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While it is widely acknowledged that Canadian Muslims are targeted at airports and borders, few studies have focused on their actual experiences of state surveillance practices. Moreover, little attention has been paid to how these experiences impact and shape identity formation and their understanding of citizenship. To address this gap, we conducted 50 in-depth interviews with young Canadian Muslims living in Vancouver and Toronto. Our interviewees referred to being repeatedly stopped, questioned, detained, and harassed by security personnel. They felt that any evidence of their Muslim identity - name, country of birth, appearance, or clothing - makes them a target for extra surveillance, resulting in heightened fears about being stripped of their rights and a lack of ability to assert their religious identities. This paper explores the implications of racialized border practices on identity formation and citizenship depletion among Muslim Canadians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies urban and environmental sociological theory to survey data on self-reported sustainable consumption practices, using a matched sample of central city and suburban residents in Edmonton, Alberta. We use cluster analysis to create an ordinal typology of four types of consumers, conduct an analysis of variance to characterize the resultant clusters, and perform logistic regression to predict the net effect of urban and neighbourhood context on sustainable consumption practices. We find that neighbourhood and environmental attitude are the strongest predictors of sustainable consumption practices. We conclude by arguing many sustainable activities are more difficult to incorporate into daily routine when residing in the suburban neighbourhood. While suburban residents may feel strongly that they should consume less, their geographic location appears to significantly constrain their ability to meaningfully reduce their own consumption. This urban Canadian case study has implications for middle class environmental practices in other North American urban and suburban settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the sociology of vital statistics by examining the understandings of infant mortality which circulated in Alberta in the early 20th century. In those years, infant mortality came to be represented as an unnatural and unacceptable diminishment of Alberta's population and an appropriate object of political concern. This paper deals with the ways in which infant mortality became saturated with symbolism, even before the full emergence of policies and programs for reducing it. Using a database of 73 digitized Alberta newspapers, I identify the dominant metaphors for infant mortality as economic inefficiency and military defeat. I also set this concern for lost infant life within the context of other population anxieties, including xenophobic fears about "unnatural increase" through immigration and fears about "population quality" which culminated in calls for eugenic sterilization. I argue that infant mortality is a unique form of population process in that it temporally fuses birth and death, creating, in the collective imagination, a spectral collection of those who might have lived, had they not been deprived of life unnaturally soon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the daily struggles of unionized employees whose municipal workplace was undergoing major change influenced by New Public Management. In-depth interviews with 45 front-line service providers revealed widespread frustration with working conditions and relationships with management. We interpret this response as an embodied expression of hysteresis, a term that Bourdieu used to describe the gap between changing field conditions and habitus. We argue that organizational change posed challenges for these workers because it produced a rupture between their taken-for-granted ways of being a "good" public servant (i.e., public service habitus) and what was expected of them during restructuring. Moreover, on the basis of gendered occupational class differences in employees' practices, we suggest that hysteresis is itself a socially structured phenomenon that reflects the tacit calculation of what was possible (or not) for workers occupying specific positions within the stratified order of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the mode of entry into adulthood of two cohorts of young Quebecers born between 1942-1951 (lyric generation) and between 1962-1971 (X generation). Examining the net effect of labour market casualization with the help of the General Social Survey 2001's retrospective data, the goal of this paper is to answer this specific question: to what extent do the 1980- 90 economic mutations explain the extension of youth and the desynchronization of life courses? The analysis reveals that the casualization of employment is not highly related to the mutations of life courses. In fact, the desynchronization of life courses can be better explained by noneconomic transformations such as the longer length of education and the easing of certain normative constraints within Quebec society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social role of universities has been the subject of a lengthy debate as to whether those who teach in the academy are system-legitimizing conservatives or radicals helping to generate critical thinking that challenges the status quo. The aim of this paper is to evaluate political affiliations of Canadian university professors based on a national survey conducted in 2000. The study shows that Canadian professors' political affiliation can be identified as either left or right depending on how the political orientation of political parties is conceptualized. University professors tend to vote more for the Liberal Party than other parties, and view it as centrist party. Moreover, the study highlights a complex and non-monolithic picture of the Canadian academy. University professors are not politically homogenous and party vote depends on the prestige of their university, their discipline, gender, ethnicity, marital status, generation, and agreement with liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the enabling and constraining effects of culture on the framing efforts of social movements by examining the use of children in materials produced by opposing sides of the Newfoundland "Confederation debate" of 1948. Cultural perceptions of children as "future citizens" of the nation coincided with a denominational schooling system which Newfoundlanders had long trusted to administer their children's civic education. The state thus had little role to play in the production of Newfoundland nationals, a situation that induced pro- and anti-Confederate frames to diverge from more familiar discourses on children and nation. The analysis shows how the coincidence of culture and structure generates cultural constrictions that shape social-movement initiatives in sometimes unexpected ways. It also contributes to the literature on the place of children in political debate, and on Newfoundland Confederation more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]