Fernwood Publishing 2023 Rights Catalogue - CIBF

halifax office 2970 Oxford Street Halifax, NS, B2L 2W4 phone (902) 857-1388 info@fernpub.ca rights@fernpub.ca

manitoba office 748 Broadway Avenue Winnipeg, MB, R3G 0X3 phone (204) 474-2958

Fernwood Publishing respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we are living and working is the Traditional Territory of many Nations. Our Nova Scotia office is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People, and our Manitoba office is located on the Treaty Territories and ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, Denesuline and Nehethowuk Nations. We acknowledge them as the past, present, and future caretakers of this land.

CRITICAL

BOOKS

FOR CRITICAL THINKERS 2 023 RIGHTS CATALOGUE

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Province of Manitoba, the Province of Nova Scotia and the Canada Council for the Arts.

HAVE A LOOK INSIDE...

Making Sense of Society 2 Power and Possibility edited by Alex Khasnabish

Insurgent Love 3 Abolition and Domestic Homicide by Ardath Whynacht

Essential Work, Disposable Workers 4 Migration, Capitalism and Class by Mostafa Henaway

Scoundrels and Shirkers 5 Capitalism and Poverty in Britain by Jim Silver

Country of Poxes 6 Three Germs and the Taking of Territory by Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay

Worlds at Stake 7 Climate Politics, Ideology, and Justice by Aaron Saad

Growing and Eating Sustainably 8 Agroecology in Action by Dana James and Evan Bowness

The Fair Trade Handbook 9 Building a Better World, Together edited by Gavin Fridell, Zack Gross and Sean McHugh

Losing Me, While Losing You 10 Caregivers Share Their Experiences of Supporting Friends and Family with Dementia by Jeanette Auger, Diane, Tedford-Litle and Brenda Wallace-Allen

Living in Indigenous Sovereignty 11 by Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara

Finding Our Niche 12 Toward A Restorative Human Ecology by Philip A. Loring

Take Back The Fight 13 Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age by Nora Loreto

Ideology Over Economics 14 P3s in an Age of Austerity by John Loxley

Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left 15 Recasting Leftist Imagination edited by Robert Latham, A. T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen and Niko Block

More Powerful Together 16 Conversations With Climate Activists and Indigenous Land Defenders by Jen Gobby

Restless Ideas 17 Contemporary Social Theory in an Anxious Age by Tony Simmons

NOlympians

Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond by Jules Boykoff

18

Frontline Farmers 19

How the National Farmers Union Resists Agribusiness and Creates Our New Food Future edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais

HAVE A LOOK INSIDE...

Reconciliation in Practice 20 A Cross-Cultural Perspective edited by Ranjan Datta

Sister Seen, Sister Heard 21 by Kimia Eslah

The Daughter Who Walked Away 21 by Kimia Eslah

Ruby Red Skies 22 by Taslim Burkowicz

The Desirable Sister 22 by Taslim Burkowicz

Chocolate Cherry Chai 22 by Taslim Burkowicz

Tiny Engines of Abundance 24 A History of Peasant Productivity and Repression by Jim Handy

COVID-19 and the Future of Capitalism 25 Postcapitalist Horizons Beyond Neo-Liberalism by Efe Can Gürcan, Ömer Ersin Kahraman and Selen Yanmaz

Extractivisms 25 Politics, Economy and Ecolog5 by Eduardo Gudynas

The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism 26 Lessons From Bolivia by Ben M. McKay

Development in Latin America 26 Toward a New Future by Maristella Svampa

Politics Rules 27 Power, Globalization and Development by Adam Sneyd

The Political Economy of Agribusiness 23 A Critical Development Perspective by Maria Luisa Mendonça

Global Fishers 24

The Politics of Transnational Movements by Elyse Noble Mills

Critical Development Studies 28 An Introduction by Henry Veltmeyer and Raúl Delgado Wise

Read Excerpt

social science / Anthropolgy / Cultural & Social social science / Sociology / Cultural Theory

Making Sense of Society Power and Possibility

edited by Alex Khasnabish

A significant book, aiming to achieve an interdisciplinary examination of society. I would have assumed this to be overly ambitious, if not impossible. Reading the manuscript has convinced me otherwise. The author has produced an impressive contribution to social science textbook writing, one quite beyond anything else I have seen.

—dr. michael clow, St. Thomas University

A fresh and radical approach to introducing social thought to undergraduate social science students that reflects the excitement and verve of a field in transition.

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 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, the 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.

Becoming Human • Doing Social Research • Making Society • Who Are “We”?: Identity and Intersections • Living Together: Family, Kinship and Social Bonds • Making Meaning, Making Sense: Communication and Belief • Making a Living: Economies and Ecologies • Power and Order: Inequality, Injustice and Paths Beyond

alex khasnabish is a writer, researcher and teacher committed to collective liberation living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. He is a professor in sociology and anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His research focuses on radical imagination, radical politics, social justice and social movements.

social theory; critical social science; research practice; social movements; climate justice; social reproduction; intersectionality; social justice

Domestic Homicide and Abolition? • Butcher• Settler Colonialism and Intimate Terrorism • Portapique • Occupation — Racial Capitalism and the Familicidal Heart • Desmond • Insurgent Love — Transformative Justice for Domestic Homicide

Insurgent Love

Abolition and Domestic Homicide

by Ardath Whynacht

This book is of profound importance, arguing for an alternate path to eradicating domestic homicide and violence and offering an opportunity to start engaging in these conversations.

—marlihan lopez, co-vice-president for la Fédération des femmes du Québec and program and outreach co-ordinator at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute

What is most significant about this book is the author’s engagement with intimate violence and abolition. Establishing links between state and intimate violence is an important framework to engage these kinds of brutalizing hardships, and without drawing on ongoing carceral legacies and colonial logics.

—vicki chartrand, associate professor and director of Centre for Justice Exchange

When loved ones transgress into violence, how do we seek justice and safety outside of policing and prisons?

Domestic homicide involves violence at the most intimate level — the partner or family relationship. The most common strategy for addressing this kind of transgression relies on policing and prisons. But through examining commonly accepted typologies of 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. This book illustrates that the origins of both the carceral state and toxic masculinity are situated in settler colonialism and racial capitalism. 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.

ardath whynacht is an activist and writer who works for and with survivors of state and family violence. She teaches sociology at Mount Allison University and lives on unceded Mi’kmaw territory.

colonialism; incarceration; residential school system; abolition; IRS; restorative justice; violence; inter-generational trauma; crime and punishment; racism

Read Excerpt

political science / Public Policy / Immigration social science / Emigration & Immigration law / Emigration & Immigration key content highlights

Neoliberal Migration • Financialization of Migration • The Making of Migration • Managing Migration & Class • Precarious Work for Precarious Workers • Amazon Economy • The City as a Sweatshop • New Forms of Organizing • Workers Centres • Fight for the Working Class • Striking for Status • Solidarity Summer & Great Migrations

Essential Work, Disposable Workers

Migration, Capitalism and Class

by Mostafa Henaway foreword by Harsha Walia

With massive expansion of precarious work under neoliberalism, migrant workers are challenging conditions of their hyperexploitation through struggles for worker rights and justice.

In recent years, waves of migration from the Middle East, Latin America and Africa to Europe and North America have been met with a corresponding rise in anti-immigrant, far-right populism in host countries, placing the question of migration at the forefront of politics and social movements. In this sweeping account, Henaway seeks to understand these patterns through contextualizing global migration within a history of global capitalism, class formation and the financialization of migration. As globalization intensifies, workers everywhere are forced to compete for wages — not through foreign investment and outsourcing, but through an increasingly mobile working class. Henaway rejects the dominant responses of restricting or “managing” migration through temporary worker programs, proposing that stopping a race to the bottom for all working people involves building solidarity with migrant worker struggles for decent work and justice.

Through examining the organizing strategies of migrant workers at giants like Amazon and Walmart as well as discount retailers like Dollarama and Sports Direct, the immense power and agency of precarious workers in global companies like Uber or Airbnb, the successful resistance of taxi drivers and fast food workers around the world, and the contemporary mass labour movement organized by new unions and workers’ centres, Henaway shows how migrant demands and strategies can help shape radical working-class politics.

mostafa henaway, a Canadian-born Egyptian, is a long-time community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, where he has been organizing for justice for immigrant/migrant workers for over two decades. He is also a researcher and phd candidate at Concordia University.

migration; labour; activism; neoliberalism; racial capitalism; british; visa; palestine; afghanistan; iraq, africa; guinea; nafta; philippines; deportation; financialization; yes we can!; border security

9781773635996 • Forthcoming Spring 2023 Paperback • 6 x 9" • 304 pages Rights Available: World subject categories political science / Political Economy history / Social History key content highlights

Feudalism to Neo-liberal Capitalism • Christianity and Enclosure • The Detritus of Crumbling Feudalism • Elizabethan Poor Law •  The New Poor Law and Horrific Forms of Poverty • Great Unrest: 1880-1914 •  Mass Unemployment and Poverty: 1920s-30s •  Mid-Century Retrenchment •  Thatcherism • Thatcherism in Redux •  Solving Perpetual Poverty

Scoundrels and Shirkers

Capitalism and Poverty in Britain

by Jim Silver

This book integrates a sophisticated analysis of poverty with a full historical account of capitalism.

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 Labour governments, 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 and the political will to confront capitalist resistance.

jim silver is a professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg who has written extensively on poverty and related issues, including public housing and low-income rental housing, community development and education, adult education and Indigenous street gangs. He is a founding member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives–Manitoba and played a key role in the establishment of Merchants Corner, a University of Winnipeg off-campus site in Winnipeg’s low-income and racialized North End.

undeserving poor; deserving poor; poor; precarious work; industrial revolution

Country of Poxes

Three Germs and the Taking of Territory by Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay

Mukhopadhyay’s voice has the insight of a health worker woven with the beauty of a poet, tying the personal and historical into a riveting work.

christa couture,

author of How to Lose Everything

An important contribution to our understanding that disease is as political as it is biological. In a highly accessible way, Dr. Mukhopadhyay threads three of our most dreaded diseases into the story of Canada’s development as a settler-colonial state.

— james daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains Read Excerpt

This story of land theft through the course of three diseases exposes how colonialism facilitates illness and profits from it.

Country of Poxes is the story of land theft in North America through three infectious diseases — syphilis, smallpox and tuberculosis — and reveals how medical care, widely considered a magnanimous cornerstone of the Canadian state, developed in lockstep with colonial control over Indigenous land and life. The 500-year-old debate over the origins of syphilis reflects colonial judgements of morality and sexuality that became formally entwined in medicine. Smallpox is notoriously linked with the project of land theft, as colonizers destroyed Indigenous land, economies and life in the name of disease eradication. And tuberculosis, considered the “Indian disease,” aroused intense fear of contagion that launched separate systems of care for Indigenous Peoples in a de facto medical apartheid, while white settlers retreated to be cured. This immersive and deeply reflective book provides riveting insights into the biological and social relationships of disease and empire.

baijayanta mukhopadhyay is a Bengali settler who has been living in Tio’tia:ke for over two decades. A family doctor who serves primarily in Eeyou Istchee, Baijayanta also works in Treaty 3 and 9 territories, as well as with undocumented migrants, unhoused people and queer/trans youth in the city. He is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural/low-resource practice.

smallpox; infectious disease; medicine; healthcare; indigenous health; empire; land theft; epidemics; history; covid-19; TB

Worlds at Stake Climate Politics, Ideology, and Justice

by Aaron Saad

Saad does a good job of covering the essentials in an environmental book — which is Indigenous and anti-colonial perspectives, which have been lacking in environmental books for too long. It’s great to have succinct explanations about denialism and geoengineering.

justin podur , author of Siegebreakers

Provides a very useful survey of how a range of ideologies respond to climate change in a political sense, considered from a climate justice perspective. I haven’t encountered a book like it before.”

—david camfield, author of Future on Fire and We Can Do Better

Our response to the climate crisis is powerfully shaped by our ideas about how the world works and how it ought to.

The intensifying climate crisis has put the world on high alert. For those living in the high-consuming, high-polluting swaths of the world, it is clear that something about our society, our politics, our economy — our very way of life — must change. But the nature of those necessary changes is a source of seemingly intractable dispute. Our ideologies — the competing ways we believe the world should be — powerfully affect how we see the problem of climate change and what we think ought to be done about it. In this highly original and accessible book, Saad presents an erudite survey of political perspectives and ethical arguments about how we should respond to the climate crisis. By arranging these approaches into two broad categories of “system preserving” and “system changing” frameworks, Saad takes the reader on a journey through competing ideas about how we can address our collective responsibility to create a livable global future.

aaron saad is a writer and professor focusing on the politics of climate justice and the intersections of ideology and climate politics. He teaches at Humber College in Toronto and is a columnist for Ricochet Media. He holds a phd in environmental studies from York University.

social

Read Excerpt

Introducing Agroecology and Food Systems Transitions • The Industrial Food System: Contradictions and Crises • Where Does Agroecological Food Come From? • Creating and Deepening Grower-Eater Relations • Envisioning the Future of Agroecological Food Systems

Growing and Eating Sustainably Agroecology in

Action

by Dana James and Evan Bowness foreword by Hannah Wittman

This book presents a creative, refreshing delivery representing the core of the agroecological ethos that puts the voices of the people practicing agroecology, daily, as front and center. It's a creative and important contribution to anyone doing education and implementing agroecology as a transformative approach.

—v. ernesto méndez, Professor of Agroecology and Environmental Studies, University of Vermont

An engaging blend of the practical and the political... This book has something for everybody!

—katie ward, President of the National Farmers Union

Through photostories, explore how agroecology is practiced by Brazilian farmers and community organizers who are leading the way in creating sustainable and just food systems.

The industrial food system, from production to consumption and waste, is a major contributor to environmental, social and economic problems. A few powerful multinational corporations have consolidated control of agricultural markets and wealth while many farmers struggle to make a living and millions of people go hungry every day. Consumer access to healthy and culturally appropriate food remains largely an option for only those who can afford it.

Responding to these destructive practices, global agrarian movements are calling for a transition to agroecology. Growing and Eating Sustainably shines light on this process by showcasing the experiences of growers and eaters in southern Brazil, a country where agrarian movements have long been at the forefront of pushing for more sustainable and just food systems. Through stories and photographs of people, landscapes, farms and farming practices, and urban spaces, this book communicates how to advance systems-level agroecological transitions by linking rural and urban areas and connecting diverse agroecological experiences.

dana james is a phd candidate, Vanier Scholar, and Public Scholar in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral research explores agroecological farming and participation in agrarian social movements in Brazil.

evan bowness is an environmental sociologist and urban political ecologist, ubc Public Scholar and phd candidate at the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

hannah wittman is a professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British

agroecology; food sovereignty; food justice; organic agriculture

Read Excerpt

social science / Agriculture & Food political science / Agriculture & Food Policy political science / International Relations /  Trade & Tariffs

The Fair Trade Handbook

Building a Better World, Together

edited by Gavin Fridell, Zack Gross

and Sean

McHugh

The Fair Trade Handbook is an essential guide on the path that leads to a more sustainable and inclusive world. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the ongoing impact of this movement on business-as-usual!

—adam sneyd, University of Guelph

This book is comprehensive and highly instructive, covering a broad range of topics, including climate justice, the challenges of small producers, fair trade fashion, the economics of free and fair trade, teaching fair trade, and a great deal more….This is an essential reference guide to have at your school or educational setting.

—ian shanahan,

Green Teacher

This handbook brings together leading fair traders, activists, advocates and commentators in Canada and internationally, reflecting on the shortfalls of conventional practices and how we can change our policies, practices and behaviours.

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.

Colonialism: How Unfair Trade Changed the World • Trade is Not Gender Neutral • Climate Justice • The Life and Death of Álvaro Vargas Fonseca • Putting Southern Farmers First • Small Producers, Northern NGOs and Fair Trade • The Roots of Fair Trade and SPP • Changing Canadian Mindsets to Choose Fairtrade • Footprints for Change • How Fair Trade Powers the Sugar Revolution • Moving the Fashion Industry Forward • Connecting Northern Consumers with Southern Producers • Where Fair Trade Fits • Why the Fair Trade Movement Ought to Shape the Business and Human Rights Agenda • Uneven Outcomes • COVID, Trade and Corporate Power • Can Trade Policy be Fair? • Education and Advocacy for Social Change • Fair Trade 2030

Includes A Lively Bean that Brightens Lives: A Graphic Story by Bill Barrett and Curt Shoultz

gavin fridell is the Canada Research Chair in International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University.

zack gross has been a Prairie-based international development activist for more than fifty years. He is a member of the Board of Fairtrade Canada and Advisory Board of the Canadian Fair Trade Network.

sean mchugh is the founder and executive director of the Canadian Fair Trade Network (cftn) and represents Canada on the International Fair Trade Towns Committee.

solidarity; justice; charity; coffee; sugar; human rights; Southern farmers

Read Excerpt

Losing Me, While Losing You Caregivers Share Their Experiences of Supporting Friends and Family with Dementia

by Jeanette Auger, Diane, Tedford-Litle and Brenda Wallace-Allen foreword by Janice Keefe

This book provides narrative accounts based on interviews with caregivers of people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Losing Me, While Losing You is a long-needed resource to those providing care for people living with dementia — and for those providing care to the caregivers. In this book, caregivers speak from their own experiences of caring for loved ones with dementia; they cover when they first noticed behavioural changes, what they did and how their roles changed when they received the diagnosis, how the experiences changed their perceptions of themselves, especially in cases where important ones no longer recognized them or their, often long-standing, relationships. The caregivers also talked about what resources, if any, were available to support them through the caregiving journey and what recommendations they would make to government policymakers and to others in similar situations. This book is unique in that it documents the personal lived experience of loss which family, friends and caregivers go through as their roles, expectations and images of self are changed throughout the caregiving process.

jeanette auger is a professor emeritus and adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at Acadia University. diane tedford-litle is a women’s activist and former palliative care volunteer with the Victorian Order of Nurses in Nova Scotia. She has volunteered with a number of organizations including the Seniors Network, the Hospice Consultation Committee and the Gerontology Association of Nova Scotia. brenda wallace-allen is an instructor at Nova Scotia Community College.

Living in Indigenous Sovereignty

by Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara with Gladys Rowe

A powerful decolonial reflection and call to action for settler peoples to learn how to work in solidarity with Indigenous peoples in ways that are decolonizing not recolonizing.

—paulette regan, author and Senior Researcher/Lead Writer of “Reconciliation,” Volume 6 of the trc Final Report

This is the most comprehensive book on anti-colonial practice focused on non-Indigenous peoples. It draws on leading scholars and advocates and incorporates a breadth of concepts that create a solid foundation for creating change. Incorporating these ideas and practices will prepare non-Indigenous and Indigenous people for our work and parallel journey ahead.

—michael anthony hart, Vice Provost (Indigenous Engagement), Professor, Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary, and author of Seeking Mino-Pimatisiwin and Wicihitowin

This book offers inspiration and guidance for non-Indigenous peoples who wish to live honourably in relationship with Indigenous Peoples, laws and lands. A much-needed book in our time.

In the last decade, the relationship between settler Canadians and Indigenous Peoples has been highlighted by various 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? This book lifts up the wisdom of Indigenous scholars, activists and knowledge keepers who speak pointedly to what they are asking of non-Indigenous people: to 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.

elizabeth (liz) carlson-manathara’s Swedish, Sámi, German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestors settled on lands of the Anishinaabe and Omaha Nations, which were unethically obtained by the us government. She considers herself to be both complicit in and resisting settler colonialism on lands occupied by the Canadian state. Liz’s scholarship is focused on the work of settlers in decolonization through the framework of living in Indigenous sovereignty; she also engages anti-colonial research methodologies and social work practice. She is involved with the Stories of Decolonization film project, and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Laurentian University.

decolonization; anti-colonial; activism; Indigenous sovereignty; settler colonialism; storytelling

Read Excerpt

Finding Our Niche

Toward A Restorative Human Ecology

by Philip A. Loring

The unflinching analysis of our collective predicament is an integral part of a deeply personal and highly engaging narrative of Loring’s quest to reimagine our links with the places we inhabit, relationships with the original stewards of those places, and the inextricable links to all our relations.

—gleb raygorodetsky, award-winning author of The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change

This book guides us in reconciling our damaging settler-colonial histories and tremendous environmental missteps in favor of a more sustainable and just vision for the future.

Imagine a world where humanity was not destined to cause harm to the natural world, where win-win scenarios — people and nature thriving together — are possible. No doubt contemporary western society is steeped in the legacy of white supremacy and colonialism, and as a result, many people have come to believe that humanity is fundamentally flawed, that the story of our species is destined to be nasty, brutish, and short. But what if this narrative could be dismantled?

In Finding Our Niche, Philip A. Loring does just that. Drawing from numerous cases around the world, from cattle ranchers on the Burren in Ireland, to clam gardeners in British Columbia and protectors of an accidental wetland in northwest Mexico, he brings the reader through a difficult journey of reconciliation, a journey that leads to a more optimistic understanding of human nature and the prospects for our future, where people and nature thrive together. Interwoven are Loring’s personal struggles to reconcile his identity as a white settler living and working on stolen Indigenous lands. In a moment when our world is hanging in the balance, Finding Our Niche is a hopeful exploration of humanity’s place in the natural world, focusing on how we can heal and reconcile our unique human ecologies to achieve more sustainable and just societies.

philip a. loring is an anthropologist who holds the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy, and Society at the University of Guelph. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Geomatics.

archeology; biodiversity; climate change; ecological footprint; conservation; environmental contamination; land stewards; reforestation; cultural heritage; tragedy of the commons; white supremacy

Read Excerpt

social science / Feminism & Feminist Theory  social science / Women's Studies

Take Back The Fight

Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age

by Nora Loreto

With Loreto’s solid research, journalism and activism, she manages to investigate what’s happened to the feminist movement and demonstrate what it will take for it to become a major force in Canadian society. This work could not be more urgent.

—judy haiven, Canadian Dimension, May 2021

Charting a tumultuous history of mainstream feminism, Take Back the Fight is a clarion call for a large-scale, intersectional and radical feminist movement in Canada.

—harsha walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism

Examines the state of modern feminism in Canada and argues that feminists must organize to take back feminism from politicians, business leaders and journalists who distort and obscure its power.

White Supremacy and the First Feminist Waves in Canada • Neoliberalism and a Decline in Activism • Social Movement Organizations as a Vehicle for Change • The Importance of Debate

• Finding the Right Debate Location • Ad Hoc Organizing versus Community Resistance • Accountable Leadership • Feminist Opposition to Government • The Digital Era • Making Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Racist Feminism Mainstream

Two decades of neoliberalism have destroyed a structured, pan-regional feminist movement in Canada. Consequently, new generations of feminists have come to age without ever seeing the force that an organized social movement can have in democratic society. They have never benefited from the knowledge, the debates, the mass mobilizations or the leadership that all accompany a social movement and instead organize in decentralized silos. As a result, government and corporate leaders have co-opted feminism to turn it into something that can be bought, sold, or used to attract voters. Campaigns like #BeenRapedNeverReported, #MeToo, the SlutWalks and the Canadian Women’s marches, while important, don’t yet have the organized power to bring the changes that activists seek to make in society. Take Back the Fight urges today’s activists to overcome the challenges that sank the movement decades ago, to stop centering whiteness as the quintessential woman’s experience, and to find ways to rebuild the communities that have been obliterated by neoliberal economic policies.

nora loreto is a writer and activist from Quebec City. She is the author of Spin Doctors and From Demonized to Organized: Building the New Union Movement. Nora is the editor of the Canadian Association of Labour Media and is an opinion columnist whose writing appears regularly in many publications. She co-hosts the popular podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics with Sandy Hudson.

national action committee; hashtag feminism; social media; hetero-patriarchy; SlutWalk; co-optation

Read Excerpt

P3 Basics • Ideology Trumping Economic Reality: P3s after the Global Financial Crisis • Asking the Right Questions: A Guide for Municipalities Considering P3s • Wrong Turn: Is a P3 the Best Way to Expand Edmonton’s LRT? • Redacted to Nothing: The Public-Private Partnerships Transparency and Accountability Act, Manitoba • Growth versus Social Responsibility: Union Pension Funds and P3s in Canada • A New Frontier: P3s and First Nations

• There Is No Free Lunch: P3s in Developing Countries • All the Same Problems and More: Are P3s the Answer to Africa’s Infrastructure Needs? • Carillion: The Collapse of a P3 Giant • Ideology Is Trumping Economic Reality: The Future of P3s

Ideology Over Economics

P3s in an Age of Austerity

by John Loxley

This book examines the expansion of P3s following the 2008 global financial crisis, when corporations responded to the crisis by lobbying governments for financial assistance and austerity governments responded by expanding financial resources for P3s.

Public private partnerships in which the private sector takes on roles previously carried out by the public sector have been heavily promoted in the provision of infrastructure throughout the world, but especially in the UK, the USA and Canada. For many governments, the rationale for using P3s lies in the state manufactured fiscal crisis. The usual economic arguments underlie government largesse – lower cost, reduced risk and high-quality construction for public projects. In these arguments little has changed.

From his close examination of case studies of P3s in the UK, Canada and developing countries, John Loxley concludes that P3s do not achieve any of these promised goals and argues that the expansion of P3s owes more to ideology than to a rational evaluation of their economic and community building benefits.

john loxley is professor of economics at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has served as an economic advisor to the governments of Tanzania, Uganda, Madagascar, Mozambique and Manitoba, and the incoming government of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, as well as a number of international institutions.

neoliberalism; public private partnership; financial crisis; risk-transfer; CUPE; infrastructure gap; First Nation infrastructure; design-bid-build; global south; fiscal policy; poverty service provision

Read Excerpt

9781773632292 • Spring 2020 Paperback • 6 x 9" • 262 pages Rights Available: World subject categories

political science / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism  political science / Fascism & Totalitarianism political science / Radicalism

Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left

Recasting Leftist Imagination

edited by Robert Latham, A. T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen and Niko Block

What does the future hold for the left? How does the left adapt to, and prepare for, the crises of our time? In moments of crisis it is always important to rethink longstanding assumptions, jettison wishful thinking and dated ideas, and recover wisdom from the past. In so doing, we have the opportunity to plot a new way forward. The authors of this edited collection do just this: putting forward a diversity of approaches and issues to strategize for the work that awaits us in the 2020s, particularly in the struggle against capitalism, climate change and the far right.

Working within five major thematic areas, the contributors examine how to engage working class people in anti-capitalist struggles, undermine reactionary currents of ethno-nationalism while supporting anti-colonial movements, strategically build power inside and outside the state apparatus, demand new forms of resistance to address environmental crises, and effectively promote solidarity and ecological responsibility. This book provides suggestions for working with popular disaffection, taking the rich, fragmented, conflicted history of refusals and defeats as a starting point for next steps in the struggle against capitalism and the far right, rather than as the basis for more conflict or defeatism.

Engaging the Working Class • Organizing the Contending Masses • Augmentation and Organization • Can Studying Workers’ Class Consciousness Help to Raise it? • Psychological Wage and the Trump Phenomenon • “Rising Powers” and Authoritarian Populism • Migration “Crises” and the Left • Navigating Contemporary Struggles • Class-Based Organizing in an Identity-Based World • Experiences on the Socialist Left • What’s Left After the Breakup of the cpgb? • Building Political Infrastructure for the Present • Class Struggle in the Marketplace of Ideas • The Anthropocene and Us • Environmental Contradictions • Andean Intercultural Ecosocialism in Times of Buen-Vivir? • Movement, Image, History: Walter Benjamin and Operational Politics • The Disintegration of the Neoliberal Order and Challenges for the Radical Left • Late Stage Capitalism, Anxiety and Tactical Art Terrorism • Jamming in the Age of General Anxiety • Theses Towards a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism

robert latham teaches in the Politics Department at York University in Toronto. a.t. kingsmith teaches in the Politics Department at York University in Toronto. julian von bargen teaches in the Politics Department at York University in Toronto. niko block is a doctoral student of political science at York University.

Black lives matter; communist party; neoliberalism; eco-socialism; global north; left-wing; Idle No More; Nazism; Indigenous Peoples; MAGA; Occupy movement; xenophobia; working class; #MeToo

Read Excerpt

More Powerful Together Conversations With Climate Activists and Indigenous Land Defenders

by Jen Gobby

As an activist, Jen Gobby has been actively involved with climate justice, anti-pipeline, and Indigenous land defense movements in Canada for many years. As a researcher, she has sat down with folks from these movements and asked them to reflect on their experiences with movement building. Bringing their incredibly poignant insights into dialogue with scholarly and activist literature on transformation, Gobby weaves together a powerful story about how change happens.

In reflecting on what’s working and what’s not working in these movements, taking inventory of the obstacles hindering efforts, and imagining the strategies for building a powerful movement of movements, a common theme emerges: relationships are crucial to building movements strong enough to transform systems. Indigenous scholarship, ecological principles, and activist reflections all converge on the insight that the means and ends of radical transformation is in forging relationships of equality and reciprocity with each other and with the land. It is through this, Gobby argues, that we become more powerful together.

100% of the royalties made from the sales of this book are being donated to Indigenous Climate Action. Visit www.indigenousclimateaction.com for more info.

Confronting Climate Change and Inequality in Canada • Understanding the Crises and Envisioning the Worlds We Want • The Movements’ Theories of Change • Identifying the Barriers to Decolonizing and Decarbonizing Canada • Overcoming Barriers and Strengthening the Movements’Transformative Power • Towards Relational Theories of Change and Relational Practices of Movement Building

jen gobby is an activist-scholar based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). She is founder of the MudGirls Natural Building Collective, organizes with Climate Justice Montreal, completed her phd at McGill, and is now post doctorate fellow at Concordia University.

activist burnout; global climate strike; First Nations; pipelines; decarbonization; doctrine of discovery; Idle No More; land defenders; NGOs

How can social movements help bring about large-scale systems change? This book argues that relationships are crucial to building movements strong enough to transform systems.

Read Excerpt

9781773630953 • Spring 2020 Paperback • 6 x 9" • 592 pages Rights Available: World subject categories social science / Sociology / General  political science / Sociology / Social Theory key content highlights

The Changing Face of Contemporary Theory • Why Do We Theorize? • Theorizing Our Human Systems: Structural Functionalism and Systems Theory • Theorizing Our Conflict Zones: Conflict Theories of Society • Theorizing Our Class Divisions: Neo-Marxist and Post-Marxist Theories of Society • Theorizing Our Administered Lives: Critical Theory, Second and Third Waves• Theorizing Our Social Selves: Symbolic Interactionism and Dramaturgy• Theorizing Our Methodical Lives: Ethnomethodology • Theorizing Our Discursive Lives: Postmodernism and Poststructuralism • Theorizing Our Sexual Selves: Feminist and Queer Theories • Theorizing Our Colonial Histories: Indigenous Knowledge and Social Thought • Theorizing Our Anxious Age: Theorists of Late Modernity • Theorizing Our Shrinking World: Globalization and Its Discontents

Restless Ideas

Contemporary Social Theory in an Anxious Age

by Tony Simmons

This book llustrates how social theory provides us with the skills for more informed observation, analysis and empathic understanding of social behaviour and social interaction.

How do we make sense of the rise of political strongmen like Trump and Erdoğan, or the increase in hate crimes and terrorism? How can we understand Brexit and xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiments and policies? More importantly, what can we do to make it all stop?

Social theory deepens our understanding of the world around us by empowering us to become practical theorists in our own lives. In Restless Ideas, Simmons traces the roots of contemporary social theory back to the works of the early structural functionalists, systems theorists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, and ethnomethodologists, and incorporates contemporary social thinkers theorizing from the margins who are redefining the canon.

Later chapters focus on the current influence of structuration theory, feminist and queer theory, Indigenous theory, third wave critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, and liquid and late modernity theories and globalization theories.

tony simmons teaches sociology at Athabasca University. He is the author of Revitalizing the Classics: What Past Social Theorists Can Teach Us Today and co-author of Reading Organizational Theory: A Critical Approach to the Study of Organizational Behaviour and Structure.

sociology; commodity fetishism; false consciousness; #MeToo; capitalism; globalization; identity politics; Indigenous Knowledge; late modernity; the West; meta narratives; social action; social-Darwinism; systemic violence

Read Excerpt

9781773632766 • Spring 2020

Paperback • 6 x 9" • 196 pages

Rights Available: World subject categories

social science / Media Studies social science / Popular Culture political science / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism key content highlights

Activism and the Games: Facts, Fictions, Histories • LA28, DSA Los Angeles and the NOlympics LA Campaign • NOlympics LA Hits Its Stride: Fighting the Olympic Machine • End Games

NOlympians

Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond

by Jules Boykoff

The need for critical writing about the Olympics has never been more important and no one does it more effectively or incisively than Boykoff. Here he shows us not only the potential harm of the LA 2028 Summer Games but the activists who are bringing this reality to light.

—dave zirin, sports editor for The Nation

Powerful and precisely, Jules Boykoff introduces us to critical voices on both sides of the Pacific who are questioning the value of the capitalist mega-event. These voices are telling us that we no longer need the Olympics. This important book inspires us to listen.

—hiroki ogasawara, Kobe University, Japan

Investigates the intersection of the global rise of anti-Olympics activism and the declining popularity of hosting of the Games.

The Olympics were once buoyed by myths of luminous prosperity and upticks in tourism and jobs, but in recent years these assurances have been debunked. Now more than ever, it’s clear that the Olympics have transmogrified into a political-economic juggernaut that arrives with displacement, expanded policing, and anti-democratic backroom deals.

Jules Boykoff – a former professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic soccer team – zooms in on Los Angeles, where the Democratic Socialists of America have launched the NOlympics LA campaign ahead of the 2028 Summer Games. Boykoff shows how DSA-LA’s anti-Olympics activism fits with the resurgence of socialism in the US and beyond. Boykoff’s research, based on more than 100 interviews with anti-Olympics activists, personal experiences at protests in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Tokyo, academic research, mass- and alternative-media coverage, and Olympic archives, is the backbone for this story of activists fighting against the odds and embracing the transformative politics of democratic socialism.

jules boykoff is a professor of political science at Pacific University in Oregon, and the author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics; Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London; Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games; and Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States. His writing has appeared in New Left Review, the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, Al Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times, Jacobin, and elsewhere.

olympics; Tokyo; covid-19; Beijing; activism; cancel olympics

Read Excerpt

9781773631738 • Fall 2019

Paperback • 6 x 9" • 276 pages Rights Available: World

subject categories

social science / Agriculture & Food political science / Agriculture & Food Policy key content highlights

Recounting the Past, Counting on the Future • nfu Takes on a Corporate Giant • Stopping Monsanto • Protecting Seeds • Organizing the Market • Farming Ecologically: The nfu in Ontario • Saving the Prison Farms • The Question of Land in Prince Edward Island • Embracing Agrarian Feminism • Inspiring Re-Generation: nfu Youth • Globalization Solidarity: La Vía Campesina and Food Sovereignty • Building Relationships: Indigenous-Settler Solidarity and the nfu

Frontline Farmers

How the National Farmers Union Resists Agribusiness and

edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais

The book offers a front-seat look at some of the key organizing efforts undertaken by one of the founding members of the global food sovereignty movement. It is an important contribution to the conversation on contemporary food movements and offers numerous insights into the on-the-ground and evolving struggle for food sovereignty in Canada and beyond.

—agriculture and human values 37, 931–932 (2020)

Who grows the food we eat? How important is it that family farms are viable in Canada today and in the future? How do family farms help determine the safety, diversity and sustainability of Canada’s food systems? Why is this important to those of us who do not farm?

Frontline Farmers introduces readers to the National Farmers Union (nfu). For over fifty years, the nfu has been on the frontlines of our food system. From fighting against transnational corporations that seek to control our food system by imposing genetically modified organisms into our food, to protecting seeds, maintaining orderly marketing, saving the prison farms, keeping the land in the hands of family farmers, farming ecologically and building food sovereignty, the nfu has been front and centre of farm and food activism.

This book collects the voices of nfu members who tell the stories of the key struggles of the progressive farm movement in Canada: fighting to build viable rural communities, protecting the family farm and creating socially just and ecologically sustainable food systems. Frontline Farmers reveals that the stakes for controlling our food in Canada have never been higher.

annette aurélie desmarais is the Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Social Justice and Food Sovereignty at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants. Prior to obtaining her doctorate in geography, Annette was a small-scale grain farmer in Saskatchewan. She also worked with the National Farmers Union in the Global Agriculture Project and provided technical support to La Vía Campesina for over a decade.

food sovereignty; food; farming; organic

Creates Our New Food Future

social science / Emigration & Immigration political science / Indigenous Studies key content highlights

Reconciliation: Challenges and Possibilities • Sámi Reconciliation in Practice • Reconciliation Through Decolonization • Reconciliation: A White Settler

Learning from the Land • Integrating Indigenous Knowledge in Practice and Research: A New Way Forward for the Immigrant Health Professionals • Reconciliation Through Transnational Lenses: An Immigrant Woman’s Learning Journey • Letter to John A. Macdonald • Reconciliation as Ceremonial Responsibility • Reconciliation via Building Respectful Relationships and Community Engagement in Indigenous Research • Reconciliation and New Canadians • Holes and Gray

Reconciliation in Practice

A Cross-Cultural Perspective

edited by Ranjan Datta

Reconciliation in Practice reminds us that reconciliation is an ongoing process, not an event.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a report designed to facilitate reconciliation between the Canadian state and Indigenous Peoples. Its call to honour treaty relationships reminds us that we are all treaty people — including immigrants and refugees living in Canada. The contributors to this volume, many of whom are themselves immigrants and refugees, take up the challenge of imagining what it means for immigrants and refugees to live as treaty people. Through essays, personal reflections and poetry, the authors explore what reconciliation is and what it means to live in relationship with Indigenous Peoples.

Speaking from their personal experiences — whether from the education and health care systems, through research and a community garden, or from experiences of discrimination and marginalization — contributors share their stories of what reconciliation means in practice. They write about building respectful relationships with Indigenous Peoples, respecting Indigenous Treaties, decolonizing our ways of knowing and acting, learning the role of colonized education processes, protecting our land and environment, creating food security and creating an intercultural space for social interactions.

Perhaps most importantly, Reconciliation in Practice reminds us that reconciliation is an ongoing process, and that decolonizing our relationships and building new ones based on understanding and respect is empowering for all of us — Indigenous, settler, immigrant and refugee alike.

ranjan datta is an Indigenous researcher from Bangladesh at the University of Regina. His research interests include advocating for Indigenous environmental sustainability, environmental justice, land-based sustainability, community-based research and community empowerment.

settler; settler colonialism; colonialism; refugees; Canada

Read Excerpt

Sister Seen, Sister Heard

A voyeuristic glimpse into the private lives of an Iranian family living in Toronto, Sister Seen, Sister Heard peels away the layers of the idealistic people we try to become for the sake of our family. Eslah’s book is unapologetically raw and intimate, forcing us to acknowledge women of colour, their experiences and traumas, and how they fit into the framework of a settler colonial Canadian society. A fresh and provocative look at the immigrant experience in the 90s, Eslah’s writing style will stay with you.

—taslim burkowicz, author of The Desirable Sister and Chocolate Cherry Chai

Farah’s ready to move out of her parent’s house. It takes an hour to get to campus, and she has no freedom to be herself. Maiheen and Mostafa, first-generation Iranian immigrants in Toronto, find their younger daughter’s “Canadian” ways disappointing and embarrassing, and they wonder why Farah can’t be like her older sister Farzana — though Farah knows things about Farzana that her parents don’t. They begrudgingly agree to let Farah move, and she begins to explore her exciting new life as an independent university student. But when Farah gets assaulted on campus, everything changes. This beautiful coming-of-age story will be familiar to every immigrant in the diaspora who has struggled to find a way between cultures, every youth who has rebelled against their parents and every woman who has faced the world alone.

fiction; sexual assault; stalking; Iran; immigrant; diaspora; police; campus; racialized sexism

The Daughter Who Walked Away

Estranged from her abusive parents as a teenager, Taraneh Pourani overcame poverty, isolation and self-hatred to build a happy home with her loving husband and children. Triggered by her young sons’ annual visit with their grandparents, Taraneh becomes psychologically distressed. She begins to doubt her memories and question her decision to remain distanced from her aging parents.

A journey into Taraneh’s family history reveals three generations of unaddressed mental illness and unresolved childhood trauma. Due to poverty in early twentieth-century Iran, Taraneh’s grandmother, Batoul, is married at the age of nine and sent to live with her husband’s family. Ashamed and traumatized, Batoul raises her children to expect hardships and to endure them in secret. The seeds of dysfunction are planted in Mojegan, Taraneh’s mother. Mojegan is a nurse in Tehran in the 1960s when she marries the charming, but alcoholic and impulsive, Reza. She stands by Reza throughout their marriage, even after he abruptly kicks out their teenage daughter, Taraneh.

A powerful and beautiful debut novel by Kimia Eslah that explores the lives of three Iranian women, across three generations, as they struggle to love and be loved unconditionally.

fiction; Iran; family; dysfunction; identity

kimia

Ruby Red Skies

Burkowicz skillfully embroiders each context through the memorable characters in this highly inventive tale of intersecting stories reminding us that the here and now is often powerfully reimagined by the histories we carry within us.

—dr. miriam pirbhai, author of Isolated Incident

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.

wildfires; climate change; ancestry; romance; self-discovery; Indo-Canadian; feminism; interracial relationship; mixed race; British Columbia

The Desirable Sister

Presented like a kaleidoscopic tapestry, we watch with fascination as Gia and Serena come of age and emerge from the grip of race and colour to become independent young women. Taslim Burkowicz is a masterful storyteller of intimate details that are surprising and sometimes shocking.

—simon choa-johnston, author of The House of Wives

Gia and Serena Pirji are sisters, but as the first-generation born in Canada to immigrant parents, their lives play out in different ways because of their skin tone. Gia’s fair skin grants her membership to cliques of white kids as a teen, while Serena’s dark skin means she is labelled as Indian and treated as inferior. This superficial difference, imposed by a society obsessed with skin colour and hierarchy, sets the sisters into a dynamic that plays out throughout their lives. In a world where white skin is preferable, The Desirable Sister reveals the bitter games of treachery women are forced to play to achieve the ranks of beauty and success, and ultimately shows the strength of love between sisters.

fiction; family; cultural construction; skin colour; self-identity

Chocolate Chery Chai

Through home-made Chocolate Cherry Chai, Burkowicz cleverly weaves together haunting life stories across time and space, told by, of, and to women, of fleeting romance, enduring hardship and heartache, powerful and yet at times powerless mother-child bond, warmth, and cruelty. Honest, fresh, powerful.

—huamei han, author of Transfer: and Other Stories

Young, free-spirited Maya Mubeen leaves behind the pressures of family, marriage and tradition for a life of experience and adventure — proving to herself, and her mother, that she is anything but a typical Indian girl. After diving with sharks in the Philippines and a sordid breakup amidst the bustling nightlife of Tokyo, Maya’s sense of who she is — and where home is — starts to falter. An ancient chai-making ritual holds the key to Maya’s past and present, unlocking the secret lives of the women in her family. Traversing the globe and historical eras, Burkowicz’s debut novel binds together themes of familial pressures, the immigrant experience, motherhood, love and loss into a poetic narrative.

fiction; cultural belonging; identity; family; coming of age

taslim burkowicz’ s work is inspired both by her Indo-Canadian heritage and her global travels and experiences. Two of her novels have been listed on CBC Books' Fall Preview. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science and education from Simon Fraser University. Taslim resides with her husband and three boys in Surrey, B.C., where she focuses on writing, running and dancing.

Read Excerpt

Critical Development Studies

about the series

This series provides a forum for the publication of small books in the interdisciplinary field of critical development studies — to generate knowledge and ideas about transformative change and alternative development.

Critical Development Studies (cds) encompasses a broad array of issues ranging from the sustainability of the environment and livelihoods, the political economy and sociology of social inequality, alternative models of local and community-based development, the land and resource-grabbing dynamics of extractive capital, the subnational and global dynamics of political and economic power, and the forces of social change and resistance, as well as the contours of contemporary struggles against the destructive operations and ravages of capitalism and imperialism in the twenty-first century.

The books in the series are designed to be accessible to an activist readershipas well as the academic community.

titles in the cds series

} The Political Economy of Agribusiness A Critical Development Perspective

| Global Fishers The Politics of Transnational Movements

{ Tiny Engines of Abundance A History of Peasant Productivity and Repression

z COVID-19 and the Future of Capitalism Postcapitalist Horizons Beyond Neo-Liberalism

y Extractivism Politics, Economy and Ecology

x The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism Lessons From Bolivia

w Development in Latin America Toward a New Future

v Politics Rules Power, Globalization and Development

u Critical Development Studies An Introduction

The Political Economy of Agribusiness A

Critical Development Perspective

by Maria Luisa Mendonça

The Political Economy of Agribusiness is a brilliantly written small book about a huge issue confronting humanity: agribusiness — and how it causes social problems such as land grabbing, inequality and exploitation, and provokes resistance. It is a must-read for academics and activists alike.

—saturnino m. borras jr., International Institute of Social Studies (iss), now in the Netherlands

What is agribusiness? When did it emerge? In answering these questions, the author traces the global contours of contemporary agriculture, bringing a critical analysis of the origins of agribusiness in the US and its subsequent international signature. The investigation reveals that the industrialization of agriculture was a result of a dialectical movement of economic crisis and expansion, and her analysis sheds new light on current debates about food sovereignty, agriculture technologies, international financial markets and farmland speculation.

Mendonça challenges the established contemporary discourse regarding the contribution that agribusiness makes to economic development. Industrialization of agriculture demands increasing amounts of credit for capital inputs, which are captured by agribusiness corporations, leading to market concentration. For those who are new to the study of agribusiness, this book provides a clear introduction to global trends. For those more engaged it serves as a valuable overview, an excellent text for students involved in studies of agriculture and food sovereignty.

9781773635941 • Forthcoming Spring 2023 Paperback • 5.5 x 8.5" • 188 pages Rights Sold: Canada & US

Global Fishers

The Politics of Transnational Movements

by Elyse Noble Mills

This very well researched book provides a valuable overview of key network organizations, tracing their origins, development and engagement in contemporary political spaces.

—charles levkoe,

Lakehead University

A must read for anyone working at the intersection of movements and food governance.

—jessica duncan, Wageningen University

Global politics around fisheries are complex and contentious. Embedded within this sector, small-scale fishers’ movements are continuously confronted with new actors, issues and conflicting interests. Yet, these movements and their political agendas have played a critical role in global fisheries. This book offers an insightful exploration and analysis of two transnational movements — the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (wffp) and the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers (wff) — tracing their origins, development, struggles and engagement in international political spaces. It explores three overlapping analytical spheres: transnational movements contesting and seeking to influence the politics of global fisheries; international political spaces movements are prioritizing; and contentious fisheries issues movements are struggling over.

fishers’ forum; anti-WTO protests; indian ocean earthquake; small-scale fisheries guidelines; aquatic genetic resources; sustainable development

Tiny Engines of Abundance

A History of Peasant Productivity and Repression

by Jim Handy

This book demonstrates the fallacy of 200 years of proclaiming the necessity of industrial agriculture to feed the world. It is essential reading for anyone interested in food sovereignty, which should be all of us.

—miguel a. altieri, emeritus professor of agroecology at the University of California at Berkeley and founder of the Latin American Scientific Society for Agroecology

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

peasants; farming; efficiency; Kerala; Guatemala; Jamaica, Nigeria

9781773632575 • Spring 2021

Paperback • 5.5 x 8.5" • 140 pages Rights Sold: Canada & US

COVID-19 and

the Future

of Capitalism Postcapitalist Horizons Beyond Neo-Liberalism

by Efe Can Gürcan, Ömer Ersin Kahraman and Selen Yanmaz

The value and importance of this book is that it provides a clear and succinct analysis of these forces. I am not aware of any other book that analyses the dynamics of capitalist development as well in this conjuncture.

—henry veltmeyer, Professor Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico. Professor emeritus, Saint Mary’s University, Canada

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

pandemic; capitalism; neoliberalism; revolutionary; populism crisis; class exploitation; right-wing

Extractivisms

Politics, Economy and Ecology

by Eduardo Gudynas

Nature and communities in the global south is being overwhelmed at a shocking rate. In many places this is due to ventures such as large-scale open-pit mining, oil extraction in tropical areas, and the spread of monocultures. These and other such forms of natural resource appropriation are usually known as extractivisms.

This introductory book on the one hand adopts an interdisciplinary and critical perspective, incorporating contributions from economics, politics, ecology, and more. On the other hand it is an exercise in the politics among humans and with the environment. Eduardo Gudnyas explores negative local impacts such as ecological and health degradation or violence, along with spillover effects that redefines democracy and justice. Significantly, presented for the first time in English is a comprehensive overview of the theoretical innovations currently being discussed in the South, such as the distinction between appropriation and production modes and a redefinition of surplus to include social and economic features or new understandings on conflict dynamics. Furthermore, Gudynas discusses the Latin American peculiarities of extractivisms produced both by conservative and new-left governments, making clear that it has very deep roots in culture and ideologies, and offers solutions for the future.

conservative extractivism; extrahection; corruption; political diversification; globalization; modes of appropriation; resource nationalism

The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism

Lessons From Bolivia

by Ben M. McKay

McKay’s powerful analysis challenges dominant discourses to reveal the highly extractive nature of the industrial soy complex in Bolivia. With rich empirical detail, he shows how the underlying dynamics of agrarian extractivism generate social exclusion and environmental harm.

—jennifer clapp, author of Speculative Harvests

Around the world, plantation economies are on the rise. Increasing concerns over food, energy and financial security, combined with a geopolitical restructuring of the global agro-food system, have resulted in a rush to secure control over resources. New actors and forms of capital penetration have entered the countryside, transforming the forms and relations of production, property and power. Soybeans, with industrial inputs upstream and storage, processing and transportation downstream, have become a quintessential agro-industrial “flex crop,” used as feed, food, fuel and industrial materials, but the very extractive character of the soy complex has severe implications for society, the economy and the environment.

The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism analyzes how the Bolivian countryside is transformed by the development and expansion of the soy complex and reveals the extractive dynamics of capitalist industrial agriculture, while also challenging dominant discourses legitimating this model as a means to achieve inclusive and sustainable rural development.

small farmers; capital accumulation; appropriationism; class alliances; contract farming; value-chain control; financial crises; mechanization; monocultures; partida arrangement; agro-chemicals; market oligopoly; state-society-capital nexus

Development in Latin America Toward

a New Future

by Maristella Svampa

In Development in Latin America, Maristella Svampa explores the contemporary development and resistance dynamics of capitalist development — the workings (on people and societies) of the world capitalist system — in the context of Latin America, where these dynamics have had their most notable outcomes. She focuses on the phenomenon of “neoextractivism,” the combination of the global advance of resource-seeking extractive capital (foreign investments in the extraction of natural resources) and the commodities consensus (export of raw materials), among both neoliberal and progressive governments — analyzing their common elements as well as their differences.

Svampa explores the complex dynamics of socio-environmental conflict associated with neoextractivism, as well as what she refers to as the “eco-territorial turn.” Svampa’s analysis includes both the ecological and gender dimensions of the global and regional capitalist development process.

extractivism; environmental activism; anthropocene; biodiversity; rural communities; socioenvironmental conflict; buen vivir; progressivism; social movements; fracking

Politics Rules Power, Globalization and Development

by Adam Sneyd

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.

Critical Development Studies

An Introduction

by Henry Veltmeyer and Raúl Delgado Wise

Development studies is typically used by agencies concerned on improving the living conditions of people across the world by advancing capitalism as the institutional and policy framework of the global development process. Veltmeyer and Delgado Wise, on the contrary, view capitalism as the problem rather than the solution, and provide a critical development perspective on some of the major issues that afflict people and countries across the world.

This introductory volume provides readers with an overview of the key issues of development studies from a critical perspective: the nature of the global capitalist system and an analysis of the dynamics associated with the development process, the agrarian question, the outmigration and urbanization of rural areas, the formation of a global working class and the emergence of powerful resistance movements such as the Zapatistas.

agribusiness; biofuel; working class; extractivism; imperialism; free market; neoliberalism; IMF; structural adjustment programs; SAPs; Zapatista Army of National Liberation; EZLN; privatization; resistance

For inquiries, please contact: rights @fernpub.ca

fernwoodpublishing.ca

halifax 2970 Oxford St Halifax, NS, B2L 2W4 phone: (902) 857-1388 info@fernpub.ca

manitoba 748 Broadway Avenue Winnipeg, MB, R3G 0X3 phone: (204) 474-2958