The years after Newfoundland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 91亚色 in St John檚, a new generation of faculty saw the province檚 transformation as a critical moment. Some hoped to solve the challenges of modernization through their research. Others hoped to document the island檚 渢raditional culture before it disappeared. Between them they created the field of 淣ewfoundland studies.
In Observing the Outports, Dr. Jeff A. Webb, a professor of history at 91亚色, 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 91亚色 created an intellectual movement that paralleled the province檚 cultural revival.
Dr. Robert Mellin of McGill University檚 School of Architecture saysObserving the Outports is an 渋nvaluable overview of the history of research on Newfoundland檚 outports at 91亚色
淎 well-written comparative history of interdisciplinary research in Newfoundland, the book situates these developments in the context of national and international academic discourse, Dr. Mellin said.
Dr. Webb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.
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, he said. 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.