National Network for Equitable Library Service

"Simply brilliant, both in its granular storytelling and its enormous compassion" —The New York Times Book Review. The story of two refugee families and their hope and resilience as they fight to survive and belong in America. The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees has been central to America's identity for centuries—yet America has periodically turned its back at the times of greatest humanitarian need.

Strong Is the New Pretty meets All the Single Ladies in this heartfelt celebration and exploration of the tomboy phenomenon and the future of girlhood, based on the author's viral New York Times op-ed. Inspired by her thought-provoking op-ed for the New York Times, Lisa Selin Davis's Tomboy explores the history and imagines the future of girls who defy societal expectations based on their gender. Tomboy is a revealing dive into the forces that have shifted and narrowed our ideas of what's normal for boys and girls, and for kids who don't fall neatly into either category.

Prostitution is often called the oldest profession in the world. Even in the Middle Ages, people believed that there would always be women willing to use their bodies for profit. But who were these women who offered themselves up to men? In A Life of Ill Repute Maria Serena Mazzi traces and reconstructs prostitution in the early fourteenth century, describing how in medieval European society women - often extremely poor and overwhelmed by debt, or victims either of predatory men full of duplicitous intentions or simply of rape - were traded as commodities.

We live in a moment of renewed and highly visible action on the issue of sexual violence. Rape culture is a real and salient force that dominates campus climates and student experiences. Canada has drafted a national framework, provincial legislation, and institutional policy to address incidences of sexual violence, and students have demanded that their universities respond. Yet rape culture persists on campuses throughout North America. Violence Interrupted presents different ways of thinking about sexual violence.

Money, often portrayed as a straightforward representation of market value, is also a political force, a technology for remaking space and population. This was especially true in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada, where money - in many forms - provided an effective means of disseminating colonial social values, laying claim to national space, and disciplining colonized peoples.

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.

In our digital world, we are confused by privacy – what is public, what is private? We are also challenged by it, the conditions of privacy so uncertain we become unsure about our rights to it. We may choose to share personal information, but often do so on the assumption that it won't be re-shared, sold, or passed on to other parties without our knowing. In the eighteenth century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote about a new model for a prison called a Panopticon, where inmates surrounded the jailers, always under watch. Have we built ourselves a digital Panopticon?

What does it mean to be a white settler on land taken from peoples who have lived there since time immemorial? In the context of reconciliation and Indigenous resurgence, Unsettling Spirit provides a personal perspective on decolonization, informed by Indigenous traditions and lifeways, and the need to examine one's complicity with colonial structures. Applying autoethnography grounded in Indigenous and feminist methodologies, Denise Nadeau weaves together stories and reflections on how to live with integrity on stolen and occupied land.

We Still Here maps the edges of hip-hop culture and makes sense of the rich and diverse ways people create and engage with hip-hop music within Canadian borders. Contributors to the collection explore the power of institutions, mainstream hegemonies, and the processes of historical formation in the evolution of hip-hop culture. Throughout, the volume foregrounds the generative issues of gender, identity, and power, in particular in relation to the Black diaspora and Indigenous cultures.

In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as “indifferent” to high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true. Invested Indifferencemakes a startling counter-argument: that what we see as societal unresponsiveness doesn’t come from an absenceof feeling but from an affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable.