New Directions in Working Class History

In Spring 2026 I was fortunate enough to secure an educational leave that will support me to complete a three-part research project. I’d like to thank Tara Lyons and Alena Buis for allowing me some space here to share my research goals with the wider KPU community. The project is made up of three distinct scholarly pieces, yet they are collectively linked by a focus on working-class history and politics in British Columbia.

In the first piece, I’m going to be writing a self-reflective article based on my experience with an in-class activity I created last year called “Bill’s box.” Bill’s Box stemmed from my desire to give students research experiences in the classroom, particularly the mystery-solving work that historians do. Last spring, I came to the first day of my BC History seminar with a box of old papers from the 1970s and ’80s. I told the students these belonged to a man named Bill. I refused to tell them anything else. Instead, week by week, students selected items from the box and analyzed them in class. At the end of the semester, they told me who they thought Bill was. Then I revealed what I knew about him, building on what they had uncovered. In addition to developing and practicing research skills collectively, the content of the box also provided a lens to see how Bill and his co-workers at a Sooke sawmill were negotiating the economic/ environmental challenges facing the forest industry in the 1970s and 1980s. In reflecting on this, I’m hoping to publish an article that will analyze this experience through the wider scholarship on teaching and learning, and then publish an article advocating for semester-long, collective research projects for teaching undergraduate research skills.

The second piece will have me significantly revising a chapter from my MA thesis for publication as a peer-reviewed journal article. This research explores a range of working-class hopes and fears over a contentious proposal to log old growth forests on Vancouver Island in the 1970s. This work emerges out my long-standing interest in how working-class communities understood and defined environmental change. The goal here is to emphasize and explain that working-class communities held nuanced views on the fate of forest lands that both challenged and bolstered the development of modern environmentalism. I also suggest that many of the forest industry’s recent struggles—the contentious protests at Fairy Creek, mill closures, acrimonious conflicts over forest tenue, and debates over tariffs and the impact on Canadian/American trade—are shaped in one way or another by transnational forces that arc back to the 1970s.

For the third piece I will be working with Dr. Lara Campbell (McMaster University) to publish an anthology of early 20th century published articles and unpublished  letters by the Marxist-Feminist and working-class suffragist, Bertha Merrill Burns. We will also co-author an introduction for the anthology that connects Burns’ writing to contemporary political debates on sexism, racism, class and the role of emotion within activist movements. Republishing Bertha Burns’ writing adds another piece to this project on BC working-class history and refigures what we know about the struggle for women’s political rights. Where liberal and conservative middle-class suffragists tend to dominate the historical record, Burns provides an important working-class and socialist alternative that significantly broadens our understanding of early feminism’s ideological and class contours.

For each of these research outputs, I will be seeking publishers that will support research dissemination by way of open access. Supporting open access aligns with priorites in the History Department which strives for zero textbook costs for our courses. This aligns strongly with Academic Plan 2027’s goal of expanding KPU’s work to further promote more open forms of education. Bill’s Box adds another two facets to support the goals of the Academic Plan by contributing to academic research on teaching and leaning and in promoting pedegogical emphasis on experiential learning by way of hands-on research with primary sources in the classroom.

The project’s different angles allow me to contribute to three different external communities. My hope is that feminist scholars will benefit from the Burns project by having at their disposal a large collection of unique primary sources that they can use in their teaching and research. The logging controversies article fills a major gap in labour and environmental history, fields that have tended to treat loggers and environmentalists as separate communities. My research is pivotal in illustrating that the two could be one and the same. Finally, when it comes to Bill’s box, I’ve long wanted to give back to the teaching and learning scholarship that has so benefited me as an instructor. Sharing my approach to using primary sources in the classroom allows me to do exactly that.

I’d like to end by way of a thank-you to so many of my colleagues here at KPU that have supported this work in its earlier phases, including supporting my application for educational leave. Many thanks are also due to the educational leave committee for all their work in adjudicating the applications. I’m very much looking forward to doing this work and I look forward to sharing more of the results with the community as the different parts of the project are published.