Athabasca University Press – serie

The contributors to Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracycritically assess the political peculiarities of Alberta and the impactof the government's relationship to the oil industry on the livesof the province's most vulnerable citizens. They also examine thepublic policy environment and the entrenchment of neoliberal politicalideology in the province. In probing the relationship between oildependency and democracy in the context of an industrialized nation,Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy offers a crucial testof the "oil inhibits democracy" thesis that has hithertobeen advanced in relation to oil-producing countries in the GlobalSouth. If reliance on oil production appears to undermine democraticparticipation and governance in Alberta, then what does the Albertacase suggest for the future of democracy in industrialized nations suchas the United States and Australia, which are now in the process ofexploiting their own substantial shale oil reserves? The environmentalconsequences of oil production have, for example, been the subject ofmuch attention. Little is likely to change, however, if citizens ofoil-rich countries cannot effectively intervene to influence governmentpolicy.

In the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume is the story of aneffort to build a bridge between museums and source communities inhopes of establishing stronger, more sustaining relationships betweenthe two and spurring change in prevailing museum policies. Theexperience of negotiating the tension between a museum'sinstitutional protocol described by both the authors and by Blackfootcontributors to the volume was transformative. Museums seek to preserveobjects for posterity. However, the emotional and spiritual power ofobjects does not vanish with the death of those who created them. ForBlackfoot people today, these shirts are a living presence, one thatevokes a sense of continuity and inspires pride in Blackfoot culturalheritage.

Aimed at men with concerns about prostate surgery and their partners,this invaluable guide includes chapters on preparing for prostatesurgery, the surgery itself, recovery in hospital and at home, a listof recommended resources, and special sections to record personal notesand important contact information.

For many years, Canadian cinema was dominated by the documentarytradition of the National Film Board, which tended to promote what filmscholar Jim Leach has called the "nationalist-realistproject"—films that privileged Canada's naturallandscape and sought to conjure a unified sense of Canadian identityfrom images of empty, untrammelled wilderness and bucolic farmlands.Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of thisfundamentally colonial, Anglo-centric vision has been challenged byfrancophone and First Nations perspectives and by the growth of cities,where most Canadians now reside, as economic and technological centres.In opposition to the mythic "Canada" shaped through thelens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity asserts itself aspolyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses andmediums, as an ongoing negotiation rather than a monolithicorientation. Taking the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers areideally poised to capture this multiplicity, creating their own,idiosyncratic portraits of the Canadian urban landscape and of thepeople who inhabit it.Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from the late 1980sonward, including Denys Arcand's Jésus de Montréal(1989), Mina Shum's Double Happiness (1994), and GuyMaddin's My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the Cityis the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and"urbanity"—the totality of urban culture and life asrefracted through the filmmaker's prism. Drawing on insights fromboth film and urban studies and building upon issues of identityformation long debated in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers howfilmmakers interpret and employ the spatiality, visuality, and oralityof urban space and how audiences read the films that result. In thisway, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film ofthe postmodern period has contributed to the articulation of a new,multifaceted understanding of national identity.