Quebec’s social elite worked for decades to impose its values on Quebec society, and was successful to the point where even public spaces like churches, cemeteries and parks still shape our behaviour, says a McGill University historian.

Brian Young is the author of Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec: The Taschereaus and McCords, which has won the 2016 Canada Prize in the Humanities awarded by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The book follows two prominent families over the course of 150 years, from roughly 1780 to 1930.

The Taschereaus are French and Catholic; the McCords are English-speaking and Protestant. Both families followed a similar path: they parlayed important land holdings into money and influence, and worked hard to make sure...

Nancy Turner says the knowledge accumulated over thousands of years by indigenous peoples shows it’s possible to develop a sustainable approach to the use of natural resources. That knowledge, she says, allowed people to survive and thrive through climate change events as important as the end of the last ice age.

Turner, an ethnobotanist, has won the 2016 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences for her two-volume study of the knowledge of plants possessed by indigenous peoples in northwestern North America. The prize is awarded by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Entitled Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America, Turner’s book examines the relationship between people and...

Food, says Caroline Durand, brings together a number of different aspects of human life, such as health, science, relations between the sexes, social relations and our relationship to nature. Food is therefore an interesting prism through which to examine humans.

In her book Nourrir la machine humaine : Nutrition et alimentation au Québec, 1860-1945, Durand paints the portrait of a society in which the people with power try to impose their values through food. The book has won the 2016 Canada Prize in the Humanities awarded by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The period Durand studies roughly covers Quebec’ industrialisation and the massive movement of people from the countryside to the cities. At the same time, people were beginning to...

About a decade ago, singer Britney Spears set off a storm of controversy when teenage girls started imitating her ‘sexy’ style of dress.

Caroline Caron, a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, has taken a second look at the issue in a new book that attempts to deconstruct the debate – in part by hearing what teenage girls have to say about it.

Her book Vues, mais non entendues : Les adolescentes québécoises et l’hypersexualisation has won the 2016 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences.

Caron says that there never was a proper debate around the issue of teenage girls imitating Britney Spears’ style of dress, because at the time everyone seemed to agree that it was a bad thing....