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Social science

  • Author:
    Richie, Beth, Meiners, Erica R., Davis, Angela Y.
    Summary:

    From divesting from the police to halting new jails, abolition shapes our political moment. The authors show how abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.

  • Author:
    Isitt, Benjamin, Malhotra, Ravi
    Summary:

    Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York, in 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be 'one of the most dangerous men in Canada'. Able to Leadtraces Kingsley's political journey, starting with his time as a soapbox speaker in San Francisco. As a leading member of the California left, he ran for the US House of Representatives. After moving to British Columbia, he rose to prominence in the Socialist Party of Canada and edited its newspaper, the Western Clarion. Although never elected to political office, Kingsley shaped an entire generation of Canadian leftists. Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt illuminate a figure who wielded considerable influence in an era when it was uncommon for disabled men to lead. They examine Kingsley's endeavours for justice against the Northern Pacific Railway, and how Kingsley's life intersected with immigration law and free-speech rights. Able to Lead brings a turbulent period in North American history to life, highlighting the implications of this profound legacy for the twenty-first-century political left.

  • Author:
    Dunham, Cyrus Grace
    Summary:

    For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. Rather than looking back on gender transition from a settled distance, Cyrus invites us into the process as it unfolds, honoring the messiness, confusion, and thrill of self-discovery.

  • Author:
    Evans, Rachel Held
    Summary:

    This 2020 audiobook edition of Rachel Held Evans's New York Times bestseller features narration by Rachel Held Evans's sister, Amanda Opelt, and husband, Daniel Evans. With just the right mixture of humor and insight, compassion and incredulity, A Year of Biblical Womanhood is an exercise in scriptural exploration and spiritual contemplation. What does God truly expect of women, and is there really a prescription for biblical womanhood? Come along with Evans as she looks for answers in the rich heritage of biblical heroines, models of grace, and all-around women of valor. What is "biblical womanhood" ... really? Strong-willed and independent, Rachel Held Evans couldn't sew a button on a blouse before she embarked on a radical life experiment--a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles ...

  • Author:
    Wanjala, Barbara, Allfrey, Ellah Wakatama
    Summary:

    Illuminating African narratives for readers both inside and outside the continent. Representing the very best of African creative nonfiction, Safe House brings together works from Africa's contemporary literary greats. In a collection that ranges from travel writing and memoir to reportage and meditative essays, editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey has brought together some of the most talented writers of creative nonfiction from across Africa. This creative nonfiction single from Safe House anthology is Barbara Wanjala's account of her journey from Kenya to Senegal to meet with LGBT activists in Dakar.

  • Author:
    Maher, Sanam
    Summary:

    In 2016, Pakistan's first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Maher reconstructs the story of her life to restore the humanity of the woman at its center.

  • Author:
    Drout, Michael D. C.
    Summary:

    In this course, Wheaton College professor Michael D.C. Drout brings his expertise in literary studies to the subject of rhetoric. He examines types of rhetoric and their effects, the structure of effective arguments, and how subtleties of language can be employed to engage in more sucessful rhetoric.

  • Author:
    Drout, Michael D. C.
    Summary:

    Professor Drout continues to explore humanity's intimate association with language, here delving into the finer points of grammar. The intricacies of grammar, in fact, should not be relegated to the realm of fussy "guardians of the language," but are rather essential clues all can employ to communicate more exactly. In such a light, this course forms an invaluable guide for everyone from all fields of interest.

  • Author:
    Friedman, Avi
    Summary:

    A View from the Porch is an illuminating collection of 22 essays about the points where design touches life and the big and small things that make us appreciate, or become disconnected from, our homes and neighbourhoods. Drawing on his experiences as an architect, planner, world traveller, and educator, Friedman delves into issues such as the North American obsession with monster homes, the impact of scale on the feeling of comfort in our communities, environmental concerns such as deforestation, innovative recycling methods in building materials, the booming do-it-yourself industry, the decline of craftsmanship, and the role of good design in bringing families together. Written with Friedman’s trademark flare A View from the Porch offers a compelling vision of the influence of design in our everyday lives from one of the world’s most innovative thinkers. This is a totally revised edition, with new material, of Room for Thought published in 2005.

  • Author:
    van Horssen, Jessica
    Summary:

    For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos from the town of Asbestos, Quebec, to produce fire-retardant products. Then, over time, people learned about the mineral’s devastating effects on human health. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community’s survival, the residents of Asbestos developed a unique, place-based understanding of their local environment; the risks they faced living next to the giant opencast mine; and their place within the global resource trade. This book unearths the local-global tensions that defined Asbestos’s proud and painful history to reveal the challenges similar resource communities have faced – and continue to face today.

  • Author:
    Blanc, Paul Le.
    Summary:

    In a blend of economic, social, and political history, P Le Blanc shows how important labor issues have been, and continue to be, in the forging of our nation's history. Within a broad analytical framework, he highlights issues of class, gender, race, and ethnicity, and includes the views of key figures of United States labor. Paul Le Blanc is a professor of history at La Roche College, has written on and participated in the United States labor, radical, and civil rights movements, and is author of such books as Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience, and Lenin and the Revolutionary Party.

  • Author:
    Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake
    Summary:

    In A Short History of the Blockade, award-winning writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg stories, storytelling aesthetics, and practices to explore the generative nature of Indigenous blockades through our relative, the beaver--or in Nishnaabemowin, Amik. Moving through genres, shifting through time, amikwag stories become a lens for the life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades, deepening our understanding of Indigenous resistance, as both a negation and an affirmation. Widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation, Simpson's work breaks open the intersections between politics, story, and song, bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. A Short History of the Blockade reveals how the practice of telling stories is also a culture of listening, "a thinking through together," and ultimately, like the dam or the blockade, an affirmation of life.

  • Author:
    Wright, Ronald
    Summary:

    Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water -- the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future? In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

  • Author:
    McGregor, Hannah
    Summary:

    How do you tell the story of a feminist education, when the work of feminism can never be perfected or completed? In A Sentimental Education, Hannah McGregor, the podcaster behind Witch, Please and Secret Feminist Agenda, explores what podcasting has taught her about doing feminist scholarship not as a methodology but as a way of life. Moving between memoir and theory, these essays consider the collective practices of feminist meaning-making in activities as varied as reading, critique, podcasting, and even mourning. In part this book is a memoir of one person's education as a reader and a thinker, and in part it is an analysis of some of the genres and aesthetic modes that have been sites of feminist meaning-making: the sentimental, the personal, the banal, and the relatable. Above all, it is a meditation on what it means to care deeply and to know that caring is both necessary and utterly insufficient. In the tradition of feminist autotheory, this collection works outward from the specificity of McGregor's embodied experience -- as a white settler, a fat femme, and a motherless daughter. In so doing, it invites readers to reconsider the culture, media, political structures, and lived experiences that inform how we move through the world separately and together.

  • Author:
    Mitchell-Cook, Amy
    Summary:

    A Sea of Misadventures examines more than 100 documented shipwreck narratives from the 17th to the 19th century as a means to understanding gender, status and religion in the history of early America. Though it includes all the drama and intrigue afforded by maritime disasters, the book’s significance lies in its investigation of how the trauma of shipwreck affected American values and behavior. Through stories of death and devastation, Amy Mitchell-Cook examines issues of hierarchy, race and gender when the sphere of social action is shrunken to the dimensions of a lifeboat or deserted shore. Rather than debate the veracity of shipwreck tales, Mitchell-Cook provides a cultural and social analysis that places maritime disasters within the broader context of North American society. She answers questions that include who survived and why, how gender or status affect survival rates and how survivors relate their stories to interested but unaffected audiences. Mitchell-Cook observes that in creating a sense of order out of chaotic events, the narratives reassured audiences that anarchy did not rule the waves, even when desperate survivors resorted to cannibalism. Some of the accounts she studies are legal documents required by insurance companies, while others have been a form of prescriptive literature — guides that taught survivors how to act and be remembered with honor. In essence, shipwreck revealed some of the traits that defined what it meant to be Anglo-American. In an elaboration of some of the themes, Mitchell-Cook compares American narratives with Portuguese narratives to reveal the power of divergent cultural norms to shape so basic an event as a shipwreck.

  • Author:
    Tahirović-Sijerčić, Hedina, Levine-Rasky, Cynthia
    Summary:

    Romani Women in Canada: Spectrum of the Blue Water is grounded upon Romani women’s lived experience as writers, essayists, visual artists, and activists. Reflecting the panoply of women’s voices, the book links everyday experience and a social critique of the factors that enable and constrain women’s lives. Through incisive creativity, pragmatic action, and affective networks, the book is a consolidation of diverse expressions of agency and collectivity. Sharing a will to advance the dignity of women’s lives, the contributors are as plural as their subject matter. Canadian Romani women are impressively diverse in their attachments, status, beliefs, and identities. The chapters in this book illustrate this multiplicity by traversing creative practices and writing motifs. Contributors are visual artists, fiction and non-fiction writers, poets, scholars, and essayists. Reflecting the breadth of contributors’ creative genres, the book is eclectic in content with multiple forms of writing and images. Photographs of visual art and black-and-white portraits of Canadian Romani women will complement the written textual components.

  • Author:
    Lapierre, Dominique
    Summary:

    When the first Dutch Calvinist settlers arrived in South Africa, they believed that they had been chosen by God to rule over the world. Their bloody and fervent saga would culminate three centuries later in the establishment of apartheid.

  • Author:
    Mills, Sean
    Summary:

    What is the relationship between migration and politics in Quebec? How did French Canadians' activities in Haiti influence Quebec society? How did Haitian migrants shape debates about language, class, nationalism and sexuality? Breaks new historiographical ground by challenging the traditional tendency to view migrants as peripheral to Quebec history. Mills begins by analyzing French-Canadians' early ideas about Haiti and their forays into the country. Missionaries, nationalist elites, and government officials produced an idea of Haiti as being linked to French Canada, yet fundamentally different from it and in need of its assistance. The second part of the book reverses the perspective, and Haitians' ideas about Quebec take centre stage. Mills engages with the ideas and activities of taxi drivers, exiled priests, aspiring authors and feminist activists. From global political economy to the intimate realm of sexuality, he argues, Haitian migrants opened up new debates and exposed new tensions, along the way playing a key role in transforming Quebec society. 2016.

  • Author:
    Hamilton, Leah K., Veronis, Luisa, Walton-Roberts, Margaret
    Summary:

    Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, over 5.6 million people have fled Syria and another 6.6 million remain internally displaced. By January 2017, a total of 40,081 Syrians had sought refuge across Canada in the largest resettlement event the country has experienced since the Indochina refugee crisis. Breaking new ground in an effort to understand and learn from the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative that Canada launched in 2015, A National Project examines the experiences of refugees, receiving communities, and a range of stakeholders who were involved in their resettlement, including sponsors, service providers, and various local and municipal agencies. The contributors, who represent a wide spectrum of disciplines, include many of Canada's leading immigration scholars and others who worked directly with refugees. Considering the policy behind the program and the geographic and demographic factors affecting it, chapters document mobilization efforts, ethical concerns, integration challenges, and varying responses to resettling Syrian refugees from coast to coast. Articulating key lessons to be learned from Canada's program, this book provides promising strategies for future events of this kind. Showcasing innovative practices and initiatives, A National Project captures a diverse range of experiences surrounding Syrian refugee resettlement in Canada.

  • Author:
    Milloy, John S.
    Summary:

    'I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry.' — Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923) '[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school.' — N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948) For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the 'circle of civilization,' the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children.

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