SOCIETY FOR SOCIALIST STUDIES / SOCIÉTÉ D’ÉTUDES SOCIALISTES National Office: 172 Allwright Close, Red Deer AB T4R 3P1

Telephone/Fax: (403) 342-7989

Email: kcollier@shaw.ca

Website: http://www.socialiststudies.ca

CONGRESS 2006

The Struggle: A Festival of Knowledge

York University

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Wednesday 31 May - Sunday 4 June

PROGRAMME

Sessions, Speakers and Abstracts

Programme Committee:

Chris Borst, William K. Carroll, Ken Collier, Murray Cooke,

Debbie Dergousoff, Roni Gechtman, Ian Hussey, June Madeley

See the summary list of sessions on the back cover!

Also, see check out the information on Socialist Studies: Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies on the back!

 

 
  
   
  
  
   
   
   
    
     
     The Socialist Studies information desk is in ACW 104. Travel subsidies previously promised are available at this desk. Memberships can be started and renewed here. A good place to mingle!   
     ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING:
     Reports, Discussions, Elections
     Friday 2 June, 14:45-17:00, ACW 106
      
      
      
     The next Congress will be held at University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The dates of Socialist Studies sessions have yet to be determined. 

     
     
     
    
   
    
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

SPECIAL SOCIALIST STUDIES EVENTS

AT THE 2006 CONGRESS

Friday 2 June, 14:45-17:00, ACW 106

Society for Socialist Studies: Annual General Meeting

Reports, Discussions, Elections

Thursday 1 June, 19:00, 401 Richmond Building, Suite 444
(Near corner of Richmond and Spadina)
Book Launch - Sociology For Changing The World: Social Movements/Social Research, Edited by Caelie Frampton, Gary Kinsman, AK Thompson, and Kate Tilliczek
Join us for refreshments and drinks, readings by book contributors, and a tribute to the life of George Smith. Books available at special launch price.

Thursday 1 June, 10:45-12:15, ACW 004

The 4th Annual CAW-Sam Gindin Chair Roundtable:

New strategies, Old Strategies - What Can We Learn From Each

Other?  An Inter-generational Dialogue

This session features a roundtable discussion of old and new strategies for promoting progressive social change.   

Thursday 1 June, 14:45-17:30, ACW 004

Keynote Address

SSS is pleased to announce that Dr. William K. Carroll will be our 2006 keynote speaker. Dr. Carroll’s speech is entitled 'Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony'.

Friday 2 June, 17:00-19:00

York University President’s reception

Friday 2 June – Sunday 4 June

Fair Trade: People, the Planet, and Profits

See detailed program on the back.

Wednesday 31 May, 10:45 – 12:15, ACW 106

New Scholars Session

Chair: Isabel Macdonald, Communication and Culture, York

The Stelco saga: Concession bargaining and union response

Brendan Stone (stonebs@mcmaster.ca), McMaster

In their opposition to concession bargaining under Stelco's CCAA debt restructuring process, two Hamilton-area USW locals have taken divergent paths. Locals 1005 and 8782 have both resisted concessions, but why has 1005 adopted an independent strategy of non-participation while 8782 worked with the other Stelco USW locals to impose a deal on the company? Why did both locals develop such militant strategies in the first place, and how are they able to use the legal system and collective bargaining to reverse Stelco's attempt to cut wages and pensions? In the end, are either able to present an alternate vision for the industry?

Our imaginations aren’t hostages: on the continuation of theory as practice

Colin G. Bowers (colinbowers@ns.sympatico.ca), English, Mt. St. Vincent

The central concern of this paper will be to examine the relationship between imagination (and fantasy) and social transformation as used by Herbert Marcuse in his early essay “Philosophy and Critical Theory”. Using Fredric Jameson’s important recent work on utopia as a theoretical marker (Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions), I will trace the dialectical nature of the relationship between utopian imaginings and present social conditions, arguing that conceptions of freedom lie very much within the force field of this tension. Without imaginative idealisms like utopian fiction, there is no possibility for social change; without social change, imaginative power is degraded to the status of mere ideology.

Lunch Break, 12:15-13:00

Wednesday 31 May, 13:00-14:30, ACW 304

Living in a Material World

Session Organizer: Dennis Soron (dsoron@brocku.ca), Sociology, Brock

Post-materialism revisited

Jonah Butovsky (jbutovsky@brocku.ca), Sociology, Brock University

Ronald Inglehart, among others, has argued that as a result of broad-based increases in material prosperity in Western countries, material political issues (jobs, taxes, inflation) have gradually given way to post-materialist issues (the environment, gender and sexual identity, etc.). Inglehart believes that the relationship between economic development and value change is unassailable. This paper questions Inglehart’s opposition between material and post-materialist issues, examining the degree to which aggregate economic indicators are an indicator of popular prosperity, and whether the rise of social conservatism, technically a post-materialist phenomenon, supports Inglehart’s theory.

Imagine Canada’s new philanthropy

Mary-Beth Raddon (mraddon@brocku.ca), Sociology, Brock

The recent creation of Imagine Canada, from the merger of the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy and the Coalition of Voluntary Organizations, signals a shift in philanthropic activity in Canada. Imagine Canada’s advocacy of closer links between governments, businesses and charitable organizations, its support of campaigns to reduce or eliminate taxes on charitable donations, and its championing of “corporate citizenship” actively promote forms of philanthropy modeled on business principles. This paper critiques the specific imaginings fostered by entrepreneurial philanthropy, such as the imagining of private donors as ideal citizens, disparities of wealth as legitimated by philanthropic gestures, and charitable giving as an effective response to social need.

Social-movement unionism, class interests, and the environment

Dennis Soron (dsoron@brocku.ca), Sociology, Brock

In recent years, Marxist thinkers such as John Bellamy Foster have challenged the liberal-individualist bias of mainstream environmentalism, highlighting the "limits of environmentalism without class". Complementing this work, my paper addresses the obverse problem: the limits of economistic forms of unionism that fail to confront the fundamental cultural and political challenges posed by today’s environmental crisis. Drawing examples from the recent history of the Canadian Auto Workers, I argue that renewing the radical edge of social movement unionism will require an enriched understanding of "class interests" – one that fully acknowledges the significance and urgency of environmental concerns and other ostensibly “post-material” issues.

Wednesday 31 May, 13:00-14:30, ACW 305

New (Gendered) Perspectives on Genocide - Parts I & II (with CWSA)
 
 Co-ordinators: Sima Aprahamian (aprhsma@alcor.concordia.ca), Sociology-Anthropology & Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia. Karin Doerr (kdoerr@alcor.concordia.ca), Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Modern Languages, Concordia
 
Girls at risk: The survival of Armenian girls during the Genocide
Isabel Kaprielian (isabelk@csufresno.edu), History, California State at Fresno
 
In research and writing relating to the Armenian Genocide, great emphasis has been placed on the political, economic, and religious factors leading to the tragedy and on the terrible events that destroyed 1 1/2 million Armenians. Less emphasis has been placed on the experiences of survivors. This paper will focus on the survival experiences of Armenian girls - those abducted, those raped, those exploited, those who survived with family members, and those fortunate enough to be placed in the many orphanages set up to save them. I will be using oral sources, published memoirs, and official reports by missionaries, Near East Relief personnel, and League of Nations agencies.
 
Public witnessing at the League of Nations: The women's movement and the Armenian Genocide
Victoria Rowe (vrowe@fps.chuo-u.ac.jp), Faculty of Policy Studies, Cross-Cultural Studies, Chuo, Tokyo, Japan
 
This paper explores the writer Inga Nalbandian's public witnessing of the
Armenian Genocide in her 1917 book, Den Store Jammer [The Great Misery]. Nalbandian's status as a Danish-born woman living in Constantinople, her marriage to an Armenian and her mothering of Armenian children, and later her ability to be a public witness and to co-operate with European feminists such as Henni Forchhammer, the Danish delegate to the League of Nations, in promoting assistance to the refugees of the Armenian Genocide raises numerous questions which will be addressed in this paper about the nature of identity and witnessing, as well as the intersection of ethnicity, citizenship and gender and the relations between European feminists and Armenian refugees. Victoria Rowe is the author of A History of Armenian Women's Writing: 1880-1922. 
 
What are the perpetrators afraid of?
George Mouradian (hyemouradi@aol.com), Retired Engineer from Schoolcraft CC and American University of Armenia
 
This paper revisits past holocausts and genocides and elaborates on the outcomes of these tragic events. The paper searches into the methods used, the results, and the after-effects of the horrors. What happened to the perpetrators, what the ancestors of the perpetrators are responsible for, and what they are afraid of is covered in detail. Turkey's denial of the Armenian Genocide has to be a festering wound that can only cure itself by the nation's acknowledgement of its wrongdoing. What is Turkey afraid of? Its desire to join the European Union and the pressures on it from civilized countries are forcing Turkey to face up to the truth. How will the past and present scenarios affect Turkey and other nations in what happens in the near future?
 
Family matters: Rape and incest in the SA and SS
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus (passau11@yahoo.com), Independent scholar
 
Sodomizing a child, raping a handicapped woman, and drinking beyond capacity: behavior unworthy of any "Aryan", especially an SA or SS man? It all happened in Lower Bavaria. The men were machos, their pants quickly unzipped, their IQs low and their past included criminal delinquencies. Their careers were not going anywhere. Wearing a uniform gave them status and power. They all trusted that their secrets would remain safe. After all, the victims were family! Who would believe them? Personal files reveal the once unthinkable: the scum inside Hitler's "elite"!

Wednesday May 31, 13:30-15:00, VH1158

Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements / Social Research – Part I (Hosted by CSAA)

Session Organizers: Caelie Frampton, Gary Kinsman, Andrew Thompson, Kate Tilleczek (ktilleczek@laurentian.ca), Sociology, Laurentian

This session features a discussion of the ways in which sociological knowledge can be (and is) produced by and for social movements. A point of entry into the session is the launch of the book Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (forthcoming 2006, Beck, Kinsman, Thompson & Tilleczek).

[Note: Part II of this session is held on Thursday 1 June, 8:30-10:00, VH1154]

Wednesday 31 May, 14:45-17:30, ACW 305
 
New (Gendered) Perspectives on Genocide - Parts III & IV
 
 Co-ordinators: Sima Aprahamian (aprhsma@alcor.concordia.ca), Sociology-Anthropology & Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia. Karin Doerr (kdoerr@alcor.concordia.ca), Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Modern Languages, Concordia
 
Rape as genocide: Findings from Rwanda
Lisa Price (lisaprice@uniserve.com)
 
In 1998 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted Jean-Paul
Akayesu of complicity in genocide, based in part on testimonies that he encouraged and condoned the rape of Tutsi women by Hutu police officers and militiamen. This precedent-setting characterization of rape as a constituent act of genocide recognized both the intersectional harms done to women in the context of ethnic conflict and the harm done to communities through the medium of anti-woman violence. This paper will trace the conceptual steps by which this understanding was arrived at; will analyze debates within the feminist community around the value or danger of differentiating genocidal rape from other forms of sexual violence in armed conflict; and will offer some suggestions as to why genocidal rape has not been included in the statute of the newly-created permanent International Criminal Court.
 
"The Genocide in Me" - Bearing witness to disappearing traces
Sima Aprahamian (aprhsma@alcor.concordia.ca), Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Sociology-Anthropology, Concordia
 
Dorota Glowacka notes in her study of Ida Fink's literary testimony and Holocaust art: "The witness is burdened with an impossible task of searching for disappearing traces" (2002: 106). Over ninety years have passed since the 1915 genocide of the Armenian people, yet in spite the documentation there continues an active denial on the part of the perpetrators and their new allies. Araz Artinian in her recent documentary "The Genocide in Me" attempts to seek the disappearing traces in the perpetrators' silences and the remains that attempt to bear witness in a touristic tour that she takes in Eastern Turkey – historic Armenia. This paper aims to examine through a feminist perspective of self-reflexivity the meaning of "bearing witness" in the midst of the perpetrators' denials and an examination of Araz Artinian's film.
 
"Cultural Genocide" and the indigenous peoples of Highland Bangladesh - new critical perspectives on post-war and reconciliation phase
 
Aditya Dewan (akdewan@hotmail.com), Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia
 
This paper argues that Bangladesh commits cultural genocide directly or indirectly by suppressing the indigenous peoples' culture in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. First, it describes the key components of traditional cultures such as language and education, religion, dress patterns, customs and rituals, habits, morals, traditional medicine, and so on. Secondly, the paper examines how these aspects of cultures have been affected by the deliberate policies followed by successive governments of Bangladesh. Finally, the paper concludes that the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord signed in December 1997 has also accelerated the process of disintegration of traditional cultures of the CHT people.
 
Ethical trauma? On the ethical implications of using trauma theory and Holocaust-study frameworks to study legacies of perpetration
Susanne Luhmann (sluhmann@laurentian.ca), Women's Studies, Thorneloe College, Laurentian
 
Can trauma be ethical?  What are the ethical limits of studying perpetration itself through the conceptual lens of trauma?  My paper considers some of the ethical dilemmas and implications that arise from using Holocaust and trauma studies to study the after-effects of national trauma not upon the victims and their descendents but upon those who trace their heritage to the perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders of these national crimes. Central to both trauma studies and Holocaust studies have been key concepts like transgenerational haunting (Abraham and Torok 1994), memory effects (Apel 2002), secondary witnessing (Apel 2002). Trauma and Holocaust studies have developed a sophisticated analysis of the pervasiveness of the psychic structure of trauma and its contiguous affects such as guilt, denial, shame etc. The psychic structure of national trauma, differently from the legal and political questions, is not limited to the victims. However, using these concepts also poses ethical risks and dilemmas that need to be addressed when expanding the insights of Holocaust and trauma studies to the aggressors and their descendents.
 
Sense memory in Charlotte Delbo's “Auschwitz and After”
Amira Bojadzija (amirab@yorku.ca), Social and Political Thought, York
 
Body as the primary site of suffering occupies an important place in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et Après (1961), in which physical pain, thirst, hunger and experience of cold are rendered in a particularly vivid manner as sense memory. Sensible is the arch-phenomenon upon which subjectivity is built. Merleau-Ponty writes that a being capable of sense-experience could have no other mode of knowing. I argue that Delbo's text exposes the incompatibility of the rationalist discourse of dignity and justice with the image of a naked, filthy subject, embodying pain. I suggest a new reading of Auschwitz et Après as a text that questions the hierarchy of the ordering of human experience, and the philosophical and cultural consequences that derive from it. 

Wednesday 31 May, 14:45-16:15, ACW 303

Canada and the New Imperialist Order

Session Organizer: Colin Mooers (cmooers@ryerson.ca), Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson

Canada, empire and propaganda: Media structures and source-journalist relationships in Canadian media coverage of the 2004 coup d'état in Haiti
Isabel MacDonald (isamacdonald@yahoo.com), Communication and Culture, York

In the months leading up to the coup d'état backed by the US, French and Canadian governments which overthrew the Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, demonstrations in Haiti against Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas government were covered extensively in the Canadian media, while much larger demonstrations calling for the Haitian government to finish its five-year term received no coverage in the mainstream media. This paper analyses this news coverage in terms of structural constraints on the commercial media, as well as source strategies and source-journalist dynamics. This pattern of coverage is consistent with the predictions of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's "propaganda model" theory of media performance, which hypothesizes that the commercial media is "filtered" by structural factors, namely corporate owners, advertisers, dominant ideology and the official sources that the media rely upon. A number of additional factors are discussed that contributed to the anti-Aristide groups' privileged access to the Canadian media.

Why be an imperialist? Canada's role in the global capitalist order
Greg Sharzer (gsharzer@yahoo.com), Communication and Culture, Ryerson

Canadian imperialism is a geo-political phenomenon, both part of, and articulated from, the broader imperialist agenda of the global north. This dual role contains two related tasks: 1) to create conditions for accumulation that benefit all imperial capital blocs, and 2) to create ideological justifications for imperialism, appropriate to Canada’s political & historical role as a middle power. Canada's imperial role must be understood as a specialization within the broader division of labour assigned to all imperialist powers, to reinforce the rule of capital across the globe.

Canada, globalization, and imperialism
Jerome Klassen (hhc@yorku.ca), Political Science, York

The Marxist tradition in Canadian political economy has been divided between those who see Canada as a dependency of the United States, and those who see Canada as an independent imperialist power. This presentation will address these issues in the context of the neoliberal restructuring of the Canadian state and the expansion of Canadian capital abroad. The goal of the presentation is to situate Canadian capital and the Canadian state in the context of the new forms of rivalry, interdependence, and uneven development in the world system.

The presentation will begin by critiquing the existing perspectives on Canadian dependency and imperialism. It will then consider the new debates within Marxism on the nature of imperialism today. These debates are divided between those who describe ultra-imperialism, super-imperialism, inter-imperial rivalry, and transnational capitalism. After summarizing these positions, the presentation will discuss their relevance for theorizing the Canadian state and Canadian capital in the present. It will discuss economic trends in the Canadian economy, Canadian multinational corporations and foreign direct investment, and Canadian foreign policy initiatives in Asia and the Caribbean.

Wednesday 31 May, 14:45-16:15, ACW 304

Towards a Theory of Indigenous Environmental Activism

Session Organizer: Donna Harrison, Sociology, York. harrison@yorku.ca.

Natural resource exploitation and indigenous activism in India.
Dip Kapoor (dip.kapoor@staff.mcgill.ca), International Development Education, McGill
 
Transnational corporations and corporatised-state interventions since the introduction of the IMF/World Bank inspired New Economic Policy (1991) are accentuating the process of natural resource exploitation - a process that continues to be met with movement activism by indigenous communities (Adivasis or original dwellers) being marginalized by these developments in India. Based on movement/popular sources and the author's association with Adivasis in Orissa since the early 1990s, this paper will (a) elaborate on recent trends in resource exploitation in this state (e.g. mining) and related implications for Adivasi well-being/access rights, and (b) discuss examples and prospects for Adivasi struggles for autonomous development, in lieu of the response of the corporate-state nexus to Adivasis "in the way of development".
 
Striking it poor? De Beers and the Mushkegowuk Cree
David Peerla (dpeerla@nan.on.ca), Nishnawbe Aski Nation Mining Coordinator
 
Diamond giant De Beers is developing Ontario's first diamond mine on James Bay in the traditional territory of the Mushkegowuk Cree. De Beers says the mine can help the Cree overcome poverty. The Cree worry development may ruin their way of life.  While others - De Beers, mining suppliers and both levels of government - may benefit from the mine, it seems likely that the Mushkegowuk Cree will benefit very little, if at all. Jobs will go to outsiders, local businesses will boom in the short-term, and spin-off industries will not likely come to James Bay. The Mushkegowuk will, however, be left with the environmental risks and a limited say on how the lands and resources will be developed. James Bay isn't South Africa, but this is a familiar story of a powerful foreign company with a tainted past in search of diamonds in a land far from the corridors of power.

Thursday 1 June, 8:30-10:00, VH1154

Sociology For Changing The World: Social Movements/Social Research – Part II (with CSAA)

Session Organizers: Caelie Frampton, Gary Kinsman, Andrew Thompson, Kate Tilleczek (ktilleczek@laurentian.ca), Sociology, Laurentian

This session features a discussion of the ways in which sociological knowledge can be (and is) produced by and for social movements. A point of entry into the session is the launch of the book Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (forthcoming 2006, Beck, Kinsman, Thompson & Tilleczek). This is a book dedicated to the life and contributions of George Smith (1935-1994) – gay liberation and AIDS activist and researcher.

For more information, visit: www.changingtheworld.tranzform.ca

Chair: Gary Kinsman, Laurentian

The Canadian Fair Trade movement: An insider's perspective
Ian Hussey, Canadian Fair Trade Network

Movement intellectuals and Imagination as method
Randolph Haluza-Deay, The King's University College

Agency and globalization
Maria Frances Cachon, Windsor

Do we need theory for changing the world?
Christian Sol, University of Amsterdam

The Praxis of sociologists: An ethnography of activist teaching and research
Deborah Brock, York.

Thursday 1 June, 9:00-10:30, ACW 004

Class Politics and Popular Struggle in Latin America (with CPSA) –

Part 1

Session Co-organizers: Susan Spronk (spronk@yorku.ca), Political Science, York and Jeffery R. Webber (jefferyrogerwebber@hotmail.com), Political Science, Toronto.

This panel is organized around the central question: “What form does class struggle take in today’s context?” We aim to explore the limits and possibilities of contemporary social movement struggles in the context of changing forms of class identity in Latin America, and how they intersect with other social movement identities such as race, ethnicity, and gender. The panels will include discussions of case studies from Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Colombia.

Chairs/Discussants: Susan Spronk (Political Science, York University) and Jeffery R. Webber (Political Science, University of Toronto)

The Cortiço movements in the city of Sao Paulo: Revival and Crisis

Charmain Levy, Développement international et sciences sociales, Université du Québec en Outaouais

We wish to understand what exogenous and endogenous factors influenced the evolution of the urban popular movements of Brazil at the end of the 1990s. The former include processes such as the political opening, structural reforms, and the presence and influence of other social movements. The latter include the internal organisation, functions of the social actor, the changes in discourse and strategy within the movements studied. At the end of the 1990s, the cortiço movements turned to more radical forms of action outside the institutional realm. We propose to answer the question: why did these urban movements undertake to revive their radical strategies at this particular time?

We Were Different Then: Indigenous Women in Rural Guatemala Developing Revolutionary Class Consciousness

Rachel O’Donnell, Political Science, York

This paper analyzes the creation of revolutionary class-consciousness among rural Guatemalan indigenous women and traces how specific women became major actors in the insurgency in the 1980s. As these women now attempt to come to terms with their years in the war, this research makes connections to developing and sustaining revolutionary identity, and looks at women’s war experiences as they have affected their current efforts to remain active in community development. This work also questions the possibilities for reviving such consciousness for future movements in the indigenous community in Guatemala, specifically among members of organized women’s groups.

The Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement in Argentina: Workers’ Self-Management and the Struggle Against Capital-Labour Relations and Social-Economic Crisis

Marcelo Vieta, Social and Political Thought, York

The Argentine worker-recovered enterprises movement (empresas recuperdas por sus trabajadores) is both a direct response to and a viable, yet still emerging, alternative beyond the country’s socio-economic crises and neoliberal enclosures of the past 30 years. To illustrate this, my paper first explores some of the key socio-economic conjunctures that have motivated the movement in Argentina. It then draws out some of the most common microeconomic and organizational successes and challenges faced by the movement. I conclude by appraising the future possibilities of the movement for social change in Argentina and its relation to comparable workers’ movements across Latin America.

Thursday 1 June, 9:00-10:30, ACW 303

The Global Justice Movement: Prospects and Problems

Panel 1 – Economic Racism/Casteism

Session Organizer and Chair: Regina Cochrane (r.cochrane@ucalgary.ca), Faculty of Communication and Culture, Calgary

Global-justice Movement – Colonial amnesia

Aziz Choudry (aziz@riseup.net), Concordia

Among many “global justice” networks there is widespread coinage of the terms "colonization" or "recolonization" to describe current manifestations of globalization. Yet in practice, the ongoing colonization and struggles of indigenous peoples for self-determination are frequently viewed as separate issues or overlooked entirely by NGOs and activists opposing neoliberal globalization and transnational corporate power in settler colonial states such as Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the USA and Australia. Struggles against neoliberalism and for indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination go hand in hand and must confront geohistorical and colonial realities. This paper draws primarily on struggles against neoliberal trade and investment agreements in Aotearoa/New Zealand and North America.

Comrade commodity: ‘Glocalizing’ anti-racist strategies to structural economic racism

Nadim Kara (nadim77@yorku.ca), Political Science, York

The globalization of capitalism has accelerated the fragmentation, dispersion and opacity of commodity supply chains. In response, the Global Justice Movement has tried to cast light into the shadows of the production process and reveal the structural racism and sexism embedded in global economic life. The eruption of campus-based ethical-consumption campaigns across North America has been one response by activists. This paper will critically explore the development of these 'global' campaigns to undermine the implicit racism and sexism inherent in capitalist globalization, and to politicize a generation of young people in the North.

Going global: The Dalit movement’s struggle for social justice and human rights

Jay Smith (jays@athabascau.ca), Political Science, Athabasca

This paper examines the Dalit (Untouchables) Movement’s entry into the Global Justice Movement, in particular its participation in transnational networks against casteism and corporate globalization at World Social Forum (WSF) venues in Asia, South America and Europe. The WSF has become an important space for both creating new and intensifying existing alliances and networks for the Dalits. This paper emphasizes the networking process of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) focussing on its involvement with the WSF starting in 2001. The paper also stresses the centrality of place as a means of understanding the dynamics of social movements within an Indian context, including the consequent decisions to “go global.”

Thursday 1 June, 9:00-10:30, ACW 106

Theorizing Labour - Part 1

Session Organizers: David Camfield (camfield@ms.umanitoba.ca), Labour Studies, Manitoba. Alan Sears (asears@ryerson.ca), Sociology, Ryerson

Care, labour and exploitation
Paul Leduc Browne (paul.leducbrowne@uqo.ca), Département de travail social et des sciences sociales, Université du Québec en Outaouais

This paper will reconsider labour, alienation and exploitation in the light of the burgeoning literature on care, understood as complex collective work, in which nature in the form of the human body is both the instrument and subject matter of human intellectual, emotional and physical activity. Far from being purely instrumental or strategic action, however, care is intrinsically communicative activity, the construction of relationships. Care is labour which coincides with the relationship in which it occurs, with the co-production of meanings and emotions by care 'givers' and 'recipients.' The extent to which direct 'caregivers' and 'recipients' actually do this depends, however, on the "public and private forms of power" (Bakker & Gill, 2003) that regulate, indeed structure, forms of social reproduction. The paper will explore these forms of power through a discussion of recent works in the feminist, Marxist and Maussian traditions on the intersections of the domestic, market and gift economies.

Hardt and Negri's theory of immaterial labour: A critique

David Camfield (camfield@ms.umanitoba.ca), Labour Studies, Manitoba

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theory of immaterial labour plays a key role in providing a socio-economic foundation for the philosophical and political elements of their thought. This paper provides a detailed critique of their theory of immaterial labour, particularly in its latest version in Multitude. The paper argues that the theory is profoundly flawed, and that immaterial labour cannot play the role Hardt and Negri assign it. The critique developed reminds us of the need for a different method of developing theory than that employed by Hardt and Negri, along with so many other contemporary writers.

Thursday 1 June, 9:00-10:30, ACW 304

Struggling for Recognition: Sex Work, Communities, Activism

Co-ordinator: Amber Dean (amber.dean@ualberta.ca), English and Film Studies, Alberta

What constitutes a “grievable” death? The unthinkable victimization of sex workers in Vancouver, BC

Amber Dean (amber.dean@ualberta.ca), English and Film Studies, Alberta

In Precarious Life Judith Butler asks us to consider: “what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” I take up her question in relation to the disappearances and/or violent murders of over 60 women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside. The victimization of these women is ‘unthinkable,’ I argue, on two levels: it is unthinkable in its horror and injustice, but also unthinkable as victimization to those who prefer to contextualize such violence as simply a “hazard of the trade.” In this paper, I explore how constitution of violence against sex workers as ‘unthinkable’ impedes recognition of the women involved as human subjects.

Restorative justice? Youth Menace’s “Victims, All of Us” and violence against sex workers in Canada

Shawna Ferris (ferrism@univmail.cis.mcmaster.ca), English and Cultural Studies, McMaster

This paper examines the ways in which the restorative justice project “Victims, All of Us” (a program initially broadcast in 2003 on Edmonton’s Youth Menace radio), simultaneously counters and reinforces traditional prejudices around and violence against urban sex workers. “Victims” features a series of monologues and moderated discussions by/with a group of girls who viciously assaulted a woman on an Edmonton street because they thought she was a prostitute. Even as “Victims” offers its otherwise disenfranchised participants a chance to air their grievances and to offer recompense for their crime, the program ultimately suggests that only the girls’ method of attack on the ‘institution’ of prostitution was wrong.

“The anatomy of a stroll”: Re-making (ready-made) spaces for prostitution in Edmonton, Alberta
Kara Granzow (kgranzow@ualberta.ca), Sociology, Alberta

An Edmonton Police Service webpage uses snapshots and maps to “prove” the presence of a stroll in Edmonton.  In mapping places of prostitution, the reader is provided with a sense of where prostitution happens but little sense of the map’s importance. What motivates this project?  What are its effects?  I postulate that mapping the places of/for prostitution is not harm-reduction or crime-prevention but an effort to bind or border violences that demand social outrage from those socially sanctioned.  This paper examines how, under the guise of crime-prevention, policing works within a colonial present-past to re-settle particular places in Canada.

Thursday 1 June, 10:45-12:15, ACW 004

The 4th Annual CAW-Sam Gindin Chair Roundtable:

New strategies, Old Strategies - What Can We Learn From Each

Other?  An Inter-generational Dialogue

Co-ordinators: Judy Rebick (jrebick@ryerson.ca), CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy, Ryerson; Mike Burke (mkburke@ryerson.ca), Politics, Ryerson

This session features a roundtable discussion of old and new strategies for promoting progressive social change.  Panellists include scholars/activists from different generations who discuss their experiences in effecting change and share their thoughts on ways of moving the struggle forward.  Emphasis is on the need to work across difference:  How can progressive groups and individuals work across political, cultural, and institutional differences in a creative, productive and democratic way?  

Panellists invite audience members to take an active part in the dialogue.

Panel:

- Grace-Edward Galabuzi is Assistant Professor at Ryerson in the Department of Politics and Public Administration. He is the author of a new book Canada's Economic Apartheid and a long-time anti-racist activist

- Sam Gindin is the Packer chair in Social Justice, Department of Political Science at York. Before his retirement, he was the Research Director of the Canadian Autoworkers for many years

- Dave Meslin (Mez) is a creative organizer and activist in Toronto who founded the Toronto Public Space Committee and City Idol, a populist new method of choosing candidates for city councillor.

- Kiké Roach is a civil rights lawyer and activist.  She has been active in both the anti-racist and feminist movements for many years and co-authored the book Politically Speaking.

- Sunera Thobani is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of British Columbia.  She is a nationally known feminist and the first woman of colour to become president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

Moderated and hosted by Judy Rebick, the Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson and publisher of rabble.ca

Thursday June 1, 10:45-12:15, ACW 304

Violent Ruptures: Family Fragmentation under Social Upheaval

Co-ordinators: Karin Doerr (kdoerr@alcor.concordia.ca), Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Modern Languages, Concordia; Aysan Sev'er, (sever@utsc.utoronto.ca), Sociology, Toronto

Session chair: Sima Aprahamian

A needed exile: Institutionalization and the risks of non-caring

Monique Lenoix (Monique.Lanoix@Dal.ca), Philosophy, Dalhousie

This paper explores the ways in which family members continue to care for loved ones once the latter become institutionalized. Institutionalization can create a rip in the fragment of the family structure and, although it may alleviate much stress, it implies that the caregiver must now negotiate the apparatus of the institution. The ways in which this negotiation happens are quite revelatory about care practices. Drawing from this analysis, I argue that the ideology of the family frames the ideal of care practices but that a market model makes this ideal impossible to reach, thus creating insurmountable tensions.

Normative weapons of family destruction: Dowry pressures in Indian

women’s family aspirations

Aysan Sev'er (sever@utsc.utoronto.ca), Sociology, Toronto

The history of dowry practices goes back thousands of years in India. The original considerations behind these practices were to protect women and their children from falling into total impoverishment, in case of the demise of their husbands. Most Indian scholars claim that, originally, dowries were small and women had say in their utilization. However, through numerous invasions, occupations and colonization India has endured, the normative structure and the social fabric of family roles, values and obligations have changed. Currently, the dowry is far removed from its original roots and has taken on a much more obligatory nature.

In this paper, after a short summary of the history of dowry practices, some of the negative consequences of the growing demands for dowry will be explored. The negative consequences include dowry tensions between women and their families of origin, dowry related tensions between women and their families of procreation, blatant male-child preferences, sex-ratio imbalances, dowry harassment and dowry murders.

The uprooted: Racial categorization and the violent government intervention into the bi-racial family space in colonial Vietnam 1939 - 1945

Christina E. Firpo (Christina.firpo@gmail.com), History, University of California

This paper will explore a history that is completely absent from the historiographies of Vietnam and post-colonial studies. During the Second World War, the French colonial government aggressively pursued the "white-looking" Eurasian children of single Vietnamese mothers and placed these children - at times against their mothers' will - into Eurasian-only orphanage institutions. In these institutions, these Eurasian children were "reeducated" as culturally French and then, as adults, reintegrated into white colonial society. By violently intervening into bi-racial families and eradicating Vietnamese mothers' maternal rights, the colonial government sought to manage the colony's racial order and thus maintain political dominance. In so doing, the government intentionally interrupted the reproduction of Vietnamese culture and, by extension, the Vietnamese nation. This paper asks the relatively small population of Eurasian children became the contest for racial categories and colonial loyalties.

Destruction of the Jewish family during the Holocaust

Karin Doerr (kdoerr@alcor.concordia.ca), Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Modern Languages, Concordia

An obvious element in the Nazi genocide was the destruction of the Jewish family. This paper will explore the systematic process that stipulated social death before physical annihilation. Two theoretical texts, one on an ethics of care and the other on feminist philosophy, provide the framework for this investigation that focuses on the gradual disappearance of human concern in the genocidal process.  For survivors in the aftermath, the issue was finding themselves without family, community and country when they most needed such support structures. Their incarceration, dehumanization, and witness to mass murder often gave rise to painful lifelong traumas. The paper concludes by pointing to the post-facto ethical questions regarding their very survival.

Thursday 1 June, 10:15-11:45, VH1154

(Neo-)Liberalism Versus Community (With CSAA)

The political economy of international development: Jeffrey Sachs meets CB Macpherson

Daniel Storms (dstorms@nvsd44.bc.ca), Simon Fraser

Mainstream models of international politics and political economy assume competition and hierarchy as normal functions of the international system. However, this assumption is based upon the acceptance of a market-based ideological worldview and conception of human nature that is antithetic to collectivism and community. The purpose of this paper is to apply CB Macpherson’s model of possessive individualism to the models of neo-liberal development. Failures of international development programmes are related to the contradiction of attempting to reconcile poverty reduction and economic development with the possessive individualist worldview.

Public broadcasters versus public values?

Patricia M. Williams (pwill@yorku.ca), York

This paper explores the strategies that the national public broadcasters in Canada, Britain, and the United States are utilizing to cope with increased political vulnerability, not only due to structural issues, such as funding tied to government approval, but also due to the fact that there has been an erosion in the values that public broadcasting systems are based upon. In the English-speaking countries, the Thatcher-Reagan ascendancy and market-oriented discourses of efficiency and consumer sovereignty versus community have redefined the public sphere. Public broadcasting is now clearly vulnerable to mass indifference and a withdrawal of state support.

Co-operation and conflict between firms, communities, new social movements, and the role of government versus cerro de San Pedro Case

José G. Vargas-Hernández (jgvh0811@yahoo.com), Instituto Technico de Cd. Guzman

This paper will analyze relationships of co-operation and conflict between a mining company (MSX), the communities of San Pedro, Soledad and San Luis, new social movements, and three levels of government. MSX began open-pit gold and silver mining operations, supported by government officials. The inhabitants of the communities, supported by environmental groups and NGOs, argue that the project will damage the environment, ecology and historic and cultural heritage of the region. This case reveals lack of sensitivity of foreign mining companies towards communities and the environment, and shows lack of negotiation between business, communities, new social movements and governments.

Democracy vs. neoliberalism is Kerala, India

Honor Brabazon (h.brabazon@utoronto.ca), York

While most research on neoliberal globalization and development focuses on the impact of globalization on development, this paper considers the impact of development on globalization. The paper uses a Marxist analysis with a Gramscian understanding of both hegemony and counter-hegemony. Focusing primarily on the case study of Kerala, India (including field research), and with reference and comparison to case studies of Porto Alegre and Chiapas, the paper suggests that communities around the world are using a particular form of participatory democratic development as a tool of resistance against the negative effects of globalization and, by extension, American hegemony.

Thursday 1 June, 10:45-12:15, ACW 303

The Global Justice Movement: Prospects and Problems

Panel 2 – Campaigns and Movement Building

Session Organizer and Chair: Regina Cochrane (r.cochrane@ucalgary.ca), Faculty of Communication and Culture, Calgary

Don’t you know that tears are not enough? Transnational campaigns, Canadian foreign aid and the politics of shame

Elizabeth Smythe (elizabeth.smythe@concordia.ab.ca), Concordia University College of Alberta

This paper examines the effectiveness of transnational advocacy campaigns through a case study of the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign and its impact in Canada. Launched at the World Social Forum in 2005 and targeted at the governments of the G8 countries, this campaign sought to change policies on aid, trade and debt via high profile advertising and events involving celebrities, concerts and heavy reliance on corporate sponsorship. The transnational campaign was linked to national campaigns in each of the countries. Despite its high profile the campaign failed to alter, in any major way, Canadian policies on foreign aid despite efforts to single Canada out and name and shame it. It thus helps understand the impact of such campaigns and their limits as a tool of change for social justice.

Dissent! in Scotland: A search for balance between autonomy and solidarity

Christian Scholl (c.scholl@uva.nl), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR)

Once we conceptualize citizenship as a set of practices constructed from below, the horizontal organizational logic that can be found in parts of the global justice movement (GJM) provides an innovative case. Citizenship is perceived here as an autonomous political practice that is not dependent on traditional institutional politics. Still, the organizational practice oscillates between the values of autonomy and solidarity, a tension that finds expression in the organizational structure of the GJM: the network. This paper will explore the practical struggles with this tension by analyzing the organizational processes of the Dissent! network against the G8 meeting in Scotland.

Movement building: Fostering trade union resistance under accelerated capitalism

Dave Bleakney (dbleakney@cupw-sttp.org), Canadian Union of Postal Workers

As the capitalist world rapidly changes and sows misery, traditional trade unions are spinning their wheels with hopefulness that "they won't be next". They petition corporate power cap in hand. Principles of grassroots social organizing for change have been replaced/ignored in a quest to "sign up" more members without questioning the nature of relations. There is a disproportional focus on sectoral bargaining with an absence of social solidarity. What principles of solidarity and practice could be adopted to change things? Much is to be learned from social movements and history that could reinvigorate and shift power to communities of human beings.

Thursday 1 June, 10:45-12:15, ACW 106

Theorizing Labour - Part 2

Session Organizers: David Camfield (camfield@ms.umanitoba.ca), Labour Studies, Manitoba. Alan Sears (asears@ryerson.ca), Sociology, Ryerson

Internationalism after communism: Russian labour and the new praxis of work

Norma Jo Baker (normajobaker@gmail.com)

The surprise implosion of Soviet communism in the late 20th century required a revaluation of theories of labour, the nature of work in modernity, and the relationships between agents and organisations in the global labour movement. The historically uneasy, fractious dealings between first- and second-world labour organisations underwent careful reconsideration, but the very language of the discussion was steeped in liberal triumphalism, outdated Cold War idioms, and was unable to keep pace with the fast-changing nature of work in the new Russia.

Through an examination of the political culture and history of work in Western Siberian oil communities, this paper addresses how local and global political and economic experiences impeded citizens’ efforts to participate in the creation of a democratic polity in post-Soviet life. The manner in which labour organisations East and West responded to the new imperatives of a liberal market and the global economy sheds light upon current forms of contemporary labour and the need for continued critical global engagement in evaluations of labour itself.

Feminization, gendering and worker militancies

Linda Briskin (lbriskin@yorku.ca), Social Science Division and School of Women's Studies, York

As a result of economic and political restructuring, globalization and regional integration through 'free' trade treaties, Canadian workers have faced deteriorating conditions of work, competitive wage bargaining across national boundaries, dismantling of social programs, decreases in the social wage and a discursive shift to radical individualism. In particular, the restructuring of the labour market from the heavily unionized manufacturing sector toward private and difficult-to-organize services, and the transformation of work from relatively-secure full-time employment to part-time, casual, temporary and often precarious employment has led to a relative decline in union density, a change in the demographics of union membership and a focus of worker struggle on resisting privatization, contracting-out and employer demands for concessions, and on protecting job security. Undoubtedly gender has been significant in and to these transformations. What is the emerging profile of women worker militancies? What conceptual, analytical and empirical tools help to interrogate this militancy?

The first part of the paper sketches out a theoretical framework for examining worker militancies. The second part points to the distinction between the feminization and gendering of militancy and explores the empirical evidence of feminization. Part Three considers the available statistical data on Canadian strikes from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada [HRSDC] and teases out a trend toward the feminization of labour militancy. Part Four elaborates the concept of gendering and offers evidence of gendering in relation to union, labour and worker militancy.

Globalization and labour movements in the Third World countries: Is social movement unionism a panacea?

M. Zia Rahman (zia_soc71@yahoo.com) and Tom Langford (langford@ucalgary.ca), Sociology, Calgary

This paper is an attempt to evaluate the efficacy and the relevance of SMU in the context of Third World countries like Bangladesh. It argues that the vigorous new kind of labour movement envisaged by the proponents of SMU is unlikely to emerge in countries like Bangladesh. Indeed, the labour movements in Bangladesh and in many other Third World countries are at an impasse and stagnant in relation to the historical development of the state, class and social institutions. A reconstructed model of militant Marxist unionism offers greater promise for the renewal of Third World labour movements than SMU.

Thursday 1 June, 13:00-14:30, ACW 303

The Global Justice Movement: Prospects and Problems

Panel 3 – Theoretical Interventions

Session Organizer and Chair: Regina Cochrane (r.cochrane@ucalgary.ca), Faculty of Communication and Culture, Calgary

The World Social Forum: Challenging empires?

Janet Conway (jconway@ryerson.ca), Ryerson, Politics and Public Administration

When critics accuse the WSF as being a "Woodstock" for the left or, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez observed, "in danger of becoming simply a folkloric event", there are particular assumptions of the nature of power and change at work. What is the nature of (and the limits of) the WSF's power? What contribution is it making to generating resistance and alternatives to neoliberalism and to the building of other possible worlds? Grounded in a long-term research project on the WSF, this paper will explore these questions and the political implications of the criticisms with particular reference to the 2006 edition of the poly-centric WSF held in Caracas.

Horizontalism: Its theoretical meanings and practical discrepancies

Nina Marolt (N.Marolt@sussex.ac.uk), University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

This paper explores the concept of horizontal organization that lately tends to represent one of the prevailing delineating principles of the Global Justice Movement (GJM). The self-understanding underlying this concept, I will argue, fails to provide a satisfactory analytical framework that realistically reflects organizational reality within the GJM. In order to highlight some of the main aspects of the horizontalism debate, this paper will address the issues of the theoretical meaning of horizontalism, the role it plays in the GJM today and its relation to the practical manifestations of the GJM with a focus on organizational discrepancies and shortcomings.

Hybridization versus differentialisms: Through a networking feminist politics

Barbara Biglia (bbiglia@uoc.edu), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Most scholars have considered feminism to be one of the more successful New Social Movements. Nevertheless, like many movements in the larger Global Justice Movement, its central goal of transforming society has been narrowed through processes like the following: assuming a political correctness around 'gender issues', the co-optation and institutionalization of some feminist theorists, and the fragmentation resulting from the movement's attempt to respect differences. The last element is a key issue that defines the challenge for a new generation of feminist activists seeking to rework feminist politics. Starting from different activist experiences, I will argue that recognizing and assuming our hybridity and developing networking are important elements in redefining a collective feminist praxis.

Lunch, 12:15-13:00

Thursday 1 June, 13:00-14:30, ACW 004

Subversion in the Footsteps of Corporate Hegemony? The Case of the Blackspot Sneaker Anticorporation

Chair: Ian Hussey (ihussey@uvic.ca), Sociology, Victoria

As an example of a current attempt to subvert hegemonic political economy in the interests of informing ethical economic practices, the Blackspot Sneaker Anticorporation campaign highlights the complexities which the social movements face by virtue of their engagement with the very discourses and practices they aim to disrupt. These complexities can be elucidated through the conceptual distinction between counter- and anti-hegemonic actions. Beginning with a textual analysis of a document integral to the public practices of the Blackspot Sneaker Anticorporation, this paper interrogates the discursive manifestation of the strategies and identities employed by their campaign. The shift in the relations of production articulated by the discursive claims of the campaign represents a challenge to the current constellation of corporate capitalism; however, it does not constitute anti-hegemonic agency. In the light of these observations, we explore the possibilities for enacting "ethical" amelioration at the local sites of the relations of production through the subversion of existing structures attuned to the hegemonic interests of political economy.

Panellists: Beth Collins (bcollins@uvic.ca), Ian Hussey (ihussey@uvic.ca), Dan Lett (dplett@uvic.ca), and Mark Vardy (mcv@uvic.ca)

Discussant: Bob Hanke (bhanke@yorku.ca), Communication Studies, York

Thursday 1 June, 14:45-17:30, ACW 004

Keynote address:

SSS is pleased to announce that Dr. William K. Carroll will be our 2006 keynote speaker. Dr. Carroll’s speech is entitled 'Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony'

Bill Carroll is a critical sociologist with research interests in the areas of social movements and social change, the political economy of corporate capitalism, and critical social theory and method. A professor at the University of Victoria, where he teaches in Sociology and in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought, his current projects include a longitudinal investigation of networks of global corporate power and a study of democratic media reform as an emergent social movement (forthcoming as Remaking Media [Routledge, 2006], co-authored with Bob Hackett). Among Dr. Carroll’s recent publications are Challenges and Perils: Social Democracy in Neo-Liberal Times (Fernwood, 2005, co-edited with Bob Ratner) and Critical Strategies for Social Research (CSPI, 2004). He has won the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association’s John Porter Prize twice: in 1988 for Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism (UBC Press, 1986) and in 2005 for Corporate Power in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2004). His Organizing Dissent (Garamond Press), published in 1992 and in a revised edition in 1997, was a widely read text. He has held visiting fellowships and appointments at the University of Amsterdam, Griffith University, Kanazawa State University and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. During the summer of 2003 he was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Carroll is a Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and a member of Sociologists Without Borders. Bill Carroll is a long-standing and frequent contributor to the Society for Socialist Studies.

Thursday 1 June, 19:00. 401 Richmond Building, suite 444

(near corner of Richmond and Spadina)

Sociology for Changing the World Book Launch Event

Refreshments & drinks, readings by book contributors, and a tribute to the life of George Smith. Hosted by Fernwood Publishing, Upping the Anti: A Journal for Theory and Action, and Organization of Autonomous Telecommunications.

Friday 2 June, 9:00-10:30, break, 10:45-12:15, ACW 106

Epistemologies/Pedagogies of Struggle

Session Organizer: Chris Borst (chris.borst@utoronto.ca), Philosophy,Toronto.

Persuasion, Dissonance, and Social Change: When Social Activism Meets Social Psychology

Adam Waldie (awaldie@yorku.ca), Political Science, York

Social psychology can be used to improve the efficacy of social activists’ attempts at changing people’s attitudes and behaviour so that these better conform to the ideals of ‘left’ social justice. Based on conclusions from social psychology research, a two-step process will be advocated, focusing first on attitude change and then on behavioural change. First, several ways to enhance the persuasiveness of activists attempting to change people’s attitudes are discussed. Second, breeding dissonance will be advocated as an effective strategy to bring people’s behaviour in line with their new attitudes. In the end, the aim of this paper is two-fold. Primarily, it will seek to show some of the ways in which social psychology can be used to create a more effective activism. The secondary goal is to inspire social activists to further investigate and adopt proven social psychology strategies.

Theorizing silence and power: Towards a pedagogy of negotiation

Linda Briskin (lbriskin@yorku.ca), Social Science and Women’s Studies, York

In Canadian universities, classroom dynamics around speaking and silence have become sites of difficult, often politicized, conflict. Part One of this paper explores classroom silence by combining two often-counterposed ways of understanding power: on the one hand, the macro-structural relations of power, and, on the other, the micro-realities of classroom power. Part Two examines the implications for pedagogical practice. In contrast to those who adopt the metaphor of dialogue as key to teaching in the multi-racial and multi-cultural classroom, I explore the conceptual and practical potential of negotiation. The practice of negotiation troubles the notion of dialogue and 'sharing' power, recognizes the complexities of power, and problematizes a focus on teaching 'tolerance'.

Social science and social struggle: Understanding the necessary confluence of scholarship and political commitment

Michael Clow (mclow@spectre.stthomasu.ca), Sociology, St. Thomas

Is there really an inherent contradiction between the role of social scientist and political partisan, one we all court to the detriment of our integrity? I argue such a perspective makes clear and legitimates the role of political commitment in the generation of scientific knowledge. Rival social scientific explanations arise from different political orientations to society itself, but such an origin is necessary. The question is how to deal with this reality, without letting social science simply dissolve into ideology, scientific debate into mere polemics. This paper explains the Edinburgh position and its implication and poses some thoughts for socialist scholarship and debate.

Pedagogies of civic participation: Liberal 'tradition' and the creation of a new democratic ethic in the former Soviet Union

Norma Jo Baker (normajobaker@gmail.com

Soviet pedagogy was predicated upon inculcating a rigid body of knowledge into the minds of its subjects so as to create a new cohort of experts, a cohort which was to be swallowed up into the monolithic state economy and society. The post-secondary pedagogical structure has been profoundly slow to respond to changing conditions in the successor states. However, there have been some notable examples of reform based upon a liberal arts model of education. I will discuss how this model is predicated upon skills necessary to create a democratic citizenry.

This paper, based upon seven years of experience as a practitioner in post-secondary educational reform projects throughout the former Soviet Union, discusses what happens when the totalitarian pedagogy of the former Soviet states is challenged by a liberal arts model of education, and what this can tell us about the unrealised potential of liberal arts in Canada as well as in a wider global setting.

Prefigurative politics and the anti-globalization movement

Tracy Supruniuk (tracys@yorku.ca), York

For many people in North America, recent mass protests have provided an introduction to the practice of prefigurative politics. First coined by Brienes (1989), prefigurative politics marks the ways in which members of a movement attempt to create alternative ways of organizing, acting and relating to each other that is not only critical of capitalist relations but is in many ways an actual concrete enactment of a different way of living. Building upon Benjamin’s theorizing of “shock” and Brecht’s attempts to “alienate the familiar”, this paper will investigate the pedagogical possibilities found within prefigurative politics.

Exploring feminist approaches to popular/adult education

Christine McKenzie (c-mckenzie@sympatico.ca), OISE, Toronto

Pedagogies coming out of the feminist consciousness-raising movement can inform popular education and continue to articulate a pedagogy that addresses critiques of the ways in which popular education “impedes women from gaining self-confidence and a personal identity, hindering the development of collective work, such as the building and strengthening of women’s movements” (Rosero, 1993: 78).

Feminist popular education emerged from South and Central American critiques of popular education processes and has grow as a practice over the last 20 years (Nadeau, 1996). While consciousness-raising pedagogies grew and fuelled social movements in North America in the 1960s, this practice, and the second wave of the women’s movement, waned in the 1970s (Ferree, 2000). However, the legacy of CR provides learning’s important to further articulating feminist popular education.

This paper articulates how consciousness-raising can inform further development of feminist popular education praxis in foregrounding feelings as a way of knowing, rethinking how women socially locate themselves within capitalist patriarchy and particularly in approaches to working across differences in coalition work.

Friday 2 June, 13:00-14:30, ACW 004

Marxism, Imperialism and Culture

Session Organizer: Scott Forsyth (sforsyth@yorku.ca), Film and Political Science, York.

Global Hollywood, humanism, and Canadian regionalism

John McCullough (johnmccu@yorku.ca), Film, York

One of the more interesting insights into globalization and cultural production is Doreen Massey’s much-referenced observation that, in globalization, the local is often emphasised and not, as predicted, effaced by global culture. In globalization, the local (including the Canadian “regions”) can become a sign of authenticity, which can trade internationally as regional exotica. In the context of “runaway productions” motivated by the political economy of Global Hollywood, Canadian television production, which has previously tended to mask its various regional identities in order to serve as a generic US stand-in, now routinely produces internationally popular television which revels in its regionalism.

Regional cultural productions are interesting because they typically play to what is perceived to be common and universal beliefs about humans, including an anthropo-centric appreciation of the trials and tribulations, and quirkiness, of “the locals”. In the period of globalization, in which ideas about techno-culture and post-humanism emerge as a response to the information age’s instrumentalization and degradation of human experience, it is useful to recognize the articulation of humanist ideology in culture as a form of de-politicization of popular entertainment. This paper will discuss Canadian television shows (incl. Gullages, Trailer Park Boys, Moccasin Flats, and Corner Gas) as representative of regional television production which uses the local as “capital” in Global Hollywood.

American Empire and internationalizing ideological state communication and cultural apparatuses

Tanner Mirlees, Communication and Culture, York

For the past fifteen years or so, there has been a gradual paradigm shift in communication and media studies away from critical and anti-capitalist discourses of “American cultural imperialism” toward more celebratory and neo-liberal considerations of “cultural globalization.” Theorists of globalization often articulate a stateless, post-national, and post-imperial world constituted by chaotic and de-centered scapes and cultural flows that facilitate hybridized identifications and global imagined communities (Tomlinson 1991; Appadurai 1996). As of late, however, popular belief in the imagined worlds described by cultural globalization theory is beginning to wane and accounts of global capitalist—and specifically American—imperialism are being widely produced and circulated.

Calls for a critical response to cultural globalization theory (Curran 2002) and a “critical cultural imperialism thesis that take on board the essentially unequal relations that underpin the global capitalist system”(Harindranath 2003: 167) have accompanied the imperial turn. This paper goes beyond theories of globalization and contributes to recent attempts refurbish an American cultural imperialism thesis with a neo-Marxist account of the imperial capitalist state, its relative autonomy to communication and cultural capital, and its internationalizing internal and external ideological ‘communication’ and ‘cultural’ apparatuses. The imperial state not only works on behalf of the American communication and cultural industries by internationalizing and securing their global economic dominance, but also, recruits these industries into global culture wars on behalf of its foreign policy.

Communist culture and the triumph of American imperialism: The contradictions of Cuban cinema

Scott Forsyth (sforsyth@yorku.ca), Departments of Film and Political Science, York

From the revolution onwards, Cuban cinema developed a critical and popular voice to raise difficult issues about Cuban socialism and the revolutionary process. The problems of bureaucratization and democracy, underdevelopment and daily life, gender and sexual politics, exile and happiness are some of the most prominent of these critical themes. Cuban cinema has always developed within and against the power of American cultural imperialism, exacerbated in recent years by the restoration of capitalism in the Communist bloc and the impact of capitalist globalization. This discussion will consider the cultural and political contradictions in socialist development at this point in history. Beginning with long-standing debates within the socialist and Marxist tradition on bureaucracy, democracy and culture and continuing with contemporaneous debates within international communism and the Cuban revolution. Themes such as the critique of bureaucracy, the impact of globalized film production, the nature of socialist development will be illustrated with discussion of Cuban films including Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), Strawberry and Chocolate (1994), Guantanamara (1995), The Waiting List (2000), So Far Away (2003).

Friday 2 June, 13:00-14:30, ACW 106

Roundtable on Social and Economic Justice and "Natural" Disasters:  The Case of Katrina

Session Chair:  Patrice LeClerc (pleclerc@stlawu.edu), Sociology, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, USA

This Round Table will present, discuss and debate the social and political aspects of 2005's Hurricane Katrina.  In particular, corporate and state economic interests were continuously prioritized over the ecological and social necessities of the region and its communities. The result was a distribution of environmental risk downward to a poor and minority community. Attention will be paid to race, class, gender outcomes of the hurricane, as well as the visual presentations via the United States media.  Round-table members will present information, debate the issues, and engage the audience in assessment.

Panellists: Robert Torres (rtorres@stlawu.edu), Kenneth Gould 

(kgould@stlawlu.edu), Karen Dillon O'Neil (koneil@stlawu.edu)

Friday 2 June, 13:00-14:30, ACW 303

From 'Dependency' to 'Globalization': Canadian Political Economy Across the Generations

Chair: Leo Panitch (lpanitch@yorku.ca), Canada Research Chair, Political Science, York

Panelists: Aidan Conway, Political Science, York; John Conway, Sociology, Regina; Chris Roberts, Labour Studies, York; Cy Gonick, Economics, Manitoba

While the new Canadian political economy of 1970s was preoccupied with the question of Canadian 'dependency', more recently a preoccupation with 'globalization' and even 'progressive competitiveness' has come to the fore. How exactly has Canadian political economy adapted, or failed to adapt, to the new realities and political questions confronting political economy and the left in Canada and around the world? Panelists from "across the generations" will discuss the thesis that a legacy of left nationalism has prepared the ground for advocacy of 'progressive competitiveness' in the current conjuncture.

Friday 2 June, 14:45-17:00, ACW 106

Society for Socialist Studies: Annual General Meeting

1. Call to order 2:45 PM

2. Approve agenda

3. Minutes of 2005 AGM (London).

3.1 Business arising

4. Socialist Register

5. Reports

5.1 Financial Report, Treasurer

5.2 SSS Journal, Editor

5.3 President’s report (including National Office)

5.4 Other

6. Congress planning for 2007 (Saskatoon)

6.1 Local Co-ordinator

6.2 Program Committee

6.3 Theme(s)

6.4 Travel Awards

7. Delegations (4:15 approx.)

7.1 CFHSS

7.2 SSS Rep. to Federation

8. Election of Officers

9. Any other business

10. Adjourn

Friday 2 June, 17:00-19:00

York University President’s reception

Saturday 3 June, 9:00-10:30, ACW 004

Food Governance and Regulation: Tensions, Analyses, and Critiques (With CASC)

Session Coordinators: Debbie Dergousoff and Jessica Duncan, Sociology, Victoria

Red gods in the sportsman’s Eden: Conservation and the ordering of land in Northern British Columbia, 1905-1918

Jonathan Peyton, History, Victoria

In 1905, A. Bryan Williams, Provincial Game Warden, began a project of collecting and disseminating information about resource use and conservation in the province of BC. James Teit, an ethnographer, advocate, and big game hunting guide and Williams carried on a rich correspondence between 1905 and 1918, exchanging information and opinions on many topics pertaining to Williams’ task. While Teit played an important adversarial role in maintaining existing Indigenous food economies, Williams’ ‘commonsense’ view attempted to impose a universal liberal world view on Indigenous peoples. This paper argues that Williams and game law were part of a greater imperial project that sought to appropriate ‘traditional’ land and resources while imposing what Ian McKay has called a ‘liberal order’ onto the landscape of British Columbia.

Organic farming: An institutional ethnography

Katie Wagner, Sociology, Victoria

Institutional ethnography is the methodological foundation of Dorothy Smith’s feminist sociology for people. For the institutional ethnographer, ordinary daily activity becomes the site for investigation of social organization. In this paper small scale organic farmers who are committed to sustainable, socially and ecologically just agriculture, offer a critical standpoint from which accounts of daily activity are used to explicate extra-local coordination of everyday life. My inquiry draws on data from open-ended interviews with farmers and organic certification officers to expand on previous feminist qualitative research on this topic. From these accounts I begin to address how it is that the certification institution that developed out of organic farming initiatives, actually enters into and reconstitutes the everyday work of people.

Great eggspectations: The Saltspring Island egg wars

Jessica Duncan, Sociology, Victoria

In May 2005, after almost thirty years of being disregarded, a 1978 regulation restricting the sale of uninspected eggs beyond the farm gate was suddenly enforced at the Saturday morning Farmers' Market on Saltspring Island (BC). This paper contextualizes egg inspection in BC and the so-called "egg wars" of Saltspring Island. Drawing on interviews I conducted with small-scale egg producers on Saltspring Island, I will explore how the work of these producers is mediated by the current regulatory system. The interviews will also inform a discussion of the merits and limitations of this system. Lastly, I will discuss how these farmers and the community have actively resisted this hegemonic framework.

The paradox of fair trade: Regulatory capitalism, social agency, and political competence

Debbie Dergousoff, Sociology, Victoria

The paradoxical nature of fair trade coffee’s challenge to mainstream trade relations raises two important questions: what forms of power does fair trade coffee challenge? and, what forms does it sustain? Through an examination of the connections that standardized (certified) fair trade coffee shares with the mainstream coffee industry and international trade practices in general, we can begin to understand how forms of power such as regulatory capitalism and international law are embedded and active in the concept and realization of standardized fair trade. I argue that while a standardized vision for fair trade works to make particular forms of social agency possible, standardizing practices limit the forms of political competency and social agency that can be made available within a system of fair trade.

Saturday 3 June, 9:00-10:30, break, 10:45-12:15, ACW 106

Marxism and Anti-Racism: Extending the Dialogue (With the CPSA)

Session Organizer: Abigail B. Bakan (bakana@post.queensu.ca), Political Studies, Queen’s

Session description: The relationship between Marxism and critical race theory has commonly been one of tension, where the former is seen to emphasize class relations to the exclusion of other forms of oppression and domination; and the latter is seen to minimize the role of political economy and the state in the construction of racist hegemony. This round table panel, suggested as a double session, will combine scholars and activists who have attempted to constructively explain and/or bridge this gap.

Central to the discussion are questions such as: What is the relationship between capitalism and racism? Can critical race theory effectively explain the role of class? Can Marxist theory effectively explain the pervasiveness of racism? In the current period of imperialist war and occupation, and post-September 11 racial profiling, are there grounds for a greater intersection between Marxist and anti-racist theorizing?

Chair: Yasmeen Abu-Laban (Alberta)

Speakers: Abbie Bakan (Queen’s); Grace-Edward Galabuzi (Ryerson); Ena Dua (York); Chantal Sundaram (CUPE); Sedef Arat-Koc (Ryerson); Sharene Razack (OISE, University of Toronto); Sheila Wilmot (independent writer); Radhika Desai (Victoria).

Saturday 3 June, 9:00-10:30, ACW 303

History of Canadian Left and Labour Participation in Municipal Politics

Session Organizer: David Orenstein (david.orenstein@utoronto.ca

Sources in labour and left municipal politics in Ontario

David Orenstein (david.orenstein@utoronto.ca), Toronto District School Board

For over a century the left - whether as Labour Councils, local Labour Parties, the Communist Party/LPP, or the CCF/NDP - has participated in municipal politics in Ontario, often with great success. Through primary archival sources, both print and manuscript, this paper looks into the daily reality of local progressive involvement from the London Labour Party's election platform to Toronto LPP politicians campaigning for a promised local pool.

The City of Vancouver’s “Ethical Purchasing Policy and Supplier Code of Conduct”: An institutional ethnographic case study

Ian Hussey (ihussey@uvic.ca), Victoria; Canadian Fair Trade Network (CFTN www.fairtradenetwork.ca)

On February 17, 2005, the City of Vancouver formally adopted an Ethical Purchasing Policy and Supplier Code of Conduct for apparel and agricultural goods being purchased by the City. This case study examines (a) how community organization influencing municipal policy-making engaged successfully with the municipal political process; and (b) the implementation processes and problems following the support of the Policy and the Code by City Council. The aim of this research is to develop practical knowledge for community organizations active or proposing to become active in municipal politics to help them to avoid the dilemma that formal processes of policy-change are not always followed by corresponding implementation.

Saturday June 3, 10:45-12:15, ACW 004

Exploring Experiences of Fair Trade: Access, Marginalization, and Empowerment (With CASC)

Chair: Ian Hussey (ianhussey@fairtradenetwork.ca), Canadian Fair Trade Network (CFTN www.fairtradenetwork.ca)

Rationing in the Fair Trade coffee market:  Who enters and how?

Jeremy Weber (weberjg1@juniata.edu), MEDA Consulting Group – Peru

This paper addresses three questions: What are the implicit and explicit costs which producers’ organizations incur to enter the current Fair Trade coffee market, including obtaining the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) certification and an organic certification?  How significant are these barriers for marginalized producers envisioned as the beneficiaries of the Fair Trade coffee system?  Finally, given the answers to the first two questions, what type of producers are most likely to enter the current Fair Trade coffee system and under what circumstances? 

To answer these questions this paper examines the experiences of seven coffee organizations established between 1998 and 2002 in the department of San Martín, Perú.  The experiences of this group range from one organization which has directly exported over 276,000 kg of Fair Trade organic coffee since 2004 to another association which has failed to begin the FLO or organic certification processes.

Is fair trade fair for women?

Caroline Langis (weberjg1@juniata.edu), Laval

This presentation intends to bring to light fair trade impacts on gender relations in developing countries. By one case study, it analyses the relation between a federation of Peruvian coffee cooperatives and the actors related to fair trade, in order to evaluate their influence on women’s participation in the cooperative. First, we describe the typical exclusion of women in the agricultural cooperative sector in developing countries. Then, we scrutinize non discrimination based on sex standard of the Fair Trade Labelling Organization (FLO), along with the concrete implementation of this demand. Lastly, this communication tries to determine that fair trade can be considered as a tool for empowerment, if seen from a woman’s point of view.

Reinterpreting the tool of domination

Daniel E. Martinez (dmartine@ucalgary.ca), Calgary

The Committee Campesino del Altiplano (CCDA) is a peasant-Mayan political organization in the Guatemalan highlands that has a small fair trade solidarity market in Canada. As an organization that at one time had links to a Guatemalan guerrilla group, they re-interpreted coffee from a liberal tool that ‘modernized’ peasant land and labour relations for more than a century to a counter-hegemonic weapon. In this presentation I will explore how the organization’s re-interpretation of coffee has affected their view and implementation of fair trade and solidarity.

Saturday 3 June, 10:45-12:15, ACW 304

The Growing Privatization and Commodification of Knowledge

Session Organizer: Claire Polster (claire.polster@uregina.ca), Sociology and Social Studies, Regina

Implications of pharmaceutical industry funding of clinical research
Joel Lexchin (jlexchin@yorku.ca or joel.lexchin@utoronto.ca), School of Health Policy and Management, York

The pharmaceutical industry is funding an ever increasing percent of
clinical research. This paper uses quantitative reports to explore the
influence of that funding in five dimensions: the direction of medical
research, sharing of information, stopping clinical trials, publication of
research results and finally the outcome of clinical research. The
conclusion is that there are serious problems in all five areas associated
with industry funding. Proposals have been made to reform the process and
also to completely sever the relationship between investigators and industry.

Space 1026: Art studio, community space, decommodifying process
Jesse Goldstein (Jesse@space1026.com), Political Science, York, Space1026 (artist-member)

At Space1026, a collective artists’ studio and gallery in Philadelphia, PA,
conversations about how to exist as an art space in a world of corporate sponsorship raise important issues regarding class, artistic practice, and what “do-it-yourself” culture means to the various artists involved. Space1026 offers an encouraging example of how dedicated people can maintain a vibrant decommodified space within a culture poised to commodify anything that even remotely resembles “cool”. It demonstrates the very real possibility of regaining the lived experience and material support of a shared commons, along with the community ties that result from shared work.

The privatization and commodification of academic knowledge in Canada
Claire Polster (claire.polster@uregina.ca), Sociology and Social Studies, Regina

This paper outlines the nature and implications of the growing privatization and commodification of knowledge in Canadian universities. In particular, it examines how these processes are contributing to both the erosion of the commons of knowledge and the further privatization of our public universities themselves. The paper also proposes a radical strategy to redress the harms posed by the privatization of academic knowledge and addresses why more accomodationist strategies are ineffective if not counterproductive.

Lunch

Saturday 3 June, 13:00-14:30, ACW 303

The Political Economy of Canadian Capital in a Global Age

Session Organizer: Murray Cooke (murray.cooke@sympatico.ca), Political Science, York.

Canadian mining companies and the global south

Grahame Russell (info@rightsaction.org), Rights Action

Based on 20 years of global justice and human rights work in Mexico and Central America, Grahame Russell will make a short presentation on the negative impacts of the operations of North American mining companies in Central America, in the context of an unjust global economic order and endemic global impunity.  Grahame will leave considerable time for questions and comment, hoping that the presentation will lead to a wide range debate and discussion.

Independent canadian finance capital: ownership links among the largest corporations in canada
Bill Burgess (billburgess@shaw.ca), Kwantlen University College

Left-nationalists often hold that Canadian capital is too strongly integrated with US capital and too weakly integrated across economic sectors to project distinctively Canadian imperialist interests. This paper demonstrates that there are few ownership linkages between large Canadian and foreign corporations and that many large Canadian financial and industrial corporations are closely linked through ownership.

'Fabricated materials, inedible': A reconsideration of the political economy of Canadian trade – a follow-up

Paul Kellogg (paul.kellogg@utoronto.ca), Independent Researcher

With the soaring value of Canadian energy exports, a trade profile has re-emerged which seems to reveal Canada as unusually dependent on the export trade in general, and the export of raw materials in particular. When contrasted with an import history weighted towards the import of finished manufactured goods, a picture of Canada has traditionally been painted of an economy that does not fit the profile of most advanced capitalist economies. This paper will empirically re-examine the data on Canada's import and export trade profile, question some common assumptions about what constitutes 'raw material' exports, and argue that Canada's trade profile is perfectly compatible with that of an advanced capitalist (and imperialist) economy.

What accumulation regime? The financialization of Canadian capitalism
Eric Pineault, (pineault.eric@uqam.ca), Sociology, Université du Québec à Montréal

What is the nature and social dynamics of the current accumulation regime in Canada? The paper, drawing critically on analysis developed by regulationist political economy and cultural economy, develops an ideal-type of a financialized accumulation regime. The ideal-type highlights the institutional structure and basic social relations that form such a regime. This ideal-type is then used as an interpretative framework to assess the current trajectory of Canadian capitalism. Both qualitative sociohistorical and quantitative macro-economic data are mobilized in this assessment. The paper concludes with an interpretation of the current income trust bubble as an exemplary manifestation of such a regime's dynamics.

Saturday 3 June, 13:00-14:30, ACW 106

Whiteness: Canadian and Transnational Perspectives - Part 1

Session Organizer: Sedef Arat-Koc (sarat_koc@trentu.ca), Women's Studies Program, Trent

Re-affirming whiteness at the frontiers of the nation

Karine Côté-Boucher (karinecb@yorku.ca), Sociology, York

This paper analyses the ways in which the discursive apparatus built around the putative notion of Canada’s porous borders and the subsequent building of a ‘zone of confidence’ in North America, feed upon deeper gendered and classist anxieties about alterity and identity, crossed by important orientalist reminiscences. It will be argued that this zone of confidence not only produces a secular and insecure subject, whose whiteness draws on his capacity to embody the neoliberal Homo economicus, but that it also relies on an essential barbarian other: the Muslim male who threatens to penetrate ‘the West’. The paper will look at the subsequent violent targeting and exclusion of Muslim men through a variety of administrative and legal measures such as smart borders or security certificates. Therefore, it will suggest that the constitution of the civilizational imagined community is never a secure project but an ambiguous and uncertain one, in which whiteness is constantly re-affirmed and re-enacted through the use of state violence.

Imperial longings, multicultural belongings: The impact of the 'war on terror' on Canadian national identity

Sunera Thobani (sth@interchange.ubc.ca), Women’s Studies, UBC

A public anti-Islamic sentiment erupted in Canada after the 9/11 attacks, as was the case in the United States and Europe. Muslims (and those who 'look' like Muslims) were viewed with suspicion and hostility, and Muslim organizations (as well as those of non-Muslim people of colour) reported increased attacks on their communities. Popularly defining these as a 'backlash', the media became a critical site for the articulation of a security-conscious anti-Islamic sentiment, severely trying Canada's image as committed to the principles of multiculturalism and diversity.

Examining print media reporting of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing 'war on terrorism', this paper argues that the 'war' has led to a rigorous re-assertion of the essential 'whiteness' of the Canadian nation-state. As the state swiftly enacted anti-terrorism measures targeting Muslims, and 'ordinary' Canadians participated in the closing down of public spaces for Muslims, the nation was being (re)constituted as part of the 'west', and hence as imperiled by the 'non-western' Muslim Other.

Whiteness and Anti-Colonial Solidarities

Krista R. Johnston (kristarj@yorku.ca), Women’s Studies, York

Drawing on research amongst anti-colonial activists in the city of Toronto, this paper inquires into the role of whiteness and the politics of ‘solidarity’ amongst Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and white settlers. Employing a group interview methodology initiated through a (De)colonizing Autobiography activity (Haig-Brown 2002), this project theorizes land and belonging with a focus on subjectivity. Drawing on some of the existing literature on whiteness (especially Frankenberg 1993 and Fine et al 1997) this paper will reflect on the role of whiteness in these complex solidarities and draw on research results to speculate about the possibilities of theorizing whiteness alongside anti-colonialism.

Saturday June 3, 13:00-14:30, ACW 304

“Security” against the Struggle: No Knowledge, No Festival

Session Organizer: Pamela Leach (pleach@cmu.ca), Political Studies, Canadian Mennonite University

Toward a Canada “secure” from social movements: Canadian anti-terrorism legislation and democracy

Honor Brabazon (h.brabazon@utoronto.ca), York

An often-forgotten element of state legislation in response to international security threats is its impact on domestic social movements. This paper will compare the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970 and the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 in the context of two growing movements they seem, through their unnecessary and disproportionately broad measures, to ultimately restrict: the Québec separatist movement and the anti-globalization movement. This comparison will suggest that an underlying unofficial goal of the anti-terrorist security measures is the criminalization of growing dissent which had come to threaten dominant interests.

National security or state-terror? The war against the internal enemy in the context of economic liberalization

Jasmin Hristov (jasminhr@yorku.ca), York

The tendency of the state in many developing countries, which have been undergoing drastic neoliberal restructuring, to resort to repressive, violent, and militaristic measures in its exercise of social control has received insufficient attention in academic literature. This paper examines the proliferation of state-terror against the civilian population in Colombia in the context of accelerated economic liberalization. The analysis critiques post-modern approaches to the study of monitoring and social control in the era of globalization, by highlighting the role of the state in the design and administration of repression, violence, and militarization programs that, while disguised under the discourse of the National Security Doctrine, are in reality functional to the consolidation of neoliberalism.

Security as anti-politics: Behind the administered festival

Pamela Leach (pleach@cmu.ca), Political Studies, Canadian Mennonite University

Considers current security practices and discourses as a retreat from democratic possibilities. Suspended civil liberties and police proliferation are presenting symptoms of this malaise. Critically at stake are participatory processes and structures, ethics of social accountability, dissenting media and cultural forms, and knowledge of the practices of governance, control and violence funded through collective marginalization. Intimidation, homogenization and seduction foster (state supported) “citizen security initiatives” that sustain retrenchment, fragment social solidarity and deny 20^th century fascism. The priority of the security of state and corporate property over human flourishing exposes the hegemonic rejoinder to promising recent social movements.

Globalizing culture(s) of (in)justice(s): Critiquing one-dimensional conceptualizations of security

W. Gordon West (gordwest@idirect.com), Digital Social Praxis/Imaging Transformation International; Sociology, Laurentian

US criminology plays a major role in providing an ideological basis for epistemologically ensconcing injustices, no "festival of knowledge".  This paper will outline such cultural/ideological/theoretical attempts within a problematique  of reproduction, production, state/law, and resistance/transformation. American concerns with illegal immigrants spreading terrorism become reconceived as illiberal interference in labour markets, fears of international drug traders become supplanted by corporate money-laundering, and terrorism by relatively ineffective groups of insurgents pale beside that of US of (N)A militarist “shock and awe” strategies destroying opposing national infrastructures in wars targeting civilians.

Saturday 3 June, 13:45-15:30, Location TBA

Class Politics and Popular Struggle in Latin America - Part II (Hosted by the CPSA),

Chair/discussant: Igor Ampuero, International Development Studies, St. Mary’s

Bolivia: The revolutionary cycle, 2000-2005

Jeffery R. Webber, (jefferyrogerwebber@hotmail.com), Political Science, Toronto

This paper will explain the dynamics of the revolutionary cycle in Bolivian grassroots indigenous-Left politics that began with the Cochabamba Water War of 2000 and reached its apogee in the Gas Wars of October 2003 and May-June 2005.

Roots of resistance to urban water privatization in Bolivia: The crisis of neoliberalism, the “new working class” and public services

Susan Spronk (spronk@yorku.ca ), Political Science, York

This paper analyzes the roots of resistance to the privatization of public services in the context of the changing forms of class identity in Bolivia. Based upon two case studies of urban water privatization in Cochabamba and La Paz-El Alto, the paper explains why the social coalitions that have emerged to protest the privatization of public water services have been led by territorial-based organizations rather than class-based organizations and the problems this presents for achieving true democratization.

The relevance of land and class struggle: Understanding Latin American indigenous rural movements in the 21^st century

Jasmin Hristov (jasminhr@yorku.ca), Sociology, York

This paper analyzes the relationship between social class and ethnicity/race as it manifests itself in the formation, struggles, and goals of contemporary Latin American indigenous rural mobilizations as well as in their relationship with the state and role in national social, economic and political transformation. The main focus of the presentation is on the indigenous movement in Colombia. By revealing the centrality of economic processes and inequalities to the experiences of struggles and collective identity of the movement, it is argued that class and ethnicity/race are inextricably linked. The paper also offers a critique of the post-modern approach to the study of Latin American indigenous movements.

Social movement and the State: The social and political dynamics of the indigenous movement in Latin America

Henry Veltmeyer, International Development Studies, St. Mary’s

Social Movements of Indigenous Communities and peasant producers in the 1990s represented the most dynamic forces of social change in Latin America. This paper examines and reconstructs the dynamics of these forces in the context of Bolivia and Ecuador.

Saturday 3 June, 14:45-16:15, ACW 106

Whiteness: Canadian and Transnational Perspectives - Part 2

Session Organizer: Sedef Arat-Koc (sarat_koc@trentu.ca), Women's Studies, Trent

Globalization and the spatial constitution of whiteness: Stories about ‘Africa’

Barbara Heron (bheron@yorku.ca), Social Work, York

The presence of development workers in the countries of the South is increasingly being amplified by that of other Northern ‘helpers’ coming for short-term durations. In this paper it is theorized that these various Northern interventions are in fact crucial to white identity formation, as they have been from the era of empire with its colonizing project. International ‘helping’, which thus simultaneously expresses and constitutes the meaning of whiteness in countries of the North, relies on constructions of global spatial differences for its authorization. Drawing on postcolonial, critical race, and space theory, this paper focuses on the narratives of Canadian women who have been development workers in Africa, with a particular emphasis on the significance of space in maintaining the meaning of whiteness and thereby upholding the ethics of the development experience from their perspectives

White and Black in race and caste: A cross-cultural perspective

Hira Singh (hsingh@yorku.ca), Sociology, York

The paper examines some of the issues raised in the context of the controversy erupting from the proposal to discuss caste at the UN Conference on Race and Racism in Durban in 2001. Social construction of whiteness in western cultures is compared to an analogous process in the caste system in India to argue that a cross-cultural comparative account is necessary and timely not only to counter the ethnocentric views of the dominant majority in racialized west but also to avoid an equally ethnocentric understanding of, and reaction to, race and racializaion by the minorities. More importantly, it is meant to serve as a reminder that the struggle to bring down the material boundaries and symbolic manifestations of systemic inequalities, such as race and caste, cannot be bound to particular histories or geographies.

Reconfiguring social and political identities in a post-Cold War, neoliberal world: Perspectives on “whiteness” in non-Western contexts

Sedef Arat-Koc (saratkoc@ryerson.ca), Politics, Ryerson

Following the end of the Cold War and the ascendancy of neoliberal globalization, there seems to be an increasing emphasis on “white” identities in many parts of the world, including non-Western countries. In several contexts, this emphasis involves an assertion of differentiation from and supremacy of some over other – class and ethnic — groups in the same country, as it signifies an aspiration for membership in the “West” and “Europe” in a new world order. Focusing mainly on “whiteness” in Turkey, and also drawing on examples from other Third World and post-communist contexts, this paper aims to explore the different meanings and connotations attached to “whiteness” in this period and its social, political and geopolitical bases.

Saturday 3 June, 14:45-16:15, Break, 16:30-18:00, ACW 303

The Research Agenda for the Left Today

Session Organizer: Chris Borst (chris.borst@utoronto.ca), Philosophy, Toronto. Ken Collier (kcollier@shaw.ca), Athabasca

Is the future passé? Precariousness, neoliberalism and the foreshortened future

Craig Ireland (ireland@bilkent.edu.tr), American Culture and Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. David Carvounas (david.carvounas@utoronto.ca), Social Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough.

The increased “flexibilization” of labour since the 1970s, as theorists from Harvey to Sennett have shown, has fostered a culture of immediacy where the short term exigencies of present survival supplant the hopes of long-term future “lendemains qui chantent.” In order to better diagnose how recent developments affect our stance towards the future and the possibility of envisioning (let alone effecting) social change, this paper proposes that we first consider how the historical correlation between Keynesian economic policy and the faith in the future became, to begin with, a (relatively short-lived) reality for the working population of industrialized societies.

From the climate of insecurity to the culture of immediacy: Methodological considerations on the material preconditions for envisioning social change

Craig Ireland (ireland@bilkent.edu.tr), American Culture and Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. David Carvounas (david.carvounas@utoronto.ca), Social Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough.

The possibility of envisioning (let alone effecting) social change is predicated on what Koselleck, Giddens and others trace to the late-eighteenth-century opening of the future. This paper shows, however, that recent attempts to address the genesis and prospects of an open future suffer from a methodological weakness, namely, a failure to consider the material preconditions for envisioning a future that extends beyond immediate needs for present survival. Indeed, the very possibility for temporal extension into an open future, let alone the capacity for envisioning social change, are predicated upon a present where material needs are at least minimally satisfied.

Assessing Global Unions: Some questions on the state of labour internationalism

David Huxtable (dhuxtabl@sfu.ca), Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser

There appears to be a disconnect between the research being done on the institutions of global capital and the lack of research being done on corresponding labour organizations.  The federations which make up Global Unions, for example, are almost unknown even amongst labour activists and scholars. An honest assessment of its institutions is essential for the global left to move forward. Where do they fit within the global political economy? What is their relationship to the broader social justice movement? Are these organizations effective? If not, are they redeemable?

The missing piece in post-colonial studies: Internal colonialism of the West

Vanmala Hiranandani (vhiranan@yorku.ca), Social Work, York

Post-colonial theory focuses largely on the relations between European imperial powers and colonized societies. Likewise, contemporary literature on imperialism centers on western models of development and globalization as new forms of colonization of the non-West. Missing from this discourse is a critical analysis of internal tensions of modernity in the West. This paper furthers the post-colonialism/imperialism debate to include the colonization of western people through indoctrination in incessant capital accumulation and consumption, and maintenance of “social order” through suppression of dissent. Since the non-West is a construction of the West, an important research agenda for the Left is to explore internal colonialism/psychological colonization and dissent management in the West, and strategies adopted to resist these insidious forms of colonization.

Break

Saturday 3 June, 16:30-18:00, ACW 106

Marxism and the National Question

Session Organizer: Roni Gechtman (roni.gechtman@msvu.ca), History, Mount Saint Vincent

East-Germans, class and the idea of the ‘white’ German nation

Juliane Edler (jedler@yorku.ca), Political Science, York,

This paper focuses on the re-constitution of one German state and the related changes (as well as continuities) pertaining to conceptions of German nationhood. Drawing from the work of David Roediger, it is argued that East Germans were paid the ‘wages of Germanness’ which compensate psychologically not only for the loss of their country but also for the (political and economic) power that has been snatched from them. Further, these ‘wages’ were central to East Germans accepting their class position and internalizing ideas about the ‘white’ German nation. Thus, I propose an alternative framework for theorizing racism in post-‘unification’ Germany.

Vladimir Medem, the Jewish Labour Bund, and the National Question, 1903-1920

Roni Gechtman (roni.gechtman@msvu.ca), History, Mount Saint Vincent

This paper examines the views of Vladimir Medem (1879-1923), prominent leader of the Jewish Labour Bund in the Russian Empire in the first decade of the twentieth century and the party’s main theorist of the national question. Medem’s goal was not just to outline a political program for the Bund but to establish the foundations for a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the nation from a social democratic (i.e., Marxist) perspective. He proposed that the state must take an active role in protecting the national minorities by granting them a national-cultural autonomy with a limited jurisdiction on cultural matters (and only on those matters). In opposition to the nation-state, Medem put forward a model of a ‘state of nationalities’ in which citizenship would be nationally neutral and granted equally to the members of all nationalities. Such arrangement would “ensure that the different nations may live in peace with one another” and “the stronger nation would not smother the weaker one.” I argue that the analysis and programs formulated by Medem and other Bundists, together with the theories produced around the same time by Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner (1870-1950) and Otto Bauer (1881-1938), deserve special attention as a form of ‘multiculturalism avant la lettre’ that offers insights relevant to today’s increasingly diverse societies.

Sunday 4 June, 10:45-12:15, Schulich E112

The Contribution Of Feminist Theories To The Study Of Labour Relations (with CIRA)

Chair: Louise Clarke, College of Commerce, Saskatchewan

Discussant: Rosemary Warskett, Department of Law, Carleton

A feminist approach to analysing union women’s leadership

Linda Briskin (lbriskin@yorku.ca), Social Science Division and School of Women’s Studies, York

With reference to research on Australia, Canada, Sweden, the UK and the US, this paper interrogates the notion that women union leaders lead differently. Despite significant variation in these union movements, a common discourse on women's union leadership emerges from these five countries. Based on a feminist approach which supports a recognition of difference without reference to essentialist ideas about women's nature, this paper seeks to identify what may be common across these countries. The paper concludes that the fact that union women face patterns of discrimination on the one hand, and organize as a constituency and have access to women-only education on the other supports the development of transformational leadership. Unpacking union women's leadership practices in this way reveals a dialectic of victimization and agency.

Feminism and men’s rights on the job

Anne Forrest, Women’s Studies/ Odette School of Business, Windsor

This paper demonstrates how feminist theory can be used to expand the rights of men (as well as women) on the job by challenging the established framework for regulating employees’ appearance in unionized workplaces. An analysis of labour arbitration cases shows that arbitrator efforts to balance employers’ legitimate business interests against employees’ right to dress and groom as they wish commonly means that employees must bend to their employers’ preferences. That these preferences are often rooted in hetero/sexist and racist stereotypes that likely violate individual employees’ human rights goes unnoticed at arbitration because conventional labour relations theory does not acknowledge the relevance of power differentials based in relationships other than the employer-employee relationship. I demonstrate that incorporating feminist theory into the analysis of these disputes at arbitration would allow men, including straight white men, more freedom to choose how to dress and groom for work than is currently possible, without violating basic labour relations principles.

Gendering union renewal: women’s contributions to labour movement revitalization

Jan Kainer, Division of Social Science and Women’s Studies, York

This paper summarizes key themes from the literature on union renewal and argues that the contributions of women’s organizing, a subject of extensive discussion within feminist analyses of trade unions, is given scant consideration in debates on labour movement revitalization. In spite of many years of feminist dialogue on women’s organizing as a model for transforming unions and labour movements, there is limited recognition of the history of women’s organizing efforts that have contributed to developments such as coalition building, rank and file activism, or devising alternative labour agendas to reflect new identities and new work forms. Additionally, the organizing work of women today continues to play a vital role in labour internationalism. This paper considers how women’s organizing initiatives that began a couple of decades ago have continued to shape labour revitalization efforts into the present. It is argued that, in general, the union renewal literature has not acknowledged the ‘gendering of the labour movement’, or the transformational dimension of women’s organizing, and its influence on labour to reposition itself in the face of neo-liberal globalization.

Fair Trade: People, the Planet, and Profits

(Friday 2 June – Sunday 4 June)

Organizers: the Canadian Fair Trade Network (CFTN www.fairtradenetwork.ca), the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation (CASC), the Canadian Student Fair Trade Network (CSFTN), and the Society for Socialist Studies (SSS)

Friday 2 June, 9:00-10:30

Co-operation, Fair Trade and Sustainability

Linking Cooperation and Sustainable Development: The Las Nubes Coffee Partnership

Howard E. Daugherty (York), Paula Pelaez (York), Stefi Hall (York), Roger Zuñiga (CoopeAgri, R.N. San Isidro de El General Costa Rica)

TBA

TransFair Canada

Friday 2 June,10:45 – 12:15

Fair Trade Keynote Address (with funding provided by CIDA)

Franz van der Hoff, UCIRI, Oaxaca, Mexico

Lunch, 12:15 – 13:30

Friday 2 June, 13:30 – 15:00

Co-operation, Fair Trade and Gender (with funding provided by CIDA)

Café Femenino

Isabel LaTorré, PROASSA, Peru

TBA

CIDA Representative

15:15 – 16:45

Northern Fair Trade Co-operatives (with funding provided by CIDA)

Panellists: Jeff de Jong (La Siembra Co-operative, Ottawa), Bill Barrett (Planet Bean Co-operative, Guelph), Erbin Crowell (Equal Exchange Co-operative, West Bridgewater, MA), Dario Iezzoni (Oxfam Fair Trade, Montreal)

Saturday 3 June, ACW 004 (SSS location)

- Food Governance and Regulation: Tensions, Analyses, and Critiques

- Short Break

- Exploring Experiences of Fair Trade: Access, Marginalization, and Empowerment

- Lunch

- Fair Trade Cotton

- Short Break

- Corporations and Fair Trade

Sunday 4 June, ACW 004 (SSS location)

This day of the Symposium will consist of focused discussions on taking the Fair Trade movement to the next level. The entire morning’s activities will be coordinated by Équiterre. Discussions will focus on the developing Canadian Consultation Committee on Fair Trade. After lunch we will discuss possible future collaborations between interested individuals, schools, organizations, unions, and businesses. We will also discuss running more seasonal campaigns (e.g. campaigns for Halloween, for the December holidays, for Valentine’s Day, Easter, etc…). Also, we will discuss the current situation of the Canadian Student Fair Trade Network (CSFTN), and how we might collectively encourage more student involvement in the Canadian Fair Trade movement (CFTM). Lastly, we will discuss possibilities for coordinating the next national meeting of the CFTM. We hope to wrap things up in the early evening (about 6pm).

Notes
Notes

Society for Socialist Studies Session Summary – Page 1

Wednesday 31 May 2006

10:45 – 12:15	ACW 106	New Scholars Session
13:00-14:30	ACW 304	Living in a Material World
13:00-14:30	ACW 305	New (Gendered) Perspectives on Genocide - Parts I & II (with CWSA)
13:30-15:00	VH1158	Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements / Social Research – Part I (Hosted by CSAA)
14:45-17:30	ACW 305	New (Gendered) Perspectives on Genocide - Parts III & IV
14:45-16:15	ACW 303	Canada and the New Imperialist Order
14:45-16:15	ACW 304	Towards a Theory of Indigenous Environmental Activism

Thursday 1 June 2006

8:30-10:00	VH1154	Sociology For Changing The World: Social Movements/Social Research – Part II (with CSAA)
9:00-10:30	ACW 004	Class Politics and Popular Struggle in Latin America (with CPSA) – Part 1
9:00-10:30	ACW 303	The Global Justice Movement: Prospects and Problems Panel 1 – Economic Racism/Casteism
9:00-10:30	ACW 106	Theorizing Labour - Part 1
9:00-10:30	ACW 304	Struggling for Recognition: Sex Work, Communities, Activism
10:45-12:15	ACW 004	The 4th Annual CAW-Sam Gindin Chair Roundtable: New strategies, Old Strategies - What Can We Learn From Each Other?  An Inter-generational Dialogue
10:45-12:15	ACW 304	Violent Ruptures: Family Fragmentation under Social Upheaval
10:15-11:45	VH1154	(Neo-)Liberalism Versus Community (With CSAA)
10:45-12:15	ACW 303	The Global Justice Movement: Prospects and Problems Panel 2 – Campaigns and Movement Building
10:45-12:15	ACW 106	Theorizing Labour - Part 2
13:00-14:30	ACW 303	The Global Justice Movement: Prospects and Problems Panel 3 – Theoretical Interventions
13:00-14:30	ACW 004	Subversion in the Footsteps of Corporate Hegemony? The Case of the Blackspot Sneaker Anticorporation
14:45-17:30	ACW 004	Keynote address: SSS is pleased to announce that Dr. William K. Carroll will be our 2006 keynote speaker. Dr. Carroll’s speech is entitled 'Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony'
19:00	RB 401 Suite 444	Book Launch - Sociology For Changing The World: Social Movements/Social Research

Friday 2 June 2006

9:00-12:15	ACW 106	Epistemologies/Pedagogies of Struggle
13:00-14:30	ACW 004	Marxism, Imperialism and Culture
13:00-14:30	ACW 106	Roundtable on Social and Economic Justice and "Natural" Disasters:  The Case of Katrina
13:00-14:30	ACW 303	From 'Dependency' to 'Globalization': Canadian Political Economy Across the Generations
14:45-17:00	ACW 106	Society for Socialist Studies: Annual General Meeting
17:00-19:00		York University President’s reception

Society for Socialist Studies Session Summary – Page 2

 
Saturday 3 June 2006

9:00-10:30	ACW 004	Food Governance and Regulation: Tensions, Analyses, and Critiques (With CASC)
9:00-12:15	ACW 106	Marxism and Anti-Racism: Extending the Dialogue (With the CPSA)
9:00-10:30	ACW 303	History of Canadian Left and Labour Participation in Municipal Politics
10:45-12:15	ACW 004	Exploring Experiences of Fair Trade: Access, Marginalization, and Empowerment (With CASC)
10:45-12:15	ACW 304	The Growing Privatization and Commodification of Knowledge
13:00-14:30	ACW 303	The Political Economy of Canadian Capital in a Global Age
13:00-14:30	ACW 106	Whiteness: Canadian and Transnational Perspectives - Part 1
13:00-14:30	ACW 304	“Security” against the Struggle: No Knowledge, No Festival
13:45-15:30	TBA	Class Politics and Popular Struggle in Latin America - Part II (Hosted by the CPSA),
14:45-16:15	ACW 106	Whiteness: Canadian and Transnational Perspectives - Part 2
14:45-18:00	ACW 303	The Research Agenda for the Left Today
16:30-18:00	ACW 106	Marxism and the National Question

 
Sunday 4 June 2006

10:45-12:15

Schulich E112

The Contribution Of Feminist Theories To The Study Of Labour Relations (with CIRA)

Friday 2 June – Sunday 4 June

Fair Trade: People, the Planet, and Profits

Legend:

ACW = Accolade West Building

VH = Vari Hall

RB = Richmond Building

Layout: Viktoria Roman, Manitoba Health

(with the great help of Jesse Vorst, Economics, University of Manitoba)