Darren Reid

McGill University | McGill

Histories of the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) often take for granted that the APS was principally a metropolitan organization, existing primarily in the minds and actions of its members in London. This paper presents a new perspective, highlighting that the APS also existed in the minds and the actions of its global network of settler, miss...

On 15 May 1879, 60 Xhosa-primarily women and children-were forcibly removed by the Cape government from an indentured labour market in Cape Town called the 'Kaffir Depot'. The Xhosa interpreter who worked at the Depot, Shadrach Boyce Mama, was present at their removal and witnessed one of the women screaming and attempting to kill herself rather th...

British and Afrikaner governments used different types of legal arguments to legitimize their acquisition of African land in the early nineteenth century. Using Pierre Legrand’s concept of legal mentalité, I explore the legal mythologies that conditioned Britons’ and Afrikaners’ methods of land acquisition. I adopt two instances of land acquisition...

Franco Moretti's work on ‘the great unread’ raises serious questions for any field. In the field of new imperial history, I am especially interested in how the use of distant reading to access “the great unread’ can inform our study of imperial and colonial discourses. To stimulate research in this direction, I conducted a small-scale case study to...

The study of British imperial culture is heavily attributed to the field of "new imperial history" that became defined in the 1990s, yet theories of imperial cultures date back to at least the 1950s. Furthermore, a recent cadre of new imperial historians has broken away from what might be called "new imperial history proper" to suggest a revised th...

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, two First Nations groups—the Chippewa of the Thames and the Six Nations of the Grand River—attempted to evict two other First Nations groups—the Munsee of the Thames and the Mississauga of the Credit—from the Thames and Grand River reserves in southern Ontario. These land disputes were successfully resolved by the tu...

Scientific uncertainty during pandemic outbreaks poses a challenge for health communicators. Debates continue over the extent to which health officials should be transparent about uncertainty and the extent to which they should suppress uncertainty and risk losing the public's trust when information changes. The middle ground, the concept of "reaso...

As part of a design-based research project, we designed, developed, and evaluated a web-based microlearning intervention in the form of a comic into the problem of COVID-19 online misinformation. In this paper, we report on our formative evaluation efforts. Specifically, we assessed the degree to which the comic was effective and engaging via respo...

As part of a design-based research effort into disrupting the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, we have iteratively designed, developed, and evaluated a learning intervention intended for public audiences. In this paper we describe the design principles we created to guide our applied research into education on the topic of online misinformation....

Purpose Because health misinformation pertaining to COVID-19 is a serious threat to public health, the purpose of this study is to develop a framework to guide an online intervention into some of the drivers of health misinformation online. This framework can be iterated upon through the use of design-based research to continue to develop further i...

As the global COVID-19 pandemic has been concurrently labelled an “infodemic,” researchers have sought to improve how the general public engages with information that is relevant, timely, and accurate. In this study, we provide an overview of the reasons why people engage and disengage with COVID-19 information. We use context-rich semi-structured...

Objectives This paper proposes an intervention into health misinformation that relies upon the health belief model as a means to bridge the risks associated with health misinformation and the impact on individual health, beyond the current recommendations for fact checking and information literacy. Study design This is a short theoretical paper....

Histories of the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) often take for granted that the APS was principally a metropolitan organization, existing primarily in the minds and actions of its members in London. This paper presents a new perspective, highlighting that the APS also existed in the minds and the actions of its global network of settler, miss...

While Grey Owl's ethnocultural transformation has been dismissed as failing to subvert settler-colonial power structures, I challenge scholars to begin to rethink Grey Owl's subversion in terms other than settler-colonialism, or, even better, to think about how his subversion reveals intersections between settler-colonialism and other discourses. I...

This paper contends that understanding Buffalo Child Long Lance’s and Grey Owl’s racial transformations from non-Indigenous to Indigenous is crucial for our understanding of racial boundaries in early twentieth century Canada, and in the British Empire as a whole. Yet it also recognizes that few historians have been drawn to the subject. To facilit...

This paper challenges the prevailing assumption that the 1917- 1929 anti-religion campaign, carried out by the Bolsheviks in the Russian countryside, was primarily intended to secularize the peasantry. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, this paper analyzes the two main tactics of the anti-religion campaign within the context of spiri...

My paper presents a comparative analysis of the development of Indigenous reserve systems in British North America and Western Australia across the nineteenth century. The existing historiography seeks to comprehend the relationship between the British metropole and the colonial periphery, and two opposing frameworks of colonial governance have bee...

The thugs of India have captured Western imaginations since their crimes were discovered by British administrators in the early 19 th century. Since that time, the thugs have been represented in various ways within Western historiography, ranging from the trope of 'thugs as a satanic cult' to the conception of 'thugs as the imagined constructions o...