By the book
1In Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Allyson Stevenson documents the rise and fall of North American transracial adoption projects, including the Adopt Indian and Métis program and the Indian Adoption project. Stevenson, a U of R Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples and Global Social Justice, illustrates how removing Indigenous children from Indigenous families and communities contributed to the "Sixties Scoop,” and sheds light on the complex reasons behind social inequalities that persist in child welfare today.
4 Edited by Arjun Tremblay, assistant professor in the U of R’s Faculty of Arts, Federalism and National Diversity in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores the obstacles to and opportunities for a sustainable and representative multinational federalism. This collection includes essays from international scholars who tackle questions about multinational federalism, such as what the main roadblocks to multinational federalism adoption are and if those obstacles can be overcome, while also seeking out roadmaps to successful and diverse multiethnic and multinational federal democracies for the 21st century.
2 In Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2020), U of R historian Donica Belisle uncovers the meanings that Canadians have attached to consumer goods. Focusing on women in the early 20th century, Belisle explains that due to exclusion from politics and employment, many women turned consumption into personal and social opportunities. Yet consumption was also a tool of exclusion. Many privileged women disparaged racialized and lower income women’s consumer habits, constructing notions of taste that defined who belonged–and who did not–in modern Canada.
5 Blair Stonechild’s Loss of Indigenous Eden and the Fall of Spirituality (University of Regina Press, 2020) explores Indigenous spiritual teachings passed down by Elders and examines their relevance today. Stonechild, professor of Indigenous Studies at First Nations University of Canada, demonstrates how global human dominance and economic and technological development have resulted in all-consuming and destructive appetites that damage relationships with the natural world, leading to a troubling loss of respect for spirituality. He also argues that international reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and their cultures is necessary for humanity’s survival.
3 In The Art of Global Power: Artwork and Popular Cultures as World-Making Practices (Routledge, 2020), editor Emily Merson, assistant professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, emphasizes the transformative power of artwork and popular cultures in challenging the status quo and calling attention to unjust power imbalances. Merson gathers contributors who draw on their experiences across arts, activist, and academic communities to examine how the global politics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are expressed, and may be transformed, through popular cultures and artistic labour.
6 Co-edited by U of R creative technologies professor Charity Marsh, We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020) aims to trace the edges of hip-hop culture in Canada and make sense of the rich and diverse ways people engage with it. Focusing on Indigenous and Black Diasporic perspectives, contributors to the collection explore issues around gender, identity, power, and diaspora. By amplifying rarely heard voices within hip-hop cultures in Canada, contributors argue for hip-hop culture’s power to disrupt national formations.
