This year, UBC Arts scholars have published books covering a fascinating range of topics — from the ethical debates surrounding medical assistance in dying and the impact of GenAI on learning, to the hidden histories of African American blues, the power of sign language music, and even the surprising role of stray cats in city communities.
Migration and the Politics of Methodology Doing Fieldwork, Decentring Power, and Foregrounding Migrants’ Perspectives
By: Dr. Ayaka Yoshimizu, Associate Professor of Teaching, Department of Asian Studies
What is your book about?
This volume examines the politics of fieldwork and the challenges of researching migrants constructed as outsiders both nationally and transnationally. Based on research with undocumented migrants, temporary workers, refugees, international students, and those who, having received citizenship status, find their lives to be discursively and legally restricted, it shows how interdisciplinary, fieldwork-based approaches can provide detailed accounts of migrants’ voices and their conditions of existence, offering insights into the ways in which they understand and take part in producing their transnational worlds.
Why did you write this book?
This volume joins broader social justice work that directly addresses migration and multiple forms of power, including the disciplinary power of academic research as it is articulated with geopolitical interests. Essential to this volume are the concerns and perspectives of migrants. Contributors to the volume show how critical and reflexive forms of fieldwork can decentre the agendas of states and multilateral organizations and recentre migrants in social justice projects, revealing how fieldwork is far more than a method or tool. By approaching fieldwork as a methodology, the volume aims to show what is at stake in engaging in the politics of methodology as we contest fields of knowledge and the way we conceive “research fields” as distant and bounded spaces.
Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change
By: Dr. M. V. Ramana, Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
What is your book about?
Proponents of nuclear energy argue that the technology should be deployed widely to reduce carbon emissions. My book demonstrates why this strategy is not only naïve but dangerous. It explains why it is not feasible to expand nuclear power fast enough to make it relevant to the climate crisis, and why such an expansion would divert resources away from faster and cheaper solutions. Further, expanding nuclear energy will inevitably result in a variety of undesirable risks and environmental impacts. Finally, nuclear energy is deeply imbricated in creating the conditions for nuclear annihilation. Expanding nuclear power would leave us in the worst of both worlds. My book also details how powerful organizations privatize the profits and socialize the risks and costs of nuclear power.
Why did you write this book?
Talking about nuclear energy as an environmentally friendly source of electricity would have sounded bizarre to most people till recently. In the last decade, advocates of nuclear energy—some energy companies, governments, and tech billionaires—have promoted it as clean and vital to solving climate change. These arguments make no sense given the history and the technical characteristics of nuclear energy, and one motivation for this book was to lay out the risks associated with nuclear power clearly. We also have much recent evidence about the high costs and lengthy time periods involved in building nuclear plants. Above all, I wanted to explain why nuclear power is incompatible with the kind of social and political transformations needed to address climate change.
Regenerating Learning Transforming How You Learn with Generative AI
By: Dr. Patrick Pennefather, Associate Professor in Design & Production, Department of Theatre & Film
What is your book about?
The perfect storm of learning provoked by generative AI is not just about learning how to use the technology to change human patterns of work and life. The technologies are re-orienting how we think we learn, what we learn, what we need to learn, when and where we learn about knowledge production, how humans communicate with each other, the economic, social, political, creative, ethical and technological factors that inform how we navigate human influenced existence on this planet.
Why did you write this book?
I was motivated to write this book because of many colleagues across different industries who were being told to use generative AI, without providing them with enough support to do so. This became the starting point for writing a book to support those colleagues. What I did not anticipate was that the book evolved to not just become a how-to, but integrated use cases, research and educational theory to propose that interacting with the technology leads to a number of unanticipated learning outcomes. These outcomes challenge the very way in which we have come to learn, what we have learned, and what we may need to unlearn.
Seeking Medicine’s Moral Centre: Ethics, Bioethics, and Assisted Dying
By: Dr. Thomas Koch, Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography
What is your book about?
Countries across Europe and North America continue to debate medical assistance in dying (MAiD). This book sets 30 years of Canada’s MAiD history in the context of a shift from a bottom-up, relational Hippocratic ethic to today’s top-down, bureaucratic, and commercial bioethics. It asks how we can balance the desire to live with support against a system in which medical termination often appears to be the only viable option.
Why did you write this book?
As a caregiver, gerontologist, journalist, and researcher, I’ve long been engaged with these issues. Framing MAiD within the evolution of medical ethics offers new insights into both medical ethics broadly and medical termination specifically.
Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music
By: Dr. Anabel Maler, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, School of Music
What is your book about?
In Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music, I argue that music is best understood as culturally defined and intentionally organized movement, rather than organized sound. This re-definition of music means that sign language music, rather than being peripheral or marginal to histories and theories about music, is in fact central and crucial to our understanding of all musical expression and perception. In this book I use a blend of tools from music theory, cognitive science, musicology, and ethnography, to explore the history, context, and analysis of sign language music.
Why did you write this book?
For too long, Deaf musicians have been on the sidelines of music research, and music has been framed as primarily involving the sense of hearing. I wrote this book to reveal that Deaf listeners are musical experts, and to challenge the notion that musical knowledge is transmitted from the hearing to the Deaf. I wanted to highlight the wealth of musical knowledge and expertise in Deaf culture, and to provide music-theoretical tools for analyzing sign language music as a product of Deaf culture.
Aesthetic Injustice
By: Dr. Dominic McIver Lopes, University Killam Professor, Department of Philosophy
What is your book about?
Groups with different aesthetic cultures sometimes come into contact with one another; aesthetic injustice occurs when the contact goes poorly. Specifically, it occurs when a group’s policies subvert interests in the value diversity and social autonomy of aesthetic cultures. The book focuses on case studies of cultural appropriation, ideals of bodily beauty, and access to aesthetic resources for disabled people and minority identity groups.
Why did you write this book?
This is the final installment of a trilogy that begins with books on the arts as social practices and social practices organized around aesthetic value or beauty. These books examine artistic and aesthetic practices in isolation. It’s in the contact between groups that art and beauty become political. That’s an important story to tell in today’s world.
Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon
By: Dr. Claudio Vellutini, Associate Professor, School of Music
What is your book about?
The book investigates how the circulation of operas and opera performers between the Italian States and Vienna helped redefine questions of collective identities in the Austrian Empire after the Napoleonic Wars. It argues that newly forged patterns of operatic and cultural exchange served as a testing ground for, among others, theories of language and education, notions of fatherland and citizenship, artistic expressions of cultural hybridity, new forms of managing economic and cultural capital, and practices of collective memory. Ultimately, this book places opera at the intersection of a broad set of political and cultural relationships that for several decades connected Vienna and prominent Italian operatic centers, contributing to a transnational historiography of the art form.
Why did you write this book?
I have always been intrigued by the pre-eminence of Italian music and culture in Vienna, which clashed with long-standing assumptions about transalpine cultural rivalries and traditional narratives about political antagonism between Austria and Italy. It soon appeared to me that a century-long historiographical tradition that emphasized cultural differences had overshadowed a rich tapestry of cultural connections that were particularly robust during the first half of the nineteenth century. Opera, in particular, was at the forefront of these connections. Casting a light on forms of operatic and cultural exchange between Vienna and the leading Italian operatic centres helps us reconsider the ideological and material conditions that allowed a transalpine cultural dialogue to thrive.
Francophone Literature after the Postcolonial Age
By: Dr. Farid Laroussi, Professor, Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
What is your book about?
My book argues that today’s Francophone literature has moved in different critical directions, away from the theoretical framework of Postcolonial Studies developed in the 1980s and 1990s. In my analysis, the three main forces that have gradually diverged from Western-designed postcolonial discourse are digital globalization, intertextual creation, and ecocriticism. One ongoing challenge is how to position the much-vaunted postcolonial transnational within highly localized or national literary narratives.
Why did you write this book?
As a scholar of Postcolonial Studies in French, I’ve come to feel that the field can be intellectually stifling. It often reproduces the very hegemonic ideologies it aims to critique. One example is the difficulty postcolonial feminism has had in distancing itself from Western discourses and the “white-woman-savior” syndrome. Another persistent issue is that in course syllabi across North America, we tend to view postcolonial literature not on its poetic or aesthetic merits, but as a token for historical trauma, class struggle, or linguistic conflict. The three key aspects of my critical approach aim to spark a new conversation, not erase the legacy of Postcolonial Studies.
Hyakunin’shu: Reading the Hundred Poets in Late Edo Japan
By: Dr. Joshua Mostow, Professor, Department of Asian Studies
What is your book about?
This book explores the “popular literary literacy” of Japanese readers at the edge of modernity. By reproducing and translating a well-known annotated and illustrated Ansei-era (1854–59) edition of the Hyakunin isshu—for centuries the most basic and best-known primer of Japanese poetry—I show how commoners of the time interpreted this 13th-century anthology.
Why did you write this book?
I wrote this as a reception history of Japan’s most canonical poetic anthology, which originated in a courtly tradition, within the context of early modern print capitalism. The translation preserves the lineation of the “scattered” calligraphy and avoids heteronormativity in the love poems.
International Handbook of Feminisms in Social Work
Edited by: Dr. Donna Baines, Professor, School of Social Work, Carolyn Noble, Shahana Rasool, Linda Harms-Smith, and Gianinna Muñoz-Arce
What is this book about?
This handbook highlights innovative and affect-driven feminist dialogues that inspire social work practice, education, and research across the globe. The editors have gathered the many (at times silenced) feminist voices and their allies together in this book which reflects current and contested feminist landscapes through 52 chapters from leading feminist social work scholars from the many branches and movements of feminist thought and practice. The breadth and width of this collection encompasses work from diverse socio-political contexts across the globe including Central and South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.
Why did you participate in the editing of this book?
Handbooks are a labour of love, since they are so large and include so many authors, reviewers and editors. I love this topic and the lead editor, Professor Caroline Noble, invited me in so I stepped up to contribute to a unique and important collection including 52 chapters, and the feminist-engaged, equity and social justice aspirations of 108 authors.
Julius Röntgen Piano Music 6
Edited by: Dr. Mark Anderson, Associate Professor, School of Music
Tell us about this recording:
This is the sixth recording in a series devoted to the solo and 2-piano music of the German-born Dutch composer Julius Röntgen. Piano Music 6 contains solo piano music by this prolific composer, much of which has never before been recorded or published.
Why did you publish this recording?
Since 2014, I have been researching, recording, editing and, through Nimbus Music Publishing, publishing long neglected solo and 2-piano music of Julius Röntgen (1855-1932). As mentioned, this is the sixth audio CD recording dedicated to his piano works.
Life Could Be a Dream: African American Blues, R&B, Gospel and Doo Wop, 1946–1956
By: Dr. Jerry Wasserman, Professor Emeritus, Department of English Language and Literatures and Department of Theatre and Film
What is your book about?
The tumultuous decade following the end of World War II saw the civil rights movement begin transforming Black lives and American society. The era also proved momentous for African American popular music: new record labels, new styles, and exciting new sounds in the form of electrified blues combos, rhythm & blues shouters, gospel and doo wop quartets. By the late 1950s, rock ’n’ roll would dominate the American soundscape and soul music would be born out of gospel’s marriage with rhythm & blues. As the Black music of the postwar decade gradually faded from radio and jukeboxes, much of it also drifted into relative obscurity. Life Could Be a Dream aims to bring this phenomenal body of music back into general awareness and to reanimate its excitement for a new audience.
Why did you write this book?
The book began as an attempt to share my playlist of African American music from the 1940s and ’50s with my music-savvy friends, some of them musicians themselves, who had never heard many of these artists or their songs. When I realized how very obscure so much of this great music has become, I decided it needed a book. George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement became a further catalyst.
Literature in Late Monolingualism: Literacies for the Linguacene
By: Dr. David Gramling, Professor, Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies
What is your book about?
For many of us, monolingualism is associated with closed-mindedness, political nationalism, and a general hostility to diverse knowledges and experiences of the world. In contrast, literature continues to stand—allegedly unbeholden—as a symbolic beacon for expansive human expression and insight, making meaning astride Earth’s thousands of human languages. But what if this division of virtue and vice isn’t quite right, leading us to overlook the uninterrupted historical and aesthetic collusion between political monolingualism and literary novels today? What if novels made in a European mold tend to be much more indebted to monolingual structures, ideologies, and styles than their publishers—and even their critics—care to acknowledge?
Why did you write this book?
Instead of whistling past such a discomfort, Literature in Late Monolingualism recognizes it squarely—detailing the important ways in which many authors of contemporary novels do so too. As it turns out, these authors and their novels tend to be far less skittish than their marketers are about the vast implications of monolingualism in literature, literary critique, and civic life. Rather than rebuking monolingualism as a social vice or a personal shortcoming, authors from China Miéville to Dorthe Nors to Karin Tidbeck to Neal Stephenson investigate it dauntlessly, aiming to show us in vivid terms how monolingualism is still often calling the shots in our globalized aesthetic and political cultures today.
Proximities: Literature, Mobility, and the Politics of Displacement
By: Dr. John Culbert, Sessional Lecturer, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
Proximities examines the politics of mobility from a transnational and decolonial perspective. The book offers a cultural genealogy of our current geopolitical context, in which migrants and asylum seekers are increasingly criminalized and incarcerated. Each chapter of the study deals with a specific literary author and reads their work as a sustained reflection on their mobile identity, whether as exile (Edith Wharton), displaced person (Samuel Beckett), refugee (Jamaica Kincaid), or as the stateless, radically abandoned condition of “bare life” (Behrouz Boochani).
Why did you write this book?
As an immigrant, exile, and longtime precaritized academic labourer at UBC, I set out to explore how living conditions of precarity, disposability and vulnerability – increasingly common in the Global North – can inform political solidarity with the world’s displaced. The student Gaza solidarity encampments were a vital inspiration at the book’s manuscript revision stage, and recent assaults on education, civil rights, and the rule of law in the United States have only added to the urgency and relevance of the issues I address. As precarity risks becoming generalized under new fascist formations, global conflict, and impending climate collapse, a key political challenge is to militate for human dignity and security while combating the political reflexes of enmity and exclusion.
Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein’s Parlor Plays
By: Dr. Adam J. Frank, Associate Dean (Policy, Faculty of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies) and Professor of English, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theatre? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theatre and proposes that radio, when approached historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her text’s unique challenges. As a document of the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays in the form of recorded radio theatre, the book includes a sample script, score, and links to audio material, as well as critical essays that grapple with Stein’s theatre from a number of disciplinary perspectives.
Why did you write this book?
The book is the culmination of more than a decade of collaborative work with composers who helped me to make sense (many different kinds of sense) of Gertrude Stein’s radically innovative, influential writing and theater. In it I have “written up my results,” as it were, the interpretive results that follow from the process of rendering nine of Stein’s early plays as radio/music theatre. I wrote the book to unfold the key insights that developed while pursuing this production project, and to demonstrate how research-creation practices can feed criticism and vice versa.
The Building Blocks of Thought: A Rationalist Account of the Origins of Concepts
By: Dr. Eric Margolis, Professor, Department of Philosophy
What is your book about?
The human mind can entertain an astounding range of thoughts. These thoughts are composed of concepts or ideas—the building blocks of thought. What explains the origins of these concepts? Many suppose that they are largely acquired by general-purpose learning mechanisms. The Building Blocks of Thought argues instead that they stem from a remarkably rich and diverse set of psychological structures that prepare us to think about many different aspects of our world.
Why did you write this book?
I have always been interested in theoretical questions about the mind and in how philosophy can draw upon and contribute to research in the cognitive sciences. Writing this book was an opportunity to thoroughly update one of the oldest debates in philosophy—the debate about “innate ideas.”
The City of Lost Cats
By: Dr. Tanya Kyi, Lecturer, School of Creative Writing
What is your book about?
A stubborn young girl named Fiona stumbles upon an abandoned house full of stray cats, just as it’s threatened by a demolition team, a leadership crisis, and two potentially malicious parakeets. It’s going to take some quick thinking on Fiona’s part—and the cooperation of all the cats—to build a community that’s safe for everyone.
Why did you write this book?
As I walked through Kitsilano one day, I noticed the many lost-cat posters on telephone poles. I began to wonder: what if those cats weren’t actually lost? What if they’d banded together and formed their own society? I was working on a different book at the time, but various cat voices kept popping into my head. And as I wrote about each character and their pasts, I realized I had something to say about housing—for people and for cats.
Time and Causality in Early Modern Drama
By: Dr. Linc Kesler, Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
Early modern drama developed in the intersection between a popular oral culture and the growing practices of literacy, of which Shakespeare in particular would soon become an icon. The development of drama, and revenge tragedy in particular (Hamlet and others), developed the tragic plot as a way of structuring time and causal action suitable for the emerging literate structures and economies of investment.
In my experience, people conditioned by literate education find it difficult to understand orally-based knowledge systems, leading to the misapprehension and discounting of Indigenous cultural practices, but also to the misapprehension of Shakespeare and other writers, whose practices, while appearing fully literate in retrospect, were deeply involved in their oral origins.
Why did you write this book?
I wrote this book to advance a radical rethinking of many categories that we have commonly used to understand the early modern period, and especially the drama, and propose a more structuralist and semiotic approach to understanding the ways in which a developmental sequence, such as the emergence of tragedy from the commercialization of the theatres, conditioned not only what was written, but how it configured the ideas of time, progress, and personal identity that have formed our cultural landscape, and open made us blind to alternate ways of being, thinking, and structuring social relations. Functional understandings across social divides are much more possible if we understand these differences, the context and origins of our own assumptions, and their limitations.
Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory
By: Dr. Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory
What is your book about?
This book offers a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction through a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Drawing on Marx’s concept of prostitution—used as a metaphor for modern labour—I explore the intersections of generalized and gendered labour in modern art.
Why did you write this book?
I aim to shift the critical focus from ideology and culture to how art indexes political-economic crises and transformations, particularly those tied to changing modes of production. Art’s relative autonomy from the manual/intellectual labour binary gives us a unique lens to understand the abstractions of everyday life.
Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century
By: Dr. Suzy Anger, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
This collection examines the widespread interest in automata—both human and mechanical—in the nineteenth century. It is the first academic study to focus solely on the Victorian period, when industrialization first met information technology, and when theories of human automatism—physical and mental—became essential to both scientific and popular understandings of human action and thought. Bringing together essays by a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars, the volume explores what it means to be human in a scientific and industrial age. It also considers how Victorian inquiry and practices continue to shape current thought on race, creativity, mind, agency, and artificial intelligence.
Why did you write this book?
A longstanding interest in Victorian automata and nineteenth-century theories of human automatism. There was no other academic book that focused exclusively on automata and automatism in the Victorian period.
