CONTRIBUTORS

Ricardo Acuña has been the executive director of the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta since 2002. He has a degree in political science from the University of Alberta and has over twenty years’ experience as a volunteer, staffer, and consultant for various nongovernment and nonprofit organizations around the province. Acuña has spoken and written extensively on issues of water, commodification, politics, energy, and economic policy in Alberta. He is a regular media commentator on public policy issues and writes a column on Alberta politics for Vue Weekly in Edmonton.

Bob Barnetson is an associate professor of labour relations at Athabasca University. His research focuses on the political economy of workplace injury as well as on child, farm, and migrant workers. He is the author of The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada (Athabasca University Press, 2010), and his articles have appeared in Journal of Workplace Rights, Just Labour, Socialist Studies, International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, and Canadian Political Science Review. Prior to joining Athabasca University, Barnetson worked for a trade union, for the Alberta Labour Relations Board, and for the Alberta Workers’ Compensation Board.

Sara Dorow is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Alberta, where she teaches and conducts research in the areas of globalization, race and culture, gender and family, qualitative methods, and the concept of community. She is currently writing an ethnographic account of Fort McMurray, the “urban service area” for the bitumen sands, and is serving as Alberta team lead for the national research project On the Move: Employment-Related Geographical Mobility in the Canadian Context. These projects follow a decade of research on adoption as a form of transnational migration. Dorow is the author of Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship (New York University Press, 2006).

Joshua Evans joined Athabasca University as an assistant professor in 2010. He is a human geographer by training, with broad interests in health, space, and power. He has published in academic journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Health and Place, Social and Cultural Geography, and Social Science and Medicine. Evans is currently involved in two projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: the first investigates how social enterprises attempt to create accommodating work environments for people with serious mental health problems; the second maps the rise of Housing First policies and programs in Canada.

Jason Foster is an assistant professor of human resources and labour relations at Athabasca University and holds a PhD in management from Saint Mary’s University. He was previously the director of policy analysis with the Alberta Federation of Labour. His research interests include migrant workers, union renewal, labour history, and diversity and equity in unions. His work has been published in a wide range of industrial relations and labour studies journals, including Labor Studies Journal, Just Labour, Journal of Workplace Rights, and Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations. He is also a contributor to Working People in Alberta: A History (Athabasca University Press, 2012). His current research focuses on the response of Canadian unions to the influx of migrant workers into Canada.

Joy Fraser is a professor in the Faculty of Humanity and Social Sciences at Athabasca University. In addition to her academic teaching and research, she has been a consultant on educational program planning and evaluation with the World Health Organization since 1999, focusing on social justice, human rights, and cultural competency. She is currently participating in the WHO Global Consultation on developing a midwifery and nursing workforce, with a view to achieving equity for women in low- and middle-income countries. Fraser has been active on many nongovernmental and governmental boards related to human rights and gender equity and was involved in the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s efforts to develop a Human Rights Report Card for Canada (2011).

Trevor Harrison is a professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge and cofounder and director of the Parkland Institute. Born and raised in Edmonton, Harrison studied at the University of Winnipeg before going on to earn his MA at the University of Calgary and his PhD at the University of Alberta. He is best known for his studies in political sociology, political economy, and public policy and for his research into populist politics in Canada and the Canadian West, in particular. He is the author, coauthor, or co-editor of eight books (including several on Alberta politics), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters, and is a frequent contributor to public media.

Paul Kellogg is an associate professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University, teaching in the Master of Arts in Integrated Studies program, and holds a status-only appointment at the University of Toronto as an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. He completed his MA at York University and his PhD at Queen’s, and, prior to joining Athabasca, was an assistant professor in the Department of International Development Studies at Trent University. His research and teaching interests include political economy, social movements, and global governance, and his articles have appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including Canadian Journal of Political Science, International Journal of Žižek Studies, New Political Science, and Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review. He is the author of Escape from the Staple Trap: Canadian Political Economy After Left Nationalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015).

Manijeh Mannani is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Athabasca University and an adjunct professor of comparative literature at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching interests include Persian literature, comparative literature, autobiography, and cultural studies. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, she is the author of Divine Deviants: The Dialectics of Devotion in the Poetry of Donne and Rumi (Peter Lang, 2007) and Najvā: Selected Poems of E. D. Blodgett in Persian (Nasl-i Nuvīn, 2006). She is also the co-editor of Selves and Subjectivities: Reflections on Canadian Arts and Culture (Athabasca University Press, 2012) and of Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature (Athabasca University Press, 2015).

Meenal Shrivastava is an associate professor of political economy and global studies at Athabasca University. She holds an MPhil and PhD in international studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and taught for nearly a decade in South Africa before moving to Athabasca University. Her research and teaching explore the political processes affecting the conceptualization and manifestation of globalization, which she sees as a process along a historical continuum of global movement of humans, ideas, institutions, commodities, and technologies. She has published in Politikon, New Global Studies, South Asian Survey, and South African Journal of International Affairs (among others) and is the author of many book chapters, media pieces, and policy reports.

Gabrielle Slowey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at York University, where she specializes in Aboriginal affairs and Arctic studies. She holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and has worked with Indigenous communities in northern Québec, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon, as well as in New Brunswick and southwestern Ontario. Her research, which adopts a community-driven approach, focuses on the political economy of resource exploration and development and on land claims and self-government. She is especially concerned about the impact of current pressures to exploit shale oil reserves on the well-being of local communities. She is the author of Navigating Neoliberalism: The Mikisew Cree First Nation (University of British Columbia Press, 2008), in addition to numerous articles and book chapters.

Peter (Jay) Smith is a professor of political science at Athabasca University. His articles on new communications technologies, globalization, trade politics, transnational networks, democracy, and citizenship have appeared in such journals as Journal of World-Systems Theory, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Globalizations, and Information, Communication and Society. He is among the authors of Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (Paradigm Publishers, 2007; 2nd ed., 2014) and contributed two chapters to the Handbook on World Social Forum Activism, edited by Jackie Smith, Scott Byrd, Ellen Reese, and Elizabeth Smythe (Paradigm Publishers, 2011): “The Road to the World Social Forum: The Case of the Dalit Movement” and, with Elizabeth Smythe, “(In)Fertile Ground? Social Forum Activism in Its Regional and Local Dimensions.”

Lorna Stefanick is a professor at Athabasca University and the head of the Governance, Law, and Management program. She has a PhD in political science with a specialization in public administration from Queen’s University, as well as degrees from the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary. Stefanick’s research interests are wide ranging: she has published on e-governance, accountability, environmental activism, and public engagement processes. She is the author of Controlling Knowledge: Information Access and Privacy Protection in a Networked World (Athabasca University Press, 2011). Born in Edmonton, she has spent much of her life in Alberta, thinking about the state of democracy in the province.

Karen Wall is an associate professor of communication studies at Athabasca University. She teaches and develops courses in the areas of cultural policy, heritage management, and media studies. Her interest in the history and culture of Alberta is reflected in several published articles and in Game Plan: A Social History of Sport in Alberta (University of Alberta Press, 2012). She has also held nonacademic positions in provincial and municipal heritage research and administration. Her current research interests include aspects of residual media, transmedia, and mobility in the contexts of tourism and everyday urban life.