Acknowledgements

All edited volumes are collective efforts by nature, but this one is special. Since 2014, the authors of the chapters collected herein have worked as a team within the Corporate Mapping Project (CMP), a research and community-engagement partnership co-directed by Shannon Daub and me. Shannon, who is director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, BC Office (CCPA-BC), has made an enormous contribution to the CMP and to virtually all of its products, including this one. Her intellectual and organizational leadership has been indispensable to the success of our efforts. As editor of this book, I am eternally grateful to Shannon and thankful for the opportunity to work closely with her over the past few years, during which I have learned a lot about how to make social science research come alive in policy and practice.

Back in the autumn of 2013, when we first conceived of the project behind this book, we envisaged building a “community of practice” that would include academics, policy analysts, movement activists, community-based researchers, and community leaders. Within an integrated program of social science research, we would expose the undue power and influence of the fossil fuel industry in Canada while developing feasible alternatives to the continued hegemony of corporate capital in and around the energy sector. But, of equal import, our community of practice would mobilize that critical knowledge via a wide array of platforms reaching a wide array of publics—concerned citizens, social and ecological activists, First Nations, policy networks, and, of course, professional social scientists. And, although the authors featured in this volume have all made crucial contributions to the CMP, the creative efforts of many others in our community of practice—which by now numbers over a hundred members—have also enhanced the chapters of this book, in many ways.

This volume addresses all the groups mentioned above, but it leans toward the last one: social scientists and students of social science. The chapters in the book highlight research conducted during the first three years of the project, from 2015 to 2018.

The University of Victoria, my academic home since 1981, has served as host of the Corporate Mapping Project. I am grateful to administrative staff in my home department, Sociology, for the many ways in which they have provided support for the project and this book in particular. Big thanks to Zoe Lu, Aileen Chong, Carole Rains, and Ann Hamilton. Their efforts have been complemented by those of two successive department chairs, Sean Hier and Steve Garlick, and by senior administrators, in particular Peter Keller and Catherine Krull, successive deans of the Faculty of Social Sciences; Valerie Kuehne, Vice-President Academic; and David Castle and Lisa Kalynchuk, successive Vice-Presidents Research.

The CMP has functioned as a community-university partnership, and the efforts of partner organizations have been crucial to its success and to the realization of this volume. In particular, I thank Seth Klein, director of the CCPA-BC until 2018; Ricardo Acuña, executive director of the Parkland Institute until 2020, and Trevor Harrison, director of the Parkland Institute; and Kevin Connor and Michael “Ziggy” Mintz, at the Public Accountability Initiative. Thi Vu, who served as project director from 2014 through 2019 from her desk at the CCPA-BC, deserves special thanks for her unflagging dedication and diligence.

Our community of practice has been enabled by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose commitment to academic freedom is even more precious than the funds it dispenses.

Our publisher, Athabasca University Press, has been a source of indefatigable support. Senior editor Pamela Holway enthusiastically steered the manuscript through the review process and made extensive and thoughtful editorial contributions after an initial round of copyediting by Alison Jacques. Karyn Wisselink offered excellent support on the production and marketing side. A leader among university presses in making its books freely available online, AU Press has been a perfect fit for the CMP, given our strong commitment to open-access publishing.

Last but certainly not least, a great many student researchers and research assistants at UVic and at other university partners to the CMP have made splendid contributions to the chapters of this volume, in some cases as co-authors. In the Sociology Department at UVic, I am thrilled to have worked with graduate students Ryan Butler, David Chen, Nicolas Graham, Robyn Hlatky, Jouke Huijzer, Mike Lang, Zach Lewis, Kevin McCartney, Jason Miller, Sara Naderi, Mark Shakespear, and Zoë Yunker, and post-doctoral fellows J. P. Sapinski and Bob Neubauer.

As I write these acknowledgements, the world has plunged into a deep public health crisis, revealing the injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal capitalism. This crisis is a foretaste of what awaits us if business-as-usual continues for much longer. The climate emergency is also a massive public health crisis, although its impacts are less acute. Coastal inundation, inland desertification, flooding, superstorms, heat waves, and other forms of extreme weather will have public health effects far more severe than a disease that runs its brutal course. The COVID-19 pandemic only intensifies the need to transition from a fossil-fueled way of life organized under the thumb of corporate power to a socially just and ecologically healthy future. I hope that this volume will be of value in clarifying the nature of the problem before us, and its possible solution.