University of Toronto Press Open Monographs

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/94427

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    The Banker Ladies: Vanguards of Solidarity Economics and Community-Based Banks
    (University of Toronto Press, 2024-08) Hossein, Caroline Shenaz
    All over the world, Black and racialized women engage in the solidarity economy through what is known as mutual aid financing. Formally referred to as rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), these institutions are purposefully informal to support the women’s livelihoods and social needs, and they act to reject tiered forms of neo-liberal development. The Banker Ladies – a term coined by women in the Black diaspora – are individuals that voluntarily organize ROSCAs for self-sufficiency and are intentional in their politicized economic co-operation to counter business exclusion. Caroline Shenaz Hossein reveals how Black women redefine the banking co-operative sector to be inclusive of informal institutions that are democratic and focused on group consensus, and which build an activist form of economic co-operation that is intent on making social profitability the norm. The book examines the ways in which diasporic Black women, who organize mutual aid, receive little to no attention. Unapologetically biased towards a group of women who have been purposely sidelined and put down for what they do, The Banker Ladies highlights how, in order to educate oneself about their contributions to politics and economics, it is imperative to listen to the voices of hundreds of Black women in charge of financial services for their communities.
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    Coerced Liberation: Muslim Women in Soviet Tajikistan
    (University of Toronto Press, 2024-05) Abman, Zamira
    In 1924, the Bolshevik regime began an unprecedented campaign to forcibly emancipate the Muslim women of Tajikistan. The emancipatory reforms included unveiling women, passing progressive family code laws, and educating women. By the 1950s, the Soviet regime largely succeeded in putting an end to veiling, child marriage, polygamy, and bride payments. Yet today there is a resurgence in these practices the Bolsheviks claimed to have eliminated. Coerced Liberation reveals that the Soviet regime transformed the lives of urban women within a single generation but without lasting effect. Drawing on unique primary sources, the book examines why this occurred. It addresses questions that are pertinent to ongoing debates in the international arena: What happens when an outside force attempts to modernize a society deeply rooted in centuries of patriarchal norms and values? In what ways can a devout religious rural community respond to, survive, and adapt to such interventions? And how does a state-centred, top-down approach towards women’s emancipation work? Coerced Liberation presents critical insights for readers interested in gender dynamics within Muslim communities, the roles of women in Islam, the resurgence of Islam in former colonial territories, the effectiveness of a top-down approach towards women’s movements, and more.
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    Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya
    (University of Toronto Press, 2024-05) Enns, Charis; Bersaglio, Brock
    Settler Ecologies tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio use immersive methods to reveal how animals and plants can be enrolled in the reproduction of settler colonialism. The book details how ecological relations have been unmade and remade to enable settler colonialism to endure as a structure in this part of Kenya. It describes five modes of violent ecological transformation used to prolong structures of settler colonialism: eliminating undesired wild species; rewilding landscapes with more desirable species to settler ecologists; selectively repeopling wilderness to create seemingly more inclusive wild spaces and capitalize on biocultural diversity; rescuing injured animals and species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for settler ecologies; and extending settler ecologies through landscape approaches to conservation that scale wild spaces. Settler Ecologies serves as a cautionary tale for future conservation agendas in all settler colonies. While urgent action is needed to halt global biodiversity loss, this book underscores the need to continually question whether the types of nature being preserved advance settler colonial structures or create conditions in which ecologies can otherwise be (re)made and flourish.
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    The Dervishes of the North: Rumi, Whirling, and the Making of Sufism in Canada
    (University of Toronto Press, 2023-04) Xavier, Merin Shobhana
    The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) is a popular spiritual icon. His legacy is sustained within the mystical and religious practice of Sufism, particularly through renditions of his poetry, music, and the meditation practice of whirling. In Canada, practices associated with Rumi have become ubiquitous in public spaces, such as museums, art galleries, and theatre halls, just as they continue to inform sacred ritual among Sufi communities. The Dervishes of the North explores what practices associated with Rumi in public and private spaces tell us about Sufism and spirituality, including sacred, cultural, and artistic expressions in the Canadian context. Using Rumi and contemporary expressions of poetry and whirling associated with him, the book captures the lived reality of Sufism through an ethnographic study of communities in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Drawing from conversations with Sufi leaders, whirling dervishes, and poets, Merin Shobhana Xavier explores how Sufism is constructed in Canada, particularly at the nexus of Islamic mysticism, Muslim diaspora, spiritual commodity, popular culture, and universal spirituality. Inviting readers with an interest in religion and spirituality, The Dervishes of the North illuminates how non-European Christian traditions, like Islam and Sufism, have informed the religious and spiritual terrain of Canada.
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    Selling Social: Procurement, Purchasing, and Social Enterprises
    (University of Toronto Press, 2023-01) Sumner, Jennifer; Chan, Andrea; Luk, Annie; Quarter, Jack
    Since the 2010s, all levels of governments in Canada have gradually initiated social procurement as a policy tool to further their social values and political agendas. Social enterprises of various shapes and sizes across the country have served as partners in the execution of those agendas. Selling Social examines the experiences of these enterprises in social procurement and social purchasing. Selling Social presents the findings of a three-year Canadian research project detailing experiences of work integration social enterprises (WISEs) selling their goods and services to organizational purchasers, including governments, businesses, and non-profit organizations. Drawing on survey findings and interviews, the book explores a diverse group of social enterprises from across Canada, showcasing their successes and their challenges based on real-life examples to aid social enterprises that are considering this path. The book emphasizes the importance of including social and environmental considerations in procurement and purchasing decisions, particularly at larger scales and through public policy. In doing so, Selling Social extends the understanding of social enterprises beyond their social and economic outcomes and into the broader movement towards responsible procurement and purchasing.
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    Performing Postracialism: Reflections on Antiblackness, Nation, and Education through Contemporary Blackface in Canada
    (University of Toronto Press, 2023-02) Howard, Philip S.S.
    Blackface – instances in which non-Black persons temporarily darken their skin with make-up to impersonate Black people, usually for fun, and frequently in educational contexts – constitutes a postracialist pedagogy that propagates antiblack logics. In Performing Postracialism, Philip S.S. Howard examines instances of contemporary blackface in Canada and argues that it is more than a simple matter of racial (mis)representation. The book looks at the ostensible humour and dominant conversations around blackface, arguing that they are manifestations of the particular formations of antiblackness in the Canadian nation state and its educational institutions. It posits that the occurrence of blackface in universities is not incidental, and outlines how educational institutions’ responses to blackface in Canada rely upon a motivation to protect whiteness. Performing Postracialism draws from focus groups and individual interviews conducted with university students, faculty, administrators, and Black student associations, along with online articles about blackface, to provide the basis for a nuanced examination of the ways that blackface is experienced by Black persons. The book investigates the work done by Black students, faculty, and staff at universities to challenge blackface and the broader campus climate of antiblackness that generates it.
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    Onscreen/Offscreen
    (University of Toronto Press, 2023-01) Nakassis, Constantine V.
    Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination. Bridging and synthesizing linguistic anthropology, film studies, visual studies, and media anthropology, Onscreen/Offscreen rethinks key issues across a number of fields concerned with the semiotic constitution of social life, from the performativity and ontology of images to questions of spectatorship, realism, and presence. In doing so, it offers both a challenge to any approach that would separate image from social context and a new vision for linguistic anthropology beyond the question of "language."
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    Before Official Multiculturalism: Women’s Pluralism in Toronto, 1950s-1970s
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-11) Iacovetta, Franca
    For almost two decades before Canada officially adopted multiculturalism in 1971, a large network of women and their allies in Toronto were promoting pluralism as a city- and nation-building project. Before Official Multiculturalism assesses women as liberal pluralist advocates and activists, critically examining the key roles they played as community organizers, frontline social workers, and promoters of ethnic festivals. The book explores women's community-based activism in support of a liberal pluralist vision of multiculturalism thorough an analysis of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto, a postwar agency that sought to integrate newcomers into the mainstream and promote cultural diversity. Drawing on the rich records of the institute, as well as the massive International Institutes collection in Minnesota, the book situates Toronto within its Canadian and North American contexts and addresses the flawed mandate to integrate immigrants and refugees into an increasingly diverse city. Franca Iacovetta investigates the contradictions between the activists' desire to celebrate and build ethnic diversity on one hand, and their project of Canadian nation-building on the other. Drawing lessons from the history of the Toronto International Institute, Before Official Multiculturalism engages with national and international debates to provide a critical analysis of women's pluralism in Canada.
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    Toronto the Good?: Negotiating Race in the Diverse City
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-11) Almeida, Shana
    Armed with the motto "Diversity Our Strength," the City of Toronto has garnered a world-class reputation for challenging racism, largely because of how it is seen to value and include racialized groups through its diversity policies and practices. Toronto the Good? unsettles popular depictions of both diversity and the City of Toronto by attending to what diversity does in and for the City in the context of historical relations of race. Toronto the Good? brings together Shana Almeida’s critical insights as a former political staff member along with her years of in-depth research on diversity in the City of Toronto to offer a compelling case to rethink how we understand diversity and racial inclusion in the City of Toronto and beyond. Initiated in a local context, Toronto the Good? critically contributes to global discussions on diversity, race, democracy, political participation, and power.
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    Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-07) Miller, John P.; Li, Xiang; Ruan, Tian
    The ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism contains profound wisdom about the cosmos, nature, human life, and education. Taoism seeks to be in harmony with nature, and using it as a guide can help us live in a way that is healing to both ourselves and the planet. Taoism, Teaching, and Learning identifies key aspects of Taoist thought and highlights how these principles can promote a holistic approach to teaching and learning. In particular, this book offers educators guidelines and pedagogical examples for how to instil a perspective of interconnectedness into their classrooms. It sheds light on how philosophical Taoism articulates a vision of the universe and life that mirrors the actual realities of nature. Providing frameworks and methods for teaching and learning based on the interconnectedness of life, Taoism, Teaching, and Learning develops an inspiring vision for education and helps us to see our world in a deeply holistic and meaningful way.
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    Messages from Ukraine
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-10) Bucken-Knapp, Gregg; Sildre, Joonas
    On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that dominated headlines around the world. Millions of Ukrainians would flee the country, and a third of the population would be displaced. In the days following the invasion, Swedish migration expert Gregg Bucken-Knapp sent text messages to his Ukrainian colleagues, offering support and assistance. These were their responses. In a series of graphic vignettes, Messages from Ukraine takes the words of Ukrainian migration professionals and transforms them into snapshots of how war affects the lives of everyday people: those who are forced to flee home and seek safety elsewhere, those who choose to stay and volunteer or fight, those who witness events unfolding from afar, and those who find themselves trapped in cities under siege. Messages from Ukraine captures a moment in time to tell a timeless story about war, displacement, determination, and resilience.
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    Multiple Barriers: The Multilevel Governance of Homelessness in Canada
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-06) Smith, Alison
    Despite decades of efforts to combat homelessness, many people continue to experience it in Canada’s major cities. There are a number of barriers that prevent effective responses to homelessness, including a lack of agreement on the fundamental question: what is homelessness? In Multiple Barriers, Alison Smith explores the forces that shape intergovernmental and multilevel governance dynamics to help better understand why, despite the best efforts of community and advocacy groups, homelessness remains as persistent as ever. Drawing on nearly 100 interviews with key actors in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as extensive participant observation, Smith argues that institutional differences across cities interact with ideas regarding homelessness to contribute to very different models of governance. Multiple Barriers shows that the genuine involvement of locally based service providers, with the development of policy, are necessary for an effective, equitable, and enduring solution to the homelessness crisis in Canada.
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    Paradoxes of Professional Regulation: In Search of Regulatory Principles
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-03) Trebilcock, Michael J.
    Occupational licensure, including regulation of the professions, dates back to the medieval period. While the guilds that performed this regulatory function have long since vanished, professional regulation continues to this day. For instance, in the United States, 22 per cent of American workers must hold licenses simply to do their jobs. While long-established professions have more settled regulatory paradigms, the case studies in Paradoxes of Professional Regulation explore other professions, taking note of incompetent services and the serious risks they pose to the physical, mental, or emotional health, financial well-being, or legal status of uninformed consumers. Michael J. Trebilcock examines five case studies of the regulation of diverse professions, including alternative medicine, mental health care provision, financial planning, immigration consulting, and legal services. Noting the widely divergent approaches to the regulation of the same professions across different jurisdictions – paradoxes of professional regulation – the book is an attempt to develop a set of regulatory principles for the future. In its comparative approach, Paradoxes of Professional Regulation gets at the heart of the tensions influencing the regulatory landscape, and works toward practical lessons for bringing greater coherence to the way in which professions are regulated.
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    Natural Resource–Based Development in Africa: Panacea or Pandora’s Box?
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-05) Grant, J. Andrew; Ovadia, Jesse Salah; Andrews, Nathan
    There is no question that Africa is endowed with abundant natural resources of different magnitudes. However, more than a decade of high commodity prices and new hydrocarbon discoveries across the continent has led countless international organizations, donor agencies, and non-governmental organizations to devote considerable attention to the potential of natural resource–based development. Natural Resource–Based Development in Africa places a particular emphasis on the actors that help us understand the extent to which resources could be transformed into broader developmental outcomes. Based on a wide variety of primary sources and fieldwork, including in-person interviews and participant observations, this collection contributes to both scholarly and policy discussions around the governance and economic development roles of local entrepreneurs, transnational firms, civil society groups, local communities, and government agencies in Africa’s natural resource sectors. Natural Resource–Based Development in Africa explores the impact that these actors have on regional trends such as resource nationalism and local procurement policies as well as grassroots-related issues such as poverty, livelihoods, gender equity, development, and human security.
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    Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era
    (University of Toronto Press, 2022-01) Buckner, Elizabeth
    Presenting an analysis of higher education in eight countries in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, Degrees of Dignity works to dismantle narratives of crisis and assert approaches to institutional reform. Drawing on policy documents, media narratives, interviews, and personal experiences, Elizabeth Buckner explores how apolitical external reform models become contested and modified by local actors in ways that are simultaneously complicated, surprising, and even inspiring. Degrees of Dignity documents how the global discourses of neoliberalism have legitimized specific policy models for higher education reform in the Arab world, including quality assurance, privatization, and internationalization. Through a multi-level and comparative analysis, this book examines how policy models are implemented, with often complex results, in countries throughout the region. Ultimately, Degrees of Dignity calls on the field of higher education development to rethink current approaches to higher education reform: rather than viewing the Arab world as a site for intervention, it argues that the Arab world can act as a source for insight on resilient higher education systems.
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    Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada
    (University of Toronto Press, 2021-07) Nguyen, Vinh; Phu, Thy
    Exploring "refuge" and "refugee" as concepts that shape Canadian nation-building both within and beyond national borders, Refugee States takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach to describing how refugees articulate their relation to and defiance of official discourses. Through close examinations of refugee movements, contexts, and subjectivities, this collection reveals how Canada has relied upon the rejection and inclusion of refugees as a crucial means of statecraft. Bringing together renowned and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines, Nguyen and Phu illuminate the historical, political, and cultural conditions that produce refugees as well as the narrative of humanitarian benevolence that persists nationally and internationally. Highlighting landmark cases, the editors and contributors together develop critical refugee studies as a framework for understanding, nuancing, and critiquing the production of Canadian humanitarian exceptionalism – the international image and discourse of Canada as a liberal, tolerant, and welcoming haven for people fleeing oppression, persecution, and unfreedom. In doing so, Refugee States offers alternative modes of understanding past and present refugee passages to and within Canada, and brings to light the many ways in which refugee subjects navigate displacement, migration, and resettlement.
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    Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity
    (University of Toronto Press, 2021-07) Bowers, Katherine; Holland, Kate
    Marking the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity takes the writer’s art – specifically the tension between experience and formal representation – as its central theme. While many critical approaches to Dostoevsky’s works are concerned with spiritual and philosophical dilemmas, this volume focuses instead on questions of design and narrative to explore Dostoevsky and the novel from a multitude of perspectives. Contributors situate Dostoevsky’s formal choices of narrative, plot, genre, characterization, and the novel itself within modernity and consider how the experience of modernity led to Dostoevsky’s particular engagement with form. Conceived as a forum for younger scholars working in new directions in Dostoevsky scholarship, this volume asks how narrative and genre shape Dostoevsky’s works, as well as how they influence the way modernity is represented. Of interest not only to readers and scholars of Russian literature but also to those curious about the genre of the novel more broadly, Dostoevsky at 200 is pathbreaking in its approach to the question of Dostoevsky’s contribution to the novel as a form.
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    Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools
    (University of Toronto Press, 2019-04) Griffith, Jane
    For nearly one hundred years, Indian boarding schools in Canada and the United States produced newspapers that were read by white settlers, government officials, and Indigenous parents. These newspapers were used as a settler colonial tool, yet within these tightly controlled chronicles there also existed sites of resistance. Illuminating and often deeply moving, this book traces colonial narratives of language, time, and place from the nineteenth century to the present day, post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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    Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law
    (University of Toronto Press, 2017-04) Suzack, Cheryl
    In Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law, Cheryl Suzack explores Indigenous women’s writing in the post-civil rights period through close-reading analysis of major texts by Leslie Marmon Silko, Beatrice Culleton Mosionier, Louise Erdrich, and Winona LaDuke. Working within a transnational framework that compares multiple tribal national contexts and U.S.–Canadian settler colonialism, Suzack sheds light on how these Indigenous writers use storytelling to engage in social justice activism by contesting discriminatory tribal membership codes, critiquing the dispossession of Indigenous women from their children, challenging dehumanizing blood quantum codes, and protesting colonial forms of land dispossession. Each chapter in this volume aligns a court case with a literary text to show how literature contributes to self-determination struggles. Situated at the intersections of critical race, Indigenous feminist, and social justice theories, Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law crafts an Indigenous-feminist literary model in order to demonstrate how Indigenous women respond to the narrow vision of law by recuperating other relationships – to themselves, the land, the community, and the settler-nation.
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    Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility
    (University of Toronto Press, 2021-03) Gez, Yonatan N.; Droz, Yvan; Rey, Jeanne; Soares, Edio
    Based on comparative ethnographic research in four countries and three continents, Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility explores the notion of "religious butinage" as a conceptual framework intended to shed light on the dynamics of everyday religious practice. Derived from the French word butiner, which refers to the foraging activity of bees and other pollinating insects, this term is employed by the authors metaphorically to refer to the "to-ing and fro-ing" of believers between religious institutions. Focused on urban, predominantly Christian settings in Brazil, Kenya, Ghana, and Switzerland, Butinage examines commonalities and differences across the four case studies and identifies religious mobility as existing at the meeting points of religious-institutional rules and narratives, social norms, and individual agency and practice. Drawing on anglophone, francophone, and lusophone academic traditions, Butinage is dedicated to a dialogue between ethnographic findings and theoretical ideas, and explores how we may rethink common conceptions of religious normativity.