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  • Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities ed. by Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli
  • Brian Corman (bio)
Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli, editors. Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities. University of Alberta Press. xxiv, 312. $49.95

This collection of essays emerged from a 2006 workshop/forum at the University of Guelph in part in response to the planning documents issued by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the title From Granting Council to Knowledge Council: Renewing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada. Those documents provoked considerable discussion at the time; the 2011 publication of these essays is, as a result, somewhat stale as a response to the ‘knowledge Council’ that has just celebrated its first five years. Fortunately, much of the content in this collection is not rigidly time-sensitive.

The authors share a commitment to cultural critique and change, and believe that the humanities should promote social activism. They share a concern that the current academic ‘culture of research’ promotes ‘research capitalism’ to the detriment both of scholarship in the humanities and of the well-being of society. ‘Is market-driven research healthy?’ is the [End Page 475] question posed on the book’s cover. The answer is predictable, but in the process of reaffirming that answer, the authors rehearse a full range of challenges confronting the humanities: short-term economic gain drives research funding; social justice continues to take a back seat to economic imperatives (L.M. Findlay); universities continue to suffer from budget cuts while society suffers from the Harper government’s attacks on the social safety net (Donna Palmateer Pennee); knowledge is being reduced to a utilitarian commodity (Kit Dobson); junior researchers continue to face dismal prospects for research support and employment (Jessica Schagerl); universities, like society at large, continue to suffer from the legacies of colonialism and racism (Ashok Mathur and Rita Wong); the study of literature no longer carries the prestige it had fifty years ago (Diana Brydon). The authors provide informed historical analyses of how we arrived at our current, unhappy state, and their lamentations are largely unobjectionable.

The late Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (1996) is frequently cited as a foundational text; the citations call attention to how little has changed in the intervening years. Expressions of outrage at the triumphs of late capitalism and nostalgia for better times, especially for humanists, dominated those earlier responses to Readings. They have been updated, but little new of substance has been added. Given the promise of the title, this is disappointing. Paul Danyluk’s elegiac essay on Roy Kiyooka as a model for resistance reminds us of what an inspirational force Kiyooka was, but he is not a very good model for young academics, and he is of little use for ‘retooling the humanities.’

The two contributors who have taken the title more seriously are Marjorie Stone and Susan Brown. Stone looks at the well-funded Metropolis Project as a model for humanists who are genuinely interested in retooling. And Brown, one of the editors of the important Orlando Project, offers a well-developed argument about the centrality of digital humanities for future research. New technology, she argues, enables new methodology, which is for her the key to ‘the remaking of civil society in a digitalized world.’ These two essays offer the kinds of challenges humanists need if we are to engage in successful retooling.

Brian Corman

Department of English, University of Toronto

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