Day 1 of A Citizens’ Hearing: Examining Canada’s Covid Response
From Wednesday, June 22, through Friday, June 24, 2022, a combined effort by the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and Fearless Canada, brought three full days of testimonies that were stre…
Tag: Canada
Introducing: “Disaster X”
Disaster X is a new publication, that is tied to this site: it is available on Substack. Here I just want to briefly introduce the material that already…
Interview: Erkundungen von Kanadas nördlichen Transportinfrastrukturen
In May 2022, I did an interview with the Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI) about my fieldwork on transport infrastructures in Northern Manitoba, Canada, within the ERC project…
Blog Post: A train ride to Hudson Bay
Budka, P. (2022). A train ride to Hudson Bay. InfraNorth – Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities Blog, 25 April. I wake up because a…
“Nothing About Us Without Us!” Really?: The Unequal Value of Lives in Harm Reduction NGOs by Catherine Larocque
Canada, like most capitalist societies of the global North, faces “an unprecedented and devastating wave of overdoses” and overdose deaths (Wells, 2017), intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic (Governm…
Protecting the Pandemic from the People: Perpetual Panic, Permanent Emergency
There are some suggestions that the Omicron variant could well end “the pandemic”. And that is a problem. It is a problem on two fronts. First, a variant that…
The State of Emergency, Coercive Medicine, and Academia
“Two weeks to flatten the curve,” is what we heard across Canada1 just after March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization unilaterally declared a global “pandemic” according to…
Paper: Anthropological notes on digital & transport infrastructures in remote communities
Budka, P. (2021). Anthropological notes on digital and transport infrastructures in remote communities. Paper at Anthropology of Technology Conference, Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University, 4-5 Novembe…
Paper: Indigenizing digital futures
Budka, P. (2021). Indigenizing digital futures: The case of a web-based environment for remote First Nation communities in Northwestern Ontario, Canada. Paper at German Anthropological Association Co…
“Stop the Shot”: Resistance through Science, Religion, and Law
On August 4, an interesting event took place: “Stop the Shot”. This was a video press conference organized by the Truth for Health Foundation in the US, which…
Community-Based Research is Hard, and Worth It
The Salt Spring Dollar I began studying the Salt Spring dollar (SSD), a community currency used on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada, for my May-August MA fieldwork…
On Quebec and its “Vaccine Passport”
Since the Government of Quebec under Premier François Legault decided to jump the gun today and announced the coming of “vaccine” certification on September 1st, possibly in response…
The False Pandemic and the Great Reset: Day 1 of an Online Interdisciplinary Symposium
A brief note before the main content for this report: since last publishing to this site I have been occupied with preparing a long and detailed series of…
COVID-19: THE SYSTEM, Part 2
In Part 1 we ended with the documentary’s discussion of the type of business model that has been created around COVID-19, or to match the title of the…
COVID-19: THE SYSTEM, Part 1
On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19’s spread was now a pandemic, and on March 13, 2020, when here in Quebec a total…
‘Race,’ ‘Diversity,’ and the University
If this was a good time for Canadian academia, you would not be able to tell from the blanket of almost absolute silence that has been pulled over…
After a Year of Being Locked Down
Nobody (as far as I know) has commented on how hard this year of lockdowns has been on university professors. That’s good: nobody should. Many millions of workers…
In the Journals – Incarceration, Rehabilitation, and Recidivism
Josh Shapiro: Fair Commutation Not Mass Incarceration by joepiette2 via creativecommons Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that are often siloed…
In the Journals – Policing Migration
A Macedonian police officer raises his baton toward migrants by Freedom House via creativecommons Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that…
Working in a Fracture Zone: Learning to Research Mental Health from Multiple Cultures by Gerald P McKinley
We are an ensemble cast. As such, it is perhaps appropriate that one of the first places where we all came together as a team had at one…
Escape, Exposure, and Life on the Pacific Crest Trail
An act of walking into the wilderness implies an act of walking out of somewhere or something. The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which extends over the US states…
MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment
This blog post is a shorter version of a paper presented at the Engaging with Web Archives (EWA20) conference in September 2020 (Book of Abstracts). Budka, P. (2020).…
A Technology of Empowerment and Governance: The IUD/IUS and Sexual Health Care in Toronto, Canada
The intrauterine device (IUD) and the intrauterine system (IUS) have a long and complicated history. The IUD is a contraceptive device inserted into the uterus, which serves as…
Pamela Klassen on her book, The Story of Radio Mind
Interview by Georgia Ennis https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo28179073.html Georgia Ennis: At the center of your account are the travels and work of missionary Frederick Du Vernet,…