Professor Jennifer Tunnicliffe Co-Edits a Book on Human Rights in Canadian History
Professor Jennifer Tunnicliffe Co-Edits a Book on Human Rights in Canadian History
University of Manitoba Press has published Revisiting Human Rights in Canadian History (external link) , a new co-edited collection by TMU History professor Jennifer Tunnicliffe and Dr. Stephanie Bangarth of Western University. The volume offers a wide-ranging reassessment of how human rights have been understood, mobilized, and contested in Canada’s past. The chapters explore themes ranging from children’s rights and wartime political incarceration to queer activism, Indigenous grassroots organizing, solitary confinement, labour and migration, and Canada’s human rights engagements in global and transnational contexts.
The collection grew out of a 2022 workshop that reunited scholars in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to reflect on urgent contemporary rights questions and place them within a broader historical perspective. As the introduction argues, recent social movements and public debates underscore the need to revisit Canada’s human rights past with renewed critical attention. Contributors examine how struggles over race, gender, colonialism, citizenship, and state power have shaped both the meaning and the limits of rights in Canada.
A central strength of the collection is its emphasis on communities, activists, and grassroots organizations as key historical actors. Rather than presenting rights as the product of state policy alone, the volume highlights how marginalized groups and social movements have pushed to redefine justice, equality, and belonging in ways that continue to resonate in the present. In doing so, the collection underscores the importance of historical scholarship in understanding the roots of ongoing debates over reconciliation, anti-racism, gender and sexual rights, incarceration, and Canada’s responsibilities within international human rights frameworks.
Of the collection, Dr. Tunnicliffe says, “This volume asks readers to look beyond celebratory national stories and instead confront the uneven, contested, and often contradictory history of rights in Canada. The contributors show that many of the debates we face today—over race, colonialism, justice, and belonging—have deep historical roots.”