New books in 2021

Education Law, 6e, by J.C. Blokhuis, Jonathan Feldman, Michael Imber, Tyll van Geel, Routledge, 2021.

Education Law, Sixth Edition provides a comprehensive survey of the legal problems and issues confronting school leaders, teachers, and policymakers today. Court cases accompanied by explanation and analysis can help aspiring educators understand the subtlety and richness of the law. Accordingly, each of the 12 thematic chapters begins with an overview, concludes with a summary, and balances an explanation of the important principles of education law with actual court decisions to illuminate those issues most relevant for educational policy and practice.

Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century, by Alexander Lanoszka, Polity, 2021.

Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to explore fully the politics that shape these security arrangements – from their initial formation through the various challenges that test them and, sometimes, lead to their demise. Across six thematic chapters, Alexander Lanoszka challenges conventional wisdom that has dominated our understanding of how military alliances have operated historically and into the present. Although military alliances today may seem uniquely hobbled by their internal difficulties, Lanoszka argues that they are in fact, by their very nature, prone to dysfunction.

Dress in Mediterranean Antiquity: Greeks, Romans, Jews, Christians, by Alicia J. Batten and Kelly Olson, T & T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2021.

Insights from anthropology, religious studies, biblical studies, sociology, classics, and Jewish studies are here combined to provide a cutting-edge guide to dress and religion in the Greco-Roman World and the Mediterranean basin. Clothing, jewellery, cosmetics, and hairstyles are among the many aspects examined to show the variety of functions of dress in communication and in both establishing and defending identity.

The volume begins by reviewing how scholars in the fields of classics, anthropology, religious studies, and sociology examine dress. The second section then looks at materials, including depictions of clothing in sculpture and in Egyptian mummy portraits. The third (and largest) part of the book then examines dress in specific contexts, beginning with Greece and Rome and going on to Jewish and Christian dress, with a specific focus on the intersection between dress, clothing and religion.

Constitutional Pariah: Reference re Senate Reform and the Future of Parliament, by Emmett Macfarlane, UBC Press, 2021.

Constitutional Pariah explores the aftermath of Reference re Senate Reform. In its first significant attempt to articulate the boundaries between key procedures in the constitutional amending formula, the Court ruled out major unilateral alteration of the Senate by Parliament. Ironically, the decision resulted in one of the most sweeping parliamentary reforms in Canadian history, creating a pathway to informal changes in the appointments process that have curbed patronage and partisanship. Emmett Macfarlane situates this incisive analysis within the context of the roles of the upper house, its evolving performance, and historical efforts at reform.

Despite reinvigorating the Senate, Reference re Senate Reform has far-reaching implications for constitutional reform in other contexts. Macfarlane’s sharp critique suggests that the Court’s nebulous approach to the amending formula raises the spectre of a frozen constitution, unable to evolve with the country.

Dilemmas of Free Expression, by Emmett Macfarlane, University of Toronto Press, 2021.

Free expression is under threat. Social media and "fake news," misinformation, and disinformation have prompted governments to propose new forms of regulation that are deeply challenging to free expression. Hate speech, far-right populism, campus speech debates, and censorship consistently make headlines in Canada and abroad.

Dilemmas of Free Expression offers forward-looking appraisals of ways to confront challenging moral issues, policy problems, and controversies that pay heed to the fundamental right to free expression. The essays in this volume offer timely analyses of the law, policy, and philosophical challenges, and social repercussions to our understanding of expressive freedom in relation to government obligations and public discourse.

Free expression and its limits are multifaceted, deeply complex, inherently values-based, and central to the ability of a society to function. Dilemmas of Free Expression addresses the challenges of limiting free expression across a host of issues through an analyses by leading and emerging voices in a number of disciplines, including political science, law, philosophy, and Indigenous studies.

Law, Migration and Precarious Labour: Ecotechnics of the Social, by Anastasia Tataryn, Routledge, 2021.

Providing a radical new approach to labour migration, this book challenges the prevailing legal and political construction of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer, whilst at the same time reimagining this irregularity as the basis of an alternative, post-capitalist, sociality. 

1937, Talks in Yan'anThomas Arthur Bisson (Translated into Chinese by Yan Li), including an essay by Yan Li, People's Literature Publishing House (In Chinese), 2021.

Centroamérica y los estudios centroamericanos en la periferia del hispanismo (Special Issue), edited by David Rozotto, Canadian Journal of Hispanic Studies, 2021.

"Central America and Central American Studies in the Periphery of Hispanism" is the first special issue of the Canadian Journal of Hispanic Studies dedicated to Central America. Contributors to this collective volume demonstrate the relevance of Central American arts, literatures and cultures within the Americas. The sociopolitical history of Central America, although similar to that of Latin America, shows a particular path because Central Americans have had to deal with the large shadow of the United States that made of this isthmian region its own backyard. Despite this fact, the seven Central American nations have survived and demonstrated that their union has produced the strength with which they gained their independence, defended their regional sovereignty, and achieved democracy and peace. This issue is an homage to the cultural expression of Central America and intends to be a Canadian contribution to Central American literary and cultural studies.

Ethnic Constructs, Royal Dynasties and Historical Geography around the Black Sea Littoral (Geographica Historica 43), edited by Altay Coskun, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021.

Ethnicity is a social construct within an ideological framework, ancient or modern. This wisdom has penetrated most scholarly disciplines, but its reception is delayed in Black Sea studies, where essentialist views still prevail. Nationalism, Rostovtzeff's culture-history and Marxist-Leninist materialism have cast longer shadows on this part of the ancient world. Likewise, the balance between documentary sources and ancient literature needs redressing. The latter has often been either accepted in a positivist manner or rejected due to perceived inconsistencies. More rewarding is to try to understand what exactly the ancient authors knew or intended. In this light, the contributors discuss the concept of Sarmatization, the implications of rural versus urban cults, ethnic hierarchies, interaction patterns in colonial settings, inversions of barbarian stereotypes, cultural affiliations of Bosporan kings, imperial policies of Pharnakes I and II, foreign princes on the Ara Pacis Augustae, the reorganization of Pontos under Pompey and Deiotaros, the sanctuary of Leukothea in Kolchis, Christian urbanism in Scythia Minor and crop selections of Anatolian farmers. Though selective, the book covers the four coastlines of the Black Sea, ranging from the archaic to the Byzantine periods.

Varieties of Austerity, by Heather Whiteside, Stephen McBride, Bryan Evans, Bristol University Press, 2021.

Identifying continuity and variety in crisis-driven austerity restructuring across Canada, Denmark, Ireland and Spain, this important book uncovers how austerity can be categorized into different dynamic types, and exposes the economic, social, and political implications of the varieties of austerity.

The Political Economy of Automotive Industrialization in East Asia, by Richard F. Doner, Gregory W. Noble, John Ravenhill, Oxford University Press, 2021.

This book offers a political economy explanation for the striking cross-national differences in strategies and performance among East Asia’s automotive industries. Some countries—China, South Korea, and Taiwan—have successfully pursued “intensive” growth strategies by increasing local value added based on domestic inputs and technological competencies. Malaysia has attempted but failed to pursue this path. In contrast, Thailand has become a champion of “extensive” growth, relying on foreign assemblers and their suppliers to achieve an impressive expansion of production, assembly, and exports. Latecomer Indonesia has followed Thailand with some success, whereas the Philippines has remained an automotive backwater.

Through cross-case and within-case analyses of the seven countries, the book argues that variation is a function of the institutional and political contexts in which firms operate. Different strategies require different institutions and institutional capacities. Intensive development is especially institutionally demanding. Effective institutions emerge when political leaders face severe claims on resources (security threats and domestic pressures for welfare improvement) in the absence of easily accessible revenues to satisfy such needs. Brief comparisons with Brazil, Mexico, and other developing countries confirm the utility of the analytic framework. This explanation is superior to neoclassical accounts. It is consistent with but provides more insight than other prominent approaches to development: national innovation systems, global value chains, and developmental states. New challenges facing auto assemblers and suppliers, such as the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles, will call heavily upon the institutional capacities highlighted in this book. 

Economics and the Sports Industry: Theory and Applications, by Corey Van de Waal, Kendall Hunt, 2021.

Most industries provide a workable context for teaching the core concepts of economic theory. As an instructor for core microeconomic theory classes throughout my teaching career, I have found that students respond favorably to examples and contexts that they can readily relate to. This text offers student an opportunity to study microeconomic topics, macroeconomic topics, and econometric topics in the fascinating context of the sports industry.

Key Topics Include: supply and demand, market context with a particular focus on Monopoly, the structure and organization of the sports industry, the importance of media, fantasy sports, sport betting and e-sport and labour economics in the context of the sports industry.

The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, by Ken Hirschkop, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

In this introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, Ken Hirschkop presents a compact, readable, detailed, and sophisticated exposition of all of Bakhtin's important works. Using the most up-to-date sources and the new, scholarly editions of Bakhtin's texts, Hirschkop explains Bakhtin's influential ideas, demonstrates their relevance and usefulness for literary and cultural analysis, and sets them in their historical context. In clear and concise language, Hirschkop shows how Bakhtin's ideas have changed the way we understand language and literary texts. Authoritative and accessible, this Cambridge Introduction is the most comprehensive and reliable account of Bakhtin and his work yet available.

Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices, edited by Shana MacDonaldBrianna I. Wiens, Michelle MacArthur, Milena Radzikowska, Rowan &Littlefield, 2021.

The collection of essays outlines how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces of solidarity and to articulate a critical politics that refuses popular forms of individual, consumerist, white feminist empowerment in favor of collective, tangible action. Including scholars and activists from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, these essays help to catalog the ways in which feminists are organizing online to mobilize different feminist, queer, trans, disability, reproductive justice, and racial equality movements. Together, these perspectives offer a comprehensive overview of how feminists are employing the tools of the internet for political change. Grounded in intersectional feminism––a perspective that attends to the interrelatedness of power and oppression based on race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and other identities––this book gathers provocations, analyses, creative explorations, theorizations, and case studies of networked feminist activist practices. In doing so, this collection archives important work already done within feminist digital cultures and acts as a vital blueprint for future feminist action.

Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs, by Henry Adam Svec, Invisible Publishing, 2021.

A grossly inaccurate “memoir” about Canadian folk legends. Henry Adam Svec has been pushing boundaries in Canadian folklore since he unearthed songs by CFL players in Library and Archives Canada, thereby thrusting himself into the scene—and the media spotlight. Those spartan poems are finally included in this anthology, in addition to the fruits of his subsequent expeditions, but there is much more besides, including honest accounts of the folklorist’s myriad trials and tribulations. This experimental and genre-defying book mixes the adventurous energies of Alan Lomax and Stompin’ Tom, the intertextual conceptualism of Vladimir Nabokov and Mark Z. Danielewski, and the searing intensity of Elizabeth Smart and Chris Kraus.

The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History, by Eric Helleiner, Cornell University Press, 2021.

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West.

Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States.

Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, by John Savarese, Ohio State University Press, 2021.

John Savarese reassesses early relationships between Romantic poetry and the sciences, uncovering a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature and demonstrating earlier engagement of cognitive approaches than has heretofore been examined at length. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers framed poetry as a window into the mind’s original, underlying structures of thought and feeling. While that Romantic argument helped forge a well-known relationship between poetry and introspective or private consciousness, Savarese argues that it also made poetry the staging ground for a more surprising set of debates about the naturally social mind. From James Macpherson’s forgeries of ancient Scottish poetry to Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, poets mined traditional literatures and recent scientific conjectures to produce alternate histories of cognition, histories that variously emphasized the impersonal, the intersubjective, and the collective. By bringing together poetics, philosophy of mind, and the physiology of embodied experience—and with major studies of James Macpherson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott—Romanticism’s Other Minds recovers the interdisciplinary conversations at the heart of Romantic-era literary theory.

The Precarious Lives of Syrians: Migration, Citizenship, and Temporary Protection in Turkey, by Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan and Kim Rygiel, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021.

Turkey now hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, more than 3.6 million of the 12.7 million displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Many of them are subject to an unpredictable temporary protection, forcing them to live under vulnerable and insecure conditions.

The Precarious Lives of Syrians examines the three dimensions of the architecture of precarity: Syrian migrants' legal status, the spaces in which they live and work, and their movements within and outside Turkey. The difficulties they face include restricted access to education and healthcare, struggles to secure employment, language barriers, identity-based discrimination, and unlawful deportations. Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan, and Kim Rygiel show that Syrians confront their precarious conditions by engaging in cultural production and community-building activities, and by undertaking perilous journeys to Europe, allowing them to claim spaces and citizenship while asserting their rights to belong, to stay, and to escape. The authors draw on migration policies, legal and scholarly materials, and five years of extensive field research with local, national, and international humanitarian organizations, and with Syrians from all walks of life

She Stitched the Stars: A Story of Ellen Harding Baker's Solar System Quilt, by Jennifer Harris, Albert Whitman and Co., 2021.

In 1876 Ellen Harding Baker began stitching an extraordinary quilt, one that accurately depicted our solar system. Ellen, an Iowa storekeeper’s wife and a mother, had a curiosity that reached far beyond the stratosphere. Today, the quilt hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. This lyrical story imagines the creation of the quilt from the perspective of Ellen’s daughters, who, like their mother, lived in a time when girls and women were expected to limit their pursuit of knowledge, and who may have been inspired to dream bigger and look farther.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan, by Andrew Hunt, University of Massachusetts Press, 2021.

In the moments before his weekly radio address hit the airwaves in 1984, Ronald Reagan made an off-the-record joke: “I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." As reports of the stunt leaked to the press, many Americans did not find themselves laughing along with the president. Long a fervent warrior against what he termed the “Evil Empire," by the mid-1980s, Reagan confronted growing domestic opposition to his revival of the Cold War. While numerous histories of the era have glorified the “Decade of Greed," historian Andrew Hunt instead explores the period's robust political and cultural dissent.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes focuses on a striking array of protest movements that took up issues such as the nuclear arms race, U.S. intervention in Central America, and American investments in South Africa. Hunt's new history of the eighties investigates how film, television, and other facets of popular culture critiqued Washington's Cold War policies and reveals that activists and cultural rebels alike posed a more meaningful challenge to the Cold War's excesses than their predecessors in the McCarthy era.