This year, Arts scholars have explored diverse topics in their publications, from posthumanism and critical race theory in classic films to medieval French literature and the changing landscape of queer nightlife. Dive into these thought-provoking works for fresh perspectives on culture, history, society, and the environment.
Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth
By: The late Karen Bakker, Professor
Contact for inquiries: Philippe Le Billon (Karen’s husband)
What is the book about?
At the uncanny edge of the scientific frontier, Gaia’s Web explores the promise and pitfalls the Digital Age holds for the future of our planet. A new generation of innovators is deploying digital and biological technologies to come to the aid of the planet, but will they end up doing more harm than good? Combining insights from computer science, ecology, engineering, environmental science, and environmental law, Gaia’s Web introduces profoundly novel ways of addressing our most pressing environmental challenges—mitigating climate change, protecting endangered species—and creating new possibilities for ecological justice by empowering nonhumans to participate in environmental regulation.
Why was this book written?
Karen passed away in August 2023, shortly after finishing this book. Gaia’s Web is part of what Karen conceived as a trilogy exploring how biological and digital technologies could bring more empathy with nature, help regenerate our damaged planet, and give greater agency to our fellow earthlings. In the award-winning first volume, The Sounds of Life, Karen beautifully narrates the hidden realm of nature’s sounds and the transformative power of digital technologies to connect us with other species. In this second book, Gaia’s Web, insightfully engages with the promises and conundrums of emerging bio-digital technologies. Sadly, Karen did not get a chance to write her final volume on a new political future, in which humans co-govern rather than dominate Earth, but she leaves behind an extensive and insightful legacy of works, and a message of love and hope.
Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene
By: William Brown, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Film
What is your book about?
Through an analysis of Buster Keaton’s classic The Navigator and through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene deconstructs white modernity and posits a ‘Black’ future.
Why did you write this book?
I felt I needed to.
You’re Gonna Love This
By: Dina Del Bucchia, Sessional Lecturer, School of Creative Writing
What is your book about?
You’re Gonna Love This tracks the narrator’s entwined relationships with her spouse, her television, and herself. Displaying Del Bucchia’s trademark nuanced media literacy, this distinctly working-class long poem unravels how media culture’s around-the-clock presence impacts our connection to the world. Recapping episodes in her experience of caregiving, she also addresses her own mental-health journey with dark humour, wry cultural references, and a flair for making the deeply personal especially relatable. You’re gonna love this!
Why did you write this book?
This book was a pandemic experiment, and the original draft was written during poetry month in 2020. I wrote every day. I was thinking about television and how it was such a complicated companion during that time, and then started to reflect on other times in my life and how that connected to my viewing habits. Specific television shows became a way to explore my relationship with my declining mental health and my 25-year relationship with my spouse.
Les Fabliaux. Fiction, vraisemblance et genre littéraire
By: Isabelle Delage-Béland, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies
What is your book about?
My book focuses on fabliaux, short narratives written mainly during the 13th century in France. The name fabliau (or fablel) is the starting point of my study. It is remarkable to use a generic label that, etymologically, is close to the Latin word fabula (the false speech, opposed to the truth of history) and the French word fable (a synonym of lie in several medieval texts). Therefore, I wanted to question the meaning of this ambiguous word in the context of a relatively young fictional literature seeking to acquire its legitimacy. By combining linguistic, poetic, and codicological approaches, I reread the fabliaux and make them participate in contemporary reflections on both the poetics of the literary genre and the powers of fiction and storytelling.
Why did you write this book?
Initially, I wanted to better understand the relationship to fiction in 13th century narratives and contribute to renewing the critical discourse on fabliaux—texts I have enjoyed reading and teaching for a long time. But in the end, the texts taught me much more than I had anticipated! Fabliaux offers a reflection on the instability of truth, the difficulty of grasping reality, and the incredible force of fiction which has its own truth value. In fact, medieval authors give a real lesson by rejecting binary oppositions and by highlighting the importance of doubt and nuance. This seems especially relevant when we think of some current polarizing debates, and I hope that we continue to have the humility to look to the past to question the present.
The Predictable Heartbreaks of Imogen Finch
By: Jacqueline Firkins, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
What is your book about?
A woman cursed to never come first at anything or to anyone tries to break her losing streak with the help of her secret high school crush, newly returned to their small Coastal Oregon town. Can she nab her first? Can the pair find common ground between their disparate lifestyles? And is anything about love ever truly predictable?
Why did you write this book?
I was thinking about two things: 1. How creative pursuits often create a false sense of competition that makes us feel like we’re never where we want to be in our careers because someone else is always out there “doing it better” and 2. How accumulating rejections and failures (however abstract or concrete) can leave us stuck expecting more rejection and failure, and unable to identify when to push on and when to pivot. I put the two together and thought, what if a woman is literally doomed to always be second in everything she does? How can I use a love story to explore the idea of limitations, how we identify them, and what we do with them once we accept that they exist?
Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution
By: Amin Ghaziani, Professor, Department of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities
What is your book about?
It’s closing time for an alarming number of gay bars in cities around the globe—but it’s definitely not the last dance. In this journey into underground parties, Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexpected revolution revitalizing urban nightlife. Far from the gay bar with its largely white, gay male clientele, here is a dazzling scene of secret parties—club nights—wherein culture creatives, many of whom are queer, trans, and racial minorities, reclaim the night in the name of those too long left out. Episodic, nomadic, and radically inclusive, club nights are refashioning queer nightlife in boundlessly imaginative and powerfully defiant ways.
Why did you write this book?
I found myself at the center of a dance floor that centered me in return. That moment stayed with me, and it inspired this book. Ephemeral events can have everlasting effects.
The Canadian Mountain Assessment (anthology which included several other authors)
By: Nina Hewitt, Associate Professor of Teaching and Michele Koppes, Professor, Department of Geography
What is the book about?
The Canadian Mountain Assessment provides a first-of-its-kind look at what we know, do not know, and need to know about mountain systems in Canada. The assessment is based on insights from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit knowledge of mountains, as well as findings from an extensive assessment of pertinent academic literature. Its inclusive knowledge co-creation approach brings these multiple forms of evidence together in ways that enhance our collective understanding of mountains in Canada, while also respecting and maintaining the integrity of different knowledge systems.
The Canadian Mountain Assessment is a text-based document but also includes a variety of visual materials as well as access to video recordings of oral knowledge shared by Indigenous individuals from mountain areas in Canada. The assessment is the result of over three years of work, during which time the initiative played an important role in connecting and cultivating relationships between mountain knowledge holders from across Canada. It is the outcome of contributions from more than 80 Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and contains six chapters.
Why did you write this book?
The Canadian Mountain Assessment aims to enhance appreciation for the diversity and significance of mountains in Canada, to clarify challenges and opportunities for mountain systems in the country, and to motivate and inform new research, relationships, and actions that support the realization of desirable mountain futures. More broadly, the Canadian Mountain Assessment provides insights into applied reconciliation efforts in a knowledge assessment context and seeks to inspire similar knowledge co-creation efforts in and beyond Canada.
Epistemic Courage
By: Jonathan Ichikawa, Department of Philosophy
What is your book about?
Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief. Many mainstream ideas about what to believe — those emphasizing the importance of ensuring that one doesn’t believe with insufficient evidence — are incomplete and distorting in important and harmful ways. A skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo. Epistemic Courage is a corrective against what I see as a negative bias in the ways people think about belief. We shouldn’t only worry about the mistake of believing things we shouldn’t — we need to be paying much more attention than we do to the mistake of not believing things that we should. Moreover, the book argues, that this is important for theoretical, moral, and political reasons.
Why did you write this book?
This project was motivated by a variety of ways I noticed skeptical instincts that contributed to oppressive harm, while at the same time enjoying a positive stereotype of rationality. It derived most directly from an older research project on rape culture and testimony, exploring ways that doubt contributes to social harm, but I quickly noticed that the pattern was much broader: I was thinking about vaccine skepticism, climate change, recognizing instances of racism, and many other examples. I think people often misdiagnose a lot of the social and political problems that characterize our modern world. Sometimes the problem isn’t that people are too gullible—it’s that they’re too skeptical. This book pulls a lot of those thoughts together, along with some contemporary epistemology.
In a Wounded Land: Conservation, Extraction, and Human Well-Being in Coastal Tanzania
By: Vinay Kamat, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
What is your book about?
Focusing on the human element of marine conservation and the extractive industry in Tanzania, this book illuminates what happens when impoverished people living in underdeveloped regions of Africa are suddenly subjected to state-directed conservation and natural resource extraction projects, implemented in their landscapes of subsistence. In a Wounded Land draws on ethnographically rich case studies and vignettes collected over ten years in several coastal villages on Tanzania’s southeastern border with Mozambique. In seven chapters, the book demonstrates how state power, processes of displacement and dispossession, forms of local resistance and acquiescence, environmental and social justice, and human well-being become interconnected.
Why did you write this book?
I wrote this book to consolidate the ethnographic research I had conducted in Tanzania over ten years with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Written in lucid, accessible language, this is the first book that reveals the social implications of the co-presence of a marine park and a gas project at a time when internationally funded conservation initiatives and extraction projects among rural African populations are engendering rapid social transformation.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World By: Naomi Klein, Associate Professor, Department of Geography
What’s your book about?
What if you woke up and found you’d acquired a double who was almost you yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Naomi Klein had just such an experience—a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many got confused. Destabilized, she lost her bearings until she understood the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness: AI-generated text blurs the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers scramble familiar political allegiances; and liberal democracies teeter on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our collective vertigo? With Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, Klein uses wry humor to face the strange doubles that haunt us and feel as intimate as a warped reflection.
Why did you write this book?
Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now—and an intellectual adventure story for our times.
Emily Posts
By: Tanya Kyi, Lecturer, School of Creative Writing
What is your book about?
Emily Posts follows Emily, a middle-school podcaster and wanna-be influencer who believes in old-school etiquette. But when her principal censors her podcast story about an upcoming climate march, things might get impolite.
Why did you write this book?
I’ve always loved reading advice columns. In this middle-grade novel, thirteen-year-old Emily and her mom are also huge fans, particularly of old-fashioned “agony aunts.” Emily sees a connection between the work of these women and her own aspirations as a social media influencer.
Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile
Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in MobileBy: Isabel Machado, Lecturer, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
What is your book about?
Carnival in Alabama uses Mardi Gras as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in the city of Mobile in the 20th century. By looking at the roles assigned, inaccessible to, or claimed and appropriated by straight-identified African Americans and people who defied gender and sexual normativity, it exposes the systems of oppression reflected in and reinforced by the celebration, while also acknowledging the festivity’s potential in reaffirming resistance and joy for historically marginalized groups of people.
Why did you write this book?
This book is a development of my History PhD dissertation for the University of Memphis.
From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics
From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic RhetoricsBy: Alexis McGee, Assistant Professor of Research, School of Journalism, Writing, and Media
What’s your book about?
From Blues to Beyoncé amplifies Black women’s ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, I explore figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge anti-Black discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyoncé reveals how Black women’s sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.
Politically Animated: Non-fiction Animation from the Hispanic World
By: Jennifer Nagtegaal, PhD Candidate in Hispanic Studies, Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies
What’s your book about?
Politically Animated studies the convergence of animation and actuality within films, television series, and digital shorts from across the Spanish-speaking world (including case studies from Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico). It interrogates many of the ways in which animation as a stylistic tool and storytelling device participates in political projects underpinning an array of non-fiction works: feature-length animated documentary films, a work of animated journalism, a short-animated essay, and micro-short episodes from a televised animated documentary series. The term “politically animated” refers to the ideological implications of choosing specific techniques and styles of animation – in many cases a comics aesthetic – within certain socio-historical and cultural contexts.
Why did you write this book?
Animation (fiction and non-fiction alike) has some of its deepest roots in the Spanish-speaking world and animation is very much political at that. This is something my introductory chapter aims to demonstrate in particular. The book’s focus on the Hispanic world works to rectify an anglocentrism that has largely characterized the field of animated documentary to date. In order to make my book as widely accessible as possible to the field, I have consistently translated into English the many Spanish-language film titles and quotes, as well as non-English scholarly criticism.
Nudos y enredos: revistas andinas del siglo XX
By: Rodolfo Ortiz, Sessional Lecturer, Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
What’s your book about?
In this book, I study the impact of Andean magazines and analyze their complex networks of cultural production in the intellectual field of the early 20th century. I propose a critical reading of the interwoven discourses and circuits of a fugitive intellectuality based on the topology of knots and tangles. I seek to demonstrate that magazines are a disposition in which the most significant controversies and debates of their time (and ours) are activated.
Why did you write this book?
This book originates from my doctoral thesis that I defended in March 2022 at the University of British Columbia.
Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English
By: Mo Pareles, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What’s your book about?
Nothing Pure presents a Jewish revision of the history of English Bible translation, proposing that the ambivalent cultural translation of Jewish law and literature is at the heart of early English vernacular theo-politics.
Why did you write this book?
I became obsessed with the earliest English translations of the Hebrew Bible (centuries before the King James Bible) and wanted to show how a translation method I call “supersessionary translation” is able to conserve, repudiate, and appropriate Jewish law for Christian political life. For instance, the early English abbot Ælfric develops in his translation of the Book of Judith a political vocabulary for the sovereignty of abbots and abbesses, and Archbishop Wulfstan uses a kind of false multivocality in his translations to bring secular institutions, including slavery, under Church control. These phenomena give us insight into some of the earliest interactions between Christian state formation and the English language–and how translation fits in.
Variegated Economies
Variegated Economies By: Jamie Peck, Professor, Department of Geography
What’s your book about?
The culmination of more than two decades of work on the spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, Variegated Economies tackles the question of how to approach, conceptualize, and analyze economies as geographically differentiated phenomena. Staged from the field of economic geography, the book seeks to build bridges to complementary developments in critical political economy and heterodox economic studies by way of a substantive theoretical and methodological program. Jamie Peck advances a series of arguments concerning the inherent and highly consequential-spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, engaging a range of issues from the diversity of capitalism(s) to the dynamics of late-stage neoliberalization, and from the problematic uneven geographical development to the challenges and opportunities of conjunctural methodologies.
How to Be Found
How to Be FoundBy: Emily Pohl-Weary, Assistant Professor, School of Creative Writing
What’s your book about?
How to Be Found is a novel about inner-city teens who live on a razor’s edge and understand that their chosen family is just as important as blood. One night, Michie wakes up to find police at the door and her best friend Trissa missing. Knowing she’s the only one who will search for Trissa, Michie begins to search in unfamiliar, dangerous territory: the backrooms of a luxury nightclub, dark alleyways, the online sex industry, and rural Ontario cottage country.
Why did you write this book?
I excavated my own teenage years growing up in downtown Toronto to explore the close bonds between best girl friends and how far two girls will go to keep each other safe. At that age (16), teens are deciding who they are and what matters to them while navigating so many expectations and pressures. Girls and non-binary folks are faced with constant and pervasive violence in the news, from other teens, authority figures, and sometimes their own families. Yet they manage to survive and often thrive. I’m in awe of the way that girls overcome: they create their own families, develop support systems of people they can trust, and figure out how to live by their own ethical codes.
The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
By: Evan Thompson, Professor, Department of Philosophy
What’s your book about?
An argument for including the human perspective within science, and for how human experience makes science possible. We present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. We urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
Why did you write this book?
To provide a different narrative about science from either science triumphalism or science denial: Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which we show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. Our book is a wake-up call for a new vision of science.
Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné
By: Mark Turin, Associate Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies & Anthropology
What’s your book about?
This collaboratively written and fully open-access book contains a unique collection of Tibetan oral narrations and songs known as Shépa, as these have been performed, recorded, and shared between generations of Choné Tibetans from Amdo living in the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Presented in Tibetan, Chinese, and English, the book reflects a sustained collaboration with and between members of the local community, including narrators, monks, and scholars, calling attention to the diversity inherent in all oral traditions, and the mutability of Shépa in particular.
Why did you write this book?
This book is the product of close teamwork and intense collaboration. While Shépa is performed and sung in Tibetan, the wider linguistic and cultural context in which it is situated is Chinese. Given the varied levels of access to Tibetan education in the Choné community, and the reality of Chinese being the lingua franca in most contexts, it felt essential to ensure that our work be accessible to readers literate in Tibetan and/or Chinese. We also decided to add an English translation to ensure global reach. It is both intellectually and pragmatically challenging to ensure consistency in three languages in a manuscript of this size and it was quite a task to implement our commitment to every aspect of the book being trilingual.
The Documentary Filmmaker’s Intuition Creating Ethical and Impactful Non-fiction Films
By: Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
What’s your book about?
This book is an introduction to the art and craft of documentary filmmaking with a focus on ethics and impact from development through distribution. Author Shannon Walsh explores point-of-view storytelling, writing for nonfiction, and the art of social change documentary.
Offering an overview of the documentary filmmaking process – from idea to pitch to a final film and impact campaign – this book provides nonfiction filmmakers with the methods required to find a voice, style, and cinematic approach to documentary filmmaking. With a specific focus on ethics and character-driven storytelling, Walsh shares her own personal insights on talking to strangers and the importance of empathetic listening skills and intuition and provides useful worksheets for filmmakers & students.”
Why did you write this book?
As a documentary filmmaker and teacher, I noticed there was a gap in what was available that really explored the questions relevant in the field today, and the common questions and themes students ask when creating their work. This book downloads a ton of my own experience as a filmmaker, as well as the insights from other filmmakers, in chapters organized around creating a film from concept & writing to production, post-production, and distribution. I pay special attention to questions of ethics and how we think about complicated questions around who is telling what story these days, as well as how to create and consider impact in a more nuanced way.
