This unique and innovative text provides undergraduate students with tools to think sociologically through the lens of everyday life. Normative social organization and taken for granted beliefs and actions are exposed as key mechanisms of power and social inequality in western societies today. By "unpacking the centre" students are encouraged to turn their social worlds inside out and explore alternatives to the dominant social order.The text is divided into three parts. In Part On...

What is a crime and how do we construct it? The answers to these questions are complex and entangled in a web of power relations that require us to think differently about processes of criminalization and regulation. This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged. It explores the dynamic interplay between practices of representation, processes of criminalization, and the ways that these circulat...

Thoroughly updated to include events that have occurred in the decade since it was originally published, this second edition of Making Work, Making Trouble re-establishes this work as the pre-eminent study of prostitution in Canada. Detailing the various forces that have presented prostitution as a social problem, Deborah R. Brock examines anti-prostitution campaigns, urban development, new policing strategies, and the responses of the media, the courts, and governments, as well a...

Between the morning of Wednesday, November 4, and the morning of Thursday, November 5, 1981, a fateful drama unfolded that changed Canada forever.In one last attempt to renew the constitution with the consent of the provinces, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau met behind closed doors in Ottawa with the ten premiers. It was the culmination of more than five decades of constitutional wrangling, and has been called the most important conference since the Fathers of Confederation g...

In Mighty Judgment Philip Slayton describes the important issues the Supreme Court decides for individual Canadians and for Canada as a nation, and the surprising and dramatic ways in which these decisions shape our future. In the Morgentaler case (1988), the court struck down laws restricting abortion, leaving Canada the only Western country without any abortion laws. In the Same-Sex Marriage Reference (2004), it decided that gays and lesbians could marry. In the Secession Refere...

Policing is a controversial subject, generating considerable debate. One issue of concern has been “racial profiling” by police, that is, the alleged practice of targeting individuals and groups on the basis of “race.” Racialized Policing argues that the debate has been limited by its individualized frame. As well, the concen- tration on police relations with people of colour means that Aboriginal people’s encounters with police receive far less scrutiny. Going beyond the interper...

What's going on with Canada's police? Once an institution that commanded respect and trust, the police are now widely regarded with skepticism and even suspicion. The dramatic death of Robert Dziekanski at the hands of the RCMP at Vancouver's airport, accusations of racial profiling, and the resistance of police to independent civilian oversight have created the impression of organizations and individuals accountable to no one and above the law.For the past twenty years, John Sewel...

John Rawls is a giant of modern political and democratic thought, but much of his important work is buried deep in weighty tomes, or hidden behind academic jargon that few people have the strength of will to decipher. This book is a concise and clearly written article length guide that covers important concepts in Rawls's democratic theory, including the idea of public reason and the politicized public sphere.

In the 1960s, the city of Halifax razed the black community of Africville under a program of urban renewal and 'slum clearance.' The city defended its actions by citing the deplorable living conditions in Africville, ignoring its own role in the creation of these conditions through years of neglect and the refusal of essential services. In the 1980s, the city created a park on Africville's former site, which has been a place of protest and commemoration for black citizens since its opening...

Ten Thousand Roses is a rich tapestry of stories told by over a hundred feminists from across Canada who organized, discussed, protested and struggled for change.Legalized abortion, resistance to male violence, pay equity and employment equity, legal equality through the Charter, pornography, anti-racism, action against poverty, rights for Aboriginal women and child care: these are the issues that rallied Canadian women to activism from the 1960s through the 1990s, the seco...

Is Canada a “queer utopia”? Canada was the fourth country in the world – and the first in the Western Hemisphere – to legalize same-sex marriage. Queer people in Canada enjoy many of the same legal rights as heterosexuals, and social acceptance of homosexuality has grown exponentially. But are these the goals that queer activists hoped to achieve? Is this legal regulation and normalization of homosexuality what the lesbian and gay liberation movement of the early 1970s fought for? Using th...

What range of possibilities might appear on the horizon to a young woman today as she contemplates her future compared to those envisioned by a young woman 150 years ago? And how would her daily life be different? The degree of change in women's lives in Canada over the last 150 years is staggering, and much is the result of the fight for greater equality. How did this change take place? Establishing equality as a fact of daily life has been a protracted struggle, and one that remains far f...