National Network for Equitable Library Service

With these 61 readable essays, Cape Breton's Tom Urbaniak brings a courageous, critical and constructive eye to problems of our time. Whether it's revitalizing struggling communities, harnessing the power of small investors, reforming tired institutions or protecting parliamentary democracy, he is able to point to workable solutions. In this practical and thought-provoking reader, Prof. Urbaniak challenges students and citizens to engage with their region and with the world.

Finalist, Banff Mountain Book Competition. On a cool morning in the winter of 2011, a logger named Dennis Cronin was walking through a stand of old-growth forest near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. His job was to survey the land and flag the boundaries for clear-cutting. As he made his way through the forest, Cronin came across a massive Douglas fir the height of a twenty-storey building. It was one of the largest trees in Canada that if felled and milled could easily fetch more than fifty thousand dollars.

Follow the journey of a Canadian and Indian couple, Savannah and Sandeep, as they travel the world to capture the human side of one of the biggest energy transitions of our times - the global shift from fossil fuels to renewables. In this exciting and provocative new book, readers are taken into the homes of the coal miners who live and work in Jharia, a town in India that has been on fire for the past 100 years due to poor coal mining practices. Life in Jharia is a version of Dante's inferno - 700,000 people live in the most unimaginable conditions.

Martin Parnell's third book highlighting the power of sport to change lives takes the reader on an inspirational journey into Afghanistan, a country known for political chaos and female oppression. "The children were stoning us, the people said bad words like 'prostitutes, why don't you stay at home? You are destroying Islam.'" -Zainab, Afghanistan's first female marathon runner. In 2016, Martin Parnell went on a journey that many believed was madness: running a marathon in Afghanistan in a quest to fight for women's rights and gender equality.

The essays in If You're Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change focus on the interconnection of community/workplace/individual and how literature (and thinking about literature) has a role in social struggles aimed at making that nexus more liberatory. The essays' topics include various social issues in contemporary writing--daily work, narrative, love poems, the teaching (and hence status) of poetry, and postmodernism.

CanLit-the commonly used short form for English Canadian Literature as a cultural formation and industry-has been at the heart of several recent public controversies. Why? Because CanLit is breaking open to reveal the accepted injustices at its heart. It is imperative that these public controversies and the issues that sparked them be subject to careful and thorough discussion and critique. Refuse provides a critical and historical context to help readers understand conversations happening about CanLit presently.

"Ann Hansen's memoir combines a riveting story with a brilliant exposé of the inner workings of the prison industrial complex. Charged with empathy, courage, and an anarchist passion for justice, Taking the Rap, is a must-read for scholars, activists, and troublemakers." - Allan Antliff, director of the Anarchist Archive, University of Victoria When Ann Hansen was arrested in 1983 along with the four other members of the radical anarchist group known as the Squamish Five, her long-time commitment to prison abolition suddenly became much more personal.

How did a social movement evolve from a small group of young radicals to the incorporation of LGBTQ communities into full citizenship on the model of Canadian multiculturalism? Tim McCaskell contextualizes his work in gay, queer, and AIDS activism in Toronto from 1974 to 2014 within the shift from the Keynesian welfare state of the 1970s to the neoliberal economy of the new millennium. A shift that saw sexuality -once tightly regulated by conservative institutions- become an economic driver of late capitalism, and sexual minorities celebrated as a niche market.

In Degrees of Failure, Randle Nelsen brings together such diverse topics as campus parking, college sports, helicopter parents, edu-business as edu-tainment, and technology in teaching to show how continuing inequities, grounded in large part upon social class differences, are maintained and reproduced in our universities.

Treating bodies as more than discursive in social research can feel out of place in academia. As a result, embodiment studies remain on the outside of academic knowledge construction and critical scholarship. However, embodiment scholars suggest that investigations into the profound division created by privileging the mind-intellect over the body-spirit are integral to the project of decolonization. The field of embodiment theorizes bodies as knowledgeable in ways that include but are not solely cognitive.