Tangled Routes

Tangled Routes
Author: Deborah Barndt
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780742555570

Where does our food come from? Whose hands have planted, cultivated, picked, packed, processed, transported, scanned, sold, sliced, and cooked it? What production practices have transformed it from seed to fruit, from fresh to processed form? Who decides what is grown and how? What are the effects of those decisions on our health and the health of the planet? Tangled Routes tackles these fascinating questions and demystifies globalization by tracing the long journey of a corporate tomato from a Mexican field to a Canadian fast-food restaurant. Through an interdisciplinary lens, Deborah Barndt examines the dynamic relationships between production and consumption, work and technology, biodiversity and cultural diversity, and health and environment. A globalization-from-above perspective is reflected in the corporate agendas of a Mexican agribusiness, the U.S.-based McDonald's chain, and Canadian-based Loblaws supermarkets. The women workers on the front line of these businesses offer a humanized globalization-from-below perspective, while yet another "globalization" is revealed through examples of resistance and local alternatives. This revised and updated edition highlights developments since the turn of the millennium, in particular the deepening economic integration of the NAFTA countries as well as the growing questioning of NAFTA's consequences and the crafting of alternatives built on foundations of sustainability and justice.

Mexico in Transition

Mexico in Transition
Author: Gerardo Otero
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1848137338

Mexico in Transition provides a wide-ranging, empirical and up-to-date survey of the multiple impacts neoliberal policies have had in practice in Mexico over twenty years, and the specific impacts of the NAFTA Agreement. The volume covers a wide terrain, including the effects of globalization on peasants; the impact of neoliberalism on wages, trade unions, and specifically women workers; the emergence of new social movements El Barzón and the Zapatistas (EZLN); how the environment, especially biodiversity, has become a target for colonization by transnational corporations; the political issue of migration to the United States; and the complicated intersections of economic and political liberalization. Mexico in Transition provides rich concrete evidence of what happens to the different sectors of an economy, its people, and natural resources, as the profound change of direction that neoliberal policy represents takes hold. It also describes and explains the diverse forms of resistance and challenge that different civil-society groups of those affected are now offering to a model the downsides of which are becoming increasingly manifest.

Investigating Gender

Investigating Gender
Author: Martha E. Thompson
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2012-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745651860

A fresh and exciting new textbook that will be an indispensable and dynamic entry point for students of gender. Pays full attention to the recent move towards recognizing intersectionality and the way gender interacts with other forms of privilege and oppression.

Farming across Borders

Farming across Borders
Author: Timothy P. Bowman
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1623495695

Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”

Organizing the 1%

Organizing the 1%
Author: William K. Carroll
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2018-12-06T00:00:00Z
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1773630814

Canada is ruled by an organized minority of the 1%, a class of corporate owners, managers and bankers who amass wealth by controlling the large corporations at the core of the economy. But corporate power also reaches into civil society and politics in many ways that greatly constrain democracy. In Organizing the 1%, William K. Carroll and J.P. Sapinski provide a unique, evidence-based perspective on corporate power in Canada and illustrate the various ways it directs and shapes economic, political and cultural life. A highly accessible introduction to Marxist political economy, Carroll and Sapinski delve into the capitalist economic system at the root of corporate wealth and power and analyze the ways the capitalist class dominates over contemporary Canadian society. The authors illustrate how corporate power perpetuates inequality and injustice. They follow the development of corporate power through Canadian history, from its roots in settler-colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, to the concentration of capital into giant corporations in the late nineteenth century. More recently, capitalist globalization and the consolidation of a market-driven neoliberal regime have dramatically enhanced corporate power while exacerbating social and economic inequalities. The result is our current oligarchic order, where power is concentrated in a few corporations that are controlled by the super-wealthy and organized into a cohesive corporate elite. Finally, Carroll and Sapinski offer possibilities for placing corporate power where it actually belongs: in the dustbin of history.

Tangled Routes

Tangled Routes
Author: Deborah Barndt
Publisher: Aurora, Ont. : Garamond Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781551930428

Tangled Routes follows a corporate--commodified and chemicalized--tomato from a Mexican field through the United States to a Canadian table, examining in its wake the dynamic relationship between production and consumption, work and technology, health and environment, biodiversity and cultural diversity.

Geography of Trafficking

Geography of Trafficking
Author: Fred M. Shelley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2017-10-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

This important reference work examines trafficking from a geographic perspective and investigates the driving forces behind it and the powers that are trying to curtail the problem. The worldwide crime of trafficking involves countless people, animals and animal parts, and illicit goods such as drugs and weapons being moved and sold illegally. Often, the trafficking occurs with the local government or law enforcement's knowledge and complicity. This one-volume encyclopedia sheds light on a frightening and major issue, investigating the geography of trafficking and examining a range of examples of illegal human, animal, drug, and weapons movement around the world. After a preface and introduction that provides an exact definition of trafficking, the encyclopedia presents thematic essays that explore the various specific kinds of trafficking. Approximately 30 country profiles describe who and what is trafficked in each country, the motivations of those doing the trafficking, where people and things are being moved to, how the trafficking occurs, and what actions are being taken in an effort to prevent it. An appendix of primary documents, interesting sidebars, a bibliography, and a glossary listing key terms and important organizations round out the work.

Retooling the Mind Factory

Retooling the Mind Factory
Author: Alan Sears
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781551930442

Alan Sears examines education reform in relation to a broad process of cultural and economic change. His book makes the case that education reform is one aspect of a broad-ranging neo-liberal agenda that aims to push the market deeper into every aspect of our lives by eliminating or shrinking non-market alternatives. The author begins by showing that advocates of education reform have had to make the case that the current system is not working. This sets the ground for an examination of the so-called 'Common Sense Revolution, ' a claim that drastic change was required to redesign government policies to fit a changing world. Lean production methods are a crucial component of this changing world, and broader social and cultural change is now required to consolidate the emerging order built on the spread of these methods. Education reform is designed to recast the relations of citizenship, contributing to the cultural and social change promoted through the social policy of the lean state.

Near Human

Near Human
Author: Mette N. Svendsen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-11-12
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1978818211

Near Human is an ethnography of research piglets in biomedical experiments and premature human infants in clinical care in Denmark. Drawing on fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen redirects the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human and to forge a nation.