Ruth Sandwell (Ph.D. Simon Fraser University, 1998) is a Canadian social historian. Her research interests are in Canadian history (of education, rural society and the social history of energy) and the teaching of history. She is the author of Canada’s Rural Majority, 1870-1940: Household, Environment, Economies (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and co-editor with Abigail Harrison Moore of In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2021) and co-editor with Amy von-Heyking of Becoming a History Teacher: Sustaining Practices in Historical Thinking and Knowing (University of Toronto Press, 2014). She is the founding co-director and executive board member of The History Education Network/Histoire et éducation en réseau and founding co-director and educational director of The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project.
What I'm working on: Into the Grid: How Modern Energy Remade Canada
How did Canadians experience, sense, and make sense of the transition to modern energy? What were the relationships between individual experiences of energy and the rapid social, political, economic, environmental and technological structural changes brought about by oil, changes that in turn transformed postwar Canadian society? Arguing that the transition to fossil fuels was characterized by the reorganization of Canadian populations and environments into new and/or transformed places, I will explore the social history of that transition from the vantage point of three spaces—the new rural, the new urban, and the new household—in order to understand how people’s everyday experiences of energy transitions can be incorporated into a broader systemic analysis of the technological, environmental and economic changes associated with grid systems of energy delivery.