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Debates about the future of small municipalities in Canada are set against a backdrop of economic, political, and social restructuring processes that have displaced former state investment policies in favour of neoliberal public policy approaches. Small municipalities struggle with outdated financial and governance structures and a provincial public policy agenda that asks them to become more creative, innovative, and "entrepreneurial" in their approach and responsibilities. Drawing upon key informant interviews with eight case studies in British Columbia, Canada, this research examines the tensions between municipal reforms mandated by the provincial government over the past 30 years and commensurate fiscal levers and capacities in place to address these broadening responsibilities for small municipalities in volatile staples‐dependent regions. Our findings demonstrate how successive provincial governments have mobilized New Public Management objectives through a host of legislative and regulatory changes that have increased the responsibilities and requirements on local governments without commensurate fiscal or jurisdictional capacity. Key Messages: Municipal reforms are mobilized through legislative changes, planning and regulatory requirements, partnership and program requirements, and restrictive fiscal levers.Reform pressures are exacerbated by the limited staff capacity and expertise at the municipal level to implement new measures.Outdated funding powers and mechanisms for municipalities limit the capacity of small municipalities to support long‐term planning and infrastructure investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic geographers are working in a system in flux. A series of interconnecting and overlapping social, political, and economic processes have resulted in a shifting academic climate for geographers and geography departments. This viewpoint brings forward evidence from multiple areas of study to provide a synthesis of this changing context. Challenges to geography include the role of "facts" and "truth" in society, neoliberal university contexts as workplaces, and generational change, among many others. This paper asks more questions than it answers, with an aim to promote an engaged and informed debate among geographers about our "place" in Canada's shifting academic context. Key Messages: Political, social, and economic changes are influencing higher education in Canada.Academic geographers must work within these intersecting and overlapping changes.The "place" of geography in Canadian higher education is under question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key Messages: Low‐income, one‐person, non‐senior households experience significant housing insecurity and homelessness in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality.This population has limited income and job opportunities and faces lower levels of assistance and fewer rental housing options.This is a result of changing economic and social geographies, a gendered and colonial welfare state that has focused on "deserving" families, a neoliberal political economy, and neoliberal discourses. We describe a growing crisis in housing affordability and homelessness for one‐person, low‐income, non‐senior households who rent in Canada. Important and not incidental, this crisis results from gendered, colonial, and neoliberal policies and practices sedimented over time. One‐person households which are low‐income and non‐senior (LINS) have fallen through a crack created by a gendered and colonial welfare state that has primarily focused on "deserving" families; a neoliberal political economy has widened this chasm by making housing less affordable and workers more vulnerable, while diminishing social supports. We illustrate our argument through a case study of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, a region in Nova Scotia with a struggling economy. Using data from sources including housing providers, tenants, and the local homelessness count, we demonstrate the significant unemployment and low median incomes for one‐person LINS households, and describe how this household type, more than any other, experiences core housing need and homelessness. In turn, we show that these individuals may be considered undeserving in that they receive less generous shelter allowances, and have fewer rental housing options available with respect to quantity (including no public housing) and quality. We point to some differential vulnerabilities within this population and suggest opportunities for intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the neoliberal production of anxiety in academic faculty members in universities in Northern Europe. The paper focuses on neoliberalization as it is instantiated through audit and ranking systems designed to produce academia as a space of economic efficiency and intensifying competition. We suggest that powerful forms of competition and ranking of academic performance have been developed in Northern Europe. These systems are differentiated and differentiating, and they serve to both index and facilitate the neoliberalization of the academy. Moreover, these audit and ranking systems produce an ongoing sense of anxiety among academic workers. We argue that neoliberalism in the academy is part of a wider system of anxiety production arising as part of the so-called 'soft governance' of everything, including life itself, in contemporary late liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon recent initiatives to highlight issues of mental health in the academy we focus in this special issue on work by geographers from Canada, the United States, England, and New Zealand that aims to shed some light on the ways that the organized practices of the academy are implicated in the current state of mental health of a broad cross section of its members across university campuses. In bringing the perspectives of Geography graduate students and faculty to bear on questions of mental wellness, this special issue is unique in its attempt to bring together three bodies of research: geographers' understanding of the relationship between mental and emotional health, social space, and material places; mental health initiatives in institutions of higher education; and the neoliberalization of the academy. Drawing together review articles, interview-based research, collective writing, and personal narratives, the articles and viewpoints bring together understandings of the crisis of mental health and wellbeing in neoliberalizing universities, and institutional and individual responses. Réflexions critiques sur la formation d'une éthique du bien-être en géographie Prenant appui sur les démarches entreprises récemment pour mettre en évidence les problèmes de santé mentale dans le milieu universitaire, ce numéro spécial se consacre aux travaux effectués par des géographes en provenance du Canada, des États-Unis, de l'Angleterre et de la Nouvelle-Zélande afin de jeter un éclairage sur le rapport entre les modes d'organisation du milieu universitaire et l'état actuel de santé mentale d'un vaste échantillon du personnel en poste dans plusieurs campus universitaires. En dégageant les perspectives des étudiants des cycles supérieurs et des professeurs en géographie qui se penchent sur le bien-être mental, ce numéro spécial innove en proposant une synthèse de trois champs de la connaissance scientifique : la compréhension par les géographes de la relation qui unit la santé mentale et émotionnelle, l'espace social et les lieux physiques ; les actions en santé mentale dans les établissements d'enseignement supérieur ; et la montée en puissance du néolibéralisme dans le milieu universitaire. Composé d'articles de fond, de recherches reposant sur des entrevues, d'ouvrages collectifs et de récits personnels, ce recueil propose une série d'articles et de points de vue qui exposent une diversité d'idées sur la crise en santé mentale et bien-être dans un contexte universitaire marqué par le néolibéralisme, et sur les mesures prises par les établissements et les individus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the sway of neoliberal forces, the university system is being reconfigured to produce certain types of knowledges, imaginaries, subjectivities, and practices informed by market imperatives. Considerable literature details the promises and perils of neoliberalism in higher education. In the past decade, this has included the growth of interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the potential of critical pedagogy as a site of contestation in the higher education sector. In this context, the notion of critical pedagogy provides a dialogical and imaginative starting point for opening up spaces for what is otherwise denied or ignored. Although critical pedagogy is a 'big tent' movement, a number of cogent and hard-hitting critiques have emerged highlighting its theoretical and political limitations. Concerns include the need for more attention to the complexities of how critical pedagogies are embodied or performed. This article argues that the performative dimension of critical pedagogy is important for putting into place the production of everyday spaces capable of transforming the boundaries of what is regarded as valid or legitimate knowledge and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a study of a northern School of Mining to interrogate questions about the relationship being negotiated between aboriginality and neoliberalism. Aboriginal Peoples have long fought for control over education as central to their right of self-determination. There are now many examples of programming and policies oriented to Aboriginal people in Canadian public post-secondary institutions. Alongside these Aboriginal gains, there has been a neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary education. This restructuring has served to open spaces to contest established colonial rationalities, technologies of power, and normed subjectivities in education, but it has also increasingly oriented schooling to economic goals, particularly skilling workers for local labour markets. Through neoliberal reforms, Aboriginal Peoples have achieved new forms of increased recognition. Elements of these changes correspond to Aboriginal Peoples' long-standing demands and vital aspirations. However, neoliberal governmentality continues to condition the possibilities for change. I argue the intertwining of Aboriginal self-determination with efforts to restructure education to better serve labour markets has shaped an aporetic terrain, where neoliberalism, under the banner of social justice, has itself become the vehicle for a limited version of justice demanded by marginalized communities. This advances a partial form of recognition which necessarily leaves aspects of Aboriginal claims unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the terrain of subalterity in education has multiplied in heterogeneous ways accentuated through the project of neoliberalism. Unpacking these socially, politically, or ideologically-through three contradictory imperatives-reveals intersecting spaces of marginality, hegemonic discourses, and complicated outcomes related to the governmentality of educational rights. However, despite serious efforts, the relentless task of contesting political rationalities, 'normed' subjectivities, or technologies of power has not gained sufficient collective momentum to usurp such modes of governance and thought. These arguments are explored through a range of empirical cases in Ontario ranging from refugee and migrant rights, to the reproduction of racial/sexual/classed profiling and subjectivities, to territorial disputes related to northern and smaller school board challenges related to school closures. It is argued that the fundamental issue is not the dilemma related to redistribution and recognition rights, but the tensions strategically created through the manipulation of economic and moral orderings and consequential fragmentations of space and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role that transformations in the K-12 public education sector have played in the ongoing structural crisis of contemporary capitalism and the re/making of North American global cities. More specifically, it explores why and how teachers' unions have been at the centre of the neoliberalization of public school systems by drawing on a case-study analysis of Chicago, which has been an experimental ground for the reconstruction of urban governance, labour markets, and education. Like the marketization of public housing, education markets contribute to the knitting together of education policy and neoliberal urban development. Underlying the assault on public education, teachers, and their unions in the United States are the intermingling logics of capital accumulation and white supremacy. Although teachers' unions have often been complicit in the making of neoliberalism, they also represent the biggest potential challenge to its further advancement through the adoption of a model of social justice, grassroots unionism. Offering a powerful glimmer of hope is the revitalized Chicago Teachers Union who waged an effective-and widely supported-September 2012 strike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to debates about subjectivity formation in neoliberal times by analyzing the emotional geographies of students' imagined futures. Drawing upon ethnographic research in a white, working-class rural Ontario school, I examine students' participation in The Real Game, a career education program that attempts to prepare grade 7/8 students for their adult futures. A curricular tool that espouses neoliberal tenets of flexibility, mobility, and self-improvement, The Real Game offers a site through which to explore the interplay between governing discourses and student subjectivities. Bringing Ahmed's critique of happiness narratives to an analysis of student interviews, I demonstrate how neoliberal governance operates affectively. As educational discourses idealize the self-reliant, future-oriented subject, students are trained to internalize neoliberal uncertainty as a set of insecurities to be managed on an affective level. The distinctly spatial operation of neoliberalism is apparent in Fieldsville students' future narratives, where dominant ideals of mobility conflict with local identifications and an allegiance to place. Students manage these pressures affectively, as they narrate their own movement and improvement through stories of hope, fear, and wonder. Thus, I argue that studies of the emotional geographies of education are integral to understanding how neoliberalism is lived in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities everywhere have been transformed as a result of expectations of labour flexibility and the implementation of market-oriented policies and practices including cost containment measures and efficiency-driven management models. Online teaching can be seen as a reform to education constituted by a 'common sense' vision for post-secondary education survival. Critical pedagogical approaches in social work education, geared towards fostering critical thinking skills and an insistence on students taking into account the social and historical positioning and identities of professionals and service recipients, must function within this context. This article explores how digitalized learning spaces in online social work education programs shape critical pedagogies and create different knowledge, power, and spatialized relations as universities are being restructured along neoliberal lines. Our central question is: What gets produced in the neoliberal university when critical pedagogies go online? We situate our discussion at the intersection of four areas of literature: critical pedagogies; geographies of education; neoliberalism; and distance education. Online education is analyzed as a technology of governance that effectively restructures the workplaces of university educators while constituting and disciplining willing subjects who can respond successfully to the demands of the neoliberal university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors undertake a geographically sensitive analysis of the influential 2010 Free to Learn report. Free to Learn proposes a reform of the funding system for First Nations students to remove funds earmarked for First Nations education from First Nations government control, convert universities into managers of First Nations student funding, and convert First Nations community members into entrepreneurs. Free to Learn employs two strategies: scalar obfuscation and the cultivation of historical geographic ignorance to obscure the links between their proposal for neoliberal educational reform and the long-standing assimilative strategies of the Canadian and pre-Canadian state. The authors explore the economics and demography in the report and expose its deep links to colonial and assimilative policies of the recent and distant past. They link this report to the larger theatre of education in Canada where cultures are frequently reduced to mutable symbols in an ahistorical context. They close with a reflection on the challenges and dangers of taking a political stance with limited understanding of the forces at work in the environment of neoliberal reform prevailing in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the recent, dramatic growth of international development studies (IDS) programs in Canada and how this growth relates to debates on neoliberal reform within higher education. I argue that, in the context of increasingly corporate management models, discourses of social responsibility, and specifically global citizenship, are not simply displaced or suppressed in spaces of higher education, but rather re-worked or re-packaged by administrations aiming to market university and college services and products to educational consumers. This is accomplished by representing 'global citizenship' not only as an ethical-moral orientation but also as a marketable set of skills and certifications. At the same time, such conceptual framings of citizenship do not go uncontested by professors and students, rather a study of IDS programs highlights the presence of counter-hegemonic practice and potential within higher education and the need for alternative imaginaries of responsible global praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School reform efforts in the United States often declare the entire institution irreparably unresponsive to student needs and in need of a fundamental overhaul. Consequently, coalitions that incorporate business and philanthropic actors have advocated strongly for the introduction of market logics into the public system. I argue that these movements are facilitated by creating a sense of obligation that is mapped onto the space of the urban or metropolitan area. I draw on archival research and open-ended interviews to demonstrate the degree to which this moral obligation dominates reform efforts in the Seattle area through two coalitions: the first, made up of local business, philanthropic, and citizen groups that advocate for introducing market logics of choice and accountability, and the second, made up of parents who advocate for a network of alternative schools that meet the needs of students not served by the public system. Based on these differences, I argue that the former coalition's greater influence is in part due to its ability to mobilize an image of urgency around school reform that is geographically specific even as it glosses over differences in the spaces of education quality within the larger Seattle area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the significant developments in the interdisciplinary field of judgment and decision making is the classification of environments as a function of (a) their capacity to enable people to learn from experience (kind environments vs. wicked environments) and (b) the consequences of having failed to understand and adapt to them (exacting environments vs. lenient environments). Based on the premise that 'environment' is a key geographical concept, I explore the usefulness of appropriating these classifications in geography and argue that they can stimulate normative work on the possible contours of a better world as well as illuminate in novel ways long-standing geographical concerns with the problematic of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canadian cities are at a crossroads. The neoliberalization of governance at multiple scales, inadequate re-investment in urban infrastructure, increasing reliance on continental and international trade, and the restructuring of the space economy have combined to weaken Canada's cities just as the global economic system is undergoing transformation. Canadian urban geographic scholarship has much to offer under current conditions, and is already making significant contributions in key areas. In particular, research on what might be called the contours and impacts of urban restructuring and the neoliberal city, immigration and cities of difference, and urban environmental justice show much promise and are likely to define the core of Canadian urban geography into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guatemala, a nation plagued by the legacy of its brutal 36-year civil war, has, in recent years liberalized its mining law to encourage the entry of multinational mining corporations. These mining companies have included two Canadian companies, which have developed the two most prominent, and controversial, mining projects in Guatemala. Using the lens of political ecology to demonstrate how environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of the socially vulnerable, this article analyses the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to mining in Guatemala. The article reviews the development of liberation theology in Latin America and how this has imparted empathy for the poor into the pastoral praxis of the church. The church is opposed to mining largely because of the potential implications of mining's environmental effects upon the livelihoods of the poor. The article postulates that the opposition of the church to mining is an example of an environmental issue connecting groups of people across class and ethnic lines to offset powerful global political and economic forces. The article concludes with a discussion of how this opposition to mining is a demonstration of the opposition of the progressive church to neoliberalism in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coexistence of conservative and liberation perspectives within the Roman Catholic Church still causes disagreements. However, since Vatican II, the Catholic Church in Guatemala has established a commitment to act as a church of the poor. There is tension between Guatemala's elite and the Church, which has led to the murders of Church members and the issuance of death threats to others. Although the growth of evangelical movements has caused the Church to lose influence, the Church remains committed to the poor, which places it in sharp contradistinction to neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This invited essay responds to requests by the Suzanne Mackenzie Memorial Lecture Nominating Committee and by the former Editor of this journal to take stock of and provide intellectual-historical context for the major preoccupations that characterized feminist urban geography in its early years, by means of a personalized reflection in light of the author's own positioning in those debates and interventions. The thread running through the article is that of the relationship between the 'economic' and the 'social' in urban geography. The last section briefly considers new challenges that neoliberalism poses for critical feminist urban geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]