Concordia University Press – förlag

Legal archives offer extraordinary opportunities for understanding intimacies across time and space. Family and Justice in the Archives presents a series of fascinating historical essays that unpack stories of familial, domestic, and sexual intimacy from the records left behind by legal processes, providing rich new insights about family, gender, race, sex, culture, identity, and daily life.

Contributors examine the written traces left by public proceedings that occurred in legally sanctioned spaces of social regulation, from notaries' offices to criminal and civil courtrooms to legislatures. Focusing on the past two centuries and spanning five continents, the essays explore a wide range of topics including marriage, citizenship, inheritance, indentured servitude, infanticide, juvenile justice, parental abuse, bigamy, and sex work. Mindful of the ethical questions that arise when scrutinizing the details of people's most vulnerable moments, these authors also demonstrate how individuals navigated and sometimes challenged legal prescriptions and processes in order to address systemic imbalances of power.

Family and Justice in the Archives reveals the wealth of detail that emerges from a close reading of documents generated by legal processes in the past, offering valuable new perspectives on the complex personal lives of so-called ordinary people in former times.

Originally published in 1987 during the panic around HIV/AIDS, The Regulation of Desire was the first book-length study of sexual regulation in what is currently called Canada. Drawing on his long experience in anti-capitalist groups, the gay liberation movement, anti-racist and anti-police organizing and AIDS activism, Gary Kinsman's investigation of the social forces that produce both sexual regulations and resistance and enforce queer, trans and Two-Spirit oppression laid the groundwork for subsequent studies of queer sexuality in "Canada" and beyond. It quickly became an essential work of scholarship and an expanded second edition appeared in 1996.

Tracing a history from the beginning of colonization into the twenty-first century, Kinsman's historical-materialist approach attends to the specificities of race, class, and gender to show how desires, pleasures, and sexualities have been organized and regulated by state relations—in the service of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist relations. At the same time, Kinsman documents the emergence of Indigenous, gay, lesbian, and trans resistance, and the formation of queer and trans movements and communities.

This third, expanded and updated edition of The Regulation of Desire includes new chapters on the rise of neoliberal queerness and the mainstreaming of white-defined homosexuality since the late 1990s, along with a new introduction by the author examining how the COVID-19 pandemic, the housing and poverty crisis, and the necessity of Indigenous liberation and police/prison abolition intersect with and transform the politics of queer liberation. This new edition also features a foreword by OmiSoore Dryden and afterword by Tom Hooper, plus updates to the text addressing topics such as the limitations of legal reform and same-sex marriage, and the emergence of transgender activism and abolitionist perspectives, moving far beyond limited rights approaches.

Not only an important landmark in the field of sexuality and gender studies, The Regulation of Desire is also an engaged work of activism. In it, Kinsman illuminates the centrality of sexual politics in the struggle for social transformation, pointing towards an erotic, love-filled future without sexual, gender, and racial oppression or class exploitation.

Motivated by a goal to understand the labour conditions of workers in the videogame industry and their participatory power to create decent work, Not All Fun and Games is a critical examination of a global entertainment juggernaut with revenues that top film, television, and music production combined. Jobs in the industry are heralded as the vanguard of the new economy, governments offer lucrative tax credits to lure game studios to their regions, and game developers often express commitment and passion for their work. Yet, the industry is also known for its toxic workplaces.

To understand these disparities and gain insight into twenty-first century labour conditions, Marie-Josée Legault and Johanna Weststar have carried out a comprehensive mixed-methods study of the North American industry over the past fifteen years. They combine detailed survey data from thousands of game developers with over one hundred qualitative interviews to systematically reveal labour issues such as precarity, lack of workforce diversity, unpredictable schedules, unpaid overtime, low unionization rates, worker burnout, and significant pay inequality.

Updating the theoretical concept of citizenship at work, the authors connect these labour issues to a fundamental lack of voice and representation in the workplace. They determine that videogame workers and others in contemporary project-based work environments lack agency in regulating their work and lack fundamental protections. Not All Fun and Games comprehensively documents conditions in the North American industry and highlights ways to counter workers' lack of voice and representation in their workplaces to better create healthy, equitable, and inclusive workplaces.

An artist, curator, critic, and teacher, Ian Carr-Harris has been a central figure in Toronto's art scene since the 1970s. By collecting his impressive output of essays, critical experiments, and reviews into a single volume, Tracings documents the growth of conceptual art and postmodernism in Canadian art, as well as the expansion of mediums and spaces, while providing insights into methods of representation and the role of criticism in contemporary art.

In clear and intelligent prose, Carr-Harris offers detailed studies of individual artists and exhibitions as well as theoretically informed reflections on broader cultural concerns. Whether writing about the complexities involved in the construction and transmission of knowledge, meaning, and historical narrative; discussing the material matters of government cultural funding, patronage, and artist-run centres; or describing his own process and artworks, these pieces reveal a literary love of language and a nuanced and investigative mind at work. Throughout his writing, he considers themes of identity, cultural nationalism, postcolonialism, institutionalism, the act of viewing, and relations of power.

An introduction by Dan Adler situates Carr-Harris's work within the context of his contemporaries, collaborators, and cultural environment, pointing out the mutually reinforcing qualities and relationships between his art and his writing. Covering decades of critical thought and engagement, Tracings confirms why Ian Carr-Harris has indelibly written himself into Canadian art.

The contemporary post-secondary classroom has become a flashpoint in public debate on gender and sexuality, with controversy over gender-inclusive policies, "trigger warnings," and "cancel culture" that have been misrepresented by opportunistic and divisive voices within and outside of the education sector. However, gender and sexuality studies scholars have long engaged in these debates over pedagogy and closer study of gender and sexuality classroom practices reveals constructive and transformative ways of learning that grapple with power, conflict, discomfort, and safety in the classroom. Reading the Room collects candid discussions of classroom experiences from instructors and students throughout Canada to provide guidance to educators on often-fraught issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and decolonization. Working from a place of coalition building, this volume is a frank, insightful, and pragmatic invitation to share different pedagogical practices with educators in a range of academic disciplines.

Contributors to this volume discuss an array of topics including asymmetrical power relations between students and teachers, how students and professors learn from each other, how to negotiate conflict in a classroom, and how to be self-reflective about methods of teaching and learning. They also consider debates around trigger warnings and students' expectations, discuss methods for curriculum selection and pedagogical practices, reflect on what it is like to embody a subject one teaches, and show how university equity, diversity, and inclusion work is often offloaded to overburdened racialized students and precariously employed staff.

A thoughtful and generous work, Reading the Room shows how teachers and students can navigate the difficulty and discomfort of contentious topics and learn more from each other.

Cuban-born and Mexico-based Clara Porset is renowned for her md-century modern furniture and interior design and for her collaborations with architects, such as Luis Barragán and Mario Pani. She was also an accomplished critic and writer. Living Design collects Porset's essays, reviews, and lectures to highlight her role as an influential thinker, educator, and practitioner. This volume insightfully contextualizes the politics that shaped Porset's design principles, charts the influence of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College on her work, and reveals the period's fusion of local adaptations and modernist principles that made Mexico a major centre of modernist design.

At a time when many practitioners believed that design could only be modernized by replacing hand craftsmanship with mechanization, Porset valued both approaches for their distinctive qualities, and urged others to do the same. Through her writings, she encouraged efforts to catalyze local design communities during a period of rapid technological and social change. With essays by historian Randal Sheppard and design curator and scholar Ana Elena Mallet, an introduction by volume editors Zoë Ryan and Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, and explanatory notes on the people and publishing forums in Porset's circle, Living Design makes available works never before published in English, and with only limited circulation in the Spanish language, in order to recover an important and neglected voice in global modernism.

Concordia University at 50: A Collective History celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the merging of Loyola College and Sir George Williams University in Montreal in August 1974. Distinct from traditional institutional histories, this volume approaches Concordia University's history from the ground up by sharing a plurality of voices from across the university over time. Fifty contributions from faculty, staff, students, and alumni, present stories of a vibrant community and its activities, in a multilayered collection of professional and personal reflections, essays, and oral histories conducted with participants and observers of key events.

Providing insights into the early political pressures that inspired Concordia's formation, the growing pains of its merger among its four faculties, as well as the development of new programs such as dance, theological studies, and études françaises, this book is a testament to an urban university formed by its many constituents and by the multilingual city and the complex province that is its home. Enriched with copious and colourful archival documents, photographs, and public artworks that grace these urban campuses, Concordia University at 50 highlights the great range of activities, causes, innovations, and debates that emerge from educational institutions but extend well beyond the classroom.

Following the Second World War, Montreal earned a reputation as a North American hotbed of eroticism due to its Red-Light District, nightclub scene, and pornography industry. Although this erotic environment had a significant presence in the art and media of the period, the topic has been neglected by scholars. The Pornographic Delicatessen: Mid-century Montreal's Erotic Art Media and Spaces offers an important examination of the development of erotic art and design in the city's postwar and Quiet Revolution-era.

Matthew Purvis surveys a range of erotic materials to rediscover nearly forgotten artworks in a period that expanded definitions of what could be considered art. He stresses the confluence of visual art and film, magazines, and journalism during the period, as formal models passed from surrealism and automatism into the evolution of a Quebec-specific variation of Pop Art, ti-pop.

A deeply researched work, The Pornographic Delicatessen shows how eroticism was central to marginal art as well as how aspects were adapted and assimilated into the expanding field of institutionalized art being constructed through state intervention. 

Where is sexuality, especially queer sexuality, in architecture? The House Is (Not) a Prison approaches this question from a radically new position, looking not for a theory of queer architecture, but rather for a queer theory of architecture. Starting from a reconsideration of the foundational principles of architecture, Colin Ripley demonstrates how the division of space steals land from the commons and forces separations and categories. In the process, queerness is created as an indispensable outside to architecture's disciplinary interior.

Tracing the evolution of architecture from the late Enlightenment to the postwar twentieth century, Ripley shows how distinctions between the prison and the domestic home began to collapse in nineteenth-century initiatives to rehabilitate the criminalized, and blurred even further with the popularization of glass and concrete in the modernist cell. He examines sites such as Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, Guillaume-Abel Blouet's Mettray penal colony, Fontevrault prison, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Philip Johnson's Glass House, and the architecture of North American suburbs to better understand how structures both facilitate and regulate queer sexuality. A parallel text in the endnotes connects Jean Genet's prison-set writings to buttress the relationship between architectural features and queerness. A provocative and surprising work, with a foreword by Slavoj Zizek, The House Is (Not) a Prison advances understandings of queer space.

Commemorations of deceased writers can often take on a life of their own—from the stately and serious to the kitschy and commercial. In Literary Life After Death, Carole Gerson categorizes and analyzes the ways in which writers have been commemorated in Canada to show how tributes have changed over time and in response to evolving national and social concerns.

First focusing on officially sanctioned commemorations by governments in objects such as coins, stamps, and plaques, as well as historic sites and place names, the book then turns to commemorations driven by local communities and non-profit organizations in various house museums, literary tourist sites, statues, parks, and other markers. The material culture and online tributes of amateurs and hobbyists are discussed as well as literary commemorations, when later authors incorporate or revisit deceased authors as characters in new works of literature. In doing so, this work identifies commonalities among commemorations as well as the under-representation of groups such as women authors, racialized authors, queer writers, and Indigenous writers in Canada.

Brimming with examples and discussions of dozens of writers, Literary Life After Death takes an expansive and often-amusing approach to literary studies and cultural history.

Contemporary concerns about climate change often overlook past periods of upheaval despite the insights they can provide. In Climate Change Cookery Madeline Bassnett turns back to the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that peaked in severity from around 1550 to 1700. Studying sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recipe collections, almanacs, diaries, manuscripts, and weather pamphlets, she details the close-knit relationship between weather, food scarcity, and famine.

Through an examination of references to the weather as a key element or influence on food practices, Bassnett shows how early modern households understood seasonal food cycles and developed systems to become more resilient during an unpredictable period. Identifying and discussing practices involving "weathering," "seasoning," and "preserving," this book investigates how perceptions of food insecurity, alongside strategies for resilience, were shared among networks of readers. Authors and works of particular focus include Hugh Plat's Sundrie Newe and Artificiall Remedies Against Famine (1596) and Delightes for Ladies (1600), the seventeenth-century manuscript recipe books of Ann Fanshawe and Mary Evelyn, and Hannah Woolley's The Queen-Like Closet (1670).

Connecting the historical record with modern concerns about disruptions to food production and distribution, Climate Change Cookery demonstrates how people previously increased their ecological and local awareness.

So many modes of culture that are essential to artistic communities are also missed when research and policy focus primarily on economic success stories in the so-called creative industries. But what about the non-commercial, the non-profits, the volunteers, the temporary spaces and groups? And what about the glorious failures? Making Worlds and the book series it initiates, Cultural Production and Everyday Life, corrects these oversights by spotlighting the small-scale cultural production of amateurs, hobbyists, autodidacts, and various countercultural scenes.

Miranda Campbell and Benjamin Woo advocate for an ecological view of the grassroots forces that sustain and develop cultural and artistic activity. The authors ground this book in examples from their own involvement in and research with cultural communities such as comics creators, game players, music scenes, zine-makers, artist co-operatives, and fan cultures. Serving as a response to some of the early twenty-first century's gig-economy boosterism, this is also a book that seeks to document how culture is not only consumed but produced in everyday practices.

Broadening the field of cultural studies and understandings of what constitutes culture, Making Worlds recognizes and celebrates the work of the chronically unsupported, underfunded, and the precariously situated in spaces at risk of eviction or gentrification.