Is market-driven research healthy? Responding to the language of “knowledge mobilization” that percolates through Canadian postsecondary education, the literary scholars who contributed these essays address the challenges that an intensified culture of research capitalism brings to the humanities in particular. Stakeholders in Canada's research infrastructure—university students, professors, and administrators; grant policy makers and bureaucrats; and the public who are the ultimate inheritors of such knowledge—are urged to examine a range of perspectives on the increasingly entrepreneurial university environment and its growing corporate culture.

Daniel Coleman is a recently retired English professor who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He taught in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He has studied and written about Canadian Literature, whiteness, the literatures of Indigeneity and diaspora, the cultural politics of reading, and wampum, the form of literacy-ceremony-communication-law that was invented by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence–Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island.

Daniel has long been fascinated by the poetic power of narrative arts to generate a sense of place and community, critical social engagement and mindfulness, and especially wonder. Although he has committed considerable effort to learning in and from the natural world, he is still a bookish person who loves the learning that is essential to writing. He has published numerous academic and creative non-fiction books as an author and as an editor. His books include Masculine Migrations (1998), The Scent of Eucalyptus (2003), White Civility (2006; winner of the Raymond Klibansky Prize), In Bed with the Word (2009) and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017, shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize).

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Smaro Kamboureli is Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph. Her publications include Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize, and, with Roy Miki, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2007). She is currently completing a new edition of her anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature.

Robert Zacharias is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests include migration literature, Canadian literature (with a focus on Mennonite literature), 18th-century studies, and critical pedagogy. His work has been published in Mosaic and Studies in Canadian Literature, as well as in the edited collections Embracing Otherness and Narratives of Citizenship.

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