NEWS AND UPCOMING EVENTS

Faculty of Social Science




NEWS AND UPCOMING EVENTS

 

Prof. Dan Malleck recently recieved a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant to research factors that influenced Canada's drug laws.
Most laws are created to shape social behavior and drug laws are no different.
Brock Prof. Dan Malleck wants to know what factors influenced the creation of restrictive drug policy in Canada.
His research project “Baneful influences: The origin of drug control in Canada, 1800-1911,” recently received an Insight Grant worth $79,470 over three years from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to help him find out.
The Insight program supports excellence in scholarship to advance the collective understanding of individual and societal challenges.
“There is not much research looking at the period before Canada’s federal drug laws were passed,” says Malleck, associate professor in Community Health Sciences.
As a doctoral student in the 90s, Malleck explored the origins of drug laws in the 19th century. His research at the time focused on the development first of provincial then federal drug restriction, but only in Eastern Canada.
With the grant, he can now look at all off Canada identify the country’s complex regionalism.
“The very idea that drugs are bad has social and cultural origins just like the laws do,” Malleck explains. “In my research I explore how we got to the point in Canada where we thought some drugs were so dangerous that federal legislation had to severely limit their use. At the time (the laws were created), such restriction was very rare.
“It helps us to understand what people believe today about the morality of drug use.”
One of the unique aspects of this project is the development of a historical prescription database. Using prescription records of Canadian pharmacies from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, Malleck hopes to gain insight into the prescribing patterns of doctors and understand how policy change affected them and their patients.
“A law like the Opium Act of 1908 may have caused doctors to change the type of drugs they prescribed” Malleck explains. “Conversely, it may also have driven formerly recreational opium users to seek help from physicians.”
Malleck hopes that this research will enable us to understand not only the social factors affecting drug policy in the past, but also shed light on the cultural and social factors that drive restrictive drug policies today.
“Our ideas about drugs are rooted in the past,” Malleck says. “But those ideas, some of which are simply incorrect, shape current drug policy.”
Understanding this process can help to shape better drug laws in the future, he adds.

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Fight the Cut to Community Start Up

Raise OW/ODSP Rates Now!

Town Hall Meeting

to plan action and advocacy in the Region and to the Province

 

Start Me Up Niagara

17 Gale Crescent

Oct. 16th 4 – 6 pm

Food and child care provided. 

75% of Niagara CSUMB (Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit) recipients used the benefit for basic housing needs like rent and utilities. Other uses include fleeing domestic violence or recovering from bedbug infestations. (Report to Public Health and Social Services, September 4) 

Tell your story. Make your voice heard.Act Now to Save Housing Supports for People on OW and ODSP!

The Community Start-up and Maintenance Benefit is being cut.

The Community Start-up and Maintenance Benefit (CSUMB) is important because:

  • It assists people on social assistance – people who rely on OW or ODSP are among the most vulnerable in Ontario.
  • It provides people with the direct assistance they need to retain their housing and prevent homelessness – it can help them pay their rent or utility arrears, or help them move to safer or more secure housing.
  • It is a mandatory benefit – people who are denied are able to appeal the decision. This oversight ensures a measure of fairness for Ontarians with low-income and protects them from arbitrary decisions.

These critically important aspects of CSUMB will be eliminated  in January 2013. That's when the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing will transfer  half of current CSUMB funds to municipalities for local housing and homelessness programs, which are meant to serve an even larger pool of low-income people. The other half will be eliminated from social assistance altogether. CSUMB will cease to exist as of January 2013. (Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario)

For more information:

niagara.CSUMB.action@gmail.com

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Labour Studies Speakers Series 
The labour studies political economy speaker series has its second event today.  We are proud to present Stephen McBride, who will be giving a talk, "labour in a cold climate," today, October 9, 2012 at 3:30pm in PL 600.  We hope to see you there.

Stephen McBride is the Canada Research Chair in Public Policy and Globalization and professor of political science at McMaster University. He is the author of Not Working: State, Unemployment and Neo-conservatism in Canada (1992) which won the 1994 Smiley prize, and Paradigm Shift: Globalization and the Canadian State (2001; 2nd edition 2005). He is the co-author of Dismantling a Nation: Canada and the New World Order (1993; 2nd edition 1997) and of Private Affluence, Public Austerity: Economic Crisis and Democratic Malaise in Canada (2011). His current research is focussed on the impact of globalization on the state, and the political economy of labour and the welfare state.

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Intersectional Feminist Theory & Activism Speakers Series
 
Gender and the Criminalization of Indigenous people
Keynote Speaker // Christa Big Canoe
Location: TH 247
Date: Thursday October 11th 2012
Time: 5-7pm

Sponsored by: The Centre for Women?s and Gender Studies; the MA Social  
Justice and Equity Studies; Aboriginal Student Services
Supported by Funding From the Council of Research in Social Sciences,  
FOSS, Brock University
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Political Science Speaker's Series
The first talk in the labour studies / political economy speaker series will be this Thursday (September 27th), at 2:30pm in the Sankey Chambers. Justin Paulson, from Carleton University, will deliver a talk entitled "Why Do Movements Decline?" All are welcome to attend - light refreshments will be served. Please consider attending, and feel free to distribute this reminder widely.
Justin Paulson teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. His research and teaching focus on questions of Marxian critical theory, social movements, and political economy. This talk stems from his ongoing project surrounding the relationship between radical imagination and social movement development and strategy. He also is also researching neoliberal urbanism in Canada and the uneven reification of capital. Justin has written for such journals as The Socialist Register, Affinities, and Cultural Logic, and is on the editorial boards of Studies in Political Economy, Mediations, and Red Quill Books.
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The second seminar in the Society for Philosophy & Culture and
Institute on Globalization & the Human Condition
2012/13 "Crossing Borders" speaker series is coming up on Friday October the 5th at
McMaster University.
"Haunting Sovereignties: the Border as Enforcement Archipelago" by Alison Mountz (Wilfrid Laurier University, Geography and Environmental Sciences)
Responses by Jane Helleiner (Brock University, Sociology) and Peter
Nyers (McMaster University, Political Science)
Friday 5th October, 3:30pm in Chester New Hall (CNH) 607B. McMaster University
In order to map what many scholars have called the "securitisation of migration," it is essential to begin with the border. Once conceived of as a line drawn by cartographers, the border has undergone dramatic spatial and conceptual transformations. It is transnational, fragmented, biometric, intimate, privatised, contracted out, policed onshore and offshore, haunting. Local enforcement officials internal to sovereign territory take up the work of border enforcement and federal authorities travel abroad to police borders in foreign territory. These vertiginous spatial logics repeat themselves time and again.
This talk maps these largely hidden geographies to show how sovereign powers haunt migrants through the displacement and relocation of the border. States increasingly invest in intimacies of daily life,
exercising biopolitical power through the simultaneous integration of information about the body and isolation of those very bodies through remote practices of interception and detention. The border is reconstituted through this fragmentation.

Sovereign power at once fails and is reconfigured through the performative work of enforcement that plays on what is hypervisible and what is left unseen. Through the blurring of on and offshore, inside and out, intimate knowledge and publicly securitised agendas, haunting sovereignties extend outward like tentacles, moving the border to intercepted bodies, carrying out detention in ambiguous places between states through "third parties." This haunting continues even as those forces made invisible continually reappear, their absence ever-present.John Sorenson will be presenting a talk, as part of the Labour Studies Political Economy Speakers Series, on the Political Economy of Animal Rights. The talk is from 2:30 to 4:00, this Tuesday (March 20th), in the Sankey Chambers. Light refreshments will be served.

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John Sorenson is professor and chair of sociology at Brock University, where he teaches courses on critical animal studies, racism, and globalization. He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on various ways of representing animals. His previous books, stemming from research on war, nationalism, and refugees, include Culture of Prejudice: Arguments in Critical Social Science; Ghosts and Shadows: Construction of Identity and Community in an African Diaspora; Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa; Disaster and Development in the Horn of Africa; and African Refugees. His most recent books, centering on animals, are Ape and About Canada – Animal Rights.

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1812 Panel  

Indigenous Perspectives on the War of 1812: Alternative Histories and Artistic
Representations

Panelists:
Alan Corbiere, Ojibwe Cultural Foundation,
Shelly Niro, artist and curator
Carol Jacobs, Brock University Elder in residence
Moderated by Renée Bedard, Tecumseh Centre

PLUS the exhibit:
Four Artists from Six Nations, paintings & photographs by
Haudenosaunee artists

Friday, March 23rd, 3 - 5 pm | Niagara Artists Center | 354 St. Paul Street |

Sponsors: Social Justice and Equity Studies MA, History Department,
Aboriginal Education Council, Tecumseh Centre for Aboriginal Research
and Education, Aboriginal Student Services, Women's and Gender
Studies, Brock University, and the Niagara Artists Centre

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Join us for the First Annual African Heritage Lecture Honourable Dr. Jean Augustine “Transcending Ghosts of the Past: The Future
of Black Political Engagement”
February 10, 2012, 1:00 pm
Sankey Chambers, McKenzie Chown A Block
Brock University
Opening Remarks by
Dr. Murray Knuttila,
Vice-President and Provost
Address by
Dr. Wilma Morrison
Presented by
Brock-Niagara African-Canadian Renaissance Group
Sponsored by
International Services, MA in SJES, OHRES, Sociology
http://brockniagaraafricangroup.weebly.com/african-heritage-month-2012.html
 


SOCIOLOGY SPEAKER SERIES 2011‐2012
Dr. June Corman & Dr. Ann Duffy
Wednesday February 15, 2012
10:00 a.m.‐12:00 p.m. Academic South 427
Personal Troubles, Public Issues: Rethinking the Personal‐Work Connection
Abstract:
We recently gave a presentation at an event hosted by the Niagara Workplace Planning Board. We
stressed that current economic realities (dramatic reductions in good jobs, rapid expansion of
marginalized and non-standard forms of employment) have negatively impacted many Canadian
workers. Managing a suitable work-life balance is becoming increasingly problematic. Even more
importantly, acquiring a secure job is extremely difficult in the Niagara Region. In discussing these
troublesome consequences of the new economy for individuals, families and communities, we
developed concrete suggestions for how to reconceptualize the work-life nexus through a more
cohesive approach to life and work. We suggested that employment support and services might be
effectively embedded in larger conversations about civic involvement and personal well-being. Our
talk for the speakers series summarizes this presentation and then reflects on what it means to do
“public sociology”.
Everyone Is Welcome
Snacks will be provided