Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.
The new book Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism, co-edited by UVic Faculty member Donna Jeffery, is a multidisciplinary book that brings together a series of critical engagements regarding the notion of ethical practice. This interesting text will lead readers into new ways of thinking about the relationship between power and ethics.
About the Book
As a whole, the book explores the question of how the current neo-liberal, socio-political moment and its relationship to the historical legacies of colonialism, white settlement, and racism inform and shape our practices, pedagogies, and understanding of encounters in diverse settings.
The contributors draw largely on the work of Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, each chapter taking up a particular encounter and unravelling the elements that created that meeting in its specific time and space. Sites of encounters included in this volume range from the classroom to social work practice and from literary to media interactions, both within Canada and internationally. Paramount to the discussions is a consideration of how relations of power and legacies of oppression shape the self and others, and draw boundaries between bodies within an encounter.
From a social justice perspective, Unravelling Encounters exposes the political conditions that configure our meetings with one another and inquires into what it means to care, to respond, and to imagine oneself as an ethical subject.
About the Editors
Donna Jeffery is the acting Director and an associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Victoria. Underpinning her work is this question: What explanatory frameworks do we draw on to explain our practice and our professional/personal identities? Jeffery has recently published in Ethics and Social Welfare, The Canadian Geographer, and Journal of Progressive Human Services.
Caitlin Janzen is a Ph.D. student in sociology at York University. Her doctoral research focuses on women’s psychic responses to representations of violence against other(ed) women. Janzen is the co-author of articles that have appeared in Hypatia, Violence Against Women, and Journal of Progressive Human Services.
Kristin Smith is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Ryerson University. Her research focuses on neo-liberal restructuring and critical social work practice and she has authored and co-authored articles in Affilia, The Canadian Geographer, and British Journal of Social Work.
