Canadian Social Science Research Articles

A traditional ecological knowledge summit

A traditional ecological knowledge summit The Global Center for Climate Change and Transboundary Waters (GCTW) cohosts a Traditional Ecological Knowledge Summit (1), as Gail Krantzberg (2), Peter Czajkowski, Dawn Martin-Hill, Rohini Patel, Hiliary Monteith, and Drew Gronewold explain. The Global Center for Climate Change and Transboundary Waters (GCTW) integrates hydroclimate modeling, water quality forecasting, and community-engaged mixed methods that harmonize and propagate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Indigenous Knowledge (IK), and Western Science (WS) into robust 21st-century transboundary water resources governance protocols. The U.S. National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council fund the Center. It supports a multinational network of researchers that is designed to promote information sharing across borders.

Themed section introduction: Emerging research on racial/ethnic inequality in Canada.

Themed section introduction: Emerging research on racial/ethnic inequality in Canada.

Quick Responses of Canadian Social Scientists to COVID-19: A Case Study of the 2020 Federal COVID-19-Specific Grant Recipients

COVID-19 prompted an abundance of independent and collaborative quick response disaster research (QRDR) initiatives globally. The 2020 federal COVID-19-driven granting opportunities initiated the first official QRDR effort in Canadian history, engaging social scientists to rapidly address the pandemic-related societal influences. This study aims to portray the landscape of this nascent social science QRDR workforce through the first round of federal COVID-19-specific grant recipients. A case study approach was employed to analyze 337 social science projects with 1119 associated researchers, examining the demographic structure of these COVID-19-driven social science researchers and their research projects’ characteristics. Accordingly, the findings are presented through the following two streams: (1) From a researcher perspective, this case study describes researcher typology, geographic location, primary discipline, and educational background, highlighting the diverse characteristics of social sciences researchers, and uneven research development across Canada. (2) From a research project perspective, this case study identifies and synthesizes research project subjects, themes, collaborations, and Canadian distinctions, emphasizing the need for galvanizing cooperation and focusing on uniquely Canadian contexts. The case study illustrates challenges associated with data curation that pose barriers to developing a nuanced understanding of the Canadian social science community COVID-19 research landscape. Consequently, the case study develops three recommendations to improve QRDR development in Canada: promoting information transparency, dissemination, and updates; improving hazards and disaster research workforce evaluation; and enhancing multi-stakeholder cooperation.

Access to COVID-19 vaccination for displaced Venezuelans in Latin America: a rapid scoping review

BackgroundVenezuelan migration is the second largest international displacement in contemporary history. Yet, amid global calls for the inclusion of migrants and refugees in COVID-19 vaccination priority groups, little is known about how Latin American countries are prioritising COVID-19 vaccination for Venezuelans. This rapid scoping review addresses this gap, taking up a Latin American Social Medicine approach to assess the region's sociopolitical context and explore the extent to which Venezuelan migrants are considered in COVID-19 vaccination strategies in Latin America. MethodsWe conducted a three-phased rapid scoping review assessing peer-reviewed literature, gray literature, and government documents addressing COVID-19 vaccine access for displaced Venezuelans in Latin America. Documents published in English, Spanish, or Portuguese between January 2020 and June 2021 were included. Peer-reviewed literature search yielded 142 results and 13 articles included in the analysis; Gray literature screening resulted in 68 publications for full-text review and 37 were included; and official Ministry of Health policies in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru were reviewed in-depth. Screening and data extraction used a combination of online platforms (Covidence, Google Forms, Zotero, and Excel) and the team met twice weekly to review, compare, discuss, analyse, and interpret data across a 6-week period. FindingsFindings from country-level policies revealed a heterogeneous and shifting policy landscape amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which strongly juxtaposed calls for a rights-based, social justice approach to COVID-19 vaccination evidenced in the peer-reviewed and gray literature. For example, under extreme resource constraints resulting from a chronically underfunded health system and mass Venezuelan migration. Colombia's vaccination plan excluded migrants with irregular migration status. Countries prioritised COVID-19 vaccines to certain “at-risk” groups defined by individual epidemiological factors rather than social vulnerability, limiting vaccine access for displaced Venezuelans in the region. Country-level policies differentiated, at times arbitrarily, between refugees, irregular migrants, and regular migrants, with important implications for vaccine access. While international right to health legislation prohibits discrimination based on migration status and urges states to refrain from denying access to preventive health services, these results suggest the need for further guidance on terminology to better contend with migrants' social vulnerabilities. InterpretationCOVID-19 is rapidly evolving and there is an urgent need for rights-based approaches to vaccination that consider sociopolitical contexts, especially impacts of mass migration. Findings underscore the need to better integrate Venezuelan migrants into vaccination strategies, not only as a matter of social justice, but a pragmatic public health strategy. FundingFunding provided by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant.

The role of positive psychological capital in softening the relationship between workplace boycott and job engagement: an analytical study

The role of positive psychological capital in softening the relationship between workplace boycott and job engagement: an analytical study

The impact of buyer shopping orientations and demographic factors on the purchasing for different product types- in the context of online shopping

The impact of buyer shopping orientations and demographic factors on the purchasing for different product types- in the context of online shopping

The Landscape of Science Communication in Contemporary Canada: A Focus on Anglophone Actors and Networks

The landscape of contemporary media presents challenges and opportunities for science writers and communicators. These issues have not yet been fully understood. This paper presents the findings of collaborative work conducted to identify the growth in numbers of social media communicators who are writing about science for the Canadian public. We used emerging media research tools, including Altmetrics, and traditional survey tools. Our goal was to help Canada's professional member associations—Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC) and the Association des Communicateurs Scientifiques du Québec (ACS)— map the changing science communication landscape in Canada. Using an online survey tool, we compared survey responses from social media science communicators we identified to those of professional science communication members of SWCC and the ACS. We found that Canadian social media science communicators were younger, were paid less (or not at all) for their science communication activities, and had been communicating science for fewer years than other science communicators. They were more likely to have a science background (rather than communication, journalism or education) and were less likely to be members of professional associations. They tended to communicate with one another through their own informal networks. These findings provide professional science communication organizations in Canada with an empirical base from which to develop training, support and outreach activities aimed at improving the quality of public engagement with science in Canada.

Engaging with Identity Politics in Canadian Political Science

AbstractThis paper critiques the deployment of the term “identity politics” in Canadian political science. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of research articles in leading English language academic journals in the Canadian social sciences, we examine whose politics are labelled identity politics and what intellectual work transpires through this label. Identity politics tends to be applied to scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, but with a lack of analytical rigour, indicating a degree of conceptual looseness. Moreover, the designation identity politics is not neutral; it is often mobilized as a rhetorical device to distance authors from scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, and to inscribe a materialist/culturalist divide in claims-making. We argue that the effect of this demarcation of identity from politics is to control the boundaries of political discourse, limiting who and what gains entry into the political. This serves to reassert an exclusionary conception of Canadian identity.

A Response to S. N. Balagangadhara’s “Translation, Interpretation and Culture”

S. N. Balagangadhara wrote an essay entitled, “Translation, Interpretation and Culture: On the Disingenuity of a Comparative Theology,” which appeared in this journal in 2014. In it, Balagangadhara defends his theory of translation and supports that theory by deconstructing the field of comparative theology, which he finds unreflective and unsophisticated, at best. The tool of that deconstruction is a sharply critical assessment of several sections of my 2010 Comparative Theology. That book, meant to introduce readers to the field even while not being itself a work of comparative theological practice, draws on my other, earlier books, none of which Balagangadhara seems to have read. Given Balagangadhara’s sharply negative judgment on my work —assessing it to be fruitless, disingenuous, dissimulating, dishonest—I feel it necessary to respond to his essay, and I am grateful to Canadian Social Science for the opportunity to write this brief reply. I will first note some of his criticisms and respond to them. I then comment on what appears to be most crucial to Balagangadhara, his own theoretical reflections on translation at the start of the essay; I will note too how his comments on my work turn out to serve as a foil to his own theorizing, perhaps as a warning to those who do not work out their translation theory first. Finally, I comment briefly on the third, constructive part of his essay, with its unexpected reference to the 1960s reforming Council of the Catholic Church, Vatican II, and the intriguing notion that Balagangadhara might make a constructive contribution to post-Vatican II attitudes toward the diversity of religions.

Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement, by Steven High

Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement, by Steven High. Vancouver & Toronto, University of British Columbia Press, 2014. xi, 441 pp. $34.95 Cdn (paper). From 2005 to 2012, Steven High, the director of Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, was the ringmaster of a sprawling, ambitious, and highly generative collaborative project called Montreal Life Stories. Supported by a CURA (Community-University Research Alliance) grant from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council as well as hundreds of dedicated university and community volunteers, the project was a collaborative effort to document and curate the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide, and other mass human rights violations. This book is both a testament to the culmination of that work and a structural ethnography of the process. It does not offer closure or any grand conclusions to the big questions of mass violence in the 20th century--an impossible task given the scale and scope of atrocity and the inherently irresolvable nature of trauma--but focuses on the continuum of reflection, dialogue, commemoration, and research (p. 300). Michael Frisch's notion of is the moral spine of the book and of the project as a whole. As interpreted and manifest by High and the MLS team, this principle was not only a literal application of the CURA mission of ongoing collaboration and mutual learning between community and academic partners, but evolved into a broader model of practical ethics in public scholarship. Unusually for an oral history project, where the main deliverable is a data dump into the archives, as much attention was given to curation of the life stories as their collection, The book's two main sections detail these aspects of the project, though this analytical separation belies the degree to which they overlapped and were mutually implicated in practice. After an introductory overview of the project--appropriately anchored by the testimony of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide--the book's first section examines the interviewing process from a variety of perspectives. Chapter one details the long process by which the ethical and methodological considerations of interviewing survivors of trauma and mass violence were unpacked and negotiated. The careful ways the project was collectively imagined (p. 18) ultimately framed a theory and practice of sharing authority in the design, training, tone, and implementation of the larger project. Other chapters in this section detail the activities of the Rwandan, Jewish, Haitian, and Cambodian working groups. Each confronted unique challenges and developed best practices that were shared among other working groups to inform an increasingly sophisticated praxis across the project. The final chapter in this section examines an individual case study in detail, a close critical forensic reading that also functions as a useful step-by-step guide through the interview process. The second section focuses on the working groups dedicated to curatorial praxis (what CURA calls knowledge mobilization) with refugee youth, education, and performance. …

Erasing the Social from Social Science: The Intellectual Costs of Boundary-Work and the Canadian Institute of Health Research

In 2009, Canadian social science research funding underwent a transition. Social science health-research was shifted from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), an agency previously dominated by natural and medical science. This paper examines the role of health-research funding structures in legitimizing and/or delimiting what counts as ‘good’ social science health research. Engaging Gieryn’s (1983) notion of ‘boundary-work’ and interviews with qualitative social science graduate students, it investigates how applicants developed proposals for CIHR. Findings show that despite claiming to be interdisciplinary, the practical mechanisms through which CIHR funding is distributed reinforce rigid boundaries of what counts as legitimate health research. These boundaries are reinforced by applicants who felt pressure to prioritize what they perceived was what funders wanted (accommodating natural-science research culture), resulting in erased, elided, and disguised social science theories and methods common for ‘good social science.’

Donna Lamping (1953–2011)

Donna Lamping, who has died at age 58, was an international expert in the field of health psychology, health status and quality of life assessment. Educated and trained in centres of excellence in Canada and the USA, she brought her cutting-edge knowledge to the UK in 1992. Despite her early death, the cadre of young scientists she nurtured and developed over the past two decades will sustain her impact. Donna grew up in Toronto. After graduating in psychology from the University of Waterloo, she was awarded a prestigious doctoral fellowship from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council to study at Harvard University. Even at this early stage, her interest was as much on patient welfare as on methodological rigour, a combination that was to feature throughout her professional career. In her doctoral research, she investigated how patients with chronic illness adapt and adjust to the inevitable stresses of their illness. A research post at Harvard was followed by assistant professorships at McMaster University in Hamilton, Fordham University in New York and McGill University in Montreal. Throughout this period, her research focused on understanding the behavioural impact of chronic illness, initially considering patients with chronic kidney disease requiring haemodialysis but later shifting to the challenges facing those diagnosed with HIV and AIDS. Her move to McGill was a key to her subsequent career, as she left behind the disciplinary comfort of psychology and entered a multidisciplinary world, working with epidemiologists, statisticians, economists and others. Here, she had to demonstrate how essential psychology was to the understanding of health and disease. In turn, exposure to these other disciplines led her to what was to become her lasting concern, the measurement of patients’ own perceptions of their condition. During her time at McMaster, Donna met Itesh Sachdev, a social psychologist of language, who she married in Nepal in 1991. By then Itesh was at Birkbeck College, London and the travails of sustaining an inter-continental relationship led Donna to join the staff of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She also had an appointment at the National Health Service that facilitated the practical application of newly developed measurement instruments. Apart from establishing psychometrics in the LSHTM, Donna made major managerial contributions both as Head of the Health Services Research Unit and in transforming the School’s doctoral programme. Over the following two decades, Donna confirmed her position not only as a leader in the UK but also internationally. She was a long-standing member of ISOQOL, the International Society for Quality Of Life Research. She served as a member of its board from 2002 to 2005, on its executive committee from 2006 to 2008, and was its president in 2007. During her tenure as president, Donna spearheaded a number of important initiatives designed to strengthen the society’s infrastructure and to ensure its continuity and its growth. This included the following: establishing an Advisory Council of Past President’s to harness the collective experience of previous Society leaders, and thus help guide the development of a more strategic, long-term view of where the society wants and needs to go; forming several committees to ensure high-quality annual meetings and a professional leadership structure; and, perhaps most importantly, nurturing the New Investigators Special Interest Group as a home for the younger generation of scientists and future leaders of the Society. Those are some of the tangibles. But Donna meant so much more to the Society. She was an elegant, articulate, sensitive and extremely skilled leader, who taught by example. She was generous of her time, respectful of others’ points of view, while at the same time keeping an eye on the ball, making sure that there was agenda to pursue and pursuing it in such a way that the job got down. Donna had an uncanny talent for combining patience and pragmatism. She had an iron fist in a velvet glove, with the diplomacy and tact to resolve things rationally, and the guts to take on a no-nonsense tone when circumstances demanded it. Donna was delightful, intelligent and indefatigable. Developing insulin-dependent diabetes in her forties was taken in her stride, something she was not going to allow to interfere with her zest for life, her optimism and her extraordinary generosity to family, friends, colleagues and students. The same spirit was apparent when, in summer 2010, she discovered the bowel cancer to which she has succumbed. Perhaps her earlier studies of adjustment to illness had provided her with the insight to be able to remain so life affirming until the end. Donna is survived by her husband, Itesh, and her mother and sister, Helen and Gina.

The Toronto Traditional Healers Project: An Introduction

This paper offers a brief introduction to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) sponsored research on the role of African, Caribbean, and South Asian traditional healers and their healing practices in Toronto. Ethnic minority groups, especially in the large metropolitan cities in North America, have been accessing and practicing traditional healing since the days of slavery using healing practices such as Animism, Voodoo, Orisha, Santeria and Espiritismo to support their health and wellbeing. However, the healers and their practices have been excluded from mainstream culture, and are forced underground as a result of the hegemony of Western medical models. This paper discusses the background, rationale and the context of the Toronto traditional healers project. The results and analysis of the Caribbean and the South Asian traditional healers are presented in this special issue following this introductory paper.

Job Market Boom and Gender Tide: The Rise of Canadian Social Sciences in the 20th Century

In the last century, the development of the social sciences in institutions of higher learning has been nothing short of spectacular. This is especially true when considering the period opened by the Second World War, a time when the number of students rose exponentially, faculty body grew accordingly, and the volume of research and publications skyrocketed. Yet a global and quantitative analysis of the evolution of Canadian social sciences is still lacking. If some excellent monographs have contributed to a better knowledge of specific disciplines, Canadian scholars did not produce a global cartography of social sciences' development over the last century. This is precisely what this paper endeavours to provide. Its first section explores the rise in student enrolment (with a special analysis of gender composition), the second looks at the growth of faculty hiring and the third section suggests some hypotheses concerning the spectacular growth of social science disciplines through a discussion of Frank and Gabler's recent book, Reconstructing the University. These sections will provide an introductory global overview of the evolution of social sciences in university-level institutions in Canada. This historical analysis will help us better grasp the changes that affected Canadian social sciences through the last century.

Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian Cities (review)

Reviewed by: Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian Cities Nikolaos I. Liodakis Cheryl Teelucksingh , ed. Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian Cities. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006. 202 pp. Index. $32.95 sc. Canadian social science has been long preoccupied with relationships of domination and subordination among and within ethnic and racialized groups. Under present conditions of capitalist globalization, we are witnessing an increase in capital movement and profits on the one hand, and restrictions in the movement of labour and world-wide increased levels of poverty and inequality on the other. Global and local demographics are changing; so is space. Despite the diminishing role of the state in certain areas, the Canadian state has been and continues to be actively engaged in the production, reproduction, and maintenance of hegemonic ideologies like multiculturalism/ interculturalism, in processes of racialization and ever-changing meanings of race, as well as in capitalist material relations and practices. We are also witnessing increasing ethnic/racialized group resistance against the power of the "dominant stakeholders." Claiming Space is an edited volume consisting of ten well-written chapters, primarily concerned with racialized spaces and the socio-political power/resistance relations that permeate them. It deals with processes of racialization and several urban manifestations of social inequality (13) from a postmodernist/post-structuralist perspective. In Teelucksingh's work (chapter 1), Soja's trialectics (from Lefebvre, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and post-colonialist theories) are coupled with Miles' conceptualization of racialization in order to provide the basic tenets of a flexible theoretical framework, and set the stage to examine issues central to Canadian social sciences: the production, reproduction of, and resistance to dominant [End Page 202] ethnic/racial culture(s), the urban spaces within which social relations operate, and critiques of the ideologies, processes, and material practices by which racialized populations —mainly new immigrants —are othered. Treating space as a) objective and subjective, b) material and metaphorical, and c) as both a medium and outcome of social life (6), contributors to this volume conceptualize, analyze and criticize various spaces in major Canadian cities, which constitute sites where socio-political and economic struggles occur. Such sites and struggles are both structural and individual (those of socially constituted subjects). In Canadian urban centres there exist many China-towns, Greek-towns, Little Italys and other ethnic neighoubrhoods and spaces within which the "stakeholders of power" act as agents in the reproduction of the particularities of spaces; spaces serve the socio-political and economic interests of power and its agents (9-10). Racial meanings and hierarchies found in those spaces are not treated as fixed or monolithic, but as part of the contexts within which they operate, as part of historical processes. They are historically specific, thus sensitive to context and fluid (4). Spatiality is material and symbolic; it is contested. Space is part of the outcome(s) of a myriad of struggles over its meaning(s) and constitution (8). Conflicts of self and other manifest themselves as conflicts over claims of space. The book may be divided thematically into two parts. The first treats space as concrete, physical, and objective. It includes chapters by Train (3), Panagakos (4), and Beneventi (8). Train examines the spatial conflicts between Toronto's Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish communities by analyzing how the former carved out their own space by building the Kehila Centre. This work shows that even othered communities are heterogeneous and that struggles over space occur within them as well. It demonstrates how "claiming space is about asserting the recognition and inclusion" (60) of minorized identities within already minorized groups, as well as society at large. As such, this is a very important piece of research, and it is a pity that there are not many qualitative analyses of such differences within other ethnic/racialized groups available in Canada. Panagakos, although referring to the exclusion of minorized subgroups (homosexual people) from mainstream organizations, is mainly concerned with how Calgary's Greek community is reinventing suburban spaces in order to accommodate (hegemonic) notions of ethnicity, patriarchy, age hierarchies, and multiculturalism (79). The role of the state in selling multiculturalism and that of the Greek Orthodox Church in stratifying the community (e.g., in terms of gender...

From production to publishing at CJC online: Experiences, insights, and considerations for adoption

We describe and analyze the dynamics of online publishing and technological development at the Canadian Journal of Communication with a focus on issues of ownership and control, financial stability, technological expertise, editorial outlook, and readership demand. Based on over ten years of experience with online publishing, the authors provide suggestions on how more widespread adoption of online publishing might be achieved in Canadian social science and humanities journals given the current and quickly evolving publishing environment.

Canadian Social Science and Humanities Online Journal Publishing, the Synergies Project, and the Creation and Representation of Knowledge

This paper opens three topics of discussion. After providing some social context, it describes the Synergies project, a Canadian university library/journal partnership designed to allow small Canadian social science and humanities journals to publish online. It then describes the capacities of one and the capacities and development of a second software package that are basic to the success of the project. It concludes with a description of how online publishing changes the nature of representation and thus knowledge.

Taking Responsible Risks

Taking Responsible Risks1 DeNel Rehberg Sedo (bio) Robert fulford’s october 2007 piece in the National Post re-ignited old debates about what kind of scholarly investigation is creditable and worthy of public funding. I am a researcher educated in a critical studies-based communication program, but employed by a professional studies department and experienced in applied communications. With this background and current engagement in multidisciplinary reading research, I am no stranger to these types of debates. Unfortunately, much of the difficulty that I face in communicating the “worthiness” of my investigations comes not from the likes of Fulford, nor from the general public, but, rather, from colleagues within my own program, university, and sshrc -defined “disciplines.” My story of trying to get funding from sshrc will illustrate how hard it is to have sshrc acknowledge interdisciplinary thinking and research. As anyone who self-identifies as “not fitting” within their discipline knows, research discrimination can be detrimental, not only to one’s [End Page 21] sense of place within the academy but also to one’s career. In this essay, I will briefly outline my own experiences in the grant process in order to encourage readers to commit to appreciating the value of research outside of their own areas and in the hope of persuading sshrc itself to rethink its evaluation process for the long term. This kind of commitment calls for a suspension of what I, crudely, call disciplinary fence-pissing. Much like dogs mark their territory by, well, peeing on fences, scholars are often trained to protect their own disciplines by finding fault in other areas while holding up their own as sacrosanct. I believe that this short-sightedness results in Fulfordesque ignorance which can be detrimental to Canadian social science and humanities research, to our students’ learning, and, ultimately, to our ability to publicly and privately support the likes of Jes Battis, who works in an interdisciplinary field which some in the academy wish to belittle just as much as Fulford does. As my story will show, I’m not going to make an argument for the obliteration of disciplinary boundaries, but rather I’m calling for an openness to the permeability of those borders by readers of this journal, particularly when they are part of the sshrc evaluation process. The result could be enhanced collaboration possibilities, facilitated assessment processes, and research results that could inform both scholarly and public knowledge-making. Here is my story. After a short career in professional communication, and a subsequent one in university administration, I began my phd studies at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication. Solidly ensconced as the program is in critical cultural studies, my American graduate-level education and professional role as a co-operative education co-ordinator for the School was a mark against me. Through the grapevine, I was told that my application lacked critical thought and that it was too “corporate-based.” Like many students, I am certain, I was fortunate to find a supportive feminist supervisor who does not privilege one kind of knowledge over another and several like-minded mentors. One was cultural theorist Anthony Wilden. One day, early in my sfu years and much to my horror, Wilden yelled out down the hall, “Sedo, I know just by looking at you that you’re American: you take risks and get things done.” It was embarrassing, but really, Wilden was right. I do get things done, and I do it by thinking big and taking risks. It took me nearly eight years to finish my phd program while working full-time and teaching on the side. Both my experience and education inform my current research agenda, but I found this difficult to communicate in early promotion and grant applications. Because I was a relatively “new” scholar, I lacked the scholarly experience and language needed to justify research plans. This [End Page 22] became painfully evident when I received the results of my first sshrc application. Along with my current research partner, Danielle Fuller of the American and Canadian Studies program at the University of Birmingham, I decided in 2003 to apply for a sshrc grant. Our three-year project to investigate...

Carl Dawson and the Research Ideal: The Evolution of a Canadian Sociologist

Carl Dawson's development as a sociologist reflected a general trend in sociology's evolution out of theology and social work. Trained as a minister, Dawson rejected the religious vocation at some point after World War I to become a social scientist. Appointed to McGill in 1922, he strove to establish research as the foundation for understanding society, questioning the efficacy of social reform. His convictions stemmed from his Maritime Baptist background, wartime experience and education at the University of Chicago. In 1914, Dawson left the Maritime region where he had been born and raised to attend the divinity school of the University of Chicago. In so doing, he was following a well travelled route: poor economic conditions drove numerous people out of the Maritime provinces between 1910 and 1929, and the lack of doctoral programmes in Canada compelled many students to attend American graduate schools. With its strong reputation for research, the University of Chicago was a popular choice. Its divinity school, a Baptist stronghold, was attractive to adherents of that faith. That a number of its faculty members were Canadians also attested to the institutional ties that had long linked Baptists in Canada and the northern United States. In 1918, Dawson recessed from graduate studies for war service and resumed his studies in 1919 - his interests now sharply turned towards sociology. This shift was partly influenced by the Chicago divinity school's close ties with the sociology department - a result of the historic link between the social gospel and sociology generally - but was also the product of the school's position as a leader in liberal and radical theological doctrine. The modernists within the institution stressed that all studies of society, including religion, must accord with modern empirical methods. That, in addition to their acceptance of the ideas of John Dewey and the Chicago School regarding social development, led some to the conclusion that religion itself was but a form of group behaviour. In reflecting all those currents of thought, Dawson's Ph.D. thesis, "The Social Nature of Knowledge," hinted at the reasons for his departure from the ministry for a career in social science. Showing that all culture and knowledge, morals and ideals had social origins, Dawson concluded that even fact was not fixed truth but represented the decision of individuals to agree on certain points and issues. This explained why Dawson believed that research - a collection of facts - would aid in understanding society. The thesis was also marked by an opposition to social action, stemming from what Dawson had witnessed during the war and the upheaval which followed, but also, it must be argued, from the antiauthoritarian and antihierarchial strain in the Baptist faith. The fact that Dawson eschewed social action in much the same way as did Harold Innis, another Baptist educated at Chicago, suggests that there exists a tradition in the development of Canadian social science quite different from the one which Brian McKillop has traced in A Disciplined Intelligence, and it was that legacy which Dawson's brand of sociology represented.

Several Roads Lead to International Norms, but Few Via International Socialization: A Case Study of the European Commission

Can an international organization socialize those who work within it? The European Commission of the European Union is a crucial case because it is an autonomous international organization with a vocation to defend supranational norms. If this body cannot socialize its members, which international organization can? I develop theoretical expectations about how time, organizational structure, alternative processes of preference formation, and national socialization affect international socialization. To test these expectations for the European Commission, I use two surveys of top permanent Commission officials, conducted in 1996 and 2002. The analysis shows that support for supranational norms is relatively high, but that this is more because of national socialization than socialization in the Commission. National norms, originating in prior experiences in national ministries, loyalty to national political parties, or experience with one's country's organization of authority, decisively shape top officials' views on supranational norms. There are, then, several roads to international norms.For comments and advice, I am grateful to Jeffrey Checkel, Gary Marks, Donald Searing, and the editors and two anonymous reviewers for International Organization. An earlier draft was presented at the Center for European Studies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This project received funding from the Center for European Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from two grants by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (1996–99, 1999–2002). Gina Cosentino, Erica Edwards, Michael Harvey, and Moira Nelson provided research assistance.