Department of Multi Disciplinary Studies
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Collection consists of research, scholarship, and publications of faculty affiliated with Glendon College's Department of Multi Disciplinary Studies.
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Item Open Access No Good Deed Goes Unrewarded: The Values/Virtues of Transnational Volunteerism in Neoliberal Capital(Taylor and Francis, 2014) Vrasti, Wanda; Montsion, Jean MichelThis paper focuses on the value of volunteering in producing, sustaining, and legitimising forms of subjectivity and social relations congruent with the ethos of neoliberal capital. Rather than treat it as a spontaneous act of virtue, we insist that volunteerism is a carefully designed technology of government the purpose of which is to align individual conduct with neoliberal capital’s double injunction of market rationality and social responsibility. To this end we investigate two complementary case studies of transnational volunteerism, one dealing with Chinese international students volunteering in Vancouver seeking to obtain Canadian citizenship, the other looking at Western university students and graduates volunteering in Ghana to gather relevant professional skills and experience. In both cases we find that transnational volunteerism helps participating individuals assume cultural skills, affective competencies, and citizenship prerogatives they could otherwise not have claimed through nationality or employment.Item Open Access Churchill, Manitoba and the Arctic Gateway: a historical contextualization(Wiley, 2015) Montsion, Jean MichelIn 2010, the University of Winnipeg and the Government of Manitoba hosted the Arctic Gateway Summit to discuss the regular use of a commercial shipping line running from Winnipeg to Murmansk, Russia via the Port of Churchill and the waters of Nunavut. In this article, I put this initiative in the historical and spatial context of the town of Churchill to help us understand how the Arctic Gateway represents the town’s past and current positioning in Northern transportation and economic development plans. The Arctic Gateway vision echoes various proposals developed since the 1910s for a port on Hudson Bay to become a key link between Western Canada and foreign markets. However, it raises concerns among Churchill’s leaders that the town is shifting from being perceived as a Northern Canadian community to becoming an outpost not quite North enough anymore. Based on archival work and interviews, I utilize community reactions to the Arctic Gateway project to examine how Churchill is positioned in the Canadian geography of transport and Northern development, and to reveal the shift that the community has perceived in recent years in terms of investment and public attention being directed to other, more Northern communities.Item Open Access Patrolling Chineseness: Singapore’s Kowloon Club and the ethnic adaptation of Hong Kongese to Singaporean society(Taylor and Francis, 2015) Montsion, Jean MichelIn combination with their strategy to recruit foreign talent, Singaporean state authorities have increasingly focused their attention on community integration schemes for Chinese professional newcomers. The government facilitated such integration with the creation of the Kowloon Club in 1990. The Kowloon Club is not only a government experiment that has been repeated three times since then, but also the only new migrant association that does not explicitly target Mainlanders. Through in-depth interviews with the Club’s leadership, I explore the ethnic adaptation of the Kowloon Club membership as it negotiates the evolving sense of Chineseness found in state designs and Singaporean society. Much like the emergence of the 1997 Hong Kongese identity, the Kowloon Club’s activities have shifted in strong reaction to the racialized category put forth by state authorities and embodied by Mainlander professionals in that the Club’s activities now symbolize and help patrol what Chineseness means as everyday performance in the city-state.