Books for review
Postcolonial literatures of Climate Change
Edited by Russell McDougalll, John C. Rya, and Pauline Reynolds
Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change investigates the evolving nature of postcolonial literary criticism in response to global, regional, and local environmental transformations brought about by climate change. It builds upon, and extends, previous studies in postcolonial ecocriticism to demonstrate how the growing awareness of human-caused global warming has begun to permeate literary consciousness, praxis and analysis. Read more
Re/Centering Lives and Lived Experience in Education
Edited by Ellen Lyle
Teaching and learning are profoundly personal experiences, yet systems of education often prioritize disembodied and decontextualized approaches that continue the historical marginalization of the lives they seek to represent. Re/centring teachers and learners places individuals at the heart of education and, in so doing, re/positions knowledge as contextual and constructivist. Read more
Educating for Action: A Curriculum for Social Activists
By Roger Hopkins
We live at a time when the competitive, capitalist model of action has eclipsed all other contemporary social and economic models and threatens the greater cooperative good of society. Neoliberalism is an attempt to reimagine governance in an age of mass democratic policies by its intention to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy. Read more
Common Currents: Examining How We Manage the Ocean Commons
Edited by H. Jordan Diamond, Holly Doremus, and Hee Cheol Yang
The world’s oceans play a vital role in everyday life, from climate regulation to food provision, and are widely recognized as a global commons. But they also face daunting challenges in the form of climate change, population growth, escalating pollution, and rapidly evolving technologies that speed the reach and pace of resource extractions. Read more
Critical Storytelling: Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia
Volume Editors: Julie Hansen and Ingela Nilsson
What does power abuse look and feel like in the academic world? How does it affect university faculty, students, education and research? What can we do to counteract and prevent power abuse? These questions are addressed in this collection of autobiographical poems, essays and illustrations about academia. Read more
An Abolitionist's Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World
By Patrisse Cullors
In AN ABOLITIONIST’S HANDBOOK, Cullors charts a framework for how everyday activists can effectively fight for an abolitionist present and future.
Filled with relatable pedagogy on the history of abolition, a reimagining of what reparations look like for Black lives and real-life anecdotes from Cullors AN ABOLITIONIST’S HANDBOOK offers a bold, innovative, and humanistic approach to how to be a modern-day abolitionist. Cullors asks us to lead with love, fierce compassion, and precision. Read more
Community Resource Handbook: A Guide to Community-Engaged Research. First Edition
By T. Mahoney, K. Grain, P. Fraser, J. Wong
Traditional research does not always prioritize community collaboration. Community-engaged research (CER) places academic and community partnership at the heart of research work. Bringing together these partnerships—which include different sets of priorities, experiences and skills—is not a straightforward or quick process. It takes time to build equitable and reciprocal relationships. By allowing communities to co-create knowledge, community-engaged research can build capacity for imagination, and enhance the capacity of communities to advocate for their own well-being. Read more
By Kari Grain
Introducing the 7 principles for practicing critical hope--because hope isn’t something you have; it’s something you do.
Each person has a unique, ever-changing relationship to hope.Hope alone can be transformational--but in moments of despair, or when you’re up against profound injustice, it isn’t enough on its own. Hope without action is, at best, naive. Read more
Canadian Justice, Indigenous Justice: The Gerald Stanley and Colten Boushie Case
By Kent Roach
Foreword by John Borrows
Putting Gerald Stanley's acquittal for killing Colten Boushie in the context of Canada's colonial and systemic discrimination against Indigenous peoples.
In August 2016 Colten Boushie, a twenty-two-year-old Cree man from Red Pheasant First Nation, was fatally shot on a Saskatchewan farm by white farmer Gerald Stanley. In a trial that bitterly divided Canadians, Stanley was acquitted of both murder and manslaughter by a jury in Battleford with no visible Indigenous representation. Read more
Edited by Della Gavrus and Susan Lamb
How teaching practices, social justice, and professional identities have shaped medical education around the globe throughout the last millennium.
In recent decades, researchers have studied the cultures of medicine and the ways in which context and identity shape both individual experiences and structural barriers in medical education. The essays in this collection offer new insights into the deep histories of these processes, across time and around the globe. Read more
Harriet's Legacies: Race, Historical Memory, and Futures in Canada
Edited by Ronald Cumming and Natalee Caple
A collection of critical and creative works exploring Black freedom and unfreedom in Canada.
Historic freedom fighter and conductor of the Underground Railroad Harriet Tubman risked her life to ferry enslaved people from America to freedom in Canada. Her legacy instigates and orients this exploration of the history of Black lives and the future of collective struggle in Canada. Read more
Unsettling Canadian Art History
Edited by Erin Morton
Rethinking visual and material histories of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diaspora in the contested white settler state of Canada.
Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada. Read more
Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals
By Josh Milburn
Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health threats, and harm to animals, we must change our food systems and practices. And in these systems, animals, too, are eaters. Read more
Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle
Edited by Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witherford, and Amanda F. Gryzb
Struggles for equality happen in all corners of the world. While social and economic justice movements are specific to their different national contexts, identities, and forms of oppression, collaboration and coalition building are required if we are to attain sustainable equality and healing justice. Read more
By Habiba Cooper Diallo
Foreword by Award Ibrahim
The prevalence of anti-Black racism and its many faces, from racial profiling to police brutality, in North America is indisputable. How do we stop racist ideas and violence if the very foundation of our society is built upon white supremacy? How do we end systemic racism if the majority do not experience it or question its existence? Do our schools instill children with the ideals of equality and tolerance, or do they reinforce differences and teach children of colour that they don’t belong? Read more
Defining Sexual Misconduct: Power, Media, and #MeToo
By Stacey Hannem & Christopher J. Schneider
In 2015, the New York Times ran just a single headline with the term “sexual misconduct.” Three years later, it ran scores of such headlines, averaging more than one per week, and expanded coverage across other media organizations followed. This shift in coverage is reflective of significant changes in public discourse about sexual harm helping to hold some perpetrators accountable for their behaviour and paved the path for #MeToo and related movements against sexual abuse and harm to receive national and global attention. Read more
Transverse Disciplines: Queer-Feminist, Anti-Racist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University
Edited by Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith
For at least a decade, university foreign language programs have been in decline throughout the English-speaking world. As programs close or are merged into large multi-language departments, disciplines such as German studies find themselves struggling to survive. Read more
Cool Anthropology: How to Engage the Public with Academic Research
Edited by Kristina Baines and Victoria Costa
Through a series of case studies by leading anthropologists, Cool Anthropology highlights the many different approaches that scholars have used to engage the public with their research. Editors Kristina Baines and Victoria Costa showcase efforts to make meaningful connections with communities outside the walls of academia, moving anthropological thinking beyond the discipline. Read more
Pop Culture and Power: Teaching Media Literacy for Social Justice
By Dawn H. Currie and Deirdre M. Kelly
Literacy education has historically characterized mass media as manipulative towards young people who, as a result, are in need of close-reading “skills.” By contrast, Pop Culture and Power treats literacy as a dynamic practice, shaped by its social and cultural context. It develops a framework to analyse power in its various manifestations, arguing that power works through popular culture, not as everyday media. Pop Culture and Power thus explores media engagement as an opportunity to promote social change. Read more
By Juanne Nancarrow Clarke
Medical error often results in disability, pain, and suffering, and it is the third leading cause of death in hospitals. Despite its frequency, medical error has been largely invisible to the mainstream public. Within the medical system itself, medical error is often understood as the result of an isolated case of malpractice.
Multiple Barriers: The Multilevel Governance of Homelessness in Canada
By Alison Smith
Despite decades of efforts to combat homelessness, many people continue to experience it in Canada’s major cities. There are a number of barriers that prevent effective responses to homelessness, including a lack of agreement on the fundamental question: what is homelessness? Read more
Profits and Power: Navigating the Politics and Geopolitics of Oil
David A. Detomasi
Oil fuels the global economy and remains a staple of our energy system. Yet, its production and use continue to draw negative criticism, and an increasing number of people want to reduce or eliminate its use altogether. Read more.
Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada
Edited by Kelly Fritsch, Jeffrey Monaghan, and Emily van der Meulen
An exploration of disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system.
Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous—even deadly—for disabled people. Disability Injustice brings together original work from a range of scholars and activists who explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system. Read more
Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina
By Deanna Reder
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition critiques ways of approaching Indigenous texts that are informed by the Western academic tradition and offers instead a new way of theorizing Indigenous literature based on the Indigenous practice of life writing. Read more
Prison Life Writing: Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U.S. Prison System
By Simon Rolston
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Prison Life Writing is the first full-length study of one of the most controversial genres in American literature. By exploring the complicated relationship between life writing and institutional power, this book reveals the overlooked aesthetic innovations of incarcerated people and the surprising literary roots of the U. S. prison system. Read more
Troubling Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian Education: Critical Perspectives
Edited by Sandra D. Styres and Arlo Kempf
The University of Alberta Press
Troubling Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian Education offers a series of critical perspectives concerning reconciliation and reconciliatory efforts between Canadian and Indigenous peoples. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars address both theoretical and practical aspects of troubling reconciliation in education across various contexts with significant diversity of thought, approach, and socio-political location. Read more
