Temple University Press’ NEH-Funded Open Access Labor Studies Titles Find New Readers Among Rutgers Students

This week in North Philly Notes, we interview Rutgers University Professor Will Brucher about Temple University Press’ NEH-funded Open Access Labor Titles.

In 2017, Temple University Press and Temple University Libraries received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make a selection of the Press’s outstanding out-of-print labor studies titles freely available online as part of the Humanities Open Book Program. All 32 titles are now available on the Temple University Press website, where they can be read online or downloaded in EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats. The titles are also available open access on JSTOR and Project MUSE.

To get a better sense of how these books are being used by new readers, Temple University Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Specialist Annie Johnson recently spoke with Rutgers University Assistant Teaching Professor William Brucher about how he has integrated the books into his own course curriculum.

First off, tell us a little bit about the class you are teaching this semester.

Labor and Employment History is an online graduate class in the Master of Labor and Employment Relations (MLER) program of the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There are 28 students enrolled in the class. Some are full-time students who will pursue careers as labor relations and human resource professionals in the private and public sectors, work for state and federal agencies like the Department of Labor and OSHA, or work as organizers and representatives for labor unions. Some are part-time students who already work full-time jobs in those fields.

How you are using the Temple University Press open access labor studies and work books in your class?

I have used several of the books in my weekly reading assignments. For instance, I assigned primary source documents from The Black Worker, Volume 1, edited by Philip S. Foner and Ronald W. Lewis, for a unit on race and labor in the nineteenth century, and chapters from Alone in a Crowd: Women in the Trades Tell Their Stories, edited by Jean Reith Schroedel, for a unit on gender and labor in the 1960s and 1970s.

In addition, each student in the class must complete an 8- to 12-page research paper on a labor history topic. This year, I asked my students to choose their topic based on the books in the Temple University Press labor studies and work collection, because it is such an excellent (and free!) resource. 

How are students approaching the assignment? 

The students have completed their first drafts and will do peer reviews before turning in their final drafts at the end of the semester.

They’re using nearly every book in the collection. Several students are exploring topics in women’s labor history, using Alone in a Crowd, edited by Jean Reith Schroedel; A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike, edited by Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson; Labor Education for Women Workers, edited by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer; Sisterhood and Solidarity, edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh and Mary Frederickson; Mary Heaton Vorse by Dee Garrison; and Sisterhood Denied, by Dolores Janieweski. One student is writing a comparative paper on women clerical workers in the U.S. and the U.K. using Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter, by Margery W. Davies, and Sameul Cohn’s The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing.  

Some students are writing about the experiences of Black workers using the volumes edited by Foner and Lewis. Others are writing about the difficulties encountered by unions in the second half of the twentieth century using The Crisis of American Labor, by Barbara S. Griffith and On Strike at Hormel, by Hardy Green. Another student is writing a paper on OSHA using Liberalism at Work, by Charles Noble, along with chapters from Alone in a Crowd and Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present, edited by James Green.  One student is writing about Philadelphia labor using Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850, by Bruce Laurie, and Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956, by Paul Lyons and another is writing about Massachusetts labor using With Our Hands, by Mark Erlich and David Goldberg.

Can you talk about the importance of this collection?

There has been an explosion of impressive labor studies scholarship over the past 50 years published by university presses, including Temple. Unfortunately, much of that scholarship has gone out of print, and resides primarily on the shelves of university and college libraries, making it inaccessible to many. It is wonderful that Temple University Press and Libraries pursued an NEH grant to republish some of the Press’s out-of-print labor studies online and open-access, free and available for anyone to use. I will continue to use the collection in the classes I teach and in my own research. Other labor studies and labor education faculty I know from around the country are also excited about this collection and are using it in their work.

Anything else you’d like to share with us?

Thanks to the Temple University Press and Libraries staff for your hard work in making this collection freely available!

Writing Latinx Environmentalisms

This week in North Philly Notes, Sarah D. Wald, David Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray, co-editors of Latinx Environmentalisms, tell “A Story of Inspiration and Acompañamiento.”

Latinx Environmentalisms is a collection of original essays and original interviews that explores the challenges and possibilities of bringing the environmental humanities and Latinx* studies together. The collection seeks to account for the variety of ways in which Latinx cultures are often (although certainly not always) environmental, but hardly ever identify as environmentalist. In this book, we argue that Latinx art, literature, film, and other forms of creative productions redefine and broaden what counts as environmentalism, even as they sometimes reject the term entirely. Part of how Latinx artists redefine these terms is by pointing out the racism inherent in some of the assumptions of environmentalism. We argue that Latinx art, literature, film, and other creative works hold the potential to make visible key aspects of the exploitation of the Earth, and in particular the ways in which colonization and capitalism exacerbate it. Latinx creative works often offer deep and significant insights about environmental issues, environmental ethics, and the intertwining of environmental ills with the social ills of racism, capitalism, and colonialism.

Although the book seeks to build new bridges in environmental humanities and Latinx studies scholarship, it is just as much a story of building collegial and friendship bridges between the editors and contributors. In this post,we share how the book is also a story of collaboration, of how academic life looks and feels behind the pages of our scholarly products. We might even say that we offer this collection as a product of “acompañamiento.” Anthropologist Mariela Nuñez-Janes describes the concept as a process of creating networks of support and solidarity in a way that extends notions of kinship.

The story of this collaboration begins at a couple of different conferences in 2013: both the First Biennial Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism conference at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) held at the University of Kansas. The four of us had known and admired each other for some time. We met to discuss the idea of producing an edited volume together. Although each of us knew about pockets of environmental humanities work that considered Latinx literature and culture, and a very tiny group of Latinx studies scholars who thought about the environment, we kept talking about how much there was to say about literary authors such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Ana Castillo, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua, visual artists such as Ester Hernandez, and filmmakers such as Alex Rivera. Our initial conversations got us to realize that there was a huge and largely untapped archive of material that had unique things to say about the environment.

We also realized that there was a growing body of scholarship in Latinx studies that was already doing some of this work. Scholars such as Kamala Platt and María Herrera-Sobek had pioneered thinking about environmental themes in Chicana/o/x literature. Social scientists Laura Pulido and Devon Peña were also early leaders in thinking about Chicana/o/x environmentalisms, as was Robert Melchior Figueroa in the discipline of philosophy. We looked to some of our contributors, such as Randy Ontiveros, Gabriela Nuñez, and Jennifer García Peacock who identified their work as environmental, and others such as Paula Moya and Richard T. Rodríguez, who didn’t identify as doing environmental work, but who were clearly engaging with important ecocritical concepts.

Our question then became: how do we put these people into conversation with one another in order to highlight the innovative environmental thinking they identified in their works? 

Our collaboration was aided by some key developments in our individual scholarship. Priscilla wrapped up her book project, Writing the Goodlife (Arizona UP, 2016), which made an important intervention in how Chicanx/Mexican American cultural production is treated in the environmental field. Rather than focusing on texts where mainstream environmental ideas appear in Mexican American writing, Writing the Goodlife asks us to redefine “environmental” to see long-standing traditions, identities, cultural sensibilities, and forms of resistance as environmental, and to interrogate the exclusion of these expressions in the mainstream environmental canon.

Sarah D. Wald’s book, The Nature of California (Washington, 2016), was also just coming out. In it, she examined the ways writings of Japanese American, Filipino, and Mexican American farmers and farmworkers contested their exclusion from national identity through depictions of nature and land. Like Priscilla, she was redefining where and how we look for environmental ideas and what environmentalism may entail.

David, too, was realizing that much of his interest in urban literary expression and Latinx identity had environmental resonance, but only if we redefined what that meant– not only “wilderness” but also a sense of space, negotiations of ecological costs and benefits, etc.. David became particularly interested in how some communities bring a keen sense of “environment” to how they inhabit places, particularly in laying claim to cultural ownership over urban neighborhoods like New York’s Spanish Harlem.

And Sarah Jaquette Ray’s research in The Ecological Other (Arizona UP, 2013) on how environmental discourse can define immigrants as threats to American national security vis-a-vis its borderland ecosystems also situated her work as pushing this intersection.

All told, the four of us found each other through this research on Latinx environmentalisms, which kept landing us in the same places, such as the John Jay Latinx Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Executive Council meetings (on which Priscilla and Sarah W. both served as Diversity Officers, Sarah R. served as Vice President, and Sarah R. and Priscilla as executive council members), the American Studies Association conferences, the Latino Studies Association conferences, and David and Sarah W’s home institution, the University of Oregon, having conversations about where the field might go, and laying the groundwork for working together.

We are so grateful to these conferences and professional organizations for providing the infrastructure for us to have these early exploratory conversations.

In other settings– especially in our classrooms, communities, and committees– we sensed a great interest in this intersection of Latinx and environmental concerns, but knew there was a dearth of scholarship on it. We were particularly struck by the enthusiasm our students shared with us. For example, in David’s courses on Latinx Sci-Fi and Environmental Thinking and Sarah W’s Environmental Humanities 203 courses at the University of Oregon, students were wildly enthusiastic about analyzing canonical authors like Leopold and Thoreau through lenses of race and ethnicity, as well as reading authors that had not been in the environmental canon through environmental lenses, such as Viramontes and Castillo. Both of the Sarahs and Priscilla led a 2015 ASLE workshop on Latinx Environmental Pedagogies, which reinforced our sense that students were pushing these boundaries.

We landed on the notion of “recovery” as a correction to the “diversity” approach of second-wave environmental literary criticism–which just adds more seats to the environmental table without challenging the very structure of the table –and had lots of ideas about how our project might take up these questions. Early in the process we recognized that some of the most sophisticated analysis of Latinx environmentalisms occurred within the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry of Latinx writers, especially among those writers who identified as Chicana feminists. This led us to talk directly to many of the Latinx authors whose work was foundational to our own inspiration.  Even more gratifying was the reception we got from scholars whose work was already pushing these fields in exciting directions. Quite simply they started to come out of the woodwork as we were beginning these conversations. That’s how the project started. Many of the insights in our Introduction to the book came from the various conversations that we had at conferences in our field and on panels with our contributors.

What is not obvious is how a project like this builds over time–in our case, five years of working together– and the details of collaboration. We learned how to step up and step back based on our strengths and weaknesses, and filled in for each other when our personal lives became distracting; we learned how scholarship never happens without tragedy, celebration, frustration, generosity, heartbreak, and mundane intrusions (like sick pets and home maintenance issues) on the intellectual process.

We met several times as a group to just sit in silence and write together. We became more acquainted with Google Docs and Dropbox than we ever thought possible. We spent what amounts to about 50 hours together on four-way Skype conference calls, watching each other’s lives carry on in the background– children growing up, family members moving in and out, seasons and health issues coming and going, the material realities of life moving through different places and stages.

The boundaries between our academic, friendship, and personal lives became increasingly blurred, and each editor would probably say that the book is a reflection of both collegial synergy and personal friendship. The work of pulling something like this together is both dramatic and unglamorous, intellectual and material, urgent and slow. To us, the process has been as illuminating as the product.

It is a true honor to share this book with audiences that are interested in not only these topics, but also the story of what academic life is about, what it means to produce scholarship in collaboration with others, and the thrills and concerns of pushing the boundaries of our disciplines.

Less than mapping these intersections, our hope is that the book opens a door for more thinking and more imagining of what could be. We want to lift voices, but also to scrutinize the liberating, and also oppressive, cultural work of environmental discourse. We continue to think about these issues, but also want to push it further to ask, for example, what implications do these conversations have for the other work we do at our institutions, such as our work with students and our efforts to create structures of inclusion and equity? 

We hope that others will not only carry this project in ever more diverse directions, but also be moved to embark on a similar kind of collaboration, where intellectual and personal worlds merge, and both are profoundly changed in the process.

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*A note on terminology: We define Latinx studies as the comparative study of race, identity, and culture in U.S. communities with roots in Latin America (for example, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, or Central American communities). We use the term Latinx as a gender-neutral alternative to Latina or Latino in solidarity with LGBTQ+ communities. We also use the “x” to mark the indigenous peoples and knowledges that we will never know due to the conquest of the Americas. We also note that in using the term Latinx, we are deliberately operating from a comparative, interethnic perspective. What this means is that the essays and interviews we include focus on multiple Latin American-origin communities in the U.S. (Mexican American and Dominican American, for example), and that we compare and contrast the environmental ideas that emerge from these disparate communities. 

 

Sequestrada: A New Film by a Temple University Press author Sabrina McCormick

This week in North Philly Notes, Sabrina McCormick, author of Mobilizing Science, promotes the Sequestrada, the film she co-wrote and co-directed with Soopum Sohn, about the devastation of the Brazilian Amazon. Based in part on her research about the anti-dam movement in Brazil—the subject of Mobilizing Science—Sequestrada stars Tim Blake Nelson and Gretchen Mol. The film opens November 15 at the Village East Cinema in New York, followed by a VOD Release on Tuesday, December 17.

Synopsis:

Sequestrada follows Kamodjara and her father, Cristiano, members of the Arara, an Amazonian indigenous tribe. When they leave their reservation to protest a dam that will displace their people, Kamodjara is separated from her family and kidnapped by traffickers.

Roberto, an indigenous agency bureaucrat overseeing a report that could change everything, is under pressure to support the dam’s construction. Thomas, an American investor in the dam, makes his way to Brazil to sway Roberto’s opinion. The film tells the story of how these three lives intertwine against a backdrop of geopolitics and environmental disaster.

Sequestrada was shot on location in Brazil and is based on the real-life event of the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, which is displacing the Arara—who have lived along the Amazon River for countless generations. The film, which had its world premiere at the Beijing Film Festival last April, deftly incorporates the experiences of local non-professional actors to tell a gripping local story of global consequences.

Artist’s Statement:

Sabrina had been doing research in Brazil for fifteen years and had made her first documentary about people displaced by large dams. She had received funding to go to the Amazon where the world’s third largest dam was being built and contested by indigenous groups who were illegally affected. We mapped out a plot. Sabrina had worked with organizations contesting dams for a long time and we planned to meet with a few of them based near Belo Monte to find out more of what the past thirty years had been like, beginning with Sting protesting the dam and a Kayapo woman slashing a government official in 1984.

Then we left for Altamira, ourselves. The last plane to the Amazon was full of men. Sabrina and a flight attendant were the only women. The men were all workers going to the Belo Monte Dam. When it landed in Altamira and the doors opened, we felt the sauna of the Amazon.

Altamira is a small town where indigenous tribes visit to buy flip flops, t-shirts, and supermarket junk food. We approached a group that we learned were Arara. We spent about three days to see if they wanted to be on camera. Then the whole Arara tribe disappeared. They re-appeared with a huge bag of live turtles. They invited Sabrina to sit in the local indigenous housing and eat a turtle they had just cooked. Then they started to open up. We learned they have a system where a chief (cacique) decides everything, so we mainly tried to speak to him. He was a quiet, young man. Later, we found he had only been cacique for one year. There was another man with thick glasses, who had been watching us. We talked to him. It turned out that he had been the chief for many years before this young man.

When he decided we were not dangerous, he stopped being a quiet man. We created a character for him so he could speak about the Arara tribe and the Belo Monte dam. The last day of the shoot, he asked Soopum if he could try his hat. He wore Soopum’s hat and was silent for long time, smiling. He seemed proud and happy. But it was Soopum’s only hat and the Equator sun made Soopum’s black hair so hot, that he really needed the hat. Sabrina didn’t want to give up her hat, either. Soopum politely asked for the hat back. He and tribe members thanked us making this film. We hugged the Arara and parted ways.

Sabrina guided the storyline exploring how government corruption undergirded the illegal construction of massive infrastructure, damaging lives and releasing methane from the degradation of flora and fauna. Soopum added fictional plot lines with traditional film language under given location and situations. Together, they captured true moments with the actors when they were living normally. We wrote together based on footage and the tribe members writing with us such that each character’s life and the fictional plot became interwoven. We constructed scenes with them, explaining where we thought the storyline was going and recording their reactions, modifying the plot with their perspectives and lines from their personal experiences.

With that approach, we fused real and imagined worlds in multiple layers, the real effects the dam has on climate change and the lives of indigenous people who live nearby, along with a narrative of imagined characters who reflect the stories of how Belo Monte came to be what it is today.

About Sabrina McCormick’s book, Mobilizing Science: 

Mobilizing Science theoretically and empirically explores the rise of a new kind of social movement—one that attempts to empower citizens through the use of expert scientific research. Sabrina McCormick advances theories of social movements, development, and science and technology studies by examining how these fields intersect in cases around the globe.

McCormick grounds her argument in two very different case studies: the anti-dam movement in Brazil and the environmental breast cancer prevention movement in the U.S. These, and many other cases, show that the scientization of society, where expert knowledge is inculcated in multiple institutions and lay people are marginalized, give rise to these new types of movements. While activists who consequently engage in science often instigate new methods that result in new findings and scientific tools, these movements still often fail due to superficial participatory institutions and tightly knit corporate/government relationships.

University Press Week Blog Tour: How to practice compassion

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to practice compassion

University of Washington Press @UWAPress

University of Washington Press Publicity Manager, M’Bilia Meekers, and Interim Sales and Marketing Director, Julie Fergus will have a conversation about the intersections between compassion, emotional intelligence, and marketing university press books.

Columbia University Press @columbiaUP

A guest blog post from Elizabeth Segal, author of Social Empathy, and how social empathy can help you become a more compassionate person.

University of Illinois Press @Illinoispress

A post about our new Transformations series and related journals and how they provide a collection of work that is radically committed to postoppositional, transdisciplinary, and transformative approaches to knowledge production and social justice.

Penn State University Press @PSUPress

A post from PSU Press Editor-in-Chief about how books in our Graphic Medicine series can catalyze the practice of compassion.

University of South Carolina Press  @uscpress

Quote from authors of Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement about the importance of support and inclusivity within a diverse queer community in the 1980s-90s in an often hostile environment of a conservative southern state

University of Nebraska Press @UnivNewPress

Excerpt on compassion from The Heart of Torah by Rabbi Shai Held.

Bucknell University Press @BucknellUPress

Guest post by Jason Farr, author of Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteentgh-Century British Literature.

Beacon Press @beaconpressbks

A Q&A with Peter Jan Honigsberg, author of A Place Outside the Law: Forgotten Voices from Guantánamo and director of Witness to Guantánamo.

 

University Press Week Blog Tour: How to build community

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to build community

Paul Farber and Ken Lum, co-editors of our new book Monument Lab penned this entry on community building.

From coeditor Paul Farber:

When we started Monument Lab, it was not a fully-realized curatorial project or intervention—it was a classroom experiment. Ken and I were teaching in Fine Arts and Urban Studies, respectively, and were galvanized by our conversations with our students about representation, equity, and memory. We each spent time with scholarly texts and we also moved outside of our classes into public spaces as their own primary sources. We met one another, and connected with a circle of collaborators after that expanded what we could have ever dreamed of on our own. We iterated and took our questions outside to the courtyard of City Hall in 2015 for our first discovery phase exhibition. We eventually that moved to public squares and parks around the city for the citywide project with Mural Arts Philadelphia documented in the book, and now work in other cities with similar goals of critically engaging monuments we have inherited and unearthing the next generation of monuments.

We have been fortunate to work with a range of artists, writers, and organizers*. Some have artworks and essays represented in this book. Others put fingerprints and directed their own forms of expertise to the project to make this possible. We hope people will read the essays, but we hope people also tend to the captions, credits, and thank you’s, as they give insights into how monuments could be and are made, critiqued, and re-imagined. This was a profoundly collaborative effort and that is the point.

There is no single fix to our monumental landscape. There are ways of engaging the moment worth nodding to by many people representing previously exisiting and ongoing approaches. This includes antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer, ecological, and other systems of social justice perspectives that take long first steps toward redress. These practitioners understand we live at once in the deep seated past, changing present, and unknowable future. The book and the work of Monument Lab is meant to document collective aspirations for art and justice and serve an active, living approach to history.

Enter Karyn Olivier, The Battle is Joined, Monument Lab 2017 (Steve Weinik/Mural Arts Philadelphia)

Sharon Hayes, If They Should Ask, Monument Lab 2017 (Steve Weinik/Mural Arts Philadelphia)

From editor Ken Lum

I just received Deborah Thomas’ book Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. She is an esteemed colleague at Penn and we both co-taught a course in Kingston, Jamaica that looks at a major violent incursion that took place in the impoverished neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens in 2010. From this moment of eruption, there followed an uneven and halting pattern of attempts at recognition, redress and reconciliation for the many human lives affected, and continues to affect, by the incursion. Although a different context, as I started reading this book, it made me think about Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, the new book from Temple University Press that Paul Farber and I edited. 

There are many sites all over the world, even sites within sites, such as neighborhoods within neighborhoods or streets within streets, whereby were they truly examined in a holistically democratic and critical sense, would reveal many of the same flailing patterns that stymies institutional and official initiatives that attempt to confront issues of human trauma and under-recognition. I started thinking about how Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia is not just a book but also a method of thinking about matters of address and redress that offers no presaged prescription or anticipated conclusion. What Monument Lab offers is a way of thinking about the world in as open a manner as possible. Monument Lab is a project of inclusion including the real inclusion of Philadelphia’s many unheard voices. Monument Lab recognizes the untapped wisdom of the unacknowledged peoples and the truths that they offer. Monument Lab is a means rather than an end, but one that produces hope in the coming together of voices. 

Monument Lab draws on visual art, oral histories, scholarship and subjugated knowledges—there is no one knowledge that takes precedence over another. It is this openness in both thinking and method that accounts for whatever success Monument Labhas been able to achieve.

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*Contributors: Alexander Alberro, Alliyah Allen, Laurie Allen, Andrew Friedman, Justin Geller, Kristen Giannantonio, Jane Golden, Aviva Kapust, Fariah Khan, Homay King, Stephanie Mach, Trapeta B. Mayson, Nathaniel Popkin, Ursula Rucker, Jodi Throckmorton, Salamishah Tillet, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Bethany Wiggin, Mariam I. Williams, Leslie Willis-Lowry, and the editors 

Artists: Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Kara Crombie, Tyree Guyton, Hans Haacke, David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, King Britt and Joshua Mays, Klip Collective, Duane Linklater, Emeka Ogboh, Karyn Olivier, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Kaitlin Pomerantz, RAIR, Alexander Rosenberg, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Shira Walinsky and Southeast by Southeast, and Marisa Williamson

University Press Week Blog Tour: How to be an environmental steward

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to be an environmental steward.

University of Pittsburgh Press @UPittPress

Patricia Demarco, author of Pathways to Our Sustainable Future, will write about global and local sustainability.

Duke University Press @DukePress

A roundtable of authors and editors answering the question, “What is one thing that more people need to understand about the current global climate crisis?”

Columbia University Press @Columbia.edu

Guest post from the author of Live Sustainably Now, about tips to decreasing your carbon footprint.

University of California Press  @ucpress

An excerpt from Humboldt State University Assoc. Professor of Environmental Studies Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, coming April 2020.

Yale University Press @yalepress

A post from authors connected with A Better Planet with actionable steps on helping the environment.

University of South Carolina Press @uscpress

A post including photos from authors of Carolina Bays about preservation of these unique ecological systems.

Bucknell University Press @BucknellUPress

Guest post by Tim Wenzell, editor of Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Writing on why ecocriticism makes us better stewards of nature.

Oregon State University Press 

Guest blogger Marcy Cottrell Houle on the genesis of her new book, A Generous Nature: Lives Transformed by Oregon, about 20 conservationists and activists who have been instrumental in preserving Oregon’s natural treasures for future generations.

University Press of Mississippi  @upmiss

Jessica H. Schexnayder, author of Fragile Grounds: Louisiana’s Endangered Cemeteries, on documenting the dying histories of coastal communities.

Harvard University Press @harvard_Press

 

University Press Week Blog Tour: How to speak up and speak out

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to speak up and speak out

University of Chicago Press  @UChicagoPress

Syracuse University Press @SUPress

Kelly Belanger, the author of Invisible Seasons: Title IX and the Fight for Equity in College Sports will discuss the theme speaking up and speaking out.

Fordham University Press @FordhamPress

A post from Joan Marans Dim, writer, historian, and co-author of Lady Liberty: An Illustrated History of America’s Most Storied Woman, focused on engaging readers to speak up and speak out.

Harvard Education Press @Harvard_Ed_Pub

Blog post by Tracey Benson, co-author of Unconscious Bias in Schools, about speaking out about racism and U.S. education.

University of South Carolina Press  @uscpress

Will Gravely, author of They Stole Him Out of Jail, will talk about how to call out racism.

University of Arizona Press @AZPress

Blog post about a book coming out that week by Mexican American Studies Associate Professor Roberto Rodriguez, inspired by his own experience with police violence when he nearly lost his life working as a journalist in Los Angeles.

University of British Columbia Press @UBCPress

An excerpt from From Where I Stand, by Jody Wilson-Raybould, a politician and Indigenous Canadian speaking on Indigenous Reconciliation and self-determination.

University of Nebraska Press @UnivNebPress

Guest post from Tim Hillegonds, author of The Distance Between.

Northwestern University Press 

We blog about Lee Bey’s Southern Exposure, a beautiful look at Chicago South Side architecture that also illuminates and raises awareness of the caustic effects of disinvestment in the area.

University of Toronto Press  @utpjournals

In this post, University of Toronto Press’s Journals division shares its approach to the current and future challenges of peer review and why we chose Publons to help us support the peer review community and ensure peer reviewers are publicly recognized for their work.

University of Regina Press @UofRPress

Recent publications that show resistance against power in action.

University Press Week Blog Tour: How to be a better (global) citizen

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to be a better (global) citizen

University of Virginia Press 

Excerpt from Amitai Etzioni’s latest book, Reclaiming Patriotism, in which he explains how recent global threats to democracy demand the response of a social movement on the scale of the civil rights or environmental movements. Etzioni lays out the requirements and opportunities to achieve such a movement.

Georgetown University Press @GUPress

A post highlighting ways to be a better global citizen in the context of the global refugee crisis accordig to David Hollenbach’s Humanity in Crisis: Ethical and Religious Response to Refugees.

Purdue University Press @purduepress

Blog post by Justin Race, director, talking about my first year with the Press and the value of a small UP that is both local and global in scope and how UPs build awareness and knowledge and foster global communication.

University of Wisconsin Press @UWiscPress

Our blog post will focus on book and journal readings that highlight scholars who are engaging with concepts of global citizenship and influencing public policy to improve global situations.

University Press of Florida @floridapress

Carl Lindskoog, author of Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System, will provide a list of actions individuals can take if they are concerned about the detention crisis at the US border.

University of Minnesota Press @UMinnPress

Ian G. R. Shaw previews his manifesto for building a future beyond late-stage capitalism, drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond what we’re conditioned for.

University of Nebraska Press  @UnivNebPress

Guest post from Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen, on what it means to be a transnational citizen.