The environment has played a profound role in shaping the movement of people, objects, and ideas in Canadian history. In turn, mobility (travel, transport, and traffic) has had significant impacts on the environment, both in materially tangible ways and in terms of how people have perceived and experienced Canada’s varied landscapes.
Canadian scholars have a long tradition of examining mobility and the environment in the context of moving hinterland resources to metropolitan markets. However, there are many other aspects of the complex relationship between environments and mobility that deserve closer scrutiny. This is a timely moment to broaden and build on the existing Canadian literature in this area, for in addition to environmental history’s emergence as a field of study in this country, recent international developments in sociology, geography, and technology studies have argued that mobility should be brought to the foreground of the humanities and social sciences.
A workshop will be held at York University’s Glendon College in Toronto on May 13-14 2011 to discuss the work of junior and senior scholars who are researching the intersections of environment and mobility in Canadian history. Starting in January 2011, this workshop webpage will begin to host images and short analyses related to the workshop papers.
The following list of papers illustrates that the workshop promises to be an engaging and productive event.
I. Introduction
Colin M. Coates, Ben Bradley, and Jay Young, “Environment and Mobility: Reconsidering Time and Space in Canadian History”
II. Production: Supplies and Pathways
- John C. Walsh, “Transportation, Nature, and the Production of Territory in Upper Canada, 1820-1870”
- Jim Clifford, Judy Burns, and Tom Peace, “Of Tides and Trees: The Rise and Fall of Shipbuilding in Maitland, Nova Scotia”
- Ruth Sandwell, “Mobility in Rural Canada, 1900-1940”
- Andrew Watson, “Mobility and Sustainability: Lakeside Supply Networks in the Age of Steamboat Navigation”
- Merle Massie, “From Freighting Goods to Fishing for Tourists: Seasonality, Mobility, and the North Prince Albert Region, 1900-1935”
- Dan Macfarlane, “Current Approaches to the St. Lawrence Seaway: Canadian Conceptions of Environment and Transportation”
- Jay Young, “Subways and Soils: Excavating Environments during the Building of Rapid Transit in Toronto, 1949-1966”
- Joy Parr, “Making Way for the War on Terror in a Canadian Suburb”
III. Consumption: Recreation and Landscape
- Elsa Lam, “The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Making of the Canadian Rockies, 1887-1929”
- Jess Dunkin, “Producing and Consuming Spaces of Sport and Leisure: The Encampments and Regattas of the American Canoe Association, 1880-1914″
- Jack Little, “Vancouver’s Playground: Class and Leisure in B.C.’s Howe Sound, 1902-1962”
- Beth Jewett, “What’s Driving Golf? Mobility and Canadian Landscapes of Golf”
- Maude-Emmanuelle Lambert, “Le tourisme automobile et la transformation des territoires québécois et ontariens: une étude comparative du tour de la Gaspésie et de la Lake Superior Scenic Highway, 1930-1960”
- Ben Bradley and Jan Hadlaw, “Fruit Stand Ahead: Roadside Produce as Environmental Experience in Postwar British Columbia”
- Lisa Cooke, “Windshields, Wilderness, and Wal-Mart: Cultural Logics of the Frontier in Yukon”
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