Against the Grain

Socially Just Social Science from the Standpoint of Roxana Ng (Review Essay)

Bibliographic Data

ID12967306
AuthorsElaine Coburn (York University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume11
Issue1
Pages136-159
Publication date2017-02-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueStudies in Social Justice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1911-4788 • E-ISSN: 1911-4788
PublisherBrock University Library (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.26522/ssj.v11i1.1329
OpenAlexW2602818896
LanguageEN
References cited9

This contribution seeks to highlight the important scholarship of Roxana Ng, arguably one of Canadian sociology and political economy’s most underappreciated theorists. Like her activism, Ng’s academic work is both wide-ranging yet firmly focused on major, unjust inequalities. Her research particularly concerns the Canadian capitalist political economy but inevitably, given the embeddedness of these social relations within worldwide historical relations, stretches beyond national borders. In particular, Ng sought to unpack the everyday, intertwined – exploitative and unjust – relations of class, race, and gender, and the ways these unjust relations are articulated through migration and citizenship. This contribution situates the reception and uneven uptake of Ng’s varied work before critically analysing her contributions to understanding (1) immigrant women’s labour in Canada, (2) the complex racialized, gendered relations of power in the academy, and (3) the liberatory potential of embodied epistemologies, specifically Qi Gong meditation. In the conclusions, I consider the overall contributions and some contradictions of her work, in moving from the local to the global, and from the personal to the political

Citizenship · Embeddedness · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Law

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Open DOIOpen Access