Items

• Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze
  Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze examines a series of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictional works that adapt Greco-Roman myths of the catabasis, the heroic journey to the underworld.
• The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago
  Alison Mountz traces the global chain of remote detention centers used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical ideal. The Death of Asylum won the 2020 Globe Award from the Association of American Geographers for advancing public understandings of geography.
• Drought Challenges: Policy Options for Developing Countries
  This book provides an understanding of the occurrence and impacts of droughts for developing countries and vulnerable sub-groups, such as women and pastoralists. A multi-sectoral perspective of the human dimensions of drought in developing countries is presented, featuring the latest research by scholars from drought-affected countries in Africa and Asia. The impacts of droughts on livelihoods are a key factor in development in many dryland and agriculturally-dependent nations. This is a co-edited volume with contributions primarily from emerging scholars in Africa and South Asia, which represent the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (Mapedza/South Africa), the Secretariat for the Convention to Combat Desertification (Tsegai/Eritrea) and the German Development Institute (Bruentrup/Germany).
• A National Project: Canada’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Experience.
  Syrian Refugee Resettlement in Canada: A National Project is a detailed examination of the experiences of refugees and receiving communities during Canada's Operation Syrian Refugee from 2015 to 2016.
• Beyond the Finish-Line: Images, Evidence, and the History of the Photo-Finish
  In the 1880s photographers and sports enthusiasts confidently declared the end of dead heats in sporting competition. Reflecting a broader social belief in technology, proponents of the camera stressed that the device could provide definitive proof of who won and who lost. Yet despite this remedy for the inadequate human eye, competitive races between horses, boats, and bicycles ended too close to call a sole champion. More than a century later, when cameras can subdivide the second into ten-thousandths and beyond, athletes continue to cross the finish line in ties.
• Visibility and Control: Cameras and Certainty In Governing
  Visibility and Control: Cameras and Certainty in Governing addresses the ways in which camera-produced images are used to support governmental authority. The text begins by examining some of the basic levels at which the body interacts with media, and then expands the scope of the analysis to consider the use of CCTV in urban environments and how that affects the experience of space. This shows how the determination of the subject and the observer is affected by interaction with and exposure to images produced by cameras.
• Decolonizing Educational Assessment: Ontario Elementary Students and the EQAO
  This book examines the history of standardized testing in Ontario leading to the current context and its impact on racialized identities, particularly on Grade 3 students, parents, and educators.
• Rumble and Crash: Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film
  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein.
• Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America. Multicultural Perspectives on Political, Cultural and Artistic Representations of Immigration
  The first decades of the new millennium have been marked by major political changes. Although The West has wished to revisit politics concerning migration policies, refugee status, integration, secularism, and the dismantling of communitarianism, events like the Syrian refugee crisis, terrorist attacks in France in 2015-16, and the 2008 economic crisis have resurrected concepts such as national identity, integration, citizenship and re-shaping state policies in many developed countries. Analyzing the cultural and political tensions between minority groups and the state in light of political events that question ideas of citizenship and belonging to a multicultural nation, the chapters in this volume serve as a testimonial to the multiple views on the political and public perception of multicultural practices and their national and international applicability to our current geopolitical context.
• Deleuze in Children's Literature
  Jane Newland explores how Deleuzian concepts can enhance and invigorate our readings of children's literature, whose implied readership masks much paradox. She focuses on children’s texts by some of the authors who fascinate Deleuze, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, André Dhôtel, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and Michel Tournier.
• Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited
  Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited showcases cutting-edge work by renowned researchers and proposes new directions for the study of films produced by American motion picture studios between 1917 and 1960.
• Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare
  Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare synthesizes Laura Mulvey’s male gaze and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s stare into a new critical lens, the filmic stare, in order to understand and analyze the visual construction of disability in adaptations of Shakespearean drama. The book explores the intersections of adaptation studies, film studies, Shakespeare studies, and disability studies to analyze twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of both physical disability and "madness" in global cinematic film, television film, and digital broadcast cinema in Shakespeare’s works.
• Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film
  Criminalization/Assimilation traces how Classical Hollywood films constructed America’s image of Chinese Americans from their criminalization as unwanted immigrants to their eventual acceptance when assimilated citizens.
• W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator
  W. G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator considers the possibility of redemption in the work of one of the twentieth century’s most significant authors.
• Community Music at the Boundaries
  Community Music at the Boundaries explores how music enhances lives in community. Some of the topics explored in the volume include education and change, music and Indigenous communities, health and wellness, music by incarcerated persons, and cultural identity. By shining a light on boundaries, this volume, which includes multiple contributors from Laurier, provides a wealth of international perspectives and knowledge about the ways that music enhances lives.