Kirsten Emiko McAllister – författare

For communities who have been the target of political violence, the after-effects can haunt what remains of their families, their communities, and the societies in which they live. Terrain of Memory tells the story of the Japanese Canadian elders who built a memorial in 1994 to mark a village in an isolated mountainous valley in British Columbia with their history of internment. It explores memory as a powerful collective cultural practice, following elders and locals as they worked together to transform a site of political violence into a space for remembrance. They transformed a valley where once over 7,000 women, men, and children were interned into a pilgrimage site where Japanese Canadians can mourn and also pay their respects to the wartime generation. This is a compelling story about how collectively excavating painful memories can contribute to building relations across social and intergenerational divides.

Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have demanded justice from the Canadian state for its discriminatory systems of colonialism and racial management. Critics have argued that state apologies co-opt those demands. Meanwhile, many Canadian institutions still attempt to control narratives about residential schools and other violence committed against Indigenous peoples, as well as the internment of Japanese Canadians. After Redress examines how struggles for justice continue long after truth and reconciliation commissions conclude and state redress is supposedly made. Contributors to this trenchant volume analyze the complex, often paradoxical redress process from the perspectives of the communities involved. In a context where mechanisms for reconciliation and redress have been defined by the settler state, this book reveals how Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have responded to Western liberal notions of justice, whether by challenging or conforming to them or pursuing their own approaches.

Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have demanded justice from the Canadian state for its discriminatory systems of colonialism and racial management. Critics have argued that state apologies co-opt those demands. Meanwhile, many Canadian institutions still attempt to control narratives about residential schools and other violence committed against Indigenous peoples, as well as the internment of Japanese Canadians. After Redress examines how struggles for justice continue long after truth and reconciliation commissions conclude and state redress is supposedly made. Contributors to this trenchant volume analyze the complex, often paradoxical redress process from the perspectives of the communities involved. In a context where mechanisms for reconciliation and redress have been defined by the settler state, this book reveals how Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have responded to Western liberal notions of justice, whether by challenging or conforming to them or pursuing their own approaches.

This volume examines the politics of fieldwork and the challenges of researching migrants constructed as outsiders both nationally and transnationally. Based on research with undocumented migrants, temporary workers, refugees, international students, and those who, having received citizenship status find their lives to be discursively and legally restricted, it shows how interdisciplinary fieldwork-based approaches can provide detailed accounts of migrants’ voices and their conditions of existence, offering insights into the ways in which they understand and take part in producing their transnational worlds. Applying critical, self-reflexive methodological approaches that challenge assumptions about who has the authority to produce knowledge and what types of knowledge have the authority of truth, Migration and the Politics of Methodology will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, and communication and cultural studies with interests in research methods and migration.

As a visual medium, the photograph has many culturally resonant properties that it shares with no other medium. These essays develop innovative cultural strategies for reading, re-reading and re-using photographs, as well as for (re)creating photographs and other artworks and evoke varied sites of memory in contemporary landscapes: from sites of war and other violence through the lost places of indigenous peoples to the once-familiar everyday places of home, family, neighborhood and community. Paying close attention to the settings in which such photographs are made and used--family collections, public archives, museums, newspapers, art galleries--the contributors consider how meanings in photographs may be shifted, challenged and renewed over time and for different purposes--from historical inquiry to quests for personal, familial, ethnic and national identity.