The Contemporary Human Geography of CanadaAuthor(s): Wayne K. D. DaviesSource: Area, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), pp. 233-234Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003136 .

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IBG Annual Conference 233

floodplain forest communities to regenerate. John Thornes (London) also emphasised the com plex nature of ecological and erosional shifts due to climatic change, involving differential sensitivities and possible non-linear responses to change.

In the final paper Andrew Goudie (Oxford) took a look at the possible implications of global warming for the world's major desert regions, pointing out that some areas are likely to become drier, others wetter, and yet others may be submerged. During the subsequent discussion session concern was expressed that insufficient basic data currently exist to allow meaningful predictions about the consequences of future climate change. Numerous wars, political instability and changing economic priorities in developing countries have resulted in a situation where less regular field monitoring work is now carried out than during the first half century. To some extent the development of remote sensing has provided an additional useful monitoring tool, but is in itself no substitute for direct field measurement of river discharge, sediment load, erosion/ sedimentation rates etc. Similarly, computer modelling of the effects of global change offers no substitute for routine collection of basic meteorological data. Additional useful information about the basic physical, chemical and biological processes operative in drylands can undoubt edly be obtained through further small-scale, within-catchment studies, but a major challenge remains to extrapolate the results of such studies to the regional and global scales.

The symposium overall was well-attended with an audience approaching 100 in some sessions. A selection of the papers presented will be published in due course as a volume edited by symposium organisers.

Ken Pye Andrew Millington

University of Reading

The contemporary human geography of Canada Fascination with the freeing of Eastern Europe and the distintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia may be responsible for the lack of British attention paid to the possibility of the break up of another federation-Canada. For the past two year, Canadians have experienced a constant barrage of media discussions commissions and conferences, all designed to find a solution to the current constitutional impasse created by the last minute failure of two provincial legislatures to approve the Meech Lake accord. This proposed revision of the 1981 constitution was designed to bring Quebec, the only province that did not sign the repatriated constitution, into a new federal relationship. The rejection was linked to many factors, but especially concerns in English Canada about the extent to which Quebec was a distinct society, leading to the revival of the Quebec separatist movement. However the current constitutional debate is not only about Quebec. It has been fuelled by several other factors: the sense of alientation of many of the western provinces; the increasingly vocal demands of native peoples and many other groups for a place at the constitutional table; increasingly severe economic changes linked to severe global competition and the difficulties of dependence upon a resource based economy; and the continentalist policy of the Mulroney government which led to a free-trade agreement with the United States.

The objective of the Canada session, which was a joint session with the Canadian Studies in Wales group, was not to focus directly upon the current political debate and its search for new constitutional arrangements. Instead it demonstrated the background to these issues by illustrat ing some of the major changes that have transformed the human geography of the country.

Papers were provided by eight Canadian geographers who were either University of Wales graduates or were brought up in Wales.

Brian Osborne (Queen's University, Kingston) summarised the myths and icons of the old Canada and showed how the new Canada needs new identities to both reflect the new multi cultural reality and satisfy the Quebecois and native peoples in a post-industrial world. John Lehr (Winnipag) specifically focused on the development of the cultural diversity of the country, illustrating the very different ethnic composition of the western provinces and the new immi gration streams of the past decade, thereby revealing the inadequacy of the old concept of a Canada based on an English-French duality.

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234 IBG Annual Conference

Adrian Seabourne (Regina) traced the changes in the economic character of the country since the original Confederation, illustrating its transformation from a resource or staple based econ omy linked to Europe to a service economy with an industrial base exposed to world competition and increasingly integrated with the USA and the Pacific Rim. Max Barlow (Concordia) concen trated upon the 1989 Free Trade agreement with the United States, summarising its effects and discussing the extent to which the east-west linkages will be replaced by continentalism and north-south ties. Wayne Davies (Calgary) identified the recent changes in the settlement pattern, identifying the continued concentration in metropolitan places, their ethnic diversity and criticised the utility of counter-urbanisation ideas. Alison Gill (Simon Fraser) reviewed aspects of another important component of the Canadian urban system, the resource town. Focusing on her previous work on the new coal community of Tumbler Ridge (BC) she discussed the planning of the centre and drew comparisons with another emerging settlement type, the resort town.

The final two speakers dealt with one of the traditional constraints of Canadian development: the harsh northern environment. Ron Bordessa (York) reviewed Canada's Green Plan for the future, unveiled in 1990. He showed the background to the plan and discussed its utility in the light of sustainable development objectives. Ken Hewitt (Wilfred Laurier) provided a broad survey of the various types of environmental hazards in Canada. He illustrated the coping

mechanisms and relative costs involved in living in a northern environment, issues which may have even greater significance given the greater linkages and alternative options of living in the south.

Wayne K D Davies University of Calgary

Communities of resistance: geography and a new politics of identity In the last two decades, new political subjects have been created through the actions of the new social movements; often by asserting the unfixed and ' overdetermined ' character of identity. Further, in attempting to avoid essentialism, people have frequently looked to their territorial roots as credentialised demonstrations of their own constituency. A cultural politics of resistance, exemplified by Black politics, feminism and gay liberation, has developed struggles to turn other sites of oppression and discrimination into spaces of resistance.

Against this background identity politics has moved from the margin to the centre of both political debate and academic interest. It is in this context that the agendas of the new cultural politics deploy a richly spatialised vocabulary that should render a dialogue with geography in understanding the absence and presences of such representations of space mutually indispens able. However, the different political practices of the new social movements and their critique of the Left and class-based theories and practices, have ensured that ma(i)nstream geographical thought has been quarantined from their influence. This failure of geographical imagination, combined with a cultural conservatism leaves geography as an academic discipline in danger of becoming an anachronism, without a language to articulate the new space of resistance, the new politics of identity.

In this one day session of the Institute of British Geographers we attempted to encourage critical debate by inviting individuals from different backgrounds and perspectives to address this agenda. Some chose to examine the ground on which an engagement with contemporary cultural theory might be possible. Hence Liz Bondi (Edinburgh) highlighted the historical roots of many of the identity politics debates in the works of Marx and Freud, George Revill (Derbyshire College of Higher Education) drew on Carol Lake's Rosehill Tales to interrogate the narration of ' community ' and Neil Smith (Rutgers) and Cindi Katz (CUNY) argued that the metaphoric excesses of some contemporary social theory reproduced the insidious distinction of theoretical excess and political practice. Others chose to explore new conceptions of ' space'

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