Pacific Affairs invited me to review a new book entitled Living with Risk: Precarity & Bangkok’s Urban Poor by Tamaki Endo, a Japanese scholar. It’s a great read for those with an interest in urbanization and poverty alleviation. What’s also nice is that it cites a lot of Japanese-language scholarship on these issues, which might not normally be accessible to other audiences. The full text of my review can be viewed here.
My contribution on social science research and teaching infrastructure in Canada and the USA was published in March 2015 by the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (Second Edition). Here is the link to the Science Direct version for purchase and downloading.
Hats off to editor of the entire, massive second edition, James D. Wright (Sociology, University of Central Florida) for proactively reaching out to non-Americans, women, non-anglophones, and minorities to get a more complete picture of the scholarship represented. He wrote an article talking about his approach available here. Nous avenues eu le plaisir de le rencontrer il y a quelques années. Merci!
P.S. Unfortunately, despite my careful feedback on the proofs, my affiliation is incorrect! It cannot, for the moment, be changed in Science Direct and the first print run has already been done.
In 2002, I had the privilege of being invited by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to do some work on a forum in Addis Ababa entitled “Feeding Cities in the Horn of Africa”. A report of the workshop involving local authorities, researchers and representatives from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors is available for downloading here. The workshop was based on some earlier work in a report produced in the year 2000 available here. Furthermore, a CD-Rom was produced with various other documents including, for example, some wonderful photographs taken by Olivio Argenti of FAO, some of which I have uploaded below. Visiting the ancient land of Abyssinia and birthplace of our species was a dream come true and I hope to go back to visit again some day.
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February is Black History Month and I am reminded of a short article I published many moons ago in the Vancouver Sun on the life of Sir James Douglas, first Governor of British Columbia. Many do not realise he was of “mixed-race” ancestry born in Demerara, British Guyana – the son of a “free coloured” mother from Barbados and a Scottish merchant. Here is the full text of the article published originally in February 2003.
Bonjour à tous et toutes: A bit of lost “herstory”…
About 10-12 years ago I was involved with a women’s service club with the mandate of advancing the status of women worldwide called Zonta International (founded in the 1920s or so, Amelia Earhart was one of the original members). I eventually found out that there had been an international Zonta president from Vancouver back in the early 1960s because, by coincidence, it had come up by chance in a conversation with her son Cole Harris (historical geographer from UBC, now emeritus). Ellen Harris was a remarkable figure who worked at the CBC and even brought Eleanor Roosevelt to UBC to open International House. To learn more, see my new blog entry published on December 14th, 2014 by an international group called the Women’s History Network. Bonne lecture!
Here’s my new op-ed published in iPolitics on November 28, 2014. Feeding the world has been one of my preoccupations for the past 30 years. This article is based in part on my remarks at a food-security workshop in Kitchener-Waterloo in June 2014. The full text is available here.
Voici mon nouvel article (en anglais) publié par iPolitics. Nourrir le monde a été une de mes préoccupations depuis 30 ans. L’article est basée en partie sur une allocution que j’ai fait au mois de juin 2014 à Kitchener-Waterloo dans le cadre d’un atelier sur la sécurité alimentaire. Le texte est disponible ici.
My co-author Narumol Nirathron of Thammasat University and I are delighted that WIEGO has published our new multimedia policy brief entitled “Vending in Public Space: The Case of Bangkok”. This brief, replete with embedded videos, is based mostly on previous research by both of us supplemented by excellent updates by Narumol. The full publication can be downloaded here. Our thanks to Martha Chen of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and founder of WIEGO for making this opportunity possible for us and to the WIEGO team for their excellent feedback and support. Our hope is that this brief will be used for policy development, research, teaching and community organizing.
Today being Eid, I am reminded of an interfaith Ifthar dinner my colleagues and I organised in fall 2004 when I was Regional Director of the Canadian Unity Council / Centre for Research and Information on Canada in collaboration with the UBC Museum of Anthropology (MOA). Since the report is no longer on the MOA website, it can be downloaded here.
In 2001, I was asked to edit and write the introduction to a collection of papers presented at a regional seminar in Bangkok in 2000, which I was also engaged in, on the topic of Feeding Asian Cities. The full text can in English can be downloaded here: http://www.cityfarmer.org/FeedingAsianCities.pdf. La version française est disponible ici: ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/007/y3399f/y3399f00.pdf.
An oldie but a goodie, this was published by FAO in 2001. The full text is available in HTML and PDF format here.