Events
Corporate Crime and Accountability
Climate Change Reconsidered: Assessing the Present State of Earth’s Climate
IRIS Fellow Mark Winfield releases book on the environment and Ontario
York Prof’s new book explores crucial link between Ontario’s environment and economy
TORONTO – A York University professor’s new book offers the first comprehensive study of Ontario’s environmental policy and what it may spell for our future.
Blue-Green Province, which launches Feb. 9, 2012, explores the relationship between the environment and Ontario’s society, politics and economy through the Progressive Conservative dynasty of premiers Drew, Frost, Robarts and Davis, the “quiet” and “common sense” revolutions of Peterson, Rae and Harris, through to the McGuinty era.
Authored by Mark Winfield, associate professor in York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES), the book includes examinations of the 2011 federal and provincial election outcomes and their implications for future environmental and energy policy in Ontario and Canada.
“The province is searching for a way to regain its pre-eminent status in Confederation, but its managerially-oriented government has seemed unable to articulate a compelling vision for the way forward,” says Winfield.
“Ontario is facing tests that will require vision and leadership, including the declining US market for our exports, difficulties for export-oriented industries posed by a rising Canadian dollar, the regional impacts of climate change, and the rural-urban split evident in the outcome of the 2011 election. We’re also facing challenges stemming from a federal government oriented towards the interests of western Canada, and the need to recover Toronto’s role as the anchor of the Greater Golden Horseshoe and as an emerging global city,” Winfield says.
The book focuses on the interplay between levels of public concern for environmental issues and the ideological orientation of the province’s Liberal, Progressive Conservative and NDP governments in understanding their approaches to environmental issues. Its findings have implications beyond Ontario, and help to explain for the recent behavior of the federal Conservative government towards the environment.
Despite the fact that environmental policy has become increasingly important in Ontario politics, very little scholarship has been devoted to exploring the development of that policy or the crucial relationship between the environment and the province’s wider political economy.
“I believe this book fills a significant gap in our understanding of factors that have shaped our environmental policy and will continue to inform it in future,” Winfield says.
Blue-Green Province: The Environment and Political Economy of Ontario is published by UBC Press. Winfield is co-chair of the FES Sustainable Energy Initiative and a Fellow of York’s Institute for Research & Innovation in Sustainability (IRIS).
Climate Justice: How do we move forward from COP17?
Disability advocate Jeff Preston to stage a ‘stairbombing’ at York
Jeff Preston, co-creator of webcomic Cripz, advocates fighting for disability rights in creative ways and will explain how in a talk Feb. 7 at York.
In “Battle Lines Drawn: Resisting Ableism Through Creative Intervention”, Preston will explain how to 
use cultural warfare – online publishing and publicity stunts such as stairbombing and chair mobbing – to put the lie to common myths and stereotypes about disability, with humour.
Right: Jeff Preston in a snowbank, in a photo on his website getmobilized.ca
Following his talk, his hosts, Access York’s Disability Education & Awareness Subcommittee, are taking his advice and staging a stairbombing on the Keele campus. They will block off a major stairwell using caution tape and place a sign stating: “Caution: These stairs are out of service. Inconvenient, eh? This is only one example of what persons with disabilities experience every day."
Preston made headlines when he drove his electric wheelchair from London to Ottawa to raise 
awareness about inaccessible transportation. In 2010, Preston and Clara Madrenas created Cripz, an online comic strip about two high school boys in wheelchairs that aims to entertain through humour while satirizing myths about disability.
Left: Image from webcomic Cripz
The disability advocate gives talks in which he argues that mainstream media, from “Daredevil” to “Glee”, rarely speak to the lived experience of disabled persons. Such TV shows are based more on the skewed perspectives of nondisabled creators, who draw heavily on stereotypes infused with pity and paternalism when portraying disabled characters.
Hear Preston speak in Winters College dining hall, 001 Winter's College, Feb. 7 from noon to 2pm. To attend, RSVP by Feb. 3 to kaley@yorku.ca.
This event was organized by Access York with assistance from the Centre for Human Rights, the Office of the Vice-President Students, and the Institute for Research & Innovation in Sustainability.
The Uneven Process of CSR Practices in Europe: A window for public intervention?
The YCISS Afternoon Seminar Series
Resource Extraction and Capitalist Accumulation in Angola and Nigeria
The turn of the millennium has brought profound change in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. In Angola and Nigeria, the region's two major oil producers, there has been considerable economic growth that is expected to continue for several more years. This talk focuses on the state promotion of 'local content' in the oil industries. Interviews and case studies of indigenous oil companies are used to ask whether local content policies are markers of a new and potentially successful variant of the developmental state. If this variant is successful in developing more capitalistic social relations of production, what does local content as a new strategy of elite accumulation mean for security and development in the Gulf of Guinea region?
Jesse Ovadia
PhD Candidate, Political Science
York University
31January 2012
1:30 – 3:00 pm
764 York Research Tower
Problematizing “Field-work”
CERLAC presents
Problematizing “Field-work”
A Seminar on Knowledge, Power and Self-reflection
Thursday February 16, 4 -6 PM
280A York Lanes
York University
Presentations:
C. Susana Caxaj: “Constructions and contradictions in research with a mining-impacted indigenous community”
Nadia Hasan: “Containing fieldwork: Locating the 'field' in academic knowledge production”
Robert Kohls: “The epistemology and ethics of member checking: Simply a question of voice?
The notion and practice of “field-work” are usually taken from granted and treated as a technical question (i.e. how to “properly” gather “the data”). However, many critical perspectives have shown that the (social) sciences are implicated in power relations. Thus, “field-work” needs to be interrogated in nuanced ways. Where is the “field”? Why are some countries frequently treated by scholars as producers of the “state of the art” (theory) while others are imagined as the place to gather data and do field-work? Does “field-work” finish when one arrives back to Pearson? Should this “epistemology of the adventurer” be challenged? Why “the poor”, “indigenous communities”, “subaltern groups” are seen, studied, talked about, and conceptually dissected while ethnographies and studies of the rich and powerful are rare? And what kind of ethical and epistemological commitments does that entail? Are graduate students of Canadian universities really that “privileged” in comparison to the “people” they “study” or the story is in some cases more complicated than that? What does the common lament about “how privileged we are” actually “do”, both politically and ethically? In sum, in what sense “field-work” can be seen as a power relation and academia as politically relevant? Our presenters will address some of these and other issues through their own research experience.
More details, including presenter bios and abstracts:
GREEN ECONOMY: FICTION OR PATHWAY TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? EVIDENCE FROM GREEN ENERGY
Paul Parker, BSc, BA, MA, PhD, Department of Geography and Environmental Management, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo
The Earth Summit was held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro with Canadian and global leaders signing conventions to protect the planet. In 2012, the Rio+20 conference will assess what we have achieved and what we need to do. Green economy has been proposed as a solution and the Ontario experience of green energy initiatives will be examined as a local case study. Energy efficiency to reduce demand and renewable sources of energy supply will be reviewed.
For more details visit: http://www.yorku.ca/rci/Site/Winter_12.html
