Search results for ""Fernwood Publishing""

This book aims to explore the role of generational relations in the reproduction of agrarian communities in their confrontation with emerging capitalist relations.Generational dimensions are obviously important in the social reproduction of agrarian communities, and deserving the attention of all those interested in agricultural futures, but they have been relatively neglected compared to class and gender. With some exceptions, especially in Africa (Sumberg et al., 2012) researchers and activists have given little attention to intergenerational differences and tensions in rural people's engagement with smallholder farming, and with expanding corporate agribusiness.

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Health care is Canada s best-loved social program and for good reason. For over forty years, Canadians have enjoyed high quality health services based on need rather than on ability to pay. Yet we hear almost daily accounts of problems with the system. We are bombarded with warnings that public health care is unsustainable, especially in light of the baby boomer generation reaching retirement age. Such stories can help undermine our support for public care even though they are often based on poor, partial or even false information. Our best defence of a public system is knowledge about how it works and how it can be improved in order to keep it. This second edition of About Canada: Health Care is an accessible, up-to-date introduction to how the Canadian health care system works, how it is changing and what can be done to make it better. Pat and Hugh Armstrong explain a range of complicated and important questions: What do public and private mean as they apply to our current health care system and in proposed reforms? As the boomer generation ages, will the growing number of seniors bankrupt Medicare? What do we mean by wait times and are they increasing? Who pays for drugs and how can we ensure Canadians have equitable access to necessary drugs? Can technologies significantly improve care and reduce costs?"

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The focus and concern of Agrarian Change, Migration and Development is the problem of labour migration. Veltmeyer and Wise explore the dynamics and development implications of the migration processes set in motion by the capitalist mode of production. The dynamics of these processes are both international - in regard to the international or cross-border flows of labour migrants - and internal to countries that have undergone, or are undergoing, a process of agrarian change and social transformation.Veltmeyer and Wise examine what they call the "migration-development nexus" from both a political economy and a sociological perspective, highlighting current trends, the global scale and the human dimension of the labour migration process, with particular reference to the increasing south-north flows of migrants who are forced to abandon their communities and ways of life by the globalizing forces of capitalist development.While it may appear that these migrants are free to choose to abandon their communities, and in many cases their families, in the search for greater economic opportunities and a better way of life, the authors show with devastating logic that the decisions made by so many migrants are rooted in the workings of the world capitalist system, which converts them into a pool of surplus labour to be pulled into and out of the system as required by capitalists in their endless search for private profit.

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This collection of eleven cases of citizens organizing for change in Canada and the United States gives form and substance to the ideal of a new economy based on fairness and environmental sustainability. These are stories of local citizens responding to the economically distorting effects of globalization, the environmental degradation brought about by industrial development and a deep concern about climate change. Grappling with complex problems in their local communities, they are forging innovation, prying open cracks in the system and seizing opportunities to redirect economic life.The cases in Citizen-Led Innovation for a New Economy explore urban and rural initiatives among citizens in ethnically diverse settings - First Nations, Inuit, Latino, African American, predominantly white and mixed communities - where self-organized efforts to bring about change have generated innovation in economic and social life. Innovation in these cases means a new way of working, tying economic justice to the creation of multiple types of environmental, economic and social assets or forms of wealth. They are stories of individuals working together to challenge the short-term focus of political leadership by taking action for the sake of future generations.

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Most Canadians believe that their health is shaped by luck, genetics, lifestyle choices, and treatment options-and government agencies, public health units, and disease associations all reinforce this perception. This study, however, tells a different story, arguing that it is the social determinants of health, as imposed by the financial markets, that dictate the health of Canadians today. Showing that health care can be greatly improved with simple changes to social policy, the discussion describes the impact of food, housing, employment, education, and social services on the nation`s health.

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While corporations continue with business as usual, climate change is rapidly expanding the gap between rich and poor, according to this group of anticapitalists from five continents. Their essays here cover topics from food shortages and carbon trading to perspectives from indigenous peoples, and the authors make a compelling case that saving the world from climate catastrophe will require much more than tinkering with technology or taxes. They argue only radical social change can prevent irreversible damage to the earth and civilization.

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A coming-of-age novel set in the iconic nineties rave scene.

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Tipping Point for Advanced Capitalism is a pathbreaking study of the changing class makeup of the Canadian, other G7 and Nordic labour forces since the 1980s, documenting especially the rise of non-managerial professional employees. The book provides unprecedented tracking of the links between employment classes and higher levels of class consciousness, including the often hidden political consciousness of corporate capitalists as well as the extent of oppositional and revolutionary consciousness among non-managerial workers. The large differences exposed between class conscious capitalists and these non-managerial workers on issues of poverty reduction and global warming reveal the strategic roles these key class agents play in actions to defend or transform advanced capitalism. The most concerted evidence-based study to bring class back into grasping the intimately linked ecological, economic and political crises we now face.

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A healing journey through fire and water.

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Dental care is excluded from Canada's universal healthcare system, with services provided based on the ability to pay. Our dental-care system is leading large segments of the population to neglect care, resulting in poor oral health and all of its consequences. This book examines the history of dentistry in Canada, demonstrating how private business interests have prevailed over public health. Current trends in the industry, such as corporate ownership and a focus on cosmetic dentistry, continue this history. But change is possible. By examining alternative approaches to the current dental-care system, this book is a call to action to make a healthier future possible.

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Disability oppression is not simply about making people disabled by not accommodating impairment, it is interlocked with capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, colonialism and racism.

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Are you a white person with questions about how race affects different situations, but you feel awkward, shy or afraid to ask the people of colour in your life? Are you a racialized person who is tired of answering the same questions over and over? This book is for you: a basic guide for people learning about racial privilege. In Frequently Asked White Questions, Drs. Alex Khasnabish and Ajay Parasram answer ten of the most common questions asked of them by people seeking to understand how race structures our every day. Drawing from their lived experiences as well as live sessions of their monthly YouTube series Safe Space for White Questions, the authors offer concise, accessible answers to questions such as, "Is it possible to be racist against white people?" or "Shouldn't everyone be treated equally?" With humour and compassion, this book offers relatable advice and a practical entry point into conversations about race.

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When working with Indigenous people, the helping professions -education, social work, health care and justice - reinforce the colonial lie that Indigenous people need saving. In White Benevolence, leading anti-racism scholars reveal the ways in which white settlers working in these institutions shape, defend and uphold institutional racism, even while professing to support Indigenous people. White supremacy shows up in the everyday behaviours, language and assumptions of white professionals who reproduce myths of Indigenous inferiority and deficit, making it clear that institutional racism encompasses not only high-level policies and laws but also the collective enactment by people within these institutions. In this uncompromising and essential collection, the authors argue that white settler social workers, educators, health-care practitioners and criminal justice workers have a responsibility to understand the colonial history of their professions and their complicity in ongoing violence, be it over-policing, school push-out, child apprehension or denial of health care. The answer isn't cultural awareness training. What's needed is radical anti-racism, solidarity and a relinquishing of the power of white supremacy.

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Spirited, young Eunice will not settle for a woman's lot in 1800s Canada. She sees the inequitable use of power everywhere, from her abusive father to the elite-ruled government, and she cannot help but challenge it. This historical fiction follows her escape from trouble into more and more trouble, through which her ignorance grows into a sophisticated political understanding of her society. Impatient to claim a place in it, Eunice dresses as a boy to find more freedom and joins an independence rebellion against the elite-ruled government. She lands in jail for stealing a rich man's horse, and there she begins to understand the intersections of power and oppression through the politics of anti-slavery and prison abolition. Though she rarely finds ease in the drudgery of settler life in Upper Canada, readers will fall in love with Eunice for her integrity and tenacity against all odds.

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Canadian universities have an ongoing history of colonialism and racism in this white-settler society. Racialized students (Indigenous, Black and students of colour), who would once have been forbidden from academic spaces and who still feel out of place, must navigate these repressive structures in their educational journeys. Through the genres of essay, art, poetry and photography, this book examines the experiences of and effects on racialized students in the Canadian academy, while exposing academia's lack of capacity to promote students' academic well-being. The book emphasizes the crucial connections that racialized students forge, which transform an otherwise hostile environment into a space of intellectual collaboration, community building and transnational kinship relations. Meticulously curated by Dr. Benita Bunjun, this book is a living example of mentorship, reciprocity and resilience.

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This edited collection brings together a broad range of case studies to highlight the role of Canadian corporations in producing, deepening and exacerbating conditions of dispossession both at home and abroad. Rather than presented as instances of exceptional greed or malice, the cases are described as expected and inherent consequences of contemporary capitalism and/or settler colonialism. A core purpose of the book is to combine and synthesize analyses of dispossession within and outside of Canada. While the literature tends to treat the two as distinct and unrelated phenomena, these processes are often connected, as the normalization of settler colonialism at home can lead to indifference and acceptance of dispossession caused by Canadian companies abroad. This book brings local and global cases together in order to present a rigorous analysis of the role of Canadian corporate activity in processes of dispossession.The book includes a diversity of theoretical approaches related to the overarching theme of capitalism and dispossession; however, they share a critical analysis of capitalism and its implications on marginalized peoples at home and abroad. Included are political economy approaches that draw on the work of theorists such as David Harvey, important interventions from Indigenous and settler colonial studies, feminist approaches using the work of scholars such as Silvia Federici and the concept environmental racism, which draws on both critical race theory and environmental justice literature.

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Twenty-first-century capitalism has little more to offer than a menu of despair: pandemics, deepening inequality, worsening depression, runaway climate change, intensifying authoritarianism and escalating militarism. Twilight Capitalism offers a wide-ranging analysis of the origins, implications and scope of the "combined" social crisis of 2020 and beyond. A compelling case is made that Karl Marx's critical analysis of capitalism, along with his program of class-struggle socialism, is essential to understanding and addressing the most important social, economic and ecological problems of our time.

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Including people with disabilities fully into Canadian society, with the rights enjoyed by non-disabled people, requires a fundamental social transformation, not simply "fixing" some bodies. It requires deep changes in the attitudes, cultural images and policies that make people with disabilities invisible, set them aside, undermine or reject their contributions and value, and justifies their neglect, abuse and death. This shift involves the simple recognition and honouring of the dignity, autonomy and rights of all people, including those who experience disabilities.In the second edition of About Canada: Disability Rights, Deborah Stienstra explores the historical and current experiences of people with disabilities in Canada, as well as the policy and advocacy responses to these experiences. Stienstra demonstrates that disability rights enable people with disabilities to make decisions about their lives and future, claim rights on their own behalf, and participate actively in all areas of Canadian society. Disability rights can and does increase access to and inclusion in critical areas like education, employment, transportation, telecommunications and health care. Additionally, Stienstra identifies new approaches and practices, such as universal design, disability supports and income supports, that can transform Canadian society to be more inclusive and accommodating for everyone.

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Holocaust to Resistance, My Journey is a powerful, awe-inspiring memoir from author and activist Suzanne Berliner Weiss. Born to Jewish parents in Paris in 1941, Suzanne was hidden from the Nazis on a farm in rural France. Alone after the war, she lived in Communist-run orphanages, where she gained a belief in peace and brotherhood. Adoption by a New York family led to a tumultuous youth haunted by domestic conflict, fear of nuclear war and anti-communist repression, consignment to a detention home and magical steps toward relinking with her origins in Europe. At age seventeen, Suzanne became a lifelong social activist, engaged in student radicalization, the Cuban Revolution, and movements for Black Power, women’s liberation, peace in Vietnam and freedom for Palestine. Now nearing eighty, Suzanne tells how the ties of friendship, solidarity and resistance that saved her as a child speak to the needs of our planet today.

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Although the health of the trade union movement may rest on its ability to include women in membership and leadership, little attention has been paid to women-only labour education.This original collection contains vibrant example of labour education events and the women involved who develop, implement, research, evaluate and facilitate at them. All the contributors speak from first-hand experience with women-only programs in unions across Canada, the United States and the world. They identify the methods used in pursuit of learner empowerment and transformation, and frankly discuss the outcomes. These real-life examples offer practical guidance and inspiration for all who create and support activist learning within unions and other social-justice organizations.

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In 2012, journalist Hugo Meunier went undercover as a Walmart employee for three months in St. Leonard, Quebec, just north of Montreal.In great detail, Meunier charts the daily life of an impoverished Walmart worker, referring to his shifts at the box store giant as "somewhere between the army and Walt Disney." Each shift began with a daily chant before bowing to customer demands and the constant pressure to sell. Meanwhile Meunier and his fellow workers could not afford to shop anywhere else but Walmart, further indenturing them to the multi-billion-dollar corporation.Beyond his time on the shop floor, Meunier documents the extraordinary efforts that Walmart exerts to block unionization campaigns, including their 2005 decision to close their outlet in Jonquiere, QC, where the United Food and Commercial Workers union had successfully gained certification rights. A decade later he charts the Supreme Court of Canada ruling that exposed the dubious legal ground on which Walmart stood in invoking closure and throwing workers out on the street.In Walmart: Diary of an Associate, Meunier reveals the truths behind Walmart's low prices. It will make you think twice before shopping there.

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Ten-year-old Cassie lives with her working-class family in 1919 Winnipeg. The Great War and Spanish Influenza have taken their toll, and workers in the city are frustrated with low wages and long hours. When they orchestrate a general strike, Cassie - bright, determined and very bored at school - desperately wants to help.She begins volunteering for the strike committee as a papergirl, distributing the strike bulletin at Portage and Main, and from her corner, she sees the strike take shape. Threatened and taunted by upper-class kids, and getting hungrier by the day, Cassie soon realizes that the strike isn't just a lark - it's a risky and brave movement.With her impoverished best friend, Mary, volunteering in the nearby Labour Café, and Cassie's police officer brother in the strike committee's inner circle, Cassie becomes increasingly furious about the conditions that led workers to strike.When an enormous but peaceful demonstration turns into a violent assault on Bloody Saturday, Cassie is changed forever.Lively and engaging, this novel is a celebration of solidarity, justice and one brave papergirl.Financial assistance provided by the Manitoba Arts Council.

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Violence in the lives of women with disabilities is not a new problem, but it is a problem about which little has been written. This gap in our knowledge needs to be addressed, as women with disabilities are valuable members of our society whose experiences need to be made known. Without such knowledge, political action for social justice and for the prevention of violence is impossible.Contributors to Not a New Problem examine the experiences of Canadian women with disabilities, the need for improved access to services and the ways this violence is exacerbated by and intersects with gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, race, ethnicity and class.

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Politics rules. Whether we like it or not, we are subject to politics wherever we go and whatever we are doing. Development is always and everywhere political, and frequently occurs with the interests of the powerful at the forefront. Can we hope to better understand the politics that shapes and controls our lives and dominates the lives of others across the globe?In this concise volume, Adam Sneyd argues that it is imperative to understand the sub-field of development politics. He shows how the hard skill of careful political analysis can shed new light on some of today's most intractable development challenges. In the end, Sneyd shows how conflicts over ideas can entrench underdevelopment and why we need better analyses of development politics in order to fight the status quo and expedite inclusive change.

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Grounded in the sister disciplines of sociology and anthropology, this textbook is an accessible and critical introduction to contemporary social research. Alex Khasnabish eschews the common disciplinary silos in favour of an integrated approach to understanding and practising critical social research. Situated in the North American context, the text draws on cross-cultural examples to give readers a clear sense of the diversity in human social relations. It is organized thematically in a way that introduces readers to the core areas of social research and social organization and takes an unapologetically radical approach in identifying the relations of oppression and exploitation that give rise to what most corporate textbooks euphemistically identify as "social problems." Focusing on key dynamics and processes at the heart of so many contemporary issues and public conversations, this text highlights the ways in which critical social research can contribute to exploring, understanding and forging alternatives to an increasingly bankrupt, violent, unstable and unjust status quo.

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Parks are importantly fertile places to talk about land. Whether its big national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks, or humble urban patches of grass, we tend to speak of parks as unqualified goods. People think of parks as public or common land, and it is a common belief that parks are the best uses of land and are good for everyone.But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as "natural oases," and urban parks as "pure nature" in the midst of the city - but that's absurd. Parks are as "natural" as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday. Furthermore, parks are not private property, but while they are called 'public', they are highly regulated spaces that normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Parks are a certain kind of property, and thus creations of law, and they are subject to all kinds of presumptions about what parks are for, and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks - as they are currently constituted - are colonial enterprises.On This Patch of Grass is an investigation into one small urban park - Vancouver's Victoria Park, or Bocce Ball Park - as a way to interrogate the politics of land. The authors grapple with the fact that they are uninvited guests on the occupied and traditional territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (səliľwətaʔɬ) nations. But Bocce Ball Park is also a wonderful place in many ways, with a startling plurality of users and sovereignties, and all kinds of overlapping activities and all kinds of overlapping people co-existing more-or-less peaceably. It is a living exhibition of the possibilities of sharing land and perhaps offers some clues to a decolonial horizon.The book is a collaborative exercise between one white family and some friends looking at the park from a variety of perspectives, asking what we might say about this patch of grass, and what kinds of occupation might this place imply.

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The view that capitalism is an inherently flawed, exploitative, crisis-prone, oppressive system is not new. But neoliberal capitalism's flaws are increasingly dangerous in Western countries and globally as corporations exert growing influence on governments, as the endless pursuit of profits pushes our climate to the breaking point and as far-right politics dominate the media. Solutions are needed. Fast.In We Can Do Better, David Camfield lays out a theoretical basis for political and social change that fuses critical Marxism with insights from anti-racist queer feminism. This reconstructed historical materialism treats capitalism and class as inextricably interwoven with gender, race and sexuality. After discussing today's most influential social theories, Camfield uses this theory to analyze a range of issues that face our world today, including climate change, growing social insecurity and the persistence of sexism and racism. Camfield argues that the key to achieving change for the better is social struggle, and he offers ideas about moving from social theory to social action.

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The evolution of the relationship between Cuba and the United States is much more complicated from the Cuban perspective than it is made to appear in mainstream media and political thinking. In this book, Arnold August highlights critical views from Cuba that are generally unfamiliar to non-Cubans. August outlines and analyzes current interactions and the future perspectives between the two neighbours. Included with August s careful analysis are interviews with five of Cuba s leading intellectuals, providing readers with a unique look into today s dynamic and complex relationship between these two countries. "

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MacDonald and Roebuck have written an excellent book on the causes and conditions of youth homelessness in Canada. A key contribution of this work is that they not only explore the challenges that young people are faced with in this situation, but the strengths, assets and resilience they bring when facing such adverse life circumstances. For those interested in youth homelessness and what to do about it, this is a must read. - Stephen Gaetz, Founder of the Canadian Observatory on HomelessnessIn Staying Alive While Living the Life, Sue-Ann MacDonald and Benjamin Roebuck unpack the realities of living on the streets from the perspective of homeless youth. While much is written about at-risk youth, most literature on youth homelessness reduces their lives to flattened images with little room for the diverse, complex and individual nature of their experiences. Challenging the dominant youth-at-risk conversation by putting forward a framework of survival and resilience, MacDonald and Roebuck illustrate the ways that young people who experience homelessness demonstrate tremendous resilience when facing adversity, social exclusion and various forms of oppression.Drawing on conversations with homeless youth, this book focuses both on the external constraints imposed on their lives as well as the ways young people understand their circumstances and their approaches to problem solving. The result is a nuanced analysis that puts human agency at its centre, allowing readers to explore the challenges young people face and the internal and external resources they draw upon when making decisions about their lives.

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Shortlisted for the 2017 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award!John Alexander MacNeil is eighty years old. Sharp-tongued and quick-witted, he lives alone in rural Cape Breton, but he still cooks breakfast for his wife, who's been dead for thirty years. He silently starts to question his own mind after stopping to pick up a hitchhiker - a hitchhiker who turns out to be his neighbour's mailbox.Everything shifts, though, when Emily, a pregnant teenager, shows up at his house with no place else to go. Determined to help Emily as best as he can, John must also keep the wolves from his door and maintain some semblance of sanity.The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil is a compelling, witty and heartwarming novel by renowned Nova Scotia author Lesley Choyce.

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Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn't grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the Canadian government enforced discriminatory, anti-Black immigration policies, designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public's fear of the "Black unknown" and racist stereotypes to justify their exclusion.In Flying Fish in the Great White North, Christopher Stuart Taylor utilizes the intersectionality of race, gender and class to challenge the perception that Blacks were simply victims of racist and discriminatory Canadian and international immigration policies by emphasizing the agency and educational capital of Black Barbadian emigrants during this period. In fact, many Barbadians were middle to upper class and were well educated, and many, particularly women, found autonomous agency and challenged the very Canadian immigration policies designed to exclude them.

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This book is about the need for an alternative to capitalism. But what does that alternative look like? And given the ever-increasing wealth and power of the 1 percent and the fact that corporations are given carte blanche to turn natural resources into profit, is an alternative possible?Tom Webb argues that a massive shift to social enterprise, primarily co-operatives, is required. More than 250 million people around the world work for co-operatives, and co-operatives impact the lives of three billion people. This model reduces almost every negative impact of capitalism - it is a model that works.Webb outlines the principles co-operatives need to hold to if they are to be a successful alternative to capitalism and examines the public-policy changes needed to nurture such a transition, but he remains neither wildly optimistic nor unduly pessimistic. A better world is possible, but it is not inevitable.

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How do we make sense of the social problems that continue to plague Canadian society? Our understanding of issues such as poverty, racism, violence, homophobia, crime and pollution stems from our view of how society is structured. From the dominant neoliberal perspective, social problems arise from individuals making poor choices. From a critical perspective, however, these social troubles are caused by structural social inequalities. Disparities in economic, social and political power - that is, relations of power based on class, race, gender and sexual orientation - are the central structural element of capitalist, patriarchal, colonialist societies.The contributors to Power and Resistance use this critical perspective to explore Canadian social issues such as poverty, colonialism, homophobia, violence against women, climate change and so on. This sixth edition adds chapters on the corporatization of higher education, the lethal impacts of colonialism, democracy, the social determinants of health, drug policy and sexual violence on campus.

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Most Canadians believe that their experiences of health and illness are shaped by genetics, medical care and lifestyle choices. Governments, the media and disease associations reinforce this perception by pointing to medical research and a healthy lifestyle as the keys to health. About Canada: Health and Illness tells a different story.In this new, updated edition, Dennis Raphael shows that living and working conditions, income, employment and quality of education, as well as access to food, housing and social services - the social determinants of health - are what dictate the health of Canadians. And these social determinants are shaped by the public-policy decisions of Canadian governments. Whether you stay healthy or become ill has more to do with policies, laws and regulations than genetics or lifestyle. Over the past thirty years, policymakers - operating under the influence of neoliberalism - have threatened health by allowing the growth of corporate power, which has led to growing inequality in these social determinants of health.This book is a wake-up call to Canadians. Public pressure needs to be put on elected representatives to create policies that are in the interest of the majority of Canadians, not just the wealthy.

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Across Canada, there is a severe shortage of decent quality housing that is affordable to those with low incomes, and much of the housing that is available is inadequate, even appalling. The poor condition of housing for those below the poverty line adds to the weight of the complex poverty they already endure, which includes worsening health, adversely affected education and neighbourhoods that are more prone to crime and violence. Using Winnipeg, Manitoba, as an example, Poor Housing examines the real-life circumstances of low-income people who are forced to live in these conditions. Contributing authors examine some of the challenges faced by low-income people in poor housing, including difficulties with landlords who abuse their power, bedbugs, racism and discrimination and a wide range of other social and psychological effects. Other selections consider the particular housing problems faced by Aboriginal people and by newcomers to Winnipeg as well as the challenges faced by individuals living in rooming houses.A central theme in the collection is that the private, for-profit housing market cannot meet the housing needs of low-income Canadians, and, therefore, governments must intervene and provide subsidies. But all levels of government have shown a consistent unwillingness to invest in decent housing for low-income people. The irony is that the social costs of poor housing and the complex poverty of which it is a part are almost certainly greater than the costs of investing in subsidized social housing and related anti-poverty measures.Finally, the authors describe a number of creative and successful housing strategies for low-income people in Winnipeg, including Aboriginal housing co-ops, a revitalized 1960s-style public housing complex and a highly creative repurposing of an inner-city church into supported social housing. In these successful cases, communities and governments have worked cooperatively to good effect.

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Indigenous Nationhood is a selection of blog posts by well-known lawyer, activist and academic Pamela Palmater. Palmater offers critical legal and political commentary and analysis on legislation, Aboriginal rights, Canadian politics, First Nations politics and social issues such as murdered and missing Indigenous women, poverty, economics, identity and culture. Palmater s writing tackles myths and stereotypes about Indigenous peoples head-on, discusses Indigenous nationhood and nation building, examines treaty rights and provides an accessible, critical analysis of laws and government policies being imposed on Indigenous peoples. Fiercely anti-racist and anti-colonial, this book is intended to help rebuild the connections between Indigenous citizens and their home communities, local governments and Indigenous Nations for the benefit of future generations. "

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Nta'tugwaqanminen provides evidence that the Mi'gmaq of the Gespe'gewa'gi (Northern New Brunswick and the Gaspé Peninsula) have occupied their territory since time immemorial. They were the sole occupants of it prior to European settlement and occupied it on a continuous basis. This book was written through an alliance between the Mi'gmaq of Northern Gespe'gewa'gi (Gaspé Peninsula), their Elders and a group of eminent researchers in the field with the aim of reclaiming their history, both oral and written, in the context of what is known as knowledge re-appropriation. It also provides non-Aboriginal peoples with a view of how Mi'gmaq history looks when it is written from an Indigenous perspective.There are two voices in the book - that of the Mi'gmaq of the Gespe'gewa'gi, including the Elders, as they act as narrators of the collective history, and that of the researchers, who studied all possible aspects of this history, including advanced investigation on place names as indicators of migration patterns.Nta'tugwaqanminen speaks of the Gespe'gewa'gi Mi'gmaq vision, history, relation to the land, past and present occupation of the territory and their place names and what they reveal in terms of ancient territorial occupation. It speaks of the treaties they agreed to with the British Crown, the respect of these treaties on the part of the Mi'gmaq people and the disrespect of them from the various levels of governments. This book speaks about the dispossession the Mi'gmaq of Gespe'gewa'gi had to endure while the European settlers illegally occupied and developed the Gaspé Peninsula to their own advantage and the rights and titles the Mi'gmaq people still have on their lands.

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More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom is about Indigenous resistance and resurgence across lands and waters claimed by Canada. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors describe and analyze struggles against contemporary colonialism by the Canadian state and, more broadly, against the global colonial-capitalist system. Resistance includes Indigenous survival against centuries of genocidal policies and the on-going dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands and waters. Resurgence is the re-invention of diverse Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in politics, economics, the arts, research and all realms of life.The underlying argument of More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom is that colonial-capitalism is a historical fact but not an inevitability. By analyzing and detailing various forms of Indigenous resistance and resurgence, the authors here describe practices and visions that prefigure a possible world where there is justice for Indigenous peoples and renewed healthy relationships with "all our relations."

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Established under late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Mision Barrio Adentro (MBA) Venezuela s adaptation of the Cuban social medical model utilizes a free, universal health care system to serve and educate rural, poor and marginalized populations and to broaden the very praxis and ideology of what health means in a true Latin American social medicine approach. MBA moves beyond conventional medicine to form a true community-oriented primary care system Through qualitative research with personnel from both sides of the political spectrum in Venezuela, Venezuela s Health Care Revolution offers a unique analysis of MBA s ability to empower marginalized populations to become health care providers for their own medically vulnerable and under-served communities. Further, Chris Walker argues that the potential of this medical approach is significant not just in Latin America but in Canada and the United States as well. Chris Walker is a PhD candidate at Saint Mary s University and the author of several publications on Cuban medical adaptations as well as on the cultural constructions of health care, medical education, rural/urban medical disparities and the connections between politics, health and poverty. "

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Becoming an Ally is a book for men who want to end sexism, white people who want to end racism, straight people who want to end heterosexism, able-bodied people who want to end ableism for all people who recognize their privilege and want to move toward a more just world by learning to act as allies. Has oppression always been with us, just part of human nature ? What does individual healing have to do with social justice? What does social justice have to do with individual healing? Why do members of the same oppressed group fight one another, sometimes more viciously than they fight their oppressors? Why do some who experience oppression develop a life-long commitment to fighting oppression, while others turn around and oppress those with less power? In this accessible and enlightening book, now in its third edition, Anne Bishop examines history, economic and political structures, and individual psychology in a search for the origins of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism and all the other forms of oppression that divide us. Becoming an Ally looks for paths to justice and lays out guidelines for becoming allies of oppressed peoples when we are in the privileged role. A new chapter in this third edition offers a greatly expanded discussion of effective approaches to educating allies, which is meant for teachers of adults, particularly those who teach about diversity, equity and anti-oppression. In this chapter, Bishop examines the ways in which Western culture prevents us from recognizing our roles as members of privileged groups and explores how to challenge this with participatory exercises and group discussion. "

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Live from the Afrikan Resistance! is the first collection of spoken word poetry by Halifax's fifth Poet Laureate, El Jones. These poems speak of community and struggle. They are grounded in the political culture of African Nova Scotia and inherit the styles and substances of hip-hop, dub and calypso's political commentary. They engage historical themes and figures and analyse contemporary issues - racism, environmental racism, poverty and violence - as well as confront the realities of life as a Black woman. The voice is urgent, uncompromising and passionate in its advocacy and demands. One of Canada's most controversial spoken word artists, El Jones writes to educate, to move communities to action and to demonstrate the possibilities of resistance and empowerment. Gathered from seven years of performances, these poems represent the tradition of the prophetic voice in Black Nova Scotia.

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First there was the Arab Spring, then the Indignados, then Occupy Wall Street. And then there was the Printemps erable the Maple Spring. In 2011, proclaiming the need for austerity, Quebec s governing Liberal Party announced a draconian increase in tuition fees. Enraged that the government would destroy a legacy of public education, so hard won during the 1960s Quiet Revolution a legacy from which they themselves had reaped benefits the youth of Quebec took to the streets in a student strike under the banner of the carres rouges. They fought not merely for education, but for the future: a future they watch being destroyed by the unrelenting march of capitalism, intent on the merciless exploitation of citizens and natural resources. Generation Rising is the story of the most important mass mobilization in Quebec s (and Canada s) history. It is the story of six months of brutalization of youth by the police forces of the capitalist class, as the students went toe-to-toe against the corrupt and autocratic elite in an effort to construct a horizontal, participative and grassroots democracy. It is the story of the Internet generation deploying its mastery of social media to harness the forces of hundreds of thousands, and ultimately defeat a battle-hardened premier. At the end of it all, Quebec s first social media mobilization had laid the foundations for a brave new future, where the old world of order and authority might finally be swept aside to make way for a new, twenty-first-century democracy. Le combat est avenir the fight is the future, and the battle has just begun."

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On December 6, 1989, a man walked into the engineering school Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and, declaring "I hate feminists," killed fourteen young women. "I Hate Feminists!", originally published in French in 2009, examines the collective memory that emerged in the immediate aftermath and years following the massacre as Canadians struggled to make sense of this tragic event and understand the motivations of the killer. Exploring stories and editorials in Montreal and Toronto newspapers, texts distributed within anti-feminist "masculinist" networks, discourses about memorials in major Canadian cities and the film Polytechnique, which was released on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, Melissa Blais argues that feminist analyses and the killer's own statements have been set aside in favour of interpretations that absolve the killer of responsibility or even shift that blame onto women and feminists. In the end, Blais contends, the collective memory that has been constructed through various media has functioned not as a testament to violence against women but as a catalyst for anti-feminist discourse.

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Cantwells' Way examines the relationship between people, place and technology at the Cape Spear Lightstation in Newfoundland and Labrador. Lightkeepers and their families were often the vanguards of technological change in their communities. Modern lighthouses and fog alarms, for example, were products of the new understandings of light and sound that emerged from the Scientific Revolution. But lightkeepers and their families still engaged in, and relied on, traditional practices, such as gardening and berry picking, that were part of the informal economy of rural Newfoundland. Life at the Cape Spear Lightstation therefore reflected the underlying duality of Newfoundland society in the period.

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In Twenty-First-Century Socialism, Atilio A. Boron, winner of the prestigious Premio Liberator al Pensamiento Critico award (Liberator Award for Critical Thinking), traces the history of capitalism in Latin America and finds that the capitalist mode of production has not led to development but instead has fostered underdevelopment. Boron argues that within a wider historical and geographical perspective, capitalism is a mode of production that has served as a means of development for a small group of nations at the price of excluding the benefits of development to all the rest. As Boron concludes, with globalization there is no longer any possibility for autonomous capitalist development. Arguing on the inability of capitalism to drive development in Latin America, Boron states that with capitalism, Latin America has no prospects. Neo-liberal policies such as the privatization of education, health and social security in the household-debt ravaged Chile, the violent usurpation of Indigenous lands, and the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor in Brazil lead to a dead end. On the other hand, countries that have resisted these destructive neo-liberal economic policies, such as Cuba and Venezuela, illustrate that any hopes of a promising future for the people of Latin America will be in a post-capitalist setting, the elements of which Boron presents in great detail.

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In the early 1990s the collapse of the Atlantic groundfish stocks signaled the destruction of life in the seas, but it also threw 40,000 people out of work, unraveling the very fabric of rural life throughout Atlantic Canada. Twenty years later, even after fishing moratoriums and limited directed fishing, the cod have not recovered and some stocks are on the verge of biological extinction. The fishing industry, politicians and government scientists blame the growing population of grey seals – a species that had up until the 1970s been severely depleted – and argue that a large-scale cull of the population is needed to save the cod.In The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Linda Pannozzo finds that the truth is much more complex and that the seals are scapegoats for the federal government’s mismanagement of the cod stocks, deflecting attention away from the effects of global warming and the continued use of destructive fishing methods. The collapse of the cod, its failure to recover and the recent recommendations for large-scale grey seal culls are stark reminders of how fisheries, science and public policy are increasingly estranged from each other.

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