Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Prize watch: Parr on Sensing Changes

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences has announced the 2011 Canada Prize in Social Sciences goes to Joy Parr for her innovative history of the human experience of megaprojects Sensing Changes.

In the book, Parr studies

"situations in the recent past when state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and environmental changes forced people to cope with radical transformations in their work and home environments. The construction of dams, chemical plants, nuclear reactors, and military training grounds; new patterns in seasonal rains; and developments in animal husbandry altered the daily lives of ordinary people and essentially disrupted their embodied understandings of the world. Familiar worlds were transformed so thoroughly that residents no longer knew the place where they lived or, by implication, who they were. 

Sensing Changes comes with its own website, Megaprojects New Media.

Other Canada Prize winners (French/English, Humanities/Social Sciences are here

Even the shortlists were pretty good to historians.  Historian Bryan Palmer and Alan Gordon, and John Borrows, legal historian as well as lawyer, completed the list.
 
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