Melissa Bull

This open access book brings together insights into Pacific policing, conceptualising policing broadly as order maintenance involving the actions of multiple local, regional and international actors with sometimes competing and conflicting agendas. A complex and multifaceted endeavour, scholarship on this topic is relatively scarce and widely dispersed across diverse sources. It examines how Pacific policing is shaped by changing state-society relations in different national contexts and ongoing processes of globalisation. Particular attention is given to the plural character of Pacific policing, profound challenges of gender equity, changing dynamics of crime, and the prominence of transnational policing in resource and capacity constrained domestic environments. The authors draw on examples from across the Pacific islands to provide a nuanced and contextualised account of policing in this socially diverse and rapidly transforming region.

Examining the historical, economic and political context for the current prohibition of particular drugs, this study investigates the problem of drug control and provides a systematic analysis of the development of the international system of regulation. It identifies the political rationalities that provided the basis of that system and positions these moral justifications for exercising power in relation to the practical programmes that put them into practice. The work not only catalogues the techniques and strategies employed in the process of governing illicit drugs, it also notes the failures, unintended consequences and other difficulties associated with getting such programmes to work. It will be of key interest to students and scholars of crime and criminology, law and society, medico-legal studies and health studies.

Melissa Bull's debut short story collection The Knockoff Eclipse and Other Stories hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull zooms in on the female experience while playing with societal expectation and literary convention. Spattered with bits of French, many of the stories pull back the covers on the intersection between French and English Canada. In the titular story "The Knockoff Eclipse," we're transported to a future world where women's clothing quite literally advertises their supposed wants and desires. Wanda and Henry meet in an old divebar turned trendy futurist café. "I used to be a model. But I got tired of people looking at me," she tells Henry. The theme of looking or being looked at runs through the entire collection, female bodies and the women who inhabit them must constantly contend with the masculine gaze, which is often internalized in such a way that it seems inescapable. The Knockoff Eclipse is dark like Duras, flippant comme Sagan, with elements of the surreal running through. These stories are modern feminist fables for the reader who is decidedly uninterested in upholding the moral of the story as it's been traditionally told.

In her compelling debut poetry collection, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award, Melissa Bull explores the familial, romantic, and sexual ties that bind lives to cities. Rue takes us through its alleys, parks, and kitchens with a robust lyricism and language that is at once inventive and plainspoken, compassionate and frank. In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street Rue's poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated withneologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author's upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North America, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father's struggles with terminal brain cancer. Inspired by powerful Quebec talents like Nelly Arcan, Marie-Sissy Labrèche, playwright Annick Lefebvre, Canadians poets Elizabeth Bachinsky, Nikki Reimer and David McGimpsey, Melissa Bull brings an unflinching new feminist voice to the Canadian literary scene.

Examining the historical, economic and political context for the current prohibition of particular drugs, this study investigates the problem of drug control and provides a systematic analysis of the development of the international system of regulation. It identifies the political rationalities that provided the basis of that system and positions these moral justifications for exercising power in relation to the practical programmes that put them into practice. The work not only catalogues the techniques and strategies employed in the process of governing illicit drugs, it also notes the failures, unintended consequences and other difficulties associated with getting such programmes to work. It will be of key interest to students and scholars of crime and criminology, law and society, medico-legal studies and health studies.