Society & Social Sciences Books

In April 2014, after a 911 call by Jessie, the 29 year-old married mother of an 18-month-old daughter is sent to an isolation room of the Psychiatric Unit of Richmond Hospital. She is engaging in the paranoia delusion that her husband is a murderer, and...

Zygmunt Bauman was both an outsider of Western modernity and one of its foremost interpreters. He was an exemplary figure in twentieth-century intellectual work on exile who experienced both Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism.The first work to draw...

Kim Thúy is a literary phenomenon, rising in her first decade of writing to a level of international recognition that few Québécois writers ever attain. The Vietnamese-born author's novels have garnered literary prize recognition and have been translated...

A silent clapboard church on a barren Arctic landscape is more than just a place of worship: it is a symbol that can evoke fraught reactions to the history of Christian colonization. In the Inuit homeland of Northern Labrador, however, that church is...

While almost all universal health coverage in Canada is provided under the Canada Health Act, there is Medicare coverage that is provided outside of the act. This is the first book to explain the nature of these boundary health services, why they exist,...

The language of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization that was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity. Although widely considered an endangered language,...

Studies of the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union ("Brexit") have largely focused on the role of politicians and political parties, on the one hand, and the characteristics of Leave and Remain voters on the other. The Failure of Remain...

Sanctions are back with a vengeance with new objectives, measures, challenges, and opportunities. Shaping the thinking of generations of scholars, Canadian visionary Margaret Doxey anticipated and analyzed these issues, making now the time to rediscover...

To this day, women globally are subjected to forms of control over their bodies, and their ability to exercise their reproductive rights in particular is still constrained. Amid a rise of challenges to the advancement of women's rights, including the...

What motivates states to protect populations threatened by mass atrocities beyond their own borders? Most often, states and their representatives appeal to the principle of common humanity, acknowledging a conscience-shocking quality that demands a moral...

Canada is often considered a multicultural mosaic, welcoming to immigrants and encouraging of cultural diversity. Yet this reputation masks a more complex history. In this groundbreaking study of the pre-history of Canadian multiculturalism, Daniel...

Debates about Islam and Muslim societies have intensified in the last four decades, triggered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and, later, by the events of 9/11. Too often present in these debates are wrongheaded assumptions about the attachment of...

Legal precarity, mobility, and the criminalization of migrants complicate the study of forced migration and exile. Traditional methodologies can obscure both the agency of displaced people and hierarchies of power between researchers and research...

The women's movement is a central, complex, and evolving socio-political actor in any national context. Vital to advancing gender equity and gendered relations in every contemporary society, the organization and mobilization of women into social...

Media pundits and students of Canadian politics alike have strived to interpret the relevance of the 2021 federal election, held in the midst of a global pandemic and reinforcing the existing parliamentary balance of power.This timely volume explains the...

The nation-state is a double sleight of hand, naturalizing both the nation and the state encompassing it. No such naturalization is possible in multinational states. To explain why these countries experience political crises that bring their very...

Blacks in Canada journeys from the introduction of slavery in 1628 to the first wave of Caribbean immigration in the 1950s and 1960s. Heralded in the Literary Review of Canada as one of the one hundred most important Canadian books, this enduring work by...

Mental illness stigma is rooted in a perceived lack of agency, but stigma itself undermines agency. While most philosophical accounts of the matter are concerned with the question of how much agency a person with mental illness has, this book asks how we...

For more than a century, posters, advertisements, and brochures have characterized Canada as a desirable tourist destination offering spectacular scenery, wild animals, outdoor recreation, and state-of-the-art accommodations. However, these explicitly...

Turkey now hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, more than 3.6 million of the 12.7 million displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Many of them are subject to an unpredictable temporary protection, forcing them to live under vulnerable and...

Quebec's most recent attempts to assert its distinctiveness within Canada have relied on unilateral constitutional means to strengthen its French and secular character, suggesting that an important change of political culture has taken place in Quebec...

The personal journals examined in Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent are not the witty, erudite, and gracefully written exercises that have drawn the attention of most biographers and literary scholars. Prosaic, ungrammatical, and poorly spelled, the...

Constitutional politics is exceptionally intense and unpredictable. It involves negotiations over the very nature of the state and the implications of self- determination. Multinational democracies face pressing challenges to the existing order because...

Substate nationalism is often studied as a question of political identity and cultural recognition. The same applies to the study of multinational federalism - it is mainly conceived as a tool for the accommodation of minority cultures and identities...

One of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) made reflection on culture a fundamental part of his academic work. He published a substantial number of papers...

Why and how does secession happen? How do different levels of government interact with each other? Why do some multilevel governments work better than others? What makes political extremism so virulent in today's society? These are some of the most...

Exceptionalist ideas have long influenced British foreign policy. As Britain begins to confront the challenges of a post-Brexit era in an increasingly unstable world, a re-examination of the nature and causes of this exceptionalist bent is in order...

Religion is fundamental to contemporary Puerto Rican society. From the cosmology of the Indigenous Taíno, to the wide range of Judeo-Christian churches and sects, to the practitioners of spiritism, Afro-Caribbean religions, and witchcraft, religious...

Federal countries face innumerable challenges including public health crises, economic uncertainty, and widespread public distrust in governing institutions. They are also home to 40 per cent of the world's population.Rethinking Decentralization explores...

While 9/11 was understood at the time as a world-changing event in international relations, its uneven aftermath and the long-term effects for North America could not have been predicted.Twenty years later, The Legacy of 9/11 explores the political,...

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, gender scholars and activists have asked whether a reconcilliation between Zionism and feminism is possible in the current political landscape. Fictions of Gender explores the contemporary controversies surrounding...

In the decades following the Second World War, women from all walks of life became increasingly frustrated by the world around them. Drawing on long-standing political traditions, these women bound together to revolutionize social norms and contest...

Premiering at Sundance in 2014, Desiree Akhavan's acclaimed debut feature, Appropriate Behavior, introduced the indie film world to the deadpan, irreverent wit that had already won over fans of her trailblazing LGBTQ web series The Slope.The first volume...

Not long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funnelling toward Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on...

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has undergone wide-ranging changes since 2006, when it was given a new maritime warning mission and the NORAD Agreement was signed in perpetuity.Andrea Charron and James Fergusson trace NORAD's recent...

In August 2016 Colten Boushie, a twenty-two-year-old Cree man from Red Pheasant First Nation, was fatally shot on a Saskatchewan farm by white farmer Gerald Stanley. In a trial that bitterly divided Canadians, Stanley was acquitted of both murder and...

Florence Nightingale is known as a hospital reformer, a social reformer, and the founder of professional nursing; few realize that she worked closely with doctors on these issues. As Nightingale's first supporters and colleagues, doctors contributed to...

Struggles for equality happen in all corners of the world. While social and economic justice movements are specific to their different national contexts, identities, and forms of oppression, collaboration and coalition building are required if we are to...

Latin America provides a compelling case for the study of migration policies and laws, with several factors - including both internal and interregional migration and refugee flows, the region's progressive approach to the management of human mobility,...

Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health...

From the Cambridge Analytica scandal to overloaded internet voting servers to faulty voting machines, the growing relationship between democracy and technology has brought to light the challenges associated with integrating new digital tools into the...

By the late nineteenth century, Canadian women had begun forging careers as professional actresses, appearing not just in Canada, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. They played an integral role in theatrical networks and...

While countries throughout the world rely on immigrants to support their populations and economies, access to the military is limited, denied to those who have not yet acquired citizenship.Precluding immigrants from serving in their host country's armed...

In recent decades an increasing share of Canada's agricultural workforce has been made up of temporary foreign workers from the Global South. These labourers work difficult and dangerous jobs with limited legal protections and are effectively barred from...

In so-called post-factual societies, where public debates are undermined by their false or misleading premises, philosophers who have reflected on diversity and pluralism can offer a critical and clarifying perspective through which to evaluate the...

In late 2017 and early 2018, South Africa and Zimbabwe both experienced rapid and unexpected political transitions. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, the only leader the country had ever known, was replaced in a "soft coup" by his erstwhile vice-president,...

Yards are not quite wild, yet rarely tamed. Across diverse residential landscapes in North America and beyond, yards are regulated by the state and markets, defined by imaginary property lines on maps, and sometimes central to privilege and exclusion.As...

Around the world and across a range of contexts, homelessness among older people is on the rise. In spite of growing media attention and new academic research on the issue, older people often remain unrecognized as a subpopulation in public policy,...