment. It was not until graduate school that I recognized the paradigm’s limitations – its predominantly micro-focus, its inattention to practice’s materiality (nature, labour, and their appropriation), and to structures such as modes of production and states. In the meantime, the reflexive project of remaking self – enlarged to include recognizing my positionality and de-reifying conventions and traditions – gained coherence. In their encouragement and generosity with time, my undergraduate mentors provided inspiration and set me on a clear course of intellectual development. They also found me work in social research. I spent the summer after my third undergraduate year working as Morris Berkowitz’s research assistant in a study of the Addiction Research Foundation’s (ARF) relations with the socialservices community in Niagara Falls. This was my first experience with social network analysis. In our report, we mapped ARF’s social circle and discussed its multifaceted relationships within the local social service community (Berkowitz et al. 1975). I continued, in my honours thesis, to conduct a network analysis of friendship formation in Brock’s caves – the poured-concrete student residences that had been my home three years earlier. Indeed, I was personally aware of and intrigued by the relationship between physical propinquity and close relationships, having met my first spouse as we both resided in the caves. In this first stab at fieldwork, I interviewed residents in their dormitory rooms, early in the academic year and then a few months later, and made nonparticipant observations along the way. Lloyd Ward supervised the project and introduced me to advanced multivariate statistics in my fourth year. His approach was critical of what C. Wright Mills called abstracted empiricism – the “garbage in-garbage out” approach that correlated for the sake of correlation – and mathematically rigorous. We wrote code in Fortran to understand closely the algorithms that produce the factor loadings in canonical correlation and the like. In my fourth year at Brock, I also took a reading course in crosscultural psychology with Sidney H. Irvine, an expert in that field. I

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had already taken several social-psychology courses, which complemented the micro-focus of the sociology department, and was well aware of psychology’s narrow empirical base (with samples often restricted to undergraduate university students). The course probed the issue of universality and embedded particularity in cognition and personality, and led to an early publication, with Irvine as senior author, in Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (Irvine and Carroll 1980, 2:181). Our chapter (I wrote perhaps a quarter of it) called into question many of the conventions of cross-cultural measurement, including intelligence testing, which was already a controversial topic, and called for more nuanced, open-ended approaches sensitive to the configurations of cognitive competencies that cohere as “intelligence” in specific cultural-material contexts. This advice has some relevance for how we work with cultural theorists, from Mead through Foucault to Bourdieu. My collaboration with Sid Irvine whetted my appetite for scholarly writing and helped point me in the direction of graduate studies. Meanwhile, in sociology, Morris Berkowitz and Lloyd Ward helped guide some shifts in my political consciousness, though in quite different ways. Morris was inclined towards a Mannheimian approach to the social basis of knowledge and viewed Darwin, Marx, and Freud as having shaped modern social thought. Morris’s sympathetic treatment of Marx help me break from the remaining traces of What You Should Know about Communism and Why. Lloyd Ward, who held a second appointment as director of Psychology Research at Queen Street Mental Health Centre in Toronto, subscribed to Harry Stack Sullivan’s critical social psychiatry. Under Lloyd’s libertarian influence, I keyed into the “politics of deviance,” particularly of mental illness, as illuminated by labelling theory and related formulations (Schur 1971, 1980). Erving Goffman and Thomas Scheff were the key sociologists, but other, more political treatments, such as Thomas Szasz’s libertarian tract The Myth of Mental Illness and R.D. Laing’s New Left antipsychiatry also received careful study. In the spring of 1975, as I was finishing my BA, Lloyd offered me a summer job as a researcher in psychology at Queen Street Mental Health Centre. Lloyd’s research shop was an island of social science in a sea of biomedical practice. Our research focused on making sense of a mass of intake data. Admitting nurses had interviewed patients and noted all the problems in living (Sullivan’s phrase). They mentioned intrapsychic (delusions, hallucinations, etc.) problems, interpersonal

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problems, economic problems, and so on. The goal was to create a “problem-oriented record keeping” system as a pragmatic alternative to psychiatry’s bible – the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (which, until 1973, categorized homosexuality as a mental illness). Revealingly, when people’s problems in living were catalogued and content-analyzed in this way, intrapsychic issues comprised a small though not insignificant minority of personal troubles. Much more profuse were interpersonal and practical problems – in conflictual close relationships, in housing and landlord-tenant relations, at work or regarding unemployment and poverty. Despite this knowledge, the practice at Queen Street, as elsewhere, was focused almost singularly on controlling intrapsychic “symptoms” through hefty doses of psychopharmaceuticals (see Gilandas 1973). My summer at Queen Street was an object lesson in the practical value of social-scientific inquiry and the powerinfused, institutional barriers to creating change. By the time I entered the graduate sociology program at York University in the fall of 1975, I was steeped in a range of research methods and practical research experience. I intended to work with James Moore, who ran sociology’s Small Groups Lab. York’s was one of the very few Canadian graduate sociology programs that included a social-psychology focus, and I had already used Brock’s similar lab in the sociology department in a study I conducted for a term paper in 1974. Moore was on sabbatical in 1975–76, so John Fox became my MA thesis supervisor and, eventually, my dissertation co-supervisor. A recently hired graduate of the University of Michigan (where he studied with William Gamson), Fox was running the Small Groups Lab and teaching social psychology and advanced statistics. I also took up an eight-month paid internship at York’s Institute for Behavioural Research (IBR, now the Institute for Social Research). The internship was centred on an interdisciplinary methods course taught by IBR associate director Michael Ornstein, a recent hire from sociology at Johns Hopkins. Towards the end of my internship, Ornstein recommended me to IBR director Bernard Blishen, who hired me for the summer as an RA. With his close friend John Porter, Bernard was one of a few highly prominent figures in Canadian sociology’s early postwar era, having published the first comprehensive socio-economic index based on census data in 1958 – beating Otis Dudley Duncan by three years (Blishen 1958, 519; Duncan 1961, 109). In 1976, he was interested in

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introducing gender directly into the analysis of socio-economic status. I crunched the numbers and prepared a detailed report, which became the main body of our 1978 research note – my first refereed publication and my first foray into macrosociology (Blishen and Carroll 1978, 352). Bernard soon joined my supervisory committee, cochaired by John Fox and Mike Ornstein, as I moved into York’s doctoral program. In the fall of 1976, I defended my MA thesis, a social-psychological study of cognitive structure and social networks. York at the time was still aglow from the progressive political ferment of the 1960s. Its social science division was very large and tilted to the left. York sociology was sprawling and chronically factionalized between a small, well-organized group of radical phenomenologists and a disorganized, heterogeneous mass of everyone else (for a very different pattern of departmental factions, see Riggins, chapter 19, this volume). In the latter, I found a lot of space for combining my research expertise with careful theorization. Courses I took in 1976–77 – in social stratification, imperialism, and Canadian society – spurred my shift from microsociology. Paul Grayson, a left nationalist with strong Marxist inclinations, introduced me to Canadian political economy. In his Canadian society seminar, we read Innis, Creighton, Levitt, Watkins, Naylor, and the lot. In the process, I realized the importance of taking the historical specificity of Canada seriously and avoiding overly abstract theoretical formulations, whether Parsonian or Marxian. Looking backward, I realized that Brock sociology had been an American “branch plant”: virtually every professor was American, trained in the United States and not particularly knowledgeable about Canada. Concerns about branch plants – whether corporate or cultural – were salient at York. The mid-to late 1970s marked the high tide of the Canadianization movement. Within academe, Canadianization sought to undo the effects (some of them rather ugly) of the migration of American academics, particularly into the humanities and social sciences, and to develop scholarly venues and curricula centred in Canadian issues. Grayson’s Canadian society course was pivotal in sensitizing me to the historical specificity of Canada (though the issue of settler colonialism was obscured through Innis’s own strongly Eurocentric lens). Other courses were more international in content. In Gordon Darroch’s seminar on social stratification, I was introduced to modern Marxist classics – E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly

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Capital. Mark Goodman’s seminar on the sociology of imperialism featured critical frameworks on colonization and the development of global capitalism. By the close of my second year at York, I was ready to take up historical materialism as a perspective within which these issues and others could be integrated. John Fox and Mike Ornstein were ideal mentors in this journey. First-rate empirical sociologists, they were also well-read Marxists who had been active in the New Left and were involved in Toronto’s Marxist Institute (MI), a community-based educational collective that connected graduate students and faculty with various activists and concerned citizens interested in Marxism. Through Fox and Ornstein, I joined the MI community, initially in study groups and eventually as a member of the collective, which offered a dialogical space among the various factions of the left, from social democracy to Maoism and Trotskyism. With an active membership numbering two to three dozen, the MI offered evening courses on a range of topics at a local elementary school in fall, winter, and summer terms, and public events that included film series, debates on the left, and such visiting speakers as Ernesto Laclau, Perry Anderson, and Ralph Miliband. For several years, the book review section of Critical Sociology (known until 1988 as the Insurgent Sociologist) was produced within the MI, and John Fox’s helpful guides to Capital were developed from MI study groups (Fox and Johnston 1978; Fox 1985). In the late 1970s, second-wave feminism was in full flower; and, in Canada, socialist feminism was a strong current within it and within the MI. As I worked my way through the three volumes of Capital and other classics, I also took up the socialist-feminist debates on class and gender, production and reproduction, capitalism and patriarchy. Among the socialist feminists associated with the MI were Bonnie Fox, Meg Luxton, Susan Archer Mann, Roxana Ng, Ester Reiter, Brenda Roman and Dorothy Smith. (Dorothy and I were in a study group on capitalist crises.) I was inspired by both their intellectual acuity and their deep radicalness, which took to heart the adage (not yet transmogrified into a lifestyle politics of identity) that the personal is political. In this setting, I became a self-identified Marxist and a feminist simultaneously. This meant recognizing gender and other subjective moorings as not just socially but also politically constructed, and it also spurred a curiosity as to how different relations of domination intersect and how distinct yet related political projects might be articulated together.

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It was in this context that my continuing interest in the social organization of corporate power emerged. I had already written, in 1976, a paper that extended my interest in network analysis to a new domain – interlocking directorates among the largest Canadian corporations. This was my major paper at the Institute for Behavioural Research Internship, for which I used data provided by Mike Ornstein (1976) and followed the lead of his article in the Canadian Journal of Sociology. Fox, Ornstein, and I retooled this paper into my first conference presentation, which was at the Western Anthropological and Sociological Association (Carroll et al. 1982). In the summer of 1977, I began researching a paper on class and the modern corporation, which would satisfy part of York sociology’s candidacy requirement, with an eye towards developing a doctoral dissertation on corporate power in post-Second World War Canada. That paper led to a detailed research proposal for a study that would track the one hundred largest corporations and their interlocks on a yearly basis, from 1946 through 1977, along with a host of state and civil-society organizations. The research would require extensive funding, far beyond my resources as a graduate student. Fox offered to adapt the proposal and to submit it to SSHRC under his name. The funding came through, and we assembled a team of research assistants who, over several months, meticulously coded data from corporate annual reports housed mostly at the Toronto Public Library’s business department. Typists at the Institute of Behavioural Research then transferred the data to thousands of Hollerith cards, which I read into York’s mainframe computer in a single batch (with fingers crossed that they would all be shuffled through). My dissertation was not the only research product to emerge from these painstaking empirical efforts. The database we assembled was mined by Mike Ornstein in a pioneering study of how the corporate network is reproduced as directors disappear (due to retirement or death) and others take their place. John and Mike also published a detailed longitudinal analysis of elite ties between the corporate and state sectors (Ornstein 1984, 210; Fox and Ornstein 1986, 481). For my part, I completed a dissertation that followed in the tracks of Wallace Clement’s studies of the Canadian corporate elite (reading the elite’s composition and organization as indicative of the nature of capitalism in Canada; see Clement, chapter 9, this volume), but it broke from Clement in the mode of analysis and the substantive interpretation. A student of John Porter, Clement had pulled Porter’s sociology-of-elites

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analysis towards Marx, reinterpreting the corporate elite as the top tier of a capitalist class, and had wedded this conception to the left-nationalist political economy of R.T. Naylor, who posited that a commercial fraction of capital had been hegemonic in shaping Canada into a staples-based economy, dependent upon a succession of imperial powers, from France through Britain to the United States. Clement viewed Canada’s corporate elite as an assemblage of class fractions, dominated domestically by bankers and merchants but allied continentally with the US-based transnational corporations that owned the branch plants and resource companies comprising Canada’s industrial sector. My dissertation presented a Marxist critique of Clement’s work and, more broadly, of the thesis of Canadian dependency in which it was ensconced (Carroll 1981). My by-then long-standing scepticism towards nationalism as a progressive strand in the Global North no doubt motivated this work. More salient still was a scientific concern: I was struck by the almost total disconnect between the substance of Marxist political economy and the claims of the Canadian dependency school. Naylor’s argument carried a profound misinterpretation of the distinction between industrial capital and financial-commercial capital, which was carried over into Clement’s and others’ analyses. For Marx, industrial capital refers to the expansion of exchange value through the production of new use-value – whether the process involves manufacturing, resource extraction, or transport/communication. For Naylor, only manufacturing counted as industrial, and Canada’s manufacturing sector had developed “by invitation,” as National Policy tariffs of the 1870s to the 1920s had induced American capitalists to establish miniature replica branch plants in Canada. Canada’s own capitalists were incurably commercial – interested only in reaping the profit and interest of merchants and bankers, obliging them to enter into a dependent alliance with the more powerful imperial capitalist fractions that developed the industrial sector. This last claim put Naylor at odds with another basic insight of Marxist political economy: in a capitalist economy, there is no deep division between industrial and commercial capital. The surplus value that issues from production (in the broad sense) is distributed competitively across all economic sectors. With the rise of corporate capital at the turn of the twentieth century, Marxists like Hilferding and Bukharin observed a close symbiosis emerging between industrial corporations and big banks (a.k.a. “finance capital”) as the former’s

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funding needs in mounting massive capital-intensive projects (like railways) dovetailed with the latter’s needs to valorize massive pools of money-capital. Set against a classic Marxist interpretation, Naylor’s narrative lacked credibility. It posited an exceptional divide between Canadian business and other, normal, business classes who were not adverse to industrial accumulation. Clement’s attempts to document a configuration of contemporary elite relations consistent with the Naylor thesis were highly influential at the time, yet the issue of fractional alliances and divisions begged for a more systematic, networkanalytic treatment. Beyond supplying that, my dissertation, published as a book in 1986, advanced a conceptual and empirical critique of the thesis of Canadian dependency (leaning heavily on the international literature, which had been skewering dependency theory since the mid-1970s) and an interpretation of Canada as an advanced capitalist middle power in an era of rising and then declining US hegemony. I argued that the Canadian capitalist class is unexceptional in its structure and composition. In the three decades after 1946, the Canadian corporate network remained focused around extensive interlocking between industrial companies and financial institutions controlled domestically. Canadian capitalist development had followed in the grooves of profit-seeking capitalist rationality, not dependency. Canadian industry’s continuing skew towards resource extraction is the result of high sectoral profit rates owing to a rich natural-resource endowment and high demand for resource-based industrial goods. Moreover, I showed that capital based in Canada was internationalizing at least as quickly as Canadian firms were being incorporated into transnational empires based abroad. The trajectory was not towards what Levitt (1970) had called a “harvest of lengthening dependency” but towards a cross-penetration of capital among the advanced countries. Although the book was awarded the John Porter Prize in 1988, its lessons were absorbed slowly, across decades (Gordon 2015; Kellogg 2015; Klassen 2014; Carroll and Klassen 2010). For me, this debate on the character of Canada’s capitalist class had an important political implication. The left-nationalist concern with dependency and foreign domination was misplaced: struggles around Canadian capitalism need to focus on democratizing control of economic life, from the shop floor to overall investment decision making, which also entails a critique of the imperialist role that Canadian business and the state have played abroad.

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Two days after I defended my dissertation in September 1981, I moved to Victoria, where I began a limited-term assistant professorship, which was quickly converted to tenure-track. I had a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship arranged and was not even looking for work. However, Bernard Blishen had given some lectures at the University of Victoria in April and had talked me up as his collaborator. As it happened, UVic sociology was deadlocked in a recruitment process. Rick Ogmundson, who had recently relocated to UVic from the University of Manitoba, heard Bernard’s pitch and alerted the department to my existence. I was hastily invited to apply for the position, flown out for a job talk in May, and immediately offered the job. This was indeed a stroke of luck. The academic labour market was terrible (and about to get much worse, as the Volcker shock south of the border triggered a global recession). Within the demographic categories of this collection, I am betwixt and between the generation of Canadian sociologists who emerged from graduate school during the great expansion of universities (and thus of professorial opportunities) and the less fortunate generation that followed in a period of seemingly endless austerity. Austerity and precarity are often thought of as twenty-first-century problems, but their origins came earlier. As an undergraduate at Brock in the early to mid-1970s, I participated in student protests against budget-driven proposals to close that university. My years at York were marked by occasionally intense labour strife spurred in part by policies of austerity. A T WO - TRACK RESEARCH PROGRAM : THE 1980 S UVic’s

sociology department felt to me like a return to Brock. I brought the full-time equivalent complement to eleven, most of whom were US-trained and some distance behind the cutting edge of sociological inquiry. Not surprisingly, positivism held sway against more critical and reflexive sociologies. I gravitated to the department’s sole Marxist, Rennie Warburton. Trained as a sociologist of religion at the London School of Economics, with Anthony Giddens in his cohort, Rennie had taken a radical turn in the 1960s. We became close, sharing space on the department’s margins and also sharing an emergent interest in critical realism as a post-positivist philosophical alternative to Parisian poststructuralism. We were particularly inspired by Method in Social Science (Sayer 1984), which remains one

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of the best sources on critical realism as a post-disciplinary approach. Victoria presented a sharp contrast to Toronto, intensified in my own experience by my move from Kensington Market (perhaps the most multicultural neighbourhood in the country at the time) to Oak Bay, which fashioned itself as the last outpost of colonial England. My experience of culture shock, without crossing national borders, hammered home the remarkable regionalization of Canada. Another sharp difference was in the field of class politics. In the postwar era, Ontario became the keystone of class compromise as vigorous accumulation enabled a moderately pragmatic labour movement to extract concessions from capital while a succession of centrist governments provided what Premier Bill Davis once called “sound conservative management” of the economy and society. In British Columbia, a militant and highly mobilized labour movement, strongly aligned with the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), posed a continuing challenge to the governing Social Credit Party. The Socreds, an anti-NDP alliance of Liberals and Conservatives, had held power since 1952 except for a three-year interruption in the early 1970s, during which an NDP government had introduced a wide range of progressive reforms. By 1982, the global recession had brought Depression-level unemployment to British Columbia, and upon its re-election the following year, the Socred government introduced an austerity program aimed at reducing the state deficit on the backs of workers. With attacks on trade union and human rights and public provisioning, the “restraint program” was directly inspired by Thatcherism, which by that point had cohered as a post-Keynesian hegemonic project that posited “two nations”: fine upstanding citizens who respect the authority of capital and state, and the otherized rabble of unions, leftists, and welfare cheats (Jessop et al. 1988). The popular response in British Columbia was the Solidarity Coalition, a massive social movement made up of unions and a wide range of progressive movements, intent on stopping the “restraint program” in its tracks. I soon joined the local Victoria group, and even became the UVic Faculty Association’s representative, as the sole faculty member who participated in the coalition. By November 1983, the conflict had intensified into an escalating political strike that threatened to shut down the province. As an activist academic, I experienced a sharp bifurcation of the sort that Dorothy Smith (1987) has described. I had divided the previous summer between political work within the Solidarity Coalition and writ-

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ing a paper on dependency, imperialism and the capitalist class in Canada for a conference Bob Brym was organizing on the structure of the Canadian capitalist class. Career-wise, this presentation was important. I had poured enormous effort into a longish paper that, in my humble view, demolished the reigning dependency perspective, and Bob had positioned my presentation prominently in the flow of sessions. So it was that I flew to Toronto just as a massive confrontation was coming to a head to participate in academic debates that paled in comparison with my own visceral experience as an activist. My feelings of having betrayed the cause were ultimately assuaged by the larger betrayal spear-headed by IWA-Canada president Jack Munro – the so-called Kelowna Accord of 18 November 1983, which protected the existing rights of provincial employees but sacrificed the coalition’s social goals concerning human rights, thereby creating a rift between labour and other movements. In the aftermath, a group of concerned UVic academics formed the Committee on Alternatives for British Columbia (CABC). Led by political scientist Warren Magnusson, our group was interdisciplinary and resolutely critical of the “new reality” of what was then called neoconservatism. We quickly mobilized an on-campus network of colleagues willing to write chapters for a public-facing book that would explain and critique the new right project that Social Credit “restraint” represented. Core members of CABC edited sections of the book, with Warren taking the lead for the introductory chapter and conclusion. We hot-housed the collection and got Vancouver-based New Star Books to publish it in September 1984, and The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia was soon a BC bestseller (Magnusson et al. 1984, 1986). Besides my editorial responsibilities, as an insider to the Solidarity Coalition I was tasked with writing a chapter on it. This was my entry point into social movement analysis and into what we now call public sociology. It opened a new research interest, which soon led me to Gramsci and to the two-track research program I have maintained since the mid-1980s. Also, it was my entry point into writing and thinking about neoliberalism (see, e.g., Bruff 2014). In that respect, my move to British Columbia was fortuitous not only as another experience of mental mobility. It also placed me in the middle of a political transformation that would eventually sweep across Canada, culminating, one could say, in the “Common Sense Revolution” of Ontario’s Conservative government in the mid- to late 1990s. In

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British Columbia, I could be a participant-observer of the contested transitions that would reshape Canadian society. Leaving Toronto in September of 1981, I had seen Victoria as a distant, marginal place, yet it turned out to be in the vanguard of what was to come. Three years on, I had been drawn into the whirlwind of regional class politics, both as activist and academic, with major consequences for my research program and, indeed, for my approach to sociology. I saw the two tracks as complementary, within a broadly historicalmaterialist approach. One track continued my research on the political economy of corporate capital with a top-down analysis of the structures of the ruling class and class domination; the other offered a bottom-up analysis of collective agencies of resistance and potential transformation. In 1985, I presented a paper at the Canadian Sociology and Anthrology Association (CSAA) conference that placed the Solidarity Coalition within a broad analysis of movements in contemporary capitalism. In 1989, Bob Ratner, a sociologist at UBC, and I published “Social Democracy, Neo-Conservatism and Hegemonic Crisis in British Columbia” in Critical Sociology (Carroll and Ratner 1989). That was really my first Gramscian piece. It read the Socred restraint program and subsequent initiatives as a developing hegemonic project, and it argued that the popular opposition had been a conjunctural assemblage of movements lacking both an alternative social vision and the organizational capacity to sustain itself over the long haul. In 1987–88, I took my first sabbatical. When they immigrated to Canada in the 1950s, my partner Anne Preyde’s Catholic Dutch parents had left behind a large family network within which we were happy to immerse ourselves. But what drew me professionally to the University of Amsterdam was its central location in the development of corporate network analysis. Meindert Fennema, who had published a path-breaking dissertation in 1982 on transnational corporate elite networks, was our host. A prominent, well-connected activist and scholar on the Dutch left, Meindert participated in the After the Crisis Group – an informal research network that was developing a Gramscian analysis of the crisis of the 1970s/1980s, with an eye towards discerning both the threats and opportunities it posed for emancipatory politics. I found its perspectives insightful, particularly regarding how to think about the issues of hegemony from a political economic perspective on capitalism that was open to theorizing collective agency and transformative practice. This network developed

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into the Amsterdam International Political Economy Project, with which I have been loosely identified (Overbeek 2004, 113; Carroll 2018a, 2018b, 197–201). Urban Dutch society combined strong civillibertarian and public-planning traditions, progressive movements were relatively robust, and anti-immigrant sentiment (mainly directed at Turks) was just in its infancy. As a newly minted Canadian, I was warmly welcomed by all, trading serendipitously on the role that Canadian troops played in liberating Holland at the close of the Second World War. During that sabbatical year my two-pronged research program really became consolidated, with new work linking corporate power structure analysis with a neo-Gramscian political economy of neoliberal capitalism (Carroll 1989, 81). Back in Victoria, the Porter Award came with a 1989 CSAA plenary address, in which I drew on the Amsterdam Project in advocating neo-Gramscian political economy as a window onto Canada’s specificity and location within global capitalism (Carroll 1990). New curricular innovations were also afoot. The CABC network morphed into an initiative to establish a graduate program in contemporary social and political thought (CSPT). Launched at the close of the 1980s, CSPT opened an interdisciplinary space for critical theorizing. In the program’s first year, I led a course on the big changes under way in culture and political economy and the raging debates around postmodernism and postmodernity. Some of this engagement found its way into the theoretical paper Bob Ratner and I published in 1994, which presented a neo-Gramscian analysis of contemporary social movements as a synthesizing, middle course between Leninist and postmodernist interpretations (Carroll and Ratner 1994). THE 1990 S AND BEYOND

My sociological practice since the early 1990s has followed the two tracks of my research program, with an increasing focus on global issues (Carroll 1993), while opening, as a third, explorations of the relationship between sociology and social justice. Here again, a combination of intellectual interest and political activism has energized my initiatives. However, the arrival of our first son, Myles, in 1989 and our second, Wes, in 1992, tended to crowd out much of the activism during the intensive years of parenting through the 1990s. On the other hand, direct experience in the double day of academic work and

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domestic labour offered fresh insights, as I assumed primary responsibility for cooking and childcare after Anne’s brief maternity leaves. Flexible work hours allowed me to shift much of my academic work into the evening hours, but the upshot was a seemingly permanent blending of exhaustion and exhilaration. Caring labour takes time and mindfulness. But, in addition to sensitizing me to the web of life in which we are all immersed, the years of intensive parenting helped me rediscover an aesthetic interest in music, which has enhanced my sociological practice. As a graduate student I had written quite a few songs, many of them political. In the early 1980s I performed some of them, such as “The Relative Surplus Population Blues,” at such activist venues as the steps of the BC Legislature, where Victoria’s Unemployed Workers’ Union held a demonstration in 1983. In the 1990s I dusted off my guitar. During the long stretches of childcare I started playing, singing, and writing for the children, at first within the genre of lullabies. Before long, I found myself producing an annual birthday song for each of them, and as Myles and Wes matured so did the songs. By the early 2000s, as the Bush administration launched its War on Terror and as my sons became conscious of the wider world, political themes crept back into the music. On advice from a friend, I started to create the occasional music video on sociologically relevant issues. These productions, some of which have been published in the Sociological Cinema; Class, Race and Corporate Power; and the International Sociological Association’s The Futures We Want and other internet platforms, are sociopoetic interventions in public sociology (Kaufman 2013). Communicating in a different register from the academic-discursive, these productions provoke the critical recognition of social issues and reflection upon them. The accessibility of these sociological music videos (several of them co-produced with my son, who in the meantime became a professional musician [Carroll and Carroll n.d.]) has made them useful as discussion-starters in various contexts, including film festivals, activist meetings, and classrooms. Meanwhile, my growing interest in public sociology led to new curricular initiatives. At the close of the 1990s, colleagues and I successfully pushed for a new undergraduate “social justice” stream in sociology that would parallel a “social research” stream. Small curricular changes caused a big stir when it became clear that, given the choice, nearly all sociology students gravitated to the new stream. With the fate of statistics courses hanging in the balance, the positivists (still the

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majority group) insisted on an end to the experiment and to social justice as a stream. In the meantime, however, I had developed a set of readings and workshops I parlayed into a reader that presented five critical research strategies (Carroll 2004). Editing that book helped clarify my own epistemic, ontological, and political commitments. The collection was centred in sociology but quite open to the whole range of social sciences. The research strategies featured in it were not technical, empirical methods but broad approaches to producing solidly grounded knowledge in ways that help expose injustice, empower subaltern groups, and democratize social relations – from the dialectical analysis of classical Marxism through institutional ethnography to critical discourse analysis and participatory action research. Several pieces in the volume took up critical realism, “the attempt to steer between the Scylla of naive realism on the one hand, and the Charybdis of idealism and constructivism on the other” (Centre for Critical Realism n.d.). In the introductory chapter, I emphasized the distinctness of the social – that “‘social facts’ can never have the same ontological status as ‘facts’ pertaining to natural processes that are devoid of human agency” (Carroll 2004, 2) – and the impossibility of political neutrality in a world organized through relations of domination and ideological mystification. The demise of UVic sociology’s social-justice stream brought a consequence unintended by the executors. Intense student interest in critical approaches led me to propose to a dozen progressive colleagues at UVic that we create an interdisciplinary program in social justice studies. I co-chaired the organizing committee, and, after considerable networking and dialogue across disciplines (to say nothing of paperwork), the program was approved in 2008, with me as founding director. Social justice studies (SJS) was designed as a bridge, fostering connections to build capacity for critical thinking and action pertaining to justice issues. Establishing the program also meant establishing a network bridging academe and activism. I worked closely with a community advisory council in setting up an SJS practicum that runs as a capstone course, enabling students to work with local activist groups as they keep a reflective journal and participate in biweekly seminars. By far the most successful of UVic’s interdisciplinary minor/diploma programs, its counter-hegemonic vision emphasizes the need for a radical politics of solidarity across movements, publics, and communities, drawing on feminist thinking on intersectionality,

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left traditions of radical pedagogy, anti-oppressive social work, and decolonizing thought. SJS also bridges across social issues, disciplinary silos, age cohorts, and categories of experience (Carroll 2014). Late in 2011, as I completed my term as SJS director and prepared for a year of round-the-world fieldwork on alternative policy groups (Carroll 2016b), I also looked forward to delivering a plenary address I had been asked to give to the CSA. My plan was to read extensively in the sociology of sociology, focusing on contemporary challenges, and from that to distil some insights on how we might practise sociology today. It was a difficult paper to write as it spoke to identity questions extending to the contested legitimacy of sociology and drew upon many strains of theory and practice. Eventually, I settled on a threepart presentation, which I worked into the title: “Discipline, Field, Nexus” (Carroll 2013). Leaning heavily on critical realism as a philosophy of science, and on C. Wright Mills’s notion of the sociological imagination, I problematized social science’s disciplinary divides and argued that the very features that worry many positivists – sociology’s permeability, its dense connectivity to other fields and critical transdisciplinarity – enhance sociology’s capacity to lead in the movement from siloed knowledge to more integrated and critical understandings of our troubled world. Clearly, this essay was shaped by a host of accumulated experiences in practising critical sociology, in activism, and in radical pedagogy. Indeed, I now notice that, in 2010, I described UVic’s Social Justice Studies Program as “a really interesting nexus between a number of disciplines” (Coburn 2010, 82). My experience as SJS director had already led me to value, in the context of critical pedagogy, the mutual learning that stems from transdisciplinary knowledge integration. It was not much of a stretch to redeploy “nexus” as a root metaphor for sociology. “Discipline, Field, Nexus” was well received, but most heartening to me was the lively debate it provoked (Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015; Misina 2015; Carroll 2016a). My work makes just a small contribution to this vast topic, and the discussion continues. CURRENT EVENTS

My current, highly collaborative project moves along all three tracks. Mapping the Power of the Carbon-Extractive Corporate Resource Sector (i.e., the Corporate Mapping Project n.d.) is a six-year SSHRC partnership hosted by UVic and involving five other university part-

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ners and four community partners. Co-directed by Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the partnership is balanced between research and public engagement. With a team of approximately one hundred co-investigators, collaborators, and community advisors, our partnership maps carbon capital’s “regime of obstruction” (Carroll 2021), extending to political and civil society and to the transnational level, but it also attends to the countermovements resisting that power and championing socially just alternatives to carbon capitalism. The partnership is a community of social scientists, policy researchers, and activists (environmental, labour, Indigenous, social justice, and public-interest), all of whom shape our research priorities and communication strategies. Functionally, it is balanced across the four genres Burawoy (2005) distinguishes – professional, critical, policy, and public sociology. Our partnership brings together the various strands of sociology that I have been somewhat haphazardly braiding since I discovered this remarkable field in the early 1970s (cf. Armstrong, chapter 12, this volume). The entwined combination creates a strong analysis, demystifying ideology, learning from movements, and helping to guide progressive change. It would be difficult to overestimate the challenges we face (“we” being the entire human extended family) in an era of what Gramsci called organic crisis, as the old is dying and the new cannot be born (Gramsci 1971, 276). The most important lesson I take from my experience as a politically engaged, critical sociologist is that our field offers important resources for addressing those challenges in ways that support a just and ecologically healthy remaking of our world. REFERENCES Baer, Douglas, Edward Grabb, and William Johnston. 1993. “National Character, Regional Culture, and the Values of Canadians and Americans.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 30 (1): 13–36. Baltzell, E. Digby. 1964. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Becker, Howard P., and Harry Elmer Barnes. 1961. Social Thought from Lore to Science, 3rd ed. New York: Dover Publications. Berkowitz, M.I., W.K. Carroll, and R. Marr. 1975. The Addiction Research Foundation and the Social Service Community: A Study of Roles and Relationships. Toronto: Addiction Research Foundation.

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Blishen, Bernard R. 1958. “The Construction and Use of an Occupational Class Scale.” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 24 (4): 519–31. Blishen, Bernard R., and William K. Carroll. 1978. “Sex Differences in a Socio-Economic Index for Occupations in Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 15 (3): 352–71. Bruff, Ian. 2014. “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism.” Rethinking Marxism 26 (1): 113–29. Buechler, Steven. 2008. “What Is Critical about Sociology?” Teaching Sociology 36 (4): 318–30. Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “2004 ASA Presidential Address: For Public Sociology.” American Sociological Review 70 (1): 4–28. Burdick, Eugene, and William Lederer. 1958. The Ugly American. New York: Norton. Carroll, William K. 1981. “Capital Accumulation and Corporate Interlocking in Post-War Canada.” PhD diss., York University. – 1989. “Neoliberalism and the Recomposition of Finance Capital in Canada.” Capital and Class 13 (2): 81–112. – 1990. “Restructuring Capital, Reorganizing Consent: Gramsci, Political Economy, and Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 27 (3): 390–416. – 1993. “Canada in the Crisis: Transformations in Capital Structure and Political Strategy.” In Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy, ed. Henk Overbeek, 216–45. London: Routledge. – , ed. 2004. Critical Strategies for Social Research. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. – 2013. “Discipline, Field, Nexus: Re-visioning Sociology.” Canadian Review of Sociology 50, (1): 1–26. – 2014. “Bridging Gaps: Social Justice Studies at the University of Victoria.” Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research 4: 157–69. – 2016a. “Critical Nexus or Chaotic Discipline? Re-Visioning Sociology Again.” Canadian Review of Sociology 53 (2): 244–52. – 2016b. Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice. London/Halifax: Zed Books/Fernwood. – 2018a. “Reflections on the Amsterdam School and the Transnational Capitalist Class.” In Transnational Capital and Class Fractions: The Amsterdam School Perspective Reconsidered. ed. Bob Jessop and Henk Overbeek, 197–201. London: Routledge. – 2018b. “Rethinking the Transnational Capitalist Class.” Alternate Routes 29: 188–206.

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– , ed. 2021. Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press. Carroll, William K., and Wes Carroll. n.d. Music videos. http://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/wcarroll/music-videos-on-politicsand-society/. Carroll, William K., John Fox, and Michael D. Ornstein. 1982. “The Network of Directorate Links among the Largest Canadian Firms.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 19 (1): 44–69. Carroll, William K., and Jerome Klassen. 2010. “Hollowing out Corporate Canada? Changes in the Corporate Network since the 1990s.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 35 (1): 1–30. Carroll, William K., and R.S. Ratner. 1989. “Social Democracy, Neo-Conservatism and Hegemonic Crisis in British Columbia.” Critical Sociology 16 (1): 29–53. – 1994. “Between Leninism and Radical Pluralism: Gramscian Reflections on Counter-Hegemony and the New Social Movements.” Critical Sociology 20 (2): 3–26. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Centre for Critical Realism. n.d. “What Is Critical Realism?” https://centreforcriticalrealism.com/about-critical-realism/. Coburn, Elaine. 2010. “‘Pulling the Monster Down’: Interview with William K. Carroll.” Socialist Studies 6 (1): 65–92. https://socialiststudies.com/index.php/sss/article/view/23675. Corporate Mapping Project. n.d. http://www.corporatemapping.ca/. Duncan, Otis Dudley. 1961. “A Socioeconomic Index for all Occupations.” In Occupations and Social Status, ed. Albert J. Reiss, 109–38. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Fox, John. 1985. Understanding Capital, Volume II: A Reader’s Guide. Toronto: Progress Books. Fox, John, and William Johnston. 1978. Understanding Capital: A Guide to Volume I. Toronto: Progress Books. Fox, John, and Michael D. Ornstein. 1986. “The Canadian State and Corporate Elites in the Post-War Period.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 23 (4): 481–506. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton. Gilandas, Alex J. 1973. “The Problem-oriented Medical Record in Psychiatry.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 7: 138–41. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3109/00048677309159736. Gordon, Todd. 2015. Imperialist Canada. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. “Americanism and Fordism.” In Selections from the

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Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 279–318. New York: International Publishers. Irvine, S.H., and William K. Carroll. 1980. “Testing and Assessment across Cultures: Issues in Methodology and Theory.” In Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology, ed. Harry Charalambas Triandis and W.W. Lambert, 2:181–244. Boston: Allyn. Jessop, Bob, Kevin Bonnett, Tom Ling, Simon Bromley. 1988. Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kaufman, Peter. 2013. “Poetic Sociology.” Everyday Sociology Blog, 8 July. http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2013/07/poetic-sociology.html. Kellogg, Paul. 2015. Escape from the Staples Trap. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Klasssen, Jerome. 2014. Joining Empire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lafargue, Paul. 1890. “Reminiscences of Marx.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1890/xx/marx.htm. Levitt, Kari. 1970. Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada. Toronto: Macmillan. Magnusson, Warren, William K. Carroll, Charles Doyle, Monika Langer, and R.B.J. Walker, eds. 1984. The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books. Magnusson, Warren, R.B.J. Walker, Charles Doyle, and John DeMarco, eds. 1986. After Bennett: A New Politics for British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books. Mestrovic, Matthew. 1962. What You Should Know about Communism and Why. New York: McGraw-Hill. Misina, Dalibor. 2015. “Who Now Needs Sociology? Transdisciplinarity vs. Tradition.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 40 (4): 527–46. Ornstein, Michael D. 1976. “The Boards and Executives of the Largest Canadian Corporations: Size, Composition, and Interlocks.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 1 (4): 411–37. – 1984. “Interlocking Directorates in Canada: Intercorporate or Class Alliance?” Administrative Science Quarterly 29 (2): 210–31. Overbeek, Henk. 2004. “Transnational Class Formation and Concepts of Control: Towards a Genealogy of the Amsterdam Project in International Political Economy.” Journal of International Relations and Development 7 (2): 113–41. Puddephatt, Anthony J., and Neil McLaughlin. 2015. “Critical Nexus or Pluralist Discipline? Institutional Ambivalence and the Future of Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Review of Sociology 52 (3): 310–32. Sayer, Andrew. 1984. Method in Social Science. London: Hutchinson.

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Schur, Edwin M. 1971. Labeling Deviant Behavior. New York: Harper and Row. – 1980. The Politics of Deviance. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Smith, Dorothy E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1992. “Remaking a Life, Remaking Sociology.” In Fragile Truths, ed. William K. Carroll, Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Raymond F. Currie, and Deborah Harrison, 125–34. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. – 1993. “The Standard North American Family: SNAF as an Ideological Code.” Journal of Family Issues 14 (1): 50–65.

12 Learning Sociology: A Participant’s Perspective Pat Armstrong

In the fall of 1963, the University of Toronto operated in much the same way as it had for fifty years. A book I picked up on a remainder table described the rules women living in Victoria College’s Annesley Hall had to follow in the early part of that century. Like those living in Canada’s first women’s residence, we had to “dress” for dinner, meet according to our year in different rooms, and then parade into the dining room where a don or senior student served the meat from her seat at the head of the table. Politics, religion, and sex were frowned upon as topics for table conversation. If we wanted to stay out past 10:00 p.m., we had to get permission and sign out when we left, saying who we were going out with and where we were going, signing in again when we returned. Of course, no male visitors were allowed past the front desk. By the time I graduated several years later, all these rules had been overturned and the sixties of legend had begun. They were for me and others transformative years. GETTING TO UNIVERSIT Y

There were two reasons I went to the University of Toronto. One was that I loved the city, based on the long car trips our family made there to see musicals, museums, and the Santa Claus Parade, with its costumes made by my aunt. The other reason was that my guidance counsellor told me to go there. Like me, my parents were born in tinytown northern Ontario – a town with no high school. Unlike them, I had access to a high school thirty-six kilometres away. As the first one

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in my family to go to university, I depended on the counsellor to guide me. As sociology tells us, class, family, and school all contributed to getting me that far. Our family was petit bourgeois. My father’s small lumber company was declared bankrupt when I was in elementary school, leading to a number of very lean years in our household. Floyd Hembruff worked in construction to pay off his debts and to prove he was not bankrupt, eventually setting up a construction company. While hard work was stressed, it was not a household that fit Max Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic because my father also believed strongly in play, constantly organizing imaginative activities and travel for us, even though that meant sleeping on some relative’s floor. He also believed strongly in commitment to community, involving us constantly in organizing parades, community picnics, celebrations, and multiple associations. He was a “red Tory” who expected us to be engaged and to stand up for our principles. When he was mayor and I was involved in a group of teens who wanted to take over the curling rink on Saturdays, he insisted on my appearing before council to make our case. It was a community curling rink that he had been central to creating. Perhaps because he had no sons, he often called on his daughters in his construction work. My first paid work was cleaning up inside buildings after construction was completed. This, along with my summer job cleaning motel rooms for my aunt, made me sympathetic to service workers of all sorts and helped me understand some of the skills involved in the work. My mother Betty was what we used to call a homemaker, and the term fit her well. Her only paid employment was as a drugstore clerk for a year before she got married at seventeen. Like other women in her time, she was involved in church groups and hospital committees. She was a voracious and wide-ranging reader, consuming daily newspapers, Readers’ Digest condensed books, and anything available from our small town library. She read about museums and restaurants, prompting our special visits to them. She loved to cook and constantly experimented, involving all four daughters in these experiments and their clean-up. This, too, shaped my life-long interest in food and in the work involved in daily eating. Both parents profoundly shaped how I experienced living with three fingers on each hand. When the surgery they took me for on the doctor’s advice and at considerable expense in those pre-

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Medicare days failed to deal with what I call my crooked finger, they brought me home and simply got on with treating me like my siblings. I was a toddler then and have no memory of thinking as a child that I was disabled. My father designed and my mother knit me gloves, including ones with leather on the palms so I could more easily grab objects and hold on to the handles of my bike. Gloves were and are tricky because of that very crooked and extra-large finger, but making gloves was not treated as a big deal – just another example of how it was assumed that you had to be inventive in solving problems. The best example I have of how my parents dealt with my disability relates to piano lessons. I wanted to take them and my parents initially said no on the grounds that we did not have a piano and my sister had failed to go to gramma’s house to practice on her piano, thus wasting both time and money. I persisted, with no understanding that maybe finding someone to teach me was an issue. They did find someone and the first person to mention that it was odd having a person with such hands play piano was the man who tested me for my grade five Royal Conservatory exam. In short, I was not socially constructed as disabled. It was different in high school. My parents, and my small town, no longer protected me. Boys would drop my hand when they asked me to dance, and then walk away. Enrolled in the grade nine class for “gifted” students who were required to take an extra class, I was rejected from typing on the grounds that typewriters were made for people with five fingers. I took home economics instead and quickly learned about discrimination. But I also learned a whole range of things that opened new worlds. Working in the library with the English teacher, I was encouraged to read the Russian classics and books such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye that were not part of the curriculum. Our history teacher brought politics and not just political figures into the classroom, and our biology teacher used his experience as a pilot in the Second World War to illustrate his lessons. In part because the Abitibi Pulp and Paper Mill offered unionized, well-paid jobs to the boys and the girls dropped out to marry them, only eight students out of our five grade nine classes ended up in grade thirteen. However, in large measure because of the teachers, four of us (two female and two male) ended up with doctorates and teach in universities. While their individual mentoring was important, it was their shared capacity to make learning rewarding and their collective commitment to students that made the difference. I

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still have letters I received from them after the grades from the students at the University of Toronto were published, as was the practice then, in the Toronto Star, and I still try to model their principles in teaching. LIVING THE SIXTIES

At the University of Toronto, it was not only the times but also my roommate that made a difference. Now a writer of mystery books, Dorothy McIntosh (2012) introduced me to the NDP and then to student politics. We hung out at The Varsity, volunteered for the newly organized U of T radio, and went to all kinds of meetings as well as to parties. My first year Social and Philosophical Studies Program required me to take five honours courses in different disciplines and one pass course. The pass course that year was taught by three graduate students (Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, and David Godfrey). These now famous literary figures exposed me to alternative and exciting ways of seeing literature. The honours courses convinced me that understanding the world required a range of disciplinary perspectives, but the second year forced me to specialize. I tried psychology but hated its narrow, medical science approach. Even though I had not taken any sociology in first year, I switched to sociology because it allowed me to take economics and political science as well as sociology. It was a time when students organized in classrooms to demand course evaluations and input into course content. We protested writing an excessive number of essays, a protest the class decided should be taken to the chair of the department by those of us who got firsts (remember, the grades were published). The chair’s response was “Leave if you don’t like it,” which is what I did, although it meant taking summer courses in order to get my degree. It was a time of economic prosperity as well as of widespread rebellion inside and outside the university. Students had no say about course content, admissions, or university governance. Applications often required pictures that could lead to discrimination based on racialization, and there were few if any accommodation programs. Quotas limiting the number of women in programs such as medicine were common, and universities were dominated by economically comfortable white men. Homosexuality, information on birth control, and abortion were illegal. At the same time, it was legal to

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require women to leave paid work when they got pregnant or even to refuse to hire married women. There were lots of good reasons to rebel. Some dropped out and turned on: these were people we called “the feelies.” Others, like me, joined organizations and fought for change based on our feminist political economy theory and our commitment to praxis. Others called us “wheelies” because we worked for collective change. STUDENT POLITICS

I applied for the job as executive assistant to the student council president at the University of Toronto Students’ Administrative Council (SAC) and began almost four years of working full-time in the student movement – two at SAC and one and a half at the Canadian Union of Students (CUS). Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff were only two of the many bright young students on the council then. That council successfully demanded a commission on university government, investigated racial discrimination in student housing, and organized an alternative summer school that provided the communist historian Stanley Ryerson with his only university work, to name only some of the issues in which I was heavily involved. Another council member, Doug Hay, who went on to write Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England with E.P. Thompson (Hay et al. 1975), invited me to participate in dinners organized by the men in his co-op house. These activists and intellectuals invited people such as Mel Watkins (1968), who had just finished the Watkins Report, to dinner and debate. They dared to dream about who they would like to talk with, and few turned them down, even though many, such as the university’s president, seemed unlikely dinner guests. During my time working for SAC, I also teamed up with Gil Levine of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) to organize the first union on the campus and began my long career of working with unions. In my first year at CUS, we worked on such issues as access to university, student evaluation of faculty, incorporating students’ councils, and Indigenous issues as well as on what others saw as non-university issues such as imperialism. When I say “worked on,” I mean writing papers, speaking on campuses, lobbying and protesting. It was this move to broader issues that got us in trouble on many campuses. When Martin Loney, a well-known student radical at Simon Fraser

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University, became president in 1969 and convinced me to return for another year at SAC, it was to help close the organization and to negotiate the selling of our library to McMaster University. I learned to apply theory to policy issues, to write accessibly, and to defend my ideas, even as they were dissected, debated, and – often appropriately – rejected by my colleagues as we together sorted through issues and strategies. Equally important, I learned that this kind of engagement was, at least among these colleagues, a sign of respect and the basis for advancing ideas worth sharing. And I started to identify as a feminist political economist. It was through the student movement that I met and married Hugh Armstrong, beginning a long history of collaboration on research, writing, and politics. Marriage was hardly popular among activists. Asked in an interview by the editor of the student newspaper The Varsity why marriage, we explained that we believed in commitment and in collective work. We married in the basement of city hall after an allnight CUS meeting that Hugh, as president, chaired, and then we flew to Ghana. As the only white boy in a Ghanaian boarding school, Hugh had had his worldview transformed and wanted this white woman to share the experience of being in a tiny minority. That trip taught me a lot about race and racism. We returned to live in Rochdale College, which in its first year was an exciting mix of activists, hippies, and others looking for alternative ways of living and learning (Sharpe 1987). Our floor had regular dinner meetings in our Zeus suite, as the apartment was called, to discuss Marx and political change. When no place could be found to have a meeting with Bettina Aptheker, we offered our apartment – an action that seemed to prompt the bugging device we found in our non-functioning intercom. It was certainly not the only lesson we had on the limits to democracy. When Hugh enrolled in the graduate program at Carleton the following year and I returned briefly to CUS, we both enrolled in a theory class. Instead of writing our own papers, we wrote a joint one. Although the professor was teaching Marx and Engels, she insisted that scholarship must be individual. We wrote the two papers she requested but refused to sign them, saying she could assign authorship because it would be wrong to claim we had written them alone. Indeed, we believed in collective work and in recognizing that few, if any, did intellectual work alone. She responded by kicking me, the part-time student, out of class and offering Hugh an A if he would

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leave. By that time, I was working for a mini-royal commission on youth, work that took me across Canada to meet with governments and students. Our collective production of a report for cabinet may well have contributed to my inclusion on a government “enemies of the state” list later published by the Toronto Telegram, a list that featured people such as Robert Rabinovitch, who became president of the CBC. GETTING SCHOOLED

In spite of my theory class experience, I was admitted to the master’s program in Canadian studies at Carleton – a program I started a week after our daughter was born. As an undergraduate, I had learned nothing about Canada from my American professors and the textbooks they had assigned. Marxist theory taught me about the importance of historical specificity and Canadian studies offered the possibility of looking at conditions here. That fall saw the October Crisis, with the War Measures Act suspending civil liberties in the wake of the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapping a cabinet minister and a diplomat and later killing one of them. Our Canadian studies cohort included students such as Sheila Hodgins Milner (Milner and Milner 1973), whose thesis was on the decolonization of Quebec, in a program directed by Pauline Jewett, who went on the become Canada’s first female president of a co-educational university, and taught by professors such as Marcel Rioux (1978), who championed Quebec. It was an incredible time to be in Ottawa and to be studying Canada. I started a thesis with John Porter (1965), known for his study of class and power in Canada. At his urging, I began studying student leaders as he had studied Canadian elites. But I increasingly felt that such work had little importance, especially as my involvement in women’s groups had made me much more interested in issues that could have a direct impact on making change. So I abandoned the half-finished thesis and Porter, instead focusing on women’s work. An article we read on racial segregation prompted me to use the same kind of approach to look at women. At the urging of Daniel Drache (Clement and Drache 1978), who knew people at McClelland and Stewart who were interested in the increasingly prominent women’s issues, that thesis on “Women and Their Work: The Canadian Experience” became The Double Ghetto: Canadian Women and Their Segregat-

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ed Work (Armstrong and Armstrong 1978). It was preceded by an article in the first special issue that the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology published on women, an issue that itself was an indication of how women were finally on the agenda as a result of the women’s movement (Armstrong and Armstrong 1975). Our timing was good in that the women’s movement was having an impact, but we were also part of that timing in that we were involved in the movement outside as well as inside the university. Frustrated by our lack of access to progressive books, we worked with Sheilagh and Henry Milner, Marilyn Hindmarsh, and Steve Harris to start a co-op bookstore in Ottawa that we called Octopus – a name we took from Steve’s New Left street tabloid. We funded it by asking faculty, relatives, and others to pre-buy books. While no longer a co-op, it continues over forty years later as a bookstore that serves as a centre for progressive debates. It is supported by Carleton students and faculty who continue to order their texts through it instead of through a corporate outlet. TAKING ON TEACHING

Our work on women continued when we moved in 1971 to Peterborough, Hugh to teach at Trent University and me to teach at Sir Sanford Fleming College. I had to go through a teacher training program and that, combined with the heavy teaching load, was a critical learning experience. At the college, I was struck by the gender segregation of the classes and by the number of women who thought a secretarial course was the only option for them. With a woman teaching in the secretarial program and two others teaching in humanities who shared my concerns, we developed a course we called “Alternatives for Women.” We wanted the course to provide students with a credit and faculty to have it recognized as part of their course load in order to establish its legitimacy. I still have the dean’s letter in response to our request, telling us that he had watched stallions biting mares’ asses in the field, indicating to him the proper order of the sexes. We were, however, after considerable struggle, successful in the end. I learned a great deal in preparing that course together, as I did from a group of young Trotskyist women enrolled in the university that asked Hugh and me if we would lead a reading group with them. We read all the feminist literature we could find, rigorously debating all of it with the likes of Debbie Field, who later established Food Share in Toronto,

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and Sue Genge, who became a union representative on the Ontario Pay Equity Tribunal. When we went to Montreal two years later, I took the idea of an alternative for a women’s course with me to the CEGEP at which I taught. I had the privilege of working there with an amazing group of women, and one of them – Shirley Pettifer (n.d.) – described us far better than I could: The Women’s Studies Program – an academic arm of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) – brought feminism into our classrooms, our curriculum, and our collegial relations, as well as collegewide committees and policies. With the most diverse student population in the Quebec CEGEP system, we applied the maxim “the personal is political” to the content of our courses, to developing feminist pedagogy, and to our way of operating as a collective – seeking consensus in decisionmaking and programming. We shared the perspectives of our various disciplines – often questioning the methodology of the disciplines themselves – as we sought proactive ways to explore the complexities of sex, gender, social justice and inequality in all of their forms and effects. And we spent time together: teamteaching, potluck dinners, nature hikes, policy development, a week of International Women’s Day activities, an annual Champagne Breakfast. We listened. We advocated. We found support in each other and ways to make a lasting feminist contribution to Vanier College. The focus on women, on diversity, on collective and democratic decisions making, on multi-disciplinarity, and on having fun stayed with me long after I left Vanier and Montreal. We also continued our efforts to establish childcare. Like progressive bookstores, daycare centres were scarce. When our first daughter was born in Ottawa, we worked with other students to set up a childcare centre. However, when we got it going, the parents’ board decided on disposable diapers, which, in their then rather toxic form, could not be worn by our daughter. We were more successful in Montreal. The centre was in our workplace, but during the first round of government austerity, the cash-strapped CEGEP wanted to charge us rent. With the support of others on the parents’ board, I responded by telling the administration that we would charge for the

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use of our space to teach students in the early childhood program. That charge, surprisingly, was the same as the rent. We heard no more about rent. While I was teaching there, we were commissioned by the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women Canada to write about women’s work. The Double Ghetto relies primarily on statistical data to make the case, mainly because such data are widely accepted as legitimate evidence (Armstrong and Armstrong 1978). In A Working Majority: What Women Must Do for Pay, we interviewed women about their work, based on the feminist assumption that those who know the work are those who do it. Combining this qualitative data with statistical data, we sought legitimacy for qualitative work and women’s voices (Armstrong and Armstrong 1983). In Montreal, The Double Ghetto connected me with Action Travail des Femmes, a group fighting to move the policy questions on women’s work beyond notions of discrimination based solely on bad people with bad ideas. They asked me to testify at the first stage of a case that ended up in the Supreme Court ruling that: systemic discrimination in an employment context is discrimination that results from the simple operation of established procedures of recruitment, hiring and promotion, none of which is necessarily designed to promote discrimination. The discrimination is then reinforced by the very exclusion of the disadvantaged group (CNR v. Canada [1987]). It required the Canadian National Railway Company to take positive steps to address such discrimination. I learned how sociological analysis based on statistics and testimony from individual women can be the basis of legal action, a lesson I took with me to the more than a dozen cases on women’s work I have testified in over the years since then. In developing my affidavits with others for those cases, I struggled through notions of skill and objectivity in measurement (Armstrong 2013). On the one hand, we were arguing that current job evaluation schemes were biased against women and, on the other, that all such schemes have values embedded within them. For me, this highlights the political economy notion of contradiction and the practical need to balance those tensions in order to achieve change. It was also while we were in Montreal that our older daughter broke her leg. When we rushed to the hospital to find her in trac-

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tion, the nurse first told us where I could get our daughter a drink and sleep overnight to provide care. There was no expectation of unpaid work from her father. As we sat with our daughter, we became very aware of the sex segregation of the paid work and of how health care brought together a wide range of traditional women’s work: paid and unpaid, unionized and not, managerial and precarious. This made us want to study the hospital as a microcosm of the segregated labour force. We quickly learned what we should have known as feminist political economists – namely, that context matters and that to study health care work we needed to know about Canadian health care. Towards the end of our stay in Montreal, I took a year off without pay to complete my course work and comprehensive examinations for a doctorate in sociology at Carleton. Wallace Clement (chapter 9, this volume), who did his MA at Carleton when I did, agreed to be my supervisor. I fought to do one comp on feminist theory, but some of my committee, unwilling to believe there was enough in feminist theory, insisted I also do the fathers – Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. We did, however, publish an expanded version of that comprehensive as Theorizing Women’s Work (Armstrong and Armstrong 1990), a book demonstrating that there was more than enough feminist theory for a comp and that theory is critical to change. My dissertation defence drew a small crowd, mainly because it was the first feminist dissertation to be defended there. A former priest who taught in the department insisted I remove my quote from Linda MacLeod (1980) claiming that “every year, 1 in 10 Canadian women who are married or in a relationship with a live-in lover are battered” because it was a gross exaggeration. A Statistics Canada (1993) survey taken more than a decade after Macleod’s book indicated that half of Canadian women experienced abuse. MOVING TO UNIVERSIT Y

My first full-time university job started in 1987 at York. York had extraordinary women in the faculty, feminist political economists such Linda Briskin (Briskin and Yan 1983), Barbara Cameron (Porter and Cameron 1987), Meg Luxton (see chapter 10, this volume), and Thelma McCormack (1950). I joined them in establishing the graduate program in women’s studies. By then, women’s studies courses and undergraduate programs had gained legitimacy, and it was time

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to extend this to the graduate program. On the basis of my expert reports in pay equity cases, I was asked to prepare a report for the Ontario Pay Equity Commission examining the impact of the legislation on the health care sector (Armstrong et al. 1988). It was my first opportunity to work with graduate students as colleagues and the start of a long history of working collaboratively with the many exceptional students from York. Jacqueline Choiniere was one of those who worked on that report. All these years later we are still working together. Our next team was together for a decade, conducting research on health care in collaboration with unions and seminars for union members on everything from how to read a hospital budget to how to use evidence in promoting change. The three books we produced were designed for unions to use in policy efforts and to give voice to their experiences (Armstrong et al. 1994, 1997, 2000). As we debated together how to carry out our research and to ensure that it reflected what we heard, we decided on an approach we later called immanent critique (Mykhalovskiy et al. 2008). Once we had conducted our interviews and together analyzed them, we took our analysis back to a different group of workers, asking them what we got right, what we got wrong, and what we missed. It was such an approach that alerted us to diaper rationing in long-term residential care. Colour changes in the blue line determined when diapers should be changed, denying the knowledge of the worker and of the resident (Armstrong et al. 2012). This research brought us in frequent contact with government policy-makers. Not all that contact was friendly. When our report on deteriorating conditions in hospitals came out, the ministry demanded that we identify the hospitals and told us that Jacqueline Choiniere’s nursing licence could be in jeopardy because nurses are required to report unsafe conditions. Our response was to say the conditions were evident in all 262 hospitals then in the province. The threat was dropped. During that time I worked with other faculty, such as Michael Stevenson, later president at Simon Fraser University, to set up the York Institute for Health Studies. Its development coincided with the women’s health movement’s successful lobby for a federal focus on women’s health, and the result was an agreement to establish five Centres of Excellence. Gina Feldberg, as the director, put together a team to respond to the call, which resulted in the establishment at York of the National Network for Environments and Women’s Health

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(NNEWH). It brought together activists and researchers from across Canada who were focused on conditions that shape women’s health. Part of my research, done in collaboration with Irene Jansen who was the CUPE member of NNEWH, used interviews with health care workers to expose the impact of neoliberal restructuring (Armstrong et al. 2003b). TAKING ON WOMEN ’ S HEALTH

When I became director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton, my work with NNEWH and with Canadian studies brought me into regular contact with government and, especially, with the Women’s Health Bureau. Through NNEWH, I connected with the Canadian Women’s Health Network and Women and Health Protection, two groups that were part of the bureau’s funding program. Abby Hoffman, then director of the bureau, asked me to organize and chair a parallel group on Women and Health Care Reform (WHCR), which I did for twelve years until the Tory government cut our funding. Working with a representative from each of the centres, this group was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. We came from different disciplines and different life experiences, but we shared a commitment to working together to improve women’s health. Our mandate was to coordinate research across the centres, to fill the gaps, and to share the results as well as other community concerns with the government. We began by trying to find out what reforms were happening across the country and what they meant for women, only to find there was no place to go for such information. So we began framing our research around the multiple forms of privatization that accompanied the neoliberal agendas in various provinces and around our three basic questions: Why is this a women’s issue? What are the issues for women? For which women are they issues? We thus drew attention to both social reproduction and intersectionality, exploring what women share and how they differ. The resulting book, Exposing Privatization, was the first of four we published out of the project (Armstrong et al. 2002, 2009, 2012; Grant et al. 2004). To draw on a wide range of evidence and experience, we organized annual workshops, inviting those who worked in care, those who researched care, and those who created care policy – a group that for us included unions and community organizations. The first work-

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shop was held in Prince Edward Island, with a focus on homecare and unpaid care work. We commissioned research to provide a shared background for the fifty-five participants (Women and Health Care Reform 2001). A major storm contributed to the sense of community, crisis, and shared concerns. The participants decided that we knew enough to move ahead on policy and spontaneously produced The Charlottetown Declaration of the Right to Care, a set of principles that still stands up as central to equitable policy and one that has been shared by researchers as well as policy-makers in a number of other countries. We also held an evening public session to share the work with the broader community. The workshop gave birth to the first of what we called our popular pieces: magazine-size documents, written in accessible language and professionally produced, based on research, accompanied by cartoons, distributed in hard copy for free, and available for downloading through the Canadian Women’s Health Network. As was the case with all our documents except the books, they were available in French and English. It was a format copied by several organizations, including the Pan American Health Organization. Because we had so many years together, we were able to respond quickly to new issues. When we heard that Romanow’s report on the future of health care in Canada was to be released, we gathered in Toronto along with two post-doctoral students working on free trade, to write an immediate press release and very quickly to produce a detailed report documenting the failure to take gender into account (Armstrong et al. 2003a). Similarly, Madeline Boscoe, a member of our group who was the director of the Canadian Women’s Health Network, encountered Dr Brian Postl on an elevator and asked him what his report on wait times for the federal government would say about gender. In response, he invited us to write what ended up as an appendix to his report – not as good as integration throughout but a start (Jackson et al. 2006). On WHCR’s behalf, I appeared before the Romanow Commission and the Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology and delivered keynote addresses around the world. We wrote together, lobbied together, and had a lot of fun. My connections with the Women’s Health Bureau and the unions provided me with partners for my ten-year chair in Health Services and Nursing Research. With that funding, and encouraged by the focus on turning research into practice, I was able to support students

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working to ensure gender is taken into account. In collaboration with the Ontario Training Centre, we developed a graduate diploma in health services and policy research. When graduate students Susan Braedley, now a professor at Carleton, and Paula Pinto, now a professor in Portugal, returned from our first summer school, they expressed frustration at the dominance of the medical model and of a particular kind of science. I suggested that they organize a conference to debate the issue, which they did with support from the chair. That conference had an impact on Jonathan Lomas, president of the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, and contributed to its shift from evidence-based to evidence-informed, recognizing the limits of “objective” science. MORE TEAM RESEARCH FOR CHANGE

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council began to promote interdisciplinary team research conducted in partnership with non-academic organizations. I had the opportunity to participate in a number of them. For me the most memorable was one on contingent work, with Leah Vosko, Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Gender and Work at York University as principal investigator. It was particularly memorable because the team of academic and union activists worked together to struggle through major conceptual and policy issues, focusing on making change. For example, together we built on Karasek’s (1979) notion of job strain to conceptualize employment strain. Related to that project was Vosko’s Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant, which became the basis for the Gender and Work Database (Gender and Work Database n.d.). Collaborating with librarians, Statistics Canada, academic and union staff, and without a model, the team created an accessible database that is a unique teaching, learning, and research tool connecting theory and data. The approach was later extended to include international data from thirty-three countries in the Comparative Perspectives Database. Through my participation on multiple editorial boards and peer review committees for grants, I have learned a great deal not only about how to write to meet their criteria but also about how to help others do so. At the same time, I have rebelled against some of those criteria, challenging evaluations based primarily on the number of publications in certain journals, contesting formulas for writing based

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on a particular notion of science, arguing against the bias in favour of statistics and broad generalizations or particular methods, and arguing for gender-based analysis that addresses multiple social relations. My most rewarding experience was with Studies in Political Economy. Although not a founding member, I joined the editorial board early on. Together we worked through all the submissions, vigorously debating most of them. We were a community struggling both for recognition of political economy and to develop new ways of operating a journal. For example, we did not do blind reviews because in Canada many know each other and often guess at authorship but also, more importantly, because we thought reviewers should be willing to stand by their reviews. Four of us from the original board resigned at the same time in order to allow a new generation to shape the journal without the heavy hand of the past. For the last decade, I have been leading a team that also relies on a SSHRC grant. “Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices” brings together a wide range of academics from health sciences, humanities, and social sciences and from six countries, along with more than sixty students and several post-doctoral fellows. We work in partnership with five unions, a couple of non-profit employer organizations, and a seniors’ association. Guided by feminist political economy and the notion that the conditions of work are the conditions of care, we are looking for good ideas worth sharing because we understand that context matters and, thus, unlike much of medicine today, are convinced there are few single best practices. We employ two major methods – namely, “analytical mapping,” based primarily on existing data; and rapid, “site switching ethnography,” a method we are further developing (Armstrong and Lowndes 2018). The latter method involves teams of twelve to fourteen members observing and interviewing over a week in long-term residential care. Each team includes people from different countries and different disciplines, with two people working together on shifts that start at 7:00 a.m. and go at least until midnight. In between, we reflect together on what we have seen and heard as well as on what we may have missed – the noises and silences. The process most closely resembles an intense summer camp and has been central to the cohesion of the team and to what we have learned from each other. This project has brought it all together for me, building on what I have learned over the years about teams, knowledge sharing, and

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making change. We conduct research together in teams that include all ranks of faculty and students. We reflect and write together, producing four booklets widely distributed for free to a broad range of publics, while also publishing four academic books and more than fifty refereed journal articles. We use these publications to work with our partners to influence policy at multiple levels in many communities. While we do not all have the same perspective, we are framed by a political economy that understands the search for profit as a force shaping all aspects of social and economic reproduction in ways that are profoundly gendered as well as raced and classed. From this perspective, we identify contradictions and tensions as well as context while linking the local and the global. We draw on the burgeoning care literature to think through care as a relationship, based on the experiences of those who work, live in, and visit nursing homes. For me, sociology draws on many disciplines and is both collective and reflexive. Guided by theory and informed by a wide range of evidence that includes the voices of experience, it captures power, tensions, and contradictions. It seeks to identify and promote the conditions that allow people to reach their full potential. And, importantly, it plans to have fun doing so. REFERENCES Armstrong, Pat. 2013. “Puzzling Skills: Feminist Political Economy Approaches.” Canadian Review of Sociology 53 (3): 256–83. Armstrong, Pat, Carol Amaratunga, Jocelyne Bernier, Karen Grant, Ann Pederson, and Kay Willson, eds. 2002. Exposing Privatization: Women and Health Care Reform. Aurora, ON: Garamond. Armstrong, Pat, and Hugh Armstrong. 1975. “The Segregated Participation of Women in the Canadian Labour Force, 1941–71.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 12 (4): 370–84. – 1978. The Double Ghetto: Canadian Women and Their Segregated Work. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. – 1983. A Working Majority: What Women Must Do for Pay. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada for the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women. – 1990. Theorizing Women‘s Work. Toronto: Garamond. Armstrong, Pat, Hugh Armstrong, Ivy Bourgeault, Jacqueline Choiniere, Eric Mykhalovskiy, and Jerry White. 2000. Heal Thyself: Managing Health Care Reform. Toronto: Garamond.

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Armstrong, Pat, Hugh Armstrong, Jacqueline Choiniere, Gina Feldberg, and Jerry White. 1994. Take Care: Warning Signals for Canadian Health Care. Toronto: Garamond. Armstrong, Pat, Hugh Armstrong, Jacqueline Choiniere, Eric Mykhalovskiy, and Jerry White. 1997. Medical Alert: New Work Organizations in Health Care. Toronto: Garamond. Armstrong, Pat, Hugh Armstrong, and Tamara Daly. 2012. “The Thin Blue Line: Long Term Care as an Indicator of Equity in Welfare States.” Canadian Women’s Studies 29 (3): 49–60. Armstrong, Pat, Madeline Boscoe, Barbara Clow, Karen Grant, Margaret Haworth-Brockman, Beth Jackson, Ann Pederson, Morgan Seeley, Jane Springer, eds. 2009. A Place to Call Home: Long Term Care in Canada. Toronto: Fernwood. Armstrong, Pat, Madeline Boscoe, Barbara Clow, Karen R. Grant, Ann Pederson, Kay Willson, Olena Hankivsky, Beth Jackson, and Marina Morrow. 2003a. Reading Romanow: The Implications of the Final Report of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada for Women. Winnipeg: Canadian Women’s Health Network. Armstrong, Pat, Jacqueline Choiniere, Chris Gabriel, and Jan Kainer. 1988. Predominately Female Sectors: Health Care. Unpublished report prepared for the Ontario Pay Equity Commission, September. Armstrong, Pat, Barbara Clow, Karen Grant, Margaret Haworth-Brockman, Beth Jackson, Ann Pederson, and Morgan Seeley, eds. 2012. Thinking Women and Health Care Reform in Canada. Toronto: Women’s Press. Armstrong, Pat, Irene Jansen, Erin Connell, and Mavis Jones. 2003b. “Assessing the Impact of Restructuring and Work Reorganization in Long Term Care.” In Head, Heart and Hands: Partnerships for Women’s Health in Canadian Environments, vol. 1, ed. Penny Van Esterik, 175–217. Toronto: National Network on Environments and Women’s Health. Armstrong, Pat, and Ruth Lowndes, eds. 2018. Creative Teamwork: Developing Rapid-Site Switching Ethnography. New York: Oxford University Press. Briskin, Linda, and Linda Yanz, eds. 1983. Union Sisters: Women in the Labour Movement. Toronto: Women’s Press. Clement, Wallace, and Daniel Drache. 1978. A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy. Toronto: James Lorimer. CNR v. Canada (Canadian Human Rights Tribunal) [1987] 1 S.C.R. 1114. https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/6280/index.do. Gender and Work Database. n.d. http://www.genderwork.ca/. Grant, Karen, Carol Amaratunga, Pat Armstrong, Madeline Boscoe, Ann

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Pederson, and Kay Willson, eds. 2004. Caring For/Caring About: Women, Home Care and Unpaid Caregiving. Aurora: Garamond. Hay, Doug, Peter Linebaugh, John Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow. 1975. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Pantheon. Jackson, Beth, Ann Pederson, and Madeline Boscoe. 2006. Women and Health Care Reform Group: “Gender-Based Analysis and Wait Times: New Questions, New Knowledge.” In Final Report of the Federal Advisor on Wait Times, by Brian Postl. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-care-system/reports-publications/health-care-system/final-report-federal-advisor-wait-times.html. Karasek, Robert A. 1979. “Job Demands, Job Decision Latitude, and Mental Strain: Implications for Job Redesign.” Administrative Science Quarterly 24 (2): 285–307. MacLeod, Linda. 1980. Wife Battering in Canada: The Vicious Circle. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada. McCormack, Thelma Herman. 1950. “The Motivation of Radicals.” American Journal of Sociology 56 (1): 17–24. McIntosh, Dorothy. 2012. The Witch of Babylon. New York: Forge Books. Milner, Henry, and Sheilagh Hodgins Milner. 1973. The Decolonization of Quebec: An Analysis of Left-Wing Nationalism. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mykhalovskiy, Eric, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Ivy Bourgeault, Jackie Choiniere, Joel Lexchin, Suzanne Peters, and Jerry White. 2008. “Qualitative Research and the Politics of Knowledge in an Age of Evidence: Developing a Research-based Practice of Immanent Critique.” Social Science and Medicine 67 (1): 195–203. Pettifer, Shirley L. n.d. “Sociology, Women’s Studies, Explorations.” http://www.judithcrawley.ca/womens-studies-at-cegep-vanier-college/. Porter, Ann, and Barbara Cameron. 1987. Impact of Free Trade on Women in Manufacturing. Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Porter, John. 1965. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rioux, Marcel. 1978. Quebec in Question. Toronto: James Lorimer. Sharpe, David. 1987. Rochdale: The Runaway College. Toronto: Anansi. Statistics Canada. 1993. The Violence against Women Survey (VAWS). Record number 3896 in Statistics Canada (database online). http://www23.statcan .gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3896&Item_Id=1712.

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Watkins, Mel. 1968. Task Force on Foreign Ownership and the Structure of Canadian Investment. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. Women and Health Care Reform. 2001. The Charlottetown Declaration on the Right to Care. Winnipeg: National Coordinating Group on Health Care Reform and Women.

13 Social Contexts, Social Networks, and Becoming a Sociologist Reza Nakhaie

I became a sociologist by accident, or at least it seemed that way until I reflected on my vocation. As I later realized, my chosen vocation was the expected outcome of my social conditions and social interactions. This joyous discovery of my past affirmed my profession. I should also mention that although my story may be similar to many others, it does not resemble that of my brother, who came to Canada a few years later, graduated from university, and is still driving a taxi; or my elder brother who stayed in Iran, and prospered as an owner of foodprocessing plants. A similar background does not automatically lead to the same outcomes. PLEASURE AND AGONY OF CHILDHOOD

I was born in a small town in Iran. Throughout my childhood, my father was the owner of businesses: a tailor shop, a fabric store, a carpet store, real estate, a construction business, and finally back to a fabric store following the 1979 Revolution. His businesses changed with the boom and bust of the oil industry and economy. He was also a political activist supporting Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh, a popularly elected prime minister who nationalized the Iranian-British Oil Company and subsequently was overthrown by a British-American sponsored coup d’état in 1953. After the coup, my father and our family had to hide from the purge in a village owned by my influential maternal grandfather. I am told that when I was about three years old and playing with my older brother, I was pushed or fell out of a

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second-floor window. Later, I was told that my aunt picked me up and turned me upside down to “put my eyes back in their sockets.” I survived but have no recollection of the actual event. I always loved to hear my relatives retell the story of my survival, all implying that the saints had protected me. I grew up having an extended family of twenty-seven aunts and uncles from my mother’s side, many with children my age. I have many good memories of playing with my cousins in our grandfather’s orchards and at family gatherings related to Nowruz (New Year, the first day of spring), weddings, and other social occasions. Every year when I revisit Iran, I meet some of these cousins and my close friends from elementary school. As friends and cousins, we worked hard to support each other, particularly if there were conflicts. My elementary school years were filled with play. Sometimes our play was a form of fighting, perhaps to establish who was the alpha dog. A common game was for one student to be placed in each corner of a room in the basement of the school and another student in the middle. Those in the corner would run from one corner to another and the one in the middle would try to get to an empty corner first. Whenever two reached the corner at the same time, they would kick and punch each other until one would give up and go to the middle. The game would continue until the school bell rang and classes started. Many had bruises and bloody noses, but no one cried, for “men don’t cry.” We would clean up and go to class without complaining. In grade nine, we were directed to decide among three fields of study: math, natural sciences, and/or humanities. I was aiming for the natural sciences with plans to become a physician, but, due to an altercation with my older brother, I missed the exam. I ended up in a school specializing in humanities, a school six to eight kilometres away from our home. I walked back and forth every day. Winters were harsh. In grade eleven, I went with my newly married oldest brother to Zabol, a poor city in southeastern Iran. Not having many friends there, I hid myself in my books and studied hard. My grades improved significantly. When I returned to my hometown, I continued with this new study habit and made it to the top 5 per cent of the class. In grade twelve, my father was in the construction business and we were financially better off due to the energy crisis. In those days, oil prices skyrocketed, businesses boomed, and the construction businesses prospered. During the summer, I helped him with accounting, bricklaying, and whatever else he asked me to do. By the time I

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reached university age, he had enough wealth to send two of his sons, including me, to university in different cities in Iran. NO , SIR , I ’ D LIKE TO REGISTER IN SOCIOLOGY

In the 1970s, grade twelve students in Iran had to participate in a national exam. Only a select few with high scores could then attend public universities. Many grade twelve students wanted to attend university, but there was space for only about 10 per cent of the national exam participants. The selection was based on students’ rank in the examination. The National University of Iran, the one I attended, had previously been a private university for children of the upper classes and courtiers. The year I wrote my university exam was the first time it had become a public university open to students from all class backgrounds. Therefore, at university, I was in contact with students from extremely different backgrounds, although most were from the upper classes. I sometime reflect that, in the shuffling of the deck of cards, I landed in this university by chance. Yet it, too, was a probability given the economic boom of the early 1970s and my father’s business prosperity. My first-year introductory sociology course at the National University of Iran was taught by an American-educated Iranian who had just returned home. I do not think she had any research background on Iranian society, and the course she taught was about sociology and social structures in the United States. Needless to say, I learned much about Talcott Parsons, structural-functionalism, and the Chicago School, and little about critical sociology or Iranian society. Although sociology was becoming a distinct discipline in Iran, it was still not connected to Iran’s rich socio-cultural history. I cannot claim that I fell in love with sociology during my first institutional encounter with it. I was an eighteen-year-old student. I had moved from a small town to the capital city, a cosmopolitan urban centre of about five million people. Like many students, I did not have much idea about what I wanted or could become when I grew up. However, when I was asked in the first year of elementary school, “What do you want to be when you are grown up?,” I recall saying that I wanted to be the – the king! Later, I wanted to be a physician, and my family and relatives thought I should become a lawyer. Iran, being an American client state, was at the forefront of the Cold War in the Middle East due to its border with the Soviet Union,

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its strategic location in the Middle East, its oil resources, and its indigenous socialist movements in the northern regions. At the time, Iranian universities and intellectuals in general were under constant political pressure, and the new emerging social science disciplines had to play the game by promoting an apolitical, if not conservative, ideology on the campuses, although some students, intellectuals, and professors challenged the status quo and risked retribution. One among these was Amir-Hossein Aryanpour. He did not teach at our university. Most of his studies were done in Iran except for about two years at Princeton University. He was expelled from the United States during the McCarthy-era witch hunt (Moini 2001). I attended one of his lectures at the University of Tehran at about the end of my first year there. I was fascinated by his communication skills, which easily excited listeners. His lecture hall was full of students and professors. There was no room to seat everyone, and many listened standing or leaning against the walls. He was not only a critic of the shah and the regime but also of the intelligentsia. His adoration of social change and dialectical materialism, his idea that every assertion needs to be supported by evidence, and his critique of the shallowness of the intelligentsia were contrary to the underground revolutionary discourse of the time, which was dominated by the example of the Cuban guerilla revolution and Régis Debris’s (1967) thesis that as long as there is a machine gun there is no need for consciousness. At the end of this stimulating lecture, I went across the street from the University of Tehran, where most bookstores were located, and looked for his book Zamine-ye-Jamesheanasi. This book was an adaptation of A Handbook of Sociology by William F. Ogburn and Meyer F. Nimkoff (1964). Aryanpour translated the book and included sections on Iranian society and an introduction showing the influence of sociologists such as Pitirim Sorokin, Wilbert E. Moore, and Georges Gurvitch. Moreover, his glossary of sociological and scientific terms was a lifesaver when, in Canada, I was reading sociology books in English. In my first year of university, although I was an A-level student in most courses, I was a B-level student in sociology. I could claim that I had left a small town with its cohesive moral and cultural values (Gemeinschaft) and had arrived at a large urban centre with few community connections and a highly differentiated population (Gesellschaft), thus liberating me from the bond of family and community. My new environment did not emphasize scholastic activities. I could claim that the experience

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of leaving a sex-segregated small town, where I barely saw a girl without a hejab, and arriving in Tehran at a university where almost all women wore miniskirts and intermingled with boys, diverted my attention. I could also say that I met new friends who introduced me to alcohol and parties. But I think the main reason for my modest marks in sociology was that I was not interested in listening to a professor who did not speak to my experiences. However, my interest in sociology grew after I listened to Aryanpour’s lecture and when I started to compare my own life experiences with those of my classmates. The comparison between a small-town boy from a land-owning and small-business background and my classmates, who were mostly upper-class children owning new models of imported American and European cars, was stark and eyeopening. In those days, I had to work. I worked as an accountant for a private company and as a bookkeeper in the university library. By the end of the first year, from among my cohort of 360 students in humanities and social sciences, only forty with the highest grades were allowed to select the field of their interest. I was among these fortunate students as I ranked twenty-seventh. Earlier, I was not interested in continuing my education in sociology; instead, I was leaning towards psychology. However, my networks of friends were more inclined towards sociology and they encouraged me to register in that discipline. I recall that when I went to register the associate dean of the faculty said, “Nakhaie, I will register you in psychology.” I replied to his surprised look, “No, sir, I would like to register in sociology.” IF YOU STAND UP, EVERYONE WILL STAND UP

Working at the university library during my undergraduate years made me an avid reader, although many of the books I read were forbidden. I read books such as Aryanpour’s translation of An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, which challenged the moral standards of the time; Revolution or Reform? A Confrontation by Herbert Marcuse and Karl Popper (trans. Hoshang Vaziri); Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic by Alasdair MacIntyre (trans. Hamid Enayat); Black Gold or Iran’s Trouble by Aboulfazl Lesani; Oil and World Power: A Geographic Interpretation by Peter Odell (trans. Amirhosain Jehanbeglo); and Gharbzadegi (Westtoxification) and Dar Khedmat and Khianate Roshanfekran (Service and betrayal of intellectuals) both written by the famous Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad. The books by

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Lesani and Odell identify Iran’s economic underdevelopment as being a result of our main commodity, which is oil, both because it was a target of foreign powers and because of our reliance on such a huge revenue-generating industry, which discouraged indigenous industrial development and capital accumulation. Al-e-Ahmad criticized the Iranian intelligentsia’s dependency on and emulation of non-Iranians and foreign products and places. A friend also introduced me to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I started to read this book for two reasons. First, I wanted to discover what “foreigners” knew about our glorious past religion, Zoroastrianism, which may have introduced monotheism to the world and encouraged the trinity of “good thoughts, good words, and good deeds”; and, second, I wanted to know why “God is dead.” The latter question was important to me for, being born into a religious family, God permeated all of my life. To me, religious morality was the only credible source of all moral principles. I read the Koran, prayed, and sometimes attended mosque for Friday prayers. I relived the martyrdom of one of the most important saints in Shiite Islam, Imam Hussain. The re-enactment of Imam Hussain’s life for a week every year had a profound impact on me. He fought against injustice, for which he was killed. This historical event and the most popular Iranian book, Shahnameh (the Persian Book of Kings, ca. 977–1010 CE), a poem that blends Persia’s glorious early history with myth, invoke the idea of attaining justice despite all hurdles. During my university life, I spent a good amount of time playing sports. I played ping-pong, volleyball, soccer, and basketball almost every day for an hour or two. I joined a newly organized field hockey team, first at the university level, then I was selected to join the national team. When I received a letter that I had been selected for training and preparation for international competitions in field hockey, I was elated. However, the letter of invitation for the national team came when I was on the path to leaving Iran for Canada, so that expected probability was cut short. My library experience was eye opening. Because of the prevailing anti-intellectual and anti-communist political atmosphere and a dictatorial regime armed to the teeth with American and British military weapons, critical books were not generally sold in bookstores and were not displayed on library shelves. Therefore, whenever we received books that were deemed “unacceptable,” we were not allowed to place them on the shelves for others to read. I was told by the head

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librarian to place them in a “cardboard box” not to be taken out on loan. Most of these books were written by the Iranian opposition or were underground translations of works by Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Lukacs, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao Zedong, and others who held critical and revolutionary worldviews. Although these forbidden books were in the “box,” I would read them in the library, wrapped in a newspaper cover, so that no one would detect my “criminal” act. I was reading these books as if I were tasting forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. This was when I was exposed to Marx’s Capital and Communist Manifesto; Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Although I had discovered Marx and Marxism, and had become fascinated by them, I still had a distorted image of Marxist theory. Despite a generally apolitical sociological discourse in classrooms, a segment of my classmates and I were actively involved in nightly debates. Like most students in other countries, Iranian students were also participating in the anti-establishment movement of the 1960s. In Iran, demonstrations were frequent and so were arrests and imprisonments. These demonstrations often had the following pattern. An issue such as a conflict with a professor, food problems in the cafeteria, or increases in the price of public transportation would result in some form of confrontation with the administration or campus police. A few students were punished, followed by students not attending classes in support, and then there were rumours (or the reality) of these students being expelled and, consequently, more demonstrations. Police would enter the university and confront the students. Weapons of choice for the police were clubs, tear gas, and arrests; for students they were stones and slogans. Student crowds would increase, tear gas and violence would ensue, and more students would be arrested. Chants and slogans became commonplace: “Stand up. If you sit down, everyone will sit down. If you stand up, everyone will stand up. Stand up.” Some students walked out to the streets and chanted, and some passersby joined in. More police repression and more destruction of property ensued. The military was called: then came tear gas, beatings, arrests, and the occupation of the university. The speed by which a spark turned into a demonstration and the participation of about one-third of the university’s students suggested an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and grievances that were not just present in the university environment but that came from the students’ experiences in their home environment. A large number of students

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came from lower middle-class backgrounds, and this increased their chance of participating in demonstrations. These demonstrations elevated my standing among students because my classmates mistakenly thought I had initiated them and that this made me an important person. This was not the case. The initiation and leadership of these protests were both often organized by a group of students who were rarely known by other students. STRAW INSTEAD OF PERSIAN CARPETS

In the last year of the program, our research methods and sociology of education professors (Mansour Ghanadan and Hoshang Naghi, respectively) took us for a research trip in the country’s eastern rural area, about two-hundred kilometres south of my home town. The methods professor, who was in charge of the research trip, encouraged us to interview the residents of several villages; to perform an income and expenditure survey; and to assess goods, cattle, shacks, and other properties. We tallied everything the villagers owned, including essentials such as sugar, tea, and firewood. We also asked a few questions about their attitudes towards their own lives and experiences. The results of these interviews and observations later become our undergraduate theses. Although we were treated lavishly during our stay in first-class hotels, our experiences with rural life challenged many students’ worldviews. Poverty was rampant. Some residents lived in mud-dried brick houses with little furniture or amenities of life. Their cooking was done mostly in a fire pit inside a room that combined living, dining, and sleeping. Toilets were holes in the ground in the yard. For these residences, floors were furnished with “carpets” made of straw or Gelim (the cheapest possible Persian rug with minimum design). There were no locks on the doors, perhaps because people trusted each other. Villagers often grew their crops with rainwater and through ghanats, a traditional aqueduct water system that used the slope of the earth in order to bring water kilometres away from wells dug at equal distances until water surfaced in the village. Most villagers were sharecroppers, somewhat similar in status to the European serfs of feudal time, working on land owned by absentee landlords. Despite their extreme poverty, they were happy to share their meagre food or whatever they had in their home with us: an example of the Iranian hos-

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pitality known around the world. We were sad to see so much poverty in our country, where oil revenues were used to buy Americanmade military jets and British-made tanks – where a coup d’état regime celebrated its fake dynasty with lavish parties. I AM GOING HOME TO GET MARRIED

I finished the four-year program in three and a half years. Initially, I had thought that when I had completed my degree requirements, I would head back to my small hometown, find a job, perhaps work for my father, get married, and do what most people in small towns do: raise children and spend my remaining life content. But the cards were shuffled yet again. A few days before leaving university, my classmates were talking about their future. One said he was going to England to study, another to the United States, another to France, and so on. I had none of that in my cards because I did not think that my family could afford to send me abroad. Thus I went back to my small hometown. One early Friday afternoon, after a nice lunch in honour of completing my degree requirements, my mother suggested that I should start thinking about marriage and provided me with a list of girls who were from good religious families and had great home management skills. Soon after lunch was finished, and as I had become receptive to what political scientist Ronald Inglehart refers to as “post-materialist values,” I asked about the process, cost, and norms of marriage. I was told that my family provided each of my brother’s wives a specific amount of land as a dowry. This was some of the land my mother had inherited from her father. Without any expectation that it might become a reality, I suggested that, rather than getting married, I would like to take the land and sell it so that I could go abroad for graduate studies. Silence dominated the room and, in my mind, even the radio stopped playing. No response from my parents. I thought that they might have attributed my request to my proverbial “full stomach.” I did not pursue it further. About a month later my father told me, while I was helping him with his real estate business, that if I could get accepted by a university abroad, he and my mother would agree to sell the land and give me the money for my education. I should say that my mother, as is the custom in Iran, kept her own family name and inheritance and was able to give it as she wished to her children. On the other side of the family, my father, who with his elementary

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degree was one of the highest educated persons in my hometown, always encouraged us to acquire an education. I went back to Tehran. I applied for MA programs at three universities, one each in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, respectively. I was accepted in all three programs, and I selected Canada. I landed in Ottawa on 17 September 1974. My cards were shuffled again. After paying for the plane ticket and the tuition for the University of Ottawa, the total amount of money in my pockets was $700. THE IMMIGRANTS ’ TABLE

At the Ottawa airport, some other young people and I were loaded into a minibus and dropped off at the YMCA. In the evening, I decided to go for a walk to see my new “home.” It was a cold and windy day, and as I walked down Elgin Street towards Confederation Square, I had my first experience of sorrow in the new country. I started to question my decision to come to Canada. I was thinking that perhaps I had made a mistake. I pondered why I had left my warm homeland and all the people I knew for this strange cold land where I barely spoke its language and knew no one and nothing about its culture. Being an immigrant is tough even for those who know the language and culture of the host society. I was not fluent in English, did not have any family or friends to fall back on, or any income to provide for myself. I had to explore this strange new place, understand its ways of doing things, work to support myself, and make new friends in order to be able to survive and make it my new home. The next day I got a shock at the University of Ottawa. The medium of language for the sociology graduate program at the university was French! I don’t know for sure what had happened, but I can surmise that the mistake started when I applied for the graduate program on the English side of a two-sided bilingual application form, thinking that if the application was in English, then the program would be in the same language. I recall arriving at the Department of Sociology, and the graduate program advisor, Ann Denis, told me that I would not be receiving a graduate assistantship and that I should apply to another university for next year because all graduate courses were taught in French. She suggested that I take fourth-year courses in English. Two were offered: a course on Canadian society and another on migration. Money ran out fast. I searched for work. I received five dollars a day for cleaning cement from windows of newly construct-

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ed apartment buildings, washing dishes in a restaurant, and serving as a bus boy in another restaurant. My time in Ottawa involved spending long hours in the library and becoming absorbed in the Iranian anti-shah, anti-imperialist student movement. Only a small number of Iranians were living in Ottawa in those days. We met every week on Wednesday nights to discuss predetermined political books, often written by Iranian revolutionaries, and planning demonstrations in and around the Parliament Buildings and Confederation Square. In those days, Iran was Canada’s trading partner and the Canadian government was a close ally of the shah. We were afraid that the Canadian security services would spy on us and report us to the security personnel in the Iranian embassy. We often wore a mask that carried messages such as “Down with the Shah.” My time in Ottawa was not all study and demonstrations. I spent a good amount of time on the fifth floor of the library. I also used to spend time in the university cafeteria at a table we called the “immigrant table.” Students from Ireland, Pakistan, India, and Palestine congregated at this table. French Canadians used to join us, too. That is when I developed strong relationships with French Canadians and those with a Quebecois background. Unfortunately, those relationships were lost when I moved to Guelph and then to Waterloo. Residential mobility uproots immigrants as they move to the new country and then harms them again as they, like others, move from city to city. I certainly felt lonely at times. MARX IN THE ACADEMY

I applied in the spring of 1975 to the University of Guelph and was accepted. Many of the sociology professors at Guelph, like those in many other universities in Canada, were educated in Britain and the United States, some leaving the latter because of the Vietnam War draft. What I recall most about the sociology department at Guelph are my conversations with Peter Sinclair, who would quiz me on my knowledge of theory. In both Iran and Canada I was exposed to functionalism, and since Marxism was not popular in Canada, Peter’s challenges to functional explanations were empowering. He would ask, “functional for what or for whom?” My interaction with Peter was a great experience, and it was one that helped me see that there is a place for Marxism in the academy. I started to reread Marx, and when

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I wrote my major paper on land reform in Iran, I was able to theorize the proletarianization of the peasants and the emergence of the new working class. Yet, my reading of Marx and Marxism was somewhat polemical. The common discourse of the day on Marxism was that it resulted in the loss of objectivity. Advocating for the poor and the working class was perceived as naïve romanticism. The counter-argument, often popular among Marxists and the emerging feminists, was that we are responsible to the people we study and from whom we learn. These two seemingly contradictory views were drilled into graduate students at the time. Peter would suggest ways of thinking that helped me redirect my thought process into something more systematic and sociological, or perhaps even more evidence-based and academic, and less polemical. During my graduate work at Guelph, Marx’s work became increasingly important to me, both politically and as a method of critical thinking. Politically, concurrent with the revolutionary process in Iran, I became more involved in the Iranian student movement. Methodologically, I used dialectical materialism to understand social processes and to make sense of the situation of the peasant and working class in Iran. THE BIG MAN ON CAMPUS

With Peter Sinclair’s advice and encouragement, I applied to the PhD program at the University of Waterloo in 1976. My most memorable experience at Waterloo developed out of taking a course from James Ensign Curtis, who was affectionately known as the “big man” on campus, though he had many other nicknames. Jim was well known in sociological circles for his contribution to Canadian sociology and his comparative research. His other extensive publications included articles and books on introductory sociology, social inequality, political sociology, and sociology of sport. Jim mentored and published extensively with graduate students. Later, when I was at Queen’s University, Jim and I published a paper in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology on the role of class background on the educational attainment of offspring, merging a neo-Marxian concept of social class and Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory. My relationship with Jim was more than a professor-student relationship. Jim almost always hung around with the graduate students – for lunch, dinner, coffee, or a drink, though I don’t recall his being a

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drinker. Whenever we had house parties or went out to dine, or to bars late at night, or to play baseball or soccer, Jim was always there. He liked to play baseball, poker, and pool, particularly eight ball, and he was very good at all of them. With Jim present, these outings were more than eating, drinking, partying, or playing. Whenever the opportunity arose, he would casually place our conversation within a sociological perspective. I can say with confidence that I learned more sociology when I was with Jim and this network of graduate students than when I was in class. Classes were often dry and structured, while conversations outside classes were free-flowing and often thought-provoking. Jim connected our conversations to the ideas of George Herbert Mead, Seymour Martin Lipset, and even, sometimes, to those of Talcott Parsons. He had a deep interest in socialization, culture, ideology, and comparative sociology. Though he was never a fan of Marxism, he tolerated it; in Jim’s class, we were taught more about stratification than class and property relations. Those “outings” were important for us, allowing us to make up our own minds (see Nakhaie and Curtis 1998). It was at one of these parties that I encountered a gender-related culture shock. My buddy, Larry Comeau, would frequently use the fword. One night, at his apartment, there was a group of men and women, including Larry’s wife Kathy. Larry used the f-word as usual. I said loudly, “It is not nice to use such a word in front of the ladies.” His wife shouted, “What the eff are you talking about Reza, that you can’t use the f-word in front of the ladies?” I was speechless. Imagine the shock I experienced considering that, for seventeen years of my life, I grew up in a sex-segregated society, where not only were men and women often separated but also the topic of sex never emerged at gatherings when both genders were present. I should stress that Larry was my confidante, advisor, and a guide for me in navigating Canadian society. The space here does not allow me to highlight how many times he brought sanity to my lost life in Canada. IS CANADA THAT DIFFERENT FROM IRAN ?

By the time I finished my comprehensive examinations, I had come to firmly believe that comparative research is essential to sociology. Consequently, I started working on my dissertation concerning capitalist development in Iran and how it compares with other countries. My first dissertation supervisor was a great Canadian Marxist historian, Leo Johnson, who ended up in trouble with the law, thus leaving me

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without a supervisor. Louis Costa-Pinto became my dissertation advisor. He introduced me to Latin American theorists, particularly Andre Gunder Frank, whose theories of underdevelopment in Latin America resonated with my understanding of Iranian society. Frank’s dependency theory helped me incorporate the effect of the relationship between metropolis and satellite countries on the slowness of Iranian economic and political development. My dissertation committee also included Ken Westhues, Alfred Hunter, and an economist and member of the New Democratic Party, Robert Needham. Ken Westhues was always supportive, and I suspect that Needham read my dissertation more closely than did the other committee members. Whenever I attended his office, he was engaging and the conversation was specific to my academic work. He really wanted to know more about Iran, its culture, its history, and, particularly, its economy; and he provided specific suggestions. Despite help from some members of the committee, I was on my own in writing my dissertation. It was an uphill battle, without academic and financial support. In order to survive financially, I worked as a taxi driver twelve hours a day and seven days a week. I worked the night shift, also known as the graveyard shift, from 4:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. But I did enjoy my time as a taxi driver for four reasons: (1) I encountered people of all walks of life and had interesting conversations; (2) these conversations enabled me to be a sociologist in training; (3) while waiting for passengers, I could read in preparation for my dissertation; and, (4) I knew that this job would not be my career. Then and now I think being a cabby was a good job. Surely, it was better than my other jobs, such as washing dishes, delivering pizza, or working in construction. I was my own boss, controlling when to work, even though I knew I had to work all those days and weeks to be able to pay bills and save for university. My PhD dissertation was my first comprehensive application of the sociological imagination to my home society, economy, culture, and (particularly) history, highlighting similarities and differences in the process of capitalist development between Iran and the “classic” cases. I used my personal experiences with the working poor and studies of rural Iran and combined them with historical, official, and nonofficial data to show how labour process, rural-urban migration, and proletarianization were fundamental to capital accumulation and the

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development of capitalism. I argued that, although the Iranian case was similar to the “classic” cases in terms of state policies ensuring the proletarianization of the peasantry, its process of capitalist development was slowed due to external forces. I explained that Iran’s late transformation was caused first by the invasions of nomadic Mongolian tribes from the East. The Mongolian invasion of Iran in the thirteenth century fundamentally destroyed its infrastructure: cities were razed to the ground; farming and aqueduct water systems were either destroyed or left unattended; government officials were killed and bureaucracy eliminated; and a taxation system was imposed that precluded the possibility of direct producers to pay, let alone accumulate enough money to develop a nascent bourgeoisie. In Iran (and perhaps elsewhere) there is a common saying about the Mongol invasion: “They came, they burned, they left.” Afterwards, Iran was able to rebuild itself and become a major power under the Safavid Dynasty (1499–1794), controlling present Iran and a large part of present Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenistan, connecting Europe to central Asia through the Silk Road and caravanserais (roadside inns), and helping with the development of an indigenous bourgeoisie. However, as soon as Iran was able to rebuild itself, the second external force, Western semi-colonization, resulted in the West’s control of Iran’s resources, the development of a dependent comprador bourgeoisie, the annihilation of Iran’s democratic structure (with the consequent overexploitation of the direct producer), and significant capital outflow. Although I argued that external forces were not the key to the slowness of capitalist development in Iran, their role – as seen through the application of dependency theory (see Andre Gunder Frank) and world systems theory (see Immanuel Wallerstein) – in Iranian society resonated with my understanding of Canada’s political and economic history as explained by the staples theory (see Harold Innis and his protégé S.D. Clark) as well as by the application of the internal colonialism perspective to the Indigenous peoples of Canada by political economists such as Wallace Clement, Patricia Marchak, Carl Cuneo, and James Frideres. Although they differ in size, economic prowess, political institutions, and ethno-linguistic composition, at least in terms of past experiences with colonial and imperial powers, Canada was not that different from Iran.

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A PROFESSIONAL AND CRITICAL SOCIOLOGIST IN THE MAKING

My research interest soon changed from the study of development and underdevelopment to the study of the highly industrialized society of which I was now a part. This change in academic orientation was partly due to the fact that I had decided to stay in Canada and soon realized that perhaps having a specialty in development, particularly in Iranian society, was not a helpful career move. If I were to live and work in Canada, I thought, I had to do research on issues related to Canada. Small towns and developing countries became part of my past and my personal history. Also, it was about this time that Erik Olin Wright and Luca Perrone (1977) published their empirical analysis of class and inequality. Schooled in Marxism and proficient in statistical analysis, I used the new data gathered by Monica Boyd, John Goyder, Kenneth McRoberts, Charles Jones, Peter Pineo, and John Porter and published my first paper on class, gender, ethnicity, and income inequality in Canada in the Review of Radical Political Economics. Wright’s influence on me was profound. Given that the conceptual frameworks adopted by Marx for class analysis in capitalist societies failed to contain adequate criteria for systematically understanding post-industrial classes, leading new Marxists reformulated the concept of class several times (e.g., Braverman 1974; Carchedi 1975; Poulantzas 1978). Among these, Wright’s research stood out for me because it contained an adequate way of operationalizing class and empirically evaluating its merit in modern societies. At first, Wright (1976) developed the concept of “contradictory class locations,” pointing to the complexity of the class concept. However, after a series of debates with John Roemer, Wright (1985) defined classes as positions within the social relations of production derived from the property relations that determine the patterns of exploitation. In this conceptualization, he defined exploitation in terms of social relations built around the ownership and control of different elements of the forces of production: labour power, capital, organization, and skill or knowledge. For him, exploitation existed when control over these assets gave people effective claims on the social surplus. This amounts to the transfer of the surplus labour from one class to another and can take place when all producers own their own means of production; however, it differs from what happens when producers own alienable and

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non-alienable assets. The differential ownership of productive assets will result in the exploitation of asset-poor by asset-rich individuals through free trade among these producers. This new conceptualization of the concept of class enabled Wright to include the post-industrial “new middle class,” which includes managers and experts (see Djilas 1957; Gouldner 1979; Heuberger 1992), in a basically Marxian scheme of social class. Although some element of the Weberian emphasis on domination is built into this conceptualization, Wright’s model took into account the link between the modes of production and class structure, and theorized class in terms of exploitation rather than in terms of “life chances.” Either way, this conceptualization of class became useful for my subsequent research and publications on class reproduction, class ideology, class-consciousness, and political behaviour. In a modified conceptualization of class, I challenged the presentation of a stereotypically traditional male working class as the “last bastion of patriarchy.” Moreover, focusing on Canadian professors, I showed that support for class equality is significantly more important than support for gender equality in the performance of housework. To me, this latter finding seems to support the argument that reduction of class inequalities and their ideological ramifications have important bearings on the reduction of gender inequalities. BUDDY , I HAVE A GRADUATION PRESENT FOR YOU

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent turmoil in Iran changed all my plans. The revolution and the subsequent Iraqi invasion of Iran challenged my worldview and disillusioned me. When Iraq invaded Iran and used mustard gas, all countries sided with Iraq in an attempt to weaken the revolutionary zeal potentially spreading to the American and other Western client states in the Middle East. Only Syria sided with Iran. One million people were killed in the eight-year war, and many were displaced. My plan for returning to Iran changed further when I met my future wife, Abby. Soon I was married and we had the first of our three children. I was now a husband and a father who needed a regular job. When my friend and classmate Larry said to me, “Buddy, I have a graduation present for you” and mentioned that the University of Western Ontario was looking for sessional instructors to teach courses in Sarnia and Stratford on stratification and Canadian society, respectively, I jumped at the

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opportunity. I applied and was accepted to teach these courses. That is how my teaching career started. In the first three years after graduation and marriage, I taught many sessional courses on a variety of topics, sometimes teaching thirteen courses in one year. Since Kitchener was my place of residence, I taught a wide variety of courses for the University of Western Ontario in Sarnia, Goderich, Stratford, Owen Sound, Tillsonburg, and Aylmer. I also taught for the University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier in Guelph and Waterloo, and for Sheridan College in Toronto. I was always on the road, from one class to another, every day of the week, weekends, and all seasons. These courses were instrumental to a systematic improvement of my understanding of Canadian society. However, the multitude of courses I taught and the lack of a tenuretrack job depressed me. I came to realize that I had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden or, rather, I had never arrived. A feeling of marginality was taking root. Unfortunately, I entered the workforce when the Canadian university expansion of the 1960s and early 1970s had petered out. Being an immigrant with a non-English name did not help me either. A MAN FROM A TRADITIONAL SOCIET Y

In 1990, I landed a two-year limited-term position at Queen’s University. I now had the academic freedom to pursue my research, all of which tested various aspects of Marxism using data that were either already available or that I collected myself. I became a professional and critical sociologist. During my time at Queen’s I built up my publication profile article by article. Frequently, I would start with a Marxian theory but would ensure that evidence informed my interpretation and, if necessary, would allow an alternative theory to guide the results. I started with the importance of class for the reproduction of inequality (Nakhaie 1992, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2016; Nakhaie et al. 2007), then moved on to work on gender (Nakhaie 1994, 1996, 1999, 2002b; Nakhaie and Wijesingha 2014) and race/ethnicity/ immigration (Nakhaie 1995, 1997, 2006a, 2006b, 2008a, 2008b, 2015), and, as new and interesting questions were posed or opportunity arose, I studied them. In all of these projects I incorporated power relations and inequality. During my two-year limited-term position and the five yearly contracts that followed, I published many articles in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, the Canadian Review of Sociology

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and Anthropology, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Review of Radical Political Economy, and Social Psychology. At the end of the two-year limited term position, I was back at the yearly contracts and sessional positions teaching at Queens, Belleville, and Brockville. Not surprisingly, inspired by The Vertical Mosaic imagery first developed by John Porter and later by other Canadian scholars such as Wallace Clement, I started to work on several papers on ethnic inequality. One of these was directly related to my exclusion from a permanent academic position. In a paper titled “Ethnic and Gender Distribution of Sociologists and Anthropologists, 1971–96: Canada,” I show that the discipline is dominated by individuals from British ancestry, both absolutely and in relation to their general or educated population; that the charter groups’ share has increased; and that the share of the “other” ethnic force has decreased during this period (Nakhaie 2001). I explained the imagery of the vertical mosaic in the academy by: (1) the Canadianization movement in the 1970s, which limited the access of non-Canadians to the academy; (2) a faster increase in the share of the educated ethnic minorities due to the Immigration Acts of 1967 and 1976; (3) the employment equity legislation during a low market demand for sociologists and anthropologists, which helped increase the employment of already privileged British women at the expense of less privileged ethnic minority women and men; and (4) potential exclusionary practices with regard to job definition, which limited the boundaries of job specification during the development of short lists (by looking for individuals who could “fit in”) and during the interview process (by looking for individuals with specific cultural and social capital). Since then, entrance into the academy has become more competitive. First, there are significantly fewer tenure-track positions in sociology and related fields; second, elimination of mandatory retirement has resulted in some faculty working past age sixty-five; third, given the increase in the number of departments with PhD programs, there are far more PhD graduates. These changes mean that many sociology PhD graduates are unable to find tenure-track positions, and some opt for sessional or limited-term positions. At Queen’s University, I established a more stable life and published extensively. In a co-authored paper titled “Victim, Offender, and Bystander: Crime in the Sky?” (Nakhaie and Pike 1995), we look at how print journalists in Canada, the United States, and Iran provided “news” about the American downing of the Iranian jetliner that killed

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293 innocent men, women, and children. We argue that media often do not see incidents in terms of the realities of an event but, more appropriately, in terms of an event’s significance to national values, tastes, worldviews, and social relations. For example, given past experiences with American foreign policies, Iranian journalists presented the American action as part and parcel of American administrative criminal policies. This tragedy was portrayed as a deliberate act by the “Great Satan.” Iranian journalists never contemplated that the downing may have been an accident. On the other hand, American journalists faced a moral dilemma in neutralizing Iranian attempts to stigmatize the United States as criminal because they themselves had earlier criminalized the USSR as an “evil empire” for the downing of KAL Flight 007. Instead, they frequently reported the incident as understandable or as a mistake, or they blamed Iran. Finally, Canadian journalists portrayed the events more like the American than the Iranian journalists, albeit in a more measured tone. We argue that this presentation of the event by the Canadian “bystander” journalists was understandable, given Canada’s economic ties with, and cultural similarities to, the United States. All journalists, more or less, rejected and/or reinterpreted information that conflicted with their existing beliefs. This ability to rationalize actions and wash away “sins,” which I think is common to most if not all humans, is what has made humans so successful. When humans experience cognitive dissonance, they tend to strive for internal consistency by rationalizing their actions, thus ensuring a “healthy” state of mind, making life more comfortable. In this article, my Iranian roots, Canadian socialization, and living close to the Empire enabled me to look at the tragedy/crime from several different points of view and relate it to a culturally based technique of neutralization. Another strand of research that was percolating in my head started due to my exposure to the feminist movement and feminist theory as well as being married to a person from another culture. During my PhD program, feminist issues became more and more prevalent in universities. When Judge Rosalie Silberman Abella’s report Equality in Employment: A Royal Commission Report (Abella 1984) was published, students and faculty often had heated debates. As I remember, opponents tended to highlight preferential treatment and proponents identified past inequalities in gender and argued that women in general, and students in particular, needed role models. Ironically, since

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there were only a few female faculty members in our department, the debate often took place among male faculty and students. My wife was born and raised in Canada and has British and Irish ancestries. Her friends were fearful that this man from the Middle East would oppress her and would treat her as an object, a housewife, and someone who could be subjected to abuse. That was what they knew of the “traditional” men of “Third World” countries. As my wife once said, “Who do they think I am? Do they think I am a powerless woman unable to stand up for myself?” Nevertheless, these stereotypes of “non-modern societies” encouraged me to study housework and conjugal violence both in terms of their distribution and in relation to power and class. I published on the symmetry and asymmetry of conjugal violence by placing it in a life course perspective and the changing power relationship of males and females during their lives (Nakhaie 1998). I also studied and wrote about the inequality and gender distribution of housework (Nakhaie 2002a, 2009). The latter interest continued when I collected data on Canadian professors, but I focused more on class relations and ethnicity rather than just on the unequal distribution of housework. These data were also instrumental in my writing of several papers on university professors, their ideology, and their political behaviour (Nakhaie 2004, 2007, 2013). IMMIGRANTS ’ DILEMMA : DO YOU THINK THEY DO IT BETTER IN IRAN ?

Finally, in 1997, after years of limited and contractual positions teaching for Queen’s University on campus and in surrounding cities, at age forty-four I was offered a job at Statistics Canada and a tenuretrack position in the Department of Sociology at the University of Windsor. I learned later that I almost did not get the job at Windsor. The position was advertised for a person skilled in theory and quantitative methods (a strange combination indeed). A few colleagues told me later that I was not included in the first round of the short list; instead, the husband of a faculty member had been short-listed. However, in the department’s council meeting, an objection was raised regarding qualifications, and this person was excluded. I was offered the position, yet the animosity and division caused by this departmental decision lingered for several years. Although the department is now more collegial, “everyday racism” does present itself from time to time. For example, when a minority

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person applied for a position, objections were raised not on the basis of merits but because “his accent would be difficult for students to understand.” In another incident in the department council, when I raised concerns about what I perceived as undemocratic decisionmaking practices, a colleague asked me, “Do you think they do it better in Iran?” The idea that “foreigners” have the right to challenge inequities may not have crossed the mind of this colleague. After forty years in Canada this immigrant is still treated as an “other.” Such experiences inspired questions. Why do many immigrants develop a divided allegiance? Why do they never integrate? Alternatively, why are some immigrants neither here nor there? These people are under the cross-pressures of two different cultures. They have lost their connection to the old land and they are not connected to the new land. They struggle to be “here” yet are not welcomed. They wish that they were “there,” yet have left it behind. It was not enough that immigrants learn not to speak out because their accents make colleagues snicker, but they are also made to feel that they should not speak out because they came from “there.” They do not have a right to challenge simply because they were “allowed” to enter. This is a foreigner’s dilemma. Coming from another world is both painful and a blessing. It is painful because it leads to marginalization. Yet, as Georg Simmel (1971, 143–50) would say, I am the “stranger” who can look at this new world from a different perspective. Simmel might even say that my sociological imagination has more credibility than that of my non-foreign colleagues. I am not bound to my socialization – or, rather, indoctrination –in either Canada or Iran. Twenty-two years of formative life in Iran and forty years of adult life in Canada have given me a sociological imagination that is potentially less likely to be found in an Iranian or Canadian sociologist. Despite the fact that, at times, working in Windsor is stressful, I know that academic life is what I like, and I am excited to teach and have the freedom to do the type of research I enjoy. I know that sociology and its institutions have given me the freedom to explore and understand myself and my world. It has allowed me to indulge my passion for knowing, doing, living, and stretching the boundaries of knowledge. It has allowed my imagination to soar; it has become my life; it is the most consistent part of my history. Sociology has been with me for over forty years, and I have worked in sociology departments for more than thirty years, over twenty of which were in a fulltime position. It was during my appointments at Queen’s and Wind-

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sor that I wrote and published articles with many colleagues and graduate students: Vince Sacco (Nakhaie and Sacco 2007, 2009); Robert Pike (Nakhaie and Pike 1995, 1998); Robert Silverman (Nakhaie and Silverman 2000a, 2000b); Robert Brym (Nakhaie and Brym 2011, 1999); Robert Arnold (Nakhaie and Arnold 1996, 2010); Barry Adam (Nakhaie and Adam 2008); Willem de Lint (Nakhaie and de Lint 2014); Abdolmohammad Kazemipur (Nakhaie and Kazemipur 2012); Paul Datta (Nakhaie and Datta 2018); and with graduate students (Nakhaie et al. 2007, 2014, 2020a, 2020b). Some of these relationships were nurtured and transformed into friendship due to our frequent contacts and our common ideas. My life in Windsor changed the direction of my research: my focus is now on topics related to my own personal experiences as an immigrant. At Windsor, my study of immigrants and ethno-racial groups has become central because I feel that I am treated as a foreigner. I am racialized in government classification, and I tend to see myself as a racialized immigrant. My research is now more closely related to race, ethnicity, and immigration, and it is often conducted through a critical lens. I have also been involved in several other strands of research in the areas of health, crime, and media. But, at the core, all of my research has been about issues relating to power and inequality in various “relations of ruling.” Summing up my biography, in my formative years the Iranian context, my social class, and the booms and bust of an oil-dependent economy were all fundamental to my development and understanding of the world in which I was living and my interest in the subject matter of sociology. Similarly, my encounter with Canadian society – my circle of friends, Canadian culture, and sociologists – has been instrumental in shaping, defining, and constructing my sense of self and my career trajectories. Each of the tiny mediating events that I encountered in these relationships could be due to luck. But these “lucky” events had a high degree of probability given my context and life history. This does not mean that I was a passive recipient; rather, I was an active agent who chose his vocation and research. Surely, my work ethic (though not rooted in the “Protestant” worldview discussed by Weber), my wanting to become “successful” (if not the king) and working hard to become so, have had a significant effect on my realizing these probabilities. I made choices, albeit against a backdrop of social constraints and opportunities, in both Iran and Canada. My self-concepts and career did not develop in a vacuum; rather, they

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were dialectically constructed through the social interactions that rendered particular choices available. REFERENCES Abella, Rosalie. 1984. Equality in Employment: A Royal Commission Report. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review. Carchedi, Guglielmo. 1975. On the Economic Identification of Social Classes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Debray, Régis. 1967. Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America. New York: Grove Press. Djilas, Milovan. 1957. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1979. The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York: Seabury Press. Heuberger, Frank W. 1992. “The New Class: On the Theory of a No Longer Entirely New Phenomenon.” In Hidden Technocrats: The New Class and New Capitalism, ed. Hansfried Kellner and Frank W. Heuberger, 23–48. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Moini, Reza. 2001. “Aryanpour Believed Science Could Explain Everything.” Iranian. http://www.iranian.com/Features/2001/August/AHA/index.html. Nakhaie, Reza. 1992. “Class and Voting Consistency in Canada: Analyses bearing on the Mobilization Thesis.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 17 (3): 275–99. – 1994. “Class, Gender and Ethnic Income Inequalities in 1973 and 1984: Findings from the Canadian National Surveys.” Review of Radical Political Economics 26 (1): 26–55. – 1995. “Ownership and Management Position of Canadian Ethnic Groups 1973–1989.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 20 (2): 167–92. – 1996. “The Reproduction of Class Relations by Gender in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 21 (4): 523–58. – 1997. “Vertical Mosaic among the Elites: The New Imagery Revisited.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 34 (1): 1–24. – 1998. “Asymmetry and Symmetry of Conjugal Violence.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 29 (3): 549–67. – 1999. Debates on Social Inequality: Class, Gender and Ethnicity in Canada. Toronto: Harcourt Brace and Co. Canada. – 2000. “Social Origins and Educational Attainment in Canada 1985 and 1994.” Review of Radical Political Economics 32 (4): 577–609.

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– 2001. “Ethnic and Gender Distribution of Sociologists and Anthropologists, 1971–96: Canada.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (2): 215–32. – 2002a. “Class, Breadwinner Ideology and Housework among Canadian Husbands.” Review of Radical Political Economics 34 (2): 137–57. – 2002b. “Gender Differences in Publication among University Professors in Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 39 (2): 151–79. – 2004. “Who Controls Canadian Universities? Ethnoracial Origins of Canadian University Administrators and Faculty’s Perception of Mistreatment.” Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal 36 (1): 92–110. – 2006a. “A Comparison of the Earnings of the Canadian Native-Born and Immigrants, 2001.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 38 (2): 19–46. – 2006b. “Contemporary Realities and Future Visions: Enhancing Multiculturalism in Canada.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 38 (1): 149–58. – 2007. “Universalism, Ascription and Academic Rank: Canadian Professors, 1987–2000.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 44 (3): 361–86. – 2008a. Controversies in Canadian Sociology. Scarborough, ON: Thomson/Nelson. – 2008b. “Ethnoracial Origins, Social Capital and Earnings.” Journal of International Migration and Integration 8 (3): 307–25. – 2008c. “Social Capital and Political Participation of Canadians.” Canadian Journal of Political Sciences 41 (4): 835–60. – 2009. “Professors, Ideology and Housework.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 30 (4): 399–411. – 2013. “Ideological Orientation of Professors and Equity Policies for Racialized Minorities.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 45 (1–2): 43–67. – 2015. “Economic Benefits of Self-employment for Canadian Immigrants.” Canadian Review of Sociology 52 (4): 377–401. – 2016. “What Drives Elite-Challenging Behaviours.” In Understanding Inequality: Social Costs and Benefits, ed. Amanda Machin, and Nico Stehr, 271–94. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien. Nakhaie, Reza, and Barry D. Adam. 2008. “Political Affiliation of Canadian University Professors.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 33 (4): 873–98. Nakhaie, Reza, and Robert Arnold. 1996. “Class Position, Class Ideology and Class Voting: Mobilization of Support for the New Democratic Party.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 2 (33): 181–214. – 1999. “Political Attitudes of Canadian Professors.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 24 (3): 329–54. – 2010. “A Four Year (1996–2000) Analysis of Social Capital and Health Status of Canadians: The Difference That Love Makes.” Social Science and Medicine 71 (5): 1037–44.

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Nakhaie, Reza, and Robert Brym. 2011. “The Ideological Orientation of Canadian University Professors.” Canadian Journal of Higher Education 41, no. 1: 18-33. Nakhaie, Reza, and James Curtis. 1998. “The Effects of Class Positions of Parents on Educational Attainment of Daughters and Sons.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 35 (4): 483–516. Nakhaie, Reza, Ali Dadgar, and Paul Datta. 2020a. “Tehran’s Troubled Youth: A Durkheimian Analysis of Suicidality and Family Dynamics.” International Social Science Journal 69 (4): 1-16. Nakhaie, Reza, and Paul Datta. 2018. “‘Who’s Got My Back?’ A NeoDurkheimian Analysis of Suicidality and Perception of Social Support in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 43 (2): 143–9. Nakhaie, Reza, and Willem de Lint. 2014. “Trust and Support for Surveillance Policies in Canadian and American Opinion.” International Criminal Justice Review 23 (2): 149–69. Nakhaie, Reza, Jennifer Halliday, and Spencer Roberts. 2020b. “Retirement Inequalities: The Immigrant Ethnic Origin Effects.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 52 (1): 23–48. Nakhaie, Reza, and Abdolmohammad Kazemipur. 2012. “Social Capital, Employment and Occupational Status of the New Immigrants in Canada.” International Journal of Migration and Integration 14 (3): 419–37. Nakhaie, Reza, and Robert Pike. 1995. “Victim, Offender, and Bystander: Crime in the Sky?” Canadian Journal of Sociology 20 (3): 309–31. – 1998. “Social Origins, Social Statuses and Home Computer Ownership and Use.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 23 (4): 427–50. Nakhaie, Reza, and Vincent Sacco. 2007. “Fear of School Violence and the Ameliorative Effects of Student Social Capital.” Journal of School Violence 6 (1): 3–25. – 2009. “Social Capital, Individual Disorder and Property Offences.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 32 (6): 392–9. Nakhaie, Reza, Robert Silverman, and Teresa LaGrange. 2000a. “Self-Control and Resistance in School.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 37 (4): 443–61. – 2000b. “Self-Control and Social-Control: An Examination of Gender, Ethnicity, Class and Delinquency.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 25 (1): 35–60. Nakhaie, Reza, Lisa Smylie, and Robert Arnold. 2007. “Social Capital, Socioeconomic Statuses and Health.” Review of Radical Political Economics 39, no 4: 562-585.

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Nakhaie, Reza, and Rochelle Wijesingha. 2014. “Discrimination and Health of Male and Female Canadian Immigrants.” Journal of International Migration and Integration 16 (4): 1255–72. Ogburn, William F., and Meyer F. Nimkoff. 1964. A Handbook of Sociology, 5th ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: Verso. Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1908]. Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wright, Erik Olin. 1976. “Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies.” New Left Review 98: 3–41. – 1985. Classes. London: New Left Books. Wright, Erik Olin, and Luca Perrone. 1977. “Marxist Class Categories and Income Inequality.” American Sociological Review 42 (1): 32–55.

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The Backstory

PA RT FOU R

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14 My Favourite Problems Metta Spencer

THE EARLY DAYS

I’m eighty-nine years old, so I’d better make this snappy. If I have anything useful to say about my intellectual life, it should be presented as an account of the problems that have interested me. I’ll gladly bequeath some of them to you, though they may fit you no better than my old shoes (Spencer 2019). I believe that the key measure of a person’s life is the value of the problems she tries to solve. In Oklahoma, when I was seven, my grandmother was the Sunday School teacher. One morning in church, a child asked her what heaven was like. She replied: “It’s where you go after you die if you’ve been good. It’s perfect. There are no problems there. You get whatever you want immediately and without effort.” I decided that I would refuse to go to such a horrible place. Problems make life interesting. Even a game or sport requires an obstacle to surmount. Good problems are scarce, and hard ones are the most fun. What a privilege we academics have! We can choose our problems and get paid for them. Of course, some problems are terrible, but what makes them terrible also makes them excellent. My grandmother soon died of cancer – an evil to us, but for that very reason every oncologist’s greatest challenge. My maternal grandfather spent sixty years behind a plough, suffering from black flies and toothaches, but entomologists, dentists, and John Deere’s engineers were already working on these evils. The perfect heaven, I decided, must be this world, which offers most of us the optimum number of excellent (difficult) problems. Just call me Pangloss.

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But the other three hundred inhabitants of Calera, Oklahoma, did not think they lived in the “best of all possible worlds.” It was 1931, during the Dust Bowl and the Depression, when I was born to Clayton and Gladys Wells, who would run the post office across from the drugstore and medical clinic of my grandfather, Dr A.J. Wells. Compared to my classmates, I was privileged. But then grandmother died, Pearl Harbor was bombed, my grandfather married a woman my father disliked, and we moved to San Bernardino, California, where my parents worked for the US Air Force. I was no longer privileged. Except in comparison to the Japanese: when I was fourteen, Hiroshima was bombed. I remember feeling triumphant. Our side was winning! Many years later I’d feel ashamed of that memory, and that shame still disciplines my work for peace, the main problem that I have chosen. I enrolled in Berkeley in 1949 (the year of the Loyalty Oath), joining an independent, interracial co-op. Boys and girls occupied separate houses but we cooked and ate together, among other things (there was no housemother). Inwardly, I had already rejected fundamentalist Christianity, and now overtly so. In the absence of an alternative internal compass, some of my decisions were reckless. In a week or two I entered a relationship with Bob Spencer, a psychology student whom I would marry two years later. THE PROBLEMS OF MY T WENTIES : RECONCILING FREEDOM WITH COMMITMENT

My first big developmental challenge as an eighteen-year-old in an avant-garde milieu, refusing to blindly follow a ruler, a religious or political dogma, or “the crowd,” was to find any sound basis for choosing with confidence. Berkeley would have been the ideal place to explore that problem, had I been ready to address it thoughtfully. The psychology faculty included three of the four authors of The Authoritarian Personality – Nevitt Sanford, Daniel Levenson, and Else FrenkelBrunswik. They identified the challenge: “the individual’s goal must be to become his own authority; i.e., to have a consciousness in moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect, and fidelity in emotional matters” (Adorno et al. 1950, 3). My student friends also talked a lot about the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s (1960 [1941]) Escape from Freedom, though only later would I recognize myself in Fromm’s account: What then is the meaning of freedom for modern man? “He

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has become free from the external bonds that would prevent him from doing and thinking as he sees fit. He would be free to act according to his own will, if he knew what he wanted, thought, and felt. But he does not know” (Fromm 1960, 220). Indeed, I did not know what I wanted, thought, or felt. Heartily assenting that freedom meant non-conformity, I violated as many conventions as possible. But it was easier to flout norms and the scripturally prescribed rules of my upbringing than to find coherence. How to authenticate a principle or value? Fromm owned that problem, but I didn’t recognize it as mine too. I only knew that I was depressed. Still, I encountered some clues during the decade of my unhappy marriage. One was David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, with its illuminating distinction between “other-directed” and “inner-directed” persons. I knew I was the former but longed to be the latter. Where do inner-directed persons get their inner stuff? Sociology says, “from socialization” – but socialization also comes from outside, so that’s no answer. Fromm’s answer – “from spontaneity and rationality” – is better, but I lacked both an external rulebook and confidence to discern better rules. Bob and I tacitly agreed that he’d make my decisions so I could “escape from freedom.” My boyfriend, who became my husband, and I were undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Bob was a psychology major and three years older than me. He was attracted by Scientology. So we moved to Arizona in the early 1950s to be acolytes of the founder of Scientology (then called Dianetics), L. Ron Hubbard. My heroic effort to make my marriage work induced me to accompany Bob to Phoenix. Soon Bob moved away, however, and I found myself surrounded by people from all over the United States who seemed to be seeking a saviour. There must have been forty or fifty of us living in sordid arrangements. They were my only friends. I had literally burned my social bridges behind me and no longer had any other significant contacts whatsoever. In so far as Hubbard had a secretary, I was she. The organization rented an empty store in an area where the neighbouring shops were a tropical furniture store and a Gestetner photocopying firm. The organization had no paid staff. There was no furniture in the rented store, and I worked as a volunteer. Hubbard lived out in the country with his young wife Sue. I don’t think Scientology had a lot of money

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then because someone told me that Sue cooked fried baloney for dinner. I transcribed recordings of Hubbard’s speeches on an electric typewriter while sitting on the concrete floor without a cushion. Someone with a car transported messages between Hubbard and me. I was supposed to write “Ack” (acknowledge receipt of information) on top of transcripts and, at the end, “Comp” (completed). Hubbard would hold lectures and charge for them, but I did not have to pay. Ron Hubbard was an amazingly charismatic person. The closest comparison I can see is Donald Trump. He was not as boastful as Trump but alluded to more extraordinary experiences than he was sharing with the public. This I found convincing. I was in Phoenix about two years. Hubbard had moved away during the second year, but we waited for him to return until that became obviously unlikely. My husband returned and we moved to Pasadena, California, and started to rebuild normal relationships and careers. I was never close with Hubbard. I went to his house once. I may have remained in the car; I’m not sure now. As far as I remember, I was never alone with him. Years later I had a correspondence with Hubbard about the ideological connection between New Age therapies and Eastern religions. My experience of Scientology was part of my curiosity about altered states of consciousness. Certainly I have explored these in countless types of therapy and experimental groups, everything from acupuncture to various kinds of yogic meditations. The one sociological lesson I learned from my experiences of Scientology concerned a real sense of how people get drawn into a deviant subculture. You don’t just out of the blue get up and think I want to join a deviant subculture. You know somebody who is involved and you form a relationship with him or her. Originally, your interest is not too crazy; you are just being sociable. But things can get crazier, and your non-deviant friends start imposing negative sanctions to bring you back into “normal reality.” If you quit your normal friends and stick with your semideviant friends as they become more deviant, you start to risk a lot. You become more dependent on your deviant network and you have no alternative. They may be stark raving mad and, in effect, you are too. The process can go on indefinitely. You may not even realize that you are burning your bridges behind you, but you cannot then go back to conventional society without losing face. You have to apologize or explain yourself in order to be accepted. I bet that this may even be how people become terrorists.

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Eventually, two years of therapy with an existentialist psychiatrist at last taught me to take responsibility for my own preferences. So, while unexpectedly pregnant, I left Bob. I was thirty and no longer ambivalent. I had read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy and was learning to search actively for meaning in the problems that life assigns, moment by moment. Babies are problems with meaning. As a divorced mother I would have little freedom, but making that commitment was itself an expression of my freedom. Regrettably, it also meant that my son would not receive all the care he needed for, “everything else being equal,” two parents are obviously better than one. (In real life, everything else is never equal.) Most days, I pushed the stroller from Oakland to the Berkeley campus, where a babysitter who was also a student would take care of my toddler on the lawn or in the student union while I was in class. Or I’d leave him with a sweet neighbour lady (see Spencer n.d.[a]). THE PROBLEMS OF MY THIRTIES : MOTHERHOOD AND BECOMING A SOCIOLOGIST

Having entered the sociology program at Berkeley only because it was convenient, I was surprised to hear a visiting Canadian professor, Dennis Wrong, say that it was “Mecca” for sociologists all over the world. And indeed it was. I studied with Herbert Blumer, Wolfram Eberhard, Nathan Glazer, William Kornhauser, Leo Lowenthal, David Matza, Philip Selznick, and Neil Smelser; and, in the philosophy department, with John Searle. These were men who made major contributions to social theory, deviance, sociology of culture, political sociology, modernization, ethnicity, ethnography, and the philosophy of mind. Without taking their courses, I also came to know Reinhard Bendix, Charles Glock, Erving Goffman, Seymour Martin Lipset, Gertrude Selznick, Martin Trow, and Harold Wilensky. This latter list includes three presidents of the American Sociological Association, an authority on anti-Semitism, and contributors to political sociology and the study of higher education. One summer my alimony and child support unexpectedly stopped and I needed a job for the fall. Herbert Blumer recommended me to Holy Names College (now University) in Oakland, California. I was hardly ready to teach, but when they sounded reluctant to hire me, he wouldn’t send them anyone else, bless him, so I taught there for two or three years. I also worked for Seymour Martin Lipset, first as a

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proofreader and then, for about five years, as his research assistant. We stayed in touch until he died in 2006. Lipset was a generous and liberal man. He had identified his favourite problem early in life – to explain the conditions for democracy – and worked on it until the end. I’ve never understood why he was so maligned. During the Free Speech Movement it may have been because of his friendship with the university’s president Clark Kerr. But he didn’t disclose his political opinions to students, presumably for the same reasons as those of Max Weber. Lipset was conducting a study of student politics around the world with a staff of graduate students that included Richard Roman and Kenneth Walker, who would become my colleagues in Toronto. He gave me a box of cards from India to analyze – a project that not only provided financing and course credit but that also could have become my MA thesis. Just then the department stopped requiring a thesis for a master’s degree, so I made it into my PhD dissertation. It wasn’t particularly good, but it got me through quickly. Lipset also got me a fellowship one year, bless his kind heart, so I didn’t have to work while reading for the oral exam. A study group met at my place every Sunday night; we’d choose a book and the person who would talk about it the following week. This group included Randall Collins, Stephen Warner, and Arlie Hochschild as well as Janet Salaff, who would become a dear colleague in Toronto. I loved the course I took with the philosopher Karl Popper, who was visiting Berkeley one term. He taught us to be interested in conundrums, remarking that “a genius is someone with a great nose for problems.” Scientists, he said, can never attain the truth; at best they can get closer to it by eliminating incorrect theories. A theory left standing may seem more likely to be true, but tomorrow someone may disprove it as well. Without eliminating false solutions there is no progress. Theories must be battle-tested. If one side gives up without a fight, maybe the false theory is not really eliminated. So big quests for truth involve contests. I am obliged to argue against opposing ideas, but, unfortunately, I tend to get angry when I do. For scientists and scholars, arguing is just part of the job. But this is not the case for peace workers – and I have been a peace worker for the past thirty-five years. I manage this difficulty by specializing in protesting injustice, where I excel, rather than in gently resolving disputes, where I do not.

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After my PhD exam, I went to Harvard to work for Lipset on the book he co-authored with Earl Rabb, The Politics of Unreason: RightWing Extremism in America, 1870–1970. We found a cleavage within the right wing between what we called the “Old Guard” and the populist “Red Necks.” That split, so far, had kept authoritarian extremists such as Father Coughlin and Huey Long from winning top American elections. However, Lipset warned that this luck might not always hold out – and in 2016 it didn’t. A recent Radcliffe graduate, Ann Swidler, and I worked together on the right-wing John Birch Society in one of Lipset’s surplus offices. It was in the Center for International Affairs, across a lobby from Henry Kissinger and his graduate assistants. Kissinger never said hello to me unless I said it first, so I pointedly greeted him at every opportunity. But occasionally he was informal. The centre’s only TV set was in a lounge next to my office, and one day in 1968 the whole staff gathered there for Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s big announcement. All chairs were occupied when Kissinger arrived, so he sat on the floor, appearing rather pleased to hear his friend announce he was dropping out of the presidential race. As a graduate student he had become a close friend of Rockefeller’s, whom he called “my brother,” and he had written the speech we were watching being delivered. (I learned this only by hearsay, the way I also learned that Lipset wrote speeches for Hubert Humphrey.) Kissinger had funds to bring politicians and military leaders to Harvard for a year, where their only duty was to present one paper in a seminar. About twenty of them gathered daily for sherry before lunch in the lobby outside my office, where I could overhear their views about Vietnam. I ate with them in the lunch room and attended a few of their seminars, but, since my dissertation was about university student politics in India, my own socializing was mainly with visiting Indian scholars and graduate students at a weekly lunch group. The director of the Center for International Affairs was the political scientist Samuel Huntington, who often invited women wearing big, lovely hats to the sherry hour. Erving Goffman (1969) was also at the centre for several months, writing his book Strategic Interaction, but he rarely came to his office. Ann Swidler babysat his son until she left for graduate school in Berkeley. Sometimes I’d audit classes. My favourites were by the political scientists Karl Deutsch and Thomas Schelling, plus John Kenneth Gal-

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braith’s graduate course on the economics of development. Galbraith spoke poker-faced without notes, but every sentence was beautifully crafted and frequently hilarious. The students were mostly foreigners who didn’t get his jokes, so I often emitted the solo guffaw, risking exposure as an interloper. I visited only one of Talcott Parsons’s classes, and this had an embarrassing end. I sat at the back with an Indian friend, Amar Kumar Singh. As we all filed out, I spoke to Amar over my shoulder, delivering my unflattering opinion of the lecture. As I turned back, Parsons was inches away, hearing everything. He may not have been fazed by my negative review, but later that week I was at the Lipsets’ house for dinner, where he, Alex Inkeles, and the political scientist James Q. Wilson were the other guests. Did he recognize me? I couldn’t guess. Parsons did write two books that I admired: The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (especially) and Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, which I was legally allowed to freely plagiarize in the textbook that I’d write later. When Lipset’s funding for studying the radical right was depleted, I was hired to teach two courses at the new University of Massachusetts, then located in Boston in the Salada Tea Building. Much more enjoyable was my other half-time job on Alex Inkeles’s comparative study of modernization. I shared an office in William James Hall with a visiting Canadian professor, Terrence Nosanchuk, and met his girlfriend, Bonnie Erickson, then a graduate student but later my colleague in Toronto. Another University of Toronto colleague, Lorne Tepperman, also worked on Alex’s project, which resulted in a book titled Becoming Modern (Inkeles and Smith 1974). At Harvard, there were three other graduate students who would become colleagues and friends in Toronto: Barry Wellman, Leslie Howard, and Nancy Howell. They and Bonnie were all enthusiastic students of Harrison White, who pioneered network analysis. Alex Inkeles had edited a series of little black books on different sociological topics, each by a different author, called the Foundations of Modern Sociology series. Prentice-Hall wanted them made into a single introductory textbook, and he knew I liked editing, so he offered me the job of turning each one into a chapter. I had decided to return to Berkeley, and this job was portable – a real blessing. There were almost no tenure-stream teaching jobs in California when I finished my PhD in 1969. Until one opened up, I

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would just teach part-time at Mills College and California State University in Hayward and work on a survey research project, while also editing the textbook. I hadn’t enjoyed Cambridge much, nor had Lipset’s wife Elsie, so they moved back to California too – to Stanford, as did their friends Alex and Bernadette Inkeles. Everyone in Berkeley seemed to be protesting against something – and not as politely as during the Free Speech Movement or the Civil Rights Movement of my graduate school years. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been killed while I was at Harvard. Now my Berkeley girlfriends were agitating for “women’s lib,” and the AntiVietnam War protesters seemed not to be students but scruffy street people and bikers wearing bandanas. The police had beaten up the campers in People’s Park only days before I returned to Berkeley. I took a job analyzing a survey of anti-Semitism among adolescents. I’d hurry to pick up my huge piles of computer printouts every day before noon, when the tear-gassing usually started. My house on Albany hill had a good view of the campus, six and a half kilometres away. One morning I could see the undergraduate library burning, so I didn’t drive in to work that day. The anti-Semitism of Christian youth was due to their resentment of being rejected and “one-upped” by their higher-status childhood friends. My research taught me, as a peace researcher, how important resentment is as a motivator of conflict. Most fights are probably matters of wounded pride. Conflicts and wars are often started by those who, losing standing or friendship, envy the higher-status persons or nations that exclude or belittle them. Indeed, fights are more often caused by the loss of group prestige than conflicts over material resources. Weber was right; Marx was wrong. Humiliation is a powerful motivator. Richard Ned Lebow (2010) has studied the motives behind ninety-four wars since 1648. He says that 58 per cent of them were prompted by rivalry for “standing,” while the rest were motivated by security concerns, revenge, or interests. Standing (or “status”) is a comparative rank, not an objective condition, and, as in the days of the Homeric warriors and gods with their touchy sense of “honour,” status is still the primary motive for war. Albany was a stable community with a good elementary school for my son. We got a dog and my son took cello lessons. But after two years there, I had to acknowledge that, to get a good tenure-stream job, I’d have to move far away again. This time I got lucky: I received an offer from the University of Toronto.

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PROBLEMS OF MY FORTIES : WORK AND LOVE

I arrived in Toronto in 1971, two days after my fortieth birthday and ready at last for a “real” academic career as an assistant professor. I was hired by Jim Giffin since S.D. Clark had retired and Irving Zeitlin had not come yet. There had been some kind of conflict the previous year between the senior professors, allegedly led by Leo Zakuta, and the younger faculty. I never grasped what it was about as everyone was nice to me. I drove to the Mississauga campus past fields of Scottish long-horn cattle, where monster homes now stand. At last I had the privilege of choosing my own problems. As Freud pointed out, there are basically only two challenges: “to work and to love.” The work part was easy and enjoyable: besides teaching, I was writing the textbook. And since those black books assumed too much prior knowledge for an introductory text, I was writing most of it myself. I finished it in Toronto in 1973 as the author, not the editor. We sold fifty-two thousand copies the first year, but Prentice-Hall requested separate Canadian editions thereafter. I’d write an American edition one year, the Canadian edition the next year, and then have a year off for other projects before starting the cycle again. Long before I wrote the tenth edition, no passages remained in it from Alex’s little black books. Unlike what is offered by “value-free” scholarship, I like problems that decision makers address. I ended every chapter of the textbook with a section on policy and, as I became more interested in war and peace, included a chapter on that too. I’ve always felt that most social research should aim to solve society’s serious problems and should lead us to be activists advocating for the solutions we discover. This was not an acceptable view until Michael Burawoy (2005) promoted what he called “public sociology” in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association. He told me that I had been doing public sociology all along. Then, as now, I prefer Frankl’s advice, which is to choose the problems that life “assigns to you.” Isaiah Berlin once distinguished between the hedgehog, which knows one big thing, and the fox, which knows a little about a lot of things. Hedgehogs are considered smarter, but I was a fox and enjoyed the diversity of topics that an intro text must cover. Besides, my textbook project was lucrative – and fun, as when I discovered a copy for

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sale in a Tokyo department store or when a Toronto cop let me off without a well-deserved traffic ticket because he’d read it. Eventually, someone in the business calculated that, worldwide, over a million people had read it. I still meet one of those readers occasionally. They are grandparents now. While work came easily for me, I cannot say the same of life’s other big challenge – love. In fact, I experienced recurring depressions. Research shows that depression is not a mere biochemical accident but, rather, is always about something – mainly or always, I think, about a perceived deficiency of love. At least mine was. In the 1970s, a plethora of self-improvement systems was on offer, and I explored them all, hoping to overcome my sadness. When I wasn’t busy with my textbook, I was trying a new psychotherapy or New Age self-help training. I turned this into a research project. Though this was far from my own field, political sociology, it was a natural choice for someone from Berkeley. I had, after all, studied symbolic interactionism with Herbert Blumer, who urged us to immerse ourselves in the subjective worlds we study. Since I was already “participant-observing” various systems of soul work and therapy, I thought I might as well call it research. I had read the popularizers of mysticism, Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley; I’d tried marijuana, encounter groups, meditation, and existentialist psychiatry. In Toronto I screamed in primal therapy sessions in the basement of Holy Trinity’s old rectory. I took a trip around the world in 1980, visiting ashrams, taking zazen instruction from the roshi of Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto, and interviewing Chinese monks in Shanghai. I took Erhard Seminars Trainings (EST) and finally learned something transformative from a Buddhist account of love. In Pali the word “metta” means the highest form of love, though my parents did not know it when they named me. The essence of the metta prayer or meditation is this: “May all beings be happy and free from suffering.” All beings? Wow. Wishing that for everyone would be a challenge. But the best thing that ever happened to me was the sudden awareness that I actually do wish all beings well. My epiphany occurred one night in a Manhattan hotel room, when I finally understood “metta.” That “aha!” moment came from seeing that one can love without knowing it – and that we actually do so all the time. I’d been swimming in oceans of love but couldn’t recognize it. When I saw this was true about myself, I knew that it must be true of others

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also. Love had not been missing; I just had been mistaken in looking for evidence of it. Nothing needed to be fixed. I knew I’d never have another depression, and I have not. PROBLEMS OF MY FIFTIES : PEACE AND DISARMAMENT

In 1981, I found a societal problem worth a lifetime of research and activism – the fact that more than fifty thousand nuclear bombs still existed (see anon n.d.)! That was news; I’d have guessed fifty. I decided to abolish them. Millions of other people also made the same decision that year. Since 1981, my life has been about peace work. Sociology was my day job but I made that about peace too. I invited thirty people to the basement of Holy Trinity’s old rectory to form the Canadian Disarmament Information Service. Soon up to three hundred persons a day were visiting the chapel, picking up flyers. I started a monthly tabloid, at first recruiting my twenty-yearold son Jonathan to run it. I slept only three or four hours a night, dividing my waking hours between my duties at the University of Toronto, revising my textbook, and giving speeches about nuclear weapons. Some nights I slept on the floor at Holy Trinity while teenaged anarchists spray-painted banners for tomorrow’s march (and damaged the carpet). In 1985 we converted our monthly paper into Peace Magazine, which I have edited and published from my bedroom ever since. (See our archive at peacemagazine.org/.) The physicist Eric Fawcett and other Toronto scientists founded Science for Peace, which has been my main network ever since. I have twice served two-year terms as president. For years we met in the homes of the game theorist Anatol Rapoport and University of Toronto chancellor George Ignatieff (yes, Michael’s distinguished father), planning a peace and conflict studies program for the U of T. At the Mississauga campus, I started a similar program, which I administered and taught until my hips were replaced. Until 2017, I taught a course at the U of T’s University College – “Public Health in a Nuclear Age” – which was about nuclear weapons and reactors. During the 1980s, peace activists sometimes influenced policies. For example, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invited us to lunch once and I served on the disarmament ambassador’s consultative group. The Soviet Peace Committee invited me and other activists to Vienna, Prague, and Moscow to talk with high-level Soviet officials, such as

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the editor of Pravda and Georgi Arbatov (1992), the head of the most influential Soviet institute. I don’t know why they listened to the likes of me, but they paid more attention than our own governments did. I continued visiting Moscow for thirty years, interviewing influential people for what would become the most important book of my life, The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy (Spencer 2010). (There were, however, several years when I did not try to go, after the KGB deported me for visiting dissident peaceniks.) When the Cold War ended, people stopped worrying about the bomb. Such optimism is misplaced. True, there are no longer seventy thousand nuclear bombs on the planet – only fourteen or fifteen thousand – but thousands are on alert and false alarms remain frequent. If one hundred of them are detonated over cities, the smoke will rise and circle the northern hemisphere for a decade, blotting out sunshine, freezing crops, and starving two billion people. What a way to solve global warming! I had wanted a cause, and I picked a humdinger. PROBLEMS OF MY SIXTIES : BEYOND BORDERS

The decade of the 1990s was the beginning of old age for me, and I retired from the university in 1997, though I kept teaching a little and doing peace research full time, except when slowed down by my health problems. My interdisciplinary degree program in peace and conflict studies was closed when I retired. I became preoccupied with devising better systems of democratic governance. In the early 1990s, I counted thirty separatist wars going on at one time, so I chose a new problem: how to make democracy work better for rival ethnic communities without splitting them into separate states. I proposed shifting from geographical polities and constituencies to functionally defined ones. Today, in 2019, I have been working on a different problem – how to make transnational governance more accountable and thereby counteract the current nationalistic backlash against globalization. Oddly, I propose the same solution to both problems: functional, rather than territorial, ways of aggregating votes. It was Seymour Martin Lipset and the Norwegian political sociologist Stein Rokkan who ignited my interest in the functional versus the territorial, though I have strayed far from their analysis. When Lipset moved to Harvard during the Vietnam War, I had stayed at Berkeley a

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year or two, preparing for exams. In the interval he sent me manuscripts to edit, one of which was his paper with Rokkan (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). In almost all democracies, ballots are counted and aggregated with other ballots in a constituency or political entity – a district, riding, or some other municipal, provincial, or national unit defined by borders on a map. National states have sovereignty, though that is being superseded by transnational organizations. Lipset and Rokkan noted that territorially defined constituencies are not the only democratic option as there are functional alternatives. Thus we might use gender instead of geography, with Canadian women electing their proportion of MPs and men electing the rest. Or, instead of ridings, we might have four linguistic federal constituencies: francophones, anglophones, Indigenous peoples, and “allothers,” each electing its appropriate number of MPs. But these are ambiguous, overlapping categories, so we’d have to let all citizens choose which one to join (and also to change from, if they so wished). The senate of Ireland is chosen by a functional set of constituencies. All graduates of Irish universities get to elect some senators, and other constituencies consist of people working in agriculture, labour, industry and commerce, and administration – without regard to where they live or work. I would bet that parliamentarians representing functional constituencies are more aware of their interests and more accountable to voters than MPs elected to represent geographical areas. Gerrymandering and the American electoral college are only two of the many questionable practices used to manipulate the relationship between political power and the territorial distributions of voters. At the end of the Cold War, separatist movements in the postcommunist world were trying to achieve democracy by dividing up countries. Some national minorities were scattered thinly through their countries, so they were generally outvoted. Others were concentrated as a local majority in one area, where they were tempted by the idea of secession. (“Why should we be a minority in your big country? If we secede, we can be the majority and you will be the minority in our own smaller country.”) But secession usually creates more problems than it solves, and it still leaves disgruntled minorities within each of the newly separated states. To avoid this and the wars that usually precede the breakup, I’d allocate political power to citizens without regard to where they live

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but according to their functional group identities, which (at least during the 1990s) were their nationalities. This can be done within a country or even internationally as a new layer of global governance. A version of this worked well for centuries in the Ottoman Empire, where different ethnic communities lived together in the same territory but under separate, autonomous governments called “millets.” Imagine a comparable system in Canada. For example, if all the Canadians who identify primarily as francophones could combine their votes, they would have more power than now, under the present territorial constituencies, whereby only in Quebec do francophones have much political clout. Such a Canada-wide francophone national constituency would have reduced the incentives for Quebec’s sovereignty. But, thank heavens, Quebec’s separatist movement did not cause a war as the urge for “self-determination” did among the Kosovars, Chechens, Tamils, and other nationalistic groups. Ethnic or national feeling is only one basis for identity, and it is equally possible to form other types of functional constituencies. In a government of functional constituencies, national identity might fade as some citizens came to identify primarily as, say, vegetarians or LGBTs. They could form vegetarian or LGBT constituencies and change their registration accordingly. Such a system of democracy would be flexible, accountable, and would not necessitate breaking up states. Still, we may always need some territorial polities to address geographically specific issues such as fixing potholes and choosing whether to install a nuclear reactor or wind turbine. Several levels of government are required, some of which may always be territorially defined and others functionally defined. Separatism is no longer a hot peace research problem but globalization is. Increasingly, political decisions can be resolved only at the international level. However, because there is a deficit of democracy in existing transnational institutions, voters are frustrated. Brexit won because English citizens could not identify the faces of their parliamentarians in Brussels. NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, and World Bank are not accountable to citizens. Nor are powerful corporations. How can we make them democratic? This is an excellent problem. Once again, functional constituencies can be more democratic when it comes to representing citizens’ concerns. Environmentalist, consumer, and labour NGOs could be empowered to appoint representatives to the boards of powerful corporations and transnational bodies of governance. The United Nations already allows civil society organi-

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zations to participate in some deliberations and may someday set up a “house of the people” representing functional constituencies in addition to the General Assembly, which represents states (Spencer 1991, 1994, 1998, 1999; Spencer and Bacher 2001). The 1990s was a period of separatist movements – especially in post-communist countries. I had more contacts in those days with Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Germans, Czechs, and Tamils – including nationalistic guests who lived with me for years – than with Russians. I also travelled and edited several books, including the Separatism volume, which contains a piece I co-authored with Peter Pithart about the breakup of Czechoslovakia (Pithart and Spencer 1998). Pithart had been a Charta 77 activist and then the prime minister of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia just before its breakup, which he had tried to prevent.1 MY THIRT Y - FIVE - YEAR - LONG PROBLEM : FIGHTING THE COLD WAR

The longest-running problem of my life is also the most important: how to handle the Cold War and its after-effects. I began work on it when I was fifty and it will certainly outlast me. On 12 July 1982, I was one of the million protesters who marched from the UN to Central Park. All over the world others were also demanding that the nuclear arms race end. NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization were toe-to-toe in Europe with their new missiles, but people in both East and West objected. That year I was also one of several thousand Westerners whom the alarmed Czechs invited to a conference in Prague, where crowds lined the streets waving and pressing expensive gifts and children’s art work upon us. Most of my junkets were self-financed. I attended a Pugwash meeting in Budapest and some European Nuclear Disarmament (END) meetings. I joined some Western peace activists – Mary Kaldor, Mient Jan Faber, and E.P. Thompson – who were in touch with Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav, and East German pro-democracy activists (see Spencer n.d.[b]). After many surreptitious meetings throughout the 1980s, we decided to found an organization – the Helsinki Citizens Assembly – publicly in Prague, taking a chance that the secret police would break it up. But amazingly, in 1989, just before this founding meeting, the Vel-

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vet Revolution took place. Havel was released from prison, became the new president of the country, and came to address us in the wonderful concert hall that he let us use without charge. Ignoring the flags that nationalists from newly liberated Eastern states had brought to promote their separatist goals, we rejoiced in the Eastern Europeans’ liberation from communism. Our joy would be brief, for their struggles would turn violent. In my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1982, I had been struck by the incongruity of attitudes. The conferences took place at tables arranged in a large circle. Interpreters in glass booths translated into our earpieces. The ostensible reason for the meeting was for the Soviets to argue their case before us. They blamed the West for all problems, as if expecting us peace activists to go home and set our governments straight. (We’d already been doing so.) Their speeches seemed scripted. When my turn came, I politely suggested that it might be easier to make deals with Western arms negotiators if the USSR were not suppressing dissent in its society. Then I received a courteous prefabricated reply and we broke for coffee. At the refreshments table, the same party official approached, barely containing his glee, saying, “Wonderful! That’s exactly the way we want you to put it. Keep it up. You’re so polite, and exactly right!” Other officials, passing me, flashed a facial expression with the same meaning as a thumbs-up gesture or a wink. At later dialogues, if I spoke instead about a different topic, a CPSU official would ask me offstage not to forget to mention human rights since I always “discussed it so constructively.” Yet elsewhere in Moscow I saw no hint of détente. A recording device in the wall of my hotel room started beeping incessantly until a maintenance man came to shut it off. A plumber came in, pretending to service my toilet, but he actually implored me to suggest how he might escape to the West. I left my handbag unattended for a moment in a restaurant, and, when I returned, the KGB guy had stolen the notebook in which I had been writing down addresses. Obviously, the repressive apparatus was functioning, but lots of people wanted to abolish it. Certainly a few Russians – the independent peace activists called the Moscow Trust Group – were willing to take a public stand, even at great personal risk. I visited them whenever I could. Despite being arrested or beaten up in the street, they held art shows and seminars in

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their apartments, leafleted in public, and even planted flower seeds in a park in the shape of a peace symbol. Once, after I called them from my hotel, they were punished by having their telephones removed. Of course not all dissidents knew each other. The most notable group, the Moscow Helsinki Group, had made human rights their cause for a whole generation. I encountered the inspiring elderly founders, Sergei Kovalev, Yuri Orlov, Lev Ponomarov, and Lyudmilla Alexeyeva, repeatedly, always feeling boundless respect for their integrity and courage. I never met Andrei Sakharov, the group’s most famous member. I could see that there was discontent in the country, but I could not gauge the extent of it and was surprised that the system crumbled so easily under Gorbachev. But already I had discovered that there were two kinds of people who disliked the regime: (1) the few hundred dissidents (such as those in the Trust Group and the Helsinki Group) who publicly criticized Soviet policies and (2) those in a far larger group of Party members who privately discussed reformist ideas (Spencer n.d.[b]). Although these two groups of people should have been allies, they were not. In fact, they expressed contempt for each other – not because they wanted different political changes but because of their differing methods of working for it. I called the first group “Barking Dogs.” These were highly principled dissidents who had no influence on the regime but made a lot of noise. I called the second group “Termites,” for they kept silent in public but were secretly burrowing inside to undermine the Party. Finally, one of them came to power: Gorbachev. Yet most people lacked any thought of change: I called them “Sheep.” And I supposed that most Party members were conservatives, still genuinely committed to the regime: I called these people “Dinosaurs.” I estimated later that about a million Party members were Termites and the other nineteen million members were Dinosaurs. The Green Cross president, Alexander Likhotal, corrected me, saying that almost all Party members had actually been Termites. It was Termites who, offstage, had enthused over my criticism of human rights abuses. As punishment for being expelled from the USSR, I was also expelled from the Toronto group, which insisted that a real peace activist would never say anything that might offend the Soviets. They did not realize that the Termites in Moscow had no interest in Western com-

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munist sycophants but mistook me for a real sage. High-level officials gladly let me interview them, but they often questioned me more than I questioned them. This was already true before Gorbachev came to power, and it became even more apparent during his presidency. If my book, The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, offers any unique insight into the Gorbachev period, it is by documenting the astonishing extent to which reform-minded Party officials absorbed Western ideas – especially those of peace researchers (Spencer 2010). More than anyone else, Arbatov interacted with North American and European peace advocates. He channelled a flood of their ideas to the Kremlin, especially influencing what was called Gorbachev’s “New Political Thinking” – a foreign policy and military doctrine based on four main principles: 1 Common or mutual security, which recognized that one side cannot make itself more secure by making its adversary insecure; 2 Reasonable sufficiency, which considered parity in weapons systems a nonsensical goal. (Since you can only kill each enemy once, if you have enough weapons to do so, that is enough, no matter how many the other side owns); 3 Non-provocative defence (the maintenance of weapons suitable for defending the homeland but incapable of offensively fighting far away, thus reassuring one’s enemies that you cannot possibly attack them); and 4 Unilateral initiatives (Spencer 2010). Without bothering to negotiate treaties, Gorbachev took bold steps toward disarmament, including withdrawing Soviet troops from Germany. He expected the West to reciprocate, creating a “reversed arms race.” Later in his presidency, when the Party’s Dinosaurs were threatening him, Gorbachev tried to placate them. For a while this cost him the support of some democratic advisers, including Arbatov. Since then, and to the present day, two younger men have been his closest aides: Professor Alexander Likhotal and Pavel Palazhchenko, Gorbachev’s interpreter, who writes wonderful stories for his Facebook friends and occasionally lets me publish one in Peace Magazine. I met Alexander Likhotal in 1988 at a mountaintop castle is Austria, where UNESCO had sent academics to establish a peace university. He had just been appointed rector of the Soviet diplomatic academy – so recently that his business cards had not yet been printed. As we sat

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around the conference table planning the curriculum, one Western delegate, out of politeness towards the Soviet delegation, proposed a course or two on Marxism. Equally politely, Likhotal demurred, expressing a preference for liberal Western theorists. Later we sat together on a bus excursion around Burgenland and found ourselves mildly disagreeing: I was supporting the Warsaw Treaty Organization’s arguments and he was supporting NATO’s. We joked about trading countries, and after that I went to see him whenever I was in Moscow. Soon he became press spokesman for President Gorbachev and a familiar face on TV, where one day in Toronto I would see him announce that the Soviet Union would disband. I published my book on Russia in 2010. I knew that if it could have any influence, it would only be in Russia – but with Putin in office and my book criticizing him, friends warned me that I’d be unable to publish it there. Besides, most Russians despised Gorbachev’s innovations and loved Putin. Even the former Termites were disenchanted with democracy, which Yeltsin had turned into chaos with Bill Clinton’s help, and they blamed Westerners for recommending “shock therapy,” which ruined their economy and created oligarchs. I saw their point. Still, I kept visiting and interviewing people in Moscow. I came home and wrote a twenty-three-thousand-word appendix to my book, updating it with new information about Putin’s illegal actions. Nowadays you can typeset your manuscript on the computer and have it bound so it looks like a regular published book. I had seven Russian-language copies made for my trip to Geneva, where I attended a UN disarmament conference and Green Cross International’s anniversary conference. The high point came when I gave Gorbachev a copy and received a hearty hug in response. REVISITING T WO OLD PROBLEMS : DEMOCRACY PROMOTION AND HUMILIATION

Two old problems have been haunting me lately. The first is the issue of promoting democracy. Clearly, democracy doesn’t always yield the best political decisions – especially in foreign affairs – but because it best supports the flourishing of citizens, I’ve always wanted to spread it around the world. I stand in awe of “Barking Dogs” – the dissidents and repressed people who try to liberate themselves non-violently from authoritarian rule.

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I have also known Gene Sharp since 1982, keeping him on a pedestal as high as Gorbachev’s. Sharp (1973, 2012; Spencer 2003), more than anyone since Gandhi, has studied methods of nonviolent civil resistance (see also Osgood 1962). He will train people upon request but never advises anyone whether to seek liberation from her or his particular oppressor. At last I see why he practises such restraint. People – especially Russians – resent foreigners’ advice about their political problems. I’ve never been shy about expressing my opinions, especially about the merits of nonviolent civil resistance, though hardly any Russians seem interested in that approach. I have often urged my friends in Moscow to use their freedom while they still have any, but this only annoys them. I have repeatedly mentioned a study showing that civil resistance is twice as likely to succeed as is a violent insurrection and vastly more likely to result in democracy (Chenoweth and Stephan 2012). Later, when the Arab Spring failed so miserably, I began to understand the pessimism of Russians. The nonviolent movement that began in North Africa led to the civil war in Syria and serious problems elsewhere. I now recognize the danger of bringing down a dictatorship non-violently before there is a significant capacity for democratic self-governance. I now regard nonviolent struggle as sometimes essential but never sufficient. In 1989, many countries non-violently freed themselves from communism but, their citizens recalled prewar freedom and understood how to practise democracy. In Russia, however, totalitarianism lasted seventy years, and even before that the country had never experienced democracy. Around the world, democracy declined more in the last decade than it increased. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and nonviolent action is now required for our own vigilant resistance. So, to the problems I’ve addressed must be added this new one for you to solve: How can people in an authoritarian regime create conditions for the success of democracy before undertaking the civil resistance that can win it? I would place my bets on the three following approaches: (1) strengthening civil society, (2) establishing the rule of law before elections, and (3) producing serial TV shows that illustrate good governance. Finally, since the 2016 American elections I have started thinking again about humiliation. I think Trump’s base identified with and

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voted for him not despite, but because, of his rudeness. He could get away with behaviour that his most fervent supporters – poorly educated, older, white Christian American rural males – no longer dared to display because of what they call “political correctness.” His critics could not embarrass Trump himself (shamelessness is his modus operandi), but they did humiliate his supporters, who struck back in the voting booth. I, as much as anyone, need to learn how to discuss issues without insulting even the most bigoted opponent. I still believe, as Popper taught, that it is my duty to defend my convictions, but I should learn to argue politely. Putin speaks for millions of humiliated Russians who imagine the West gloats over their decline. He aims to “make Russia great again,” and even Gorbachev called Obama “triumphalist.” Western leaders after the Cold War didn’t actually denigrate Russia: they merely treated it as a “regional power” – but that was perceived as triumphalist. To be sure, the West made several grave foreign policy mistakes, especially when breaking its promise to Gorbachev by gradually expanding NATO towards Russia’s border as well as by installing anti-ballistic missile systems against the country. That was nasty, but it was not meant to humiliate. When people feel humiliation or envy, their grievances are sometimes realistic, sometimes less so. Wounded pride hurts, even when the wound is self-inflicted. For every “humiliatee” there is not necessarily a “humiliator.” For everyone who feels “put down” there is not necessarily anyone attempting to be “one up.” But so long as we rank each other comparatively, for every winner there will always be a loser. The sociological solution is to demand equality, but as a principle this seems to diminish the value of achievement. So what is the answer? Personally, I always vote in favour of greater equality. Paradoxically, however, the politics of equality can exacerbate resentment. In fact, it may be better to approach equality indirectly, by avoiding comparative ranking itself. Permit me to be didactic here: an old sociologist is entitled to rant about inequality. The source of most humiliation and resentment is not objective inequality, I think, but the very drawing of invidious comparisons. Nevertheless, we have to rank each other every day, and we need ethical self-discipline to restrain both the pride and indignity that this inflicts. My ethic is this: when I have to judge someone’s performance, I try to do so by objective criteria, not by comparing her to others. Especially, I should not compare myself to others.

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Yes, a good society is an egalitarian society – when it comes to money, political influence, and social honour alike. But we can become increasingly equal without comparing people to each other and thereby generating pride and humiliation. Instead of asking, “Do I receive my fair share?” we can ask, “Do I have enough?” I have learned one principle that I hope may be useful to others too: seek the problems life is assigning to you – and be grateful for them. Blessings.

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NOTES I am also the author of Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society (Spencer 2006). I wanted my book to illustrate moral criticism not only by analyzing plots from the situation comedy Northern Exposure but also by contrasting it with a TV series with a very different sensibility. REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper. Anon. n.d. “List of States with Nuclear Weapons.” n.d. https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/list_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons. Arbatov, Georgi. 1992. The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics. New York: Times Books. Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “For Public Sociology.” American Sociological Review 70 (1): 4–28. Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria Stephan. 2012. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Colombia University Press. Fromm, Erich. 1960. Escape from Freedom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Inkeles, Alex, and David H. Smith. 1974. Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lebow, Richard N. 2010. Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan, eds. 1967. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. New York: Free Press. Osgood, Charles E. 1962. An Alternative to War or Surrender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Pithart, Peter, and Metta Spencer. 1998. “The Partition of Czechoslovakia.” In Separatism: Democracy and Disintegration, ed. Metta Spencer, 185–204. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Sharp, Gene, 1973. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston: Porter Sargent. – 2012. From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. London: Serpent’s Tail. Spencer, Metta. n.d.(a) One hundred brief autobiographical videos. Video archive at mettaspencer.com. – n.d.(b) “Russian Peace and Democracy Informants.” http://russianpeace anddemocracy.com/informants. – 1991. “Politics Beyond Turf: Democratic Integration in the Helsinki Process.” Bulletin of Peace Proposals 22 (4): 427–35 (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute). – 1994. “How to Enhance Democracy and Discourage Secession.” In World Security: The New Challenge, ed. Derek Paul, Carl G. Jacobson, Morris Miller, Metta Spencer, and Eric Tollefson for Canadian Pugwash Group, 161–78. Toronto: Science for Peace/Dundurn. http://www.mettaspencer .com/?Papers:Academic_papers:How_to_Enhance_Democracy_and _Discourage_Secession. – , ed. 1998. Separatism: Democracy and Disintegration. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. – 1999. “Devolution, Secession, and Democracy.” In The Constitutional and Political Regulation of Ethnic Relations and Conflicts, ed. Mitja Zagar, Boris Jesih, and Romana Bester. Ljubljana: Institute for Ethnic Studies. – 2003. “Gene Sharp 101” (interview). Peace Magazine, 1 July. http://peacemagazine.org/archive/v19n3p16.htm. – 2006. Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. – 2010. The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy. Lanham, MD: Lexington. – 2019. “Our House is on Fire!” Peace Magazine 35 (3): 16–25. http://peacemagazine.org/archive/v35n3p16.htm. Spencer, Metta, and John Bacher. 2001. “Development and Nationalism.” In Encyclopedia of Nationalism, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Motyl. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. http://www.mettaspencer.com/?Papers:Academic _papers:Development_and_Nationalism.

15 From Residential School to University Professor Cora J. Voyageur

I am a Dene woman. My Christian name is Cora Voyageur and my traditional name is Sepia Mata Po (Her Journey Begins at Night). As a First Nations person, I will follow the traditional Indigenous protocol of introducing my community, my family, and then myself. My people are from a small isolated community in northeastern Alberta called Fort Chipewyan. Our southern neighbours, the Cree, named us Chipewyan, meaning “pointed skins.” This describes our winter jackets, which had hoods sewn into a point so the snow would fall off. However, we call ourselves Denesuline, or The People of the Red Willow. As a Dene, I am part of the widely dispersed Athapaskan-speaking linguistic group that includes the Chipewyan at Cold Lake, Alberta; the Tsuut’ina (who live just outside of Calgary); and the Apache and the Navajo in the United States. I have always been proud of the fact that the great American Indian warrior and military genius, Geronimo, was Dene. My community is located eighty kilometres south of the border of the Northwest Territories on the western tip of Lake Athabasca – a 320-kilometre body of water that straddles the Saskatchewan-Alberta border. Fort Chipewyan is an isolated community and accessible year-round only by air. A network of rivers around the community allows water transport in all directions during the mild months. The community is linked by an ice road to Fort McMurray to the south (a five-hour trek) and Fort Smith to the north after the rivers freeze over (usually in early December). We see the beauty of the northern

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boreal forests with its rivers, fens, low hills, Precambrian rock, and trees as far as the eye can see while taking the journey either north or south. Despite its isolation, Fort Chipewyan has been affected by outside forces, beginning with the fur trade and followed by the church, the federal and provincial governments, and resource development. The Euro-based fur trade came to northern Alberta in 1788, making Fort Chipewyan the oldest European settlement in this province. The North-West Company decided to take the upper hand in its long-running fur trade battle with the Hudson’s Bay Company by bringing the traders to the First Nations people in their own territory. This differed from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s practice of having the First Nations people bring furs to it. The Scottish Orkney Islanders employed by the North-West Company left a legacy of Métis descendants in Fort Chipewyan, with the family names of Campbell, Simpson, McKay, McDonald, Fraser, and Flett. Western religion entered the community with the fur traders. The current Anglican church, built in 1880, is a designated provincial historical building. The Roman Catholic church was built in 1909. A Roman Catholic Indian school called the Holy Angels Residential School was established in 1874. The residential school was operated by priests of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who were assisted by the Sisters of Charity (also known as the Grey Nuns) of Montreal. Generations of my family were forced into residential schools by government policy. I was one of the last to attend one of these institutions. The residential school, or “The Mission,” as it was called by the locals, was closed in 1974. A short time later, the vacant building was burned to the ground by an arsonist. That land has been reclaimed by the community and is now used for community events. The presence of oil in the sands south of Fort Chipewyan was known about for centuries. In 1793, explorer Alexander Mackenzie stated: “Tar and oil could be found oozing from the banks of the Athabasca” (Daniel 1999, 58). However, serious exploration did not begin until 1912. Many of our community members are currently employed in the oil sands plants. Our First Nation owns a number of service companies, which hold contracts with the major resource developers who operate on or near our traditional territory.

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WE ARE ALL RELATED

We are First Nations people from the Treaty 8 region of Alberta. This treaty was negotiated between the local Cree, the Chipewyan, and the Queen’s representatives in Fort Chipewyan on 4 August 1899. Treaty 8 Indians surrendered a resource-rich tract of land about three-quarters the size of Ontario, or 324,000 square miles (839,156 square kilometres) (Oberle 1986). I was born into a political family. My great-grandfather, Alexandre Laviolette, was a treaty signatory and our first Indian Act chief. Treaty commissioners wrote that “the Chief at Fort Chipewyan displayed considerable keenness of intellect and much practical sense in pressing the claims of his band. They wished as liberal, if not more liberal terms, than were granted to the Indians of the plains” (Mair 2009, 174). They further stated: “The Chipewyan confined themselves to asking questions and making brief arguments. They appeared to be more adept at cross-examination than at speech making” (Mair 2009, 174). The government made many promises to the First Nations people in exchange for sharing their land with the newcomers. Some of these promises have never been fulfilled and are the basis of ongoing claims. Alexandre Laviolette served as our chief from the signing of Treaty 8 until his death in 1921. After his death, the office was passed to his brother Jonas, who served as our chief for thirty-one years until his death in 1952. From 1952 to 1956, Jonas’s nephew, Benjamin Marcel (an elected band councillor), served as acting chief. Then, Jonas’s other nephew (and Benjamin’s brother), Auguste Fredolin (Fred) Marcel, was appointed as our last traditional and hereditary chief. Uncle Fred (as he was known to the family) served as our chief for twenty-seven years from 1956 until 1983 (Pare 2004). The Voyageurs, and our extended family, make up a large proportion of the Athabasca Chipewyan membership list. Many of my family members have been involved in band administration or band politics, including Fred’s nephew Patrice, who served as chief from 1987 to 1991. My uncles Charlie Voyageur and John Marcel as well as my aunts Patricia Lepine and Lily Marcel were elected to council. My late uncle, Ernie Voyageur, served as band manager from the late 1970s until 1983. My first cousin, Peggy Laviolette, was the first of my generation to seek elected office in October 2003. She lost her run to be

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the first female chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation by eleven votes. My niece, Michelle Voyageur, is currently serving on our band council and is now the acting chief. A FEW FACTS ABOUT ME

I was born in a small resource town in northern Saskatchewan in 1956. My family moved to the Saskatchewan side of Lake Athabasca so family members could work in the uranium mines. The town in which I was born, Uranium City, is now a ghost town. The once bustling community was created because of resource development, which was precariously based on a commodity whose worth was both unstable and controversial – namely, uranium. When the demand for uranium dwindled, most of the Fort Chipewyan families returned to the Alberta side of Lake Athabasca and resumed their traditional livelihood of hunting, trapping, and fishing. However, those activities would soon be placed in jeopardy by southern resource development and hydroelectric dams built in British Columbia. My small nuclear family, which consisted of my parents, me, and my baby sister Lillian, moved to Edmonton in the late 1950s. We were one of many Indigenous families that moved from rural communities to the urban areas in search of work and opportunities. We lived a transient lifestyle during my childhood as my parents moved from town to town in search of work. Our family came apart at the seams when my parents separated after I completed grade four. To keep us out of the child welfare system my sisters Lillian, Dorothy (my younger sister who was born in Edmonton), and I were sent to live with my aunt in Fort Chipewyan. We were soon placed in Holy Angels Residential School, where we stayed for one year. The residential school system in Canada was based on the idea that Indigenous cultures were inferior to those of the Europeans. The Bagot Commission (1842–44) found that separating children from their parents was the best way to assimilate Indigenous people. The Davin Report (1879), commissioned by Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, stated that many of the educational practices used for American Indian children could be replicated in Canada (Milloy 1999). Prime Minister Macdonald wondered if the American policy of “aggressive civilization” might prove helpful. Having Indigenous children attend residential school was deemed to be the most

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effective way of instilling into them religious teaching and agricultural training further assimilating Indigenous people into mainstream society, thus lessening the government’s responsibilities to them. Residential schools in Canada began in 1831 in Brantford, Ontario, with the Mohawk Institute Residential School, also called the “Mush Hole,” and ended with the closure of Gordon’s Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan in 1996 (Graham 1997). The residential school was a harsh environment, in which children lived in fear of random punishment. For a few reasons I was spared that fate to some degree. First, I had taken French in my earlier grades and was able to speak, albeit haltingly, to the francophone nuns. Second, I had not yet had my first communion. So I became a project for the nuns. I think this Roman Catholic rite of passage gave them something to look forward to and helped them break the monotony of caring for Indian children in a location so far away from their families. Third, I was smart. I received high marks on assignments and I could help others with their schoolwork. As a residential school survivor, I was intrigued during my university studies by Erving Goffman’s concept of a “total institution,” which he defined as a “place of residence or work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (Goffman 1961, 6). These settings include hospitals, prisons, and residential schools. Goffman defined five types of total institutions, although the categories overlap to some extent. They include institutions established for the care of people who are considered to be: (1) incapable of taking care of themselves and harmless, (2) incapable of taking care of themselves and a threat to the community, (3) a danger to the community, (4) pursuing some work-like task and justifying themselves on instrumental grounds, and (5) retreating from the world but including training stations such as those of religious orders (Goffman 1961, 6). Residential schools fall under the fourth definition. The following is a key passage, which makes readers aware of the oppressive features of total institutions: A basic social arrangement in modern society is that the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places, with different co-participants, under different authorities, and without an over-all rational plan. The central feature of total institutions can

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be described as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life. First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member’s daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together. Third, all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution. (Goffman 1961, 6) I was affected by the residential school system but I maintained dreams of a bigger and better world. I was always a bright student. But I came from a poor family where little value was placed on education. I found refuge in books and my happiest times were spent in the library. I was a voracious reader and I had a vivid imagination. I remember when Crosby, Stills, and Nash released the song “Marrakesh Express.” I had no idea what “Marrakesh” meant so I went to the school library and looked it up. I was captivated to find out that Marrakesh was a city in Morocco. I saw the narrow strip of water that separated Spain from Morocco and promised myself that one day I would take a ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar. The likelihood of a poor, Indian girl ever fulfilling that dream was just that – a dream. However, dreams motivated me. Being Indigenous in Canada has never been easy. Since earliest European contact, Indigenous people have been placed in a precarious and subordinate position by foreign and (later) domestic governments. Foreign imperialist governments emphasized racial bias and differential values to rationalize their belief in European superiority over Indigenous populations (Memmi 2000). An example of racist Indian policy was documented by Canadian educator E. Brian Titley (1986), from the University of Lethbridge, in A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada. Although the Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in the Province, 1857 (also known as the Gradual Enfranchisement Act, 1857), was in place prior to Confederation, it became part of official policy in 1869 (Canada, Depart-

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ment of the Interior 1869). The intent was to eliminate Canada’s responsibilities to its first peoples by erasing them through policy and legislation. This was aggressively pursued under Scott’s tenure as head of the Department of Indian Affairs. Duncan Campbell Scott’s mission was outlined in this famous statement: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem … Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department” (Scott 1920). The restrictive and overarching policies that First Nations peoples lived under in Canadian society were burdensome. However, what was even harsher was the treatment received in day-to-day life. Racism and prejudice was a fact of life that everybody experienced and had to deal with as best they could. For example, after our stint in a residential school, my sisters and I left the North and moved with our reunited family to a small Ukrainian town east of Edmonton. We were one of two Indigenous families in a small agricultural town. Even as a child, I could determine that the relationship between the Ukrainians and the “Indians” was not great. The townspeople were not careful in how they treated us or what they said to us. Our entire family suffered from the results of “othering” that went on in this tightly knit and relatively ethnically homogenous farming community. For example, whenever we went into local stores, the sales clerks would follow us. Later, in university, I was able to link this experience to Howard Becker’s (1991) labelling theory. Individuals and groups are first viewed as deviant, and then a label is affixed to them. The stigma of their having this negative label means that they are treated as different. My family and I were stigmatized as a result of being Indigenous and were treated badly once the labels of “deviant” and “inferior” were affixed to us. My only friend was an Indian girl called Mavis. We pretty much stuck to ourselves – the interactionist approach of homophily (also referred to as “birds of a feather flock together”) describes our “forced” friendship. It emphasizes the social consequences of people classifying others as either “similar” or “different” from one another. Mavis and I were certainly seen as “different” by the Ukrainian girls in our school. Wharton (2005) states that individuals form stronger social ties with those who are similar to themselves, feeling that it is easier to communicate with them. This was definitely the case with Mavis and me. We had similar struggles in school and in the racist, ethnic community in which we were a bullied minority.

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One day when Mavis and I left school, a swarm of girls who wanted to beat us up because we were Indian soon surrounded us. Obviously, the aggressors had planned this ambush and it was not meant to be a fair fight. They told us that they meant to “beat the shit out of the Indians.” The taunting and racial slurs quickly escalated to a full brawl. I am not sure how we did it, but Mavis and I were able to fight our way out. We ran all the way to my house, and my mother was upset when we told her what had happened. Mavis and I were called down to the principal’s office the next morning. When we arrived, many of the girls who fought with us were there with their parents. These girls who conspired to “jump us” were suddenly being portrayed as the victims. The parents were irate and wanted Mavis and me to be punished. They wanted to accomplish what their daughters had failed to do – beat up the Indians. It was startling for me to see the hate in their eyes. We were just kids – twelve-year-olds. I recognize it now as racism. Unfortunately, I would see that look in the eyes of a great number of people over the years. The principal wanted to appease the parents and told me to put out my hand so I could be strapped. I refused. I told the principal that I would put my hand out after he had strapped all the girls who attacked us. Mavis and I both got suspended from school. Fortunately, the Ukrainian girls did not try to ambush us again. One of the ironies of living in that small Ukrainian town would surface years later when I was in graduate school. The professor who taught the history of Canadian education, for whom I served as a teaching assistant, was of Ukrainian descent. Professor Nick Koch lectured on the experiences of Ukrainian farmers who had come to the Prairies as part of the second wave of agricultural immigration. They suffered harsh treatment and racism at the hands of their British neighbours. I cannot understand how they could exhibit xenophobic behaviour towards us when they had suffered the same treatment only decades before. As Eastern European immigrants, Ukrainian farmers were viewed as “less than us” by the Canadian government. The government only agreed to allow them to come to Canada after they had tapped out all the prospective British farmers. They were “enemy aliens” to the Canadian government, and more than eight thousand Ukrainians Canadians were interned during the First World War (Hewitt 2007).

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STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND

As a child, I remember sitting on an Edmonton transit bus and seeing a young man get in wearing a leather University of Alberta jacket. I didn’t know what “U of A” meant. Any awareness of university was entirely out of my realm. Little did I know that in 1997 I would be the first First Nations person to complete a PhD at the University of Alberta. As a First Nations woman born in Saskatchewan, I was more likely to go to jail than to earn a university degree (Hylton 1980). After graduating with a high school diploma, I began working at a string of low-paying, low-skilled jobs: waitress, barmaid, janitor, and chambermaid. According to Statistics Canada’s (2017) data on the female First Nations workforce, these were exactly the types of jobs I was expected to get as a First Nations woman. First Nations people have had a rocky relationship with education. However, attitudes have changed over the past few decades. Indigenous people have embraced education and view it is as a way to improve their opportunities, status, and standard of living (Statistics Canada 2017). I was one of the masses of Indigenous people beating a path to post-secondary institutions. I started university as a mature student, a wife, and mother of two. My husband (also a First Nations person) was a plumber and pipefitter. Our path to college involved a series of fateful coincidences. Over coffee, Brian’s cousins mentioned that they were attending the University of Alberta. Brian was working outdoors and building a gas plant. That winter was particularly cold, with temperatures hitting minus forty degrees. He began to hate his job. As we were driving home one day he asked me what I thought about his going back to school. I told him I thought it was a great idea, but I added that I wanted to go as well. The new journey was exciting but scary. I was a high school graduate but Brian was not. He had to upgrade his high school English and we both enrolled in night school. A guidance counsellor at Grande Prairie Regional College reviewed our aptitude tests and developed a list of potential occupations for us. Brian decided right away that he wanted to be a lawyer. I was not sure what I wanted to do, so I started out in a bachelor of arts program with a psychology major and a sociology minor. We usually hear about the unfamiliarity and the uncertainty newcomers experience when moving to Canada from a foreign land. This

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is exactly how I felt as a college student. I came from a working-class background, with my father working as a truck driver and my mother working as a cook. Nobody in my family had ever gone to college. This meant that I had nobody to help me acculturate to the new landscape, explain the process, or let me know whether my experiences were out of the ordinary. My husband and I were completely on our own in a highly competitive and sometimes hostile environment. We had to learn to swim or we would sink like stones. After I left home, my parents began a highly successful and familyowned trucking company that employed all my brothers and sisters for twenty-five years. I was the only member of my family who did not have a Class 1 driver’s licence. My parents’ social class elevated and they were able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle and greater job satisfaction. However, their entrepreneurial success did little to help me cope with my lack of understanding of the post-secondary education system. My family had no idea what I did at school. They would make jokes about my being a “life-long student.” My Aunt Emma visited as I was nearing the end of my master’s degree in the sociology of education (I had been at university for seven years). She said to me, “Oh, my girl, you must be too lazy to go out to work since you have been in school for so long.” I just smiled. I had completed ten graduate courses and had just written a two-hundred-page thesis. I was also working as a teaching assistant, running a household, and taking care of two children. I could have been called a lot of things, but lazy wasn’t one of them. FINDING SOCIOLOGY

As an undergraduate student, I was open to almost any field of study. Sociology was ideal for me because its broad scope included many facets of human interaction and experience. I loved sociology right from the first moment. I had two great sociology professors at Grande Prairie Regional College – Vince Salvo and Bibi Laurie. They were so passionate about teaching and they made me love sociology as much as they did. They explained classical theory in ways that made me understand its implications for modern life – and for my life. It made sense to me and I began to feel more comfortable and confident. I began to think that I had made the wrong choice in pursuing psychology instead of sociology. I was not sure who to speak to about

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changing my major since I was not familiar with the university landscape. As a result, I took a lot of science-based psychology courses that did not apply to my sociology degree. I envied my fellow students who had university-educated parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who could help them study and write papers. As a result, I really appreciated Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) concepts of cultural capital and social capital, which helped explain my life experience. In my old world, being smart was understood as doing well in school, but my new reality was proving that that was not enough. The concept of cultural capital emphasizes the idea that social reproduction occurs within the education system. Cultural capital can be understood as institutionalized and high-status cultural signals – such as attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviours, and credentials – used for social and cultural exclusion (Lamont and Lareau 1988, 156). Parents with more educational resources have richer sources of cultural capital since it derives primarily from education and reflects middle- and upper-class values (Dureden-Comeau and McMullin 2010). My father lived through the Great Depression and had experienced harsh economic times. He thought I should be out earning money instead of “wasting” time in school. My mother was a residential school survivor who suffered the detrimental effects of that harsh educational experiment. For her, education held stark and painful memories. But she supported me throughout my educational pursuits despite her own bad experiences. Social capital refers to an individual’s real or potential social connections: networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam 2000). Knowledge of the workings of the school system and familiarity with its obscure language allows for the effective navigation of that system. I always loved research. I would begin my research papers early and get lost in the library while looking at all the publications. I was reminded of the refuge I used to find in libraries as a child. I had a prophetic conversation with John Gartrell, who taught my undergraduate research methods course, when he asked me if I was Indigenous. I said yes. He asked whether I planned to work with an Indigenous community when I completed my degree. Again, I answered yes. He advised me to become a researcher because non-Indigenous researchers were “ripping off” Indigenous communities with high-

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priced contracts and shoddy work. He said I could be a valuable asset to my community by being the best researcher I could possibly be. He encouraged me to enter graduate school. DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE – MASTER ’ S DEGREE

Although I completed an undergraduate degree in sociology, I was unfamiliar with the educational theory and practices of the Sociology of Education Master’s Program in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. I made it through as an undergraduate student, but in graduate school I felt I was there by mistake – an imposter. After I told this story to a reporter, it was published in a collection of Indigenous “role model” stories. Cora Voyageur sat tucked away in her small graduate office one afternoon at the University of Alberta in the early 1990s. The solitude was unexpectedly interrupted as the tapping of a woman’s high-heeled shoes on the unforgiving floor began to echo down the corridor. The sound grew louder as the strides became more purposeful. “I can’t really explain it but for some reason that sound inspired a deep sense of terror within me,” says Dr. Voyageur, an accomplished author, speaker, and associate professor of sociology at the University of Calgary. “All I could think was, oh no, they’re coming to kick me out. I had what I called the Imposter Syndrome. I worried that somebody was going to find out that I was dumb and say, hey you don’t belong here.” (Syncrude 2008) I was fortunate to meet a person who would be influential in my continued studies. Ann Marie Decore was a professor in the educational foundations department at the University of Alberta. She offered me part-time work as a research assistant and was very supportive of me throughout my master’s degree. In fact, she recommended me to the Department of Sociology when it was looking for additional PhD students. The important thing about Dr Decore was that she believed in me. That went a long way in helping me to believe in myself. Another person who was very good to me during my time at the University of Alberta was anthropology professor Carl Urion. Carl was Métis and he understood the post-secondary system like nobody

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I had ever met before. I finally had an Indigenous role model who was generous with his time and his knowledge. Carl answered the most menial questions I had with patience and understanding. He helped me develop my thoughts and understand theoretical concepts that explained social phenomena. He was a mentor to two generations of Indigenous students at the University of Alberta. In fact, I do not believe I would have completed my PhD program without his encouragement. He and his family embraced me and supported me through some difficult and painful experiences at the U of A. He aided me in filing a human rights charge against a professor who commented that I was “reasonably well-adjusted for an Indian” while I was making a class presentation. That experience was so humiliating that it almost caused me to quit the PhD program. My master’s supervisor, however, did not have much faith in me. She worked with a number of Indigenous women whom she assisted. However, she did not see me as someone with much potential. It was hard for me to watch her be so nurturing, understanding, and supportive of other Indigenous women when she seemed to have so little time for me. When you are on the outside of a cohort of female Indigenous graduate students you are really on the outside. As an Indigenous person in a post-secondary institution, I was frequently reminded that I occupied a low rank on Canada’s socioeconomic ladder. Over the years, being an Indigenous person in a position of authority has been a challenge. Some believe that I do not deserve to be where I am and think they need to “knock me down a few pegs.” For example, I taught a seminar for an introductory educational foundations course as part of a TA cohort. I was viewed as the “weak link” of a group of seven teaching assistants. After a mid-term exam, all the teaching assistants (TAs) were summoned by the only male student in our cohort. I thought it was odd that the only man in the group was elevated to the role of supervisor (either by his own initiative or by our professor) over his six female colleagues. This is where I saw the “glass ceiling” and “male privilege” play out in the academy first-hand – phenomena whereby males are seen to move easily into positions of power vis-à-vis females, even though they are no better, smarter, competent, or qualified (Sandberg 2013). It seems that an undergraduate student had complained that a TA had given students extra time to complete the mid-term exam. This accusation implied that others were unfairly disadvantaged. The

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female TAs were told that their grades would be reviewed to determine whether they were in line with those in the other sections. The male TA’s logic was that if a particular group’s grades were higher than the others, then this proved dishonesty and the student’s allegations were true. I did not give this allegation another thought because I knew it was not true of either me or my students. I was dumbfounded when I was summoned to the TA’s office and told that I was the guilty party. He called me a liar and a cheat and said I was going to be sanctioned. I was outraged that some anonymous student could malign me and that my hard work, honour, and integrity would be questioned by my peer. It did not occur to the male TA that I was a good teacher or that I had prepared my students well for the exam. What an affront to me and my dedicated students. They did not have to cheat to get good grades. I believe the anonymous student who complained saw me as an easy target for accusations and that my colleague was happy to go along with the ruse to exert his little bit of power. I would go on to experience numerous instances of racism and sexism from both students and colleagues throughout my career. As a master’s student, I grew tired of the pathology-based academic literature and the deficit-based focus of academics’ studies of the Indigenous community. I wanted to write a paper about Indigenous health and well-being. A report had just been released by Statistics Canada that talked about Indigenous people and their subjective well-being. It reported that the vast majority of Indigenous people said they were happy or relatively happy with their lives. If this were true, why did so much academic literature speak about the sorry state of affairs in the Indigenous community? I conducted a Socio-file search for Indigenous peoples and subjective well-being. This yielded six academic articles on the topic. I got approximately ten thousand hits when I changed the keywords to “Indigenous peoples” and “social problems.” Again, this speaks about the lens through which the Indigenous community is viewed by many social scientists. Outsiders interpret life in the Indigenous community – and their interpretations are not always accurate or based on good research. Later in my academic career I would come across other research methodologies, such as appreciative inquiry and participatory action research, that would serve as the basis for my academic work (Voyageur 2010, 2014; Voyageur and Beavon 2005, 2011; Voyageur and Calliou 2001).

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A REASONABLY WELL- ADJUSTED INDIAN – PHD STUDIES

I was uncertain about whether to further my education after my master’s degree. I had asked my master’s supervisor to write a letter of support for me when I applied to enter the doctoral program in the Faculty of Education. It never arrived. I entered the sociology PhD program at the University of Alberta in an irregular manner. I was working as a summer student for the Indian Management Assistance Program, where university students were paired with Indigenous organizations, agencies, or First Nations to complete research projects or to help build capacity through knowledge transfer. I worked for this program for five summers when I was a graduate student and gained great experience and was able to apply my knowledge of important issues. I worked two summers with a political organization called the Indian Association of Alberta. It was here that I first encountered the work of the sociologist Menno Boldt, who was from the University of Lethbridge. Boldt’s (1993) book, Surviving as Indians: The Challenge of Self-Government, examines the role of social action in revitalizing Indigenous culture and regaining economic, social, and political power in Canadian society while surviving culturally as Indigenous people. Boldt’s book reinforced the agency and political activism I had witnessed in the Indigenous community, while the academic literature spoke only of social problems. During my PhD program, I was fortunate to work eventually with U of A sociologist Graham Lowe, who was a well-respected member of the Department of Sociology. Our department required students to choose two areas of specialization. I chose sociology of work, with an emphasis on Indigenous employment and criminology, and a specialization in Indigenous justice systems. My dissertation (Voyageur 1997) explores Canada’s Employment Equity Act. Indigenous people were one of the four designated groups under the aegis of the Employment Equity Act, along with visible minorities, women, and disabled individuals. My dissertation has three parts: (1) how reports changed over time from the inception of the Employment Equity Act in 1986 until 1995; (2) a four-way case study analysis of companies/organizations that had employment equity or employment equity-like policies; and (3) an examination of the work-life experiences of forty Indigenous employ-

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ees in these companies. Graham Lowe was influential in opening up a completely new area of study for me. He and his collaborator, Harvey Krahn, specialized in the sociology of work. Under Lowe’s guidance, I was able to implement some of the measures used to determine a particular group’s workplace involvement. Examples of this include how the job fits into the workplace hierarchy and the wages, autonomy, and authority given to the employee (Krahn et al. 2014). My research showed that Indigenous people have been active in the wage economy for a very long time. However, little had been written on the topic within my own discipline and I had to look to other disciplines for information. Historian Arthur Ray (1974) documented the central role played by Indigenous peoples as trappers and traders in the fur trade since the mid-1700s. From the beginning, they played an enormous role in European explorations and in the fur trade. Geographer Frank Tough (1992) found that, in the post-treaty period in northern Manitoba, many Indigenous people voluntarily left the fur trade to pursue wage labour in lumbering and fishing. They geared their diversified economy to seasonal changes. Economist Peter Douglas Elias (1990) found that Indigenous peoples’ participation in the wage labour market occurred as early as the mid-nineteenth century. He further noted that wage labour was only one component of a complex regional economy: others included market and domestic production. Rolf Knight’s (1996) study, Indians at Work, indicates that Indigenous peoples in British Columbia, and elsewhere in Canada, have a long history as both wage workers and independent producers who quickly adjusted to the industrial world. Knight argues that the farming, trapping, and other methods of independent production undertaken by Indigenous peoples have been an integral part of the Canadian capitalist economy. These social scientists from the mid1970s onward documented Indigenous people as active agents who responded and adapted to an ever-changing social and economic landscape. This perspective greatly influenced the direction of my academic work. I found many misconceptions and a tremendous amount of racism against Indigenous people while interviewing representatives for the case studies. I was told by managers that Indigenous people were “generally” not good employees. There was a prevailing idea that Indigenous people lacked merit and were unreliable workers. These managers spoke in generalities and were unable to give specifics when I pressed them and asked for examples.

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However, the Indigenous participants who worked in these organizations had a very different perspective. They were qualified both in terms of educational credentials and workplace experience. They gave examples of their credentials being challenged. For example, one participant said that she was asked by a co-worker, “Do you have a ‘real degree?’” Many experienced both overt and covert discrimination and racism in the workplace. Many of their co-workers had discriminatory opinions despite never having interacted with Indigenous people. The Indigenous employees commented about having to do a lot of “myth busting” relating to the negative stereotypes held by other employees. More than half of the Indigenous participants were underemployed in view of their workplace experience and educational credentials. Most were unhappy employees and felt that they were working in a hostile environment. Over the years, I have presented Indigenous employment data at conferences, and I always have Indigenous audience members tell me their work experiences are similar to my findings. It appears that acceptance of Indigenous people in the workplace is slow and that racism is still a concern. As a graduate student, I was contracted by the Department of Indian Affairs to create an environmental scan to provide information for the Aboriginal Head Start initiative for Alberta. I was proud to say that, as a result of my research, the province was awarded nineteen Aboriginal Headstart sites. These programs are still running today. I would love to see where the first and second cohorts are now. I was also on the steering committee that created the programs and (later) on the advisory committee. This is one of the most significant contributions I have made to the Indigenous community. I am currently completing a follow-up environmental scan, literature review, and community engagement report to assist with the distribution of federal funds to Indigenous early learning sites in Alberta. F INALLY , A PAYING JOB !

After I completed my PhD, I was not sure whether I wanted to go into an academic position. I worked as a sessional instructor at the University of Alberta for one year for a fraction of what I was paid as a research assistant. I also started a lucrative research and consulting company. As a First Nations researcher, I was highly sought after and busy with a variety of governmental, academic, agency, and Indigenous clients.

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I recognize that I am in a privileged position as a First Nations person with an earned doctorate. I have been highly sought after by many post-secondary institutions. I was also contacted by a number of universities, which were looking for Indigenous scholars to help them fulfill their responsibilities to the Employment Equity Act. As large organizations with more than one hundred employees and that conduct more than $200,000 in business through research grants with the federal government, universities have to work towards making their workforce mirror the local demographic. At the time of my doctoral research, universities had to ensure that 3 per cent of the workforce was Indigenous since Indigenous people constituted approximately 3 per cent of the population. U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A LG A RY

I was contacted by a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary and encouraged to apply for a tenuretrack position. I was very uncertain about the University of Calgary for a couple of reasons. First, the cost of living in the city of Calgary was very high. Second, I was ideologically opposed to the scholarship of the “Calgary School.” This was a group of right-wing academics and political ideologues who have written some unflattering (and, in my opinion, inaccurate) works about Indigenous peoples. In the forefront was Tom Flanagan, an American-born political scientist whose ideology and publications attacked Aboriginal and treaty rights. As First Nations people we know that we have been on this land long before European settlers. In his book First Nations? Second Thoughts Flanagan (2000) refers to us as merely the “first immigrants to Canada.” Almost all Indigenous people who are aware of his work consider his beliefs to be repugnant. He advocates the dismantling of the collective rights of Indian reserves in favour of “fee simple” ownership. He believes that assimilation into Canadian society could be the most efficient and expedient way for the government to deal with Indigenous peoples. The conservative reputation of the University of Calgary and the anti-Indigenous ideologies of the Calgary School made me feel like I would be walking into a hostile workplace. I was the only Indigenous tenure-track professor when I started my position at the University of Calgary in 1998. This meant that I was the only Indigenous person with a permanent teaching position.

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There were two established Caucasian men who had specialized in Indigenous issues in my department. There was a tremendous amount of social distance between us based on age, gender, rank, and ethnic background. I co-authored an article with one of them, but the other did not have much to do with me. I liken academic life to being a small business owner in a strip mall. We are geographically close but we are all running our own little business. Our colleagues are friendly enough, but in the end we are all competing for scarce resources: research grants, graduate students, positions on high-status committees, and favoured courses. The academic Holy Trinity of research, teaching, and community service keeps us hopping. Being a female in the academy also has its challenges. As female professors, we find ourselves doing a tremendous amount of committee work and being assigned to labour-intensive tasks, which are not valued enough to justify large merit increments. Teaching, publishing, and service are not equally weighted in the academy. Generally, publications trump both teaching and service. There are so few Indigenous scholars in the academy that we are called upon to sit on numerous committees to ensure representative diversity. It seems important that administration prove that it consulted various constituencies within the system. Serving on so many committees is burdensome because it eats up valuable time when we must research and publish to further our academic career. Very early on, as Indigenous scholars, we must determine which of two routes we will take: administration or research. Many times, in the university system newly minted Indigenous scholars are shuffled into administrative roles for which they are ill-prepared. Many are placed in positions in which they have little or no experience and feel overwhelmed. They feel they are unable to say “no.” Within two weeks of arriving at the University of Calgary, I was on a committee to start a new Indigenous studies program. It is not unusual for an Indigenous scholar to find her- or himself to be the only Indigenous person in the room. Many are placed in the position of “speaking for all Indigenous peoples.” This is an uncomfortable position and is similar to a woman on a committee being expected to speak for all women on any given issue. Because of the geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the First Nations in Canada, one person cannot speak for all Indigenous peoples (Voyageur and Calliou 2001).

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As an Indigenous scholar you must decide whether you are going to speak against a particular matter or remain silent simply to “get along.” Those who speak out or who question things are labelled “troublemakers” and “difficult to work with.” First the label is affixed and then the treatment of the person alters to be in line with the label. Being a “troublemaker” means that you are no longer invited to meetings where decisions are made, invited to sit on examining committees, to join research teams, to co-author articles, or to be “one of the gang.” You find yourself working in isolation. There is a price to pay for speaking out, and you can be very lonely as a result. Monture, speaking of her experience as an Indigenous scholar, writes: The difficulty, lacking a mentor in the university, has been an experience of race/culture and gender. In general, I experienced the university as a “chilly” place. The lack of a guide to lend assistance in clearing the maze of unnecessary obstacles is just one of the processes by which women and racialized persons are, at worst, covertly excluded from the ranks, or more often merely managed within those ranks (that is, being tokenized). (Monture 2009, 81) Times are changing. We are getting to a point where there is a critical mass of Indigenous scholars in several post-secondary institutions. This means that there is another lens through which to view the Indigenous community. It is not easy because many non-Indigenous people are still viewed as experts on Indigenous issues. I’m a residential school survivor and I was struck by the fact that, at the time of the June 2008 “residential school apology,” CBC had a non-Indigenous man speaking on what residential schools meant in Canada. I asked myself how long it would take for the news media and other institutions in mainstream society to realize that there are Indigenous experts in this country who are well-qualified, willing, and able to speak on Indigenous issues. Others have been speaking for us for centuries: it is time for us to speak for ourselves. THE WINDS OF CHANGE : RESEARCH PRACTICES

There is still a tremendous amount of applied research that needs to be conducted within Indigenous communities. At one time, university researchers could simply come into an Indigenous community,

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gather their data, and never be seen again. Now, the original intent of the gathered data must remain within the initial research project unless permission is given by an Indigenous community to reuse that data. University researchers must now have free, prior, and informed consent from an Indigenous community before conducting research. Further, more university researchers must develop projects with an Indigenous community and not simply on an Indigenous community. Indigenous communities have been transformed from mere research subjects into research partners. Research ethics have changed over the years as well. In 2008, the Tri-Council Granting Agencies (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) developed guidelines for academic research in Indigenous communities. The OCAP principles (Community Ownership, Control, Access and Possession of its own data) are now widely expected to be followed when research is conducted in Indigenous communities. I was influenced as a researcher by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who is dean of the School of Maori and Pacific Development at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. She developed a model for non-Indigenous scholars who conduct research with Indigenous people. Her book, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, was revolutionary. She articulates the exploitative relationship inherent in the Western, knowledge-based paradigm of research encounters and knowledge transfers from Indigenous communities to academic researchers. Her book addresses the unequal power relations between Indigenous people and academic researchers. According to Smith (1999, 20), “decolonization” is concerned with having “a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values that inform research practice.” I found that, when I conduct research in Indigenous communities, I must strictly adhere to the following tenets: building relationships, earning trust, and showing respect. Indigenous perspectives, such as those pertaining to traditional knowledge, are now being published. I have conducted a tremendous amount of research in Indigenous communities. I am very proud to say that I have never taken a nickel from any of them as research funding covered my expenses. In fact, in most cases I brought money, jobs, knowledge transfer, and expertise to

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the community. I am very proud of this contribution. Almost all of the research that I’ve done has been applied and community-based (see, e.g., Voyageur and Calliou 2007; Voyageur et al. 2014). I have worked with Indigenous communities as partners in the research process, as is the custom in participatory action research. I conducted the first academic study of female First Nations Indian Act chiefs (Voyageur 2008; see also Voyageur 1996). I was influenced by Gayatri Spivak and her concept of the subaltern (those individuals who are marginalized and controlled by the colonizers). She states that women suffer the long-term social, political, economic, and cultural effects of colonization more than men (Spivak 1987). In other words, colonized women face twice the discrimination of colonized men. My research on women chiefs offers a glimpse into the First Nations political world. Approximately three-quarters of the female chiefs I interviewed came from what I called politically involved families – that is, they had family members (father, grandfather, brothers, uncles, and a smattering of female relatives) who had been involved in community politics. As members of a political family they would have name recognition, community status, and perhaps a certain amount of respect. They consistently highlighted gender when talking about their experiences as female chiefs. They felt they brought more to the job in terms of educational attainment and workplace experience than did men. Furthermore, they felt they were better able to be charismatic leaders than were male chiefs. I found that female First Nations chiefs felt that they were expected to do different work than their male counterparts – to deal with “soft” issues in the community, such as childcare, eldercare, social services, and health. Male chiefs, on the other hand, were thought to be responsible for economic development, job creation, and community infrastructure projects. Most recently I have been involved in health research in Indigenous communities. Here I was influenced by the work of Indigenous health scholars Charlotte Loppie, Rod McCormack, and Malcolm King. I have served on research teams that have won multi-year research envelopes, which have helped support students to complete graduate degrees and to establish research agendas. I am proud to have supported a number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous graduate students with my research grants. Many of these students (Angeline Letendre, Lois Edge, Josie Auger, and Amy Christiansen) received a PhD with financial support and mentorship from me and my colleagues.

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Tremendous strides have been made in Indigenous health research in the past decade. This is due to the persistence of Indigenous researchers in demanding more funding to conduct badly needed research. I participated in a multi-year study that explored the prevalence of cancer in First Nations communities in Alberta. The research findings showed a disconnect between traditional Indigenous beliefs about wellness and mainstream Western medicine. Also, we found that First Nations people in Alberta were more likely to have their disease diagnosed at later stages, thus leading to higher levels of morbidity. We also found a breakdown between service delivery in urban and rural facilities. People were released into locations that lacked trained personnel to treat their disease. For another health project I collaborated with the large Cree community of Maskwacis, Alberta, over a three-year preliminary research project exploring women’s experience of menopause. It led to the formation of the Sohki Teyhew (Strong Heart) Group, which included elders, community members, health services leaders, and researchers. The initial goal was to increase menopause awareness in the community, utilizing a community-based participatory research approach. The goals of the group have expanded to include other mature women’s health and wellness issues – issues that were considered taboo in the community but that significantly affected these women’s quality of life. We work with community women to identify wellness issues and to develop activities and implementation strategies that they believe are suitable. The work and outcomes will be culturally based and will result in sustainable strategies to improve the wellness of mature women and their families in this community and beyond. I am a true believer in education as a means of social mobility and of increasing one’s life choices. I am living a life that I did not know existed when I was a child. I love my job. I have an opportunity to help my community through research and policy development. I also have an opportunity to inform students of the history and contemporary condition of First Nations communities. I can tell them that there is hope for the future. I take pride in having the confidence of my community members and having them trust that I will provide them, and others, with accurate and honest reporting. I bring a new and valuable perspective to the academy. Throughout my academic career I have made a priority of maintaining my connection to my Indigenous community. I continue to participate in cultural and spiritual activities on a regular basis. In

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fact, I would not be able to do my work in the academy without the council, support, and spiritual practices of the elders that I have consulted over the years. Elders support me in my work and advise me on the difficult situations that I encounter. Education is a means of successfully integrating rather than assimilating into mainstream society. I know many well-educated and highly successful Indigenous people who are deeply rooted in their cultural and spiritual traditions. It is possible to walk in two worlds – we are living proof. REFERENCES Becker, Howard S. 1991. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Simon and Schuster. Boldt, Menno. 1993. Surviving as Indians: The Challenge of Self-Government. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for Sociology of Education, 241–58. New York: Greenwood. Canada. Department of the Interior. 1869. “An Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians, the Better Management of Indian Affairs and to Extend the Provisions of the Act 31st Victoria Chapter 42.” In Statutes of Canada, 6. Ottawa: Queen’s Press. Comeau, Tammy Duerden, and Julie McMullin. 2010. “CAGE(s) and Education.” In Understanding Social Inequality, 2nd ed., ed. Julie McMullin, 209–50. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Daniel, Richard. 1999. “The Spirit and Terms of Treaty 8.” In The Spirit of Alberta Indian Treaties, 3rd ed., ed. Richard Price, 47–100. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Elias, Peter Douglas. 1990. “Wage Labour, Aboriginal Relations, and the Cree of the Churchill River Basin, Saskatchewan.” Native Studies Review 6 (2): 43–64. Flanagan, Tom. 2000. First Nations, Second Thoughts. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books. – 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Graham, Elizabeth. 1997. The Mush Hole: Life in Two Indian Residential Schools. Waterloo, ON: Heffle. Hewitt, Steve. 2007. “Policing the Promised Land: The RCMP and Negative Nation-Building in Alberta and Saskatchewan in the Interwar Period.” In

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The Prairie West as Promised Land, ed. R. Douglas Francis and Chris Kitzan, 318–20. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Hylton, John H. 1980. “Public Attitudes towards Crime and Police in a Prairie City.” Canadian Police College Journal 4 (4): 243–76. Knight, Rolf. 1996. Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Indian Labour in British Columbia, 1858–1930. Vancouver: New Star Books. Krahn, Harvey, Karen Hughes, and Graham S. Lowe. 2014. Work, Industry, and Canadian Society. Toronto: Nelson. Lamont, Michelle, and Annette Lareau. 1988. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries in the Making of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mair, Charles. 2009. Through the Mackenzie Basin: An Account of the Signing of Treaty 8 and the Scrip Commission, 1899. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Memmi, Albert. 2000. Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Milloy, John G.S. 1999. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Montoure, Patricia. 2009. “‘Doing Academia Differently’: Confronting ‘Whiteness’ in the University.” In Racism in the Canadian University: Demanding Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equity, ed. Frances Henry and Carol Tator, 76–105. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oberle, Frank. 1986. Treaty Eight Renovation: Discussion Paper. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs. Pare, L. 2004. List of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chiefs. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs. Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ray, Arthur J. 1974. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson’s Bay, 1600–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sandberg, Sheryl. 2013. Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Scott, Duncan Campbell. 1920. Library and Archives Canada, RG 10, vol. 6810, file 470-2-3, vol. 7, 55 (L-3) and 63 (N-3). Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Spivak, Gayatri, 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen. Statistics Canada. 2017. “Aboriginal People and the Labour Market.” The

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Daily. 16 March. Cat. No. 11-001-1. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/dailyquotidien/170316/dq170316d-eng.htm. Syncrude Canada. 2008. Inspiring People: 2008 Aboriginal Review. Calgary: Blanchette Press. Titley, E. Brian. 1986. A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Tough, Frank. 1992. “Regional Analysis of Indian Aggregate Income, Northern Manitoba: 1896–1935.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 12 (1): 95–146. Voyageur, Cora J. 1996. “Contemporary First Nations Women Issues.” In Visions of the Heart: Contemporary Issues, ed. David A. Long and Olive Dickason, 93–115. Toronto: Oxford University Press. – 1997. “Employment Equity and Aboriginal People in Canada.” PhD diss., University of Alberta. – 2008. Firekeepers of the Twenty-First Century: First Nations Women Chiefs. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2010. My Heroes Have Always Been Indian: A Century of Great Indigenous Albertans. Calgary: Detselig. – 2014. “The Eagle Has Landed: Optimism among Canada’s First Nations Community.” In Aboriginal Populations: Social Demographic, and Epidemiological Perspectives, ed. Frank Trovato and Anatole Romaniuk, 325–49. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Voyageur, Cora J., and Dan Beavon, eds. 2005 and 2011. Hidden in Plain Sight: Contributions of Aboriginal Peoples to Canadian Identity and Culture, vols. 1 and 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Voyageur, Cora, Laura Brearly, and Brian Calliou, eds. 2014. Restorying Indigenous Leadership: Wise Practices in Community Development, 2nd ed. Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press. Voyageur, Cora J., and Brian Calliou, eds. 2001. “Various Shades of Red: Diversity in Canada’s Aboriginal Community.” London Journal of Canadian Studies 16: 103–118. – 2007. “Aboriginal Economic Development and the Struggle for Self-Government.” In Power and Resistance: Critical Thinking about Canadian Social Issues, 4th ed., ed. Wayne Antony, Jessica Antony, and Leslie Samuelson, 135–60. Halifax: Fernwood. Wharton, Amy S. 2005. The Sociology of Gender: An Introduction to Theory and Research. London: Blackwell.

16 “I Know You Are, But What Am I?”: Race, Nation, and the Everyday Sarita Srivastava

“I know you are, but what am I?” This nonsensical chant worked when we had to tune out schoolyard taunts like “crybaby” or “dummy.” But it made little sense to respond with “I know you are, but what am I?” when the taunt was “Paki” or “burnt toast.” The other schoolyard rejoinder that was common in my childhood, “I’m rubber and you’re glue, it bounces off me and sticks to you,” doesn’t work either – instead, a stunned sensation of wanting to disappear or pretend it hadn’t happened was my only response.1 Perhaps it was the impotence of those schoolyard tools that led me to seek analytical and political tools that offer a more nuanced understanding of everyday racial politics and a more realistic strategy for challenging them. It is this more nuanced understanding of the cultural politics of race, anti-racism, and diversity that I seek in my intellectual work – nuance that a blunt instrument like “I know you are, but what am I?” avoids or that a sophisticated tool like documenting overt racial discrimination leaves out. When I became an activist and an academic, I saw that my childhood desire to imagine away racist taunts coincided with “colourblindness,” the popular notion that if we pretend not to see skin colour, we also absent racism. The desire to pretend that we are a “post-racial” society has made it difficult to speak about everyday practices of race. While Canada’s multiculturalism celebrates ethnic diversity, it has been less likely to acknowledge historical and structural racism and colonialism. Not surprisingly then, efforts to address diversity and racism in institutions and organizations have often fal-

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tered or been mired in emotional and personal conflict. As an activist and a researcher, I have seen debates about race end in an emotional stalemate of hurt, confused, and angry feelings rather than in organizational change. In the 1990s, many of these battles tore apart community and women’s organizations and became front-page headlines. Organizations were accused of racism and lack of diversity; hurt feelings, resistance, arguments, and resignations followed. And it has not become any easier to bridge conflict over race. Racial tensions within organizational and corporate environments not only continue to flare but also continue to turn to the standard responses – diversity policies and diversity workshops. The “raw dialogue” over race within the Women’s March to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump made front-page headlines and echoed precisely that of the 1990s (Stockman 2017). My academic work examines not only these ongoing tensions in organizations but also my own activist history. I explore how and why conversations go awry when we begin to talk about “diversity” and racism, and examine the practices, psychic investments, and histories of our efforts to challenge racism. As I wrote in “‘You’re Calling Me a Racist?,’” whether we are debating police violence or promoting diversity, all conversations about race have become overlaid with emotional attachments to innocence (Srivastava 2005). Instead of focusing on how to change institutional practices so that they are more equitable, we become mired in misdirected anxieties about who is and who is not racist. In my research, I analyze these deeply emotional responses (Srivastava 2006) – the tears and anger that often sidetrack discussions of race – and show that they are often rooted in our desire to be seen as moral, progressive, and innocent. Indeed, in many alternative organizations, the disclosure of personal feelings and experiences is framed as desirable, principled, and important for reform – I refer to this as the “let’s talk” approach to discussion. The prevalence of the “let’s talk” therapeutic approach encourages and even demands the disclosure of certain kinds of feelings about racism. The result is often space that is conflictual, volatile, risky for the people sharing feelings, and unlikely to produce concrete shifts towards diversity or anti-racism. My personal and family history of racism, colonialism, and activism have been an ongoing backdrop to this research on race and social movements, helping to explain the turning points, inspirations, and silences in my academic and activist journey.

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DISCOVERING INDIA WITHOUT COLUMBUS :

1492–1992

I was born on “Columbus Day” in the US. This accident of birth meant that I was attentive at a very young age to certain everyday practices of colonialism and discourses of discovery. One school day, after we had placed our hands on our hearts and pledged allegiance to the flag, my kindergarten teacher wrote “October 12th” in large letters on the blackboard; her broad smile and manner conveyed that something exciting and special was happening today. Yes, my five-year-old self thought, how exciting that it’s my birthday – but no, she explained that on 12 October Columbus had “discovered America.” He was looking for India, mind you, which is why there are two kinds of Indians. Did she look at me when she said that? Her excitement about this day confused me, just as the pledge of allegiance to the flag made me nervous – would I remember which was my right hand, where my heart was? But it was a disciplining of heart and mind I did not forget – for many years it was the memory of that daily pledge of allegiance to the United States that helped me recall where my heart was located, a tight and insidious collation of nationalism, heart, mind, and body. The pernicious rhyme she taught us that day also never left me: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue …” On 12 October 1992, I marched with thousands of others to mark five hundred years of resistance to colonialism – and to oppose the Quincentennial Jubilee celebrations of Columbus happening all over the United States (Hoxie 1992). That year, still a young activist in Toronto, I published my first journal article, “Discovering India without Columbus” (Srivastava 1992), as an alternative to those history lessons I had learned in school. Based on interviews with my grandmother, Shanti Gupta, about her work in the 1930s fighting for India’s independence, the article explores not only the story of her anti-colonial activism but also how her story countered my own feelings of not belonging in activism. At the time, I was working for Greenpeace as a campaigner, organizing direct actions, speaking at rallies, talking to the media, and creating educational and campaign material. People were often surprised to learn I was an activist or that I worked for an environmental organization; one activist told me I was the only other non-white environmentalist he had ever heard of. These responses only heightened my feeling of being an outsider in the activist world.

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And then I realized that my grandmother Shanti’s activism was similar to my own. Going door to door to educate people, picketing, leafleting, and attending meetings and rallies, my grandmother worked to promote the campaign of non-violent non-cooperation with the British as well as boycotts of British textiles. She also told me about women’s marches brutally broken up by the police and about how, because of her strong voice, she was asked to take the podium when police tried to break up a rally: I was suddenly scared, and said, “Sister, what can I do?” but my leader said, “Just come here.” I don’t know how it occurred to me, but I got on that podium and I said, “Listen, no one is moving, and these lathis [batons] cannot harm us.” And the police weren’t able to do much. And they couldn’t arrest me either. (Srivastava 1992, 25, my translation) My interviews with my grandmother not only further inspired my activism but also helped me to feel that my activism was inevitable rather than aberrant. Moreover, I realized that there were perhaps some political parallels: like my grandmother, I too was fighting racism within a British colony. At the time I wrote the article, I had been working on anti-racist change within Greenpeace, writing an anti-racist policy, organizing an equity workshop, and starting an antiracist committee. Reflecting on my family history produced a striking revelation: activism, academic pursuit, writing, anti-racism, anticolonialism, and transnationality have been threads that not only run through my own life but also precede me. My maternal grandfather, Ram Gupta, was a newspaper editor, also active in the struggle before and after independence. My paternal grandfather grew up in a rural village in India with no school; he went to great lengths to gain an education, leaving home at a very young age, working as a tutor to earn law school fees, and walking the many kilometres from the train station to return home every weekend. My father, Muni Srivastava, born in the same village as his father, also went far from home to pursue his studies, travelling from India to Stanford University, where he completed his PhD, and going on to a prolific academic career (M. Srivastava 2002, 2007).

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CROSSROADS AND DETOURS

In looking at someone’s early work, we can often see the kernels of ideas, which become more complex in their later contributions. Though I had not yet begun my PhD in sociology, this first publication about my grandmother’s activism did reflect my ongoing and passionate interest in activism, in the relations of power inside social movements, and in representations of racial identity and racial knowledge. On the other hand, that is probably an overly tidy story of my origins as a sociologist. I would like my own graduate students to hear that a neat and linear journey is not the only way to academic success. In the end, it was my circuitous academic path that allowed me to explore creative juxtapositions of theory, experience, and disciplines. I failed my first test in university. It was in organic chemistry. I can still remember standing in the halls of the chemistry building at the University of Toronto, scanning the taped-up computer printouts for my student number and then staring in shock at my grade. The impersonal ugliness of the corridors loomed large that day, and the university did not feel like a place that welcomed me (sometimes it still doesn’t). I can only imagine how disappointed my parents must have been in me, their eldest child, as I stumbled through that year with mediocre grades. Respecting one’s elders, speaking out against injustice, and knowing how to make perfect basmati rice without a measuring cup – these are all considered important attributes in my family, but little is held in such high regard as academic success. It was an inauspicious and unlikely beginning to a career as a professor. Or one might instead observe that it was precisely this failed beginning in science that led me to environmental activism and to sociology. While it took me several more years to realize that science was not my calling, it was Biology 101 that led me to environmental studies, which in turn led me to environmental activism and then to the study of social movements. My early graduate research in toxicology with Dr Peter Wells at the University of Toronto brought some of these interests together. We showed that even low-level mercury pollution is significant because it interacts with drugs to magnify birth defects (Srivastava and Wells 1992), research that is sadly still relevant: a recent study shows that 90 per cent of people in Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemoong First Nations continue to suffer the effects of mercury dumped in the river by a paper mill decades ago (Takaoka et al. 2014;

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Leslie 2016). My journey from lab research to sociology required me, however, to first become a traveller and an activist. RACE AND THE EVERYDAY

In 1986, while still a science student, I backpacked around India for four months and had a chance encounter that continues to shape my intellectual life. There was little way of connecting to people back home or getting current travel information, so the camaraderie among fellow travellers was a central part of the travelling experience. But as much fun as it was to meet travellers from all over North America and Europe, and to discuss with them the perils of Himalayan bus rides, I began to observe that they often did not look at me when they spoke. I was almost always the only person of colour among the backpackers, and they directed most of their conversation to my white travelling companion. After awhile I asked: “Did you notice that the travellers we meet don’t really look at me, and don’t talk directly to me? They only look at you.” He had not noticed. “I think,” I continued, “it’s because I look Indian – and they ignore all the other Indians.” He dismissed it, perhaps couldn’t believe it was true. Then one day at the Ecological Centre café in Leh, a town high in the Himalayan Mountains, we met a fellow Canadian backpacker. Ashok was from Calgary, an undergraduate student and one-time journalist whose family had also emigrated from India. Sitting at an outdoor table surrounded by the desert-like mountainscape, eating food made by solar power, I leaned in towards Ashok and timidly asked, “Do you ever notice that … well … other travellers don’t look at us?” To my surprise, Ashok answered definitively in a quiet, kind voice, “Of course.” It was an affirmation equally stunning and calming. In recounting this conversation it’s hard not to say: “Aha! This is the moment that produced me as a scholar of race.” For not only did I later become an academic whose work focuses on race and cultural studies, so, too, did Ashok. We are now both scholars for whom questions of race, transnationality, indigeneity, colonialism, diaspora, and history are key. Last year, thirty years after we first met, Ashok Mathur invited me to be a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan, where he was head of the creative studies department. Our serendipitous meeting in India was a kind of beginning for my future work on the everyday cultural practices of race and identity among well-meaning people.

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Still, once again this sort of seamless story leaves out the more aimless parts of the journey. What actually happened: I dropped out of my graduate program in pharmacology at the University of Toronto school, ill suited as I was to doing lab research with animals, and spent the rest of the year as a temporary secretary in countless industrial parks and corporate towers across Toronto. I learned a great deal about workplace relationships and the conditions of secretarial labour, and I began to think about how hierarchy can accommodate camaraderie and mutual support as easily as it can condescension and disrespect. Many years later, it was Australian sociologist Rosemary Pringle’s (1989) brilliant study of gender and work, Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work, that inspired me to think creatively about power relations within organizations and movements – as an activist, I saw how camaraderie and friendships were also integral to the relations of power within social movement organizations. GREENPEACE

I realized that science was not the place for me to pursue my interest in environmental issues; instead, I began a master’s in environmental studies at York University. It was this turning point that brought me to social and political theory. The Master in Environmental Studies (MES) Program at York was a quirky interdisciplinary program born of the 1970s that embraced inquiry-based learning and a broad definition of “environment.” Here, I felt I had finally come home. I avidly studied theory – feminism, politics, deep ecology, critical pedagogy; started a community radio program (The O-Zone); made video documentaries; went to Sweden and the Northwest Territories to research popular education and community organizing; and taught community courses in environmental issues. I discovered a supportive community of students and professors. I don’t think there has been another time in my life when I felt so capable of changing the world. The environmental movement had an enormous revival in the 1990s, so after graduate school I was able to get one of those rare gigs – a paid job as an activist. A hole in the ozone layer had recently been discovered, and I became a national campaigner and spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada, organizing direct action and education campaigns aimed at getting Dupont to stop its production of ozonedestroying CFCs (Anon. 2010).

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One might say that Greenpeace made me a sociologist of social movements and race. There is much about my experience at Greenpeace that I value to this day. To be involved in direct action, lobbying, media relations, and speaking to cameras and crowds was a powerful experience; I also made life-long friends and allies. However, I also saw how the familial relationships within social movements could prop up inequities of gender and race. I learned several things from my experience as an environmental activist that shaped my own research on social movements. While I admired the tactics of direct action and “bearing witness” (Wapner 2014) that Greenpeace undertook, which required feats such as climbing smokestacks or confronting trains or large ships, I saw that it had also traditionally favoured a certain kind of activist and a certain kind of masculinity – an approach we teasingly referred to as “boys in boats” (Ratner and Carroll 1991, 1). When I tried to work on social justice issues within Greenpeace, I learned that there have been clear borders around the concept of “environmental issues” and “nature” and that these borders have been defined to some extent by relations of race and gender and guarded in the name of purity. So “environment” had come to be seen as distinct from social justice and Indigenous concerns, just as “women’s issues” have often been seen as distinct from concerns about immigration or racism. There was also an assumption by many that social movements would be automatically egalitarian spaces. Why, surprised observers would ask, is there a need for a harassment or anti-racist policy at Greenpeace? It was frustrating when concerns about racism and sexism were dealt with through interpersonal conflict-resolution rather than broader changes to organizational practices. “How do you feel about what she said?” a facilitator might ask; the focus, in other words, was on the individuals rather than on changing organizational practices. It was these insights that led me to write about the emotional hotspots, defensiveness, moral preoccupations, and distractions that keep us from more profound anti-racist practice. THE PROBLEM WITH ANTI - RACIST WORKSHOPS

I began to attend anti-racist events and workshops. They did not provide a route to comfort or change, as I had hoped. Each workshop I attended used similar techniques – techniques that were not only ineffective but also uncomfortable and upsetting. I began to analyze and

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write about these anti-racist workshops, highlighting how each of the common techniques – telling stories about racism, sitting in circles, sharing feelings, role playing – produces its own effects, sometimes precisely contrary to what is intended (Srivastava 1994, 1996). For example, as people of colour or queer youth become resources on racism, they also become vulnerable targets of those who want to deny it or to defend themselves. As I argue in my articles “Song and Dance” (Srivastava 1996) and “The Problem of ‘Authentic Experience’” (Srivastava and Francis 2006), most organizational efforts are based on the assumption that racism or homophobia are produced by faulty knowledge of the other or of the self; efforts then focus on better knowledge, talk, and self-reflection as the keys to diversity and anti-racism rather than on changing institutional practices. David Goldberg (1993) argues that racism is judged as immoral because (and only when) it is considered irrational. This leads to the assumption that if one acts in a more rational manner, one will be less racist and homophobic. The solution, too often, is to assume that not only do we need to act in a more rational manner but also that we need more information, knowledge, and education to do so. AN ACADEMIC LENS ON ACTIVISM AND THE EVERYDAY

Graduate school became a kind of refuge. I began a PhD program so that I could find the space to think and write about how social movements also reproduce the same relations of power against which they stand, and how the same moral imperatives that inspire the fight for racial justice might also be its undoing. The Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education within the University of Toronto supported a focus on activism and feminist theory. I loved going to the archives at the women’s research centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a small windowless room lined with bookshelves, where I read and photocopied old back copies of Canadian feminist newspapers and magazines, and pored over the tumultuous battles about racism within the Toronto women’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s. My committee members – Roxana Ng (1993, 1995, 1996), Sherene Razack (1998), and Mariana Valverde (1991) – were known for their innovative and intersectional work bringing together questions of gender, race, and nation. As these and other theorists argue, we need to understand “race” or “gender”

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and “sexuality” not as categories of analysis that we might add and subtract but, rather, as social relations that are not only intersecting but also “interlocking.” (The term is credited to Kimberle Crenshaw [1991]. See also Collins 1990; Ng 1995; Razack 1998.) To describe race and gender as “social relations” or “power relations” shifts our focus away from the static and discrete labels applied to individuals, and to ongoing and historical economic, cultural, and social practices that produce, for example, racial inequality. These theories felt revelatory: many of the publications on theories of intersectionality, critical race theory, and queer theory that are now canonical had only recently been published. I started graduate school shortly after the appearance of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Sedgewick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991). I vividly remember the moment of revelation when I read Sedgewick’s (1991, 12) central argument that “homo/heterosexual definition … has the same primary importance for all modern Western identity and social organization … as do the more traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class and race … through its ineffaceable marking particularly of the categories secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance.” Several of us in Deborah Britzman’s graduate seminar (see Britzman 1998) trooped down one night to hear Sedgewick speak in the dim concert space at the back of the Rivoli bar on Queen Street West – it felt heady and incongruous, in the way that the collision of theory and the gritty everyday feels when one is a graduate student. All of these theorists helped me to craft my own analysis of the assumptions about ignorance and knowledge that underlie pedagogical attempts at anti-racism and “diversity.” I was fortunate to work closely with Mariana Valverde, whose study of the gendered and racialized discourses of purity and nation in the first-wave feminist and moral reform movements, The Age of Light, Soap and Water, commences with a brief background on what were then “new” poststructuralist approaches to historiography. As Valverde (1991, 9) so straightforwardly outlines it, this approach highlights “the role of discourses, symbolic systems, images and texts in actively organizing both social relations and people’s feelings.” Taking this approach, a feminist or anti-racist historical study does not focus on “things that happened to women” or “things that happened to people of color” but, instead, on how gender and racial difference and inequality are historically constituted.

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Valverde’s focus on moral regulation, race, nation, and first-wave feminism, taken together with Michel Foucault’s (1979) genealogical method, or “history of the present,” offered me a methodological approach to understanding contemporary feminist movements. Put most simply, a genealogical method is interested in how our present categories, knowledges, and practices may be historically constituted – it begins with an analysis of the present rather than of history and asks, “How did we get here” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, 118)? Valverde’s focus on moral regulation and Foucault’s interest in practices of self-examination as integral to the constitution of ourselves as moral subjects further trained my focus on the moral and psychic burdens of anti-racist efforts within social movements. While I was a PhD student, I moved a few hours north of Toronto to live near Saugeen First Nation, where my then partner was working. I became very involved with several community projects there, including a successful and controversial effort to create the first independent Aboriginal trade union – declaring independence from Canadian labour organizations was an important assertion of sovereignty. One day, some Saugeen First Nation employees went to picket in solidarity with teachers on strike; they were told to leave because the teachers feared getting involved in the “internal” politics on the reserve. In any other community it is to be expected that labour organizing is not supported by everyone. Yet the effort to organize a labour union at Saugeen First Nation was seen as “internal” – and therefore as belonging only to the Saugeen community rather than as relevant to the labour movement as a whole. I saw once again the difficulties and the importance of working across movements. I was also fortunate to take a graduate course with Dorothy Smith, often referred to as a founder of feminist sociology and institutional ethnography. Smith (1989, 1999) argues that we must move beyond categories and concepts as a way of understanding the social and instead look at the social organization of people’s lives, focusing on the texts, discourses, and practices that coordinate people’s activities. And she insists that this investigation should begin from within lived experiences. In particular, she advocates an institutional ethnography that examines the texts that are responsible for coordinating social organization. By the time I was her student, Dorothy Smith was already legendary. Her confident and firm manner, though not exactly imperious (indeed, she was warm and sympathetic about the death of my

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young cousin), did not lessen my intimidation. While speaking to her in person made me nervous, I made my final essay an imagined conversation with Smith. I recently came across this essay, along with Smith’s very generous response and grade. Her comments on my essay are an astonishing three and a half pages long – typed and signed by hand. Point by point, and with reflective engagement, Smith answers my methodological and conceptual queries, including my questions about the textual analysis of social relations. I realize that her counsel has been influential not only in my research but also in the way I teach graduate methodology classes. In her response to my reflective essay, Smith offered comments I still find relevant today: My view is that you use whatever methods come to hand when what you’re after is those aspects of social organization or relations that you’ve identified as problematic for inquiry. In any organization in today’s society it would almost certainly be a mistake to exclude dealing with its textuality, because that’s a key to its organizational processes. But texts are only interesting as coordinators of people’s activities and it’s the processes of coordinating that you’re after … It would be, in my view, really important to do preliminary interviews … Your own experience could be included here. Though your experience is particular, your problematizing of that experience opens up investigation of dimensions of organization that are general. You want to find out more about the ordinary practices of racism in such organizations and that’s the place to start. (Smith, personal communication with Srivastava) As I learned from Smith, documenting our everyday experience is not our end point but only our starting point for mapping the relations of power, the texts, and the institutions that coordinate people’s everyday activities. EMOTIONS , RACE , AND THE “ THERAPEUTIC ”

Just as I did not plan to become a sociologist, I did not plan to become a sociologist of emotion. Yet when I interviewed anti-racist activists, I began hearing a pattern of complaints about the therapeutic language of their organizational meetings and about the over-emotional responses, the tears and the anger. Some activists observed that “white women

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cry all the time.” The “sociology of emotions” was just beginning as a subfield. There were not yet any books on emotions and social movements; as a PhD student I presented at one of the first sessions on the “sociology of emotion” at the Canadian Sociology Association meetings. I began to explore the ways that the political and the therapeutic came together in social movements. Through my research, I found that when conversations about diversity and race do happen, they are often sidelined by emotional responses such as defensiveness, sadness, and shame (Srivastava 2005). Discussion would derail as people expressed their feelings, were taken care of, had outbursts. For people who think of themselves as fair and egalitarian, the fear of appearing racist can be so deeply troubling that it doubles back and perpetuates racial tension (Srivastava 2005; Goff et al. 2008). Studies on strategic colour-blindness analyze the strategic avoidance of talking about race in order to be seen as non-racist. In more progressive environments, however, confessing one’s own racism may be the route to non-racism. The focus in both cases remains on the individual rather than on organizational practices, such as recruitment, hiring and promotion, community services, and division of labour. This helps to explains why even within spaces whose very existence is trained towards the pursuit of social justice and egalitarian community, meaningful shifts towards anti-racism and diversity prove elusive. Each situation demands instead a careful analysis of how organizational culture, practices, and values limit genuine equity and diversity. Sometimes when I speak, people say, “But don’t you think emotions are important to activism?” And indeed other theorists have argued that rational bureaucratic organizations should bring in more emotions (Ferguson 1984; Putnam and Mumby 1993). But whose emotions are valued? And what work do emotional displays do? We cannot simply bring in emotions without taking into account how emotional expression is differently valued depending on who is speaking and what we are speaking about. As my interviews show, white people crying about how guilty they feel about racism receive care, while people of colour angry about racism are unlikely to be comforted. More important, however, these racialized valorizations sidetrack discussions of anti-racism; when a participant breaks down, the session often turns to “taking care” of her rather than focusing on the concerns at hand (Srivastava 2006). This therapeutic focus on individual feelings makes it difficult to work on changing organizational practices.

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THE PITFALLS OF “ STORY TELLING ”

There is a certain irony in this telling of the story of my life as one of the primary questions I ask in my work on anti-racist and anti-homophobia workshops is, “How does telling mark the knower?” (Srivastava 1996).2 As I wrote with Margot Francis, storytelling by nonwhite and queer participants is often used to teach about anti-racism and anti-homophobia, but compelling people to speak from their position as “people of colour” or as “queer youth” ends by reinforcing fixed notions of racial and sexual identity – it reinforces the idea, for example, that non-whites are seen primarily through the lens of race and racism, and that it is their responsibility to explain it to others. Rather than challenging ideas about race, gender, and sexuality, workshops can thereby unwittingly reinforce them (Srivastava and Francis 2006). In the same way, highlighting racism in the life story I tell here flattens the complexities of racial experience. Yes, I remember racism as an integral part of my childhood: I grew up in Toronto in the 1970s, the era of both official multiculturalism and Paki-bashing, and young men leaning out of cars yelling “Paki!” was a not uncommon occurrence. However, my childhood was also full of the pleasures of 1980s sitcoms, sci-fi novels, and watching old 1950s movies with my sisters. Yes, my immigrant parents taught me the importance of resourcefulness, but I also owe my extensive education in disco music to them; our house was often the site of dance parties in the late 1970s and early 1980s, powered by the dance mixes my father made on a huge reel-to-reel tape player from the 1960s. Yes, my mother wore silk saris on special occasions, but she also wore long halter-top gowns to her dance parties (traditions that I continue!). But more relevant to my work is that my parents always had a critical eye and a subtle thread of feminism and social justice in their commentary. In the late 1970s, in the midst of the anti-Quebec sentiment all around me, my father gave me an alternate view, explaining the historical marginalization to which French language laws in Quebec were responding. Whenever I would read aloud a statistic or conclusion from the newspaper, my father, a professor of statistics, would respond with a critical analysis. My mother noted and thereby taught us about the sexism she observed in everyday life – relatives, school, TV. And she wished there had been childcare available so that she would not have felt

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compelled to give up her career as a forensic chemist – and she counselled us not to do the same. My father impressed upon us three girls that we must have our own careers so that we would not, as he put it, become economically dependent on a man – and he had every expectation that we would succeed. We took heed, each of us raising two kids while balancing demanding professional careers. I offer these details as a way of tempering my storytelling. It is an impossible balancing act – to avoid predictable and singular representations of self, to challenge the “colour-blind” silences about race, and at the same time to avoid a simplistic celebration of voice and expression over silence. A few years ago, there was a prominent news story about the racism that young high school students experience in Toronto schools. I remember my father shaking his head at the newspaper on the kitchen table, my parents’ appalled expressions, “That’s terrible – can you believe this racism?” my parents asked. “Believe it?” my sister snorted. “We lived through it,” she said, “You think this is new?” I felt badly for my parents when I saw how stunned they were – they never knew. And we in turn were astonished at their ignorance. But why should they have known? Why did we never tell them, never whisper a word about the name-calling and shame? It is not simply politeness, then, that cultivates this silence, that prevents us from speaking openly about race. One of artist Barbara Kruger’s best-known pieces is a photo collage of a man with his finger to his lips overlaid with the bold text, “Your Comfort Is My Silence.” Silence can be a form of survival, certainly – but what, then, does it allow to survive, to thrive? Mona Oikawa’s (2012) work on the legacy of Japanese Canadian internment shows us that familial silence about that internment must be carefully interpreted; in particular, as Wendy Brown (1995) argues, speech should not be uncritically accepted as a liberatory opposite to silence. We should also ask, then: What comfort does silence bring and to whom? And at what price does this comfort come? These are questions that I am asking anew as contemporary political discourse makes anti-refugee and anti-immigration politics increasingly less silent and more explicit. Polite, well-meaning multiculturalism has not gone away, but it coexists with increasingly prevalent expressions of anti-immigration and racism; these historical particularities demand our academic and activist attentions.

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QUEEN ’ S UNIVERSIT Y : “ A CULTURE OF WHITENESS ”

I was hired by the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University in 2003; few universities then were hiring tenure-track professors, but there was a rare opening for a sociologist of race, gender, and postcoloniality. Ironically, the position was open because a woman of colour had resigned – one of six faculty of colour who left Queen’s in the same short time period (Macdonald and Woods 2008). When I arrived, the university had just commissioned a study of the experiences of faculty of colour and Indigenous faculty. The report found that nearly half of the faculty who were polled had experienced discrimination and that a third of those surveyed were “extremely disillusioned with their work environment and their everyday experiences” at Queen’s. Referred to as the Henry Report, led by sociologist Frances Henry (2004) of York University, it also described a “culture of whiteness” at Queen’s and urged policy and curriculum changes. Queen’s University is not unique in its need to address race and diversity. However, as the Henry Report identifies, both the local and the student population at Queen’s is also well known for its ethnic homogeneity, which further discourages students of colour from coming to Queen’s. The most blatant and well-publicized incidents of racism at Queen’s – students dressing in blackface or donning Halloween costumes that mock racial caricatures – have been similarly bemoaned at many campuses across Canada and the United States. These blatant incidents get plenty of publicity and protest. Yet, as in most organizations, the more mundane questions of curriculum reform, learning and teaching environment, and hiring and admissions remain resistant to change (Srivastava 2008). My own intervention was to start an equity and social justice committee with my colleague, Cynthia Levine-Rasky, shortly after I arrived at Queen’s. For the last decade, she and I have made the committee a place of creative collaboration with graduate students. Our major project in the last few years has been Equity Talk (n.d.), a newsletter that highlights research, activism, events, and courses focused on social justice. However, I was discouraged by the suspicion and resistance that I met when I first proposed this committee to the sociology department. From these and other conflicts within the university, I have come to see that some of my research findings about racial innocence and defensiveness have implications and echoes that

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go well beyond social movements, entering all spaces where people think of themselves as enlightened, educated, and well meaning. BRINGING TOGETHER SEPARATE WORLDS

And then I had children. For any sociologist of emotion, the practice of parenting provides ample data for a study of non-stop emotional labour. The work of single-parenting two young kids adds another sixty hours to my week but is largely invisible and, moreover, indecorous to mention, yet these are ever-present conditions that limit and shape my intellectual labour. How to explain the challenge of thinking when engaged in the emotional and physical labour of being the only parent in a small child’s life? And yet, in the last few years, the experience of becoming a single parent by choice and of cultivating non-traditional family and community has also pushed me to reflect more deeply on research, teaching, and supervising. One of my most rewarding projects recently has been to write about teaching my social justice practicum, in which I supervise students’ community involvements (Srivastava 2019), and one of my most satisfying accomplishments has been to receive an award of excellence from the graduate student society at Queen’s. It is perhaps an over-familiar observation that children of immigrants feel they come from two worlds yet belong to neither. Yet I feel that this is a thread that has continued in my professional life. My PhD supervisor, Roxana Ng (1995), spoke about how there was once no place for her, neither in race and ethnic studies nor in women’s studies, because her work theorized race, class, and gender not as separate categories but as “interlocking” social relations. Similarly, because I have a feeling of belonging neither in the academic world nor in the activist world, neither in Canada nor in India, neither in social movement theory nor in race and ethnic studies, the sense of looking in from the outside persists, just as I chose to sit in the outer circle at that early anti-racist workshop I attended. But it is this perspective perhaps that urges me to try to bring together disparate and divergent approaches. What makes our work interesting, fresh, and productive is the way that we bring together that which has not been previously juxtaposed – I may use critical race theory to look at the environmental movement or to bring together postcolonial literature with refugee studies. My second published article analyzes the politics of body hair by bringing

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together my own photographs with John Berger’s and Su Braden’s work on political activist photography (Srivastava 1993). I also exhibited the photos as part of a joint art exhibit at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. At the beginning of my academic career, I was far more creative in this way, less constrained by professional considerations. However, the scope for creative work within contemporary sociology and cultural studies is wide, and I find myself returning more to collaborative and creative work. When asked to write a chapter in critical refugee studies, I turned to the novel Ru. A meditation on author Kim Thuy’s (2012) own experience as a Vietnamese refugee, it was my entry point to analyze how our conceptions of gratitude might shape refugee experience (Srivastava forthcoming). Perhaps it is my own indirect professional journey that encourages me to lean towards hybrid theoretical paradigms in my own and in my students’ work. “What were your starting points? What inspired you to do this work?” Inevitably, these are the questions I ask my graduate students as I help them revise their theses. So often they are caught up in theoretical circumnavigations that float above the observations and imaginings that first prompted their research projects. Yet it is these connections among everyday observations, passions, and analyses that can produce our most energetic work. A graduate student, for example, recently came to me with a draft of her thesis that began by reviewing educational policy in Quebec yet left out the haunting question that had first inspired her research: With a former residential school for Indigenous children on the edge of her Quebec town, how could it be that nobody in her community seemed to know its history? We need to stay connected to these “starting points,” the things about everyday social life and institutions that both inspire and rankle us or that everyone else seems to take for granted. Reflecting on our starting points often brings us to a productive conversation between the everyday and the theoretical or between activism and analysis. It is this conversation that has been at the heart of my own pedagogy and my own scholarship. A few weeks after I had joined the sociology department at Queen’s, one of my new colleagues waylaid me as I put the key in my office door. With no preamble, he asked, “You’re from India, right?” I hesitated, knowing that he, like others, did not want to hear that I was born in the United States and raised in Toronto. “Yes, my parents are from India,” I replied. I was stunned when his next sentence was, “Do you know anything about human sacrifice?” We passed some e-mails

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back and forth; he explained it was his current research obsession and I explained that it was not part of my research expertise. He began to understand what it meant for me to be seen primarily as his conduit to traditional Indian practices rather than as a scholar of social movements and race. Years later, he and I can laugh together at this story – and indeed I told this story at his retirement roast to appreciative laughter. Turning that hurtful moment into comedy or into starting points for research – these are my potential forms of resistance. It occurs to me now that I could also have responded, “I know you are, but what am I?” In a sense, that has been the goal of my work: transforming this schoolyard chant into a question about the sociology of knowledge, race, and emotion. NOTES 1 I am grateful that my school-age daughter has not heard of these chants. I would like to think this shift is thanks to the continual anti-bullying efforts in her school, but no doubt it is also because bullying and responses to bullying are taking new forms. 2 I share David Goldberg’s (1993) interest in the production of racial knowledge and how it helps to “create, authorize, legitimate and license the figures of racial otherness, the fabrication of racial selves and social subjects.” REFERENCES Anon. 2010. “Whatever Happened to the Ozone Hole?” National Geographic News, 7 May. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/5/100505science-environment-ozone-hole-25-years/. Britzman, Deborah. 1998. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Equity Talk (newsletter) n.d. Queen’s University Department of Sociology. https://www.queensu.ca/sociology/sites/webpublish.queensu.ca.doswww /files/files/Equity%20Talk%20Newsletter%20-%20March%202019%20 Final.pdf. Ferguson, Kathy. 1984. The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Goff, Phillip Atiba, Claude M. Steele, and Paul G. Davies. 2008. “The Space between Us: Stereotype, Threat and Distance in Interracial Contexts.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94 (1): 91–107. Goldberg, David Theo. 1993. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Henry, Francis. 2004. Systemic Racism: Towards Faculty of Colour and Aboriginal Faculty at Queen’s University. Report prepared for the Queen’s Senate Education Equity Committee, April. http://www.queensu.ca/provost/sites /webpublish.queensu.ca.provwww/files/files/SystemicRacism.pdf. Hoxie, Frederick E. 1992. “Goodbye Columbus Day.” Chicago Tribune, 21 November. Leslie, Keith. 2016. “90% of Grassy Narrows Residents show Mercury Poisoning Signs: Researchers.” Globe and Mail, 20 September. Macdonald, Kerri, and Michael Woods. 2008. “Confronting a Culture of Silence.” Queen’s Journal, Queen’s University, 14 November. http://www .queensjournal.ca/story/2008-11-14/features/confronting-culture-silence/. Ng, Roxana. 1993. “A Woman Out of Control: Deconstructing Sexism and Racism in the University.” Canadian Journal of Education 18 (3): 189–205. – 1995. “Sexism, Racism and Canadian Nationalism.” In Race, Class, Gender: Bonds and Barriers, ed. Jesse Vorst. Toronto: Garamond. – 1996. The Politics of Community Services: Immigrant Women, Class and State. Toronto: Fernwood. Oikawa, Mona. 2012. Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of Internment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pringle, Rosemary. 1989. Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work. London: Verso. Putnam, Linda, and Dennis Mumby. 1993. “Organizations, Emotion and the Myth of Rationality.” In Emotion in Organizations, ed. Stephen Fineman, 36–57. London: Sage. Ratner, R.S., and William Carroll. 1999. “Media Strategies and Political Pro-

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jects: A Comparative Study of Social Movements.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 24 (1): 1–34. Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking White People in the Eye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. 1991. Epistemology of the Closet. Oakland: University of California Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1989. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. – 1993. Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. New York: Routledge. – 1999. Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Srivastava, Muni. 2002. Methods of Multivariate Statistics. Hoboken, NJ: WileyInterscience. – 2007. "Multivariate Theory for Analyzing High Dimensional Data." Journal of the Japan Statistical Society 37: 53–86. Srivastava, Sarita. 1992. “Discovering India without Columbus: Relearning and Reclaiming Herstory.” Canadian Woman Studies 13 (1): 24–6. – 1993. “Unwanted Hair Problem? Struggling to Re-Present Our Bodies.” Rungh: A South Asian Quarterly of Culture, Comment and Criticism 1 (4): 5–7. – 1994. “Voyeurism and Vulnerability: Critiquing the Power Relations of Anti-Racist Workshops.” Canadian Woman Studies 14 (2): 105–9. – 1996. “Song and Dance: The Performance of Antiracist Workshops.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 33 (3): 292–315. – 2005. “‘You’re Calling Me a Racist?’: The Moral and Emotional Regulation of Anti-Racism and Feminism.” SIGNS: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 31 (1): 29–62. – 2006. “Tears, Fears and Careers: Anti-Racism, Emotion and Social Movement Organizations.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 31 (1): 55–90. – 2008. “A ‘Culture of Whiteness’ (Is Change Possible?).” Ardent: Anti-Racism and Decolonization Review 1 (1): 23–5. – 2019. “There’s More Than One Way to Save a Baby: Navigating Tensions between Activism vs. Community Service and Anti-racism vs. Multiculturalism.” In Feminist Praxis Revisited: Critical Reflections on UniversityCommunity Engagement, ed. Amber Dean, Jennifer L. Johnson, and Susanne Luhmann, 55–72. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. – Forthcoming. “The Grateful Refugee: The Emotional and Moral Terrain of Refugee and Immigrant Gratitude.” In Borders of Mass Destruction:

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Racialization, National Belonging and “the Refugee,” ed. Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo Torres. London: Routledge. – Forthcoming. "You're Calling Me a Racist?" New York: New York University Press. Srivastava, Sarita, and Margot Francis. 2006. “The Problem of ‘Authentic Experience’: Storytelling in Anti-Racist and Anti-homophobic Education.” Critical Sociology 32 (2–3): 275–307. Srivastava, Sarita, and Peter Wells. 1992. “Enhancement of Phenytoin Fetal and Maternal Toxicity by Low-Level Exposure to Methylmercury.” Toxicologist 12: 309. Stockman, Farah. 2017. “Women’s March Opens a Raw Dialogue about Race.” New York Times, 10 January, A1. Takaoka, Shigeru, Tadashi Fujino, Nobuyuki Hotta, Keishi Ueda, Masanobu Hanada, Masami Tajiri, and Yukari Inoue. 2014. “Signs and Symptoms of Methylmercury Contamination in a First Nations Community in Northwestern Ontario.” Science of the Total Environment 468–9 (January): 950–7. Thúy, Kim. 2012. Ru. Toronto: Vintage Canada. Valverde, Mariana. 1991. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wapner, Paul. 2014. “Greenpeace and Political Globalism.” In The Globalization Reader, ed. Frank J. Lechner and John Boli, 443–50. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

17 “What the Are You Going to Do with Sociology?”: Race, Community, and Professional Life Carl E. James

I entered university without any clear sense of what career or occupation I would pursue but with the socialized belief that post-secondary education was the means by which I would be able to attain “whatever I wanted in life,” especially as a recent immigrant in Canada. As such, during my first year in university, I did, as I would often say, “introductory everything” (i.e., social sciences, humanities, economics, science, and Caribbean studies), and during the following summer I did introductory courses in psychology and sociology. Like Richard Wright (1966) I was attracted to psychology because to my young mind it helped me make sense of individuals’ behaviours and attitudes. Nevertheless, it did not seem to help me fully understand the cultural, racial, and social practices and interactions around me. Essentially, based on my reading of the world around me, I sought to understand my existence as a young Black newcomer to Canada and the experiences I was having as I interacted with the many institutions and communities in Toronto. During that summer I read Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth and identified with what he said about his “conception of life” at the age of twelve that made him sceptical, tolerant, and critical of things, and how he “loved burrowing into psychology.” He wrote about his home situation. Growing up without a father and having a very sick mother accounted for his “attitude toward life that was to endure” (Wright 1966, 112). That Wright’s com-

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ments resonated with me likely has to do with the fact that I, too, grew up without a father as he died when I entered high school; and, as an “only child” with responsibilities for myself (my mother was around and was very supportive), I felt a deep sense of having to learn how to get to know the world on my own. In a similar way, Peter Berger (2011) recalls immigrating with his parents to the United States as a young man. In New York, where they lived, he registered in a sociology course, believing that it would be a way “to find out about American society.” Berger’s early experience in sociology contributed to his, as it did to my, becoming “a sociologist by mistake,” or an “accidental sociologist” (as he titled his book). In my case, however, I entered Canada with the growing wave of nonEuropeans (including Black people from the Caribbean) that contributed to changes in the racial, ethnic, “accent,” and cultural mix of Toronto. It was a time that most of us, who arrived then, remember as our saying “hello to every Black person we met on the street.” There was a sense of communal solidarity as we navigated the cultural curiosity, scrutiny, ambivalence, and questions about our legitimate presence in the society – all of which were premised on heightened xenophobia and racism. In what follows, I explore how my biography and experiences as a Canadian (albeit racialized) operated in my educational ambitions, chosen career, scholarly activities, and student engagements. For many of us, our educational and career paths are often informed by the social situation in which we find ourselves and the related concerns and questions we seek to address – all of which are mediated by the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which we exist, the sense of the world that has been revealed to us, and the communities with which we do or do not identify, or with which others identify us. The fact is community plays a significant role in our lives and in our educational, professional, and occupational pursuits. COMMUNIT Y , RACIAL IDENTIFICATION , AND “ DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS ”

The significant role that community played in decisions about my occupational pursuits was driven home to me the summer after that second year in university once I had decided to major in sociology. I was in downtown Toronto with a group of friends when we met Kevin (pseudonym), an acquaintance of Howard (pseudonym), who

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was with us. All of us were young Black men who, less than six years ago, had emigrated from the Caribbean and were attending university in Toronto. After the introductions, the conversation soon turned to our studies. During this exchange Kevin asked me what my major was. I responded quite happily, saying, “sociology,” whereupon Kevin retorted: “What the fuck are you going to do with sociology?” I then asked him what his major was, and he quite smugly said, “business.” Over the course of further conversations in the group, I learned that Kevin failed to see the relevance of sociology not only to me as a Black immigrant but also to the larger Black community. For him, business offered more potential and possibilities for us as Black immigrants in Toronto. From Kevin’s perspective, a business degree in capitalist Canada would afford us opportunities for a “better life” because we would know “how to make money,” which is essential to creating a path to our independence and self-sufficiency. So according to Kevin, and, as I would come to ascertain through my doctoral research with Black youth (James 1990), I needed to pursue a career that would benefit not only me but also the “Black community.” And while, in those early years, I did not fully grasp the significance of community in my career choice of sociology and the doctoral work upon which I eventually embarked, I have since come to realize that the research projects I undertake, the content of the courses I teach/taught, and the university and community services in which I engage are all linked to my efforts to be responsive to the needs, interests, expectations, and aspirations of community. One of my professors did discourage me from going on to earn a PhD, suggesting that doing so would not be of further benefit to me. In rebelling against this counsel, I entered the PhD program with a determination to succeed and to prove – as the community often admonishes us – that it was possible for me as a Black person to do so. Furthermore, I needed to be a good role model for my then young son. My racial identification as a Black/African Canadian and the communities (Black, Caribbean, immigrant, racialized) with which I identify are meaningful references in this reflection. W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” serves as an appropriate starting point and port for the scaffolding of the selves that help to frame my educational and professional experiences. Double consciousness, Du Bois (1996, 5) writes, is “a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, a

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Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” But clearly, this “peculiar sensation” of individuals is not only related to the two dimensions of identities – race (Black) and citizenship (here, Canadian) – but also to multiple others, such as immigrant background, class, gender, sexuality, age, and parental status, which account for the cultural hybridity and the everchanging and complex lives of individuals. In Canada, race matters and is often used to define belongingness framed by the “essentialized identity paradigm” of European colonialism (Chiang 2010). As such, race is used to construct some immigrants as “assimilable,” and in time they are identified as “Canadians.” Others of us are assigned the racializing moniker “visible minority,”1 and we tend to remain trapped in the “immigrant” box and viewed as “Other” – forever “foreigners” even if those born here are “without accent.” (See the Nakhaie, chapter 13, this volume; Srivastava, chapter 16 this volume.) But notwithstanding my other identities, my raced or Black self (by which I am often read as Caribbean and Jamaican, in particular), serves as an imperative marker for it embodies my “foreign” self and “new country” self (see Lobban 2013), giving meaning and expression to my sociological imagination, community service, aspirational goals, and theoretical orientation. Indeed, as Patricia Williams (1991, 28) writes in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor: Race isn’t important because it isn’t important, most of us devoutly wish this to be a color blind society, in which removing the words “black” and “white” from our vocabulary would render the words, in a miraculous flash, free of all divisions … Often we have to use the words in order to acknowledge the undeniable psychological and cultural power of racial constructions upon all our lives. I am drawn to critical theories (conflict theory being the first) as they provide the analytical means by which I am able to make sense of the inequitable conditions that contribute to the educational and social concerns of marginalized and racialized group members who are the focus of my research. Critical race theory, in particular, which informs much of my recent works, promotes an approach to sociological work that conveys awareness of inequity, cognizance of privi-

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lege and power, appreciation of our responsibilities to our own and wider communities as scholars, and critical consciousness of the dominant culture that serves to essentialize, de-historicize, misrepresent, homogenize, and generalize racialized groups, and in so doing ignores their inter- and intragroup differences (Delgado and Stafancic 2012; McDermott and Varenne 2006). As a critical theorist, I am mindful of my personal and professional responsibility, and undertake to produce work that presents alternative perspectives that illuminate the experiences, interrupt the silences, and challenge the complacencies in the dominant discourse of race and oppression, and underscore the agency and resistance of marginalized people (Gillborn 2015; James 2012). This is consistent with facilitating critical hope, which fosters the capacity to dream, to restore optimism, to regenerate aspirational capital, and to see beyond despair, without which individuals would simply “dissipate into hopelessness and despair” (Freire 1994, 9). On this basis, sociologists who work with marginalized and racialized people have a responsibility to help “unveil opportunities for hope” (148) through counter-narratives that bear witness to their lived experiences, liberatory stance, and hopefulness.2 And, in doing so, to challenge and make visible the barriers to their/our inequitable treatment and outcomes. Baszile (2008, 253) suggests that testimony involves “a first person account of what has or is happening” and that, in so doing, “the teller speaks not only on his or her behalf, but in relation to the group situation from which and because of which she narrates.” My story, then, of coming to and working in sociology, in part bears witness not only to my own experiences but also to those of others whose identities I share. And, as Reyes and Rodriguez (2012, 528) also write, although a story or “testimonio is technically an account made by one person, it represents the voice of many whose lives have been affected” by the same cultural, political, and historic events. Further, Lewis (2005, 7) posits with reference to the political reality of the personal: The telling of our personal stories is a fundamental prerequisite to developing new understandings concerning the workings of larger political discourses and structures. Indeed … we are able to access the workings of these larger political structures only through the stories we might tell about them. Precisely because lives are lived in the finely textured fabric of the everyday, in the crevices of what happens to us in our casual encounters and con-

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versations, it is, as Michelle Fine points out, by speaking of the “personal” that the “mystified” space yawning between “objectivity” and “politics” is exposed as an illusion, justifying and laminating existing forms of social privilege in the name of objectivity. Moreover, Hartman (2008, 7) asserts that an autobiographical account “is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them.” The idea, then, is not to conceive of my circumstances and experiences as simply a product of my own making but, rather, as a product of the cultural structures and institutions that we all help to create. Having provided this framework, I return to where I started in my expedition into sociology. GETTING STARTED : SEEKING TO UNDERSTAND THE EXPERIENCES AND ASPIRATIONS OF BLACK YOUTH

During my university undergraduate years, I volunteered as a tutor with the Black Education Project (BEP), where I was also a program worker in the summers. BEP was a community agency established in the late 1960s to address the familial, social, and educational issues of Black parents and their children – many of whom were joining their parents after many years of separation.3 As a tutor, I helped students with their mathematics lessons, but it soon became clear that they also needed help – and in some case more so – with cultural and family adjustment problems. In this regard, my tasks morphed into being a “big brother” and/or mentor, which meant having to interact with their parents. My work at BEP put me in contact with young people and their parents from many of the Caribbean islands; in many cases, it was the first time I closely interacted with people from these islands. At the same time, even though I had been in Toronto a few years earlier than some of these youth, I was nevertheless still adjusting to life in Canada. My experiences working with newcomer youth and parents led me to a number of questions: How do I translate or interpret the cultural context of Canada to them? How do I explain to the youth and their parents the “adjustment problems” that studies by various school boards have identified as responsible for their education and social

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situation (Roth 1973; Schreiber 1970; Stewart 1975)? And, as an immigrant adolescent of Caribbean origin who seemed to be “applying himself to his studies” and, as expected, taking advantage of the educational opportunities that Canada afforded us, how do I help the youth to effectively negotiate the school system and fulfill the expectations of their parents and community members? My tendency at this time was to delve into psychology, not only to try and understand my own place in society and how I was identified and responded to by the “host” or dominant ethno-racial group members (perceived as British Canadians) but also to be able to model and translate how to be in the society to my “young charges.” In time, I would learn the word “acculturation” as relating to the “adjustment” process new members go through in becoming settled in a new or host society. But this did not sufficiently explain attitudes and behaviours towards us in relation to race, language, accent, and cultural habits. Actually, as I would later write: While acculturation recognizes that the interactions among immigrants and “host” members of the society is a two-way street, it leaves unacknowledged the stratification and power relationships in society that contribute to inequitable interactions between the dominant ethno-racial group (in English Canada, White and British and typically considered “host”) and the “minoritized Others.” Furthermore, this ahistorical individualist approach to group interactions fails to take into account the hegemonic ways in which the social, economic, political and legal institutions operate to force acculturation – more likely assimilation – in order to resist change that might be brought about by the presence of newcomers with different bodies. (James 2018, 35) This resistance to change, and the cultural, social, and political contexts that produce the circumstances in which young people found themselves, was made evident to me in my work with youth in the then low-income Regent Park community in downtown Toronto.4 In the fall of 1979, I was invited by a nearby community centre to help address a situation in which the “Canadian” (mostly white and a few Black Nova Scotian) youth, who were long-time program attendees, were protesting Black youths’ (predominantly of Jamaican origin) participation in “their program.” That the “Canadian” youth – Blacks as much as their white peers – sought to prevent the youth of

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Caribbean origin from coming “onto their territory” is, as I observed, a reflection of the youth’s understandings of each other’s “difference,” their sense of belonging, and what they believed that they had to give up – particularly to “newcomers.” In an effort to address the conflict between the youth, and for safety reasons (as explained to the youth), the young people of Caribbean origin were asked not to return to the centre until something could be done for them. My introduction into this situation was, on the one hand, to help negotiate a “truce” between the youth; and, on the other hand, to use my racial and cultural “similarity” with the Black youth (my social and cultural capital) to “translate” the situation to them so that they could come to understand that it was not that the centre’s administrators did not want them there but that the long-time regular participants needed time to adjust to their presence.5 Eventually, a separate program was established for the Black youth, which I coordinated. However, after a few months, the “Canadian” youth stopped attending programs while the attendance of the Black youth grew to hundreds. But the centre’s program workers, administrators (including members of the board), and neighbours (who were predominantly white) were not comfortable with what was perceived to be “segregated programs.” This youth worker role to which I was assigned occurred in the winter of the year I entered the graduate program in sociology and, understandably, considerably influenced the questions I would take up in my assignments. However, feeling that I would be better positioned to meet the needs and expectations of these youth with a social work education, I considered pursuing that degree and took courses in the graduate program in social work at the University of Toronto. After a year of courses, I returned to pursue my PhD in sociology on the basis that this degree would be more helpful. Besides, I saw sociology as providing me the opportunity to build on insights I had gained from working with Professor Anisef and his survey data on the educational plans and achievements of 1973 grade twelve Ontario students (Anisef et al. 2000). I had used this data for my undergraduate thesis, but they were not disaggregated to show findings about racialized youth. This absence inspired the work that I would eventually do with Black youth. So, too, was my 1974 experience as a research assistant for Professor Wilson Head’s study The Black Presence in the Canadian Mosaic. These research experiences gave impetus to the questions I would ask myself: What does it take to respond effectively to the

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familial, cultural, social, and educational circumstances of Caribbeanborn Black youth? What do I need to know to create a space that would be culturally inviting for them? And, as a university student with a particular interest in the educational performance of these youth, and reckoning that their educational success or failure is read as reflective of “our” community, how might I support their schooling and education? Clearly, I was searching for what could be done to change the narrative of the underachieving, sports-minded, undisciplined, and troublesome Black youth and, through research evidence, present a counter-narrative. Working with the youth, I observed that a majority of them (mainly boys) came to the centre to play basketball. It seemed to have been the activity that made them attend school, tolerate the education they were receiving, and gain recognition from their coaches, peers, and teachers (in that order). So, the space and coaching support that the youth received in the program provided them the opportunity to practise and hone their skills, and, in the process, display their talent, abilities, and dexterities among their peers; cultivate their “good basketball player” reputation; and earn respect from their male peers and attention from the females (whose attendance seemed to be largely about watching the males play basketball). Like the youths’ parents, I was concerned with the “basic”- and “general”-level school programs into which most of them were streamed.6 And, like their parents, who shared their concerns with me, I wished that the youth would put their efforts into studying their schoolwork rather than attaching themselves so tenaciously to sport. We did not imagine that sport would facilitate, or enable them to fulfill, the high educational outcomes their immigrant parents had for them. I remember Sammy (pseudonym), a six-foot-two basketball player who played the centre position, saying in a documentary video we did of the program that he expected to win an athletic scholarship to an American university and “someday play for the NBA.” I do not know if he believed what he said, but his ambitious statement disturbed me. How could Sammy expect to make it to the NBA when he was not doing well in school? Furthermore, he was in a vocational education program. Nevertheless, among his peers, Sammy’s aspirations were never questioned. Despite the youth’s expectations, the youth program was not exclusively recreational but, instead, included activities such as academic tutoring, educational counselling, peer leadership, mentoring, and workshops aimed at

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assisting the youth in their planning for high school, work, and postsecondary education.7 My experiences with these youth bolstered or spawned the trajectory of my career in sociology. For instance, for my PhD dissertation, supervised by Professor Clifford Jensen, I studied the socialization process, schooling lives, educational outcomes, and social aspirations of Black youth, making sure to capture the heterogeneity of their population in the sixty qualitative interviews that were conducted in 1984 and 1985. Observations were conducted at public and community events where I would have informal conversations with Black youth and others in attendance. These included youth programs, demonstrations, student forums, Caribana, and events during Black Liberation Month. Apart from race, most of the research participants and I connected on a number of levels or through other roles, such as having immigrated to Canada from the Caribbean as adolescents and/or having known each other through the youth programs I had administered, classes I had taught, and community events in which I had participated. In research terms, I was an “insider” conducting research with young people with whom I ethno-racially identified, was familiar, and shared similar concerns and experiences (see researcher positioning in Tilley 2016, 30). As well, I wished to “co-author” (see Riggins, chapter 19, this volume) a counter-narrative of Black youth. Moreover, I was interested in knowing or hearing from respondents how and when they positioned Blackness in both their identification and life experiences. To this end, in the interviewing process I chose not to mention race until participants did. Accordingly, I introduced my research as being based on talking with youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two about their experiences and aspirations. In some cases, I was asked “What exactly are you looking for?” and I would assure them: “Nothing specific.” Participants were asked about their experiences at school and work, in extracurricular activities, and with family (in terms of influence, encouragement, and aspiration). They were also asked about their educational and career aspirations, and to note how they saw their chances of achievement and the strategies they employed or intended to employ to realize their ambitions. The strategy of not mentioning race produced varying results. Understandably, some participants suspected that, because of my race and community activities, my interest was in their experiences as “Black youth.” In this regard, they would mention their experiences

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with racism and discrimination early in the interviews. But even in cases in which participants were not explicit, there seemed to be an underlying assumption that race was implicit in their responses – “you should know that.” This was the case with Courtney, whose interview lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. At no time did he explicitly mention race or Blackness; but, like the other participants, he talked about the “importance of education” and his efforts at “working hard” to “prove himself” in order to be successful. At the end of the interview about the significance of race in his experiences and aspirations, he said: “Very significant [brief pause]. It is obvious; as a Black person you should know that, Carl.” Periodically, I would return to the participants in my first study to check up on them, to hear about their experiences and sense of self in becoming Black adults, to enquire into their optimism and hope, and to obtain their assessment of the extent to which, through their strategies, they were able to attain their aspirations. I returned in 1991 and interviewed twenty-two participants. And, in 2006, I worked with Sobaz Benjamin to produce an eleven-minute National Film Board (2006) video, Making It, which features twelve participants. Apart from the foundational aspect to my work, chronicling the lives of these Black youth has provided important insights into the complex and diverse ways in which, over time, racialized individuals grapple with, understand, assert, and perform our identities as Canadians, and maintain critical hope as we resist the power and pervasive structure of racism normalized within the institutions we enter as students, teachers, researchers, parents, and so on (see Nakhaie, chapter 13, this volume; Srivastava, chapter 16, this volume). Often research participants would put into words remarks I would have made had I been the respondent. For instance, as Kai (pseudonym) commented with reference to racism: “I think that we can make a difference, we should try to make a difference and we shouldn’t give up” (James 1993, 20). MOVING BEYOND THE INITIAL SOCIOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE : OPPORTUNITIES AND COSTS

In time, I sought to explore much more fervently the social, political, and economic context that generates and maintains the structures and institutions that nurture the cultural processes that underlie individuals’ interactions. Stated differently, I started to study the culture of the society that shapes and is shaped by individuals or, as McDermott

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and Varenne (2006 23) would say, “that which we also make.” This interest spawned a number of research and writing projects in which the Canadian cultural context was explored, noting how identity characteristics such as race, ethnicity, citizenship, and place of origin are understood and performed in Canada. The impetus for this work started with the course (Human Relations and Cross-Culturalism) I was teaching at Sheridan College. Through this work, I wanted to challenge students to acknowledge that these identity characteristics and associated cultures are not particular to me or to other racialized people because we are Black or members of racialized groups. Further, I wanted to discourage the thinking that race is the same as ethnicity and that the use of culture, race, and ethnicity are interchangeable. These practices were evident in my everyday experiences as much as in my university education (except in courses such as Race and Ethnic Relations). In fact, I found it troubling that Canadian sociologists, or social scientists generally, would carry out investigations and give consideration to (or control for) such variables as gender, region, education, occupation, family patterns, socio-economic class, and so on but not race. And in conversations about the materiality of race in people’s lives, reference is often made to the United States of America. So, this raises the question: What accounts for Canadians’ tendency to disavow the material reality of race in people’s lives? A relevant starting point for this question is to reflect on how race, and its relationship to the construction of “difference,” is positioned in Canadian culture. Indeed, “difference, with all its variances, ambiguities and discrepancies, is a fundamental aspect of our human existence. It is a reality that cannot be avoided; neither can we avoid the messy, complicated, unpredictable and contentious realities that come in our interactions with difference” (James 2000, 15). “What is Canadian culture?” is a question that I am often asked and one that I would have students contemplate. Responses to this question have included: “I thought that to have a culture a person had to be of a different racial group. Since I was born in Canada, I thought I was just Canadian.” Another was: “I am Canadian. Period! There are no special traditions or attitudes that have been passed on to me by my parents or grandparents … I have no traditional food or drink, no cultural costume.” The thinking here, then, is that one has to be “different” to have culture. This kind of thinking comes about because these students (and many other Canadians) took for granted the world around them, as Barnlund (1985) asserts, unaware of their pro-

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found relationship to the power structure and to the acquired cultural codes that regulate and govern their ideas and actions. In Seeing Ourselves: Exploring Race, Ethnicity and Culture (James 2010, 4th ed.), which I wrote with students and non-academics in mind, I try to convey the dynamism, transmutability, and borderlessness of culture, and that there is a set of norms, values, traditions. and expectations (informed by laws, regulations, policies, sanctions, and environmental/geographic conditions) by which we live as Canadians and into which immigrants and other residents are expected to integrate. So contrary to the multicultural discourse of Canada, immigrants or minoritized Canadians cannot “keep” their culture for to participate effectively in Canadian society means engaging in activities (e.g., education and employment) that will invariably precipitate changes that will ensure the stability of society even at the expense of some groups. That I seek in my work to illuminate how race functions in selfidentification, interactions, and constructs of belonging in Canadian society comes with costs or challenges (see Nakhaie, chapter 13, this volume; Srivastava, chapter 16, this volume; and Voyageur, chapter 15, this volume). For instance, my scholarship is sometimes read as “narrow” – that is, I am only skilled in talking about issues pertaining to race and racialized groups. This thinking was made evident when, in my first university job interview, a member of the Appointment Committee, referring to my scholarship on Black youth in Toronto, asked: “Don’t you think that your work on youth is rather narrow and would not apply to other youth?” I read this question, and similar questions often put to me, as an indication of the myopia that is sustained by white universalism and its race-neutral discourses. Note that I was not asked about the limits of Erik Erickson, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Friedenberg, and Rolf Muuss, whose theories I referenced along with the ethnographic and research works of Reginald Bibby, Herbert Gans, William Foote Whyte, and others as I delved into the literature about adolescence. It seemed not to be self-evident that knowledge gained from studying minoritized group members could be valuable, useful, or applicable to a larger population of youth or majority group members. This experience with myopia is not unlike another one I had in trying to include works by Indigenous, Black, and other authors in a first-year course (Education and Social Change) I was invited to coteach. Granted, I came to the course in late July after the syllabus was

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already developed; nevertheless, I sought to add to the foundational readings by Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Mead, Dewey, and Wollstonecraft other scholars, such as Du Bois, Thomas King, Dionne Brand, Allison Prentice, as well as more women and other Indigenous and racialized writers. The intent was to add a diversity of ideas to the course. The only “professor” on the team argued for the “foundational” readings to remain, and a few of the readings I suggested were included in the second semester. This compromise, however, did not, for me, convey to students the same significance of these other authors for their education. Understandably, the effort to bring awareness to the experiences of racialized and marginalized Canadians through teaching and research studies has resulted in criticisms that sometimes become personal. For instance, I have occasionally received e-mails from a former student challenging my “minority-group” perspective. In February 2014, I received an e-mail that reads in part: Your focus is calibrated to looking at the worst in people and what a sad place of existence you occupy. I truly feel sorry for you and for those within your community, students and others whose ear you have. You are seemingly the type of individual who perpetuates stereotypes and operates within the parameters of reverse racism as you instil and reinforce negative falsehoods … There are in fact “cultural” mores and values that have been deeply entrenched in Canadian society which are under constant scrutiny by people such as yourself … Anyway Carl … if you are so unhappy with “Canadians” why don’t you stop disparaging them, casting them off as racists and elitists and actually develop some self confidence in yourself to just simply “be Canadian” … perhaps if you worked as hard at this, you would feel like one rather than living within your self-imposed exile. Likewise, in responding to the news report (Toronto Star 2015) of a study I co-authored with Tana Turner about the educational and social well-being of Black youth in the Peel region of Ontario, one online comment by a “conscientious observer” reads: “The mere mention of Carl James of York University nullifies any possible credibility from the study’s findings. He is an agitator and race-baiter who has focused his entire life and career on trying to substantiate a perceived

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wrong or so-called injustice into a racially charged fact whether it has merit or not” (see Brown 2015). And in summer 2019, the Globe and Mail carried an article by Caroline Alphonso about research I conducted for the Peel District School Board on the experiences of Black students highlighting my recommendation that the board “reconsider whether texts such as To Kill a Mockingbird should continue to be taught” (Alphonso 2019). Within hours of this article’s publication I received e-mails expressing various viewpoints about the recommendation. Most noteworthy were the online comments from readers in which my race, community, and sociology were conceived as inseparable. Take, for example, the following: He should be thankful there are books like TKAMB and racism in society – he would have no career without it. Wonder whether his scholarly investigations consider how behaviours feed stereotypes? … … And sorry about the 400 years, hope you can just forget about that and move on … [Following up on above.] Precisely. Live in the past, stay stuck in the past. One would think that they were the only minority that faced injustice and discrimination. Time to move on. While I disagree with Mr. James’ position and recommendations, even a virtue-signalling professor trying desperately to remain relevant in his profession is entitled to his opinion. My recommendation regarding To Kill a Mocking Bird resulted from the qualitative study I conducted with focus group participants of all grade levels in May 2018. In all the sessions, participants complained of the persistent use of the “n-word” by their peers to taunt and hurt them – and of the trouble they sometimes would get into because of their responses. Furthermore, in the fall of that year, there was considerable media coverage of the efficacy of using To Kill a Mockingbird in schools (Teotonio and Yang 2018). Taking into account the number of times the word “nigger” appears in the book and the possible impact that might have on some Black students, following discussions with the board’s research staff, the recommendation was made. In the many appearances in media programs to which I was invited, I tried to make the point that, in using any teaching materials, consideration

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must be given to the social and cultural contexts and readers’ or students’ relationship with the text. In other words, notwithstanding that To Kill a Mockingbird is considered a “classic” of the English literary cannon, like every other teaching material, it must be critically and continuously assessed in relation to the social and educational contexts, and with regard to the backgrounds of all students we wish to engage in the teaching-learning process. This exercise, I argue, is not about banning books, or the whiteness of authors, but about creating a hospitable learning environment for Black students that takes into account their lived realities. In my work with school boards I have advocated for the collection of data – including data on race. In fact, I contend that all institutions and agencies, including police services, social services, and businesses should collect data on race – not just the aggregate “visible minority” data. My suggestion is premised on the assumption that if we are to address the experiences, concerns, and issues with which racialized community members and youth are confronted, then we need the evidence that disaggregated race data can provide. However, I am well aware that having data does not necessarily mean that they will be used to address the concerns of racialized people. And there are cases where, because the research does not confirm the desired sentiment, the bias of the researcher is called into question. An example of this occurred after I submitted a research report on the experiences of Black youth in which, in a postscript, I noted possible factors that needed to be addressed if the institution’s programs for them were to be more effective. Dissatisfied with my suggestions, senior leaders of the organization – including the researcher – asked that the postscript be removed because “it had nothing to do with the research.” Of course, I disagreed, but it was clear from the discussion that they saw what I had written as a result of my advocacy rather than of my being an “objective” researcher. While it seems logical that racialized community members, and Black Canadians in particular, would see the value of this practice, some of the most impassioned challenges to this idea come from Black community members, particularly those, for instance, who believe that, within a racist system, reports on Black youth’s nefarious educational situation and involvement in the justice system would lead to their further stereotyping, stigmatization, and/or marginalization. They stressed that, in the absence of knowledgeable experts to interpret the data, institutions could use the differences between the

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various groups to reinforce the idea that racism was not the issue but, rather, cultural practices, attitudes, and lack of discipline among group members. The fear among community members is having groups pitted against each other. Despite these concerns, in October 2016 I disaggregated data from the Toronto District School Board. I disaggregated the data for Black students – identifying Jamaicans, Other English Caribbean, Somali, Other East Africans, West Africans, and Others. My argument to an advisory group of community members that I brought together, and to other community members, is that we cannot afford to encourage the racism of homogenization to prevent us from obtaining data that will address the issues and concerns of community members. “Our community,” like all others, is diverse, and hence we must support research that provides disaggregated data pertaining to the Black and other racialized populations in order to ensure equitable treatment related to the specific circumstances of regional or ethnic groups that make up our Black communities. Doing otherwise would contribute to the colonial and racist approach of sameness among Black and other minoritized populations. E N G AG I N G W I T H ST U D E N T S : DIALOGICAL , INTERACTIVE , AND TEACHER - AS - RESEARCHER PEDAGOGIES

Nowhere is my biography and sociological reasoning more scrutinized than in the classroom. For some people, I seem to have become a sociological subject of study – even longitudinally – the point apparently being to ascertain the cultural, social, political, and intellectual changes I have undergone. I recall in my earlier years of teaching going into classes and, after introducing myself – specifically telling of my educational and professional background in relation to the course – and passing out the course outline, the first question I would be asked would be: “Where are you from?” Sometimes the question would be: “Are you from Jamaica?” I would not answer the question. On the occasions when I would answer, my response would be: “I am from the Caribbean.” On other occasions, I would ask for a justification: “Why the question?” – reckoning that such an exchange would help me to engage students in some analysis of the cultural context in which we are operating with the hope that they would come to understand what led them to construct me

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as a particular sociological subject. Often they would respond: “Because you have an accent.” While the questions might have been a way to “get to know their teacher” and to build a relationship with me, it nevertheless signals how race and other identity characteristics operate in our interactions. The fact is, it is not simply my “accent” (which is obviously now Canadian). But in our Canadian context a combination of accent and race is used to construct me as “different.” I am well aware that for students to engage fully and productively in the learning-teaching process, they will have to get past my skin colour, accent, and immigrant identification, and come to accept my educational qualifications and status as an instructor. This would require, to the extent possible, setting aside the stereotypes and/or limited knowledge they might have of a Black person. I say this, having received comments like the following from students: [Carl’s] black skin “surprised” me … [and] his accent annoyed me. The idea of having a Black teacher quite intrigued me, but having to cope with a poorly educated black teacher seemed to be asking a lot … I was surprised when I later found out that Carl has a PhD in sociology. Somehow that did not fit my stereotype of a Black person especially from the Caribbean. (However, I could picture an American Black person having a doctorate) … Carl was very dark and black and I have had problems with dark black people in the past. (in James 2001a, 151) I am now sure that if a white man had stood there and talked about immigration to Canada and how non-whites were discriminated against I would have taken it much differently. I found myself saying that both his writing and teaching were clearly taken from a black person’s point of view and I wanted him to be more objective. Could this … really mean that I wanted him to be white? (in James 2001a, 157) Many students also frequently made a relationship between my racial identity and the courses that I am qualified to teach. Many assumed that courses that deal with race and ethnic relations, minority issues, urban education, culture, and equity would be “up my alley” – not merely because of my sociological expertise but because of identity and assumed self-interest. Some even thought that I was

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“an equity hire” – someone who obtained the job without the relevant qualifications. In the case of Black and other racialized students, my presence in the classroom was a welcomed opportunity for them to engage with someone with whom they could identify. For some, I was their first Black teacher, and, like their white peers, they felt “unsure of how to react” towards me; others felt positive and comfortable; and some made public how they were different from me. There were those students who said that my presence in the classroom made them feel validated within post-secondary educational spaces. In the words of one student: “I suppose I felt a sense of pride and belonging because for once the person in charge was just like me.” And, while some Black students expected to receive “special treatment,” others were ambivalent about what to expect, and still others maintained a distance, having observed how my interactions with them were being scrutinized by their peers (James 2001a, 162). Much of the feedback I received from students had to do with my dialogical or interactive pedagogical approach. Such an approach provides space for active class participation and for students to contribute to their own and others’ learning (including mine as facilitator) based on their experiences and expectations. In the tradition of social interactionist theory, a dialogical approach enables students to bring to the learning-teaching processes their lived experiences, which inform the subjective interpretations they employ in their analyses of the social contexts, events, behaviours, social interactions, and society generally. So, just as in an ethnographic or qualitative interview, hearing from students about their experiences and what they believe and value not only helped me to build a rapport with them but also provided insights – especially in a cross-cultural situation – into their conceptual framework, contextual references, sociological questions (all subjective), and possible readiness to engage with what might be considered evidenced-based facts. This approach proved to be beneficial in my early years in the Teacher Training Department at Uppsala University in Sweden (James 2001b), where I was invited in 1997 to work with student-teachers and teachers on handling the cultural diversity in their classroom. Basically, my teacher-as-researcher approach (Anderson et al. 1994) enabled me to gain an awareness of the class participants beyond my experiences with Swedes in Tanzania, where we interacted as foreign workers – an experience that served me well in the early years.8

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In facilitating the education of students, I am mindful of their learning needs, interests, and readiness to accept new information that might challenge long-held beliefs about themselves, their communities, and/or the world around them. And, of course, it might be years after working with students that they come to appreciate what they might have learned, or it might be years before I hear from them about what the class they took with me meant to them. An example of this thinking materialized in 2016 when I received an e-mail with an attachment, the subject line saying “check out the preamble” and a note that read: “Hi Carl, Thanks for everything. Sorry for the poetic license. I guess in the end, I told it the way I heard it. Anyway, thanks. Craig.” The attachment was his thesis, titled “From Where Do We Teach?” (Stevens 2016). In the preamble, Craig recounted the first week of his bachelor of education program when he met professors and fellow students, and was handed reading lists and course outlines and assessment schedules. “Everything was as I expected,” he said, “until I met the professor of EDUC 3400: Models of Education.” And he recalled that, in the first class, I asked them “to get into small groups and put together a reading list, a draft outline, and some ideas about how you want to be assessed, etc.” The expectation was that everyone would contribute to the development of a course outline. Craig recalls that most of them “looked blankly at each other … somewhat uncomfortably, got into groups and started talking.” He then added: “No one in my group could think of one book about education that they wanted to read. I had wanted to be a teacher since I was 12 and I could not think of one educational theorist to add to our non-existent reading list. Nothing really got done in that first class. Everyone was very frustrated.” Early in the class the following week, a “frustrated student,” as Craig described her, said: “I paid over 10,000 dollars for this program. It is not my job to make a reading list and a course outline. It is not my job to figure out how I will be assessed. That is your job.” In response, Craig quotes me as saying to a “quiet” room: The hardest way to teach is to teach from a stance of genuine democracy. Asking students what they want to learn, how they want to learn, how they learn best, and how they would like to show what they have learned, is always very difficult. The easiest way to teach, the most convenient, is to tell students what to do. The easiest thing I could have done is to come in the first day, give

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you all a list of books and articles that I have read, ask you to read them, tell you to tell me what I already know about them, and congratulate you for regurgitating predetermined knowledge. Noting that, in the course, he “met Paulo Freire” through Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as well as Giroux, McLaren, hooks, and others. He went on to say: In many ways, what I learned in that course framed not only my career as a teacher but also my life as a learner … My hope is that the questions I have asked and the teaching positions I have discussed through this thesis might have the same effect on one teacher that my professor’s teaching position had on me; if that happens, there can be an exponential ripple through the citizenry as hundreds of students are offered opportunities to create their own learning experiences, to name themselves and their world, to recognize and seek alternatives to systemic inequity and marginalization, and to be active in transforming their society in socially just directions. Similarly, in November 2018, Jeff, another student who took a class with me in 2000–01 and from whom I have periodically heard, emailed to say “Hi” (subject line of the e-mail) and went on to say: “Long time, no chat! I was talking about teacher’s college with my student teacher … this week, and I got to thinking about your class … I was telling him about how much I enjoyed your class and your approach, but mostly how much you were sincerely interested in what your students had to say.” Further, late one afternoon in spring 2019, I received an e-mail from Roger, another former student, that said: “I got some good news today – a letter stating that I’ve been granted tenure. These kinds of moments always give me pause for reflection … I just want to convey my thanks. This path would not have been possible if not for you.” THE CONTEXT IN WHICH I WORK : STILL PURSUING ADVOCACY WORK IN EQUIT Y

I recall that in a conversation with two racialized female colleagues who teach at two other Canadian universities one shared that she was once asked by a colleague, “You know why you were hired, don’t you?” We all admitted that we were not surprised that a faculty member

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would voice what often goes unsaid. And, as I wrote with reference to this occurrence: “This is the context in which we work and the expectations with which we have to live if we are to remain in the institution. Indeed, said or unsaid, many racialized faculty know too well these expectations, and for the most part, make every effort to live up to them, sometimes at the cost of personal and scholarly interests and advancement” (James, in Henry et al. 2017, 155). In many institutions, racialized bodies (women, Indigenous people, and people with disabilities) are read as limited in that we are skilled only to teach, talk, and/or write about subjects related to “race” and minority issues or we are qualified only for particular disciplines. Many racialized faculty members try to distance ourselves from settings, perspectives, or scholarships that mark us as imposters. And there are those of us who work to dislodge the notion that equity programs bring less capable or less qualified scholars onto university campuses. We believe that such programs serve the interests of everyone in that they provide students and the university community with a diverse group of faculty members whose lived experiences and varied perspectives contribute to learning that is essential to living in today’s ever-changing globalized world. Convinced of this significance of equity, and knowing that racialized group members, especially Black people, are underrepresented in universities, and at the administrative levels, it is fitting and useful for me to examine the context within which I work. The fact is, in the absence of race data within institutions, and with the use of the aggregate “visible minority” data in employment equity programs, interand intragroup differences and realities are obfuscated, thereby contributing to the lack of representation of some groups within the academy. Stated differently, the assumption behind this single “visible minority” category is that individuals within this group tend to have similar experiences. It is a problematic assumption that negates the heterogeneity of Canadians of African, Asian, and South Asian descent, among others, who are considered “visible minorities” by the employment equity legislation. Between 2010 and 2016, I worked with colleagues on a national study, Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.9 I brought to this project my experience from some two decades of work on several equity committees at York University, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the Canadian Sociological Association, and the Royal Society of Canada. During this time, I have twice held the posi-

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tion of affirmative action officer at York University (2003–06, 2016–20). Our study indicated that Employment Equity has failed to bring about the necessary representation in today’s institutions and to help create a welcoming, hospitable, and accepting environment for racialized scholars (Henry et al. 2017). This likely has to do with the fact that compliance is voluntary rather than mandatory and, hence, an ineffective enforcement mechanism. I wonder, therefore, if affirmative action with compliance penalties – what Marjorie Cohen deemed “too strong and politically dangerous to use” – would be a more effective component of Employment Equity programs. Indeed, as Cohen (1985, 23) said when Employment Equity was introduced, “the market mechanisms which control the work people do,” their salary and the congeniality of the environment within which they work, “will never, by themselves bring about conditions of equality”; nor is it sufficient to make “specific acts of discrimination illegal.” The focus on discrimination has tended to be on individuals’ actions and not the institutional and societal structures that are responsible for the policies, regulations, and legislations that inform/influence individuals’ practices. Based on my experiences and research within post-secondary institutions, I contend that there is a need for “whole institution” equity and inclusivity programs that promote recognition of how racialized faculty members advance the scholarship and reputation of institutions; bring innovative pedagogical approaches to teaching and research; enhance academic programming and administrative efficiency; augment epistemological and ontological contributions; assist in student recruitment, engagement, and retention; and contribute to the building of university-community partnerships. Indeed, universities stand to benefit substantially from a diverse faculty. And the presence of racialized faculty members demonstrates to the Canadian public the universities’ responsiveness to the educational and research needs, interests, and aspirations of all Canadians – a truly important commitment to marginalized people whose tax dollars finance these institutions. SO , WHAT HAVE I DONE WITH SOCIOLOGY ?

When speaking about “race” in education, many of us have been faced with the question “What about class/gender/sexuality/disability/faith?” whereas rarely are speakers on these topics ever asked, “What about ‘race?’” A focus on “race” in analysis is indicative, for some academics, of a sign of pathology or suspicion (Preston and Bhopal 2012, 214).

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Sociology has enabled me, over the years, to understand, interpret, and explain my own lived experiences and circumstances, the world around me, and the people and communities I have studied. My early questions pertaining to the integration and accommodation of Black immigrant youth established my foundation in sociology and spawned works on Black and other racialized youth, immigrant settlement, Canadian culture, schooling and education, community dynamics, equity and social difference, and urban and suburbanization. So, to Kevin who posed the question many years ago, I would say that I have used sociology satisfactorily in the interest of members of Black and racialized communities and Canadian society as a whole. Indeed, as a friend (Zoila Airall) pointed out to me: “We cannot understand things from a distance, we have to get close.” The opportunity to “get close” and study the situation of racialized members of society has led to an understanding of how societal and institutional structures operate to produce the circumstances in which we find ourselves and, as a consequence, the cultural processes that underlie how we exercise agency through our interactions with individuals and societal structures. The counter-narratives that have been produced serve to facilitate the voices of those of us who would otherwise not be heard in our bid to challenge the misrepresentation and takenfor-granted truths about our lives and experiences – herein lies the value, as Kevin should appreciate, of the sociology scholar. Furthermore, as the popular African proverb says, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” I take this theory to mean: until a community has its own sociologists, the story about the community will always be told from an outsider’s perspective. NOTES 1 Noting that the term is “problematic, arbitrary and imprecise,” Driedger and Halli (2004) go on to say that visibility “is in the eye of the beholder” and that the people to whom the issues of race and racism apply are not necessarily visible. In March 2007, the United Nations anti-racism watchdog, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, asked Canada to reflect on its use of the term “visible minority” as it could be deemed racist and might contravene “an international treaty aimed at eliminating racism.” Visible minorities, the committee suggested, “may not be in accordance with the aims and objectives of … the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination” (CBC News 2007).

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2 Writing about the lives, hopes, well-being and activism of African Canadians, my colleagues and I stated, “A sense of hope, rooted in an understanding of the history of Black people, continues to sustain those who are Black and offers a buffer against the wounds and pain of racism” (James et al. 2010, 28). 3 A significant number of Black Caribbean people immigrated to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s with 1971 to 1975 being the peak years. Most of the immigrants were women who had come earlier as domestics and were joined during the peak years by their children, male partners, and other family members (Head and Lee 1975; Johnson 2012; Kitossa 2012). 4 The community has since been gentrified with high-rise condominiums that the families with whom I worked cannot afford. Most of the earlier residents have since moved out of the neighbourhood to other low-income communities, and some have moved to the suburbs, where that were able to buy affordable houses. 5 Ostensibly, the clashes at the community centre were similar to those taking place at the time in communities, schools, and other institutions in the Toronto area as racialized bodies considered to be newcomers or “foreigners” (Black people in this instance) were perceived to be “invading” the spaces of “Canadians.” 6 There was also the “advanced” level program that led to university. Very few of the youth – more females than males – were in this program. 7 Portions of this paragraph and the next were taken from the introduction to the book (James 2005, 4–6). 8 In my seventeen years of teaching this course for two to three weeks every spring (1997–2014), I was able to connect with many class participants and some Swedish teachers by using experiences I had gained while working in Tanzania. 9 Frances Henry (emerita), Enakshi Dua (the initiator), and I are at York University; Audrey Kobayashi is at Queen’s University; Malinda Smith is at the University of Alberta; Howard Ramos is at Dalhousie University; and Peter Li (emeritus) is at the University of Saskatchewan. REFERENCES Alphonso, Caroline. 2019. “York University Professor Asks Peel Board to Consider Not Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird.” Globe and Mail, 10 July. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/canada/toronto/article-yorkuniversity-professor-asks-peel-school-board-to-reconsider/. Anderson, Gary L., Kathryn Herr, and Ann Sigrid Nihlen. 1994. Studying

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Our Own School: An Educator’s Guide to Qualitative Practitioner Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Anisef, Paul, Paul Axelrod, Etta Baichman-Anisef, Carl E. James, and Anton Turrittin. 2000. Opportunity and Uncertainty: Life Course Experiences of the Class of ’73. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barnlund, Dean C. 1985. “Communication in a Global Village.” In Intercultural Communication: A Reader, ed. Larry A. Samovar and Richard E. Porter, 5–14. New York: Wadsworth. Baszile, Denise Taliaferro. 2008. “Beyond All Reason Indeed: The Pedagogical Promise of Critical Race Testimony.” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 11 (3): 251–65. Berger, Peter. 2011. Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World without Becoming a Bore. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Brown, Louise. 2015. “Peel Region No Haven for Black Youth Struggling with Racism and Alienation.” Toronto Star, 10 May. https://www.thestar .com/news/gta/2015/05/10/peel-region-no-haven-for-black-youthstruggling-with-racism-and-alienation.html. CBC News. 2007. “Term ‘Visible Minorities’ may be Discriminatory, UN body warns Canada.” 8 March. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/term-visibleminorities-may-be-discriminatory-un-body-warns-canada-1.690247. Chiang, Chih-Yun. 2010. “Diasporic Theorizing Paradigm on Cultural Identity.” Intercultural Communications Studies 19 (1): 29–45. Cohen, Marjorie. 1985. “Employment Equity is NOT Affirmative Action.” Canadian Woman’s Studies 6 (4): 23–5. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stafancic. 2012. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Driedger, Leo, and Shiva Halli. 2004. Race and Racism: Canada’s Challenge. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1996 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folks. New York: Penguin Books. Freire, Paulo. 1994. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gillborn, David. 2015. “Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the Primacy of Racism: Race, Class, Gender, and Disability in Education.” Qualitative Inquiry 21 (3): 277–87. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14. Head, Wilson A., and Jeri Lee. 1975. The Black Presence in the Canadian Mosaic. Toronto: Ontario Human Rights Commission.

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Henry, Frances, Enakshi Dua, Carl E. James, Audrey Kobayashi, Peter Li, Howard Ramos, and Malinda S. Smith. 2017. The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities. Vancouver: UBC Press. James, Carl E. 1990. Making It: Black Youth, Racism and Career Aspirations in a Big City. Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press. – 1993. “Getting There and Staying There: Blacks’ Employment Experiences.” In Transition: Schooling and Employment in Canadian Society, ed. Paul Axelrod and Paul Anisef, 3–20. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing. – 2001a. “‘I’ve Never had a Black Teacher Before.’” In Talking about Identity: Encounters in Race, Ethnicity and Language, ed. Carl E. James and Adrianne Shadd, 150–67. Toronto: Between the Lines. – 2001b. “Making Teaching Relevant: Toward an Understanding of Students’ Experiences in a Culturally ‘Different’ Sweden.” Pedagogy, Culture and Society 9 (3): 407–26. – 2005. Race in Play: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Worlds of Student Athletes. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. – 2010. Seeing Ourselves: Exploring Race, Ethnicity and Culture. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing. – 2012. Life at the Intersection: Community, Class and Schooling. Halifax: Fernwood Educational Publishing. – 2018. “Race, Racialization and Canadian Children of Immigrant Parents.” In Immigrant Youth in Canada, ed. Stacey Wilson-Forsberg and Andrew M. Robinson, 33–48. Toronto: Oxford University Press. James, Carl E., Wanda Thomas Bernard, David Este, Bethan Lloyd, and Tana Turner. 2010. Race and Well-Being: The Lives, Hopes and Activism of African Canadians. Halifax: Fernwood. Johnson, Michele A. 2012. “‘To Ensure That Only Suitable Persons Are Sent’: Screening Jamaican Women for the West Indian Domestic Scheme.” In Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence, ed. Carl E. James and Andrea Davis, 36–53. Halifax: Fernwood. Kitossa, Tamari. 2012. “Odyssey Home to a Place Within: An Autobiography of One of Jamaica’s ‘Lost Children.’” In Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence, ed. Carl E. James and Andrea Davis, 54–66. Halifax: Fernwood. Lewis, Magda. 2005. “More Than Meets the Eye: The Underside of the Corporate Culture of Higher Education and Possibilities for a New Feminist Critique.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 21 (1): 7–24. Lobban, Glenys. 2013. “The Immigrant Analyst: A Journey from Double

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Consciousness toward Hybridity.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 23 (5): 554–67. McDermott, Ray, and Hervé Varenne. 2006. “Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research.” In Innovations in Educational Ethnography, ed. George Spindler and Lorie Hammond, 3–31. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. National Film Board. 2006. Making It. https://www.nfb.ca/film/making_it/. Preston, John, and Kalwant Bhopal. 2012. “Conclusion: Intersectional Theories and ‘Race’: From Toolkit to ‘Mash-Up.’” In Intersectionality and “Race” in Education, ed. Kalwant Bhopal and John Preston, 213–20. London: Routledge. Reyes, Blackmer Kathryn, and Julia E. Curry Rodriguez. 2012. “Testimonio: Origins, Terms, and Resources.” Equity and Excellence in Education 45 (3): 525–38. Roth, John. 1973. West Indians in Toronto: The Student and the School. Toronto: York Board of Education. Schreiber, Jan Edward. 1970. In the Course of Discovery: West Indian Immigrants in Toronto Schools. Toronto: Toronto Board of Education. Stevens, Craig. 2016. “From Where Do We Teach? Potential Positions in Public Education.” MA thesis, Queen’s University. Stewart, Anne-Marie. 1975. See Me Yah: Working Papers on the Newly Arrived West Indian Child in the Downtown School. Toronto: Toronto Board of Education. Teotonio, Isabel, and Jennifer Yang. 2018. “Shakespeare Play Meant to Challenge Hatred Ignites a Firestorm.” Toronto Star, 1 November. https://www .thestar.com/news/gta/2018/10/31/play-meant-to-challenge-hatred-ignitesa-firestorm.html. Tilley, Susan A. 2016. Doing Respectful Research: Power, Privilege and Passion. Halifax: Fernwood. Williams, Patricia J. 1991. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wright, Richard. 1966. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper and Row.

The Backstory

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18 On Becoming a Professional Stranger Will C. van den Hoonaard

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS

The signs of my marginality in Dutch and Canadian society are all too compelling: born in the Netherlands as the son of a German soldier (a lance corporal, private first class); spending time in a post-Second World War hospital recovering from malnutrition; living as a child in a limestone cave in Normandy, France; and not finishing high school. During the many years following that time, I was unfocused in my life as I worked through a number of short-term jobs in The Hague: temporary bank clerk-in-training, typist at a Netherlands patent office, receptionist at the International Patent Institute, water-metre clerk, and an assistant cartographic editor for a European map-making firm. By the time I was thirty-two years old, my parents and I had lived in twenty-seven different locations, moving almost every year. I was a stranger in my own life. I should have realized that these circumstances fated me to abandon my status as “amateur” stranger to become a professional stranger (Agar 1980) in the form of an anthropologist. Never really part of any community they study, anthropologists pose as strangers by their own choice and calling. This approach stands far apart from some contemporary forms of research that call for closer, more personal relationships with research participants in research settings. The various jobs I held made me realize that life proceeds more on the basis of chance than choice. Many years later, I could not commit myself to using an otherwise good textbook, Choices and Chances: Sociology for Everyday Life (Tepperman 1988), just because of its title. All

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my experiences told me that it was chance that defines the character of life. What role, then, does chance play in the life of an ethnographer? Plenty. Although this autobiography focuses on my experiences as an ethnographer, one could say, too, that I am a restless generalist taking on a variety of topics all within the ambit of sociology: social cartography (e.g., van den Hoonaard 2013), marine-resource management, race and ethnic relations, research ethics, crime in Iceland, and so on. SUBARCTIC CLIMES

I was twenty-four when I immigrated to Canada for the second time – a place where I had earlier lived as a child until a terrifying car accident at midnight between Waldheim and Saskatoon killed my stepfather in 1955. I was then twelve years old. Our family returned to Holland. However, without expecting to continue my education and without any noticeable skills, I returned to Canada in 1966, making my way as an unskilled worker to Canada’s subarctic region, where I started work as a sampler in a gold mine. For the purpose of grade control, I would take samples of exposed surfaces in the mine and bring them to the surface for assessment. My daily routine in the gold mine covered the levels between 229 to 533 metres below the surface. I had to manoeuvre going down long, swinging ladders into total darkness except for the light mounted on my helmet as I moved from one level down to the next. I recall dragging a huge encyclopaedia set with me to the North, enamoured as I was with learning. Open to new experience (and wanting the first “diploma” in my life), I obtained a driver’s licence by learning to drive and double clutch a five-hundred-gallon fire truck on the mine site. I also ran the projector at the gold-mine’s recreation hall every Wednesday. It was a bonus to have close contact with the Dogrib people near the gold mine because they provided friendship and hospitality. That connection awakened in me a sense of kinship due to the fact that both of us were on the margins of Canadian society, but it also provided an easy atmosphere within which I could hope to unwind my prejudices. Meeting with Ina Mae Brown, a grand-daughter of Chief Sitting Bull, consolidated my wish to get to know the history and lives of First Nations peoples. I realized that if I had the opportunity to go to university, I would study anthropology.

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The limitations of one’s personal background can be exaggerated. My grandmother did not allow my mother (Petronella Adriana Putters, born in 1909) to go to school after age eleven because she thought that her own schooling until the age of eleven had served her well. So why would my mother need more education than she did? Still, my mother acquired a great love of reading, and the library became her second home. A devoted socialist, Petra taught herself Esperanto. She marched in the annual May Day Parades and participated in the one sport that Dutch socialists were noted for: gymnastics. For her strength, she was known as “Lady Samson.” INDEBTEDNESS TO THE BAHÁ ’ Í FAITH AND TO CANADA ’ S FIRST NATIONS

It seems odd for a contemporary sociologist to attribute his education to a religious faith. The Bahá’í faith has played a key role in both my personal and academic life. Introduced to the faith through a coworker in The Hague, I was immediately attracted to its teachings: the oneness of humanity, the universal need for education, the equality of women and men, and the elimination of racism. Growing up in a socialist environment, I had been inclined to disavow religion because of its apparent divisive character. I learned that Bahá’u’lláh (1817–92), the founder of the Bahá’í faith, had declared that when two people argue about religion they are both wrong. Later on, I was touched by the Bahá’í emphasis on everyone needing an education. That teaching was an essential antidote for someone like me, who had to quit high school for “not being smart enough.” The other Bahá’í teachings on the need to promote racial harmony, world peace, and economic equality provided me with enough of a stimulus to follow through with my education. I never returned to high school, but I found a way of entering university based on my six or seven years of work experience. I was twenty-five when I entered the University of New Brunswick. Marginality and my diverse and rich experiences in life influenced my stance in nearly everything I undertook to study in sociology and would later define part of the scope, nature, and methodology of my sociological approaches. This stance became evident early in my undergraduate linguistic work, which involved assisting with the writing of a grammar of the Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik) language, spoken by

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fifteen hundred First Nations people in New Brunswick. My close contact with the Maliseet permitted me, in 1969, to organize an association called Action Corps, allowing sixty university students to help First Nations children do their homework three times a week in several homes on the Kingsclear Reserve near Fredericton. When I heard that a retired New York physicist named Jan Janus and his wife Jeanne wanted to visit First Nations reserves, I introduced them to my First Nations friends. Jan Janus was the co-inventor of the neon light. Little did I realize that the Januses would later mention my name to the permanent representative of the Bahá’í International Community to the United Nations in New York, who was looking for an alternate representative to the United Nations. The contact would later lead me to a position at the Bahá’í International Community. Again, the role of chance permeated so much of the course of my life. With the successful completion of my undergraduate work in sociology and linguistic anthropology, I was awarded a 1970 Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. This generous American fellowship promoting leadership in scholarship, business, and the arts was a vortex that yearly received twelve thousand student applicants. Only 150 were selected. My anthropological/sociological interests began to expand. I knew I could be accepted into the MA program at Harvard University by virtue of this fellowship alone, but I was too timid to go there and instead opted to go to Memorial University of Newfoundland (as it was then called). ICELAND

When I was an undergraduate at the University of New Brunswick, Raoul R. Andersen, one of the founders of marine anthropology, walked past my office and we chatted. I mentioned that I had been interested in Iceland since I was a child and that I hoped Memorial University would give me the means to go there. I had selected Iceland because I realized that many ethnographic studies had focused on the Pacific, and I wanted to create something new – that is, the first sociological study of Iceland. Andersen nicely fit the bill as my MA supervisor. This part of my life as an anthropology fieldworker could well be mistaken for an early episode of the TV show Survival. In brief: skip your graduation ceremonies; fly to Iceland with a grant but without any knowledge of the Icelandic language and Iceland itself; if you manage to live in a village for eight months, emerge with ten kilo-

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grams of field notes, and produce a thesis; receive your degree. My thesis was sociological in topic but anthropological in its use of field methods. I arrived at Memorial University in May 1970, only to whisk myself off to Iceland within days. When I arrived in Iceland, I was the only social researcher in the country collecting information through ethnography. In June, two more arrived. A sociology professor from Nevada claimed all of Iceland as his territory of investigation; and a PhD student from Pennsylvania claimed a regional centre as “his.” It is probably no wonder that I, as an MA student, had chosen a small fishing village of five hundred people, many of whom must have seen me as a British spy just as their territorial waters were expanding from five to nineteen kilometres. The three of us barely exchanged our insights, and it was up to me as the researcher with the lowest status to initiate contact with the other two. I do recall my arrival at Keflavik International Airport and being greeted by a lava landscape that resembled the moon. After the bus ride to the capital city, I soon found a room at City Hotel in Reykjavik. I frequented one of the very few eateries in the city, trying to sort out the food with the help of a menu completely in Icelandic. I sorted out my meal of small potatoes, cold peas from the can, and some fish, followed by skýr, a yoghurt. I stood up to eat my meal at a raised counter – there were no tables. I looked up into the wall mirrors. I was transfixed by how the stark neon light of the place made my face look blotchy. Mirrors highlight imperfections. Turning away from the mirror and then towards the street, I witnessed grand sweeps of horizontal rain that would render umbrellas immediately irrelevant. Where am I? What am I doing here? What was I thinking? It did not take me very long to discover a theologian, Björn B. Björnsson. Earning a PhD in sociology from Edinburgh University, he had studied patterns of unmarried cohabitation in Iceland. There was also an agricultural economist, Björn Stefánsson, who had a passing knowledge of sociology but was intimately familiar with the conditions of Icelandic communities – something I had intended to study. Following his advice, I took up learning Icelandic in a two-week private crash course with an Icelandic student. The term “crash” seemed quite appropriate. Not very long into the lessons, I realized that the study of Icelandic would require more than just a passing acquaintance. I began to worry. Surely, the research funders would want me to stay in Iceland, but they would expect me to

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know Icelandic. By this time, I had moved out of City Hotel and into the living room of a family. I recall one night having a dream in which I was visiting a village where the residents spoke Icelandic. I understood everything and I even recall speaking Icelandic. When I awoke from this dream at sunrise, my host walked into the room and I repeated what I had said in Icelandic in my dream. He exclaimed, “You speak Icelandic!” As soon as he had uttered those words, the Icelandic escaped me, but I knew that I was fated to do field research in Iceland. Within two weeks, the agricultural economist put me on a regional bus. He told me that I should step out of the bus after a two-hour trip and that I would be left in a fishing village in southern Iceland. He would call the chairman of the village ahead of time. The bus stopped and as the doors opened I was greeted by the chairman and another bout of horizontal rain. My fieldwork had begun. My exploratory stay in Iceland lasted until August 1970. That stay became my actual research period, in which I collected data on a topic that was yet to be determined. In the end, my study was about local-state relations as expressed in the life of the village. In the fall of 1970, I returned to Memorial University, but in February 1971 Robert Paine, the noted anthropologist of the Saami, told me that if I wanted to get the true ethnographic flavour of life in Iceland, I should promptly return to that country. Within a week, I left, not finishing my courses. From February to August 1971, I stayed again in that distant country and I realized that being a professional stranger became a lot more challenging after the initial excitement had worn off. Thus, I returned to the same village – the very place from which Bjarni Herjúlfsson sailed to Greenland and Vinland (now Newfoundland) in 986. It was an unimaginably lonely place. For me, being “lonely” and “alone” were synonymous. I would flee to the capital to escape the loneliness; in the capital, I could not stand the respite from fieldwork. It was unsettling. However, even with all these struggles, I saw myself as a fieldworker, and this was important to me. The weather and climes were gruesome, and xenophobia (or was it shyness?) pervaded the setting. A few kind people took me under their wings – no one spoke English (or Maliseet, for that matter), with the exception of my fifteen-year-old research assistant who later, as an adult, rose to the prominent position of executive director of the Association of Icelandic Local Communities. One of my interview participants was an author who featured my research as part of the plot of his new novel,

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Járnblómið (Daníelsson 1972). In September I returned to Memorial University, where I joined my peers in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology – some thirty graduate students in the “huts,” temporary buildings where the Queen Elizabeth II Library now stands. I threw myself into the courses I had not finished. I lived in a fourbedroom home in St John’s, with as many people as could be crammed into it – including the Newfoundland family who owned the place. I think there were fourteen or fifteen of us. I finished writing my thesis by May 1972. My fellow students were doing quite innovative field research. Few of us, I recall, had formal thesis proposals. I certainly didn’t. One went out into the field for one or two years and concentrated on collecting field observations and other information through inductive-style research. RETURN TO ICELAND

Anthony P. Cohen persuaded me to go to the University of Manchester, where I would be under his tutelage as my PhD supervisor. I met him at the St John’s airport when I was due to leave for a three-month sojourn in East Africa. Cohen saw himself as either a sociologist or a social anthropologist. The 1970s opened up an era in both disciplines in which there was growing interest in taking to the international field. At first glance, both disciplines began to look quite similar. At Manchester University, my personal contact with Peter Worsley, the first Western sociologist to have visited the People’s Republic of China, further rekindled my interest in doing fieldwork. He had just authored The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia. Max Gluckman, a towering social anthropologist respected for his research on “tribal Africa” and best known as the founder of the Manchester School of Anthropology, was often seen in the faculty lounge. In 1973, I returned to Iceland with the intention of conducting fieldwork in the same village, this time for my PhD. But the surprising Icelandic novel that my stay in Eyrarbakki had provoked made my re-entry into the village impossible. I appeared in that novel as a character named “Brúsi frá Lóni.” I now imagine that some may have blamed me for exposing their village in that book, even though the accounts were fictional. Someone later told me that many did not care one way or the other. This led me to study another fishing village. It faced eastern Greenland, some 241 kilometres away. My study dealt with how (shrimp)

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fishers and marine biologists related to one another; in other words, it was a study about the contrast between “ethno-science” and “deskscience.” I would call these fishers “reluctant pioneers” because of the new way in which they managed their marine resources (van den Hoonaard 1992). Their particular quota system for harvesting shrimp was among the first of its kind in the world. Initially, not knowing where to start in this town of some three thousand people, I settled into a local coffee shop where I could observe the locals traversing the streets. Looking for ways to make good use of observational skills, I made notes of how long it took people to walk from block to block. One person stood out as he was walking faster than anyone else. I relied on my gut feeling that I should meet him. I followed him to his apartment, knocked on his door, and announced that I was a sociologist. Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson’s face lit up because, as the new principal at the high school, he had been trying to find a sociologist to teach a class in sociology. I was hired. My entry into the town was secured. Both he and his wife, Bryndis Schram, showed exceptional hospitality. “Jón B.” (as he is known) was the head of Iceland’s Socialist Party. Hannibalsson (2002) mentions our encounter in his memoir, and we have stayed friends since 1973. ETHNOGRAPHY

Both anthropology and sociology stimulated in me a deep interest in doing ethnographic fieldwork. From the sociological side, I must pay tribute to Nels Anderson, one of my professors at the University of New Brunswick and one of the earliest sociologists to have completed a study within the context of the so-called Chicago School. He cultivated in me a sense of ethnography. In anthropology, it was Memorial University’s George Park who cultivated my thirst for doing ethnographic research. George was the grandson of Robert Park of the Chicago School and the nephew of the famed University of Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield, the noted ethno-linguist and pioneering cultural anthropologist who studied peasant society. What is so striking about ethnography over the past thirty years is its shifting focus from its positivist phase in the 1960s and early 1970s to postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s and now to the possibility of a neo-positivist phase. “Thick description,” a concept introduced by Clifford Geertz (1973) to indicate how ethnographers made sense of

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their findings by providing them with an ever-widening context, reigned in the 1970s. After that, ethnography moved from an authorevacuated style of writing and thinking to one in which the author took centre stage (van Maanen 1988). Whereas in my positivist phase the research “filled” the ethnographer, I now see the ethnographer filling the research. I wonder, however, whether we are on our way to adopting a “research-evacuated style of writing,” in which the researcher’s biography and sensibilities are so much up front that the study of everyone else’s everyday life becomes lost. My own early fieldwork in Iceland echoed the positivist phase. I believed there was a grand narrative (as did Spencer, Toynbee, Marx, Sorokin, etc.) in the sense that it was possible to document historical and social processes in a quasi-objective fashion. All you needed were “facts” and “triangulation.” The traditional fieldwork with which I was familiar came from the usual round of suspects: the venerable classics from the Chicago School, followed by the George and Louise Spindler series in anthropology, and then by ethnographic accounts of maritime fishing communities. In addition to the classic book The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man by Nels Anderson (1967 [1923]), I also became acquainted with the ethnographic works of Horace Miner in Quebec, Fred Thrasher’s study of gangs in Chicago, and Harvey Zorbaugh’s study of Chicago neighbourhoods. I was hooked. What touched me the most in these classics was their urgent attention to details of life on the margins – something that resonated within me. These works did not carry the theoretical sophistication that is current among contemporary writing, but their intention to effect social change was evident. In reflecting on my own ethnographic work, I now see my MA thesis in Iceland (van den Hoonaard 1972) as very restrained as personal conundrums were confined largely to one footnote. By the time I completed my PhD dissertation (van den Hoonaard 1977), I still kept my own reflections close to my chest, albeit they appeared in footnotes, which occupied an increasingly larger space – some of them taking up almost half a page. And while many of those footnotes did not specifically express personal reflections about my fieldwork, they did contain academic items that were not supposed to be officially part of the text. I still clung to the belief that data are something that should be “captured.” Even before the postmodernist perspective became popular, such a belief was the height of folly. I believe it was the Canadian Ethnographic and Qualitative Analysis Conferences

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that brought home, for me, the relevance of self-reflection as part of one’s research and texts. Superimposing an exaggerated sense of rationality onto our reallife participants is a habit of our craft: we think of ourselves as hyperrational (we write, don’t we?), and we convey that equally to the people whose lives we feel privileged to know. Thus, our ethnography tends to lack the depth that comes with being human. Interview transcripts confirm our concepts and, when extracted from their context, seem rather lifeless. Although much of that context is expressed by our research participants, we pull their words out of context. The heightened use of coding “flattens” the social experience that transcriptions are supposed to reflect. Whenever we have recourse to automatization (such as In Vivo) in constructing codes and concepts, we run the risk of betraying the trust that research participants have placed in us. Thus, resorting to the use of sensitizing concepts (van den Hoonaard 1997) became a significant approach in my own research. While the idea of qualitative research has become more acceptable in universities, it is my impression that its relative success begat a counter-methodology under the guise of “mixed methods.” This particular method, however, is overbearingly quantitative with a dapple of qualitative methods thrown in to make it more palatable to grant committees and to those who allegedly favour a more “holistic” approach. This is now the Orwellian “newspeak” of contemporary research grant applications. The transition in the academy to an entrepreneurial mentality involved a drastic change to favouring health research and policy research. Curiosity-driven research has become the preserve of those who are not vitally interested in securing grants. Chasing research dollars has become the new modus vivendi. When I became the founding editor of the Thumbprint, our departmental newsletter, I vowed that I would not report on the size of the grants bestowed upon my colleagues; rather, I would emphasize the goal and nature of these recently acquired grants. THE CHANGING INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick did not have a shared ideological framework that defined the work of all or even most of its colleagues, although in some quarters Marxist sociology prevailed. The intellectual climate of the department was genteel. Chad Bowman (who came from an

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academic family in Texas) never bothered with research, although he was always interested in what others were doing. A purely reflective scholar, he nevertheless had a deep influence on some students who were searching for an interest and ideas that would change their outlooks. This approach had a profound effect on Andy Scott, who later became a Liberal member of Parliament and who implemented his vision of involving his electoral unit many times a year in forums on contemporary topics. Scott became highly respected among the public, politicians, and academics. My own special connection to Scott involved my encouraging him to enlist academic research to advance social policies. I was fortunate to have entered the sociology department when both sociology and anthropology had a strong network throughout the Atlantic Region in Canada. At the annual meetings of the Atlantic Association of Sociologists and Anthropologists (AASA) some one hundred scholars, including students, presented and discussed their work. These gatherings had a salubrious impact on research because many of us were able to identify with individuals across the region who worked with similar interests. The AASA proved to be a centre for cultivating research for at least thirty years. In 1999, the AASA dissolved as scholars focused on presenting their work at national, and sometimes international, meetings. I was AASA’s last treasurer. This turning away from regional academic bodies also characterized other scholarly societies in Canada. Participation in regional affairs waned as a notable measure of research activity despite its deep influence on the lives of so many upcoming and even veteran scholars. While I always thought of myself as an ethnographer, I did not initially identify as a qualitative researcher. In 1988, Robert Prus had come up with the idea of holding annual gatherings in Canada devoted exclusively to qualitative research. He developed the idea of generic social processes (Prus 1996) to organize the sessions at the Canadian Qualitative Analysis Conference. Under such generic titles as “Becoming an Ex” attendees would hear a group of papers on very diverse topics. I found this approach to be very stimulating, and it came to inform my teaching, research, and writing. Little did I realize that a paper I presented at the Qualitatives in 1990 would lead me later to do substantive work in this area, serving as a member of the (Tri-Council) Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics as well as the chair of its Special Committee on the Social Sciences and the Humanities. My paper, “Is Research-Ethics

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Review a Moral Panic?,” describes the spread of formal policies on research ethics, paradoxically, as a moral panic (van den Hoonaard 2001). I was the sole senator at my university who voted against the adoption of the formal ethics policy on our campus; I believed that the policy spelled the demise of ethnographic research. Researching and writing on the formal research-ethics review process made me an activist ethnographer, and I began to see the power of the accounts of the everyday experiences of researchers with research ethics boards (van den Hoonaard 2011). In the course of my writing the moral panic article, I moved from being anxious about research-ethics review to being eager about how to change policies that would make more sense to researchers in the social sciences (van den Hoonaard 2002, 2003, 2006; van den Hoonaard and Hamilton 2016; W. van den Hoonaard and D.K. van den Hoonaard 2013). As a member of the Advisory Panel, I was actively engaged in helping to craft chapter 10, which is devoted entirely to qualitative research in the second version of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. Little did I realize that my interest in formal research-ethics policies (all of which are based on medical research ethics) would blossom into a second career. Soon after my retirement in 2007, invitations began pouring in from around the world. It was a rare experience to be recognized as one of the forty scholars worldwide who were vigorously debating the need to move social-science ethics in research out from under the umbrella of medical ethics. One of the chief challenges was the fact that social scientists were “othering” themselves to satisfy the requirements laid down in (medical) ethics codes. HOW PERSONAL VALUES ENTERED MY SOCIOLOGY

My marriage in 1976 to Deborah Kestin from Long Island, New York, would lead to a more meaningful and productive life as a sociologist. She awakened in me an intellectual curiosity. Growing up in a Jewish family, Deborah had a heightened sense of the importance of family – a sense that was not particular to me and my family. For us, the ravages of war and of moving around so much, and the vastly differing experiences among family members, created an unconnected family. It was through Deborah’s presence that I began to understand the family as a social institution. No less significant was Deborah’s taking up her PhD in sociology at Loyola University of Chicago in 1985.

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Anthropologist Christine L. Fry offered to supervise her, while Helena Z. Lopata, author of one of the first studies of housewives and well known around the world for her work on widows, was also eager to guide Deborah in her studies. Thanks to encouragement from Judith Wittner, Deborah attended Howard S. Becker’s field methods class at Northwestern University. She chose to write two of the first scholarly works on widows and widowers in Canada (D. van den Hoonaard 2001, 2010). Our daughter Lisa-Jo is also a sociologist. I was part way through my PhD program at the University of Manchester when the Bahá’í International Community Office at the United Nations in New York City invited me to serve as alternate Bahá’í representative to the United Nations (1975–79). Many of the United Nations’ ideals and plans of action reawakened my sociological interests. Four years later, in 1979, I explored the possibility of returning to a life of research and found an academic home at the University of New Brunswick, my alma mater. The national governing body of the Bahá’ís of Canada asked my wife and me to conduct a “survey” on the progress the community was making in implementing the equality of women and men – a fundamental Bahá’í teaching expressed through the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the nineteenth-century founder of the Bahá’í faith. We both quickly resolved that a survey would have shortcomings; instead, we concentrated on using focus groups across Canada. For us it was a bold stab at doing qualitative research; using focus groups was then le dernier cris in qualitative research. Here was a small religious community that was not accustomed to examining itself: the sociological concepts of equality were primarily Western-based, and no one had a precise idea of what equality might look like in the future. We had no idea what we were facing when we started to analyze the 450 pages of transcripts of the focus-group discussions. Trusting the process was uppermost in our minds as we combed through the transcripts for relevant clues to saying something interesting and useful about the Bahá’í understanding of equality. There was also an all-Persian focus group that conducted its discussion in Farsi. We discovered that some of the most inspiring stories and attitudes came from the Persian women. The women took the lead in the focus group’s discussions and articulated more contemporary concepts about the issue than did the men (Hoonaard and Hoonaard 2006). In 1991, at the age of forty-nine, I published my first book, Silent Ethnicity: The Dutch of New Brunswick (Hoonaard 1991). This was fol-

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lowed in 1992 by Reluctant Pioneers: Constraints and Opportunities in an Icelandic Fishing Community, a book based on my dissertation on the fishing community in Isafjorður, Iceland (Hoonaard 1992). All too late, I realized that my scholarly activity had been engendered under the cloud of competition. I found myself helplessly drawn to competition, much like a rabbit attracted to a snake. Competition thrives on the belief that, while resources are scarce, the individual can or should excel at the cost of others. As someone who has come in from the margins, it was tempting to imbibe the vapours emanating from competition, despite knowing its cancerous influence on human relations. Competition gave me an opportunity to mark myself out as a (hard-working) scholar and therefore deserving of being a university professor. The overarching principles of unity and kindness can be easily overwhelmed by the competitive spirit. Disavowing competition and striving towards humility are hard lessons to follow. Even now, sad to say, calling my shelf of published books and articles “the shelf of shame” (a nice alliteration) hardly diminishes the ego. I am a “restless generalist.” Interdisciplinarity expresses a contemporary perspective, but it is truly and genuinely hard to come by. I find the notion of “team” overplayed: the term has enormous currency today, but its reality is far distant from its goal. Reviewing grant applications at the SSHRC Committee for Standard Grants, I noted that “teams” are often composed of scholars who are already in agreement with each other. If ethnographers are to study everyday life, we are obliged to adopt a stance that speaks about the heart, soul, and activities of the people we are privileged to study. It is an “obdurate world” out there, to quote symbolic interactionist Herbert Blumer (1969, 22–3). Is it not time to also embrace the finest literature as a gateway to helping us understand the world? What inspired me about ethnographers was the fact that their inductive research brought one closer to the studied culture: they offered a virtual inside look. Literary insights can improve our vision and stimulate our imagination. Most recently, I have broadened the scope of my writing and have started to author children’s books. The first one dealt with the childhood of the Báb, the founding figure of the Bábi movement (van den Hoonaard 2018), and the second delved into the accomplishments of the first person, Kira Shingareva, to have mapped the far side of the moon (van den Hoonaard forthcoming). The scope of sociology remains a boundless source of intellectual and scholarly adventures.

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REFERENCES Agar, Michael H. 1980. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. New York: Academic Press. Anderson, Nels. 1967 [1923]. The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Daníelsson, Guðmundur. 1972. Járnblomið [Weathervane]. Reykjavik. Isafoldar Prentsmiðja. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Prus, Robert. 1996. Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived Experience. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Tepperman, Lorne. 1988. Choices and Chances: Sociology for Everyday Life. Toronto: Harcourt Brace. van den Hoonaard, Deborah K. 2001. The Widowed Self: The Older Woman’s Journey through Widowhood. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. – 2010. By Himself: The Older Man’s Experience of Widowhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. van den Hoonaard, Deborah K., and Will C. van den Hoonaard. 2006. The Equality of Women and Men: The Experience of the Bahá’í Community of Canada. Douglas, NB: published by the authors. van den Hoonaard, Will C. 1972. “Local-Level Autonomy: A Case Study of an Icelandic Fishing Community.” MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland. – 1977. “Social Context and Evaluation of an Occupational Culture: A Case Study of a Shrimp-fishing Community in Iceland.” PhD diss., University of Manchester. – 1991. Silent Ethnicity: The Dutch of New Brunswick. Fredericton: New Ireland Press. – 1992. Reluctant Pioneers: Constraints and Opportunities in an Icelandic Fishing Community. New York: Peter Lang. – 1997. Working with Sensitizing Concepts: Analytical Field Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. – 2001. “Is Research-Ethics Review a Moral Panic?” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 38 (1): 19–36. – , ed. 2002. Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Issues for Qualitative Researchers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2003. “Is Anonymity an Artifact in Ethnographic Research?” Journal of Academic Ethics 1 (2): 221–3.

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– , ed. 2006. “The Ethics Trapeze.” Journal of Academic Ethics 1 (4): 1–10. – 2011. The Seduction of Ethics: Transforming the Social Sciences. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2013. Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. – 2018. Did You Ever Wonder? The Life of the Báb as a Child. Victoria, BC: Tellwell Publications. van den Hoonaard, Will C., and Ann Hamilton, eds. 2016. The Ethics Rupture: Exploring Alternatives to Formal Research-Ethics Review. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. van den Hoonaard, Will C., and Deborah K. van den Hoonaard. 2013. Essentials of Thinking Ethically in Qualitative Research. Walnut Creek, CA: East Coast Press. van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

19 Before Cultural Studies Became a Buzzword Stephen Harold Riggins

THE REAL INDIANA

When a conversation with a stranger turns to the topic of our geographical origins, I usually mention that I grew up in the scenic region of Indiana. The hilly, forested southern counties are, in Indiana, the northern extreme of Appalachia, physically and culturally. The Hoosier National Forest – 220,000 acres (89,031 hectares) managed by the US Forest Service – is located there. To me, this is the real Indiana. The beauty of the landscape continually draws me back home. My family’s roots in this land go back to the late 1820s. I am part of this rural area. Its people and culture have shaped the person I became.1 Loogootee, Indiana, where I grew up, had one stop light. The population was about three thousand. On grandmother’s next-door property, which we owned, was a large vegetable garden, a raspberry patch, two cherry trees, a grape arbour, a chicken coop with real chickens, a cage of pet racoons, and a small two-story barn that sheltered my father’s Model-T Ford, which he drove in parades. My parents’ home faced the flourishing garden of the high school agriculture teacher. There was a large Amish community nearby, and everyday they drove through town in horse-drawn buggies.2 Because I was a late-life baby, one unusual experience of my childhood was the amount of time I spent with older adults. My parents were married for seventeen years before their only child was born. Mother’s father was over fifty when she was born. Consequently, the normal span of five generations was close to three in mother’s family.

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My mother Eithel (Ledgerwood) Riggins had work experiences that put her ahead of her time. She worked for a dentist. Her boss owned a small savings and loan company and was a local leader of the Red Cross. So mother was simultaneously part-time dental receptionist, bookkeeper, and secretary for the Red Cross. My father operated a tiny factory on our property, which specialized in the first stage of manufacturing buttons from White River mussel shells. When plastic replaced shell in the 1940s, he became a carpenter, sanding hardwood floors in houses and gymnasiums. I had substitute grandparents, Guy and Reba Chandler, who were neighbours. My appreciation of nature comes from them. Reba was a great storyteller and devotee of crossword puzzles and teaching Sunday School. Guy was a retired veterinarian. In the 1920s, he had served as a leader of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (Riggins 2003). In general, I consider the influence of my older-than-average parents and substitute grandparents to have been a blessing. However, it encouraged a perspective that is, arguably, a liability for a mainstream career in sociology. My interests in culture, rural communities, and the lives of people society overlooked are more consistent with a career in history, folklore, or anthropology. I NDIANA UNIVERSIT Y

From a working-class background, I faced the hurdles and disadvantages such students confront – little sense of what different career options demanded and little appreciation of how to manoeuvre the social side of university life. I had started piano lessons in grade one and loved music, but my high school piano teacher in Bloomington, the German-Jewish émigré Dorothy Robert, warned me about the dangers of a musical career. She and her husband Walter, a pianist on the faculty of Indiana University, failed to give me the little piece of advice that would have changed my life – the highpoint of a musician’s life is not the public acclaim of performances but the quiet work, which goes on behind the scenes. Theory, musicology, even practising are the highlights. That I learned this lesson too late in life is typical of how university students from working-class families often lack the experience to make wise career choices. My university studies would have been easier if I had become a musicologist. Then I would have known from the moment I entered university what career I wanted to pursue.

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If I had not experienced the student activism of the 1960s counterculture at Indiana University (Wynkoop 2002), I doubt that I would have majored in sociology. Accidents saved me from the excesses of the counterculture. I was academically oriented and saw student politics as a distraction. Spending a year at the University of Munich, Germany, through Wayne State University’s Junior Year Abroad Program, interrupted my involvement in student politics. In the 1960s, it was also common for student activists to publicly display their attraction to the opposite sex. The unintended message to gay and lesbian witnesses could easily have been: “you don’t fit in this movement.” Indiana University may have been one of the top sociology departments in the United States, but the emphasis was on quantitative methods. For that reason, it was not the ideal school for me. A pioneer of the sociology of music (John Henry Mueller) had recently retired from teaching and the university had one of the preeminent music schools in the United States. When I later came to spend a lot of time teaching social theory, it was Irving Zeitlin’s theory courses that probably had the greatest impact on me. Zeitlin was then giving the lectures that became his major book, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. His idea was that classical social theory was an extended conversation with Karl Marx. Zeitlin later became a professor at the University of Toronto. Two well-known symbolic interactionists were teaching at Indiana University: Sheldon Stryker and Alfred Lindesmith. In 1968–69 their courses were not such that they could easily talk about their own research. Most of my knowledge of symbolic interactionism was acquired later, in an effort to understand Erving Goffman. The Indiana University sociologist I remember the most fondly is the underappreciated Francis Joseph Schneider. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he was an anarchist, socialist, pacifist, and a marginal person within the department. Schneider (1952, 1959) was one of the pioneers of the sociology of war and peace but published too little to be professionally recognized. He emphasized the fundamental difference between the police and the military, claiming that it was easier to abolish war than crime. Only the latter reflects people’s innate anti-social tendencies. I am told that he taught his war and peace course from a history of ideas perspective, but I suspect that none of the students understood exactly what that meant. Despite a rather gruff exterior, Schneider attracted an enthusiastic following among intellectually ambitious students and activists. One

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other Indiana University sociologist needs to be mentioned: I am indebted to James Wood for supervising my unconventional MA thesis about the audience for classical music in Toronto. On the fourth and fifth of April 1968 in Louisville, Kentucky, I completed my physical examination for the military draft. Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated on the first day of my examination, and his death was celebrated with cheers by some of the men completing their examinations with me. I was interviewed by an FBI agent because I attended meetings of apparently subversive organizations (i.e., the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the Socialist Workers Party, and Students for a Democratic Society) and had visited Prague and East Berlin. This is part of my statement to the FBI: “As a member of the Unitarian Church and as a Christian and follower of Gandhi, I am an advocate of non-violent resistance. As a socialist and Marxist, I will support neither the USSR nor the US governments in their Cold War efforts. I have not yet decided whether I will enter the armed services if my petition for Conscientious Objector status is denied and I am drafted. I will enter the armed forces only if forced to do so.”3 However, the FBI agent persuaded me that applying for conscientious objector status would unnecessarily complicate my life. Thus, I was classified 4-F, unfit for military service. The reason for this was my sexual orientation. It was the easy way out. I cannot know what the FBI agent was thinking when he gave me advice, but I assume he was actually concerned about my welfare. In 1968, my knowledge of pacifism came primarily from Schneider’s course on the sociology of war. My superficial knowledge of Marxism was mostly from Zeitlin’s social theory courses. The highly acclaimed Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, written by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton (2013), is a study of student subcultures at Indiana University. I must say that I am not able to recognize the school in this book, but not, I suspect, because the 1960s were so different from the present. What Armstrong and Hamilton fail to fully capture is the sense of superiority that students on the “professional pathway” feel towards the other-directed, academically disengaged students who spend their time competing for admission to fraternities and sororities. I entered Indiana University assuming I wanted to be a professor, although I was uncertain in which field. I had good role models, Walter and Dorothy Robert, and on day one I was familiar with the layout of the campus and its arts organizations.

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My luck was having unusual parents. Armstrong and Hamilton did understand the key role of parents in children’s college education and job prospects. The biggest indulgence in my parents’ marriage was spending money on my education. They could afford this because of their age and because they had only one child. Mother opened a savings account for my university education the year I was born. Because the local school lacked a kindergarten, they paid for some private tutoring before I entered grade one. They paid for twelve years of private piano lessons, drove me to Bloomington (eighty kilometres from home) from the age of about fourteen to sixteen, and then trusted me to be mature enough to make the trip alone. They accompanied me through 4-H, the Boy Scouts, the Order of the Arrow, the youth group at the Methodist church, and the school band. They paid part of the expenses of my Junior Year Abroad experience. When I completed my MA degree, I had few debts because they had paid for my education. Mother even volunteered to assist the secretary at the local draft board because she thought (incorrectly) that this might make it more likely that I would be exempt from the armed forces. All of this happened despite my parents’ poor understanding of the realities of professional careers, especially in academia. YOU CAN ’ T SELL YOUR PARENTS ON THE GREATNESS OF CANADA

In one sentence, I would describe my conflicts with my parents as a clash between baby-boomer, post-materialist values and mother’s preoccupation with money (so typical of her generation). My mother was fixated on my securing a prosperous future. They had married in September 1929, a month before the stock market crash. They, too, had left town for better work, but, due to the Depression, had to return home. My adolescence, which stretched into my thirties, was a very foreign experience to my parents. They did not understand the idealization of self-expression, authenticity, and recreational deviance that were hallmarks of the 1960s counterculture. Disappointed with American politics and the decay of inner cities, and looking for adventure, I moved to Toronto in August 1969. New York seemed too dangerous, California too distant. The critic of city planning and author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, resided in Toronto. She was one of my heroes. I knew no one in Toronto and had visited the city only for a few hours, but

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immigrating to Canada was often in the news due to the number of war resisters leaving the United States to escape the draft. In late August 1969, I drove off for Toronto in my red Ford Mustang. It was easy for Americans to immigrate to Canada. The immigration officer at the border encouraged me to say that I was a social worker because, according to the immigration point system, that occupation was more highly valued than was that of sociologist. I had never taken a single social work course. Normally, I do not look for omens, but when I turned on the radio in the car as I was driving from Windsor to Toronto the first piece of music I heard was one of my favourites – Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite. Within a month of arriving in Toronto I met an authentic French structuralist at the St Charles Tavern, a gay bar on Yonge Street where no one would expect to spot a student of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paul Bouissac was an aspiring novelist, semiotician, and professor of French at the University of Toronto; he became the anthropological authority on European circuses. My career has been profoundly influenced by Paul. Had I not been supported by him, I could not have embarked upon such an impractical early career by specializing in the sociology of the arts. Mother had somewhat liberal ideas about personal relationships, gender, and the proper way of raising children. But her worldview included the myth of American superiority. So there was parental opposition to my move to Canada. A year after I had moved not much progress had been made in resolving our conflicts. Mother wrote (24 November 1970): Most people in the US just aren’t interested in Canada and no matter how well you like it, you can’t sell them on the greatness of Canada, not even us, your parents … I held down four [parttime] jobs to put you through college so naturally I hoped you could get a good job. Anyway, you can use the education if you ever make up your mind that you really want to make money. While I was an ideal undergraduate student, I was not an excellent graduate student. I could not find a niche in sociology that appealed to me. The topics that interested me the most were the sociology of the arts, the sociology of war and peace, and urban sociology. Even today, these specialties are not emphasized in Canadian sociology.

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Despite having completed an MA in sociology, I was hesitant about entering a PhD program in the same discipline and thought that museum studies or urban studies might be more appropriate. I asked to be a teaching assistant at the Mississauga Campus of the University of Toronto because the classes were small and I was shy. It was my great luck to be a TA for Metta Spencer for three years. I admired William Michelson’s contribution to environmental sociology, some of which dealt with urban issues. The other Toronto professor I admired was Lewis Feuer, the authority on Marx, Einstein, and the concept of intellectual generations. Unfortunately, he soon returned to the United States. The obituary in the Toronto Star for the U of T sociologist John Alan Lee mentioned that he had lived in a Toronto “commune” for fifteen years. I lived there – 101 Bedford Road – for about six months. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I was not able to relate to S.D. Clark, the preeminent historical sociologist of his generation. At the first meeting of his graduate course he asked students to propose a topic for a research paper. I knew little about Canadian history and mentioned “Jesus freaks” as a potential topic. These people formed a puzzling group and were recently in the news. Clark’s negative reaction made me drop his course. Maybe he did not appreciate the fact that my study would have been an ethnography rather than a history. Perhaps he thought the topic was too American. Clark published The Suburban Society without citing the ground-breaking American literature on the topic. The pioneering undergraduate program in cultural studies at Trent University dates from the latter years of the 1970s, too late to benefit me. However, even today cultural studies remains a peripheral specialty in many departments of sociology. In 1991, Ray Morrow wrote one of the most perceptive accounts of the slow acceptance of cultural studies within Canadian departments of sociology. The growth of cultural studies was hindered by the slowness with which the teaching of sociological theory has adapted to theoretical developments outside sociology; the rise of communications programs; the literary (high culture) bias and atheoretical character of much Canadian studies; the initial resistance of political economy; and the exclusive positivism which still dominates methodology training. (Morrow 1991, 159)

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As Morrow pointed out, cultural studies was more firmly established in Quebec than in English Canada, and many feminist researchers were engaged in cultural studies but tended to frame their research within the context of a feminist sociology of knowledge. No one in the U of T department specialized in the study of culture, although four students were trying to write dissertations on different aspects of culture.4 A little later, the department decided that in the future such students would be rejected because of the absence of qualified advisers. Toronto was not the ideal place for me to study. But Paul and I lived next door. I spent an entire year writing seven proposals for a dissertation on musical innovation. Why were there no innovative composers in British music circa 1880 to 1940? What was responsible for the diffusion of indeterminate techniques of composition in contemporary music? What did innovative composers (Wagner, Varèse, Ives, and Schönberg) have in common? None of these proposals was considered acceptable by my supervisor (Riggins 2003). Relationships between supervisors and students are often strained. In retrospect, what seems remarkable is the department’s willingness to tolerate dissertations as impractical as mine and as Robert Brym’s study of Jewish intellectuals in Russia. The person who saved my career was an acquaintance, the McMaster University sociologist Howard Brotz. His best-known book is The Black Jews of Harlem: Negro Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Negro Leadership (Brotz 1964). “Don’t worry about whether your ideas will be considered history or sociology,” Brotz argued. “There is no reason why you need to have a well-articulated theory to test before you begin the research. A theoretical framework will gradually emerge in the process of writing.” Trained at the University of Chicago, Brotz’s advice to ethnographers could be as simple as “just go and talk to people.” Ethnography requires patience and tact more than methodological rigour. Chicago School ethnographers were taught to be flexible, to be willing to change their research midstream depending on the ambiguous and contradictory information informants disclosed. From the archives of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, I mailed a third of my dissertation to Toronto. My supervisor again asked me to write a proposal. I refused and was awarded a new supervisor, Dennis Magill, who had the intelligence to let me do what I wanted. My dissertation, “Institutional Change in Nineteenth-Century French Music” (Riggins 1980, 1985a), is the musical equivalent of Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World, which

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was written by Harvard sociologist Harrison White and his wife Cynthia White. They showed how two sets of institutions, which they called academic and dealer-critic, shaped the careers of French artists (White and White 1965). I called the two sets in music opera-centric and concert-centric. In 1980, Harrison White was my external examiner, and he kindly wrote a letter of recommendation for me. THE LONG TREK TO TENURE

In the middle of October 1982, I was appointed by Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, as a replacement for Czech Canadian sociologist Bedrich Baumann, who had become ill. There was absolutely no time to prepare. Given my weak knowledge of mainstream sociology, I needed far more preparation time than most graduates. I was also painfully shy. The night before I had to teach my first two-hour class, I thought I would rather throw myself in one of the lakes on campus than lecture about classical social theory. That first year of teaching was the most difficult experience of my entire life. I had a nearly constant headache for the first three weeks and weekend headaches afterwards. It is so stressful to walk to class giving no thought to the looming lecture because you are worried you have nothing for tomorrow. At the end of the year in which a course lasted from September to April, I vowed that if every year was this stressful I would rather live on social welfare than teach at a university. I commuted between downtown Toronto and Sudbury, spending maybe three weekends a year there. This was an 805-kilometre round trip by bus every weekend. Friday nights, Paul waited in downtown Toronto beside the Park Plaza Hotel for the return bus as it came down Avenue Road. Pedestrians sometimes mistook the French professor on the sidewalk for a man selling newspapers. Oddly, I finally became committed to sociology as a career while I taught that first year at Laurentian. I realized that I could enjoy teaching sociology if I just excluded the stuff that did not interest me. Rarely are undergraduate sociology majors aware of the sacrifices academics have to make in order to obtain a secure tenure-stream teaching position, especially in periods of precarious employment (see Nakhaie, chapter 13, this volume). The start of my academic career coincided with the worst period to begin teaching (between circa 1975 and 1995) since the Great Depression. Two years elapsed after defending my dissertation in 1980 before I landed a job. In this

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interval I worked as a reporter for the Toronto Native Times, published by the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. Ultimately, volunteering at the centre was more important for my career than was my dissertation.5 I would advise all undergraduate students to augment their curricula vitae by volunteering at non-profit organizations. At Memorial, I created an internship course in order to give sociology majors credit for volunteering. My story about the Toronto Native Times, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, led to an invitation to edit an issue of Anthropologica titled “Native North Americans and the Media: Studies in Minority Journalism” (Riggins 1983). This led to broader topics when I edited Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective (Riggins 1992) and, finally, The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse (Riggins 1997). I argue, using the production of culture perspective, that the content of Indigenous print media reflects its weak organizational structure. This results in content that is a distortion of Indigenous values. Perhaps my most controversial conclusion is that the dominant discourse in news stories about environmental politics in several prominent Indigenous newspapers is not consistent with traditional ecological knowledge (e.g., Riggins 2015). In the 1980s, I applied for tenure-stream teaching positions at universities literally from St John’s, Newfoundland, to the University of Victoria, British Columbia. I considered returning to the United States and applied to universities in the Midwest and northern New York State. However, after three years of teaching at Laurentian (from 1982 to 1985), a year at Memorial as a visiting professor (1985–86), three years of teaching at the University of Alberta (1986–89), and one year at the University of Toronto (1989–90), I returned to Memorial as an assistant professor. Among the people recommending me was Arlie Hochschild, the so-called “mother of the sociology of emotions.” I had met Hochschild when I co-organized a conference in India on the legacy of Erving Goffman. To my knowledge this was the first major conference on Goffman outside his terrain of anglophone North America, although his perspective is universally relevant. By 1990, I had acquired the experiences that enabled me to teach courses on mass media, sociological theory, deviance, ethnicity, and the sociology of the arts. My edited book, Beyond Goffman: Studies on Communication, Institution, and Social Interaction (1990), was on the verge of appearing. Also, influenced by symbolic interactionism, I had started publishing about the symbolic dimension of the objects displayed in the more public rooms of homes. This eventually resulted in my

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editing The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects (Riggins 1994). SOCIOLOGY AT MEMORIAL UNIVERSIT Y OF NEWFOUNDLAND

The literature on the Canadianization movement in academia in the 1970s (e.g., Cormier 2004) rarely takes into consideration the unique features of Newfoundland that account for different reactions on the island to the pressure to appoint Canadians to academic positions. These features include Newfoundland patriotism, the reluctance of mainland Canadians to move to Newfoundland, and Memorial’s hiring policy, which put Newfoundlanders at a disadvantage. Requiring local students to prove themselves academically in more competitive environments than Memorial was an excellent policy. However, when Newfoundland-born students, who might be expected to do research on the province and Atlantic Canada, were encouraged to leave for graduate school and teaching experiences, many did not want to return. M.O. Morgan, the dean of arts and science, said that mainlanders seemed to think Newfoundlanders were Alaskans and that it was easier to persuade Americans and Europeans than Canadians to teach at Memorial. “The lack of Canadians is certainly not due to a lack of effort,” Morgan emphasized. Sociology was first taught at Memorial in 1956 a couple of years before the introduction of anthropology. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology, founded in 1965, split in 1973 primarily because it came to be run by anthropologists who, as departments heads, privileged their own discipline (Riggins 2017). The split is remembered as amiable, although documents from the time show more tension than people remember. Sociologists and anthropologists continued to socialize with each other.6 A wave of children brought some of the sociologists together. Two factions began to emerge whose members had somewhat different concepts of sociology and university service. “Alliances,” “undercurrents,” and “cliques” are also potential labels for these factions. However one wants to characterize them, they existed for about twenty years (from circa 1985 to 2005). They could lie dormant for a while but were likely to flare up again as soon as a decision had to be made about hiring. In addition to these two factions, some members of the faculty were independents or crossovers.

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In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Department of Sociology was characterized by a high level of collegiality. Even later, the department was more sociable than many academic departments in North America. Professor Larry Felt attributed the collegiality to the quality of life in St John’s. The Avalon Peninsula features an exceptionally beautiful landscape. St John’s is a unique city and a good place to raise children. Several sociologists came to Memorial after unpleasant experiences elsewhere. “If you really like a place,” Felt once told me, “you try to make it work.” But, to be frank, we did have our village soap operas. The factions were jokingly called “theory” and “fish,” or “the dark side” and “the skywalkers.” I prefer these humorous labels because they suggest children arguing on a playground. The standard terms in sociology are “cosmopolitans” (theory or the dark side) and “locals” (fish or the skywalkers). These academic terms were popularized in a classic study by Alvin Gouldner (1957, 1958). “Local” does not refer to where someone was born: Douglas House was the only native Newfoundlander in the department and he was an independent. The fish faction consisted of Canadian come-from-aways and British immigrants. They specialized in research about socio-economic development, usually in Newfoundland. The theory faction, sceptical of the neo-Marxism popular among their colleagues, engaged in research that was either theoretical or rooted in a geographical area outside Canada. The theorists were American or European, with one exception, who had been born in Malaysia to English and Canadian parents. Marilyn Porter (2019) claims that the theory faction was hostile to feminism. This is not my understanding. It was sympathetic to feminism but hostile to sociology as political activism. People in both factions spent a considerable amount of time working with historical materials. Many Memorial sociologists who specialized in socio-economic development published independent policy analysis, including reports to government commissions. This is one of the most notable differences in the publication records of the two factions. But here, too, there is overlap. Gouldner claimed that cosmopolitans are more loyal to their discipline than to their department. I think that was also true of Memorial, but the theory faction certainly rejected any narrow definition of sociology. The key figures in the department illustrate the factions’ vague boundaries. The main person in the theory faction was Volker Meja, a specialist in the sociology of knowledge. The main person in the fish faction was Peter Sinclair, who served as department head for seven and a half years, longer than any other faculty member, and

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who published theoretically significant research about the social and economic organization of the fishing industry. Peter Sinclair adamantly denied being a member of either group. “I point blank refuse to see myself in the ‘fish faction,’” he told me. “I don’t want to be put in a ‘theory faction’ either. I see them as necessarily overlapping.” Sinclair’s early publications about populism in western Canada and fascism in Europe were explicitly linked to important theoretical debates in the social sciences. However, Sinclair hired me as a visiting professor in 1985. At that time department heads chose applicants for one-year appointments. Meja spent much of his career doing library and archival research on a classical theorist, Karl Mannheim, who, towards the end of his life, was a community-engaged scholar committed to rationally planning post-Second World War Europe. Does that make Volker Meja a community-engaged scholar or a curiositydriven scholar? Both Meja and Sinclair had mutual respect for the opposite camp, which helped to limit damage. Both were also surprisingly modest and seemed to think that it was bad manners to talk shop outside the classroom. It is not insignificant to mention that Sinclair was an amateur photographer and painter. The introduction of the PhD program in the late 1980s tested the limits of collegiality. The theory faction thought we did not have the resources to establish a credible program. One opponent called the proposed program “a rather desperate attempt to make work life more satisfying.” In contrast, the fish faction, consistent with university administrators’ aspirations, enthusiastically supported the program. In 1989, when the final vote was taken to establish the PhD, a compromise was reached declaring faculty participation in graduate studies as voluntary work. Later, the administration put an end to this interpretation of teaching duties. When candidates competed for jobs, some faculty members preferred to select the “best person” among the applicants, even if their specialties did not quite fit the advertised job description. Their assumption was that the teaching load would eventually resolve itself. Tenured faculty members were not looking specifically to hire Canadian citizens, but they were seeking new colleagues with research interests in Canadian topics. There was an attempt to follow a pragmatic middle ground with respect to the dangers and benefits of networking. One-year visiting appointments were not considered mere teaching positions but a way of seeing if visitors and the university were compatible.

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My impression is that the factions were generally good at accommodating each other. This made it easier to hire in cultural studies. Political economy may have been the dominant perspective in Atlantic Canadian sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the sociology department at Memorial those identifying with cultural studies did not have the impression that we were bucking a department tradition. The factions first struck a deal to make everyone happy by offering tenure-stream positions to Marilyn Porter (the favourite of the fish faction) and Raymond Morrow (the favourite of the theory faction). Porter accepted, but Morrow opted for the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Whoever was appointed had to meet the standards of both factions. The department thus lost some good candidates who would have been hired if 51 per cent voting in favour had been sufficient to offer a contract. It is best to view the transformation of the Memorial Department of Sociology between the early 1970s and 2005 in terms of two phases. The first was characterized by a basic consensus on departmental matters. Thus, the impression that sociologists at Memorial University were more than a department – as Bob Hill said, “we were a community.” This feeling of community gradually declined in the mid1980s. The fragmentation and increasing individualism could be explained, in part, as a feature of a societal-wide phenomenon that involved decreasing participation in voluntary associations, churches, political parties, and neighbourhoods (see Putnam 2000). Another influence was the hyper-professionalism that swept Canadian universities and left middle-aged academics – taught so long ago to be self-reliant loners – with little time for small talk. Surely, it was no coincidence that more local intellectual exchanges occurred before the internet and e-mail. Our closest professional contacts were no longer down the hallway or in the stacks of the Queen Elizabeth II Library. Aging and the size of St John’s also played a role. After a couple of decades of residence in St John’s, some individuals had exhausted the possibilities for local intellectual renewal (and romance). Finally, the loss of community was due to the declining university budget, which became less generous in sponsoring visiting professorships and lectures by well-known academics (notably Zygmunt Bauman) and in providing spaces where faculty could socialize. When I was department head (2005–08), one of my concerns was creating a sense of community. Thus I founded, edited, and subsidized the department newsletter, Sociology on the Rock; organized the first

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group portrait of Memorial sociologists in nearly fifty years; and began writing a history of the department.7 In the late twentieth century, Memorial’s Department of Sociology was not as well known as it should have been within the wider community of Canadian sociologists (see Brym, chapter 1, this volume). The main reason for this is that many of the best Memorial sociologists were engaged in research outside neo-Marxism and mainstream professional sociology. In my opinion, the best sociologist at Memorial was Victor Zaslavsky (1937–2009). He was a Russian Jewish art historian who turned himself into an authority on the Soviet Union once he moved to Canada. Zaslavsky never wrote about Canada. The only book by a Memorial sociologist that made David Nock’s (2001) list of major books in Canadian sociology published between 1975 and 1992 was Frederick Johnstone’s Class, Race and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa. Members of the theory faction showed little interest in participating in the Canadian Sociological Association and in the Atlantic Association of Sociologists and Anthropologists (AASA). (Memorial anthropologists, however, were active in the AASA and in the Canadianization movement.) As Memorial professors aged during that long period of stability, they remained active as researchers, but their interest in promoting the department seemed to decline. RESEARCH ON ETHNICIT Y , CULTURE , AND THE HISTORY OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The following contributors to cultural studies have been most influential in my research. I did not always agree with them but, for various reasons, had to come to terms with their ideas. They include Harrison White because of Canvases and Careers (White and White 1965); Richard Peterson, who was a key figure in developing the production of culture perspective; Stuart Hall, the authority on media and race relations; John Fiske, the authority on television; novelist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans; anthropologist Daniel Miller, who specialized in research on material culture; the linguists Teun van Dijk and Norman Fairclough; and Erving Goffman (primarily the secondary literature on Goffman and symbolic interactionism). The social activists I have come to admire are Edward Sagarin (pen name Donald Webster Cory); the University of Toronto graduate Stephen O. Murray; and Frank Robert Westie. I appreciate the latter not because

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of his Indiana University course on race relations, which I completed, but because of his anti-war novel Ash Wednesday ’45, based on his own experiences as a bomber pilot during the Second World War, and his realistic assessment of the vanity of academics (Westie 1973, 1995). Helmes-Hayes and Milne (2017) write in their history of symbolic interactionism in Canada that eclecticism has been a typical feature of that perspective since the 1990s. A term from their research, “symbolic-interactionist friendly,” is a good label for me. My perspective is an eclectic combination of symbolic interactionism, cultural studies, semiotics, and discourse analysis. Semiotics and discourse analysis emphasize the methodological rigour missing in the older works by symbolic interactionists. As a scholar who studies mass media, I specialize in the discourse analysis of print media. I try to replicate the close reading of texts by van Dijk and Fairclough. My focus is on the subtle bias of both spot news and background features on ethnic conflicts in the most professional newspapers. My aim is to show that these stories are less objective than one might expect given the journalistic practices these newspapers espouse. To provoke class discussion, my students and I dissected news stories in class, and I think these exercises have contributed to their acquiring a multicultural outlook. Only once did I hear the plea,“but I didn’t want to major in English!” I have also explored the commonsensical knowledge embodied in anecdotes. The fact that these micronarratives are memorable, quickly spread, and contain some proverb about the essence of a group or individual indicates that a minor literary genre – and social ritual – is more significant than it appears to be to scientifically oriented social scientists looking for quantitative information (Riggins 2007). In his exposé of the harsh life of tenant farmers in 1930s Alabama, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the novelist and film critic James Agee (1960) discusses the colour, shape, location, size, and aesthetics of their possessions. The exhaustiveness of his descriptions was a political act. Humble things were accorded the attention normally reserved for the fine arts. “Fieldwork in the Living Room” is my attempt to provide a systematic methodology for describing vernacular interior decoration – something that is missing in Agee’s book (Riggins 1994). It requires a technical vocabulary, which I derived mainly from Goffman, Baudrillard, symbolic interactionism, and general concepts in semiotics. One set of categories represents the features of individual objects. The other represents the way objects are displayed and per-

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ceived in relation to each other. My interviews begin with a prominent object likely to attract attention, then proceed systematically around the room. Photographs, which are essential because I do not assume residents are authorities on their own homes, need to be made in the same manner. This is a very invasive methodology. Given the present concern about research ethics, it requires that interviewees be treated as co-authors. Stories about objects often serve as an excuse for talking about the people and social occasions they symbolize. This makes the study of domestic objects highly relevant to sociology (Riggins 1985b, 1990, 1994, 2013). The last ten years of my career at Memorial were the most satisfying. Unexpectedly, I became a sort of authority on Newfoundland and Labrador. I began a very ambitious and still unfinished study of the history of sociology at Memorial (Riggins 2012, 2014, 2017, 2019; Riggins and Buchanan 2019). In the process I read practically everything about the province written by my colleagues. Historians writing about the development of the social sciences in others places would probably not be so preoccupied with the relationship between sociologists and the province in which they reside. Although my research is primarily curiosity-driven, some publications have a political dimension and applied value – notably, the publications on ethic-minority media, Othering, and government cultural policies (e.g., Riggins and Pham 1986). But scholars who stress the ethical obligations of academics to the public may not be happy – and for good reasons – with my continual fascination with rural southern Indiana (e.g., Riggins 1988, 1991, 2005, 2018). At first glance, criticism might seem nitpicking because my work is about inconsequential events in one of the smallest counties in one American state. I think I am contributing to working-class history by giving people who have been denied individuality in the historical record a sort of afterlife – to the extent that this is possible. My writings are a rebellion against the great-man theory of history. But in my research I tend to imagine a community spirit, which I am not able to find in my own life. My focus is on the era when local socializing was intense, not the years since 1950 when modernization undermined neighbourhood and family. My writings tend to have a nostalgic edge. Ironically, I am contributing to rural identity although I am not able to live in that environment. The folklore I gather about anonymous actors on the stage of history is perhaps the intellectual equivalent of gay men safeguarding culture by preserving historical buildings and antiques (Fellows

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2004).8 There is a more serious problem, however, with my writings about Indiana. Because I concentrate on family farming, no one learns from my writings that the largest inland naval facility in the entire United States is in the county I study. The base was established during the Second World War and is still thriving. Tiny Martin County is now financially dependent on the military-industrial complex. The rumour in the 1960s was that, if the Soviet Union attacked the United States, the Indiana state government would be moved from Indianapolis to Bloomington and housed in the School of Music, a new building with few windows. In Toronto, Paul and I live on Richmond Street West, a rare one-way street in the downtown area. We have been told that Richmond Street West was made one-way in order to facilitate the evacuation of Toronto in case of a nuclear attack. I regret that I did not follow my early interest in the sociology of war and peace. MARRIED BACHELORS IN ACADEMIA

The book I am most proud of, which took over thirty years of parttime work, is The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, a Life. It makes sense to view these stories about me and Paul Bouissac living in France as an odd mix of realist and impressionist ethnography, although they were written as an escape from sociology. In a realist tale the author is like a fly on the wall noticing everything. Nothing in the text calls attention to the author as a witness. An impressionist tale is so sketchy it is barely a story, but it is evocative and conveys a certain mood about a brief moment in time. The Pleasures of Time includes my interviews with Michel Foucault and the avant-garde composer John Cage. In primary school, when captains of the basketball and baseball teams chose their players, I was the next-to-the-last pick. My low status bothered me so much that for a while I developed a facial tic and avoided activities with playmates that should have been fun. Neither of my parents understood the importance of team sports for preadolescent boys. Both had lost their fathers at young ages and had grown up in the countryside when there were few opportunities for children’s recreation. As a result I was not good at team sports and ended up associating with the girls. By high school, sports mattered less and I had conformed to gender expectations. “You smiled out as a baby,” mother once said to me. She was wrong about the age and the reason for my seriousness. The lasting impact of my experiences

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as a boy who did not quite fit masculine gender expectations is that I rarely show any facial sign of emotion. A deadpan interactional style was better in childhood than the spontaneity that might betray a girlish identity. This is a disadvantage for a teacher. I would have been a better teacher if I had felt comfortable being more expressive in public. I bear the scars of childhood rejection in a way that is both visible and invisible since most people probably attribute my seriousness to my personality. On the other hand, the advantage of childhood rejection was that, in my early life, it broke my ties with an oppressive environment. I have spent most of my adult life in an elite environment and thus have little personal experience of discrimination. Toronto is one of the gay centres of North America. Paul and I celebrated our fiftieth anniversary in Munich in October 2019. Although my parents liked him, he was never seen as anything more than my friend. In the last years of mother’s life, when I spent a lot of time with her during my vacations, she never recognized that my visits might be a sacrifice for someone back in Toronto. In less than a lifetime gays and lesbians in Canada have risen from the status of mentally ill criminals to being recognized as a model minority. No one could have predicted how quickly this change would occur. This evolution in values has been more rapid in Canada than in the United States. The recognition of gay rights (along with concerns about the environment and gender) is now a part of Canada’s foreign policy when allocating economic assistance to developing countries. Tim McCaskell’s Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism is one of the best guides to the past fifty years of gay and lesbian activism. Although not an academic sociologist, McCaskell does have a background in sociology and he participated in Toronto’s Marxist Institute (see Luxton, chapter 10, this volume; Carroll, chapter 11, this volume). He even met his boyfriend there. McCaskell describes Toronto’s gay activists in the 1970s as consisting of two factions: liberationist radicals and cautious assimilationists. The former celebrated the atypical family forms of gay liberation; the latter were more concerned about respectability, legal marriage, and same-sex spousal benefits. The early gay activists, usually unpaid volunteers, were seen as members of a “quasi-criminal class” defending itself against the state. They were replaced by a leadership of professionals who sought state protection through the legal system. McCaskell and other radicals had hoped that the gay movement would be part of a coalition

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promoting social justice more broadly. To their disappointment, this did not happen because it was not a part of the agenda of the winning faction – the assimilationists. “We have become ordinary. We are no longer dangerous nor do we carry the germ of a utopian future; we are the mundane present,” McCaskell (2016, 455) concludes. Nor has progress been uniform. Economic inequality, male privilege, and racism are still problems within gay communities. Although the People’s Republic of China once seemed to be the dreariest place on earth, it re-emerged on the world stage; and, unexpectedly, in the 1980s I became interested in East Asian cultures. The aspect of my teaching at Memorial that I have enjoyed the most is introducing our students to Chinese culture. I did this in the context of courses on race and ethnicity, and justified doing so with the fact that the Chinese are one of the largest minority groups in Canada. In addition to assigning some standard publications about the sociology of race and ethnicity, I assigned, depending on the year, either the Tao de Ching or Thomas Merton’s translation of Chuang Tzu. There were also lectures about philosophical Taoism and a lecture or two stolen from Daisetz T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese immigrants to North America were sometimes called “married bachelors.” Many were married and had fathered children in China, but, due to racism, they lived in North America in a society of bachelors. They were not allowed to bring their families with them. Obviously, their experiences were more oppressive than mine. But, given Memorial’s geographical location at the very edge of North America, it is not unusual for members of our faculty to be in commuting relationships that resemble the austere lifestyle of married bachelors. (“Married bachelor” suggests a range of experiences, not all of which are bleak.) The university has lost several faculty members because of commuting relationships and the expense of having two residences. I have been told that Memorial is one of the Canadian pioneers in facilitating spousal appointments. Memorial administrators, however, cannot guarantee a spousal appointment: the relevant department must voluntarily accept the spouse. The administration also has little influence on hiring off campus. Teaching in St John’s required that I sacrifice my personal life, although no one expected me to hide it. Commuting is a cruel existence. To be middle-aged and hope that time will pass as quickly as possible is really sad. I coped by resolutely refusing to think about my

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unhappiness and reminding myself that the perks of my professional life outweighed the sacrifices. Commuting between St John’s and Toronto meant that my experience of Newfoundland was odd. I taught at Memorial for a dozen years before I spent a summer on the island and discovered to my surprise that St John’s is full of lilac bushes and laburnum trees. They look too delicate to survive Newfoundland gales. When I retired, drivers in downtown St John’s were still stopping to let pedestrians jaywalk; the passengers on city buses still thanked the driver or said goodbye as they left. In winter, pedestrians had to confront cars by walking in the street because the sidewalks were not properly cleared of snow. Walking in the traffic on icy streets is, for me, a quintessential St John’s experience. Piano lessons, Taoist Tai Chi, and photographing St John’s changed my relationship to the city. You cannot dislike a place when you stalk heritage buildings searching for the precise moment when they look their best.

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NOTES This is a substantial revision of a chapter that first appeared in Stephen Harold Riggins and Roberta Buchanan, eds., Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience (St John’s: ISER Books, 2019). I would like to thank Roberta Buchanan, Meg Luxton, and Neil McLaughlin for their assistance in writing this chapter. Arthur Rothstein, working for the Farm Security Administration, took some classic Depression-era photographs of Martin County, where Loogootee is located. The complete statement to the FBI, along with other information about my university education, can be found in the Special Collections, Archives of Victoria University, University of Toronto, E.J. Pratt Library, Fond 50. I also enjoyed encouraging conversations with York University sociologists Ioan Davies and Peter Landstreet, who were interested in the sociology of the arts. Landstreet was an informal advisor for my dissertation. I have First Nations ancestry from both sides of my family. However, these women died in the early and mid-1800s. I know almost nothing about them. Borrowing ideas from traditional Aboriginal wisdom became fashionable during the 1960s counterculture. The environmental movement also contributed to the re-evaluation of First Nations spirituality. These shifts in public opinion led me to the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto rather than feeling an identity with unknown ancestors. Memorial University has two links with the Chicago School of sociology. Nels Anderson, remembered mostly for his research on hobos although he

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had a long publication record, taught at Memorial as a visiting professor for two years in the mid-1960s. He was not happy at Memorial, which was much smaller then than today, and left for the University of New Brunswick (Riggins 2017). George Park, a grandson of Robert Park, taught anthropology for many years at Memorial. 7 I also served as book review editor for the CRS for five years and was the main organizer of the thirty-second annual meeting of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association in St John’s, choosing the general theme for the occasion – the social other: diversity and inclusiveness. 8 One aspect of Martin County, Indiana, that has attracted the attention of social scientists is the socialist utopian community called Padanaram (Wagner 1982). REFERENCES Agee, James, and Walker Evans. 1960. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. Armstrong, Elizabeth A., and Laura T. Hamilton. 2013. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brotz, Howard. 1964. The Black Jews of Harlem: Negro Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Negro Leadership. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Cormier, Jeffrey. 2004. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fellows, Will. 2004. A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gouldner, Alvin. 1957 and 1958. “Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles.” Part 1. Administrative Science Quarterly 2 (3): 281–306. – 1958. “Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles.” Part 2. Administrative Science Quarterly 2 (4): 444–81. Helmes-Hayes, Rick, and Emily Milne. 2017. “The Institutionalization of Symbolic Interactionism in Canadian Sociology, 1922–1979: Success at What Cost?” Canadian Journal of Sociology 42 (20): 145–96. McCaskell, Tim. 2016. Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism. Toronto: Between the Lines. Morrow, Raymond A. 1991. “Introduction: The Challenge of Cultural Studies to Canadian Sociology and Anthropology.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 28 (2): 153–72. Nock, David A. 2001. “Careers in Print: Canadian Sociological Books and Their Impact, 1975-1992.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 469–85.

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Porter, Marilyn. 2019. “The Edge of Experience: Coming to Newfoundland in the 1980s.” In Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience, ed. Stephen Harold Riggins and Roberta Buchanan, 268–77. St John’s, NL: ISER Books. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Riggins, Stephen Harold. 1980. “Institutional Change in Nineteenth-Century French Music.” PhD diss., University of Toronto. – , ed. 1983. Special issue of Anthropologica on Native North Americans and the Media: Studies in Minority Journalism 25 (1). – 1985a. “Institutional Change in Nineteenth-Century French Music.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 6: 243–60. – 1985b. “The Semiotics of Things: Towards a Sociology of Human-object Interaction.” Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 5 (1): 69–77. – 1988. “The Spirit of Commerce in the Journalism of Carlos McCarty.” Indiana Magazine of History 84 (3): 262–81. – , ed. 1990. Beyond Goffman: Studies on Communication, Institution, and Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. – 1991. “‘If Work Made People Rich’: An Oral History of General Farming.” Midwestern Folklore 17 (2): 73–109. – , ed. 1992. Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. – , ed. 1994. The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. – , ed. 1997. The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. – 2003. The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, a Life. Toronto: Insomniac Press. – 2005. “Shoofly Quilts and Poetry.” Globe and Mail, 18 July. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/shoofly-quilts-and-poetry/article18240981/. – 2007. “The Value of Anecdotal Evidence.” In Reading Sociology: Canadian Perspectives, ed. Lorne Tepperman and Harley Dickinson, 11–13. Toronto: Oxford University Press. – 2012. “‘A Square Deal for the Least and the Last’: The Career of W.G. Smith in the Methodist Ministry, Experimental Psychology, and Sociology.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 27 (2): 179–222. – 2013. “The Natural Order is Decay: The House as an Ephemeral Art Project.” In Things in Culture, Culture in Things, ed. Anu Kannike and Patrick Laviolette, 36–57. Tartu, Estonia: University of Tartu Press. – 2014. “Memorial University’s First Sociologist: The Dilemmas of a

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Bureaucratic Intellectual.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 29 (1): 47–83. – 2015. “Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Identity in Wawatay News.” Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies 4 (1): 131–2. – 2017. “Sociology by Anthropologists: A Chapter in the History of an Academic Discipline in Newfoundland during the 1960s.” Acadiensis 46 (2): 119–42. – 2018. “The Early Years” and “Go Further, Stay Home.” In Memories of a Small Town, ed. Marla Williams-Van Hoy and Patty Williams, 5–72. Loogootee, IN: penitpublications.com. – 2019. “Married Bachelor in the Department of Sociology.” In Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience, ed. Stephen Harold Riggins and Roberta Buchanan, 278–90. St John’s, NL: ISER Books. Riggins, Stephen Harold, and Roberta Buchanan, eds. 2019. Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience. St John’s: ISER Books. Riggins, Stephen Harold, and Khoa Pham. 1986. “Democratizing the Arts: France in an Era of Austerity.” Queen’s Quarterly 93 (1): 149–61. Schneider, Joseph. 1952. “On the Beginnings of Warfare.” Social Forces 31 (1): 68–74. – 1959. “Is War a Problem?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 3 (4): 353–60. Wagner, Jon. 1982. “A Midwestern Patriarchy.” In Sex Roles in Contemporary American Communes, ed. John Wagner, 211–40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Westie, Frank Robert. 1973. “Academic Expectations for Professional Immortality: A Study of Legitimation.” American Sociologist 8 (1): 19–32. – 1995. Ash Wednesday ‘45. Ann Arbor, MI: George Wahr. White, Harrison, and Cynthia White. 1965. Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in 19th Century French Music. New York: John Wiley. Wynkoop, Mary Ann. 2002. Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

20 In a Strange Nation in My Nation Itself Jean-Philippe Warren

I am considered a specialist of Quebec society. Yet, I was not interested in Quebec until very late. My mother (Odette Bartok-Elias) is the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish mother from the Czech Republic and a Palestinian father who was raised a Greek Catholic (her uncle was an Archimandrite). Born in Haifa and having studied in Beirut at a school run by French Catholic sisters, she arrived in Montreal seven years before my birth. She was welcomed by her mother who was by then divorced and had reconnected with her religious heritage (in contact with her, my sister eventually turned to the Jewish faith). A distant heir of a soldier of the British Army, my father (Jean-Pierre Warren) studied in England, at the Imperial College. When I was born, my paternal grandmother had already left Quebec to live in France, where she died, and in my eyes, I always considered her French to the core. Being a Jewish-Catholic-Palestinian-Hungarian-Czech-SlovakFrench-British-Scottish-francophone-English-Quebecer-Canadian, I had every reason to be disoriented about my identity. The obsession with Auschwitz, where a large part of my maternal family died; the nostalgia for Palestine, from which my grandfather was expelled after the creation of Israel (1948); the contempt for Quebec displayed by my paternal grandmother, who had been disgusted by the narrowmindedness of her compatriots and had chosen to live elsewhere; the taste for business transmitted by my successful paternal grandfather; the remarriage of my parents to immigrants – all this made it unlikely that I would become a sociologist of francophone Quebec society.

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On the other hand, I grew up at a time of quiet nationalism, in a city (Quebec City) where Quebec identity was never questioned by anyone. We were Québécois without even having to define ourselves in relation to anything else. The English, for example, were not part of our psyche (as they were for francophone Montrealers). I did not speak a word of English, and, even when I came of age, I mastered this language with difficulty (even today, only 36 per cent of francophone Quebecers are bilingual, a proportion that falls rapidly as one moves away from Montreal). In 1970, at the time of my birth, a mere 0.57 per cent of Quebec City’s denizens were not Canadian-born, and members of visible minorities were an exotic curiosity with whom I almost never crossed paths. At home, I ate kibbeh, tabbouleh, and falafel, but I never thought that these were not ordinary Quebec dishes, and, based on my friends’ reactions, I had no reason to realize that they were Middle Eastern. Since the very idea that someone could be an immigrant did not exist in our imagination (even in my own!), my childhood friends simply said that the dishes cooked by my mother were different from what they ate at home and that the food was good. I considered my life to be very North American because it could not be thought (and lived) otherwise. Hence, I was not confronted with my own marginality. Simultaneously, without really understanding where this sentiment came from, I felt a certain detachment from my environment. As long as I can remember, inhabiting the world seemed problematic to me. When I was young, my parents divorced. Since my father and mother had strangely remained with their fathers when their parents divorced, it seemed natural to them, without ever debating the matter, that my siblings and I remain with our father after their separation. I was therefore raised by my father at a time when there were still very few divorces in my milieu and even fewer social representations of this fast-growing reality. My father having to absent himself for work and not knowing what to do with his three children, I grew up in a huge house without much parental guidance. My grandparents had also divorced and remarried several times. Needless to say, the idea of the family was a rather vague concept for me. In addition to this, my father was a single child and my mother was a quasi-single daughter (although she had two sisters, we very rarely visited them, and, for all intents and purposes, it was as if they did not exist), so I did not have any extended family. The first society that a family represents was not part of my experience. I grew up, in effect, without a

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family, and I believed that I should be grateful for it. Being unattached, I thought, made me freer. I had the impression of being a child from nowhere. Attracted by the absurd, in high school I founded a student paper called, with bravado, The Fodder Plant. Marcel Gotlib, the famous French cartoonist, author of the celebrated Dingodossiers, was my hero. COMMITMENT AND DISTANCING

I was, in the words of the poet Louis Aragon (1945), “in a strange nation in my nation itself” (En étrange pays dans mon pays luimême). I was totally from Quebec and, at the same time, a little off in my own society. This is a position that differs from the experience of being an “awkward insider” that Val Colic-Peisker talks about. A Croatian immigrant to Australia who wanted to blend into his new society, Colic-Peisker (2004) undertook ethnographic works within his own minority community only to discover that he was entrusted with the task of representing his own people. I would discover much later that my life personified in many ways a challenge that has tormented sociology since its very beginnings. The discipline is essentially torn between those who advocate keeping society at a distance and those who plea for a certain complicity with it. There is a constant tension between these two poles. Gaston Bachelard (2002) spoke of the need for an “epistemological rupture” – that is, a break with one’s milieu, one’s past, one’s values, or one’s preconceived ideas in order to pass from a stage of “believing” to a stage of “knowing.” Yet every social scientist knows that, without a certain level of empathy for one’s object of study, it is difficult to understand its motivations, attitudes, and behaviour. Sociologists, therefore, are confronted with two radically different approaches: either they try to adopt some “cosmic vantage point” and construct knowledge in the abstract, in a way that is truer than the common truth, thus tearing away the veil of myths and obscurantism that pervade the larger society; or they begin with the knowledge conveyed by the social actors in order to give it back in a more constructed form. If a scholar chooses distancing, he or she may end up producing disembodied abstractions; and if she or he chooses immersion, s/he may end up reproducing commonplaces (albeit in a learned form). How can passions be neutralized without losing that minimum of sympathy that gives meaning to actions driven by values and beliefs?

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This question is not raised often enough by sociologists. For some researchers, the scientific study of society is simply a matter of blindly following the rules of the scientific method. They identify their research field, select a theoretical framework, conduct their investigations, hand out questionnaires, crunch results, and write papers without compromising themselves in their research. Such an attitude has the unfortunate result of giving too many papers a scholastic outlook that ultimately renders them akin to discussions about the sex of angels. Other researchers take full account of their egocentric views, embrace the cause of their subjects, and turn their discipline into an opportunity to defend the rights of certain groups, be it women, Indigenous peoples, or the poor. They seek not to “betray their subjects,” naively accepting the discourses formulated by the actors. There is some good sociology in the midst of all of this. However, critical reflection is usually absent from such work: sociologists do not take their own position into consideration. They go about their business, objectifying everything and anything, except, of course, themselves. It never occurs to them that the first condition of the objectivity of their work is to make sure that their research is not a mirror reflection of their status or education. Too often, the applications of loose methodologies combined with an altar-boy morality are enough for them. In a paper later included in his book Commitment and Distancing, Norbert Elias posed the question of how sociologists can distance themselves from objects that, unlike those of the natural sciences, are also subjects. He wondered how researchers who, through immersion or identification, participate in the cultural patterns they intend to study, can detach themselves from their roles and undertake scientific projects that require a certain distancing. It was clear to him that the “dialectics of the near and far” must inhabit the sociological mind, the error being to favour one of the two and either try to reach an illusory completely objective standpoint or succumb to the temptation of value judgments. The problem confronting them [social scientists] is not simply to discard the latter role [the requirements of their position as members of other groups] in favour of the former [their social task as scientists]. They cannot cease to take part in, and to be affected by, the social and political affairs of their groups and their time. Their own participation and involvement, moreover, is itself one of the conditions for comprehending the problems they try to solve as

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scientists. For while one need not know, in order to understand the structure of molecules, what it feels like to be one of its atoms, in order to understand the functioning of human groups one needs to know, as it were, from inside how human beings experience their own and other groups, and one cannot know without active participation and involvement. The problem confronting those who study one or the other aspects of human groups is how to keep their two roles as participant and as inquirer clearly and consistently apart and, as a professional group, to establish in their work the undisputed dominance of the latter. (Elias 1956, 237) My personal background partly prevented me from adopting a naïve epistemological approach. Coming to the study of Quebec from an original perspective, I could not take the question of belonging for granted. My interest in francophone Quebec culture began when I was a teenager, in the 1980s. I loved browsing flea markets where I could buy second-hand records and books for twenty-five cents. Partly for practical reasons (I couldn’t find much else) and financial hurdles (I couldn’t buy much else), I became a big fan of Gilles Vigneault, Paul Piché, and Harmonium. When I arrived at college (called CEGEP in Quebec) in 1986, at the age of sixteen, the debates around René Lévesque’s “beau risque” (the promise of a renewed federalism that would take into account Quebec’s claims) and the Meech Lake Accord (which recognized Quebec as a distinct society) were in full swing. My political consciousness took shape in this period of intense political discussion. On television and in the newspapers opinions clashed. As a member of the CEGEP Student Association, I brought the director of Le Devoir from Montreal to speak at our college, and this rather lacklustre man, speaking in a monotone, surprisingly attracted a huge crowd of highly politicized students. At the time, I saw myself as a full-fledged Quebecer. I was proud to belong to this dynamic society that had emerged from the Quiet Revolution (an era of intense institutional and cultural reforms during the 1960s) and was looking forward to the future with great optimism. One had to live through the intense collective fervour of the period to understand how a society can assert itself in history. In March 1989, for example, I participated with some of my friends in one of the most important marches in Quebec’s history to protest Bill 178 (which maintained French as the only language on outdoor public signs, within shopping centres, and in the public transit) and to demand the retention of Bill 101

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(which made French the official language of the provincial government). More than sixty thousand people paraded through the streets of Montreal, waving Quebec flags and chanting the slogan, “Everyone on the move to live in French” (Tout le Québec en marche pour le français). In my young adult mind, social democracy, language, feminism, Quebec identity, social justice, progress, and unionism were one and the same. Yet, within this unrest, my sense of imbalance in relation to my own society never left me. It was not a malaise. On the contrary, I felt absolutely Québécois, without a hyphen, and I would have been stupefied to meet anyone who would not have considered me such. I didn’t feel alienated; I felt detached. To be more exact, I should say that I consciously wanted to keep myself at a distance. The passion I harboured for Quebec did not attenuate this need for a certain retreat. I did not experience the filiations, for example, that Serge Cantin (1997, 25) evoked when he invited Quebecers to “shoulder their country as a child” and wrote that he could not be indifferent to the fate of his people “without betraying [him]self. What Quebec is, I still do not know. But, curiously enough, this ignorance no longer appears to me to be sufficient reason for not responding to the call Quebec sends us from the depths of its very silence, a silence that every Quebecer carries within himself like a cross.” When he was a doctoral student in France, Cantin felt as though he lacked “an essential part of [himself]” and was oftentimes homesick. The same experience was denied me when it was my turn to move to the French capital in 1996 to enrol at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure: my grandmother lived there. TRUTH AND RELEVANCE

Many francophone Quebec sociologists born after the Second World War came from poor and uneducated families. For them, doing advanced studies was both an exhilarating and a painful experience. Fernand Dumont, often considered the greatest Quebec sociologist, was plagued by a bad conscience for being the child of a working-class family who acceded to the learned culture. This rupture from the world of his youth was experienced as a personal drama. Dumont described how, for him, school projected him into a foreign universe. In his remarkable autobiography, Récit d’une emigration (Narrative of an emigration), he writes that entering college was for him the equiv-

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alent of “moving to a new country.” Coming from a working-class milieu, he did not find that his teachers’ lessons reaffirmed what he had learned in his little town. On the contrary, he felt he was being taught the rules of a society “of nowhere.” In Le lieu de l’homme: La culture comme distance et mémoire (The locus of man: Culture as distance and memory), Dumont (1968) translated his personal trajectory into a general theory of culture. For him, culture is always divided: it opposes a “primary culture” (i.e., a culture made of people’s traditions and inheritances) to a “secondary culture” (i.e., a culture based on criticism and reflection). Culture exists, according to Dumont, because human beings can be objects to themselves. Culture creates a void that distances individuals from their inner selves, and it is within this abyss that the emergence of consciousness becomes possible. Culture, Dumont argues, is nothing in itself and has no other function than to separate experience and expression. There is, therefore, no way to abolish the distance or fill the void from which culture emerges. But, for Dumont, the modern age raises new and disturbing problems. In his opinion, primary and secondary cultures, once linked to each other, are becoming more and more isolated. Science is partly guilty of this evolution. It confines knowledge to small tight compartments that are segmented according to research sectors, methodologies, and theories, with the consequence that the knowledge produced by researchers is increasingly overspecialized and insignificant. Great assertions about social life being settled, researchers work on extremely circumscribed domains that no longer speak to the general public. Dumont conceptualized this fracture by contrasting truth and relevance. The university libraries, he said, are full of truths. But these truths are often meaningless, for it is not enough for science to be true: it must also be relevant. Why should society care that, studied according to a certain theoretical perspective and with a methodology drawn from this or that repertory – an institution recalls Bentham’s panopticon – if this knowledge is not pertinent to anyone? Observing the academic trends in the 1980s and 1990s, Dumont feared a world of research that would have no other justification than itself, having detached itself from all obligations in relation to the wider society. He was not the only one. Many other French-speaking Quebec researchers agreed with him. Their enthusiasm for Marxism or nationalism was partly rooted in this concern. Quebec sociology was historically more agitated than English sociology (the main struggle of which in the 1970s was fighting for the hire of tenure-track can-

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didates holding Canadian PhDs at Canadian universities [Cormier 2004]) because it aspired to be more relevant. It was afraid of finding itself without a mission. It was desperately seeking a project, an intention, a finality that would transform science into something more than the mere accumulation of raw data. For example, Marcel Rioux, a sociologist at the Université de Montréal, founded the magazine Possibles in 1976 with the objective of bringing about a revolution in Quebec. He was surrounded by many prominent sociologists, including Marcel Fournier, Andrée Fortin, Gabriel Gagnon, and JeanJacques Simard. I have always appreciated Dumont’s distinction between truth and relevance. On the one hand, truth creates a distance with an object of study to the point that the object of study may not recognize itself in the knowledge produced. Didn’t Auguste Comte teach people not to believe in their traditions, Marx in their ideologies, and Durkheim in their religions? Social science effects a formidable decentring, claiming that individuals recognize themselves in representations that are not of their own fabrication, and not even of their own choosing. Conversely, relevance seeks to make knowledge legible, acceptable, and agreeable to the larger public. Research that aims for greater relevancy is based on a deep level of collaboration and ethical engagement, resulting in various partnerships and collaborative practices. Between these two options, the easy solution would be to seek a research model that would allow research projects to be both true and relevant, but this is more easily said than done. Inevitably, there will be tension at the heart of one’s work, whether such a deep-seated tension is acknowledged or not. I personally welcome this cleavage imposed by social sciences’ epistemological rupture. I remember a dinner with an immigrant colleague who was complaining that he had never felt like a “true” Quebecer. I replied that I could not understand how one would deplore a situation that seemed to me to be a key characteristic of a social scientist’s life. Yet I know that the feeling expressed by my colleague is shared by many others. Born in France to Polish Jewish parents, and having immigrated to Montreal in 1977, the professor of sociology Régine Robin (2011) grieved that, after thirty-five years, she did not feel “at home here” (in Quebec). Let us pass over the fact that Robin has earned many accolades, including the Jacques-Rousseau Prize; I would only emphasize that her admission cannot be a failure for those who dedicate themselves to the study of society. Studying the social world requires a certain dis-

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tance. The art of sociologists consists in detaching themselves from their first belongings and becoming strangers to themselves. To inhabit the world of science they must learn to move away from their roots, values, belongings, and beliefs. My great fortune was not to have to tear myself away from my own society. I was somehow, by birth, a “foreign native.” BECOMING A QUEBEC SPECIALIST

I became aware of my condition in the 1990s for a very simple reason: I chose to study Quebec society. That was not a matter of course. On the one hand, the era was already riding the wave of globalization. “Transnationalism” was becoming one of the new buzzwords of academic circles (along with “deconstruction,” the Holy Trinity “gender-class-race,” and “narrative”). I started my doctoral studies just when the events in Seattle broke out and I was strongly attracted, like all of my classmates, to the emerging anti-globalization movements. Later, in 2000, at the Quebec City Summit, I would brave tear gas to assert my opposition to neoliberal policies. I had also travelled extensively. For instance, when I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree, I spent a year cycling in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and another three months walking the countrysides of India, Nepal, and Pakistan. I indulged in theory, having at one time considered enrolling in philosophy, and the optional courses I took at the undergraduate level touched more on the thought of Hegel than that of Lionel Groulx (an outspoken French Canadian nationalist of the 1930s). The professor who influenced me the most in my first university year – and who would become my master’s supervisor – taught Marxism. I remember that Gilles Gagné began his first class on Marxism with a sibylline sentence that has remained in my head ever since, “Imagine a pool table in three dimensions in a space without gravity.” We were far from Quebec… I do not know exactly why, but to Gilles Gagné, who invited me some years later to write a thesis on the young Niklas Luhmann, I replied that if I were to make a study of a sociologist, it would be a sociologist from Quebec. Gagné suggested that I do a study on the scholar who was then considered the greatest sociologist in Quebec: Fernand Dumont. I accepted at the outset. There was a comical situation in such a choice. My director was a disciple of Michel Freitag (a sociologist who taught epistemology at Université du Québec à Montréal), and I used in my dissertation the methods of the Geneva School,

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in particular the work of Jean Starobinski, to study a Quebec intellectual close to Paul Ricoeur. This eclecticism pleased me. The era in which I came of age had marked the end of “grand narratives” (Lyotard 1984), including functionalism, Marxism, and structuralism. The students of my generation found themselves without a supreme theory to which to adhere. In 1989, I remember seeing Un monde sans pitié (A world without mercy), a French movie that described the disillusionment of French youth rebelling against the new world order but not knowing how to formulate this refusal other than by subscribing to an idle bohemia. Jean Leloup was singing “L’amour est sans pitié” (Love is without mercy), “Décadence,” and “1990.” In my spare time, I was reading Theodor W. Adorno, Alexis de Tocqueville, Michel Foucault, Michel Freitag, Niklas Luhmann, Zygmunt Bauman, and so on. Besides sociology, I was reading everything that I could get my hands on: Edward Said, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Pierre Clastres, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Julia Kristeva, René Thom, Hannah Arendt. These readings allowed me later not to restrict myself to the territory of sociology and to travel through the whole of the social and human sciences. If I was later able to publish articles in political science, philosophy, literature, anthropology, religion, and history journals, I owe it to this first education, which made me, for better or for worse, a “jack of all trades, master of none” in a period of increasing specialization. By focusing my thesis on the life and work of Fernand Dumont, a French Canadian Catholic who grew up in a working-class environment, I suddenly realized how far the Quebec he embodied was from mine: I knew almost nothing about the Catholic religion, my family was wealthy, my grandmothers could not remotely be recognized in Maria Chapdelaine’s portrait (the heroine of a celebrated ruralist novel written in 1913 who chooses to perpetuate French Canadian tradition and marry someone from her parish), and so on. I discovered that I could not readily rely on my “primary culture,” to use one of Dumont’s concepts, to understand his biography. I was like an anthropologist who had moved to the Solomon Islands. I began reading in a bulimic fashion, including many Quebec novels and poems. When my MA thesis was published in 1998, it was fairly well received, not least because I had been able to accomplish two things that were not so self-evident (Warren 1998). First, I brought a fresh eye to the Catholic religion towards which I had neither unfavourable prejudices nor favourable opinions. For me, the Roman Catholic Church

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was an institution like any other, my family having not suffered under the yoke of the clergy during the so-called “Great Darkness,” when Quebec was seen as a “priest-ridden province” (none of my grandparents went to mass or to the synagogue). Second, I was able to integrate many original elements into my analysis, having read, during my studies, a great number of European and American authors. I started realizing that my weird “inner stranger” posture was not without its advantages. In English, we say that a student “enters into a subject.” That’s exactly what I had done for my master’s, but with the difference that part of me was already there. I was both inside looking out and outside looking in. I also discovered that my “inner stranger” posture was shared (but for other reasons) by the professors I most appreciated. Two professors influenced me tremendously during my studies. Gilles Gagné served as my unofficial doctoral supervisor (my official supervisor was a woman of extraordinary talent, Nicole Laurin, to whom I am also greatly indebted). Teaching at the Université de Moncton and studying at the Université de Montréal, I had kept a pied-à-terre in Quebec City, and Gilles Gagné agreed to guide my doctoral investigations. I have been extremely privileged to rub shoulders with this impressive intellectual, of unlimited erudition, capable of passing without effort from anecdotal facts to the most abstract theories. His concerns were fundamentally political, but a politics without moralizing, situated on a sociological horizon that was – as much as possible – devoid of value judgments. Denys Delâge was my other mentor. In 1985 he had published a landmark book on the “meeting of the two worlds” (Delâge 1993). Inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel, the book brilliantly placed the history of Indigenous peoples in the context of world history. Each in his own way, Gagné and Delâge put Quebec on the map of the material world and on the star chart of ideas. Neither of them sat on my dissertation committee. Yet, showing exceptional generosity, they read and annotated everything I sent them. They made long critical comments that adjusted and clarified my ideas. They pushed me further. If I succeeded in landing a job as a university professor, it was entirely thanks to them. They did more: they embodied a humanist model of the university that I found nowhere else. When I won the Governor General’s Award in 2015 for Honoré Beaugrand: La plume et l’épée (1848–1906) it was to them that my first thoughts went. Continuing on the thrust of my MA thesis, my doctorate focused on French Canadian sociology before the 1960s. This is how I became, in

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the eyes of everyone, a specialist of Quebec. The qualifier was even more true for me than for others. Indeed, my study did not concern this or that aspect of Quebec society. I was not interested per se in the analysis of unemployment, immigration, delinquency, health care, or any other specific research topic. Though I have over the years published books on Santa Claus (Warren 2006a), Marxism-Leninism (Warren 2007), student movements (Warren 2008), literature (Garnier and Warren 2012, Warren 2005), counterculture (Warren 2008; Warren and Fortin 2015), artistic schools (Warren 2011), and Aboriginal peoples (Delâge and Warren 2017), no one could say that I was a specialist of social movements (Meunier and Warren 2002; Warren 2006b; Warren 2013; Carel et al. 2013), or labour, or gender (Warren 2012), or arts (Warren 2011), or First Nations (Warren 2003b), or intellectuals (Gagné and Warren 2003; Warren and Saint-Pierre 2006; Warren 2003a, 2005, 2015a), or religion (Mercier and Warren 2016; Meunier and Warren 2002; Pâcquet et al. 2013; Warren 2015b; Warren and Dumons 2015), or consumerism (Warren 2006a). My only specialization, if I had one, was the study of Quebec. When asked what my research was about, I had no other choice but to respond: Quebec. Hence, I found myself, not by virtue of my particular perspective, but because of the sheer accumulation of my research projects, replicating the approach of the great Quebec sociologists of the last generation who had studied Quebec as a “global society” (Dumont 1963, 277–94). Studying Quebec as a “global society” is not self-evident. From a political point of view, Quebec is not a global society in the sense that all, or at least a large part, of its social reproduction would be of its own design. Quebec is a province. But from a cultural point of view, francophone Quebec appears to be a separate entity, an almost sovereign nation. Quebec has its own star system, and the programs most watched by Quebecers are locally produced. In March 2016, twentyeight of the thirty most watched programs in Quebec were filmed in the province. English Canadian society cannot boast of such success: because of the porosity of the American and Canadian anglophone markets, only five of the thirty most popular programs in Canada were produced nationally in March 2016. Moreover, the rest of Canada has never succeeded in penetrating the francophone market and, conversely, no Quebec program makes a significant dent in the English market. The same can be said about cinema. Only 1 per cent of English Canadians prefer Quebec films, and only 1 per cent of French-speaking Quebecers prefer Canadian films. Bon Cop, Bad Cop,

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the highest-grossing film in the history of Canadian cinema, garnered $12 million: $1 million outside the province and $11 million in Quebec. It is a beautiful illustration of the so-called “two solitudes.” There is very little dialogue between francophone Quebec society and the rest of the country because the former is culturally self-sufficient (something frustrated English Canadians sometimes refer to as navelgazing!). As if that were not enough, the Quebec television market has an even greater following: programs such as Unité 9 or Les beaux malaises regularly reach two million viewers, whereas such a feat is rare for English Canada, which has a market that is four times larger. The annual end-of-the-year TV comedy Bye Bye reached five million viewers in 2015 (62 per cent of the population), a vertiginous figure compared to any other market (less than 50 per cent of Americans watch the Super Bowl). In such a context, it is tempting to overlook what is happening elsewhere when studying Quebec society. It would be foolhardy to try to do the same for other Canadian provinces, to pose as a sociologist of the “global society of Manitoba” or the “global society of Ontario.” Quebec’s cultural isolationism is reflected in the academic field. Over the past thirty years, while the international collaborations of Canadian sociologists have increased, interprovincial collaborations between Quebec and the rest of Canada have been on the decline (Gingras and Larivière 2005, 10–11). Canadian sociologists are increasingly working with foreign colleagues and less with colleagues “from the other side of the Ottawa River,” as the expression goes. It is like there is a wall between the two linguistic communities. A study has shown that French-speaking social scientists’ research is not cited by their Englishspeaking colleagues, even when it is published in English (Rocher 2007). The problem is that the reverse is also true: French-speaking sociologists in Quebec have little interest in English-Canadian sociology, which they consider insipid and uninspiring. This is primarily due to the uneven balance of power and prestige within the disciplinary field: Canada represents a peripheral country within the global research community. In particular, the United States and the United Kingdom (the metropolises of English Canadian academics) and France (the historic metropolis of French Canadian academics) attract many researchers. In McGill’s Department of Sociology, for example, the vast majority of professors earned their PhD degrees in American institutions, which only accentuates their already strong propensity to pretend their university is located on the other side of the border. At Laval or Université

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du Québec à Montréal, collaboration with France or Belgium is considered equally prestigious. The result is that there is not one Canadian sociology but two. Being a francophone Quebec sociologist does not mean the same thing as being an anglophone Canadian sociologist. I am representative of this isolation: I have seldom collaborated with colleagues in Toronto, Calgary, or Vancouver, whereas I am regularly invited to present my work in Rome, Freiburg, Brussels, Paris, or Lyon. KEEPING QUEBEC AT ARM ’ S LENGTH

I publish mainly in French. This choice condemns me to relative insignificance in the now internationalized academic world. In return I receive tremendous recognition from my own society. I am invited to speak on television, I am interviewed on the radio, newspapers publish my op-eds. I end up being, whether I like it or not, an organic intellectual, in the sense given by Gramsci. “Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” (Gramsci 1971). Against the universal intellectual who intervenes on every hot topic, like Jean-Paul Sartre, who never shied away from taking a stand on any issue, some argue in favour of the figure of the specialized intellectual, whose word is legitimized on the basis of mastering a particular domain of knowledge. The problem is that the debate that has historically, first and foremost, concerned Quebec is Quebec itself, as a whole. The great public intellectuals of Quebec are intellectuals of the Quebec nation – such as Lionel Groulx (the first French Canadian chair of Canadian history, in 1915), Fernand Dumont (one of the thinkers behind the crafting of language legislation in the province of Quebec, in 1977), or Gérard Bouchard (who co-chaired the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences in 2007–08). Those who tackle other interests have a much more anonymous profile. By becoming a Quebec sociologist, I was necessarily caught up in the national question. It solicited me, even when I tried to escape its web. Not all francophone Quebecers studying Quebec are nationalists, but a large proportion are. The reason is quite simple: scientists’ values and interests determine their object of study, as Karl Mannheim

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(1936) noted long ago. The most arbitrary aspect of the scientific endeavour is the subjective choice of one’s object of study. As scholars, we are motivated by our own situation. This explains why women are more likely to study women, or Blacks Blacks, or homosexuals homosexuals. Students who take Quebec as an object of study are more likely to be concerned about what is happening in this region of the globe. Trends towards transnationalism, cultural crossbreeding, and cosmopolitanism have not changed the situation as much as one would think. It is true that the national wave has receded in recent years and that support for sovereignty is declining in the polls, and that, as a result, Quebec studies has recently lost its past appeal. In university circles students are less interested than before in Quebec studies. Their minds are elsewhere: the rise of individualism, the dynamics of social media, globalization, unrestrained consumerism – these are some of the factors combining to make the study of Quebec less exciting than it was a decade or two ago, especially during the constitutional crises that had the eyes of the whole world turned to Quebec and fuelled collective passions (Gingras and Warren 2006). And as if this were not enough, the internationalization of research results in the reduction of more peripheral and less prestigious objects of study in favour of more “profitable” themes in terms of symbolic capital. Quebecers therefore deserted the study of their own society, a phenomenon that has also affected English Canadian sociology (Warren 2014). However, these trends also mean that some of those who remain attached to the study of Quebec will be concerned by the national question to a higher degree than the provincial average. To use an image, when a planet’s force of gravity decreases, it is the heaviest objects that remain on the ground and the most volatile objects that start floating around. Such is the case for the study of Quebec society. The most nationalistic cling to the study of a society that remains dear to their heart, while the most cosmopolitan start looking elsewhere. The end result is a continuing nationalist trend within the field of Quebec studies that counterbalances the forces of cosmopolitanism. When it comes to Quebec sociology, household names include people like Gérard Bouchard, Jacques Beauchemin (a Parti Québécois deputy minister from 2012 to 2014), and Joseph-Yvon Thériault (who held, among many other positions, a research chair in identity and francophonie). These authors have produced works of very high quality. They have situated their reflections on a broad hori-

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zon, publishing comparative and international studies. Their analyses are of a stature that allows for a dialogue with the great thinkers of our time. They are also known for their sovereigntist convictions. They do not hesitate to lend their voices to the struggle of Quebecers claiming full independence. My disciplinary anchoring in the study of Quebec contrasted with that of some of my colleagues. Being entrusted with the role of an organic intellectual, I ran the risk of being completely reconciled with the dominant nationalist discourses and losing that distance that is essential to the sociologist’s work. This risk was nevertheless tempered by two choices that played a crucial role in my career. First, in 2002, I began teaching at Concordia University, the most “Canadian” of Quebec’s seventeen universities. I found in this institution an extremely stimulating environment, but not for the reason that is usually expected. If I liked to teach at Concordia so much, it was because Concordia did not speak to the people in my community. The university had no reputation, neither good nor bad, as far as my francophone colleagues were concerned. They hardly knew where it was located on the map. None of Concordia’s sociologists has a reputation outside the campus, apart from Hubert Guindon, who was the author of half a dozen papers in the 1960s and 1970s. As the youngest of Quebec’s universities (it was founded in 1974), its research infrastructure was underdeveloped. Courses were taught in English, and my English was quite deficient when I arrived as a young tenure-track professor. Many of my friends were surprised that I agreed to work there. Some of them interpreted my choice as a failure. If I was at Concordia, they imagined, it was because I could not be anywhere else. They did not understand that it was because I wanted to be somewhere else that I was at Concordia. At Concordia, I worked with students from a wide range of backgrounds. The university offered me a more multicultural image of Quebec society than the one I had been used to at Laval University or the Université de Montréal, where almost all my classmates were white, francophone, and Roman Catholic. Quebec is indeed cut in two, to a certain extent. Approximately 80 per cent of anglophones in Quebec and 80 per cent of immigrants live in the Montreal metropolitan area (the other large contingent live on the outskirts of Ottawa). Also, the island of Montreal itself is split in two, with the French Canadian population living in the east half, and the English-speaking population in the west half (historically immigrants set-

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tled right in the middle). Attracting many first- or second-generation immigrants, Concordia creates a vibrant academic environment, where ideas and opinions clash in a collegial fashion. Teaching at Concordia, a sociologist is far removed from the old French Canadian world. Another way of keeping Quebec at arm’s length was to settle in Verdun, a disreputable district of the southwest, which had the double “flaw” of being poor and being located to the west of St-Laurent Street (the “Main”), which divides francophones from anglophones. The average income in the Wellington-de l’Église sector ($23,000 in 2005), where I lived, was a third below the Montreal means. The dropout rate at the only French high school, ranked as one of the ten most disadvantaged schools in Montreal, hovered around 50 per cent. Moreover, the part of Verdun where I live is very mixed. For example, when my son attended his first year of school, fifteen out of eighteen of his classmates were first- or second-generation immigrants; in his class alone he mingled with fourteen different nationalities. Verdun may seem a confusing borough for someone who, like me, was born in Quebec City, a place where still today fewer than 5 per cent of the residents are immigrants (many of whom are from France!). I felt at home in what seemed a “no man’s land” to many francophones. It was exactly what I was looking for. In this non-place, I could study Quebec without the risk of espousing its dominant vision. I thus avoided identifying myself with it, while fully inhabiting it. At Concordia and Verdun, I found myself both withdrawn from Quebec society and immersed in it. I must confess, I am attached to Quebec. I was raised there. I feel at home there. This proximity is useful for a sociologist. Too much distance from a society can make a researcher blind to important realities. A first barrier for a non-francophone researcher is, of course, the level of command of the French language. It would be difficult to see how sociologists could rigorously study the United States without reading and understanding English, and the same observation applies to unilingual English scholars interested in studying Quebec society. It is not only that some crucial data will be lacking: it is also that the cultural and national subtleties will evade them and that their conclusions might be biased as a result. Speaking intelligently of a region without really engaging with it usually provides dubious results. And to really know a society, it is necessary to live it, not only live in it, by which I mean that it is imperative to discover it from the inside. Sociology is not only a compilation of facts and fig-

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ures, it is also an interpretation of culture that, in many cases, borders on hermeneutics. Let us take the fifteen following words: “tenderness, morality, frankness, God, foreigner, resourcefulness, sensual, certainty, marriage, soldier, emotion, prudence, tolerance, savings, and warmth.” Invited to select only five words from this list, English Canadians retain in greater numbers the words “savings, morality, marriage, God, soldier, and foreigner.” Francophone Quebecers are more likely to select “tenderness, warmth, frankness, resourcefulness, emotion, tolerance, and sensuality” (Léger et al. 2016, 41). These differences are subtle. They determine, however, different visions of the world. Sociologists will be influenced by these traits according to their mother tongue and where they live. Certainly, studying a different society from their own requires a departure from their ways of thinking so as not to attribute to another community the expectations of their group. This is why I have seldom read (although there are brilliant exceptions) any good work on a society that was not signed by authors who had spent a long time there. It is difficult for someone to become overnight a specialist of Quebec (or Tunisia, or India). It is hard to do solid research by simply spending time in the library. The lived experience of the world is irreplaceable. A HAPPY EXILE

I became a sociologist because I was familiar enough with my society to engage with it and yet foreign enough to feel a certain distance from it. In this regard, I followed the path taken by the best sociologists, whether it be the bourgeois Karl Marx (who advocated for the rights of the working class) or the aristocrat Tocqueville (who heralded democracy). Their reflections were so powerful and stimulating because they were based on a dialectics of the near and the far. I, of course, did not succeed in raising myself to the height of these famous pioneers. But, like them, I accepted, as a practitioner of the social sciences, living in exile. I discovered that I could offer an image of Quebec that, while remaining critical and reflective, is nonetheless enriched by all the sympathy I have for this society. Bourdieu had developed an almost paranoiac posture in his relation to his society, of which he was pathologically suspicious, for he had always felt rejected by the French elites and power-holders. It gave his sociology a very subversive turn (Bourdieu 2000). My posture is different. I have

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developed an immense confidence in Quebec society. I always recognized how privileged I was, being welcomed everywhere like a guest, so to speak. Instead of, like Bourdieu, striving to integrate myself all the while denouncing the conservative character of society’s institutions, my life made the opposite possible: keeping society at a distance, while trying to demonstrate the rationality of Quebec’s institutions and culture. One felt Bourdieu was embittered. I do not think the same could ever be said about me. I am a happy exile. REFERENCES Aragon, Louis. 1945. En étrange pays dans mon pays lui-même. Monaco: La voile latine. Bachelard, Gaston. 2002. The Formation of the Scientific Mind. Bolton: Clinamen. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Cantin, Serge. 1997. Ce pays comme un enfant. Paris: L’Hexagone. Le texte a d’abord paru en 1988 dans la revue Liberté. Carel, Ivan, Robert Comeau, and Jean-Philippe Warren, eds. 2013. Violences politiques: Europe et Amérique, 1960–1979. Montréal: Lux. Colic-Peisker, Val. 2004. “Doing Ethnography in ‘One’s Own Ethnic Community’: The Experience of an Awkward Insider.” In Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation, ed. Lynn Hume and Jane Mulock, 82–94. New York: Columbia University Press. Cormier, Jeffrey. 2004. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Delâge, Denys. 1993. Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600–64. Vancouver: UBC Press. Delâge, Denys, and Jean-Philippe Warren. 2017. Le piège de la liberté: les peuples autochtones dans l’engrenage des régimes coloniaux. Montreal: Boréal. Dumont, Fernand. 1963. “L’étude systématique de la société globale canadienne-française.” Recherches sociographiques 3 (1–2): 277–94. – 1968. Le lieu de l’homme: La culture comme distance et mémoire. Montreal: HMH. Elias, Norbert. 1956. “Problems of Involvement and Detachment.” British Journal of Sociology 7 (3): 226–52. Gagné, Gilles, and Jean-Philippe Warren, eds. 2003. Sociologie et valeurs: Quatorze penseurs Québécois du XXème siècle. Montreal: Les Presses Universitaires de Montréal. Garnier, Xavier, and Jean-Philippe Warren, eds. 2012. Écrivains francophones en exil à Paris: entre cosmopolitisme et marginalité. Paris: Karthala.

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Gingras, Yves, and Vincent Larivière. 2005. “Les pratiques de publication des chercheurs québécois en sciences sociales.” Le Cahier de l’ACSALF 2, April: 10–11. Gingras, Yves, and Jean-Philippe Warren. 2006. “Montée et déclin du rayonnement universitaire.” Sociologie et société québécoise: Présences de Guy Rocher, ed. Céline Saint-Pierre and Jean-Philippe Warren, 289–302. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Léger, Jean-Marc, Jacques Nantel, and Pierre Duhamel. 2016. Cracking the Quebec Code: The 7 Keys to Understanding Quebecers. Montreal: Juniper. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge. Mercier, Charles, and Jean-Philippe Warren. 2016. Identités religieuses et cohésion sociale: La France et le Québec à l’école de la diversité. Bordeaux: Le Bord de l’Eau. Meunier, E.-Martin, and Jean-Philippe Warren. 2002. Sortir de la Grande Noirceur: L’horizon personnaliste de la Révolution tranquille. Sillery: Septentrion. Pâquet, Martin, Matteo Sanfilippo, and Jean-Philippe Warren, eds. 2013. Le Saint-Siège, le Québec et l’Amérique française: Les archives vaticanes, pistes et défis. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Robin, Régine. 2011. Nous autres, les autres. Montreal: Boréal. Rocher, François. 2007. “The End of the ‘Two Solitudes’? The Presence (or Absence) of the Work of French Speaking Scholars in Canadian Politics.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 40 (4): 833–57. Warren, Jean-Philippe. 1998. Un supplément d’âme: Les intentions primordiales de Fernand Dumont (1947–1970). Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’université Laval. – 2003a. L’Engagement sociologique: La tradition sociologique du Québec francophone, 1886–1955. Montreal: Boréal. – , ed. 2003b. La question des races: Une anthologie. Montreal: Bibliothèque Québécoise. – 2005. Edmond de Nevers: Portrait d’un intellectuel. Montreal: Boréal. – 2006a. Hourra pour Santa Claus: La commercialisation de la saison des fêtes au Québec, 1885–1915. Montreal: Boréal. – , ed. 2006b. Mémoires d’un avenir: Dix utopies qui ont forgé le Québec. Québec: Nota Bene.

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– 2007. Ils voulaient changer le monde: Le militantisme marxiste-léniniste au Québec. Montreal: VLB éditeur. – 2008. Une douce anarchie: Les années 68 au Québec. Montreal: Boréal. – 2011. L’art vivant: autour de Paul-Émile Borduas. Montreal: Boréal. – , ed. 2012. Histoires des sexualités au Québec au XXe siècle. Montreal: VLB éditeur. – 2013. Les prisonniers politiques au Québec. Montreal: VLB éditeur. – 2014. “The Fates of Sociology in English Canada and French Quebec in a Globalized Field of Science.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 50: 87–108. – 2015a. Honoré Beaugrand. La plume et l’épée (1848–1906). Montreal: Boréal. – , ed. 2015b. Les soldats du Pape: Les zouaves canadiens entre l’Europe et l’Amérique. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Warren, Jean-Philippe, and Bruno Dumons, eds. 2015. Les zouaves pontificaux en France, en Belgique et au Québec: La mise en récit d’une expérience historique transnationale (XIX-XX siècle). Bern: Peter Lang. Warren, Jean-Philippe, and Andrée Fortin. 2015. Discours et pratiques de la contreculture au Québec. Québec: Septentrion. Warren, Jean-Philippe, and Céline Saint-Pierre, eds. 2006. Sociologie et société québécoise: Présence de Guy Rocher. Montréal: Presses de l’université de Montréal.

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Index

academic precariat, 87 academic revolution, 78–9, 94 acculturation, 423 Action Travail des Femmes, 304 Addiction Research Foundation, 274 administration, university, 79–80, 95–6, 116–17, 138 Africa, 170, 300, 453, 477 African Americans, 102, 269–70 Africville, 103 age, 107–8, 113–5 agency, 46, 134, 142, 144 aging, sociology of, 113 Alberta, 40–1, 71, 369–72, 391 Alberta Prion Research Institute (APRI), 151 American Journal of Sociology, 60, 87 American Sociological Association, 91, 93 Americanization, 140 Amsterdam School of Sociology, 67–8 Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies, 70

anthropology, 128, 140, 147, 160, 197, 248–9, 253–4, 447, 450–4, 459, 472–3, 477, 484, 496 anti-globalization, 495 anti-Semitism, 353 AquaNet, 150 art, 68–9 Athabasca University, 205 Atlantic Association of Sociologists and Anthropologists, 457, 477 Atlantic Canada, 15, 40–1, 457 autobiography, 3–6, 22, 422 authenticity, 403 Bahá’í faith, 449–50, 459–60 Birzeit University, 44 Black Education Project, 422 Brazil, 42 British Columbia, 16, 71, 149, 176–82, 203–9, 213, 283–5 Brock University, 272–6, 282 Calgary School of Political Science, 386 California State University, 353

510

Canada Research Chairs, 93–4, 116–7, 164, 168–70, 216 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 290 Canadian Disarmament Information Service, 356 Canadian Native Centre of Toronto, 472, 483 Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology (Canadian Review of Sociology), 40, 86, 136, 231, 258, 302, 326, 332 Canadian Sociological Association, 4, 16, 85, 96, 111, 210–1, 213, 218, 438, 477 Canadian Women’s Health Network, 308 Canadianization, 10–11, 13, 75, 118–9, 268, 277, 323, 473, 477 Carbon-Extractive Corporate Resource Sector, 289–90 career trajectory, 73, 152–3, 157–8, 262, 337–8, 426, 447, 468 Carleton University, 18, 35, 228–34, 237–9, 300–1, 305, 307 Centre for Feminist Research, York University, 111 Chicago School of sociology, 134, 272, 454–5, 470, 483–4 childcare, 252, 303. See also parenting China, 169, 453, 482 Cinema of Solidarity, 251 class, 85–6, 141, 144, 194, 231, 235–6, 238–40, 248, 283–5, 326, 330–2, 466; new middle, 64 Coastal Communities Network, 149 co-authorship, 426, 479

Index

Cold War, 360–4 commitment, 489–92 community, resettlement, 135–7; studies, 133 comparative welfare and employment, 71 Concordia University, 65, 68, 163, 172, 502–3 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Learned Societies Meetings), 82 corporatization of universities, 193 counterculture, 9, 205, 465, 498 criminal prosecutions, 207 critical realism, 72, 282, 289 critics, 104–5, 210–1 culture, 86, 207–8, 428; Canadian 428; cultural capital, 379; Cultural Studies, 18–19, 469–70, 476–7; material, 478–9; primary, 493; production of, 472, 477; rural 214; secondary, 493 Czechoslovakia, 360 Dalhousie University, 34, 37, 149, 213, 441 decolonization, 389 democracy, 60–1, 350, 357–8, 363–5; liberal, 58 demography, 105--19 departmental discord, 11, 80, 82–4, 89–92, 94–5, 141, 144–5, 236–7, 277, 282, 287–8, 456–7, 473–7 dependency, regional, 143–4 dialogical pedagogies, 433–7 Dickinson State College, 52–3, 61 disability, living with, 297

Index

disarmament, nuclear, 360–1, 363 distance, 489–92, 500–5 double consciousness, 419–20 Eastern Europe, 56 École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 7, 160–3 ecology, networked political, 209, 215 education, 237–8; sociology of, 91 elites, 229–32, 235–6, 285; corporate, 279–81 emotions, sociology of, 406–7, 472 England, 246–8 environmentalism, 178; environmental movement, 186–8, 401–2; environmental studies, 182–3 epistemology, democratic 73 equity, employment, 383–5, 439; myth, 13 ethics, research, 19, 389, 457–8, 479 ethnicity. See political activism, racism ethnography, 4, 18–9, 21, 288, 310, 349, 405, 451, 454–8, 460, 470, 478, 480 extremism, right-wing, 217, 351 Faculty of Forestry, UBC, 188–96 families, politically engaged, 179, 226, 296, 371–2, 390; sociology of, 112; working-class, 20, 39, 102, 200, 225–6, 245–7, 261, 378–9, 464, 467 farming, 41, 236, 384 Federation for Humanities and Social Science, 105

511

feminism, 11, 95, 103–4,109–12, 217, 246–67, 278, 295–314, 404–5; feminist sociology, 111, 236, 246–67, 405–6; feminist theory 110–2, 334; political economy, 14, 252–62, 305; socialist, 252–62, 271, 278 First Nations, 149–50, 369–94, 399, 405, 448–50, 483, 498; Chiefs, 390 fisheries, 16, 125, 129, 136, 140, 144, 150–2, 182, 235–6, 238, 384, 451–4, 460, 475 foreigner’s dilemma, 336 forestry, 16, 207, 384 France, 16, 160, 470–1 Frankfurt School of sociology, 55, 60 fur trade, 384 gender, 86, 103, 110, 112, 116, 239–40, 259, 277, 302, 327, 332–4, 390, 401, 404, 459, 480–1 Gender and Work Database, 309 generation, 108–9; political, 202 generic social processes, 457 Geneva School of linguistics, 495 George Washington University, 161 governance, transnational, 357 Grande Prairie Regional College, 377–8 Greenpeace, 17, 397, 401–2. See also political activism Harvard University, 7, 17, 92, 168, 185, 231, 233, 351–2, 450 health care, 18, 306–9, 390–1

512

Index

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 34 higher education, organization of, 79 hiring, 11, 38–40, 61–2, 87–9, 95, 118, 138–40, 145–6, 148, 163–4, 193, 212–3, 234–5, 282, 304, 335, 354, 437–8, 471–3 Holy Names University, 349 housewives, 253–5, 459; housework, 335 humiliation, 353, 365--7 Iceland, 450–5, 460 ideas, in institutional and policy change, 165, 167 immigrants, Dutch, 49–52, 447, 459; Caribbean 417–44 India, 350, 397–8, 400 Indiana University, 464–7, 478 Indigeneity, 438; employment, 383–5; health research, 390–1 Indigenous scholars, 387–8 inner-directed, 101, 347 insecurity, employment, 64, 66; politics of, 165 Institute for Health Studies, 306 Institute of Behavioural Research, 276, 279 Institute of Social and Economic Research, 136–8 institutional systems in art and music; academic, dealer-critic, opera-centric, concert-centric, 471 institutions, total, 373–4 intellectuals, 35–6, 40 interests, private-sector, 194–6 International Sociological Association, 168, 211

Iran, 18, 315–24, 327–9, 331, 334, 336–7 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 15, 43–5 labour markets, 70 late bloomers, 12 Laurentian University, 471–2 Laval University, 499, 502 leisure, serious, 171 legitimation crisis, 59 LGBTQ2S, 13–14, 253, 404, 481 life-chances, 331 life-course, 99, 103, 109, 335 life-writing, 6, 21–2 love, 355–6 loyalty, professional, 78–9 Loyola University of Chicago, 458–9 male standpoint, 110 Manchester School of Anthropology, 453 marginality, 20, 101–2; optimal, 35 married bachelors, 482 Marxism, 11, 17–9, 51, 95, 179, 263, 271, 288, 456, 493, 498; Canadian Marxist tradition, 240; capitalist state, 59, 62–4; departmental conflict and Marxism, 145, 477; dependency theory, 144, 280–2; economic underdevelopment, 141–2; feminism, 83, 252, 255, 259–60; inequality, 330–2; Marxist Institute in Toronto, 251, 278, 481; Russia, 364; student movement, 54–5; undergraduate and graduate education, 57, 82–3, 134, 230, 250–1, 277–8, 321, 325–7,

Index

466, 495–6; working-class culture, 86 mass media, 182–3, 207–8, 210, 216–7, 230, 334, 472, 478; minority, 472; television 367 McGill University, 10, 57–63, 72, 75, 171–2, 216, 499 McMaster University, 34–5, 82, 84, 89–90, 92, 94, 139–47, 153, 228–9, 233–7, 255, 300 Memorial University, 38, 127–8, 131, 135–40, 153, 211, 213–4, 450–4, 470, 472, 473–7, 482–4 mentoring, 104–5, 136–7, 139, 164, 167–8, 170–3, 188–97, 216–9, 326–7, 379–81, 430–7, 449, 470–2, 502–4 Mills College, 353 mining, 235–6 minorities, visible, 420, 438, 440 music, 171, 203, 287, 465, 470–1, 480 myths, 105, 113, 119 National Film Board, 427 National University of Iran, 317–23 nationalism, 165, 271–2, 280, 488, 493 neoconservatism, 284–5 neoliberalism, 107, 259, 261, 284, 286 Netherlands, 49–52, 67, 69, 447–9 New Brunswick, 33, 40, 459 New Democratic Party, 41, 283, 328 New Left, 250, 252 Newfoundland and Labrador, 16, 125–31, 135–9, 142–3, 214, 216, 479, 483

513

Niagara College, 226 Northwestern University, 459 Nova Scotia, 213 nursing, 308 Octopus Bookstore, 302 Offord Centre for Child Studies, 92 oil-tourism, 211, 214 Oklahoma, 345–6 Oklahoma State University, 274 Ontario, 16, 71, 80, 86, 92–3, 203, 225–8, 248, 261, 269, 271, 283, 295, 430–1 Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 93–4, 111–2, 403 other-directed, 101, 347 Ottoman Empire, 359 Padanaram, 484 parenting, 286–7, 411 peace and disarmament, 356–7 Peace Magazine, 356 pension reform, 161, 164–5 PhD dissertation, 34–7, 62–4, 85–7, 137, 161–2, 170, 183, 186, 209–10, 231–4, 253–4, 276, 279–82, 305, 327–9, 350, 383–5, 419, 426, 455, 460, 470–2, 495, 497 political activism, 343–4; academic activists, 217–8; childcare, 303–4; class inequality, 235–6, 238–9, 332, 479; community resettlement, 135–7, 143; critique of utopia, 62–4; educational achievement, 92–4; environment and social justice, 196, 204, 206–7, 399; First Nations, 388–92, 449–50, 471–2; gender

514

Index

inequality, 253–4, 261–2, 332, 459; government cultural policy, 479; health care, 307–11; imprisonment 206–7; labour market insecurity, 64–6; LGBTQ2S 477, 479–80; nature-based tourism, 214–5; peace and disarmament, 356–7; promoting democracy, 364–7; Quebec, 495–500; race and ethnic inequality, 322–3, 335–6, 395–416, 417–44, 478, 482; reproductive choices, 109; research ethics, 457--8; resource management, 149–51; sexual harassment, 110; suicide bombers, 43–6; welfare and employment policies, 71; welfare and pension reform, 164–5; working-class culture, 479–80 political ecology, networked, 215 political economy, 18, 135, 141–4, 225–341, 476; new Canadian, 240–2 political science, 161, 171 politics, environmental, 176–99, 208 positivism, 71–2, 282, 287, 289, 454–5 post-positivist consensus, 71 Princeton University, 34 privatization, 307 professionalism, 85, 94–5, 476; contested, 80 power, corporate, 279 psychology, 81, 128, 134, 177, 181–2, 274–7, 298, 319, 346–7, 378–9, 417 public policy, 169

Qualitative Analysis Conference, 455–7 Quebec, 7–8, 16, 19, 57, 71, 132, 157–60, 165, 171–2, 200–3, 216, 301, 359, 412, 455, 487–507; sociologists, 6–8, 24, 157–75, 492–5, 498–501; Studies, 491, 501 Queen Street Mental Health Centre, 275 Queen’s University, 162, 205, 326, 332–3, 336, 410–3, 441 Quiet Revolution, 132, 491 racism, 13, 249, 332, 335, 374–5, 384–5, 395–416, 417–44 rebels in administration, 95–6 recruitment, 95 relations of ruling, 111 research methods, analytical mapping 310; appreciative inquiry, 382; autoethnography, 21; discourse analysis, 207–10, 288, 478; historical institutionalism, 161, 166; methodological pragmatism, 210, 213; mixed methods 456; participatory action 288, 382; social network analysis, 183, 185; team 309–11. See also ethnography, social networks, feminism, Marxism residential care, long-term, 306, 310 residential schools, 252–3, 370, 372–4, 412 resource management, 150 Rise Up! Archive of Feminist Activism, 251 Rochdale College, 300

Index

Russia, 15, 17, 36, 38, 43, 356–7, 361–6, 477 Ryerson University, 87--8 Saskatchewan, 40–1, 169, 369, 372 School of Canadian Studies, Carleton University, 307 Schumpeter’s dilemma, 60–1 Science for Peace, 356 sciences, contested, 151; natural, 189–93; social, 192–3 Scientology, 347–8 secretaries, 401 self-government, 383 semiotics, 19, 478 sex roles, 110–2. See also gender sexism. See gender sexual harassment, 110 Sheridan College, 332, 428 Simon Fraser University, 306 Sir Sandford Fleming College, 302 skiing, 208–9, 213 Small Groups Lab, 276 Small-world problem, 182 social brain, 134, 152 Social Credit Party, 283–4 Social Gospel, 9 social justice, 18, 102, 109, 204, 208, 286–9, 402, 410–1 social movements, 187, 402; environmentalism, 176–99, 208; peace, 187, 356–7, 360–4; protests, 40–1, 176, 202–3; separatism, 358–60; Soviet-Jewish emigration, 38; student, 54, 350 social networks, 181–8, 197, 209 Social Policy Institute, Amsterdam, 69

515

social reproduction, 260–1 social vitality, 143 social work, 424, 468 socialism, 64 society, global, 498 sociological imagination, 249 sociological theories, 59, 71–4, 128, 134, 273–4, 465; actor-network, 213; credential, 81; critical race, 17, 420–1; dependency, 280–1, 329; grand theory, 65–7; labeling, 375; mobilities, 209, 213; modernization, 126, 352; postmodernism, 95, 286, 454; poststructuralism, 282; rational choice, 67–8, 182; staples, 17; structural functionalism, 18, 134, 248, 325, 496; structuralism, 468, 496; symbolic interactionism, 4, 14, 18–19, 21, 83, 131–2, 134, 273, 355, 460, 465, 472, 478; world-systems, 57, 329. See also cultural studies, ethnography, feminism, political activism, political economy sociology, analytical, 66, 72; critical, 24, 96; departmental cultures, 194–5; environmental, 183, 186, 191, 206, 209; historical eras, 9–14, 24; history of departments, 141; mainstream, 80, 96; policy, 15–16, 125–221; professional, 14–15, 33–124, 477; public, 16–17, 72, 217, 284, 287, 354; relational, 215 sports, sociology of, 209 standpoint feminism, 104 Stanford University, 398 staples economy, 141

516

state protection, 166 Statistics Canada, 66, 335 stories, adventure, 21; confessional, 21; impressionist 480; realist 20–2, 480 storytelling, 408–9 stranger, 19, 447, 495, 497 student movement, 54, 350 Studies in Political Economy, 310 Sunbelt Social Network Conference, 184 Sweden, 64–6, 238–9 Swedish Institute for Social Research, 65 Tanzania, 435, 441 tenure, 10, 196–7, 236–7 testimony, 421–2 textbooks, introductory sociology, 41–3, 352, 354 Third World Books, 251 tourism, sociology of, 211, 214–5 tragedy of the commons, 182 Trent University, 302, 469 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 103 United States: Alabama, 478; Indiana, 463–4, 479, 484; Long Island, NY, 268, 458; Louisiana, 102; Pennsylvania, 270-1 Université de/du, Moncton, 497; Montréal, 70, 159–60, 494, 497, 502; Québec à Montréal, 159–60, 162, 172, 495, 499–500 University of, Alberta, 35, 38, 61–2, 99, 377, 380–4, 385, 441, 472; Amsterdam, 285; British Columbia, 83, 88, 146–53, 177, 180, 182,

Index

188–97, 208–9, 227, 285, 400; Calgary, 17, 163, 167, 386–8; California, 268, 346–7, 349–50, 352–3; Chicago, 14, 161, 470; Gothenburg, 65; Guelph, 34, 227, 332; Illinois, 42; London, 127; Manchester, 453, 459; Massachusetts, 352; Michigan, 276; Minnesota, 131–5, 137; New Brunswick, 449–50, 454, 456–7, 459, 484; Ottawa, 162, 165, 205, 324–5; Paris, 7; Pennsylvania, 93; Saskatchewan, 168–71, 441; Sterling, 88; Stockholm, 65; Toronto, 13, 17, 35, 37, 39–40, 44, 81–8, 94, 111, 142, 183, 185–6, 233–4, 240, 248–50, 252, 254, 295, 298–9, 352, 356, 399, 401, 424, 469–70, 472, 477; Umea, 65; Victoria, 18, 180–3, 195, 207, 211–2, 282–90; Waikato, 389; Waterloo, 110, 112, 326; Western Ontario, 227–8, 271, 331–2; Windsor, 335–7; Wisconsin, 35 Uppsala University, 435, 441 values, post-materialist, 323, 467 Vancouver Community College, 204 virtue signalling, 85 war and peace, sociology of, 465, 480 work, sociology of, 49, 128, 383–4 weak ties, strength of, 181 welfare state, 62, 165–6 Western Anthropological and Sociological Association, 279

Index

whiteness, 410–1 widows and widowers, 459 Wilfrid Laurier University, 332 women’s liberation movement, 250–2, 302 Women’s Press Collective, 251 Women’s Studies, 254, 256–8, 303, 305 women’s work, 253–4, 262, 304–5

517

work, sociology of, 49, 128, 383–4 York University, 18, 35, 111–2, 238, 256–7, 276–9, 305, 401, 410, 430, 438–9, 441, 483 youth, Black, 419, 423–6, 429–32; cultures, 10; newcomer, 422–3; queer 408 Zionism, 43

518

Index