Search results for ""Fernwood Publishing""

This analysis explores law-and-order policing as a central point of capitalist state power, arguing that crime-fighting is not the principle aim of contemporary law and order policing-rather, the aim is the Production of a new, neoliberal capitalist order based on the restructuring of social relations. Two case studies provide a close-up look at the impact of such policing as a means of social control.

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This book addresses two areas of feminist scholarship-the recognition of violence against women and the endeavor to make visible the lives of women in prison. Beginning with personal accounts of trouble with the law and using a combination of socialist and standpoint feminism, the collection presents the stories of 24 incarcerated women.

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Inspiring educators, philosophers, activists, shamans, artists, and visionaries to take up the challenge of bringing alternative teaching possibilities and strategies to the educational experience, this book creatively combines Aboriginal teachings with feminist and antiracist theory and practice.

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One Boxis a children's counting story about a migrant worker sending a box of gifts and supplies to their loved ones in the Philippines. Also known as Balikbayan boxes, these are typically filled with things like canned goods, clothing and snacks. But inOne Boxthere's more than just stuff it's full of promises.

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As nationalism and oppression of minority racialized groups proliferate globally, the plight of stateless people becomes ever more urgent. Legal scholar Jamie Liew explores what statelessness means as a shattering legal condition, lived experience and arena of powerful struggle for genuine justice.

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This book is the first scholarly study of the new transnational agrarian movements (TAMs) from their perspective. It explores how they strategize against the global governance of agriculture to confront neoliberal aims of expanding capital penetration in the countryside. TAMs oppose this phase of financialization and instead foster a system based on agroecology and re-peasantization of production, valuing labour and natural resources over capital.The book outlines how TAMs defend food sovereignty and oppose neoliberal policies in the context of climate change negotiations. It is written from their perspective, merging scholarship with activism through a methodology of observant participation.

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Contemporary politics around fisheries are complex and contentious. Fishers' movements and their political agendas have played a critical role in global fisheries, particularly in the context of rural and environmental transformations. This book explores two transnational movements representing small-scale fishers - the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) and the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers (WFF). It brings the politics of these movements into academic and political debates by exploring three connected analytical spheres: transnational movements contesting and seeking to influence the politics of global fisheries; international political spaces movements are prioritizing; and contentious fisheries issues movements are struggling over. This book draws upon political economy and political ecology debates, focusing its multi-layered analytical approach on socio-ecological dynamics of fisheries politics.

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This book provides a historical and comparative perspective of peasant productivity using case studies portraying the extraordinary efficiency with which English cottagers, Jamaican ex-slaves, Guatemalan Mayan campesinos, Nigerian hill farmers and Kerala hut dwellers obtained bountiful and diversified harvests from small parcels of land, provisioning for their families and often local markets. These stories provide us with pictures of carefully limited needs, of sustainable livelihoods and of resilient self-reliance attacked relentlessly and mercilessly in the name of capital, progress, development, modernity and/or the state. For two hundred years we have been told that the hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of hungry mouths require that peasants be dispossessed to allow more industrious farmers to feed them. This book helps make it clear how wrong we have been. Handy's approach is original, and the book will engage people interested in the history of the peasantry, rural development, and the quest for food sovereignty.

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COVID-19 may be an historical turning point for global capitalism. It has revealed the crisis of neoliberal globalization; however, this does not automatically lead to the ultimate defeat of capitalism or its neoliberal incarnation. The authors in this collection posit that a new framework cannot be built on the values and beliefs of current-day consumer capitalist society; resistance in the pandemic age should be based on the values and beliefs that could be the foundation of a new, postcapitalist society. This book formulates a tentative revolutionary program that could take advantage of the COVID-19 environment to defeat and transcend capitalism.

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In the supposedly enlightened '60s and '70s, violence against women was widespread. It wasn't talked about, and women had few, if any, options to escape their abusers. Yet in 1973 - with no statistics, no money and little public support - five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened Canada's first battered women's shelters. Today, there are well over 600.In Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists, journalist Margo Goodhand tracks down the "rogue feminists" whose work forged an underground railway for women and children, weaving their stories into an unforgettable - and until now untold - history.As they lobbied for funding, scrounged for furniture and fended off outraged husbands, these women marked a defining moment in Canadian history, triggering monumental changes in government, schools, courts and law enforcement. But was it enough to stop the cycle of violence? Forty years later, these pioneers describe how and why Canada has lost its ground in the battle for women's rights.

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The human need to belong is very powerful, so much so that we often sacrifice parts of who we are in order to be accepted. This is the tale of a young cougar, Ajig, who makes this sacrifice – and pays dearly. A curious and adventurous cougar, Ajig decides to build a new home in a strange forest. When he finds that all of the animals in the forest are afraid of him, Ajig agrees to stop behaving like a cougar so that he can make friends. But when Ajig tries to return to his birthplace, he learns that he is no longer welcome. Lost between two worlds, the young cougar becomes a "ghost cat." This beautifully illustrated book, written in both Mi'kmaw and English, reflects the experiences of First Nations peoples' assimilation into the Euro-Canadian school system, but speaks to everyone who is marginalized or at risk.The human need to belong is very powerful, so much so that we often sacrifice parts of who we are in order to be accepted. This is the tale of a young cougar, Ajig, who makes this sacrifice – and pays dearly. A curious and adventurous cougar, Ajig decides to build a new home in a strange forest. When he finds that all of the animals in the forest are afraid of him, Ajig agrees to stop behaving like a cougar so that he can make friends. But when Ajig tries to return to his birthplace, he learns that he is no longer welcome. Lost between two worlds, the young cougar becomes a "ghost cat." This beautifully illustrated book, written in both Mi'kmaw and English, reflects the experiences of First Nations peoples' assimilation into the Euro-Canadian school system, but speaks to everyone who is marginalized or at risk.

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Questioning the ability of political organizations to assist in fully eradicating the oppression of First Nations and their citizens, the author critically reflects on the meaning of "self-government"-and the obstacles as well as solutions to some of its challenges. Concluding that self-government as a goal is too narrow and overly inundated by colonial meanings to be a full solution, Monture-Angus rejects the idea of "self-government" in favor of a much larger idea, independence.

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The worker lockout at Regina's Co-op Refinery Complex shows that, left unchecked, corporations will transfer the costs and burdens of the necessary transition to a fossil fuel-free future to workers.

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Resisting Eviction centres tenant organizing in its investigation of gentrification, eviction and the financialization of rental housing. Andrew Crosby argues that racial discrimination, property relations and settler colonialism inform contemporary urban (re)development efforts and impacts affordable housing loss. How can the City of Ottawa aspire to become North America's most liveable mid-sized city while large-scale, demolition-driven evictions displace hundreds of people and destroy a community? Troubling discourses of urban liveability, revitalization and improvement, Crosby examines the deliberate destruction of home-domicide-and tenant resistance in the Heron Gate neighbourhood in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin land. Heron Gate is a large rental neighbourhood owned by one multi-billion-dollar real estate investment firm. Around 800 people-predominantly lower-income, racialized households-have been demovicted and displaced from the neighbourhood since 2016, leading to the emer

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In Abolitionist Intimacies, El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Understanding the history of prisons in Canada in their relationship to settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, Jones observes how practices of intimacy become imbued with state violence at carceral sites including prisons, policing and borders, as well as through purported care institutions such as hospitals and social work. The state also polices intimacy through mechanisms such as prison visits, strip searches and managing community contact with incarcerated people. Despite this, Jones argues, intimacy is integral to the ongoing struggles of prisoners for justice and liberation through the care work of building relationships and organizing with the people inside. Through characteristically fierce and personal prose and poetry, and motivated by a decade of prison justice work, Jones observes that abolition is not only a political movement to end prisons; it is also an intimate one deeply motivated by commitment and love.

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Institutions everywhere seem to be increasingly aware of their roles in settler colonialism and anti-Black racism. As such, many racialized workers find themselves tasked with developing equity plans for their departments, associations or faculties. This collection acknowledges this work as both survival and burden for Black, Indigenous and racialized peoples. It highlights what we already know and are already doing in our respective areas and offers a vision of what equity can look like through a decolonial lens. What helps us to make this work possible? How do we take care with ourselves and each other in this work? What does solidarity, collaboration or "allyship" look like in decolonial equity work? What are the implicit and explicit barriers we face in shifting equity discourse, policy and practice, and what strategies, skills and practices can help us in creating environments and lived realities of decolonial equity?This edited collection centres the voices of Indigenous, Black and other racialized peoples in articulating a vision for decolonial equity work. Specifically, the focus on decolonizing equity is an invitation to re-articulate what equity work can look like when we refuse to separate ideas of equity from the historical and contemporary realities of colonialism in the settler colonial nation states known as Canada and the United States and when we insist on linking an equity agenda to the work of decolonizing our shared realities.

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AJ Withers draws on their own experiences as an organizer, extensive interviews with OCAP activists and Toronto bureaucrats, and freedom of information requests to provide a detailed account of the work of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). This book shows that poor people's organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment.Fight to Win tells the stories of three key OCAP homelessness campaigns: stopping the criminalization of homeless people in a public park; the fight for poor people's access to the Housing Shelter Fund; and a campaign to improve the emergency shelter system and the City's overarching, but inadequate, Housing First policy.This book shows how power works at the municipal level, including the use of a multitude of demobilization tactics, devaluing poor people as sources of knowledge about their own lives, and gaslighting poor people and anti-poverty activists. AJ Withers also details OCAP's dual activist strategy - direct-action casework coupled with mass mobilization - for both immediate need and long-term change. These campaigns demonstrate the validity of OCAP's longstanding critiques of dominant homelessness policies and practices. Each campaign was fully or partially successful: these victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use of, and the threat of, direct disruptive action tactics.

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NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond investigates the intersection of the global rise of anti-Olympics activism and the declining popularity of hosting of the Games. The Olympics were once buoyed by myths of luminous prosperity and upticks in tourism and jobs, but in recent years these assurances have been debunked. Now more than ever, it's clear that the Olympics have transmogrified into a political-economic juggernaut that arrives with displacement, expanded policing, and anti-democratic backroom deals. Jules Boykoff - a former professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic soccer team - zooms in on Los Angeles, where the Democratic Socialists of America have launched the NOlympics LA campaign ahead of the 2028 Summer Games. Boykoff shows how DSA-LA's anti-Olympics activism fits with the resurgence of socialism in the US and beyond. Boykoff's research, based on more than 100 interviews with anti-Olympics activists, personal experiences at protests in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Tokyo, academic research, mass- and alternative-media coverage, and Olympic archives, is the backbone for this story of activists fighting against the odds and embracing the transformative politics of democratic socialism.

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Thirty years ago, Canada was a climate leader, designing policy to curb rising emissions and demanding the same of other countries. But in the intervening decades, Canada has become more of a climate villain, rejecting global attempts to slow climate change and ignoring ever-increasing emissions at home. How did Canada go from climate leader to climate villain? In Thirty Years of Failure, Robert MacNeil examines Canada’s changing climate policy in meticulous detail and argues that the failure of this policy is due to a perfect storm of interrelated and mutually reinforcing cultural, political and economic factors — all of which have made a functional and effective national climate strategy impossible. But as MacNeil reveals, the factors preventing a sensible, sustainable climate policy in Canada are also the keys to change, and he offers readers an understanding of the strategies and policies required to decarbonize the Canadian economy and make Canada a global leader on climate change once again.

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Gia and Serena Pirji are sisters, but as the first-generation born in Canada to immigrant parents, their lives play out in different ways because of their skin tone. Gia’s fair skin grants her membership to cliques of white kids as a teen, while Serena’s dark skin means she is labelled as Indian and treated as inferior. This superficial difference, imposed by a society obsessed with skin colour and hierarchy, sets the sisters into a dynamic that plays out throughout their lives. In a world where white skin is preferable, the sisters are pitted against each other through acts of revenge and competition as they experience adultery, ruined friendships, domestic abuse, infertility and motherhood. Taslim Burkowicz’s vivid, sensory-rich writing style brings readers to the party scene in Goa, suburban supermarkets in Vancouver and a safari in Africa, where Gia and Serena navigate through the highs and lows of a tumultuous, loving relationship. The Desirable Sister reveals the bitter games of treachery women are forced to play to achieve the ranks of beauty and success, and ultimately shows the strength of love between sisters.

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Western theory and practice are over-represented in child welfare services for Indigenous peoples, not the other way around. Contributors to this collection invert the long-held, colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and systems of child welfare in Canada. By understanding the problem as the prevalence of the Western universe in child welfare services rather than Indigenous peoples, efforts to understand and support Indigenous children and families are fundamentally transformed. Child welfare for Indigenous peoples must be informed and guided by Indigenous practices and understandings. Privileging the iyiniw (First people, people of the land) universe leads to reinvigorating traditional knowledges, practices and ceremonies related to children and families that have existed for centuries.The chapters of ohpikinâwasowin/Growing a Child describe wisdom-seeking journeys and service-provision changes that occurred in Treaty 6, Treaty 7, and Treaty 8 territory on Turtle Island. Many of the teachings are nehiyaw (Cree) and some are from the Blackfoot people. Taken together, this collection forms a whole related to the Turtle Lodge Teachings, which expresses nehiyaw stages of development, and works to undo the colonial trappings of Canada's current child welfare system.

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This book offers the first-ever intersectional feminist analysis of the gendered and racialized dynamics of the contemporary Calgary Stampede.Kimberly A. Williams wants the annual Calgary Stampede to change its ways. An intrepid feminist scholar with a raucous sense of humour, Williams combines memoir, theory, history, pop culture, and current events to challenge readers to make feminist sense of how gender and race matter at Canada's oldest and largest western heritage festival.Stampede! takes readers on an adventure into Alberta's past, looking at how the Calgary Stampede came to be and tracing its evolution to the Centennial event in 2012. Using a variety of cultural materials-photography, print advertisements, news coverage, poetry, and social media-Williams asks who gets to be part of the "we" in the Stampede's 2012 slogan "We're Greatest Together." Who gets left out? And what do you have to do to get in?Williams examines some beloved traditions of the Calgary Stampede through the lens of the feminist killjoy: the parade, the First Nations Princess, the Stampede Queen and her two princesses, First Nations Village, and the chuckwagon races. She uses ads from the Centennial planner to weave a story about the Albertan petro cowboy, his family, and his community. And she asks how the Treaty 7 Nations fit into this narrative about the white settler cowboy.There's no question the Stampede is a widely loved event, but could it do more to ensure that we actually are "greatest together"? Williams thinks so, and she concludes the book with some ideas for a new way forward.

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Public private partnerships in which the private sector takes on roles previously carried out by the public sector have been heavily promoted in the provision of infrastructure throughout the world, but especially in the UK, the USA and Canada. In Ideology Over Economics, economist John Loxley examines the expansion of P3s following the 2008 global financial crisis, when corporations responded to the crisis by lobbying governments for financial assistance and austerity governments responded by expanding financial resources for P3s. For many governments, the rationale for using P3s lies in the state manufactured fiscal crisis. The usual economic arguments underlie government largesse – lower cost, reduced risk and high-quality construction for public projects. In these arguments little has changed.From his close examination of case studies of P3s in the UK, Canada and developing countries, John Loxley concludes that P3s do not achieve any of these promised goals and argues that the expansion of P3s owes more to ideology than to a rational evaluation of their economic and community building benefits.

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Estranged from her abusive parents as a teenager, Taraneh Pourani overcame poverty, isolation and self-hatred to build a happy home with her loving husband and children. Triggered by her young sons’ annual visit with their grandparents, Taraneh becomes psychologically distressed. She begins to doubt her memories and question her decision to remain distanced from her aging parents. A journey into Taraneh’s family history reveals three generations of unaddressed mental illness and unresolved childhood trauma. Due to poverty in early twentieth-century Iran, Taraneh’s grandmother, Batoul, is married at the age of nine and sent to live with her husband’s family. Ashamed and traumatized, Batoul raises her children to expect hardships and to endure them in secret. The seeds of dysfunction are planted in Mojegan, Taraneh’s mother. Mojegan is a nurse in Tehran in the 1960s when she marries the charming, but alcoholic and impulsive, Reza. She stands by Reza throughout their marriage, even after he abruptly kicks out their teenage daughter, Taraneh. A powerful and beautiful debut novel by Kimia Eslah, The Daughter Who Walked Away explores the lives of three Iranian women, across three generations, as they struggle to love and be loved unconditionally.

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In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a report designed to facilitate reconciliation between the Canadian state and Indigenous Peoples. Its call to honour treaty relationships reminds us that we are all treaty people — including immigrants and refugees living in Canada. The contributors to this volume, many of whom are themselves immigrants and refugees, take up the challenge of imagining what it means for immigrants and refugees to live as treaty people. Through essays, personal reflections and poetry, the authors explore what reconciliation is and what it means to live in relationship with Indigenous Peoples. Speaking from their personal experience — whether from the education and health care systems, through research and a community garden, or from experiences of discrimination and marginalization — contributors share their stories of what reconciliation means in practice. They write about building respectful relationships with Indigenous Peoples, respecting Indigenous Treaties, decolonizing our ways of knowing and acting, learning the role of colonized education processes, protecting our land and environment, creating food security and creating an intercultural space for social interactions. Perhaps most importantly, Reconciliation in Practice reminds us that reconciliation is an ongoing process, not an event, and that decolonizing our relationships and building new ones based on understanding and respect is empowering for all of us — Indigenous, settler, immigrant and refugee alike.

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From Suffragette to Homesteader opens a unique window into the past. Central to this book is a powerful memoir written in 1952 by Ethel Marie Sentance as an anniversary present for her husband, Clarence. The memoir begins in 1883 and details Ethel's early life in a small English village. Frustrated with women's social and political inequality, Ethel became a suffragette in her early twenties. She participated in meetings and rallies, sold suffrage newspapers, and was eventually jailed for breaking a window at a protest. In 1912, her life changed considerably when she married and relocated to the Saskatchewan prairies to become a homesteader and settler.Surrounding Ethel's memoir are chapters by leading historians and life-writing scholars that provide further analysis and context, exploring topics within and beyond those written about by Ethel. Together, the chapters in this book tell a compelling story of early and mid twentieth century social justice advocacy, women's and feminist histories, struggles for gender equality, and the farmworker and homesteader experience. At the same time, the book is also a story of imperialism and the British Empire, race and class, and settler colonialism.

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Many Canadians know that Viola Desmond is the first Black, non-royal woman to be featured on Canadian currency. But fewer know the details of Viola Desmond's life and legacy. In 1946, Desmond was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in a whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Her singular act of courage was a catalyst in the struggle for racial equality that eventually ended segregation in Nova Scotia.Authors Graham Reynolds and Wanda Robson (Viola's sister) look beyond the theatre incident and provide new insights into her life. They detail not only her act of courage in resisting the practice of racial segregation in Canada, but also her extraordinary achievement as a pioneer African Canadian businesswoman. In spite of the widespread racial barriers that existed in Canada during most of the twentieth century, Viola Desmond became the pre-eminent Black beauty culturist in Canada, establishing the first Black beauty studio in Halifax and the Desmond School of Beauty Culture. She also created her own line of beauty products.Accessible, concise and timely, this book tells the incredible, important story of Viola Desmond, considered by many to be Canada's Rosa Parks.

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For nearly fifty years, Professor Harry Glasbeek has been at the forefront of legal scholars and public intellectuals challenging assumptions and understandings about the injustices embedded in the economic, social, political and legal orders of Western capitalist democracies. His writings and teachings have influenced generations of law students, academics and activists.The Class Politics of Law brings together eleven incisive contributions from pre-eminent scholars across several disciplines activated by the same desire for democracy and justice that Glasbeek advances, showing how capitalism shapes the law and how the law protects capitalism. This collection foregrounds a class analysis of the law's responses to corporate killing, workplace violence, surveillance, worker resistance and income inequality, among other issues.

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When our infrastructures deteriorate, when social benefits are frozen, when our living conditions are precarious, it is because of tax havens. A source of growing inequalities and colossal tax losses, the use of tax havens by large corporations and wealthy individuals explains the increasingly popular austerity policies of governments in the West.With formidable efficacy and clarity, and in the wake of the Paradise Papers leak, Alain Deneault raises the political questions behind of this legalized theft: What are the consequences of tax havens? How do we counter the private sovereignty thus conferred on the powerful? As taxpayers shoulder the social and financial burdens while corporations hide billions in off-shore tax havens, Deneault identifies the urgent need to put an end to this legalized theft.

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In Bombardier Abroad, Thomas examines several cases of the Canadian aerospace giant's work in the high-speed rail sector in South Africa, China/Tibet, and Israel/Palestine and argues that these projects are deepening existing social and political tensions. By participating in these infrastructure projects, Thomas argues, Bombardier is both inserting itself into highly contested social and political climates and profiting from actions that further exacerbate existing conditions of dispossession and inequality. Thomas also examines the various ways in which the Canadian state supports the work of Bombardier in these countries.Centred around a theoretical framework that combines concepts of dispossession, political economy and important interventions from the field of settler colonial studies, Bombardier Abroad is a critical look at the problematic practices of a Canadian corporation and the ways in which the Canadian state is culpable.

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Wave goodbye to the American dream.Just a heartbeat into the future, America is being dragged to its knees by social unrest and economic inequality. The furious pace of technological advancement has made medicine capable of near-miracles but has also enabled the widespread displacement of workers by automated systems. As unemployment and poverty levels rise to dangerous heights, those with fortunes to lose are pitted against those with nothing left. The threat of rebellion looms greater every day.When a chance meeting in a Washington, D.C., slum leads journalist Richard LaPointe to a heinous discovery, he and his wife, internationally respected physician and medical technologist Allie MacKay, start down a path that exposes just how far those in power will go to protect themselves from the impending crisis. When their daughter, Skyie, an online video activist sensation, gets involved after pulling off a spectacular protest stunt, they are all plunged into a world in which no one is safe.What they find behind the curtain is not an America made great again. It is an empire in ruin.

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In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction.But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism. Through an examination of four prominent movements - the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation - this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance.In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state.

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Published some two decades ago, Elizabeth Comack’s Women in Trouble explored the connections between the women’s abuse histories and their law violations as well as their experience of imprisonment in an aged facility. What has changed for incarcerated women in those twenty years? Are experiences of abuse continuing to have an impact on the lives of criminalized women? How do women find the experience of imprisonment in a new facility? Drawing on the stories of forty-two incarcerated women, Coming Back to Jail broadens the focus to examine the role of trauma in the women’s lives. Resisting the popular move to understand trauma in psychiatric terms — as post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) — the book frames trauma as “lived experience” and locates the women’s lives within the context of a settler-colonial, capitalist, patriarchal society. Doing so enables a better appreciation of the social conditions that produce trauma and the problems, conflicts and dilemmas that bring women into the criminal justice net. In Coming Back to Jail, Comack shows how — despite recent moves to be more “gender responsive” — the prisoning of women is ultimately more punishing than empowering. What is more, because the sources of the women’s trauma reside in the systemic processes that have contoured their lives and their communities, true healing will require changing women’s social circumstances on the outside so they no longer keep coming back to jail.

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Young, free-spirited Maya Mubeen leaves behind the pressures of family, marriage and tradition for a life of experience and adventure - proving to herself, and her mother, that she is anything but a typical Indian girl. After diving with sharks in the Philippines and a sordid breakup amidst the bustling nightlife of Tokyo, Maya's sense of who she is - and where home is - starts to falter.An ancient chai-making ritual holds the key to Maya's past and present, unlocking the secret lives of her mother, Nina, who lived through Idi Amin's rule in Uganda, her grandmother, Nargis, forced into marriage at thirteen, her great-grandmother, Sukaina, an underground radical socialist who fled an abusive husband, and lastly, her great-great grandmother, Zainab, who left behind a luxurious life in India.Traversing the globe and historical eras, Taslim Burkowicz's debut Chocolate Cherry Chai binds together themes of familial pressures, the immigrant experience, motherhood, love and loss into a poetic narrative.

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Human Misunderstanding is the latest work by award-winning poet Kathy Mac. The first of the book's three long poems compares a fictional child soldier (a hero) with a real child soldier (a victim). The second juxtaposes eighteenth century philosophy with one person's search for another in downtown Halifax. The final poem explores two court cases in which an immigrant faces deportation, and torture, if found guilty of assault in a Canadian court.

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Did You Just Call Me Old Lady? is an upbeat look at aging and the impacts of Canada’s increasingly aged population through the eyes of a ninety-year-old woman. Far from seeing older citizens as a burden and a strain on our public health care system, Lillian Zimmerman gracefully, and often humourously, argues that long-livers are able to live fulfilling lives and make valuable contributions to society.Zimmerman illustrates how prevalent ageism - the dislike and prejudice against old people - is in society, media and popular culture, showing how language, advertisements for products to alleviate bodily failings, and jokes about memory loss and sexual infirmity are all examples of ageism, inevitably framing and fuelling negative attitudes towards older people. Ageism, much like sexism and racism, needs to be part of the conversations around social justice and anti-oppression.Zimmerman also recognizes that there are huge challenges to aging, some of which she has experienced herself, and that serious illnesses, mental deficiencies, low income and isolation are realities for some seniors. However, Zimmerman’s analysis shows that many of these problems result from inefficient management and poor policies.

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Canada is ruled by an organized minority of the 1%, a class of corporate owners, managers and bankers who amass wealth by controlling the large corporations at the core of the economy. But corporate power also reaches into civil society and politics in many ways that greatly constrain democracy.In Organizing the 1%, William K. Carroll and J.P. Sapinski provide a unique, evidence-based perspective on corporate power in Canada and illustrate the various ways it directs and shapes economic, political and cultural life.A highly accessible introduction to Marxist political economy, Carroll and Sapinski delve into the capitalist economic system at the root of corporate wealth and power and analyze the ways the capitalist class dominates over contemporary Canadian society. The authors illustrate how corporate power perpetuates inequality and injustice. They follow the development of corporate power through Canadian history, from its roots in settler-colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, to the concentration of capital into giant corporations in the late nineteenth century. More recently, capitalist globalization and the consolidation of a market-driven neoliberal regime have dramatically enhanced corporate power while exacerbating social and economic inequalities. The result is our current oligarchic order, where power is concentrated in a few corporations that are controlled by the super-wealthy and organized into a cohesive corporate elite.Finally, Carroll and Sapinski offer possibilities for placing corporate power where it actually belongs: in the dustbin of history.

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Land used to produce food is at the core of disputes, violent conflicts and despair across the world. As farmers increasingly can no longer afford to grow food and as one in ten Canadians faces food insecurity each year, it is clear that our culture-specific land systems lie at the heart of the current food and farm crises. Solutions must be implemented to ensure food security and food sovereignty in Canada and the world.In Belongings, Sally Miller illustrates how food and farm crises result from adherence to the rules of private property. Miller looks at the state of farmland and farmers in Canada and across the world as a way of understanding ownership, land regulation and the dire situation of our ability to produce food. Hundreds of acres of prime farmland are lost each day to residential development, further restricting the ability of farmers to supply our food needs. Farmers face ever-increasing financial risks and often have to sell farmable land for commercial development to make ends meet.Finally, Miller highlights several alternative structures of land use that are proving to be successful in Canada and across the globe and argues that the way in which we understand and manage foodlands needs to be reconsidered to achieve sustainable food systems with healthy food access for all.

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Men commit crimes. Men are violent. Men start wars. Men have power.In Paying for Masculinity, Murray Knuttila argues that male dominance is best understood in the context of the particular mode of gender practice - hegemonic masculinity - that typifies patriarchal gender orders. This mode of masculinity permeates our society, media and culture. It persists because of "the patriarchal dividend" - men directly benefit from their dominance in society. But these benefits exact a price, first and foremost from women and girls. But, as boys and men are under pressure to "man up," they too pay the costs: they die younger, go to prison, restrict their emotions and blunt their humanity. Simply put, men need to understand that the costs of practising this mode of masculinity far outweigh the benefits.Knuttila's conceptual framework allows him to trace the history of the patriarchal dividend through various aspects of patriarchal capitalism, demonstrating how ingrained it is in our society, and to illustrate ways of encouraging non-hegemonic forms of masculinity, which are ultimately to the benefit of everyone.

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What do Canadian films say about crime and justice in Canada? What purpose do Canadian crime films serve politically and culturally? Screening Justice is a scholarly exploration of films that focus on crime and justice in Canada. Contributors to this edited collection argue that crime films are pivotal for understanding and shaping Canadian sensibilities about justice by setting out widely available templates for thinking about crime, justice and society. They argue that films offer accessible cultural spaces to contest mainstream assumptions about the ways race, class, gender, place and culture produce and reproduce crime. Spanning disciplines and examining films from across Canada, Screening Justice is the first comprehensive Canadian volume on crime films that takes up cultural criminology s call for more critical scholarly analyses of the interplay between crime, culture and society.Defining Canadian crime films as movies that focus significantly on crime and its consequences in Canadian society, the book is as much about the ways crime films provide vehicles for understanding what it means to be Canadian as it is about the depiction and representation of crime and justice in Canadian cinema and television. The films examined in this book span all regions of Canada and include case studies of films set in Atlantic Canada, Nunavut, British Columbia s Lower Mainland, the Prairies, Ontario and Quebec. Moreover, Canadian crime films produced from the 1930s to the present are included in these analyses. Contributors to this multi- and interdisciplinary volume are drawn from criminology, criminal justice studies, English literature, art history, film studies and communications, cultural anthropology, sociology, and women s and gender studies. Adopting American criminologist Nicole Rafter s concept popular criminology, the essays in this volume all take crime films seriously as popular efforts to understand the causes, consequences and meanings of crime in Canadian society."

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This study is among the first in Canada to document the transformation of municipal governance and public services from Keynesian to neoliberal public policy at the urban scale. Focusing on the neoliberal transformation of cites in Ontario from 1954 to 2014, with special attention to Toronto, it begins with a theoretical analysis of the remaking of municipal public finances and intergovernmental transfers, exposing the social and political causes of urban fiscal crises. This study makes the case that cities have been underfinanced, which has led to a deterioration of public services based on the contention that they are unaffordable. Reductions to employee compensation have been a stated aim of municipal austerity. Megacity Malaise analyzes the interactions and strategies used by civic workers and community groups as they struggle to understand and respond to demands for concessions. Focusing on two major Toronto strikes (by CUPE locals 79 and 416), it puts forward a range of evidence-based social policy alternatives to austerity, drawing attention to labour-community coalitions as the most effective strategy for building resistance against neoliberalism. As headquarters to Canada s largest financial institutions, local government, employment centre and municipal unions, Toronto provides a vivid setting for studying municipal restructuring. Fanelli s analysis is grounded in critical political economy and informed by his decade-long experiences as a Toronto civic worker and municipal unionist. Rigorous intellectual analysis is combined with municipal employee interviews and participant observation, providing a unique methodological approach to examining the socio-political struggles in Toronto and connecting them to municipalities across Ontario and beyond."

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Yves Engler continues his groundbreaking analyses of past and present Canadian foreign policy. The author of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, and other works that challenge the myth of Canadian benevolence, documents Canadian involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, the scramble for Africa and European colonialism. The book reveals Ottawa s opposition to anticolonial struggles, its support for apartheid South Africa and Idi Amin s coup, and its role in ousting independence leaders Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. Based on an exhaustive look at the public record as well as on-the-ground research, Canada in Africa shows how the federal government pressed African countries to follow neoliberal economic prescriptions and sheds light on Canada s part in the violence that has engulfed Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo, as well as how Canada s indifference to climate change means a death sentence to ever-growing numbers of Africans."

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Canada has never had an "Indian problem"- but it does have a Settler problem. But what does it mean to be Settler? And why does it matter?Through an engaging, and sometimes enraging, look at the relationships between Canada and Indigenous nations, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada explains what it means to be Settler and argues that accepting this identity is an important first step towards changing those relationships. Being Settler means understanding that Canada is deeply entangled in the violence of colonialism, and that this colonialism and pervasive violence continue to define contemporary political, economic and cultural life in Canada. It also means accepting our responsibility to struggle for change. Settler offers important ways forward - ways to decolonize relationships between Settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples - so that we can find new ways of being on the land, together.This book presents a serious challenge. It offers no easy road, and lets no one off the hook. It will unsettle, but only to help Settler people find a pathway for transformative change, one that prepares us to imagine and move towards just and beneficial relationships with Indigenous nations. And this way forward may mean leaving much of what we know as Canada behind.

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Canadian universities are being slowly but inexorably corporatized. Casualizing academic labour, remaking students into consumers of education, implementing corporate management models and commercializing academic research all point to the ascendance of business interests and values in Canada s higher education system. Academia, Inc. examines the tensions that result from the merging of two fundamentally incompatible institutions the university and the corporation. Brownlee argues that moving from liberal education to corporate job training, public service to profit-making and critical research to commercial invention radically undermines the goals of higher education. Investigating the history, causes and impacts of corporatization, this book explores how this transformation has taken shape and its ramifications for both universities and society as a whole. Brownlee suggests several strategies for resisting this process. "

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This accessible and engaging book introduces readers to key historical events, and the women who were central to them, in the struggle for women s equality in Canada. Four and a half decades after the report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, the feminist struggle is as necessary as ever but thanks to the hard work of activist women, many forms of discrimination are a thing of the past. Beginning before the colonization of Canada by European settlers, Penni Mitchell explores gender roles within First Nations societies, where women often brokered peace agreements, oversaw property and advised leaders. She also examines the struggles of First Nations women to challenge Indian Act discrimination against women and children. Exploring the early days of colonial settlement, Mitchell notes that women were among Canada s first administrators, and they started its first schools and hospitals. Later, women were among the first to oppose slavery, internment and racial segregation. Demanding a greater say in their country, women fought for the right to vote, attend university and divorce. They fought for child protection laws, public health clinics, minimum wages, equal pay and better working conditions. About Canada: Women s Rights considers the ways in which women s lives have been transformed by the legalization of birth control and abortion and the removal of patriarchal privilege from family law. About Canada: Women s Rights introduces readers to some of the many women who changed Canada through their efforts to secure greater equality. While a few are well known, many of these women and the battles they won have been forgotten. They deserve a greater place in Canada s history."

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Socialist Cowboy is a political biography detailing the life and activism of longtime New Democrat mpp Peter Kormos, one of the most colourful and controversial political personalities in the history of Ontario politics. Throughout his illustrious twenty-three-year career as a member of the Ontario Legislature, Kormos's unapologetic commitment to democratic socialism and his shoot-from-the-hip brand of small-town populism won him strong accolades back in his blue-collar hometown of Welland, while raising eyebrows at Queen's Park and within his own party. From his days as a student strike leader, to his short-lived time in Bob Rae's cabinet, to his run for the Ontario ndp leadership and his epic battles with the province's political establishment, the book chronicles Kormos's political trajectory, through interviews and archival research, with a view to unpacking the ideas and traits that made him a New Democrat icon.

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This book describes its successes and its failures and details how a small group of people - "just us" - worked against adversity and defied many of the norms associated with building a business. In this fascinating tale, general readers, business owners and community activists will find hope and the courage to forge new paths, build new organizations and shape a new society. This story is also about the fair trade movement, providing a snapshot of the struggle of the small coffee producers in the South to control their own production, find a fair market for their coffee and get a fair hearing for their concerns. Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op is an experiment in a radical business model - one rooted in cooperation, social justice and meaningful social change.

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