Canada and the Challenges of International Development and Globalization by Mahmoud Masaeli and Lauchlan T. Munro (eds)
Author | John Cameron |
Published date | 01 June 2019 |
Date | 01 June 2019 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020702019853225 |
Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Mahmoud Masaeli and Lauchlan T. Munro (eds)
Canada and the Challenges of International Development and Globalization
University of Ottawa Press: Ottawa, 2018; 364 pp. $44.99 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-77662-636-9
Reviewed by: John Cameron (john.cameron@dal.ca), Department of International
Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada
Full disclosure: I don’t like textbooks. The benefits of comprehensive survey cover-
age seem almost impossible to combine with engaging writing, while the uniformity
of organization and writing style fails to expose students to different forms of
writing for different audiences and purposes. I can also never seem to find text-
books that perfectly fit my particular ways of organizing courses, so I prefer to
create my own reading packages that include academic articles, book chapters,
NGO and government reports, media articles, op-eds, short stories, video clips,
and films. With so much online material easily available, and copyright regulations
that make it possible to provide most of this material at no extra cost to students, I
find it hard to advocate for textbooks.
My personal biases aside, the new textbook edited by Mahmoud Masaeli and
Lauchlan Munro, Canada and the Challenges of International Development and
Globalization, offers an important alternative to previously published texts.
International development is often taught in Canada and other ‘‘developed’’ coun-
tries as something that happens ‘‘over there’’—in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America—that has little to do with the daily lives of Canadian students. This
approach typically focuses on the key issues of international development, such
as gender, health, poverty, inequality, rural development, urbanization, et cetera,
but not on the ways in which these issues are connected to students’ daily lives.
Conceptually, international development remains far away, and students are cast
as innocent bystanders.
An alternative approach is to connect the challenges of international develop-
ment to the daily lives of students so that the key issues are framed around con-
nections to students through their roles as consumers, citizens, taxpayers, and
investors. For example, through use of a mobile phone, students are connected
to conflicts over the extraction of natural resources, often involving Canadian
companies; to worker suicides in tech factories in China; and to e-waste dumping
and its impacts on human health around the world. Similarly, a cotton T-shirt
connects them to the global water crisis, child labour in cotton harvesting in
Uzbekistan, dangerous working conditions in garment factories in Bangladesh,
and the dumping of used clothes into textile markets throughout Africa. Any stu-
dent who has ever received a paycheque has made contributions to the Canada
Pension Plan, which connects them to the global investment industry and debates
about responsible investing. From this perspective, international development and
poverty are not issues that happen ‘‘over there’’; they are intimately connected to
almost every aspect of our existence. Moreover, students are not innocent bystan-
ders, but are rather potentially implicated—if only indirectly—in patterns of global
Book Reviews 331
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