By Pete Anderson
Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environment, and the Everyday, 1953-2003
Joy Parr
University of British Columbia Press
Paperback, 304 pages, $32.95
Just as all politics can be viewed as local, so, too, can history. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (UBC Press, 2010) explores local reactions to a series of “megaprojects,” with a focus on how the residents and workers involved adapted to changing environments, technologies, and everyday experiences often outside of their control. Through seven diverse episodes—ranging from the creation of CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick, the building of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in eastern Ontario, the flooding of the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia, three aspects of Canada’s nuclear program, and the local and provincial response to the e.coli outbreak in Walkerton, Ontario in 2001—Parr seeks to reclaim the vital importance of local, embodied experience in historical research and writing, and, by extension, in political and policy decision-making processes.
Each story in Sensing Changes is accompanied by an online “new media” package prepared by Jon van der Veen (see http://megaprojects.uwo.ca), which also includes an additional section on Asbestos, Quebec). The episodic nature of the work allows for a more casual reading, as each event is self-contained and can be easily read in a sitting, though the multi-media package is not as well integrated into the work as it could be. Nonetheless, the oral histories that inform the text and the accompanying multimedia package provide Parr’s narrative with a sense of place not always found in purely textual sources and narratives. It also shows the importance of taking local stories seriously and of policy makers being aware of the effects that their decisions have on the well-being, habits, and lived experience of individuals and communities.
While Parr introduces her intellectual predecessors from a host of disciplines and a number of tightly defined academic words in her introduction, three closely related concepts stand out as important for understanding her book as a whole: “embodied knowledge”; habitat; and the local. Embodied knowledge refers to the fact that as physical beings our “minds are embodied,” and that “doing can organize knowing: that logic can be founded in practice” (8). Parr argues that we come to know our world not only through abstract thought, but also by acting in and upon our environments. Our actions are possible because we have bodies that exist in the physical world and are capable of knowing that world through our sensory perceptions. The human body, then, becomes the fundamental archive of historical experience that is researchable through written and oral accounts of lived experience. Continue reading →
By Michele A. Johnson, Funke Aladejebi & Francesca D’Amico
