A Tory High Modernism? Grand Plans and Visions of Order in Neoconservative Ontario

Trends toward mass incarceration in the United States and elsewhere raise compelling questions about the social purposes of prisons, and their role in the consolidation (and/or privatization) of the neoconservative state. This article examines two moments of penal reform that were historically distinct, but remarkably similar in their shape and intent. Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservatives won control of Ontario’s provincial government in 1995, and undertook a wide-ranging program of institutional and social restructuring that was intended to transform Canada’s industrial heartland. Penal reform was central to this agenda, but Conservative efforts here were remarkably similar to those 160 years before, when Canada built its first penitentiary. This article compares these two moments of flux using a theoretical framework developed by James Scott. He argues that the grand plans of ‘high modernist’ reformers, while seeking to make society more ‘legible’ and ‘rational’, tend to employ simplifications—especially visually pleasing ones—which obscure and suppress insights that might be gained from the ‘practical knowledge’ of those closer to the ground. They do this at their peril, for grand plans tend to fail for lack of such knowledge. The article argues that Ontario’s experience fits neatly into these categories, except that the aim of reformers here has been to restore an old social order, rather than to build a new one.     

Discolouring Democracy? Policing,Sensitive Evidence,and Contentious Deaths in the United Kingdom

This article examines recent United Kingdom government proposals for secret inquests, which, it is argued, are part of a general push for secrecy discernible across common law jurisdictions, and which include developments such as increased recourse to sensitive evidence in forensic settings and the normalization of intelligence‐led policing. While the push for secrecy is justified by national security claims, the article shows that in cases of contentious death involving police, the issue is less about national security and more about the use of intercept evidence, covert surveillance, and intelligence‐led policing, all of which have implications for police trust, accountability, and reputation management.     

Do Project Pedagogies Make a Difference?

Community-based action research (CBAR) encourages students to view internships and other civic-engagement opportunities as the first steps in collaborative projects that build long-term relationships with community partners and model how democracy works. We marshal longitudinal data, qualitative and quantitative, on both attitudes and behaviors to demonstrate meaningful impacts of community-based work by university students. Our approach to this difficult question involves the use of a treatment group contrasted with two distinct control groups: one situated somewhat closely to the experiences of the treatment group and one more distantly. Despite the difficulty of developing metrics of attitude and behavior change over relatively short periods of time, we achieve leverage on the question of how project pedagogies and experiential learning shape civic attitude formation and associated changed behaviors.     

The political economy of Southeast Asia's techno-glocalism

Asian economies' prospects for upward mobility within the global division of labour hinge significantly on the degree to which transnational corporations' (TNCs) global production networks (GPNs) accommodate or hinder their efforts to shift from simple production into more remunerative roles. A growing literature notes the rise in various countries of a ‘neo-techno-nationalism’ that aims to bolster local innovation and challenge TNCs' technologically derived leverage over the distribution of roles and rewards within GPNs. Industrial and technological policies in Southeast Asia, however, reflect a quite different ‘techno-glocalist’ strategy. Such strategies are based on a ‘governance bargain’ in which host governments, in exchange for technological upgrading, facilitate TNCs' exercise of governance authority transnationally as well as in coordinating local investments in innovation and other cluster-building activities. They highlight a conceptual distinction between the degree of internalization and hierarchy within networks that is typically elided in theories of GPN governance.     

The Circulation of Secularism

Inquiring into the causes behind the spread of secularism in the modern world, this paper proposes that the concept has proliferated owing to its peculiar property as culture: It is simultaneously a piece of culture and also a reflection upon culture. In its latter capacity, it imagines a world in which alternative religious belief systems divide people. It spreads as a piece of culture because it enables sharing and, hence, community, across the cultural boundaries erected by religious belief. For this reason, some governments have embraced the concept and incorporated it into official state discourse. Other governments, in turn, have copied the language of secularism not for its intended meaning but for pragmatic purposes—namely, to proclaim a position within the community of modern nations. State discourse, however, irrespective of the reasons for which it was adopted, affects how ordinary people reason about religion. Reasoning from the possibility of alternative religions opens a space for unbelief. Through an analysis of constitutional language, census data, and interviews, the paper concludes that secularism has more to do with the circulation of discourse and the reasons behind it, than with an immanent versus transcendent solution to the puzzle of existence—the transcendent solution being the foundation for the circulation of religious belief itself.