A Bridge to Nowhere

Name: A Bridge to Nowhere
Price: 47.99 AUD
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ISBN: 9781487564476

Temporalities to Abandonment in Rural Canada

Donna Young

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Paperback

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English

University of Toronto Press
04 February 2026

Memoirs; Social classes; Social & cultural anthropology

Series: Anthropological Horizons

Artfully written and meticulously crafted, A Bridge to Nowhere explores the lives of men and women in isolated settlements across Canada, examining how their experiences are shaped by memory, precarity, and poverty. Following men abandoned at remote rail sidings in western Canada and women left in rural settlements in northern New Brunswick, Donna Young presents a powerful and unflinching Canadian story that critically analyses how poverty is represented in anthropological studies.

Based on research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, this innovative ethnography centres each chapter on a specific place or individual, developing an analysis anchored in memory and relationality. Young deftly connects the precariousness of these communities to the extraction of primary resources in the twentieth century, while also addressing the gendered spaces and labour conditions that define their lives. In navigating the complex and often contradictory forces at play, the book engages with a storied loneliness set against rural landscapes and regional sensibilities.

honours the emotional and social structures embedded in the landscape, capturing the intensity of precarious living.

By: Donna Young
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 320g
ISBN: 9781487564476
ISBN 10: 1487564473
Series: Anthropological Horizons
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 04 February 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Donna Young is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Reviews for A Bridge to Nowhere: Temporalities to Abandonment in Rural Canada

“Donna Young's A Bridge to Nowhere takes us to 1980s and 1990s 'unravelling,' 'nowhere places' in the Maritimes and the Prairies with deep sensitivity, nuance, honesty, and brilliance. Among other feats, Young expands the concepts of Maritime gothic, ethnography and autobiography complexity, and social history.” -- Heidi MacDonald, Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of New Brunswick “This book was a delight to read. Donna Young has a light touch and crafts each chapter beautifully in essay form: setting the scene with description of place and/or character alongside an intellectual touch point such as the place of rancour alongside melancholy or the purchase of apparently repressed memories as time passes. Young integrates different strands of scholarship very effectively indeed within these vignettes, weaving social histories together with memory studies and anthropologies of performance, marginality, ideology, and more.” -- Sophie Day, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London and Principal Research Fellow, School of Public Health, Imperial College London