BiblioVault - Books about Canada

Daniels v. Canada

In and Beyond the Courts

Nathalie Kermoal

University of Manitoba Press, 2021

Dark Matters

On the Surveillance of Blackness

Simone Browne

Duke University Press, 2015

In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

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Deaf Daughter, Hearing Father

Richard Medugno

Gallaudet University Press, 2005

When Richard Medugno and his wife Brenda learned in 1993 that their 17-month-old daughter Miranda was deaf, they grieved, as many hearing parents do. Soon, however, Medugno seized hold of the need to take positive action for Miranda. Deaf Daughter, Hearing Father recounts the remarkable story of their journey during the past fourteen years.

Medugno first researched the best communication mode for Miranda. Quickly dismissing the speech pathology model, he and his wife chose ASL alone as the best, natural language for Miranda. He surrounded his daughter with opportunities to learn ASL, by arranging to meet deaf individuals and families, and also by hiring deaf babysitters. He also determined to learn ASL himself, to ensure communication with his daughter. As Miranda neared school age, Medugno spearheaded a transcontinental search for exactly the right school for her education. So that Miranda could attend the California School for the Deaf (CSD), the Medugno family moved from Toronto, Canada to Fremont, CA.

In Deaf Daughter, Hearing Father, Medugno shares practical information on many of the common challenges faced by hearing parents. He provides a list of games that hearing and deaf children can play together, an important consideration for many families. His enthusiasm for all possibilities, from exploring the potential of video phones to helping stage CSD musicals, reveals his abiding devotion to Miranda. Such a foundation has enabled her to feel proud, confident, and happy in her pursuits. At the same time, Medugno recognizes that the rewards of having a deaf daughter are far greater than he could have hoped for or imagined.

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Declaring His Genius

Oscar Wilde in North America

Roy Morris Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2013

Arriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” But as Roy Morris, Jr., reveals in this sparkling narrative, Wilde was, for the first time in his life, underselling himself. A chronicle of the sensation that was Wilde’s eleven-month speaking tour of America, Declaring His Genius offers an indelible portrait of both Oscar Wilde and the Gilded Age.

Wilde covered 15,000 miles, delivered 140 lectures, and met everyone who was anyone. Dressed in satin knee britches and black silk stockings, the long-haired apostle of the British Aesthetic Movement alternately shocked, entertained, and enlightened a spellbound nation. Harvard students attending one of his lectures sported Wildean costume, clutching sunflowers and affecting world-weary poses. Denver prostitutes enticed customers by crying: “We know what makes a cat wild, but what makes Oscar Wilde?” Whitman hoisted a glass to his health, while Ambrose Bierce denounced him as a fraud.

Wilde helped alter the way post–Civil War Americans—still reeling from the most destructive conflict in their history—understood themselves. In an era that saw rapid technological changes, social upheaval, and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, he delivered a powerful anti-materialistic message about art and the need for beauty. Yet Wilde too was changed by his tour. Having conquered America, a savvier, more mature writer was ready to take on the rest of the world. Neither Wilde nor America would ever be the same.

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Decolonizing Discipline

Children, Corporal Punishment, Christian Theologies, and Reconciliation

Valerie E. Michaelson

University of Manitoba Press, 2020

Decolonizing Employment

Aboriginal Inclusion in Canada's Labour Market

Shauna MacKinnon

University of Manitoba Press, 2015

Devil in Deerskins

My Life with Grey Owl

Anahareo

University of Manitoba Press, 2014

Diasporic Intimacies

Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries

Edited by Robert Diaz, Marissa Largo, and Fritz Pino

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries is the first edited volume of its kind, featuring the works of leading scholars, artists, and activists who reflect on the contributions of queer Filipinos to Canadian culture and society.

Addressing a wide range of issues beyond the academy, the authors present a rich and under-studied archive of personal reflections, in-depth interviews, creative works, and scholarly essays. Their trandsdisciplinary approach highlights the need for queer, transgressive, and utopian practices that render visible histories of migration, empire building, settler colonialism, and globalization.

Timely, urgent, and fascinating, Diasporic Intimacies offers an accessible entry point for readers who seek to pursue critically engaged community work, arts education, curatorial practice, and socially inflected research on sexuality, gender, and race in this ever-changing world.

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Dictionary of Manitoba Biography

J.M. Bumsted

University of Manitoba Press, 1999

Manitoba has been at the crossroads of many of the important debates and events in Canadian history. From the early fur trade to the Riel Rebellion to the Winnipeg General Strike, Manitobans have frequently played crucial roles in Canadian and sometimes world history. Until now, there has been no comprehensive, contemporary source for information on the many Manitobans who have left their mark on history and society. Dictionary of Manitoba Biography fills this gap, with biographical sketches of over 1700 Manitobans who have made an impact in politics, the arts, sports, commerce, agriculture, and society. It is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and general readers interested in Canadian history. Particular emphasis has been placed on reflecting Manitoba's ethnic and social diversity, and on including men and women who were notable in their own day but have now been forgotten. Many entries also refer the reader to additional references for further reading. More than a reference book, Dictionary of Manitoba Biography is also a fascinating work of history in its own right, which presents the full and colourful scope of over 300 years of people in Manitoba history and social life, from premiers and mayors to nightclub owners and sports heroes.

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Difficult Decisions Closing An D Merging Academic Libraries

Sara Holder

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2015

Difficult Decisions

Closing and Merging Academic Libraries

Sara Holder

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2015

Disabled Upon Arrival

Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability

Jay T Dolmage

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable. This premise forms the crux of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability, a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.

Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealing how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival.

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Disaster Citizenship

Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era

Jacob Remes

University of Illinois Press, 2015

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era–beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands--the Salem Fire of 1914 and the Halifax Explosion of 1917--saw working class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. Both official and unofficial responses, meanwhile, showed how the United States and Canada were linked by experts, workers, and money.

In Disaster Citizenship, Jacob A. C. Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive "solutions" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

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Disease and Class

Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society

Georgina D. Feldberg

Rutgers University Press, 1995

Until a decade ago, the conquest of tuberculosis seemed one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. The resurgence of TB in the wake of AIDS has to be understood, Georgina Feldberg argues, in the context of decisions the U.S. Public Health Service made, beginning in the 1930s, to prevent TB through improved hygiene and long-term treatment with medications, rather than program of BCG vaccination that Canada and many other countries adopted. Feldberg's aim is not to judge which was the right choice, but to explain why the U.S. rejected the vaccine and the consequences of that choice. To American physicians, TB, the conditions that fostered it, and the kind of people who got it were a direct threat to their own middle-class values, institutions, and prosperity. They prescribed vigorous social reform, and by the 1960s, they were convinced the strategy had worked. But, as the country's commitment to strong social welfare programs waned, the bacteriological reality of TB reasserted itself. Feldberg challenges us to recognize that the interplay of disease, class, and the practice of medicine can have unexpected consequences for the health of nations. The book is essential reading for students and professionals in public health, medicine, and the history and sociology of medicine. Georgina D. Feldberg is director of the York University Centre for Health Studies in North York, Ontario. She is coauthor of Take Care: Warning Signals for Canada's Health System.

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Distant Fires

Duluth to Hudson Bay

Scott Anderson

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

"The waves on Lake Superior nearly splattered them all over the cliffs, and mosquitoes almost ate them alive in the Boundary Waters. Halfway through the three-month trip, they buried their underwear. But who needs underwear when you’re 22 years old and living out the adventure of a boyhood dream?" —St. Paul Pioneer Press

"Distant Fires, a true-life adventure, describes a 1,700-mile canoe trip from Duluth to York Factory on Hudson Bay. Anderson and a companion retraced the paddles taken by Eric Sevareid and a companion almost sixty years earlier. Their trials and tribulations, plus Anderson’s sense of humor, make the trip fun in book form. Pen-and-ink illustrations are by noted Minnesota wildlife artist Les Kouba." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Distant Fires is a voyage of discovery. Scott Anderson is an inquisitive traveler, and when he sees something that piques his interest, he stops for a chat. He also has a marvelous eye for the natural world that surrounds him in his summerlong journey. He is a natural-born writer." —Duluth News Tribune

"Some of [Anderson’s] phrasing is very happy indeed: ‘the resting place of the rivers.’ I wish I had written that." —Eric Sevareid

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The Diviners

Margaret Laurence

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In The Diviners, Morag Gunn, a middle aged writer who lives in a farmhouse on the Canadian prairie, struggles to understand the loneliness of her eighteen-year-old daughter. With unusual wit and depth, Morag recognizes that she needs solitude and work as much as she needs the love of her family. With an afterword by Margaret Atwood.

"Mrs. Laurence's [novel] is both poetic and muscular, and her heroine is certainly one of the more humane, unglorified, unpolemical, believable women to have appeared in recent fiction."—The New Yorker

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Do You See Ice?

Inuit and Americans at Home and Away

Karen Routledge

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Many Americans imagine the Arctic as harsh, freezing, and nearly uninhabitable. The living Arctic, however—the one experienced by native Inuit and others who work and travel there—is a diverse region shaped by much more than stereotype and mythology. Do You See Ice? presents a history of Arctic encounters from 1850 to 1920 based on Inuit and American accounts, revealing how people made sense of new or changing environments.

Routledge vividly depicts the experiences of American whalers and explorers in Inuit homelands. Conversely, she relates stories of Inuit who traveled to the northeastern United States and were similarly challenged by the norms, practices, and weather they found there. Standing apart from earlier books of Arctic cultural research—which tend to focus on either Western expeditions or Inuit life—Do You See Ice? explores relationships between these two groups in a range of northern and temperate locations. Based on archival research and conversations with Inuit Elders and experts, Routledge’s book is grounded by ideas of home: how Inuit and Americans often experienced each other’s countries as dangerous and inhospitable, how they tried to feel at home in unfamiliar places, and why these feelings and experiences continue to resonate today.

The author intends to donate all royalties from this book to the Elders’ Room at the Angmarlik Center in Pangnirtung, Nunavut.

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Doctors and Demonstrators

How Political Institutions Shape Abortion Law in the United States, Britain, and Canada

Drew Halfmann

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Since Roe v. Wade, abortion has continued to be a divisive political issue in the United States. In contrast, it has remained primarily a medical issue in Britain and Canada despite the countries’ shared heritage. Doctors and Demonstrators looks beyond simplistic cultural or religious explanations to find out why abortion politics and policies differ so dramatically in these otherwise similar countries.

Drew Halfmann argues that political institutions are the key. In the United States, federalism, judicial review, and a private health care system contributed to the public definition of abortion as an individual right rather than a medical necessity. Meanwhile, Halfmann explains, the porous structure of American political parties gave pro-choice and pro-life groups the opportunity to move the issue onto the political agenda. A groundbreaking study of the complex legal and political factors behind the evolution of abortion policy, Doctors and Demonstrators will be vital for anyone trying to understand this contentious issue.

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Don Proch

Masking and Mapping

Patricia Bovey

University of Manitoba Press, 2019

Downwardly Global

Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora

Lalaie Ameeriar

Duke University Press, 2017

In Downwardly Global Lalaie Ameeriar examines the transnational labor migration of Pakistani women to Toronto. Despite being trained professionals in fields including engineering, law, medicine, and education, they experience high levels of unemployment and poverty. Rather than addressing this downward mobility as the result of bureaucratic failures, in practice their unemployment is treated as a problem of culture and racialized bodily difference. In Toronto, a city that prides itself on multicultural inclusion, women are subjected to two distinct cultural contexts revealing that integration in Canada represents not the erasure of all differences, but the celebration of some differences and the eradication of others. Downwardly Global juxtaposes the experiences of these women in state-funded unemployment workshops, where they are instructed not to smell like Indian food or wear ethnic clothing, with their experiences at cultural festivals in which they are encouraged to promote these same differences. This form of multiculturalism, Ameeriar reveals, privileges whiteness while using race, gender, and cultural difference as a scapegoat for the failures of Canadian neoliberal policies.

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Dynamic Partisanship

How and Why Voter Loyalties Change

Ken Kollman and John E. Jackson

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Why do people identify with political parties? How stable are those identifications? Stable party systems, with a limited number of parties and mostly stable voter identification with a party, are normally considered significant signals of a steady democracy. In Dynamic Partisanship, Ken Kollman and John E. Jackson study changing patterns of partisanship in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia over the last fifty years in order to disentangle possible reasons for shifting partisanship and party identification. The authors argue that changes in partisanship can be explained by adjustments in voters’ attitudes toward issues or parties; the success or failure of policies advocated by parties; or alterations in parties’ positions on key issues. They contend that, while all three factors contribute, it is the latter, a party changing positions on a chief concern, that most consistently leads voters to or from a particular party. Their approach provides a deeper knowledge of the critical moving parts in democratic politics.

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