Spring 2024 at AU Press

Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees | May 2024

Edited by Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Michael Frishkopf, Reza Hasmath, and Anna Kirova

Refugees face distinct challenges and are often subject to dehumanization by politicians, media, and the public. In this context, Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees provides urgent insights and policy relevant perspectives to improve refugees’ social well-being and integration. Taking a transdisciplinary approach, scholars from the social sciences, arts, and humanities, alongside practitioners and refugees, explore what it means to experience dehumanization. They consider how refugees’ experiences of dehumanization inform both epistemological and practical approaches to humanizing (or re-humanizing) refugees before, during, and after resettlement. By addressing these important issues, contributors marshall rich and multidimensional responses that draw upon our shared humanity and reveal new possibilities for change.

Yasmeen Abu-Laban is a professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. Michael Frishkopf is a professor of Ethnomusicology and the director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta, and adjunct professor, Faculty of Communication and Cultural Studies, University for Development Studies, Ghana. Reza Hasmath is a professor in political science at the University of Alberta. Anna Kirova is a professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta.

With contributions by Jeffrey M. Ayres, Abigail B. Bakan, Jalal Barzanji, Pallabi Bhattacharyya, Fariborz Birjandian, Chiedza Chikawa-Araga, Jim Gurnett, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Louise Harrington, Benjamin Ho, Jwamer Jalal, Solomon Kay-Reid, Nariya Khasanova, Thomas Mapfumo, Labe Songose, Dana Waissi, and Lori Wilkinson.

Challenging Borders: Contingencies and Consequences | August 2024

Edited by Paul McKenzie-Jones, Sheila McManus, and Julie Young

Challenging Borders: Contingencies and Consequences sets out to explore the concrete, complex effects of borders on human aspirations and lives, while at the same time underscoring the diversity of individual encounters with these deceptively invisible lines. Indigenous nations, migrants, and refugees have long known how destructive colonial boundaries can be, and this volume offers compelling new angles from which to map the geographies of oppression and resistance.

Paul McKenzie-Jones is a settler associate professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Lethbridge and an external research affiliate with the Purai Global Indigenous and Diaspora Research Center of the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power. Sheila McManus is a settler professor of history and author of Both Sides Now: Making the Alberta-Montana Borderlands, Choices and Chances: A History of Women in the U.S. West, and Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West. They are co-editor of One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests. Julie Young is associate professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in critical border studies in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Lethbridge.

With contributions by Aliya Amarshi, Lori Barkley, Claudia Donoso, Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Ryan Hall, Marilyn James, Evan Light, Anne McNevin, Michael P. A. Murphy, Sarah Naumes, Heather Parrish, Ramon Resendiz, Rosalva Resendiz, Lou Stone, and Chloe Wells.

Newly announced in the Issues in Distance Education series

Troubles Online: Ableism and Access in Higher Education | August 2024

Edited by Chelsea Temple Jones, Fady Shanouda, and Lisanne Binhammer

Online education is often heralded as a solution for accessibility to higher education; however, ableism thrives online. In this timely collection, contributors aim to trouble what online teaching looks like and think critically about how disability is addressed in online classrooms. Through narratives, poetry, interviews, and scholarly analysis, they reflect on disabled, mad, sick, and crip online pedagogy and highlight the possibilities of expanding critical standards for accessible teaching and learning. Necessarily interdisciplinary, this collection retheorizes the classroom around a justice-based approach to online pedagogy and challenges the assumptions we have around universal design. Refusing to position access as an afterthought, this collection troubles our engagement with online accessibility in uncertain and evolving times.

Chelsea Temple Jones is an associate professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University and the co-producer of Podagogies: A Learning and Teaching Podcast at Toronto Metropolitan University. Fady Shanouda is an assistant professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. Lisanne Binhammer is an educator, researcher, and designer who received her MA in Anthropology with a specialization in Digital Humanities from Carleton University.

With contributions by Felicita Arzu-Carmichael, Fiona N. Cheuk, Mina Chun, Kimberlee Collins, Jay Dolmage, Elena G. Garcia, Esther Ignagni, Donna Jeffery, Erika Johnson, Curtis Maloley, Mary McCall, Elizabeth Mohler, Jenna Reid, Kristin Smith, Hannah L. Stevens, Jessica Vorstermans, Nathan Whitlock, and Anne Zbitnew.

Hockey on the Moon: Imagination and Canada’s Game | October 2024

Jamie Dopp

Fantasy and reality come together in sports and Jamie Dopp argues that nowhere is this blurring of the borders of reality more evident than in Canadian hockey. Using imagination as a unifying theme, Dopp offers in-depth analyses of key texts of hockey literature, with a focus on how these texts reveal the imaginative possibilities of the game. Popular texts like Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “The Hockey Song,” Scott Young’s Scrubs on Skates trilogy, and Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater, as well as important literary texts like Bill Gaston’s The Good Body, Cara Hedley’s Twenty Miles, and Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse are examined. Dopp’s analysis draws on literary history and methods and explores broader topics such as the role of imagination in human culture, the significance of play, the evolution of sport in Canada and elsewhere, the history of Canada, and the history and social significance of hockey.

Jamie Dopp is an associate professor of Canadian literature at the University of Victoria. He has co-edited three collections of essays on sports literature: Now is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey with Richard Harrison; and Writing the Body in Motion: A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature and Not Hockey: Critical Essays on Canada’s Other Sport Literature with Angie Abdou.