Social Science Human Geography
Sensing Changes
Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003
- Publisher
- UBC Press
- Initial publish date
- Jul 2010
- Category
- Human Geography, Ecology, Post-Confederation (1867-), Social History
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780774817240
- Publish Date
- Jul 2010
- List Price
- $32.95
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780774817233
- Publish Date
- Dec 2009
- List Price
- $95.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780774817257
- Publish Date
- Jul 2010
- List Price
- $125.00
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Description
Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. But if global environmental changes continue at their present unsettling pace, how will we make sense of time and place when the air, land, and water around us are no longer familiar?
Joy Parr, one of Canada’s premier historians, tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past when state-driven megaprojects such as chemical plants, dams, nuclear reactors, transportation corridors, and new regulatory regimes forced people to cope with radical transformations in their work and home environments. In each case, the familiar was transformed so thoroughly that residents no longer recognized where they lived or, by implication, who they were.
Sensing Changes and its associated website, http://megaprojects.uwo.ca, make a key contribution to environmental history and the emerging field of sensory history. This study offers a timely, prescient perspective on how humans make sense of the world in the face of rapid environmental change.
About the author
Joy Parr is a Farley Endowed Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of The Gender of Breadwinners, winner of the 1990 Macdonald Prize for the best work in Canadian history.
Awards
- Short-listed, The François-Xavier Garneau Medal, Canadian Historical Association
- Winner, Sidney Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology
- Winner, Canada Prize in the Social Sciences, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Short-listed, Sir John A. Macdonald Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association
Editorial Reviews
The New Media component of Sensing Changes is a wonderful illustration of how we can and should engage our students in multi-sensory ways and how we, as historians, must move beyond privileging the written word.
Left History, 15.1
Historian and geographer Joy Parr has written an extraordinary book…Sensing Changes will make important contributions to the field of sensory studies and that other readers, approaching their own topics in diverse locations and from various disciplinary backgrounds, will, like this reviewer, find edification and inspiration in the pages of this remarkable book.
Senses and Society, Vol 6, Issue 2
Other titles by
Moving Natures
Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History
Sensing Changes
Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003
Domestic Goods:
Histories of Canadian Children and Youth
Labouring Children
British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924
Domestic Goods
Domestic Goods
These Goods Are Canadian Made
An Historian Thinks About Things
The Gender of Breadwinners
Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950
A Diversity of Women
Women in Ontario since 1945