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?" This book offers a thoughtful and respectful guide for anyone trying to figure out "woke" politics without jargon and judgement.
In “There’s Something In The Water”, Ingrid R. G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities.
Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. By and large, the environmental justice narrative in Nova Scotia fails to make race explicit, obscuring it within discussions on class, and this type of strategic inadvertence mutes the specificity of Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian experiences with racism and environmental hazards in Nova Scotia. By redefining the parameters of critique around the environmental justice narrative and movement in Nova Scotia and Canada, Waldron opens a space for a more critical dialogue on how environmental racism manifests itself within this intersectional context.
Waldron also illustrates the ways in which the effects of environmental racism are compounded by other forms of oppression to further dehumanize and harm communities already dealing with pre-existing vulnerabilities, such as long-standing social and economic inequality. Finally, Waldron documents the long history of struggle, resistance, and mobilizing in Indigenous and Black communities to address environmental racism.
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.
Across the world we are witnessing daily the lethal effects of a rapid and scary hardening of borders, ignited and justified by manufactured fear and scarcity. In such conditions, highly exploitative ideas of “managed migration” are presented as reasonable and just.
And temporary worker programs, championed by countries like Canada and the US, are presented as an acceptable response to both acute labour shortages and ugly nationalist feelings. For this, all workers pay the price in the form of dwindling rights and diminished solidarity. This book is the result of decades of thinking, organizing and deep research on the global struggle for equality and freedom in and against an increasingly walled world. Through this immediate and up-close account, Henaway takes the reader on a journey across a familiar consumer landscape of corporate power — from Amazon and Dollarama to chicken farms and late night rideshares —offering a vivid analysis of the consequences of a system built to marginalize, exploit and divide people through the creation of exclusionary categories of belonging.
In Essential Work, Disposable Workers, Henaway offers a counter proposal to the global border, arguing that we reject control over freedom of movement as a means to halt a race to the bottom for all working people and instead build solidarity across struggles for decent work and justice. In this moving account of a global system of hyper-exploitation, Henaway weaves stories of struggle with his own on-the-ground experience and expansive research, to explain the workings of a global system of managed precarity that affects everyone who works, albeit unequally. Written with the unique verve and insight of a committed scholar and decades-long grassroots organizer, Essential Work, Disposable Workers offers a vivid analysis to help us grasp the cruel consequences of borders and points to an alternative future.
The Consulting Trap does a deep dive into how governments have become hooked on private consultancy firms with dire consequences for democratic decision-making, public accountability and accessible public services. Hurl and Werner contend that firms like McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG and Deloitte increasingly take responsibility for core public services, trapping governments in cycles of dependency. Through orchestrating tax avoidance for the wealthy while engineering austerity for the rest, these firms have created the foundations for the deepening privatization of the public services, further entrenching their power.
Drawing on case studies from Canada and around the world, Hurl and Werner investigate how big consultancies leverage social networks, institutionalize relationships, mine and commodify data, and establish policy pipelines that facilitate the quick diffusion of ideas across jurisdictions. Drawing from real world examples, The Consulting Trap offers strategies for how these powerful firms can be resisted using people’s audits, public consultations, access to information requests, and social network analyses.
No longer is the climate emergency purely an external threat to our wellbeing: this profoundly political circumstance is deeply personal. The summer after giving birth, Sarah Marie Wiebe and her baby endured the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, with temperatures over 20 degrees above normal, creating all-time heat records across the province. It was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. The extreme heat landed Wiebe in the hospital, dehydrated and separated from her nursing baby from dawn until dusk. So began a year of mothering through heat, fires and floods. The climate emergency’s many incarnations shaped Wiebe’s politics of parenting and revealed the layers, textures and nuances of the disastrous emergencies we encounter in a world dominated by extractive capitalism.
Drawing on hospital codes to explore the connections, Wiebe opens up tender conversations about intimate matters of how our bodies respond to emergency interventions: informed consent, emergency C-sections, reproductive mental health, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. A critical ecofeminist scholar, Wiebe invites collective envisioning and enacting of caring, ethical relations between humans and the planet, including our atmospheres, lands, waters, animals, plants and each other.
We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social and ecological catastrophe and that everything needs to change, and fast. Thankfully, radical environmental movements have forced the question of “system change” to the centre of the political agenda to make way for a just and livable world.
Insurgent Ecologies takes readers on an inspiring journey across key sites of ecological crisis and contestation, showing how revolutionary politics can emerge from the convergences between place-based, often disconnected struggles. These engaging essays speak to longstanding debates in political ecology around how to advance transformations in, against and beyond capitalism. The collection starts from the belief that the environmental struggles taking place across the Global South and North are a necessary component of such transformations. The book presents unique stories of the visions and strategies of struggles organized around sovereignty, land, climate, feminisms and labour, written by scholar-activists rooted in territories around the globe, offering locally grounded yet global perspectives. Each story reflects on how to build solidarity and comradeship across diverse struggles and how new political subjects and transformative collective projects for social-ecological justice are created.
In More Harm Than Good, Carter, Boyd and MacPherson take a critical look at the current state of Canadian drug policy and raise key questions about the effects of Canada’s increasing involvement in and commitment to the “war on drugs.” A primer on Canadian drug policy, the analysis in More Harm Than Good is shaped by critical sociology and feminist perspectives on drugs and incorporates insights not only from individuals who are on the front lines of drug policy in Canada — treatment and service workers — but also from those who live with the consequences of that policy on a daily basis — people who use criminalized drugs. Finally, the authors propose realistic alternatives to today’s failed policy approach.
“Your book really expanded thinking and understanding and had a big influence on students critical and reflective thought. Readings sparked rich conversations about their own hopes and wishes for the field, broader social and political responses and the impact on youth and families affected by substances.” - Stephanie McCune, University of Victoria
Please note: an error occurred with the printing of this book, and one of the sidebars was not printed. It is available to download here. We sincerely apologize for this oversight.
In the last decade, the relationship between settler Canadians and Indigenous Peoples has been highlighted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Idle No More movement, the Wet’suwet’en struggle against pipeline development and other Indigenous-led struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization. Increasing numbers of Canadians are beginning to recognize how settler colonialism continues to shape relationships on these lands. With this recognition comes the question many settler Canadians are now asking, what can I do?
Living in Indigenous Sovereignty lifts up the wisdom of Indigenous scholars, activists and knowledge keepers who speak pointedly to what they are asking of non-Indigenous people. It also shares the experiences of thirteen white settler Canadians who are deeply engaged in solidarity work with Indigenous Peoples. Together, these stories offer inspiration and guidance for settler Canadians who wish to live honourably in relationship with Indigenous Peoples, laws and lands. If Canadians truly want to achieve this goal, Carlson and Rowe argue, they will pursue a reorientation of their lives toward “living in Indigenous sovereignty” — living in an awareness that these are Indigenous lands, containing relationships, laws, protocols, stories, obligations and opportunities that have been understood and practised by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.
Collectively, these stories will help settler Canadians understand what transformations we must undertake if we are to fundamentally shift our current relations and find a new way forward, together.
Visit for more details: https://www.storiesofdecolonization.org
Winona LaDuke is a leader in cultural-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy, sustainable food systems and Indigenous rights. Her new book, To Be a Water Protector: Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers, is an expansive, provocative engagement with issues that have been central to her many years of activism. LaDuke honours Mother Earth and her teachings while detailing global, Indigenous-led opposition to the enslavement and exploitation of the land and water. She discusses several elements of a New Green Economy and outlines the lessons we can take from activists outside the US and Canada. In her unique way of storytelling, Winona LaDuke is inspiring, always a teacher and an utterly fearless activist, writer and speaker.
Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota. She is executive director of Honor the Earth, a national Native advocacy and environmental organization. Her work at the White Earth Land Recovery Project spans thirty years of legal, policy and community development work, including the creation of one of the first tribal land trusts in the country. LaDuke has testified at the United Nations, US Congress and state hearings and is an expert witness on economics and the environment. She is the author of numerous acclaimed articles and books.
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 gives way to a more sophisticated understanding of her society. Impatient to claim a place in it, Eunice dresses as a boy in order to join a rebellion against the government. She lands in jail for stealing a rich man's horse, and there, the stories of her socially marginalized female cellmates - in particular a young black prisoner - forces her to confront anew the startling injustices of race and social class and the institutionalized cruelty of prison. Readers will fall in love with Eunice for her integrity and tenacity against all odds.
Domestic homicide is violence that strikes within our most intimate relations. The most common strategy for addressing this kind of transgression relies on policing and prisons. But through examining commonly accepted typologies of high-risk intimate partner violence, Ardath Whynacht shows that policing can be understood as part of the same root problem as the violence it seeks to mend and provides an abolitionist frame for the most dangerous forms of intimate partner violence. This book illustrates that the origins of both the carceral state and toxic masculinity are situated in settler colonialism and racial capitalism and sees police homicide and domestic homicide as akin. Describing an experience of domestic homicide in her community and providing a deeply personal analysis of some of the most recent cases of homicide in Canada, the author inhabits the complexity of seeking abolitionist justice. Insurgent Love traces the major risk factors for domestic homicide within the structures of racial capitalism and suggests transformative, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist approaches for safety, prevention and justice.
Framed within the common goal of advancing trade justice and South-North solidarity, The Fair Trade Handbook presents a broad interpretation of fair trade and a wide-ranging dialogue between different viewpoints. Canadian researchers in particular have advanced a transformative vision of fair trade, rooted in the cooperative movement and arguing for a more central role for Southern farmers and workers. Contributors to this book look at the issues within global trade, and assess fair trade and how to make it more effective against the broader structures of the capitalist, colonialist, racist and patriarchal global economy. The debates and discussions are set within a critical development studies and critical political economy framework. However, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers, as it translates the key issues for a popular audience.
Includes : A Lively Bean that Brightens Lives: A Graphic Story by Bill Barrett and Curt Shoultz
Ruby used to be a fiery, sexy, musical genius. But when she got pregnant as a teenager in the 90s, her life took a turn into banality. Now a middle-aged Indo-Canadian woman, she feels unseen and unheard by her white husband and struggles to communicate with her mixed-race daughter. When she discovers her husband cheating, she embarks on a quest to unearth exciting secrets from her past. To find what she needs, she drives straight into B.C.'s raging wildfires, accompanied only by the fantastical stories her mother used to tell about their ancient Mughal ancestry - a dancer named Rubina who lived in the concubine quarters of the great Agra Fort. This book is at once historical fiction and political romance, deftly navigating themes of mixed-race relationships, climate change, motherhood, body shame, death and the passage of time.
After a hunting trip one fall, a family in the far reaches of so-called Canada’s north return to nothing but an empty space where their home once stood. Finding themselves suddenly homeless, they have no choice but to assimilate into settler-colonial society in a mining town that has encroached on their freedom.
An intergenerational coming-of-age novel, This House Is Not a Home follows K, a Dene man who grew up entirely on the land before being taken to residential school. When he finally returns home, he struggles to connect with his family: his younger brother whom he has never met, his mother because he has lost his language, and an absent father whose disappearance he is too afraid to question.
The third book from acclaimed Dene, Cree and Metis writer Katà, This House Is Not a Home is a fictional story based on true events. Visceral and embodied, heartbreaking and spirited, this book presents a clear trajectory of how settlers dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their land and how Indigenous communities, with dignity and resilience, continue to live and honour their culture, values, inherent knowledge systems, and Indigenous rights towards re-establishing sovereignty. Fierce and unflinching, this story is a call for land back.
This first critical history of a street gang in a Canadian city is a result of a four-year collaboration between a university professor (Ted Rutland) and the leader of les Bélangers (Maxime Aurélien). Out to Defend Ourselves tells the story of Montreal’s first Haitian street gang, les Bélangers. It traces how the gang emerged from a group of Haitian friends, the children of migrants from Haiti in the 1970s. It documents the forms of racial violence they experienced and their battles against them. It also documents the everyday lives of the gang members, the petty crime some members engaged in to make ends meet, and how the police actions against the gang changed its nature and function – making it, finally, a more criminally oriented and violent formation. It is a story about a gang, but it is also a story of young Haitians making their lives in 1970s and 80s Montreal and a story about Montreal in a period of great change.
Scoundrels and Shirkers examines the deep relationship between capitalism and poverty in England since the 12th century. It exposes the dynamics of capitalism, from its origins in the long transition from feudalism to its current crisis under neoliberal capitalism, in producing poverty.
The book, unique in the historical breadth of its focus, shows conclusively that poverty is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. In the search for profits and control of society’s economic surplus, capitalism expands, adapts and innovates, producing not only commodities and wealth but also, and necessarily, poverty.
With the partial but important exception of the 1945–51 period, and to a lesser extent the time between 1906 and 1914, there has never been a serious attempt to solve poverty. Efforts have always been to manage and control the poor to prevent them from starving or rebelling; to punish and blame them for being poor; and to force them into poverty-level jobs. Any real solution would require the logic of capitalism to be deeply disrupted. While possible in theory, such a change will require massive social movements.
You can’t win a race you’re kept from running.
Set amid the cubicles and courtyards of Toronto City Hall, Kimia Eslah’s third novel centres on three women of colour navigating labyrinths at work, in love and in life. Faiza Hosseini is a cutthroat executive with a proven record — she knows she’s enough, but can she circumvent the old boys’ club? Sameera Jahani is passionate about equity but her girlfriend isn’t — can she bridge this gap, or has she had enough? Goldie Sheer has triumphantly landed her first job, but unexpected work drama makes her question — is she really enough? With grace and insight, Eslah bares three women’s experiences of structural discrimination, from microagressions to corruption.
Enough is an empathetic missive to anyone working on equity, diversity and inclusion — in cubicles, courtyards and countless other spaces.
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 emergence of the Herongate Tenant Coalition to fight the evictions and confront the landlord-developer. This case study is meticulously documented through political activist ethnography, making this book a brilliant example of ethical engagement and methodological integrity.
Decolonizing Sport tells the stories of sport colonizing Indigenous Peoples and of Indigenous Peoples using sport to decolonize. Spanning several lands — Turtle Island, the US, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Kenya — the authors demonstrate the two sharp edges of sport in the history of colonialism. Colonizers used sport, their own and Indigenous recreational activities they appropriated, as part of the process of dispossession of land and culture. Indigenous mascots and team names, hockey at residential schools, lacrosse and many other examples show the subjugating force of sport. Yet, Indigenous Peoples used sport, playing their own games and those of the colonizers, including hockey, horse racing and fishing, and subverting colonial sport rules as liberation from colonialism. This collection stands apart from recent publications in the area of sport with its focus on Indigenous Peoples, sport and decolonization, as well as in imagining a new way forward.
Our blood has stories to tell, and we are told stories about blood. Globally, blood is a story that is built — whose blood counts, whose blood spills and whose blood is of use. The history of blood donation practices in Canada speaks to the larger blood story of anti-Black racism, evident since the country’s founding. Through storytelling, theorizing and discourse analysis, Got Blood to Give examines how anti-Black homophobic nation-building policies became enshrined in blood donation systems.
OmiSoore H. Dryden, a Black queer femme academic and the foremost scholar on Canadian blood donation practices, examines contaminated blood crises in the 1980s and 1990s, Canadian Red Cross Society, and Canadian Blood Services. She contextualizes contemporary homonationalisms, medical anti-Black racism, homophobia and transphobia in blood-related practices, connecting blood stories with health disparities affecting Black and Black queer populations.
From a BlaQueer disasporic theoretical lens, this book uses narrative as method to show how healthcare systems continue to propagate anti-Blackness.
Clashes over free speech rights and wrongs haunt public debates about the state of democracy, freedom and the future. While freedom of speech is recognized as foundational to democratic society, its meaning is persistently misunderstood and distorted. Prominent commentators have built massive platforms around claims that their right to free speech is being undermined. Critics of free speech correctly see these claims as a veil for misogyny, white-supremacy, colonialism and transphobia, concluding it is a political weapon to conserve entrenched power arrangements. But is this all there is to say?
Rethinking Free Speech will change the way you think about the politics of speech and its relationship to the future of freedom and democracy in the age of social media. Political theorist Peter Ives offers a new way of thinking about the essential and increasingly contentious debates around the politics of speech. Drawing on political philosophy, including the classic arguments of JS Mill, and everyday examples, Ives takes the reader on a journey through the hotspots of today’s raging speech wars. In its bold and careful insights on the combative politics of language, Rethinking Free Speech provides a map for critically grasping these battles as they erupt in university classrooms, debates around the meaning of antisemitism, the “cancelling” of racist comedians and the proliferation of hate speech on social media. This is an original and essential guide to the perils and possibilities of communication for democracy and justice.Clashes over free speech rights and wrongs haunt public debates about the state of democracy, freedom and the future. While freedom of speech is recognized as foundational to democratic society, its meaning is persistently misunderstood and distorted. Prominent commentators have built massive platforms around claims that their right to free speech is being undermined. Critics of free speech correctly see these claims as a veil for misogyny, white-supremacy, colonialism and transphobia, concluding that it is a political weapon to conserve entrenched power arrangements.
Rethinking Free Speech will change the way you think about the politics of speech in the age of social media. Peter Ives offers a new way of thinking about the essential and increasingly contentious debates around the politics of speech. Drawing on political philosophy and everyday examples, Ives takes the reader on a journey through the hotspots of today's raging speech wars. This book provides a map for critically grasping these battles as they erupt in university classrooms, debates around the meaning of antisemitism, the "cancelling" of racist comedians and the proliferation of hate speech on social media. This is an original and essential guide to the perils and possibilities of communication for democracy and justice.
This book is a case-study analysis of the public housing district of Lawrence Heights in North York, Toronto, a neighbourhood undergoing the largest revitalization in Canada. The book presents a chronological narrative of change and upheaval in Lawrence Heights, beginning with its origins after World War Two as a modernist style “city on a hill” that was intended to help remedy Toronto’s affordable housing shortage and simultaneously transform its systemically disadvantaged tenant base into idealized members of the middle class. As the community became progressively more racialized and oppressed in the late twentieth century, the reputation of Lawrence Heights and its occupants became steadily more denigrated by the forces of stigmatization, governmental neglect and police brutality. In this milieu, local political officials and private developer partners have striven to tear Lawrence Heights down and rebuild it into a socially mixed neighbourhood. This plan threatens the existing social fabric of a proud and politically active community.
For Land and Culture offers the first comprehensive account of a long forgotten and neglected grassroots movement. In the wake of Iran’s 1979 revolution, Turkmen peasants collectively occupied their ancestral lands, which had been seized through colonial modernization, land registry and land reform under the Pahlavi monarchy. The book chronicles this movement using theoretical and historical engagement with the modern councils and offers a detailed account of the “land question” in Iran’s colonial modernization. The book describes the systematic dispossession of Turkmen communities from some of the most fertile areas in Iran. Vahabzadeh shows how Turkmen land occupation in 1979 led to a sophisticated council system that offered a practical politics of semi-autonomous, democratic self-governance in the face of hostile militias and other forces of the nascent authoritarian Islamic Republic. With social justice as one of its unshakable pillars, the Turkmen council movement took back land as commons and abolished capitalist private ownership of land, providing an alternative to top-down politics until it was defeated by the state through a combination of military terror and assimilation. Although short lived, the radically democratic movement connected with global struggles of Indigenous Peoples and autonomous movements that had broken away from patriarchal state forms and capitalist domination.
