National Network for Equitable Library Service

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.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-80s, feminist activism in North America and Europe reached its peak, animated by a disparate array of issues and ideas. Frontiers of Feminism compares Québécois and Italian feminisms, revealing both the synergy between feminism and the left and the influence of American and French women's movements on those in Québec and Italy.

An RCMP sting caught Nicole Doucet (Ryan) trying to hire a hitman to kill her ex-husband. It was supposed to be an open-and-shut case. It wasn't. She was acquitted on the basis of duress in a context of abuse. But her ordeal did not end there. No Legal Way Out details the judicial process, media coverage, and legal implications of R v Ryan, a landmark case in Canadian law for all the wrong reasons. Appealed up to the Supreme Court of Canada, Doucet's acquittal was overturned, even though the court accepted that she had been abused.

Entertainment and profit constitute the driving force behind popular representations of women in correctional facilities. But the creative influence of film and television also generates legal meaning. The women-in-prison (WIP) genre can leave viewers feeling both empathetic toward the women portrayed in these representations and troubled about the crimes for which they have been convicted.

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.

Arctic historian Kenn Harper gathers the best of his columns about Inuit history, which appear weekly in Nunatsiaq News, in this exciting new series of books. Each installment of In Those Days: Collected Columns on Arctic History will cover a particularly fascinating aspect of traditional Inuit life. In volume one, Inuit Biographies, Harper shares the unique challenges and life histories of several Inuit living in pre-contact times.

In 1970, when he was travelling in Spain as an 18-year-old, David Homel took a false step and ended up in pieces at the foot of a cliff. After a spell in a Spanish hospital, he was gathered up in the arms of a nearby US military hospital where he began a long march back toward life, through botched surgeries, opiate addiction, and the loneliness of being a crippled traveler. Many years later, living in Montreal with growing pain and incapacity, he made an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon who gave him advice to live by.

In the early 1970s, a German study estimated that women expended as many calories cleaning their coal-mining husbands' work clothes as their husbands did working below ground, arguably making the home as much a site of industrialized work as factories and mines. But while energy studies are beginning to acknowledge the importance of social and historical contexts and to produce more inclusive histories of the unprecedented energy transitions that powered industrialization, women have remained notably absent from these accounts.

Anton Chekhov's representations of children have generally remained on the periphery of scholarly attention. Yet his stories about children, which focus on communication and the emergence of personhood, also illuminate the process by which the author forged his own language of expression and occupy a uniquely important place within his work. Chekhov's Children explores these stories - dating from Chekhov's early writings in the 1880s - as a distinct body of work unified by the theme of maturation and by the creation of a literary model of childhood.