From award-winning and shortlisted works of fiction, to scholarly and historical inquiry and analysis, to engaging personal memoirs, women faculty and alumni from Arts & Science published exciting new books this past year.
A few titles to inform, educate and inspire you:
A powerful story of Japanese internment
Arts & Science alum Lara Jean Okihiro’s grandparents lost everything as Japanese Canadians living in British Columbia during the Second World War. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they and many other Japanese Canadians were labeled “alien enemies,” even those born in Canada.
Their movements were restricted, they were ostracized by white Canadian society and eventually relocated and incarcerated. Families were torn apart, and property was confiscated and sold — all by the Canadian government in the name of national security.
Eighty years later, Okihiro finally shares her obaasan’s — or grandmother’s — story through her book, Obaasan’s Boots.
Says Okihiro of the experience of researching and writing the book, “I gained an immense sense for how histories and historical trauma connect to our lives and connect us with each other in complex ways, begging us to ask questions for which there are never easy or singular answers.”
Children’s book about disability culture seeks to build more inclusive communities
Anne McGuire is empowering children and adults alike to imagine new possibilities for the world around them through efforts such as We Move Together — a children’s picture book about disability culture, community and social justice.
Co-created by McGuire, an associate professor, teaching stream, and the program director of New College’s Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity program, We Move Together is the first picture book to introduce young readers to Disability Justice (DJ) — a social movement borne out of the activism of queer and trans disabled people of colour in the early 2000s that addresses oppression like ableism, racism and heterosexism.
In addition to the book, McGuire and her colleagues have been leading engaging DJ teaching workshops with instructors using the book and its accompanying open-access learning guide.
Regardless of the reader’s age, the lesson is the same — we can build a world where more of us can live and be and flourish by envisioning what the world around us could be.
The shocking power and political influence of Chinese gangs
When Lynette Ong began researching her new book, Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China, she was shocked at what she found.
Chinese cities were growing at a rapid pace: farmland on the outskirts of municipalities such as Beijing and Shanghai were rapidly being replaced by new construction. But the human cost was high. Houses were demolished to clear space for high-rises and their owners evicted — victims of intimidation, beatings and arson carried out by gangs.
Ong, a professor in the Department of Political Science, jointly appointed to the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, has been conducting research in China since the 1990s.
With research spanning more than a decade and more than 200 interviews, she discovered that gangs not only existed in China: they were instrumental in helping the government meet its urbanization targets.
A personal account of a biracial family’s journey
Author and A&S alum Charlotte Gill’s newest book, Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir, explores the story of her mixed-race, immigrant family, creating a deeply personal memoir with a contextualizing historical lens.
The story begins in the 1960s in London, England, where Gill’s English mother met her Indian father, in a time and place where interracial love was far from welcome. The story follows her family’s life as immigrants in the United States and Canada, including “all the tragic comedy of being an immigrant family as well as a mixed-race family,” says Gill, a celebrated author and a writing instructor at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the University of King’s College in Halifax.
Almost Brown is also an exploration of racial identity. As a biracial woman, Gill is keenly aware of the ways in which the world has — and hasn’t — changed when it comes to perception of race and people who are mixed-race.
Reimagining human rights in the age of data
Wendy H. Wong believes that data is such an integral part of our lives, it’s an essential part of who we are. In her new book, We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age, Wong suggests human rights should extend beyond our physical selves which warrants a new way of thinking about human rights to match the reality of our data-driven world.
Wong is a professor and principal’s research chair at the University of British Columbia Okanagan’s Department of Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science, and a faculty affiliate at U of T’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Her research explores global governance, with a focus on emerging technologies such as AI and big data.
We, The Data proposes that we are all stakeholders in today’s digital world but are currently being left out of the most urgent conversations around technology, ethics and policy.