Carleton University’s Bruce Curtis, professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, has won two Canadian History Association (CHA) awards.  His book, Ruling By Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality  – A Historical Sociology was awarded the CHA’s Clio-Quebec Prize for the best book on the history of Quebec and the Political History Prize – Best Book, awarded by the Political History Group (PHG), a CHA-affiliated committee…Read more

Focusing on the upcoming 2014 World Cup in Brazil, this research project aims to contribute to theoretical and empirical understandings of the intersections between major sporting events, moral panics and anti-prostitution/trafficking campaigns.  While the scholarly literature on this issue provides substantial evidence of the use of anti-trafficking campaigns to promote the abolition of prostitution, little is known of the ways in which these types of campaigns unfold locally through specific cultural contexts.  This project seeks to address this gap through an ethnographic analysis of the campaigns against sex tourism during the World Cup 2014 in Brazil, with a focus on the city of Natal, one of the twelve host cities.  Natal offers a unique case in point due to both its long history of anti-sex tourism campaigns and the processes of gentrification expressed through these campaigns.  The proposed investigation thus seek to analyse whether the campaigns linked to the 2014 World Cup might further stigmatize, criminalize and spatially marginalize the women engaging in practices of sex tourism.

Christine Duff (Department of French): Lire le zombi: Haïti et au-delà/ Reading the Zombie: Haiti and Beyond

The last few years have seen a resurgence of popular interest in the zombie in North America: witness the advent of Zombie Walks and the use of the zombie metaphor in the Occupy Movement.  There have been international conferences devoted to the subject, two recently taking place in Montreal: Autopsie du zombi in May 2012, and Invasion Montréal: colloque international sur le zombi in July of the same year.  In short, the undead are experiencing a renaissance.  While the zombie is a useful metaphor in contemporary debates regarding exploitation and oppression, its contemporary revival obscures its origins, along with much of its signifying potential.  Literature represents one of the richest arenas in which this signifying potential plays out.  In literary studies, however, work on the zombie has focused exclusively on Haitian literary production, extending only recently to writings of the Haitian diaspora.

The proposed project seeks to: 1) establish the extent to which the motif of zombification is present in the literatures of the Americas (in the hemispheric sense of the term); and 2) determine overarching tendencies in its use and explore their implications.  The trope of zombification undergirds a larger number of literary works than is currently acknowledged.  If, as Kaiama Glover maintains in her 2005 article on Haitian literature, the zombie is a particularly rich site of metaphorical potential and is “highly exploitable as a literary device”, it is my assertion that the full and myriad implications of the zombie and zombification as literary devices remain to be identified and articulated, especially with regard to literatures outside of Haiti.

Michel Hogue (Department of History): Empire of Possibilities: Isaac Cowie and the Making of the Prairie West

In putting his recollections to paper, former fur trader Isaac Cowie sought to preserve in print some of his experiences during a critical period in the Prairie West’s history.  “These papers may prove interesting,” Cowie suggested, “to anyone connected with the ‘days of auld lang syne’ in Western Canada, and perhaps to a few of the numerous newcomers who have come to build an empire of infinite possibilities therein.”  Born in the Shetland Islands, Cowie entered the Hudson’s Bay Company’s (HBC) service at Fort Qu’Appelle in 1867 at a critical moment in both the history of the fur trade and that of the Prairie West.  He was an active participant in the final days of the Plains fur trade and in the promotion of the economic and social order that displaced it.  When success in his business ventures eluded him, Cowie found a career as an advocate for “pioneers” seeking government recognition and as an amateur ethnographer and historian preserving and promoting aspects of the western past, particularly the exploits of its early settlers.  Cowie’s “empire of possibilities” evoked the enduring and cherished myth of the orderly and peaceful nature of the Canadian West’s settlement and embodied his own personal hopes and dreams.  It overlooked, however, the people for whom “settlement” meant dispossession or marginalization, not opportunity.  By narrating Cowie’s own version of his life alongside stories of the Metis and First Nations with whom he lived, worked, and traded, whose land he bought and sold, and whose histories and material culture he collected, this project will re-contextualize Cowie’s narrative of the West and interweave the stories of “pioneers” with those of Indigenous peoples.  In so doing, it will open a new window on the processes of dispossession and repossession that made the Prairie West.

Jody Mason (Department of English Language and Literature): Workers, Readers, Citizens: Canada’s Frontier College, 1899-1950

This project will study the vast archive of Canada’s most significant adult literacy initiative, Frontier College.  The College, founded as the Canadian Reading Camp Association in 1899 by Protestant minister Alfred Fitzpatrick, developed a labourer-teacher model that enabled its work among immigrant labourers in Canada’s resource frontier.  Frontier College is an organization with roots in the social gospel movement and, by the interwar period, it was actively involved in discouraging political radicalism in work camps through its promotion of democratic citizenship and naturalization.

While much is known about the institutional history of Frontier College, I aim to use the organization’s archive at Library and Archives Canada to learn more about the workers as learners, as readers, and as consumers of culture in the first half of the twentieth century.  This research has several main objectives: it will study, synthesize, and analyze a large body of largely unstudied archival material, while enriching nascent work on the history of reading in Canada and fostering important interdisciplinary links among literary and cultural studies, labour history, book history and print culture studies, and the study of immigration and ethnicity.

Mohammed Rustom (College of the Humanities): The Philosophical Mysticism of ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani (d. 1131)

Rustom’s first book on the famous Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) has afforded him with the ability to understand how a number of key figures’ ideas came together in Sadra’s own synthetic project, the most prominent example being the work of the controversial Andalusian Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240) and the immediate generations of his followers (somewhat misleadingly referred to as the “school of Ibn ‘Arabi”).  Yet what can be said about the phase immediately before Ibn ‘Arabi, that is, the twelfth century?  We admittedly have a great deal of information concerning the early development of Islamic theology and philosophy from the eighth century to the beginning of the twelfth century.  But when we come to the twelfth century proper, many important questions remain unanswered.

In other words, the one area of inquiry which has largely been neglected is the phase between the famous Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and Ibn ‘Arabi.  This period is particularly problematic owing to its indebtedness to the earlier Islamic philosophical tradition, particularly the work Avicenna (d. 1037).  Rustom’s background in Islamic theology and philosophy in general and the writings of Avicenna and al-Ghazali in particular, coupled with his work in Islamic thought from Ibn ‘Arabi onwards, has positioned him well in terms of grappling with the complexity of the twelfth century of Islamic thought, which, he argues, bears witness to a very unique shift in Islamic intellectual history.

Although there are a number of key authors who belong to the era in question, Rustom maintains that one of the most important is the great martyr ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani (d. 1131).  This figure is famous for having been the student of Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126) (the brother of the aforementioned al-Ghazali), and for having been put to death by the Seljuq government, ostensibly on charges of “heresy.”  Yet, to date, there is not a single, thorough presentation of ‘Ayn al-Qudat’s thought and influence.  Rustom’s project seeks to fill this lacuna by demonstrating ‘Ayn al-Qudat’s pivotal role in the development of the Persian poetic tradition on the one hand, and the Islamic intellectual tradition on the other.

Paul Mkandawire (Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies – Human Rights): Indigenous Knowledge Transfer and Adaptation to Climate Change Among Orphans in Malawi 

This research project aims at examining whether pathways for transmitting traditional ecological knowledge between the elderly and the youth are dissolving under the weight of heavy adult mortality in Malawi in a context where more than 1.3 million children live without one or both biological parents due to HIV/AIDS. While contributing the least amount of greenhouse gases, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will experience the vilest impacts of global warming in the foreseeable future.  Unfortunately, the region also doubles as home to the overwhelming majority of the world’s orphaned and vulnerable children. The prime focus accorded to vulnerable groups in the global agenda on combating the negative effects of global warming means that future efforts aimed at building social resilience in communities in SSA cannot proceed without considering the unique needs of this expanding group of youth coming of age without natal parents.

While orphans’ vulnerabilities in other domains such as healthcare, schooling, discrimination, stigma, and HIV/AIDS have largely been documented, not much is known as to whether this cohort is similarly disadvantaged with regard to access to indigenous ecological knowledge vital for mitigating and adapting to climate change.  This study draws upon an ecosystem approach and employs qualitative approaches to explore how heavy adult mortality being triggered by the AIDS epidemic in Malawi is affecting the transfer of indigenous climatic knowledge between elders and youth. Though often bypassed in scientific discourse, indigenous knowledge, rooted in African smallholder farming systems and longstanding familiarity with local climatological events, can significantly improve the ability of marginalized populations to adapt to climate change.

Julie Murray (Department of English Language and Literature): British Women Writers and the Forms of Life, 1790-1840

In this project, Murray argues that the life-writing produced in the early decades of the nineteenth century is intimately linked to the politicization of “bare life” that writers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, and before them, Edmund Burke, argue is a result of the discourse of the “rights of man.”  The link is a sure sign of the chilling effect that a universalizing concept of rights has on life understood as bios.  Murray’s hypothesis is that writers’ desire to clothe a newly politicized (or, as Agamben puts it, formerly “creaturely”) “bare” or “naked” life motivates a range of experiments in life-writing in the early nineteenth century.  The texts that she examines replay a tension, however, already internal to 1790s political debates about the relationship between chivalry and rights, discussions of which are saturated with metaphors of the “naked” and the “clothed.”  Ultimately, this project examines the relationship between the biographical and the biopolitical at the turn of the nineteenth century, and takes seriously the “life” in life-writing in order to explore how literature is intimately bound up with the discursive terrain of life in this period and beyond.

David Wood (School of Linguistics and Language Studies): An Idiodynamic Investigation of the Relationship between Willingness to Communicate and Speech Fluency in a Second Language

Second language (L2) speech fluency has typically been identified as a set of observable temporal features of speech, but has not been analyzed in relation to learner factors in performance such as willingness to communicate (WTC), which can be defined as readiness to engage in communication at a specific time and with specific interlocutors.  With the exception of exploratory case study work by Wood (2012), focusing on general links between overall WTC and fluency gain over time, no researchers have examined  the relationship between WTC and L2 fluency.  A clearer, evidence-based perspective on the link between WTC and fluency can have significant implications for classroom teaching and assessment. Among other benefits, it can help in determining whether dysfluency influences WTC, and whether lowered WTC can lead to dysfluency, or whether the relationship between WTC and fluency development is more complex than that.

The proposed study is an exploratory, case-study attempt at answering the question of what the interrelationship is between L2 speech fluency and WTC. It presents an examination of the influence of WTC on fluency in monologic speech of for Chinese learners of English L2, with a non-Chinese interlocutor, in intensive English as a foreign language (EFL). Monologic narrative speech samples from the Chinese EFL learners in Canada will be analyzed for markers of fluency and interpreted in light of the learners’ WTC profiles and retrospective self-analysis of WTC in stimulated recall.  The results can potentially illuminate the relationship between dysfluency and WTC, particularly the directionality of the relationship, whether fluency breakdowns lead to lowered WTC or vice versa. This can serve to establish a research methodology foundation for a larger-scale study in future, focusing on larger groups of learners in several different learning contexts, such as EFL abroad, and part-time and full-time EFL intensive programs in their own country.

Are you a student who is interested in and/or researching any of the following topics?

• Children and violence
• Mental health
• Issues concerning Aboriginal children
• Sexual exploitation of children
• Youth justice

If so, access to a world-class resource is right at your fingertips.

The Landon Pearson Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights houses a collection of over 10,000 items organized according to the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These books, documents and reports have been donated to Carleton by The Honourable Landon Pearson.  Pearson has been a life-long advocate for the rights and well-being of children, and a Canadian Senator responsible for children.

The Landon Pearson Resource Centre offers a print library that is rich in relevant materials and also a unique ‘living’ library. These resources would be relevant for students who are studying children’s rights, political science, law, human rights, social work, child studies, women’s and gender studies, public policy, Canadian studies, sociology and international development etc.

The Centre not only offers students access to a vast collection of resources and study aids, it also presents them with the exceptional opportunity to meet and work one-on-one on projects such as honours research papers and theses with former Senator, author and an international representative of Canada, Landon Pearson.

Take advantage of this exceptional opportunity to collaborate with one of Canada’s most prominent child rights advocates.

Please contact Landon Pearson or Associate Professor Virginia Caputo to schedule an appointment.

The Landon Pearson Resource Centre is located in A735 Loeb Building.

Check out the Landon Pearson Resource Centre website for more information:  http://www.landonpearson.ca/

The 3MT competition was created by The University of Queensland, Australia in 2008 as a research communication competition for MA and PhD students engaged in research.  Graduate students deliver a clear and concise oral presentation of their independent research, presenting the key idea and impact on academia/industry of their research in three minutes or less.  This is why it is called the 3 Minute Thesis!

Students compete by presenting their 3MTs to a panel of judges consisting of GSA reps, Carleton faculty, and staff.  The top 3 Carleton presentations win the following bursaries:

1st place -$1000
2nd place -$500
3rd place – $250

The first and second place winners will also travel to Kingston Ontario to compete at the Provincial 3MT competition at Queens’ University all expenses paid!!!

Watch Cassandra Verardi  (Anthropology)give her 3MT:

Janet Siltanen

Janet Siltanen, Professor of Sociology, and Nick Scott (PhD/12), a Carleton Sociology PhD graduate, have developed a new toolkit for doing quantitative research on gender and intersectionality.

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada contracted Scott and Siltanen to put together this toolkit to help government researchers and policy analysts develop research skills that can account for diversity within gendered experience.

Titled Gender and Intersectionality – A Quantitative Toolkit for Analyzing Complex Inequalities, Scott and Siltanen’s kit describes and assesses four quantitative models for this purpose.

On March 25^th, 2013, Siltanen and Scott presented their work in a two hour “Community of Practice” event hosted by the Policy Research Directorate of HRSDC.  The event generated a lot of interest. Close to a hundred people registered for the session including researchers and analysts from HRSDC, and representatives from several other sectors of the federal government. Cari-Anne Ackland, an analyst at HRSDC and a current Sociology PhD student at Carleton helped to organize the event.

Commenting on the strong interest in the topic, Ackland stated “There is a clear demand among government analysts to understand the applicability of such methodological innovations for social policy, and to explore concrete examples of applied quantitative gender-based techniques.”

In their presentation, Scott and Siltanen noted the convergence of interests between academic and government analysts when it comes to questions of how to adequately research gender inequality.

Both are trying to respond to the awareness that when analyzing differences between women and men, it is important to adopt an intersectional perspective by incorporating what is known about significant differences within each gender. However, finding a way to do this in practice has proved challenging.

The idea that gender is enmeshed in complex intersecting patterns of inequality has been well developed theoretically, but is in need of further development as a methodological strategy for purposes of research. This is especially the case with respect to quantitative analysis – and both academic and government-based researchers are interested in finding ways to do quantitative analyses of gender inequality from an intersectional perspective.

In her opening remarks at the dissemination event, Professor Siltanen commented that the topic of the toolkit was of equal interest to academic researchers.

In fact, Siltanen and Scott will be presenting a version of the toolkit to the Canadian Sociology Association annual meetings at the 2013 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held in June in Victoria, BC. They also plan to write a version of the toolkit for academic publication.

Nick Scott summed up the convergence of academic and government research interest in the ideas presented in the toolkit, by saying “the enthusiasm demonstrated by HRSDC in advancing quantitative approaches to intersectionality is encouraging, because ultimately to address complex inequalities involving gender in effective ways, we need to bring academic experts, government researchers and policy makers together at the same table“.

Cari-Anne Ackland

Nick Scott

Contact details:

Janet Siltanen:  Janet_Siltanen@carleton.ca

Nick Scott: nascot5@uottawa.ca

Cari-Anne Ackland : CariAnneAckland@cmail.carleton.ca

From left to right: Karen Foster, Riva Soucie, Janet Siltanen, Nick Scott

On November 10^th at Fall Convocation, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Institute of Political Economy, Janet Siltanen, hooded three Sociology PhD students whom she supervised: Riva Soucie, Karen Foster (co-supervised with fellow Sociology Professor Andrea Doucet) and Nick Scott.

Having three PhD students graduating at the same convocation is a memorable event.  Recently, Siltanen took some time to discuss how she was able to score a PhD hat trick with This Week @ FASS.

Can you describe the ‘day of’ experience of hooding three students at Carleton’s 2012 Fall Convocation?

It is always a great thrill to bring our work with PhD students to a ceremonial close by hooding them at convocation.  But, it isn’t always possible because people have often moved on and away. So, it was wonderful that Karen, Nick and Riva were all going to be there on the day – and that their schedules allowed us to gather in the Raven’s Nest for a group photo.

What does an accomplishment like this mean to you on both a personal and professional level?

In many ways I find that relationships with PhD students are both personal and professional.  We spend a lot of time together at very significant moments in their personal lives. Plus, many go on to be academic colleagues who we meet at conferences or work with on other projects.  I have a good track record of keeping in touch with PhD students I’ve worked with – including the first one I supervised at the University of Edinburgh who graduated in 1990.

We get a lot from working with PhD students – and we give a lot – and this usually means we’ve forged a strong relationship that lasts well into the future. I hope this will be the case for all three of these students.

Your workload must have been enormous!  How did you manage?

They were kind enough to not defend in the same month!

These three students are so accomplished that even though they kept me working hard, it was always a joy to read their work. Also, each student had very dedicated committee members (Fran Klodawsky from Geography was on two of the committees), and for Karen I was co-supervisor with my colleague Andrea Doucet. This doesn’t necessarily reduce your own workload but it certainly helps in sharing the responsibility.

Could you describe the experience of working with these particular students?

What was remarkable about working with Karen, Nick and Riva is that they are each very adventurous scholars – willing to explore new areas of thinking and try new approaches to research.

Each one of them pushed the boundaries of theory and research methodology, and each produced excellent work. If anyone wants a great read, I recommend they look at the three dissertations. They taken on important questions and are written beautifully. They also include wonderful visual material..Riva’s thesis presents a fantastic collection of digital photographs taken by young people to show how they conceptualize home, and Nick’s dissertation is punctuated with visual narratives of Ottawa streetscapes.

I continue to work with two of them on other projects.  I am working with Riva on an article about a teaching strategy I started to use in my graduate class on the logic of the research process that developed out of thinking experiments we tried during her PhD to help clarify the focus and methodology for her dissertation research.  I am also working with Nick on a contract for the Federal government to develop a guide for policy analysts and researchers on how to do quantitative intersectional analysis.

Anything you’d like to add?

I suspect this will be my one and only convocation hat trick, and I enjoyed it thoroughly! Thank you to Karen, Nick and Riva for a memorable convocation.

More information on each graduate’s PhD work:

Riva Soucie‘s thesis ”So Long Little White Fence? Young Adults Confront and Transform Notions of Home”  is a study of experiences of home and homemaking for young adults in Canada. She is a Policy Analyst at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, where her work revolves around the federal agenda on community development. She is presently on leave of absence from the government and lives in Washington, DC with her husband who also graduated in the November convocation with a Master’s in Applied Science. Riva defended her thesis in August 2012.

Karen Foster’s dissertation is titled ‘Relating to Work: Generation, Discourse and Social Change’. She is a Senate Medal winner for her doctoral work. Karen is now a Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow in Management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, studying the measurement and morality of economic “productivity” in Atlantic Canada. Although Karen defended in the fall of 2012 and could have attended convocation in June – she chose to defer to the November ceremony so that she could be awarded her degree along with her husband who received his PhD in History.

Nick Scott‘s thesis “Reassembling Urban Travel: Mobilities, Neighbourhoods, and Off-Car Possibilities” examines contemporary and historical city planning trajectories for the city of Ottawa. He is now teaching at the University of Ottawa and building on his Ph.D. research by exploring the politics and practice of urban bicycle travel comparing Canada and Europe. Nick defended in May 2012.

Curtis’s work extends from the history of weights and measures to the contemporary regulation of youth sexuality, and from the politics and practices of census-making in 19^th century Canada and the development of schooling in Quebec to the sociology of African-American music.

Curtis’ election coincides with the publication of his fifth book, Ruling by Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology.  Ruling by Schooling Quebec provides a rich and detailed account of colonial politics from 1760 to 1841 by following repeated attempts by government to school the people of Quebec.

In Canada, recognition in the RSC is the highest honour that scholars, artists and scientists can achieve and is only conferred upon those who have distinguished themselves among their peers.  As Canada’s national academy, the RSC exists to recognize academic excellence, to advise governments and organizations and to promote Canadian culture.

About the Royal Society:
The Royal Society of Canada: the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada was established under an Act of Parliament in 1882 as the senior Canadian collegium of distinguished scholars, artists and scientists. The primary objective of the Society is to promote learning and research in the arts, the humanities, and the social and natural sciences. As a national, bilingual organization consisting of over 2000 Fellows and over 40 Institutional Members from every province, the RSC is Canada’s National Academy.

In the article, Mire examines the close cooperation between publicly funded universities and private industries in the research development and globalization of quasi pharmaceutical high-end skin whitening and anti-ageing ‘cosmeceuticals’.

The article entitled “The Scientification of Skin Whitening and the Entrepreneurial University-Linked Corporate Scientific Officer” was recently published in the Canadian Journal for Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education.

In her critique, Mire deconstructs the interlocking strategies of scientific entrepreneurialism and academic capitalism in the research and development of high-end skin whitening and anti-aging cosmeceuticals.  She explains that skin whitening and anti-aging cosmeceuticals are growing, lucrative markets whose global reach are greatly facilitated by new scientific innovations and aggressive internet advertising.

Her work has been well received by critics and peers, which has subsequently helped in initiating debate on a topic which will inevitably become more prevalent as time passes.

An example of this is a recent article by David Blades of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria.  Blades has used Mire’s article as a foundation to build a broader argument on the social, health, ethical, economic, pedagogical implications of skin whitening and anti-aging products.

Read Blades’s Full Article

Ultimately, Mire’s research goal is to effectively interrogate the extent to which this research and these products promote the biomedicalization and racialization of women’s bodies and skin—A pertinent topic with very serious social consequences.

Read Mire’s Full Article

A native of Quebec City, Carrier-Moisan spent her post graduate years studying migrant female factory workers in Brazil, and how they dealt with and dissented against the harsh realities of dependently living on oppressive labour structures.

Before studying anthropology, Carrier-Moisan achieved a college degree in special education.  Upon completion of college, she made the decision to go volunteering in Central America and West Africa. This experience was eye-opening in that it challenged her to rethink her assumption that “development” is necessarily good, and she thus began to see the paradoxes and fallacies of the “development industry” and the post-colonial relations it sustains. Carrier-Moisan made the decision that she wanted to learn more about this, among other things, and she opted to attend University to study anthropology.

In her time as both an undergraduate and graduate student, her interests shifted more specifically to the study of the global political economy and its impacts on disadvantage or marginalized groups with a first project on factory female workers in Brazil and a second on sex tourism in the same region.

In her study of female Brazilian factory workers, Carrier-Moisan noticed a very apparent trend:  many of these workers were leaving factory work to take part in Brazil’s prominent sex tourism industry.  Her research in the field of global sex tourism revealed, perhaps surprisingly, that some of the younger Brazilian women chose to make their livings in the sex tourism industry rather than following in the footsteps of their mothers and work in what they perceived as the more exploitative world of factory work.  Carrier-Moisan’s research attributed this to her finding that many young Brazilian women are fuelled by dreams of economic and social mobility, and for some of them, sex tourism is a point of access to what they perceive as a better life in Europe. In sex tourism, these women are oftentimes seeking to develop transnational ties with foreign men beyond the strict realm of sex tourism

In fact, Carrier-Moisan found that the encounters between these Brazilian women and foreign men extended beyond business, meaning the study of this subject could not be confined to the parameters of the term ‘labour’.  For her PhD Carrier-Moisan linked scholarship on labour to the academic research of Feminist scholars on affect, power and mobility in the processes of global capitalism.  Her dissertation entitled Gringo Love: Affect, Power, and Mobility in Sex Tourism, Northeast Brazil, examined the intersections of gender, migration and globalization while presenting the argument that ‘gringo love’ (i.e. love with foreigners) provides these Brazilian women with both a cultural script to engage in practices of mobility and functions as an escape from their estranged lives.

“In many ways, what brought me to anthropology in the first place remains at the centre of my intellectual journey: I now engage with what Laura Agustín terms the ‘rescue industry’ (i.e. attempts to ‘save’ migrant sex workers) and I am still driven by an intellectual curiosity to grasp the working of power, as well as issues of social justice.”

Carrier-Moisan is very excited to bring her research to Carleton University, and will hit the ground running as a new faculty member this fall semester.

“I feel extremely fortunate to be joining Carleton University, as it allows me to pursue what I most cherish, that is, to be engaging in critical teaching and meaningful research. I think that Carleton is an interesting place to be at the moment; it is growing, and increasingly recognized for both its cutting-edge research and teaching excellence. It is exciting to join such a vibrant institution where progressive and innovative ideas are fostered, and where there is a real commitment to provide students with a meaningful education.”

Teaching is a huge point of pride for Carrier-Moisan.  She hopes to relay to her students an understanding of the ubiquitous relevance of anthropology.

“As a teacher, I hope to convey to my students that anthropology may be applicable in their everyday lives and may provide them with a lens through which to rethink the world they inhabit. I also hope that my students may rethink their assumptions and biases through their engagement with the class materials. Anthropology is a vast field of study, but it does invite us to think about our humanity beyond some pure defining essence. As such, it provides us with the tool to think critically about the world we live in.”

She also wishes to convey to her students that research and theory can be interesting and important to their everyday lives.

“Another thing that I hope my students may walk away with from my classroom is a sense that theory is not this scary, unapproachable, obscure, and purely abstract thing bearing no connection to their lives. Rather, I see theory as something that we all engage in and I want my students to realize that we all develop worldview based on our practical engagement with the world which in turn influence our actions. I’d like to demystify theory as something that is disconnected from their lives and be able to apply the critical thinking developed in class to contemporary social issues.”

Prior to her appointment at Carleton, Carrier-Moisan has taught courses in the anthropology of gender ethnography of Latin America, globalization, and sexual labours.

At Carleton, in 2012-2013 she will be teaching undergraduate courses such as:

Introduction to Anthropology; (syllabus) and Anthropology & Gender; as well as a graduate seminar in Anthropology, Love & Globalization (course description)

Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan