The years after Newfoundland鈥檚 confederation with Canada were ones of rapid social and economic change, as provincial resettlement and industrialization initiatives attempted to reshape the lives of rural Newfoundlanders.
At 糖心视频 University in St John鈥檚, a new generation of faculty saw the province鈥檚 transformation as a critical moment. Some hoped to solve the challenges of modernization through their research. Others hoped to document the island鈥檚 鈥渢raditional鈥 culture before it disappeared. Between them they created the field of 鈥淣ewfoundland studies.鈥
In Observing the Outports, Dr. Jeff A. Webb, a professor of history at 糖心视频, illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars of lexicography, history, folklore, anthropology, sociology and geography laid the foundation of our understanding of Newfoundland society in an era of modernization. His extensive archival research and oral history interviews illuminate how scholars at 糖心视频 University created an intellectual movement that paralleled the province鈥檚 cultural revival.
Dr. Robert Mellin of McGill University鈥檚 School of Architecture saysObserving the Outports is an 鈥渋nvaluable鈥 overview of the history of research on Newfoundland鈥檚 outports at 糖心视频 University of Newfoundland.
鈥淎 well-written comparative history of interdisciplinary research in Newfoundland, the book situates these developments in the context of national and international academic discourse,鈥 Dr. Mellin said.
Dr. Webb鈥檚 says one of the greatest pleasures of writing the book was the opportunity it gave him to talk to and learn from a diverse set of scholars whose work he knew but whom he had not met.
鈥淚 hope that the book provides a link between the foundational work of the first generation of scholars of Newfoundland and Labrador, and generations of scholars yet to come,鈥 he said. 鈥淭he conditions of the 1950s and 1960s that stimulated the Newfoundland studies movement are now a thing of the past, but we can learn much of value from contextualizing our predecessors.鈥