Review: The Inconvenient Indian

[Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012.]

It's hard to come up with a substantive review when you don't have much to say that's critical, even constructively critical, about the book in question. So this review will be short, perhaps no longer than a single paragraph. In any case, King is a great writer. His prose is accessible and engaging, and his ability to convey ideas that might be unfamiliar and challenging to readers left me deeply impressed. I like his way of interweaving history and story. I think I was most taken by his strategic, flowing use of different tones and modes -- humour, self-deprecation, interventions from his partner, upfront anger, personal anecdotes, lists, honest bitterness, lots of others -- to simultaneously convey the depth of the pain and struggle that cannot help but be present in an "account of Native people in North America" while refusing to let that make the text heavy or detach it from the reality of matter-of-fact, everyday survival and even thriving. Folks who have already put time and energy into learning this history may not learn much in terms of new "facts" from this book -- though speaking for myself, a fair bit of the material from the south side of the line that artificially divides Turtle Island was new to me, and a little bit from the north side too -- but they might still enjoy the read. And while it inevitably reflects one person's analysis of the current moment and the way forward, and I think efforts by those of us who are non-indigenous to grapple with our colonial past and present and work towards a decolonized future of necessity means listening and reading much farther and wider than just one analysis, I still think this is exactly the sort of book that should be in the curriculum of every high school in North America. But probably won't be.


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Review: Warlords

[Tim Cook. Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada's World Wars. Toronto: Allen Lane, 2012.]

On a certain level, I enjoyed reading this book. But it also embodies many ways of relating to history that I find quite objectionable.

Written by a well-known Canadian military historian, Warlords tells the story of Canada in the First and Second World Wars through the lens of the two men who were Prime Minister during the respective conflicts, Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King. Notwithstanding the 85 pages of bibliography and notes at the end, it reads like it was written for a lay audience rather than a scholarly audience -- it is engaging, fairly brisk in pace, and not overburdened with detail, though it does cover a lot of ground and is not a short book. The writing moves easily and effectively back and forth between the leader and the broader social story, and I quite appreciate ways of telling history that make that move between individual life and social world. Despite all that I have to say in the rest of this review, I read the book eagerly, particularly the portion covering the First World War, which is history I'm a bit less familiar with.

That said, my objections to the book, and perhaps more importantly to the many mainstream ways of relating to history that it embodies, are considerable. For one thing, I think the book's focus is a major problem. Of course anyone can write a book about whatever they please, and I'm not arguing otherwise, but I have written quite pointedly before about my objections to the subdiscipline of military history. Not all of what I wrote about the book I was reviewing in that post is quite as acutely applicable to this book, but much of it is still relevant, including my horror at how unremarkable it is for us to write about wars past in ways that show no concern at all about preventing wars future. As well, trying to understand the history of a place or a people by focusing on so-called "great men" and on wars, as this book does, is not only depressingly common in conventional history, particularly conventional history meant to have lay appeal, but also a major political problem that we need to work against. Whether it makes this kind of claim explicitly or not, by the very space it takes up in widespread imaginings of what "history" is and should be, history with this kind of focus depends on and reproduces a spectrum of narrow, specific, inaccurate, and destructive assumptions about self, nation, the motion of history, and the way the social world is put together. (And it does this, I hasten to add, without any requirement for any particular fact that it presents to be inaccurate or wrong.)

Then there's the title. From how he talks about it, the author seems to have a kind of uneasy relationship with the title as well, perhaps because, as the story he tells makes very clear, Borden and (particularly) Mackenzie King bear no resemblance whatsoever to the sorts of figures conjured by the word "warlord," and even for a co-operative reader it takes a little work on the author's part to make it plausible. I can imagine a number of different scenarios leading to this title despite the uneasy fit, some based in marketing imperatives and others based in either actively pursuing or passively riding upon the push in the last decade or two to militarize Canadian history. Regardless of the author's actual intent, it is a particularly egregious example of forcing a foregrounding of war when it doesn't particularly make sense, and certainly feels consistent with an agenda of re-visioning Canadian history in a militarized way.

In reading this book, I also was able to clarify for myself another sort of concern that I have with many conventional approaches to history. My concern is related to the ways in which writing about the past does or does not make judgements about that past. It's a basic tenet of academic history that it is a bad practice to project contemporary standards of evaluation into history. On a certain level, I think this is a valid concern, as there are lots of ways that agendas or preoccupations or ways of judging things that are grounded in the present can be completely inappropriate, even nonsensical or actively harmful, when they are pushed in an uncritical way into evaluating the events of years past. At the same time, this imperative can be one of the many paths that lead in liberal scholarship to hiding the knower that is doing the knowing -- history is always an activity in the present focused on the past, and I think we're better off acknowledging that and recognizing its inevitable embeddedness in the present than pretending we can disconnect ourselves from that fact. In any case, from what I have seen, one way in which this imperative against imposing anachronistic judgement on the past can be enacted is to restrict judgement solely to questions that might be characterized in a technocratic, apolitical sort of way as "accuracy." Or, it can be taken to mean making judgements that are a bit more actively evaluative of what given historical agents have done, but are careful to do so in a way that is entirely context bound (such as evaluating the decisions of battle commanders in military history and declaring them wise or foolish). This book tended towards the latter. Which is not, in and of itself, necessarily a problem. I'm not necessarily against that sort of ground-level evaluation done in context, though I wasn't always comfortable with how it was done in this book. At points it came across as a bit gossipy, in that it was evaluating the men, their decisions, and their characters in ways that seemed unnecessary and a bit beside the point of the overall narrative. And given the book's apparent lay focus and its broad scope, there was often little or no detail about what underlay a given evaluation of Borden or Mackenzie King, so at times judgements appeared to be ungrounded -- I'm not saying they were, but some certainly came across that way.

Worse than those things, though, is that allowing judgement only in such narrow scope gives historians an out for making political decisions whose political character is concealed. For instance, I think it is perfectly possible and reasonable (not to mention desireable) to approach the history of the First World War with clear, contemporary anti-war intent and to do so in a way that is not inappropriately presentist. On the other hand, if you start from the premise of telling the stories of elite men and state institutions in wartime, and you are committed to a methodology that only allows you to make judgements on a very close-to-the-ground level -- was Borden warranted in making decision X, or was it a bad move? etc. -- then you foreclose the possibility of asking deeper questions about the circumstances and social relations that drew a world into war. Not asking those questions is as intensely political a decision as asking them, but you are effectively hiding the political essence of the decision behind disciplinary norms or methodological necessity and pretending that there was nothing political about it at all.

The book seemed to have a bit of an anti-left bias, too. Of course all of the above, from the book's focus to its bland acceptance of norms that silently exclude critical questioning, could be seen as anti-left bias as well, but I mean it in a more specific and content-driven way: There were a number of historical events about which I know a certain amount from other sources that were given summary descriptions in the book that I just don't think were accurate, and they were inaccurate in ways that are unfair to the left. For instance, the characterization of the Spanish Civil War paints it as a struggle between extremists that Canada and the other liberal democracies were wise to ignore, omitting the fact that it began as a fascist uprising against an elected government; implying the entire Republican side was subservient to Moscow instead of being a complicated coalition among Communists, non-Communist socialists of various stripes, labour formations, and anarchists; and making it sound like both sides were equally bad. Similarly, its brief mention of the Canadian federal government's internment of leftists during the Second World War again just assumes that those who were detained were in fact mostly Communists and that Communists were rightly considered to be unsavoury and worth detaining -- never mind that after 1942 the Communist Party was incredibly active in its support of the war effort (including at points opposing autonomous struggles by workers to improve their wages and conditions), and that a significant proportion of those detained were not Communists at all but unaffiliated leftists whose main interest was standing up for workers who were being mistreated and trying to leverage a slightly higher proportion of the war profits from the owners who were getting them and into paycheques that still often amounted to Depression-era wages. And the brief characterization of the Gouzenko affair similarly villainizes the left and says little or nothing critical of the liberal capitalist state.

I'm not sure quite what to recommend re. this book. It's well written and it contains useful information -- I read it with a purpose, and I found the sorts of things I was hoping to find. I also want to stress that most of the the objections I have to what it does are hardly unique to it. Yet the ease with which I'm sure this book gets read as an entertaining and fairly blandly informational text, with its intensely political character made invisible, continues to be upsetting to me, as does my complete confidence that a different book on the same general theme that made equally political but politically very different choices would be dismissed as outrageous, biased, and not worth reading. Such are the politics of relating in the present to the past, I suppose.

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Review: Community Organizing

[Joan Kuyek. Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach. Halifax NS and Winnipeg MB: Fernwood Publishing, 2011.]

When it comes to working to change the world, I think there is absolutely nothing inconsistent about combining the feeling that you really have no idea how to go about it, with having lots of strong opinions on related issues big and small. This might not sound like it makes much sense, but I think it does. In fact, I think it flows directly, and perhaps even inescapably, from the nature of the problem. Even if you believe that there is a One True Way to change the world -- which I emphatically don't -- then the only meaningful way to evaluate different approaches is through the success of their implementation. Last time I checked, no political line, no organizational form, no radical tradition had managed to change social relations such that all axes of domination and subordination were transformed in just, liberatory, and lasting ways. All are partial, incomplete, works-in-progress. At the same time, we need to be able to act, and we need to be able to think critically and engage in critical dialogue and debate about our choices and the choices of others. If we can't do that, there can be no cycle of action, reflection, and further action. So it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable to be both clueless (or, more accurately, fundamentally uncertain) and opinionated. Certainly that is my own experience. (And, I would add, I think we're much better off when we admit to both of those things than when we pretend otherwise on one count or the other.)

How books about social change relate to this seeming contradiction varies a great deal. As with so much about social change work, I don't think there is any one perfect approach. That said, I do have a certain affinity for the approach enacted in Community Organizing -- it is, in my reading, an instance of a broader class of books about diverse sorts of doing that I have, over the years, become rather fond of and have dubbed in my own mind "practice books." Most books that I have read that I would classify in this way have been not about social change at all but about writing, and I never tire of those; I have also read some that are about self-care, meditation, relationships, and various other things. What unites them across these many different sorts of activities is that they are not filled with rules and do not try to present an overarching and final vision for the activity in question. Rather, they tend to be a collection of tools and practical insights and stories and lessons from experience that you are explicitly meant to take up and adapt and experiment with, to suit your own needs. They are books that you can read from front to back as you prepare for your next big choices, books that you can dip into at random for insight and inspiration, books that you can turn to when you are wrestling with a specific problem, and books that you get more and/or different things out of when you return to them at different stages of your own work and journey.

Community Organizing is a short book of many chapters that distils lessons, stories, and wisdom from the author's decades of involvement in working for social transformation, from her activism in some of the core moments of the New Left in Canada in the late 1960s, through many different manifestations of community organizing and grassroots struggle up to the present day. Its topic range from the nature of power, to running good meetings, to the food system, to tactics. It integrates accessible analysis of the social world and practical, movement-grounded tips on things as divergent as managing group dynamics and what to think about when deciding whether to call a boycott. The social analysis generally does a good job of being useful and grounded in its own right while providing pointers to and hooks into possible paths for those who wish to explore the many and diverse topics in much more depth. The generous use of stories and examples, some as short as a paragraph and others an entire chapter, is very well suited to a pedagogy premised on learning by example, active uptake, and adaptation. The book is, of course, guided by one vision -- the author's -- but it is more than that as well. I think its knowledge of the world and of how to change it is meaningfully dialogical, not only because it is presented in a way that invites active engagement and reflection but because of the picture it conveys of how it was generated -- its plentiful use of stories of collective change work and the evidence it provides that the author's organizing praxis is grounded heavily in listening and adapting. The result, despite being the product of one person's vision, is not closed and proscriptive but open and suggestive. This, in my reading of it, is central to what makes it a "practice book."

Though many readers will not find this important, I was particularly struck by how many of the examples were about Sudbury, Ontario, the city I now call home. Though she moved away before I arrived, Kuyek was a long-time Sudburian -- I first met her in passing several years ago when she was back in the city for a conference about community organizing in response to the mining industry, an issue in which she has been very involved over the years. Though I do not know her well, she was kind enough to give me a copy of this book when she came to the launch event I held for my own books in Ottawa, where she now lives. I knew fragments and echoes of the community history-from-below that she draws on so effectively in this book, but in many cases I knew little more than that. As I noted in my last review, so much of the cultural material we have access to is about a limited range of places, such that even those of us who live in more geographically peripheral corners of globally core nations are likely to recognize places we have never been to, and to have little experience of seeing the places we live in film or text. So it was very satisfying, and even in some cases moving, to have those fragments and echoes put into more fully-fleshed stories, and to have names of people and organizations that I know from living and doing political work here attached in print to past struggles that are now often forgotten.

One of the strengths of the "practice book" is that, unlike more rule-based or thesis-based works, it can not only survive as useful in the face of the reader having a complicated mixture of reactions to its specifics, but it positively calls for such a mixture. It expects its value to come from exactly the sort of active engagement that is needed to produce such a mosaic response. In the case of this book, many of the specifics I like a great deal. For instance, I like its (very accessible) commitment to thinking about the world in non-reifying ways that foreground human activity. I like its forthright critical discussion -- too rare, in Canada -- of the pros and cons of grassroots groups seeking funding. I like its deftness at combining an overall tone and approach that even a newly politicized community group would be able to relate to with a refusal to romanticize the power structure that we face and the horrific violence of which it is capable. I could name lots of other things, too.

But, as well, there are specifics in the book that I feel need much more in-depth treatment. In a way, this is true of everything in the book, and is so by design. It covers a lot of ground and is meant to be accessible for someone new to these issues, so of course there is much more that could be said about pretty much every topic it covers. And as I've already indicated, its organization seems to invite people to take those next steps themselves -- to go further in thinking, reading, writing, speaking, and acting. But there are also a few specific areas that I might have wished to receive more attention within the book in its present form. The example that springs most readily to mind is that it points out the importance of working towards large, strong, democratic, membership-based organizations that fund themselves through their members, but unlike in most of the book it does not accompany that insight (which I think is a good one) with concrete tips for getting there, or successful examples. That may be because there aren't very many such groups in the Canadian context, but if so, then I think it would have been useful to temporarily hop across the border and draw on some of the exciting work done in working-class communities of colour in the United States along such lines in the last decade or two. As well, I would have liked to have seen a more in-depth treatment of the ways in which differences in power organized around race, gender, ability, sexuality, and other factors gets inside our groups and messes them up, and how to navigate that. And, of course, there are specifics as well where my analysis would simply differ from that presented in the book. For instance, there is one part where there seemed to be less analytical clarity than I think our movements need around "race," "culture," how they differ, and how they intersect. And though the book has no hesitation about acknowledging at least some of the dreadful things of which the liberal state is capable, it has perhaps less skepticism than I think is warranted about the possibility of adapting the state form to our own ends in the long run.

There are, of course, a wide range of positions from which to engage with this book, but I would argue that people beginning from a great many of them would be able to derive benefit from it, even those based in rather different conceptions of how to organize for change. This is the case, I think, because of another of the key characteristics of the "practice book" -- it won't solve your problems for you, but what it will do is provide you with grist for the action-reflection-action mill that might.

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Review: The Motion of Light in Water

[Samuel R. Delany. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. (Original edition by Arbor House, 1988.)]

I don't think I've ever read any of Samuel Delany's science fiction. I've known his name as a major author of the genre since I was a teen, and I suppose it's possible that I did read something of his back then and I don't recall, but I don't think so. Rather, I read this memoir because a friend of mine taught it last year and seemed to think it would interest me, and she was right.

Part of the appeal is the writing: It's good. He weaves together anecdote and reflection and mood in skillful ways, and though it's not a short book, it was a pleasure to read all the way through. He makes the inevitably partial slice of life and experience that goes into a memoir (as opposed to the more comprehensive treatment expected of biography or autobiography) feel both focused and substantial. He plays a bit with approach and form, and does it with the deft hand of someone who has written voluminously and obsessively since childhood.

The insights he offers are also valuable. At various points, he shifts modes for a paragraph or a few pages and reflects in a more overt and analytical way on things like writing, memory, history, and identity. Not only are all of these things connected to interests that I happen to have as well, but it was also intriguing to encounter analysis in these areas that was clearly the result of long and deep thought but just as clearly offered in the spirit of the engaged non-specialist rather than the career scholar. There was no attempt to produce a final whole, a synthesis that brought all of these insights together, and instead they were left as thoughts produced along a journey.

The book is also of considerable sociological interest. It focuses on his early life, and, as a middle-class gay Black man who came of age in mid-20th century New York City and whose marriage to a woman -- white poet Marilyn Hacker -- was mutually and consensually open from its very beginning, his experiences provide a rare window into pre-Stonewall sexual cultures, particularly among men who had sex with men. I found it fascinating how the book made it clear that what I, in my bookish and probably not terribly well-informed way, would have identified as three distinct constellations of experience and practices -- urban gay male culture pre-Stonewall; mixed-gender bohemian culture of the mid-century urban literary and arts scene; and the earlier working-class sexual cultures found in parts of New York and other cities with their relative openness but still quite different relationship to sex between men than feels familiar today -- all kind of blended together, at least in that moment, at least in the particular shape Delany's life took.

And, finally, it is of interest because it is a fairly matter-of-fact telling of a life lived counter to dominant oppressive norms in multiple respects. I always find something awesome and inspiring and affirming about such narratives, as they are a reminder that I personally seem to constantly need that the weight of normalizing discipline is rarely as uniformly heavy as I imagine it to be (even in the era of his account, which ends not only before Stonewall but before the sixties proper got underway). I particularly appreciated how his account did not romanticize his practices or the experiences they resulted in -- he shared the bad and the troubling as well as the good -- but neither did he stint on discussion of the positives that those with moralizing disapproval might not be able to even imagine -- how ordinary it was for meaningful friendship to emerge from anonymous hook-ups, for instance, or how joyful the triad was that he, Hacker, and another man lived in for a stretch of time. And I appreciated his reflections on the challenges of giving voice to stigmatized ways of living your life when the very public language itself that is available is so intensely saturated with denigration and dehumanization (it made me think a bit of this book).

The downsides to the book were few. Certainly I got an occasional sense of self-indulgence from it, which while not universal is certainly not uncommon with memoir. I didn't really mind it, as it was only occasional and he had interesting things to say, and, anyway, he had earned a little indulgence. There was also something about the New York-ness of it all that was simultaneously appealing and grating. It's not at all the author's fault, as of course he wrote about where he was. Still, there's something about being familiar with metropolitan places you have never been, and knowing that seeing your own streets and neighbourhoods in print would feel weird, that is so common that we often do not notice it but that still sometimes annoys me. Of course, I recognize that in the grand colonial scheme of things this centre-and-periphery organization of our cultural and imaginative landscape is more to my benefit than my detriment, and the fact is I *enjoyed* hearing about New York neighbourhoods; seeing cameos by W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, and Bob Dylan; and experiencing by proxy cultural pivots like the first-ever performance art piece to be promoted as a "happening."

These are minor points, however. I'm very glad that circumstances directed my attention to the book. It won't be of interest to everyone, of course, but for those whose curiosity is piqued, I encourage you to make the effort track it down and read it.

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What Does This Article Tell Us About "Canada"?

Today, I want to do an experiment. Back in January, I wrote a post beginning the work of thinking through what it means to write (about) "Canada" in some of the ways I'm interested in doing so. The idea was for that to be one little piece feeding into a larger project -- one with a more specific and not-yet-made-public focus. Since then, I've done some other (non-public) writing to lay more of the groundwork for that project. Based on that, it now looks like I have a lot, lot, lot of research and reading to do before I can really do too much more writing for the project proper. I don't really like that, because I don't want the thinking and scribbling I've done so far to just fade away from my consciousness and practice, in part because it is still so fragile and tentatively developed but also because it would risk leaving the research to flounder along ungrounded. However, plunging forward directly with the writing just wouldn't make sense at this point. So what I want to do is find ways to do related work that is short and immediate and related, even if it doesn't contribute directly to the larger project.

So. What I want to do today -- and this may be a one-of, or it may lead to more or other things -- is to take a recent news article and ask the question in this post's title: What does this tell us about "Canada" (where that quotation-marked word is used not to point towards some underlying essence or simple unity, but rather to an uneven, arbitrary cluster of relations, practices, images, and ideas whose interconnection under the sign "Canada" must be explored and explained)?

I'm looking for questions it may prompt me to ask, new-to-me elements linked somehow to "Canada," and connections it may make between such elements. Obviously, this way of approaching it may allow me to inch beyond my already-existing understanding of things, but it still depends a lot on what I already understand about "Canada," so there are likely to be loads of things I miss. But I hope that by paying close attention to a piece of writing that would be legible to a wide audience and what it says (or don't say, or presumes) about "Canada," I can continue to the work of clarifying for myself some of the important elements clustered under "Canada" and developing ways to write about it all. Which, as with most things I write on this blog, may or may not be of interest to anybody else, but will be useful to me.

The article I've chosen is a CBC investigative report called "Shipbuilding contract holds $250M mystery: Cost of arctic patrol ships' design sparks warning of another procurement 'fiasco'". The focus of the article is that the federal government is paying Irving Shipbuilding in Halifax $288 million just to design new arctic patrol ships, something that multiple experts quoted in the article say should cost somewhere around a tenth of that or even less, and an amount that is in excess of what other countries have paid recently to both design and build similar ships. The government and the shipyards have both issued material intended as clarification and rebuttal since the story first appeared, which has been incorporated into the revised version of the story currently linked above, but none of the new material actually explains the mystery identified in the title of the article.

A good place to start, given what I'm trying to achieve, is to look at how "Canada" is most directly present in the article. And it seems to be present as one of the central agents in the story that piece is trying to tell -- it is about "Canada's ambitious shipbuilding program," about "the Canadian project," and about the question of "why Canada would pay so much more" (emphasis added). Now, the post I've linked above already makes clear that I really don't buy the myth of a single, unitary thing called "Canada," particularly one that can be easily treated as having agency. If you look a little more closely at this article with that in mind, it seems like there is a complicated but largely assumed and unnoted slippage going on among a few different things connected with "Canada." Sometimes "Canada" seems to be pointing towards the whole, vast conglomeration that can be seen to cluster under that word, or at least is being allowed to blend into that broadest of meanings. At other times in the piece it seems to be indicating that particular cluster of people and organizations and practices and ways of organizing lives that we might summarize by calling "the Canadian state." At other times, specific people are mentioned as being able to speak for "Canada" -- in places, that is unnamed "officials," and in others it is named politicians, Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose and Defence Minister Peter MacKay. Again, there appears to be slippage happening among different things, as civil servants, the government as a whole, and ministers of government are all participants in state relations, but they are not the whole of what gets reified as "the state" yet they are presented as speaking for that whole...which, as I said, in how the article is written, is allowed to blend into or even rhetorically substitute for the conglomeration that is "Canada" as a whole. I have a feeling this gets at something central about the social work that "Canada" -- the nation, the state, the imagined community -- performs, though I'm not sure there's raw material to explore it more here.

This agent "Canada" is, of course, doing something in the article: buying "a fleet of new Arctic offshore patrol ships" whose role is, at least in part, "to assert Canadian sovereignty in the North." This points to a number of key features of what nations and state relations are (or are supposed to be) both in general and specifically in the Canadian case. When the article says "sovereignty", for instance, it invokes a particular version of sovereignty, in which the world is divided into nation-states that have exclusive control over clearly defined units of territory. The very need for this kind of ship points towards clear boundaries that Canadian state relations claim the right to surveil and enforce. This is very different from, for example, the medieval European understanding of sovereignty, or the pre-contact indigenous Turtle Island understanding(s) of sovereignty. Which leads to questions of why this understanding of sovereignty is the one that is treated as natural and inevitable, why this social form is treated as belonging to and having power over particular territories, and how all of that came to be. It also points towards questions about why this particular cluster of people, practices, and relations -- Canadian settler state relations -- gets to claim this kind of sovereignty over this specific territory, which in turn points towards histories of colonization and conquest.

The action being taken to obtain ships also has a form that presumes various important things. For one thing, not only do these various elements of the overall conglomeration of "Canada" get to speak for the whole, at least in certain ways and at certain times, but they also seem to have the ability to amass and allocate resources (in the form of money) in its name. It doesn't say much about how these resources are amassed or how decisions about expenditure are made, but it is treated as unremarkable for their allocation to integrate state relations into a particular way of socially organizing making and doing, which it doesn't name but which we can call capitalism. That, of course, connects "Canada" to a whole vast literature and series of debates, but my own position would be that the social relations that fit that description depend on and reproduce exploitation, violence, oppression, and other sorts of nastiness. The unremarkable character of the intimate connection between "Canada" and these ways of organizing making and doing is significant, if hardly surprising.

Though it is a bit farther removed from the specifics of the article, a few hints can be gleaned about some of the features of this way of organizing making and doing that are relevant to larger discussions. For instance, the name of the firm in question, "Irving Shipbuilding," points towards details of class relations in Canada if you know what to look for -- "Irving" is the name of one of the richest families in the territory over which Canadian state relations preside. The mention that "Canada's shipyards have been in decline for 30 years" and the possibility of "recreating a world-class shipbuilding capacity" point towards (a) the fact that capitalist relations of production are more expansive than just one state (and, it is easy enough to learn elsewhere, are global); (b) the specific wave of changes that global capitalist social relations have undergone in the last 30 years, including shifts in where many types of manufacturing occur; and (c) competing ways of framing and responding to these things -- in particular, the left-nationalist framing, which this piece seems interested in invoking at least in a small way, which talks about "Canada" as having and then losing; but also (by implication through absence) at least one other approach which recognizes that the social organization of capitalist production has always been globally unequal in complicated ways that almost invariably are connected to racialized/colonized/formerly colonized workers being subject to much greater violence than white/colonial workers, though this inequality is used to both privilege and attack the latter group in different ways and at different times.

What is explicitly questioned in the article is not the fact of this way of organizing things, but the details. How much money? Allocated how? Spent on what, exactly? That these kinds of questions are asked implies that there are "right" and "wrong" ways -- or practices widely accepted as such, at least -- to engage in this sort of making and doing. We don't learn much about that distinction beyond the idea that paying too much is suspicious. But, interestingly, the fact that this is a legitimate area of questioning may be a hint that the supposedly agentless, absolute rules of the so-called "free market" that we are taught to respect and not question are really not as agentless and absolute as all that, but rather are created, policed, and enforced by human activity -- that is, human choices and actions, and active policing, define what is supposedly "right" and makes sure they happen, which means other choices, other actions, could create more just ways of organizing making and doing. In this case, someone seems to have violated those rules, and the article is seeking an explanation and perhaps someone to blame.

The article provides relatively little indication that this purchase might be part of a larger series of interrelated changes, though I would argue that it is. Partly, these are changes in the military (and militarized, and militarist) aspects of the state and social relations connected with "Canada" -- see here for discussion of a book that talks about some of this. (The mention of the F-35 fighters is perhaps a hint that the purchase of these ships is part of something bigger, but even so it isn't really enough to go on unless you know the context.) Beyond that, I would argue that these changes related to militarism cannot be properly understood without seeing them as integral to even broader changes in social and state relations in that time, though at present I don't think I would be able to make a completely convincing and concrete case to that effect.

It is, by the way, through the largely unmade connection between the focus of this story and larger social shifts that one way to connect the story to gender can be found, and the article itself hints at this -- the mention of criticism of Harper's choice of these particular ships as "slush-breakers" has a whiff of the ways in which competing posturings about masculinity can be so central to party-political competition. As well, one way to talk about the larger shifts in state and social relations of which this purchase is a part frames it all in terms of state and social relations returning to a more traditional reflection of masculinity-associated elements (e.g. an increasing emphasis on militarism) and a devaluing of elements typically associated with femininity (e.g. aspects of collective caring through welfare state measures).

A final element presumed by the article is, of course, that someone is reading it and cares about it. That someone is, presumably, in some way connected with the overall cluster that is "Canada." As well, something about who the author presumes his audience to be can be understood from the article's focus -- though the word "taxpayer" occurs only once in the article, in a quote from one of the experts on the shipbuilding industry, the questions that are treated as important in the piece are whether the resources allocated through Canadian settler state relations correspond to the goods and services being thus acquired -- that is, are we getting value for our money. None of the other possible questions, whether to-the-root radical or (more realistically) more immediate questions less about value-for-money and more about what values are reflected in what the money is spent upon, are treated as important -- which is to say, acknowledged to exist as questions at all. This, I think, means that the piece is written such that it regards its intended audience as "taxpayers" rather than, say, "citizens" (itself full of problems and limitations) or any of the many other ways that audience might be understood.

So. I'm sure there's more in there, though that's about as much as I care to wring out at the moment. It may be of marginal interest to readers, but writing it has been useful to me, I think more useful than I had expected -- not so much because it has told me much of anything new but because it feels like a step in thinking through some of the ways I want to be able to talk about connections and relationships in the context of "Canada."

Drowning in Information, Thirsting for Knowledge (About Movements)

It's no great novelty to observe that anyone today with the resources and inclination to own the right kind of cellphone can instantly access more information than was available to, say, the President of the United States fifty years ago. We are awash with information, bathed in it, saturated by it. There are a lot of opinions out there about what exactly that implies about us and about the social world we live in, many of them quite silly, but I do think this fact is relevant to something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Through a combination of chance and following my inclinations, I have ended up involved in several different things which mean I spend a lot of time paying attention to how information about organizing (or activism, or social change work, or struggle) moves around. On the local level, I am the current curator of Sudbury Social Justice News, an email newsletter sharing local social justice (and, more recently, environmental) events with interested subscribers in the city. It was started perhaps a dozen years ago by one friend; made a bit more systematic and technically smooth by another friend a few years ago, who looked after it for awhile; and, after periodic guest stints while that friend was out of town, since last spring I have been its regular maintainer. This means constantly being on the look-out for local event information to include in the mostly-weekly updates. Beyond that, I am also involved in Grassroots, the Sudbury working group of The Media Co-op network. I do a bit of grassroots journalism for the site, but mostly am involved with organizing and editorial work -- which means, in large part, dealing with information from and about local groups related to change-work, and seeking to build relationships with and readership/writership among them.

On a larger scale, my new-ish podcasting/broadcasting project, Talking Radical Radio (browse all episodes so far here) means that I am constantly looking to learn about groups, projects, and initiatives engaged in interesting social change work (broadly understood) in all different parts of the country. This means pursuing both online written sources of info as well as word-of-mouth sources in various regional and national networks with which I'm connected. I'm also on the advisory board of the radical political journal Upping the Anti, which is a much less week-to-week sort of thing but which does mean connecting with active folks in other places and still sometimes encountering word about social change efforts across the country (and beyond). As well, though it is no longer a current focus of work, it is a reference point for me (and source of one of those networks just mentioned) that years ago I put rather a lot of effort into connecting with long-time activists in different parts of the country in order to do oral history interviews with them for the project that ended up resulting in my first books. And, finally, I spend lots of time -- probably too much time -- reading about all of this stuff in lots of different sources because I can't help myself.

The first point that has become clear to me from all of this work is that the flood of information that surrounds us makes it harder, sometimes, for us to perceive the significant unevenness in that flow. It feels like everything, at any time, is at our fingertips, but that's really not the case -- some things come to us effortlessly, other things can easily be found with a little work, while still others remain hidden despite the most heroic of efforts. Now, there are some aspects of this unevenness that, while they might be shocking to some in the general public, will come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has been involved in social movement-ish activity. To explain that portion of the unevenness, many people who are involved in movements point out that the powerful institutions that comprise the dominant media are simply not going to produce substantial content that will undermine the status quo in which they are embedded and on which they depend for returning substantial profit to their owners -- the very usefulness of these institutions to powerful interests is connected to the best of them exhibiting a certain limited openness and a modest commitment to following (limited and always-problematic) rules to produce knowledge about the world, which is the basis for reactionaries screaming about liberal bias in the media, and there are certainly better and worse ways that the basic criticism gets made, but I think it is a fundamentally accurate point.

That part is important. It may even be the most important part, as I think the dominant media is still the single biggest way in which people learn about the world and about efforts to change it. But I'm not only interested in that information flow, but also the ways in which it flows or does not among people who are already actively engaged in seeking out and circulating information about struggle. We've always had word-of-mouth, and with the burgeoning use of email, online media, social media, and the autonomous self-publishing and circulation of information by other mechanisms, it is possible to connect with lots that the dominant media is unlikely to circulate. So the information flood that surrounds us can make us forget about how uneven it all is, but then focusing too much on the flaws in the dominant media can lead us to neglect how uneven all of these other aspects of information flow are as well.

So, for instance, one of the tools that I've been experimenting with to get leads about groups/project/initiatives that I might do a radio show on is Google Alerts. This service from the search engine behemoth emails you an alert whenever your specified search terms appear in new content online. I have a fair number set up in which I combine the names of mid-sized Canadian cities with keywords that are associated in one way or another with social movements of various sorts -- things like "union" and "feminist" and "anti-poverty" and "social justice" and "LGBT." The relative lack of leads, or even of somewhat relevant content, that this nets for me is in part about the failings of the dominant media -- newspapers don't write about these things very much, so they don't appear in search engines very much. However, I don't think that's all. Google doesn't just index the online presence of newspapers, it keeps tabs on the entire web, and I don't get a flood of notifications about relevant material on more marginal sites either. Of course their algorithm might be such that it excludes more marginal blogs and so on just as a matter of course. But even granting some biasing of the results in that fashion, I think it also indicates that lots of information about lots of the things that go on in any city -- and I know from my involvement in Sudbury and, at earlier points, in other cities that they do happen -- doesn't end up even on that kind of site. Much of it remains isolated in the immediate environment of the people who actually did the work. That is, it does not enter the flood, so even if we swim out of the larger currents to the more out-of-the-way eddies and pools to look for it, there's no guarantee we'll find what we want.

Another way that this unevenness happens is, I think, through patterns of attention and how those are replicated in the ways in which information gets shared via social media. (The norms instilled in us in major ways through the dominant media are a part of this, of course.) I don't think my experience gives me enough basis to do more than speculate about this, but I think they are fairly grounded speculations. Partly I'm drawing on my own experience of being a fairly avid follower of people who share movement-relevant info on both Facebook and Twitter, and partly through what I've been able to observe about how various pieces of my own work get circulated or don't. I won't try to tease out details, but I will say this: Even granting the limited time most of us have to engage with all of the possible content that comes our way, more often than not what most of us pay attention to, what we engage with, what we share, what we consider as somehow relevant to or about us, versus what content that floats by us that does not catch our attention in those ways, often flows from and reproduces aspects of the oppressive social relations we claim to be working in-and-against (even as it may oppose others). As a fairly banal example, white people are just as shaped by the white supremacy/racism that permeates our society as people of colour, but are much less likely to regard it as about us and therefore much less likely to read/share/care about material that focuses on it. I think there are a many other kinds of examples that could be cited, too, that are built from this basic phenomenon.

Along with making it harder to see this unevenness, the overwhelming flow of information that surrounds us also makes it hard for us to appreciate the truth and significance of two other points that sound more obvious than they actually are: the default state is not-knowing and any instance of knowing is a product of work. We're so used to just knowing, or just being able to know after a few keystrokes and a click, it's easy to forget that the default state in relation to pretty much anything that isn't our own immediate experience is not knowing, and that just because we don't know doesn't mean that whatever-it-is doesn't exist or doesn't matter. So finding out that local environmental groups who are pretty politically compatible and who exist in the same small city often don't know what each other is up to should definitely be seen as regretable, as a problem to be work on -- and they are -- but it shouldn't be surprising. When a particular union local in Sudbury is inspired to start making public noise about a particular issue and they don't bother to tell any of the most likely potential community allies, well, that shouldn't be a surprise either -- they don't know, we don't know, and of course that's where things start from.

Moreover, one common and initially surprising experience I've had in asking other progressive-ish people for suggestions for the radio show has been a relative paucity of responses. Given how generous people were sharing suggestions for my long-ago interview project, I know it's not a matter of activists being inherently suspicious and unhelpful when it comes to these sorts of requests for information. But, for some reason, lots of people I've asked in this current search whom I would've expected to be full of ideas have none whatsoever, and many others can only come up with an idea or two from that very short list of groups/organizations that lots of people have already heard of. Partly, I think, this is about patterns of attention, as described in the last paragraph -- I think a lot more people identify in a passive way with movements as good things than actually pay much attention to the nuts and bolts of what is being done and how it is being done, or see that kind of information as in any way relevant to their own lives, so a number of people I might've expected to have their finger on the pulse of a particular kind of organizing in the city or in the country don't actually pay much attention to it. Probably a bigger part, though, is again that not-knowing is the default, and going from not-knowing to knowing is a product of work being done -- and not just being done by the individual who ends up knowing, though of course being done by them as well, but a whole range of socially co-ordinated work by multiple people situated in multiple ways. Part of what the onslaught of information in our lives obscures (and this is perfectly consistent with lots of other default understandings in our culture) is the fact that knowing, just 'cause, that celebrity X cheated on celebrity Y, or that the Leafs failed to make the playoffs again, or what politician Z said last week about gun control, are all the product of a great deal of socially organized work allowing us to know these things. And if that work isn't happening when it comes to organizing/social change work, or if it is happening in ways that require significant effort to encounter the knowledge thus produced, then that is going to reinforce patterns of attention that relate to movement-building in passive ways and result in (among many more politically significant consequences) fewer people having fewer suggestions for me than I might have predicted before I started.

Just as this post started with an obvious point, it is going to end with one: If we can't count on the dominant media, if the default is not-knowing, and if knowing requires socially co-ordinated work across multiple sites by multiple people, then we really need more people doing more and different kinds of work if we want to produce and circulate the kinds of knowledge that will support movements. Now, this could easily just end up being a pitch for more people to get involved in producing independent media (hint: Sudburians, write for us!). Certainly I think that would be useful. But I also mean it more expansively than that -- it's not just a matter of taking on some new, specialized form of practice, i.e. grassroots journalism, but it's also about being a bit more deliberate and a bit more critical in how we navigate the flood in our everyday lives. It means recognizing that whoever we are, however we are located, we already do work that is related to how efforts to create social change become known (or don't). If we spend at least a little bit of time reading or viewing or listening to content about the world and about efforts to change it, then that includes us. If we at least occasionally use social media or even old fashioned verbal recommendation to direct other people towards particular kinds of content, we are doing that kind of work. Moreover, at least some of you are already involved in collective efforts of one kind or another to create change, and that too intrinsically means that you are part of the work through which knowledge about social change is produced and circulates. All I'm saying is that we can take up those roles a bit more deliberately. We can work against the ways in which our deeply engrained patterns of attention remarginalize knowledge that is already marginalized, even when we think we're posting all sorts of politically rad stuff. We can begin to work on relating to what we encounter on social media not just as individuals with consumption practices that we might change, not just as spectators to a rapidly deteriorating world, but as potential subjects of collective liberation -- even if we don't march down and join up with some group, we can recognize that we have that potential, that content about relational practices and collective actions are in fact relevant to us, and we can start to pay attention to things that address us as such. And in the groups that we are already a part of, we can tweak how we do what we are already doing to be more attentive to the importance of including work that is about producing and circulating critical knowledge. It might be a few coalition-focused meetings a year. It might be recognizing that my union local may need community allies in the future, and doing preemptive work to figure out who they might be. And I'm pretty sure that, even given our inevitably scarce time and energy, it can mean a whole lot more than that too.

Don't be fooled by the flood of information that surrounds us. It is only by recognizing its multiple forms of unevenness and doing the work do turn not-knowing into knowing that we can produce and circulate the kinds of knowledge necessary to support the kinds of social movements that might have the kinds of impacts that we want.

Canadian Social Change Podcast, Six Weeks In

Six weeks ago, I announced the launch of a new radio/podcasting project called Talking Radical Radio. It's a weekly, half-hour show that broadcasts in-depth interviews with people involved in a wide range of social change activities across Canada and gives them an opportunity to reflect on what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

So far the show is exceeding my expectations, and I'm very excited about what it's going to be able to do over the longer term. It is currently podcast on well-known progressive news and analysis site Rabble.ca -- you can browse the existing episodes on the Rabble site itself or you can go to this page to subscribe to it using a range of podcatchers, as well as iTunes. It is currently broadcast over the airwaves every Wednesday morning at 8am on 96.7 FM CKLU in Sudbury, Ontario, and I'm hopeful that other campus and community stations will pick the show up as I move forward.

To visit the show's online home, click here. But just for a taste of what I've done in the first six weeks, you can check out on rabble shows about

• grassroots feminist organizing that won women's studies curriculum for Ontario high schools;
  
• climate justice organizing in Vancouver that emphasizes solidarity with frontline indigenous communities;
  
• struggles by the Black community in north-end Halifax to save a closed school building as a community space;
  
• efforts by militants in Hamilton, Ontario to use direct action to combat wage theft;
  
• a longstanding organization in Calgary that provides support and infrastructure for numerous grassroots initiatives;
  
• shop-floor worker organizing in the social serivce agency sector in northern Alberta
  
• and, Vancouver-based efforts to present grassroots histories in accessible, engaging graphical ways

Upcoming shows will feature the R3 Collective, a group of anti-colonial and social justice-focused musicians and performers; a former student who was a core organizer at an anglophone university in Quebec that in only one year transformed its political culture and successfully took up the general assembly-based organizing model used in the province's francophone universities, in the lead-up to last year's massive and successful student strike; an individual involved in queer organizing in the far north of the country; and, a militant from Winnipeg Cop Watch.

If you know of some kind of neat social change work going on anywhere in Canada (but especially outside of Ontario, and outside of the Vancouver/Montreal/Toronto nexus), please email me at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca!

Other Pieces of Writing

Here is a list of other work from the last number of years that doesn't fall into the categories of online journalism for The Media Co-op since September 2012; presentations, talks, and workshops; or episodes (listed on Rabble.ca) of Talking Radical Radio.

• "Ontario Teachers Rally Workers." The Dominion, Issue #87, p. 6. March/April 2013.
  
• "Eli Clare's Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation -- A Genderqueer Classic Revisited." Rabble.ca Book Lounge. March 29, 2012.
  
• "Co-operative Corner." Eat Local Sudbury eFlyer, weekly from January 11 to March 21, 2012.
  
• "Local Food and Co-operatives." rethink news, Issue #15, p. 2, February 3, 2012.
  
• "New Book Explores the Legacy of Colonization and Decolonization for Native American Rights." Left Eye On Books: Progressive Book News and Reviews, September 27, 2011.
  
• "Imperialist Canada: A Review." Left Eye On Books: Progressive Book News and Reviews, May 20, 2011.
  
• "Resisting Austerity: Don't (Just) Show Me the Money," New Socialist Webzine, April 18, 2011.
  
• "Feelings About Masculinity." XYOnline, January 7, 2011.
  
• "Neo-liberalism and home care." Linchpin, pp. 6-7, December 2010. (Also: Z-Net)
  
• "Striking in a Time of Austerity: The NOSM Strike in Northern Ontario." The Bullet: Socialist Project E-Bulletin, No. 417, October 3, 2010.
  
• "Challenging masculinity is about much more than 'unloading this junk,'" XYOnline, August 18, 2010.
  
• "Review: Men and Feminism," XYOnline, August 14, 2010.
  
• "One day longer? The Vale-Inco strike comes to a close," Linchpin.ca, July 21, 2010. (Also published: Z-Net, Socialist Project, Reinventing Labour, Toronto Media Co-op, Canadian Dimension, CUPE 3907)
  
• "Becoming the media in Sudbury," Linchpin.ca, June 24, 2010. (link broken)
  
• "G8, G20 summits attract rampant media spin," Northern Life, p. 8, June 24, 2010.
  
• "Israeli Apartheid Week hits Sudbury," Linchpin.ca, April 4, 2010. (link broken)
  
• "Offering support for strikers as the rich get richer," Northern Life, p. 7, February 16, 2010.
  
• "Campaign seeks to clear John Moore's name," Linchpin.ca, December 8, 2009. (link broken)
  
• "Students and Steelworkers march against poverty," Linchpin.ca, November 7, 2009. (link broken)
  
• "Nickel, Neoliberalism, and Nationalism," Linchpin.ca, August 1, 2009. (Also published: Z-Net, New Socialist.)
  
• "Elections: all we can hope for?" Linchpin, Issue 6, Oct/Nov '08, p. 3. (link broken)
  
• Neigh, Scott. "A Tool Against Apartheid -- Review of Grace-Edward Galabuzzi's Canada's Economic Apartheid." Upping the Anti #6, May 2008.
  
• "Traps In Our Outrage", pp. 222-229 in Skyla Dawn Cameron, lead editor. Nothing But Red, Lulu.com, 2008. (post)

Recent Presentations, Talks, and Workshops

The following is a listing of presentations, talks, and workshops given for various purposes in the last several years. If you are interested in having me do one of them, or something similar, please be in touch at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.

• "15-Minute Mini-Workshop on Writing Good Media Releases and Getting Your Message Out." A workshop for Grassroots: Sudbury's Media Collective. Delivered to:
  
  • Sudbury Green Gathering. April 8, 2013.
    
  • Board of the Sudbury Social Planning Council. April 8, 2013.
    
  • Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty. February 26, 2013.
• "Writing Process and Grassroots Journalism." A workshop for Grassroots: Sudbury's Media Collective. December 5, 2012.
  
• "Our Movements and Our Histories." Book launch talk for Scott's two books of Canadian history through the stories of activists, Gender and Sexuality and Resisting the State -- learn about them here and buy them here. Delivered at:
  
  • Concordia University in Montreal. March 5, 2013.
    
  • Octopus Books@UnderOneRoof in Ottawa. February 13, 2013.
    
  • University of Waterloo. January 13, 2013.
    
  • University of Windsor. November 14, 2012.
    
  • University of Toronto. November 13, 2012.
    
  • McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. November 8, 2012.
    
  • The Formagerie in Sudbury, Ontario. November 6, 2012.
• "Active Remembering and History From Below." Book launch talk for Scott's two books of Canadian history through the stories of activists, Gender and Sexuality and Resisting the State -- learn about them here and buy them here. Delivered at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. November 6, 2012.
  
• "Ambiguous Potential: Grounded in the Present and Looking to the Future." Presented at Practicum Colloquium 2012, Interdisciplinary Humanities M.A. in Interpretation and Values. April 19, 2012.
  
• "Moving Forward Co-operatively." Presentation and workshops for Eat Local Sudbury, Sudbury, Ontario, February 20, March 2, March 3, March 8, and April 11, 2012.
  
• "Active Remembering and Community History." Presented at New Frontiers 2012, York University, Toronto, Ontario, February 25, 2012.
  
• "Don Weitz and New Left Anti-psychiatry in Ontario." Presented at International Workshop -- Disability: Definitions, Representations, Classifications, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, February 7, 2012.
  
• "Engaging With John Holloway." Guest speaker, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, October 11, 2011.
  
• "Workshop on Opinion and Political Writing." Session #2 of All of Us Are Writers -- Writing for Social Change. Sudbury, Ontario. May 14, 2011.
  
• "Talking Radical: Active Remembering and Histories From Below," presented at Windsor Radical History Conference, February 5, 2011.
  
• "National Security Certificates: Organizing Against Secret Trials in Canada." Presented at Canadian Security Into the 21st Century: (Re)Articulations in the Post-9/11 World, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, March 5, 2008.
  
  

Reluctant Promotions; Or, Informal Research on the Canadian Academy

Over the course of a recent fortnight, I used any time not otherwise committed to engage in a mind-numbing and potentially pointless task: I have gone through the web sites of pretty much every English-language university in Canada looking for faculty whose declared research and/or teaching interests connect in some way to my books, customizing for each a cover letter, printing that letter, addressing an envelope, and putting the letters plus a flyer for each book in said envelope, and then sending it. While there is lots of labour that fills the everyday lives of lots of people that is orders of magnitude less pleasant than this, I still had unaccustomed difficulty forcing myself through it, and I'm happy it's done. I sent somewhere between 200 and 250 packages.

Part of the difficulty was, as I said, serious doubts about how much point there is to it. There are a number of reasons for these doubts. One is a certain amount of knowledge of how academic work is organized -- the regular need to resist distraction in the face of multiple external demands means, for many academics, deliberately tuning out that which is of genuine interest to be better able to focus on that which has to be done. So even if I do find the right people, the vagaries of academic life mean there's a good chance these letters won't get any attention and will instead go straight into the blue box or be lost in chaotic piles of paper. And targeting based on interests declared on official web pages is at best an approximation. To make it all manageable, I confined myself to History, Political Science, and Sociology, plus interdisciplinary areas like Women's and Gender Studies, Canadian Studies, Labour Studies, and a few others, so I'm sure I missed appropriate people by excluding their departments. I think I had to do it this way to make the task manageable, but I'm sure I missed people because of it. As well, I think interest in my books is likely to correlate better with political sensibility than with scholarly interest, and that is close to impossible to gauge from most faculty profiles, so there will be plenty of false positives as well as an unknown number of false negatives. However, I did the first handful of these a few months ago and actually got a supportive email in response from a Labour Studies prof on the West coast. And a friend who is a Women's Studies prof said she gets a couple such letters a month and, if they are well targeted, she does act on them. So I have persevered.

This work has been, of course, a form of research. Not only was I locating and applying the very narrow form of information that was my primary target, but as a way to ease the boredom I was also observing and processing lots of other things along the way. And in so doing, I've come up with a handful of observations about Canadian universities. These observations don't form any kind of neat whole, so I'll present them as a list rather than trying to force them into a single story.

• Humanities and social sciences departments hire shamefully few faculty of colour, on average. There are exceptions, including a couple of quite prominent departments at quite prominent institutions, but the whiteness of the Canadian academy, at least in the areas that I was inspecting, remains intense. It really illustrated for me one of the points made by Malinda Smith's essay in this collection -- though white women continue to face barriers and at times a rather chilly climate in Canadian universities, they have been the primary beneficiaries of strategies to dismantle barriers, while women and men of colour remain the "other Other" and continue to be excluded in much more profound ways.
  
  
• It was interesting to see what kinds of departments brought together a high proportion of academics whose work would actually interest me. Note that this is quite a different question from how many should get promo packages -- some people who work on social movements really don't do much that interests me, and my interests extend far beyond what might make people potential recipients of information about my own recently published books. And the institutional location that most consistently presented the most interesting-to-me work by the highest proportion of members was Women's and Gender Studies departments. A couple of the more obviously left-leaning Labour Studies departments were not far behind but Labour Studies as a whole was much more mixed, given the emphasis in some departments on labour relations rather than labour-as-movement. Sociology and History departments always had a real mix -- not surprising, I think -- and Political Science departments almost always rated the lowest in interesting-to-me work. (Even the supposed marxist haven of York University's poli sci department actually contains far more people doing what appears to the non-initiate at least to be fairly conventional and not-super-interesting-to-me poli sci along with the cluster of marxists whose names are well known in certain circles. Not only that, but my enthusiasm for the brand of political economy that is most often produced by some of said lefties has its limits.) There was variation in Women's and Gender Studies as well -- on the positive end of that, I was surprised to find, for instance, how many members of that department at Queen's University I had already read and liked without realizing that's where any of them teach -- but for whatever reason, even the less interesting-to-me and more politically staid Women's Studies departments tended to have at least some members whose work caught my eye.
  
  
• Getting this kind of overview of the work that gets done in Canadian universities reinforced my existing sense of the disciplinary boundaries and other aspects of the social organization of knowledge and its production in academic settings as arbitrary and weird. I know the arguments for having disciplines with continuity over time, and I can get behind at least some of them -- for instance, having agreed-upon standards and practices that are changed incrementally is one way to ensure that knowledge production is a collective, cumulative enterprise, and there are at least theoretically social benefits to doing that rather than having all knowledge production organized as a series of neoliberal and individualized ad-hoceries. I also can appreciate that however you organize such semi-stable traditions, there will be arbitrary aspects. That said, my own sensibility when it comes to both politics and knowledge production (are they even worth naming as separate things? :) ) is towards seeking connection, and towards broad acquisition and synthesis. And getting to take a bit of an overview and see some of those lines across which many academics would say, "Oh, well, that over there has nothing to do with me and my work" really made it clear to me that there are serious problems with how it all works in practice.
  
  
• A much smaller proportion of the work that gets done, at least in the areas I was looking at, is truly as irrelevant to people's lives as populist objections to academic knowledge production usually claim. The connections are not always obvious or direct, and sometimes they are not at all good, but complete absence is not as ubiquitous as some people think. (And, anyway, I want to live in a world where pursuing something because it is beautiful or interesting is something open to anyone, so while I'm all for criticizing how universities use resources in a world in which so many people's lives are organized into exploitation, oppression, and need, I think we want to be strategic in how we do that.)
  
  
• Another populist objection is that universities are overrun by radicals. This is, sadly, not true. The kernel of truth at the heart of this is that universities have developed ways of producing knowledge that are generally rule-based, which increasingly powerful right-wing politics of knowledge production exemplified by Fox News tend to object to on principle, and are often either already open to or can with struggle be opened to considering inputs that those right-wing politics of knowledge production would rather rule out of bounds on principle. Being rule-based and having a certain kind of openness are aspects that make academic knowledge production useful to capital and to the demands of ruling, so they are not easy for powerful institutions and interests to just dismiss. The rules and the shape and the limits, and particularly the institutional relations and practices in which all of them are embodied and enacted, often have serious problems with them, when considered from the perspective of movements seeking justice and liberation, but the very fact of being rule-based and having a certain kind of openness provides openings for struggle. The right would rather not allow even those openings. All of that said, the actual proportion of knowledge production that happens in universities that you might describe as "critical" remains a fairly small proportion. And much of what is nominally critical sounds radical but is actually pretty ungrounded so it is not in and of itself threatening to established interests. I think much of that class of knowledge can, with work, be reappropriated and reformulated in ways that are more directly useful to movements, but far too little of it already, in and of itself, serves the kinds of radical goals that its internal rhetoric might claim. And the proportion of academically produced knowledge that is already both critical and grounded is quite tiny.
  
  
• A very significant proportion of the knowledge production that happens in universities happens in the service of ruling. Which isn't to endorse the blanket rejection of anything with any connection to the academy as irrevocably tainted, which you sometimes run across -- there is still the "critical and grounded" and "critical but ungrounded" material, and even some of the knowledge that is produced in the service of ruling can be reapporpriated and reoformulated for just and liberatory ends. And choices about how to relate to at least some of the knowledge produced in the service of ruling is complicated by the fact that much of it happens in the name of a kind of top-down version of societal "helping" that mixes ruling in with the allocation of certain sorts of social goods to meet real human needs. But it is still ruling. Even with those provisos, however, the involvement of academics in projects of ruling (many, I would bet, without any real appreciation that this is what they are doing) is extensive and depressing.
  
  
• Finally, in line with a number of the other points above, this exercise has, for me, affirmed my conviction of the need for much greater support for knowledge production grounded in movements, including that which is committed to building movement-useful knowledge from the ground up but also academic and community-based knowledge production that is open to "steal[ing] from the university" -- work that will "abuse [the academy's] hospitality" and be "in but not of it" (from here).