Susan Dodd

Susan Dodd has an enduring interest in interplays between the talk of day-to-day life and the languages of bureaucracies. Such interplays are particularly evident in the aftermaths of industrial disasters when all the legitimation machinery of liberal democracies kick into high gear. This work both draws on and explores the limits of Habermas's  systems-lifeworld model of socio-political organization in late capitalism.

Dr. Dodd first came to FYP as a student from West King's District High School in the Annapolis Valley. During her Masters in Political Science at York University she studied dialogic goods in Charles Taylor's "Sources of the Self." In her Doctorate at York Sociology she studied the importance, for relatives, of "The Westray Story," the report of the public inquiry into the deaths of 26 miners in 1991 in the Nova Scotia coal mine.

She is an avid supporter of the Halifax Humanities 101 and Clemente Seminar, where great works are studied with people who often do not get a chance to participate in the kinds of reading and talking that make up the King's community. She has served HH101 as a section coordinator, lecturer, fundraiser and currently sits as Vice Chair on the Board of Directors.

Dr. Dodd has been a co-chair of the Nova Scotia NDP's Election Planning Committee since 2003 and was a member of the NDP transition-to-government team in June 2009. She currently serves on the Nova Scotia Election Commission. She was appointed to the Board of Directors for Film Nova Scotia in the spring of 2010.

Current projects

Dr. Dodd's book, The Ocean Ranger: Remaking the Promise of Oil (Halifax: Fernwood, 2012), was launched in February 2012. The loss of 84 men with the Ocean Ranger oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in February 1982 prompted a vigorous response from the socio-legal processes of liberal democracy. When the disaster made it shockingly evident that Canada and Newfoundland had failed to regulate the offshore oil industry, all the bureaucratic mechanisms of liberal democracy kicked into high gear in an effort to re-establish confidence in the legitimacy of governments, companies and legal systems.

This book considers the politics of how the story of the Ocean Ranger loss is being written into the history of Newfoundland, Canada, and the oil industry. Over time, the Ocean Ranger story is more and more a sad story about a bad storm and less and less a cautionary tale about governments' failure to regulate and corporations' negligence of public goods. Public inquiries, media coverage, and the payment of "blood money" have key roles in re-establishing confidence in the ability of liberal democracy to establish "truth" as well as the ongoing relations of exchange in collective life.

Dr. Dodd is collaborating with Dr. Neil Robertson on a collection of essays about the strong tradition of Hegel scholarship in Canadian universities. We consider the influence on generations of students of four great teachers of Hegel: Doull (King's and Dalhousie), Fackenheim (University of Toronto), Harris (York), Taylor (McGill).

Selected publications

• The Ocean Ranger: Remaking the Promise of Oil (Halifax: Fernwood, 2012) 
• "The Grotesque and the Sublime in Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis,'" International Journal of the Humanities, August, 2008.
• “‘When the slaughter is wholesale’: blame and causation in fatality reports from Nova Scotia's coal mines (1858-1997).” In Working Disasters: the politics of recognition and response, E. Tucker, ed. Baywood Press. Forthcoming.
• “Unsettled Accounts After Westray.” In The Westray Chronicles: a case study in corporate crime, C McCormick, ed. Fernwood Press, 1999: 218-249
• “Evading Accountability for Industrial Disaster: an Analysis of TNC Strategies,” Alternate Routes: a journal of critical social research, Volume 12, 1995