Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Towards Meaningful Research And Engagement: Indigenous Knowledge Systems And Great Lakes Governance, Deborah Mcgregor, Nicole Latulippe, Rod Whitlow, Kristi Leora Gansworth, Lorrilee Mcgregor, Stephanie Allen

Articles & Book Chapters

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples governed their relations in the Great Lakes region, guided by distinct political, legal, governance, and knowledge systems. Despite historic and ongoing exclusion of Indigenous peoples from Great Lakes governance in the Canadian context and other assaults on Indigenous sovereignty, authority, jurisdiction and responsibilities, Indigenous peoples have maintained their relationships with the Great Lakes. In recent years, Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) have made inroads in Great Lakes governance, thanks primarily to First Nation political advocacy. However, it remains a challenge to include Indigenous knowledge and implement approaches that bridge Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. …

Metadata Best Practices For Trans And Gender Diverse Resources, Trans Metadata Collective, Jasmine Burns, Michelle Cronquist, Jackson Huang, Devon Murphy, K. J. Rawson, Beck Schaefer, Jamie Simons, Brian M. Watson, Adrian Williams

Librarian Publications & Presentations

This document is the result of a year of work and collaboration by the Trans Metadata Collective (TMDC; https://transmetadatacollective.org/), a group of dozens of cataloguers, librarians, archivists, scholars, and information professionals with a concerted interest in improving the description and classification of trans and gender diverse people in GLAMS (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Special Collections). The Collective’s primary goal was to develop a set of best practices for the description, cataloguing, and classification of information resources as well as the creation of metadata about trans and gender diverse people, including authors and other creators.

Ocul Collaborative Futures (Cf) Decolonizing Descriptions Working Group Final Report, Erin Johnson, F. Tim Knight, Antonio Muñoz Gómez

Librarian Publications & Presentations

The broad objective of the working group is to develop recommendations on how to make descriptive metadata in Omni, the Collaborative Futures (CF) shared library services platform, more accurately and respectfully reflect Indigenous Peoples, knowledges, and contexts.

The following report was created by the OCUL-CF Decolonizing Descriptions Working Group and submitted to the OCUL-CF Metadata Management and Standards Committee as per its Terms of Reference.

In section 1 of the report, we have included a set of recommendations organized as follows:

● Recommendations on relationship building and consultation: The Working Group recognized that without this step, this work cannot advance …

Term Circles: Using Linked Data As A Tool To Mitigate Colonial Subject Bias, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

This paper considers the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) recommendation to “decolonize library access and classification” and begins by exploring the difficulty involved when addressing this recommendation working from within a colonial institution that represents a colonial worldview. It compares general characteristics of Western and Indigenous worldviews and considers the affect that these perspectives have on the organization of knowledge and information especially in relation to a controlled subject vocabulary like the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). It presents the “term circle” as a way to mitigate colonial biases by creating a hybrid subject language system using SKOS …

Emotions And Precedent, Emily Kidd White

All Papers

The philosophy of emotion raises complications for theories of precedent. This chapter argues that it is productive to think of the effect of some precedents as facets of legal reasoning that are related to the use and understanding of legal concepts as thick concepts. In legal reasoning, precedents are routinely invoked to explicate, and/or clarify the content of legal concepts that are at issue in a case. This chapter develops an argument by Bernard Williams, i.e., that one must avoid the risk of over-generalizing the relationship of emotions to thick concepts, by placing it in the context of legal reasoning. …

Osgoode Digital Schoarship: Osgoode Digital Commons And Ssrn Research Paper Series, Statistics 2021, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

Statistical overview of activity of Osgoode Digital Commons and Osgoode Legal Research Paper Series (SSRN) prepared for faculty meeting December 10, 2021.

Using Linked Data To Mitigate Colonial Subject Bias, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

This presentation is inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Report and Recommendations released by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations in April 2017. With a focus on the “decolonization of library access and classification” in relation to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) it presents the term circle as a way to mitigate colonial biases by creating a hybrid subject language system using SKOS RDF/XML in a linked data context. This hybrid system facilitates Indigenous community participation in the control and development of subject metadata and suggests a new role for metadata.

A History Of Classifying Trans Subjects At The Library Of Congress Before 1963, Beck Schaefer

Librarian Publications & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Open Access & Research Dissemination @ Osgoode, F. Tim Knight, Yemisi A. Dina

Librarian Publications & Presentations

Yemisi Dina, Chief Law Librarian and Tim Knight, Head of Technical Services from the Osgoode Library, will be discussing open access, publishing options, and the best tools for dissemination your research.

Resetting Normal: Women, Decent Work And Canada's Fractured Care Economy, The Canadian Women's Foundation, Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives, Ontario Nonprofit Network, Fay Faraday

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

Women in Canada have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to an extent that threatens to roll back equality gains. Economic losses have fallen heavily on women and most dramatically on women living on low incomes who experience intersecting inequalities based on race, class, disability, education, and migration and immigration status. The pandemic crisis has highlighted the fragility of response systems and the urgent need for structural rethinking and systemic change.

Worldviews, Term Circles, Linked Data, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

The CFLA-FCAB Truth & Reconciliation Report advises that libraries address “structural biases” in knowledge organization. This session explores the effects a Western worldview has on our ability to successfully “integrate Indigenous epistemologies” and decolonize our approaches to knowledge organization, the need for respectful consultation with Indigenous communities, and linked data as a way forward. This session features Camille Callison, Anne Carr-Wiggin and F. Tim Knight and is one of several sessions at OLA SC 2020 concentrating on the respectful decolonization of Canadian libraries.

On Emotions And The Politics Of Attention In Judicial Reasoning, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

Legal doctrine regularly requires judges to both understand and use emotions in different ways. This chapter explores the role of emotions in fixing and sustaining judicial attention on the impact of a law on the constitutional rights of an individual or group. That certain forms of wrong or harm, including forms of political and social exclusion, are difficult to detect in the absence of focused attention is, I think, what Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Man-Moth’, excerpted here in epigraph, intends to express. This chapter explores the role of emotions in setting up the serious, sustained inquiry into the impact of a …

Enhancements To Heinonline Author Profiles, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Words And Worldviews: Decolonizing Description, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

Recommendation #5 in the CFLA-FCAB Truth & Reconciliation Report advises that libraries address the “structural biases in existing schemes of knowledge organization and information retrieval arising from colonialism.” It suggests that one way to do this is by “integrating Indigenous epistemologies into cataloguing praxis and knowledge management.” This requires conversations and collaborations, learning and unlearning. In this panel, F. Tim Knight and Sharon Farnel will discuss their paths toward understanding the inherent differences that exist between Western and indigenous approaches to knowledge, and explore what decolonization means in the context of library resource description.

Research Dissemination @ Osgoode Hall Law School: An Update, Yemisi Dina, Teodora Naydenova

Librarian Publications & Presentations

A presentation on research dissemination metrics for Osgoode faculty with statistics derived from the Osgoode Digital Commons, SSRN, and HeinOnline.

Law, Autonomy, And Local Government: A Legal History Of Municipal Corporations In Canada West/Ontario, 1850-1880, Mary Margaret Pelton Stokes

PhD Dissertations

The historiography of local government in mid-nineteenth century Canada West/Ontario is divided on the question of municipal autonomy. The more dominant thesis asserts that the Municipal Corporations (Baldwin) Act of 1849 ushered in a period of freedom for municipalities. The second depicts the Act as oppressive of autonomy in the interests of economic development. Both interpretations are based largely on extrapolation from earlier and later periods; there have been no direct examinations of local governance in Canada West/Ontario for what may be considered its formative period, from 1850 to 1880. In addition, much that has been written has been conceptually …

Law, Metaphor, And The Encrypted Machine, Lex Gill

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The metaphors we use to imagine, describe, and regulate new technologies have profound legal implications. This article offers a critical examination of the metaphors we choose to describe encryption technology and aims to uncover some of the normative and legal implications of those choices. The article begins with a basic technical backgrounder and reviews the main legal and policy problems raised by strong encryption. Then it explores the relationship between metaphor and the law, demonstrating that legal metaphor may be particularly determinative wherever the law seeks to integrate novel technologies into old legal frameworks. The article establishes a loose framework …

Law, Culture, And The City: Urban Legal Anthropology, The Counterhegemonic Use Of Hegemonic Legal Tools, And The Management Of Intangible Cultural Heritage Spaces Within Toronto's Municipal Legal Frameworks, Sara Gwendolyn Ross

PhD Dissertations

The deep process of revision needed in managing Toronto and Canadas urban intangible cultural heritage not only affects redevelopment decisions and cultural policies at the municipal level, and cultural heritage legislation and regulations at the provincial level, but it also calls for the need to address issues at the federal level, such as correctly acknowledging what terms like heritage value mean when drawn from international cultural heritage legislation and the currently unratified status of the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage within Canada. Through the application of urban legal anthropology, as well as through a lens …

Cripping The Ethics Of Disability Arts Research, Roxanne Mykitiuk, Andrea Lamarre, Carla Rice

Articles & Book Chapters

The use of multimedia story making and drama based narrative in disability health research raises conventional ethical issues of informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality. In this chapter we explore unique ethical issues that arise when working with non-normatively embodied research participants in a highly collaborative way, using arts based mediums that transgress boundaries of anonymity and privacy, and call for difference-tailored processes of consent. People with disabilities have long been the object of medical and health research and the subjects of biomedical ethical transgressions, giving rise to the need for stricter human subject protocols about consent, confidentiality and anonymity. However, …

Heinonline’S World Constitutions Illustrated In Top 5 Fcil Sources, Yemisi Dina

Articles & Book Chapters

World Constitutions Illustrated provides access to constitutions of various jurisdictions. There is a current constitution in the original language, one English language translation for each country, and amending laws for each constitution.

The database provides access to constitutional development documents, which is very important and critical, especially when researching smaller economies and jurisdictions. It serves as a one-stop shop for materials that may not necessarily be easily available anywhere else.

Can Local Actors Foster A More Inclusive And Sustainable Model Of Economic Development? The Role Of Business Improvement Areas In The “New” Industrial Policy, Matias De Dovitiis, Juan Gomez, Rafael Gomez

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

A growing body of evidence links differing managerial practices, specifically ones addressing environmental sustainability and the management of people, to variations in performance observed across firms and countries. Firms (and by extension jurisdictions) that invest in better environmental policies (sustainability) and that empower workers (inclusivity) tend to outperform, over the long run, those that do not. Despite the gains associated with these inclusive and sustainable management techniques, large differences in the adoption of even the most basic management practices persist. We premise this article on an institution that can lower the costs of gaining best practice knowledge and help in …

The Conundrum Of Youth Unemployment, Harpreet Gill

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This commentary explores issues surrounding youth employment in Toronto from the point of view of a social worker with the Youth Job Connection program. The author highlights issues with the program and the need for reform—from within both government and communities— by drawing on her personal experiences with a typical client.

The Youth Employment Solution: From Universal Healthcare To Universal Employment, Timothy Lang

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This short commentary examines youth unemployment in Canada and offers four solutions for increasing youth employment and creating a stronger, safer society: (1) increase participation rates in post-secondary education; (2) provide employment readiness and job placement through youth employment services programs; (3) enhance high school curriculums to better prepare youth for employment; and (4) adopt best practices and policies from leading nations and organizations.

Incentives And Ethics In The Economics Of Body Parts, Nicola Lacetera

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Research shows that properly devised economic incentives increase the supply of blood without hampering its safety; similar effects may be expected also for other body parts such as bone marrow and organs. These positive effects alone, however, do not necessarily justify the introduction of payments for supplying body parts, because these activities concern contested commodities or repugnant transactions. Societies may want to prevent these transactions even if they increase supply, because of ethical concerns. When transactions involve contested commodities, therefore, there often is tension between the efficiency-enhancing effects of trades mediated by a monetary price and the moral opposition to …

Markets And Sovereignty, Joseph Blocher, Mitu Gulati

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The past few decades have witnessed the growth of an exciting debate in the legal academy about the tensions between economic pressures to commodify and philosophical commitments to the market inalienability of certain items. Sex, organs, babies, and college athletics are among the many topics that have received attention. The debates often have proceeded, however, as if they involve markets on one side and the state on the other, with the relevant question being the ways in which the latter can or should try to facilitate, restrict, or rely on the former. In this article, we approach the relationship between …

What About Classification Bias?: Channeling Sandy Berman, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

As libraries explore new avenues of information access, the need for a critical evaluation of our bibliographic tools is more important than ever. With the potential of the emerging semantic web and the promise of linked data, how will systems originally designed to organize closed physical collections translate to an increasingly fragmented digital information space? How will deep-seated cultural biases affect access to a cross-cultural information environment? This paper will review the work of Sandy Berman’s Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People aiming to explore a critical framework to evaluate the cultural interoperability of …

Book Review: Americanah By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yemisi Dina

Articles & Book Chapters

Americanah is based on a love story that revolved around 3 continents - Africa, North America, and Europe. The themes of race, gender, and identity feature prominently in this award winning novel. Adichie’s story gives a vivid description of the lives of young teenagers of various ethnic and class structures in military-ruled Nigeria from the late 1970s to the 1990s and the beginning of a democratic government. It subtly describes the different ramifications of corruption and highlights a very degenerative period and the beginning of professional brain drain in the country.

Changing The Landscape Of Scholarship, Louis Mirando, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Osgoode Digital Commons: One Million Downloads And Still Counting!, Louis Mirando

Librarian Publications & Presentations

Osgoode Digital Commons, the institutional repository and digital archive of Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, offering world-wide access to the research and publications of the School’s scholarly community, achieved a significant milestone when it reached one million downloads in the early morning of Monday, November 21, 2016, less than three years since its inception.

Class Roots: The Genesis Of The Ontario Class Proceedings Act, 1966 - 1993, Suzanne Erica Chiodo

LLM Theses

Nearly 25 years since its passage, the Ontario Class Proceedings Act has become one of the most frequently debated procedural mechanisms of its kind. The CPA came about following the release of the Attorney Generals Advisory Committee (AGAC) Report in 1990. None of the current narratives explain how this Report pulled together so many divergent interests where previous attempts had failed. My thesis answers this question with reference to the historical sources and the legal, political and social changes that took place throughout this period.

This thesis also highlights the unique nature of the AGAC consultation process, which saw the …