National Network for Equitable Library Service

Social Work in Africa offers professors, students, and practitioners insight concerning social work in the African context. Its purpose is to encourage examination of the social work curriculum and to demonstrate practical ways to make it more culturally relevant.

What is family? Citing national security and societal welfare, the Harper government adopted a strict definition of family to limit access to citizenship for certain immigrants.

Problems – of integration, failed political participation, and requests for various kinds of accommodation – seem to dominate the research on minority Muslims in Western nations. Beyond Accommodation offers a different perspective, showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity. The authors critique the model of reasonable accommodation, suggesting that it disempowers religious minorities by implicitly privileging Christianity and by placing the onus on minorities to make formal requests for accommodation.

Media for diasporic communities have emerged in major cities and reflect a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual reality. But do these media serve their respective communities exclusively, or are they available and accessible to members of greater society at large? Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora explores structural and institutional challenges and opportunities for these media and suggests policy directions with the aim of fostering broader intercultural dialogue.

There is increasing pressure on university scholars to reach beyond the “ivory tower” and engage in collaborative research with communities. But what exactly is community-based participatory research (CBPR) and what does engagement look like? This book presents stories about CBPR from Manitoba Research Alliance projects in marginalized communities. Bringing together experienced researchers with new scholars and community practitioners, the stories describe the impetus for the projects, how they came to be implemented, and how CBPR is still being used within the community.

Drawing on the insights of Indigenous feminist legal theory, Emily Snyder examines representations of Cree law and gender in books, videos, graphic novels, educational websites, online lectures, and a video game. Although these resources promote the revitalization of Cree law and the principle of miyo-wîcêhtowin (good relations), Snyder argues that they do not capture the complexities of gendered power relations.

In this first-ever international history of the influential feminist movement Wages for Housework, Louise Toupin draws on extensive archival research and interviews with the movement’s founders and activists from Italy, England, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Canada. Featuring previously unpublished conversations with Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the book highlights the power and originality of the movement, detailing its theoretical and organizational innovations around the unrecognized forms of labour performed largely by women.

As a national network of roads and hostels spread across Canada, so did the practice of hitchhiking. Thumbing a Ride examines its rise and fall in the 1970s, drawing on records from the time. Many equated adventure travel with freedom and independence, but a counter-narrative emerged of girls gone missing and other dangers. Town councillors, community groups, and motorists demanded a clampdown on a transient youth movement they believed was spreading anti-establishment nomadism.

Too often Indigenous peoples have been portrayed as being without a future, destined either to disappear or assimilate into settler society. This book asserts quite the opposite: Indigenous peoples are not in any sense “out of time” in our contemporary world. Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii shows how Indigenous peoples in Canada not only continue to have a future, but are at work building many different futures – for themselves and for their non-Indigenous neighbours.

What has it meant to be a man in Canada? Percy Nobbs, architect, fisherman, fencer; Andy Paull, residential school survivor and athlete; Yves Charbonneau, jazz musician and commune member; “James,” black and gay in postwar Windsor. Who were these men, and how did they identify as masculine? Populated with figures both well known and unknown, Making Men, Making History reveals the dissonance between ideals of manhood and masculinity and the everyday lives of Canadian men and boys.