National Network for Equitable Library Service

In The Art of the Obit, award-winning journalist Sandra Martin reveals the cult and craft of obituary writing from the ancient Greeks to a wired-up 24/7 world. In this witty exploration of our oldest biographical form, Martin punctures five long-held myths about the dead beat, chronicles the social, political, cultural, and historical impact of obituaries and explores the future of writing about the dead on the Internet and social media sites. This fascinating and provocative work proves that there’s no such thing as an uninteresting life.

This collection invites us to think about how African-descended men are seen as both appealing and appalling, and exposed to eroticized hatred and violence and how some resist, accommodate, and capitalize on their eroticization. Drawing on James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon, the contributors examine the contradictions, paradoxes, and politico-psychosexual implications of Black men as objects of sexual desire, fear, and loathing.

When civil war broke out in his home country in 2011, Hassan Al Kontar was a young Syrian living and working in the UAE. He refused to return to Syria for compulsory military service and lived illegally before being deported to Malaysia in 2018. Unable to obtain a visa for any other country, he became trapped in the arrivals zone at Kuala Lumpur Airport. Exiled by war and trapped by geopolitics, Al Kontar used social media and humour to tell his story to the world, becoming an international celebrity and ultimately finding refuge in Canada.

As a troubled teen, Lauren Manning sought refuge online in the angry world of black metal music. When she met a recruiter who offered her the acceptance she craved, the doctrine of white supremacy supplanted the values of her middle-class upbringing, and Lauren traded suburbia for a life of violence and criminality on the streets of Toronto.

Gathering together powerful voices of feminist writers, peace activists, and matriarchal studies scholars from around the globe, The Legacy of Mothers reconceptualizes mothers, motherhood, and mothering as an alternative human logic to create a new sociopolitical order. The contributors draw on ancient knowledges, Indigenous perspectives, and African traditions like Motherism to argue for the reordering of our world according to a distinctly transformative feminism.

One hundred years of feminist activism, from the 1880s to the 1980s, presented multiple paths for women's search for equality, autonomy, and dignity. Women fashioned different dreams of freedom and social transformation, yet what isCanadian feminism?Demanding Equalityillustrates feminist thought and organizing from mid-nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-inspired writing to the multi-issue movement of the 1980s, with its focus on feminism as a collective project of resistance.

Nearly one third of wildfire evacuations in Canada involve Indigenous communities. While evacuations are carried out to protect people from smoke and flames, deciding to leave brings its own challenges.This evacuation guide is based on interviews with over two hundred wildfire evacuees from seven First Nations. By comparing the evacuees' experiences, both good and bad, it provides direction on how Indigenous communities and external agencies can best prepare for the different stages of an evacuation.

Deliberative democracy - whereby people debate competing ideas before agreeing upon political action - must surely rest on its capacity to include all points of view. But how does this inclusive framework engage with activism that occurs outside of, and in opposition to, deliberative systems themselves?

Through twelve ethnographic case studies,The Social Life of Standardsreveals how standards - political and technical tools for organizing society - are developed, applied, subverted, contested, and reassembled by local communities interacting with norms often created by others. Contributors explore standards at work across different countries and contexts, such as Ebola biomedical safety precautions in Senegal, Colombian farmers contesting politicized seed regulations, and the application of Indigenous standards to Canadian environmental assessments.

At 5 percent, Canada's population growth was the highest of all G7 countries when the most recent census was taken. But only a handful of large cities drove that growth, attracting human and monetary capital from across the country and leaving myriad social, economic, and environmental challenges behind. Quietly Shrinking Cities investigates a trend that has been largely overlooked: over 20 percent of Canadian cities lost population between 2011 and 2016, and twice that proportion grew more slowly than the national average.