Canada | Platypus

The “Doing” of Collaborative Ethnography

 John Neufeld  June 6, 2024

There is no simple way to tell the story of the recent history of Sainte-Thérèse Island, known as IST (Île-Sainte-Thérèse) by members of the Montreal Waterways research collective, a group based out of the Concordia University Ethnography Lab. Once you start, there is little certainty as to where the story may lead, as its tellings often open different and overlapping pathways for understanding the landscape. Therefore when it came down to the question of how to tell the story of an island—one with a diversity of characters, histories, and happenings—Montreal Waterways made the decision to create a multi-authored compilation of ethnographic texts in the form of a book, entitled An Island is More Than a Park and available online—as part of its research outcomes. The title of the book came from a direct quote made by one of the island’s residents during an interview conducted at a rather difficult time. In the months prior, the community of IST had been preparing to legally defend themselves against a government which had labelled them as squatters, and which was committed to expropriating the seasonal inhabitants to make way for an eco-park. In the time Montreal Waterways spent engaging with the island’s residents and its landscape, it became evident that an island is more than a park: an island is actually a composite of a great number of things that hold meanings that sometimes conflict or contradict each other, especially when so many actors are invested in a version of the island’s story. There was understandably some apprehension on behalf of IST residents, who were suspicious as to why a group of anthropology students were interested in learning about the park, their expropriation, and a project involving collaborative ethnographic research. (read more...)

Platypod, Episode Three: Disability, Toxicity, and the Environment

 Elizabeth Roberts, Sophia Jaworski  September 27, 2022

 Listen to this podcast episode.

In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Elizabeth Roberts (the University of Michigan) and Sophia Jaworski (the University of Toronto). They discuss the complexities of corporeal life in toxic environments. This episode was created with the participation of Elizabeth Roberts (the University of Michigan, speaker), Sophia Jaworski (the University of Toronto, speaker), Svetlana Borodina (Columbia University, host, producer), Gebby Keny (Rice University, host, sound editor), and Angela VandenBroek (Texas State University, CASTAC web producer). The transcript of their conversation is available below. We thank Sophia Jaworski for her work on editing the transcript for comprehension. (read more...)

Community-Based Research is Hard, and Worth It

 Maya Cowan  August 12, 2021

I began studying the Salt Spring dollar (SSD), a community currency used on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada, for my May-August MA fieldwork period. I had heard about the currency from one of my committee members, and from some former Salt Spring residents I knew. One of the main research questions I outlined was “What the future of the currency might look like?” From the outside, there was a lot of optimism about a currency like this. Many tourists were interested in it, and many residents were proud of it. From the beginning, I knew I would have to take a community-based approach, which meant starting by contacting and meeting with board members of the Salt Spring Island Monetary Foundation, the currency’s issuer. It also meant volunteering with this community organization to exchange the currency at the Saturday market the community holds, which has many artisan goods stands, as well as food producers and prepared food. (read more...)

A Technology of Empowerment and Governance: The IUD/IUS and Sexual Health Care in Toronto, Canada

 Allison Odger  November 5, 2020

The intrauterine device (IUD) and the intrauterine system (IUS) have a long and complicated history. The IUD is a contraceptive device inserted into the uterus, which serves as a physical barrier to prevent sperm from fertilizing the egg. Its earliest form can be linked to the work of Ernst Gräfenberg, who in 1929 created the ring IUD (Thiery 1997). Over the course of several decades, the IUD was constructed and re-constructed in terms of the materials used, its physical shape, and its promotion to women. Through the development process, some devices, such as the Dalkon Shield, caused irreparable damage. In 1969, the first copper IUD was created by Jaime Zipper and Howard J. Tatum, which took the now easily recognizable T-shape form. While the copper IUD was considered successful in terms of its ability to prevent pregnancy, women commonly had it removed due to increased bleeding during menstruation. Subsequently, the intrauterine system (IUS) was created, first by Antonio Scommegna in the 1960s using progesterone and later by Tapani Luukkainen in 1976 using levonorgestrel; this shift increased its effectiveness from a duration of one year to five years. After over a decade of testing, the Mirena IUS was released in Finland – it would not be approved for sale in the United States until 2001. (read more...)

Weekly Round-up | March 31st, 2017

 Ian Lowrie  March 31, 2017

We’re back to full steam on the round-up this week! Your editor’s brief paternity leave included the aimless stockpiling of dozens of partially-read tabs in Chrome, and we’ve got the cream of the crop for you here. As always, let us know if you’ve written, sculpted, recorded, or just stumbled across anything cool on the web for next week’s round-up. (read more...)

Public Numbers, Public Land: Learning to Count Trees in British Columbia

 Tom Özden-Schilling  August 19, 2014

2001 was a long year for British Columbia’s (BC’s) Ministry of Forests. In April, provincial elections replaced the incumbent New Democratic Party (NDP) with Gordon Campbell and the BC Liberals, a right-leaning party sharing little but name with the Liberal Party covering the rest of Canada. By the end of the year, the province’s “dirt ministries” were in flux. An assortment of public institutions covering provincial forests, lands, mines, geology, parks, and fisheries, the dirt ministries and their matters rarely reach the headlines of the Vancouver Sun or the Victoria Times Colonist. Even before entitlement spending began to dominate provincial budgets in the 1990s, BC’s public mines inspectors and forestry researchers commanded a relatively meager share of the provincial budget. Members of the Ministry of Forests maintained a particularly low profile, despite being managers of a land base covering half a million square kilometers (think all of Ukraine, or Madagascar), an economic sector generating an eleven figure annual revenue for the province, and a job source for close to half the residents of BC’s sprawling rural north. Foresters periodically appeared in the news only to offer up seemingly self-explanatory numbers – this many cubic meters of lumber harvested last year, that many hectares of forest lost to fire. After 2001, however, deciding which forests get counted, who (or what) counts them, and how, got a lot messier. Enter Dendroctonus ponderosae – the mountain pine beetle. (read more...)

Off the Grid in the Modern World

 Phillip Vannini  June 18, 2013

Power is an interesting word. For most social scientists “power” stands for authority, control, sovereignty, economic capital, military-industrial hegemony, social stratification, and similar ideas. But power—especially in everyday usage—is synonymous with something seemingly more immediate, proximate, and concrete. Thus we may commonly talk of “engine power” that allows us to drive faster, of “physical power” that enables us to jump higher, or of “domestic power” that permits us to live comfortable, connected, and convenient lives. What is truly interesting about this is that the dictionary definition of power—the ability or capacity to act—refers to all of the above, an idea that only a handful of scholars have capitalized upon. It’s an irremediably cloudy, intermittently soggy day on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. But not even an unexpectedly miserable stretch of bad late spring weather can cast a wet blanket over the elation in the air. It’s the last interview—with informants number (read more...)