Sociology Resources: Books

Award-winning entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow reveals the counterintuitive reasons why so many partnerships and groups break down--and why some break through.

In this second edition of I'm Right and You're an Idiot, James Hoggan grapples with this critical issue, through interviews with outstanding thinkers and drawing on wisdom from highly regarded public figures.

Crystallizing the essential principles of social reproductive theory, this anthology provides long-overdue analysis of everyday life under capitalism. It focuses on issues such as childcare, healthcare, education, family life, and the roles of gender, race, and sexuality--all of which are central to understanding the relationship between exploitation and social oppression.

Modern Sociological Theory by George Ritzer and Jeff Stepnisky provides a comprehensive overview of the major theorists and theoretical schools, from the Structural Functionalism of early 20th Century through the cutting-edge theories of the late 20th Century and early 21st Century.

The contributors to Power and Resistance use this critical perspective to explore Canadian social issues such as poverty, colonialism, homophobia, violence against women, climate change and so on.

Framed around paired theoretical perspectives on a series of sociological problems, the book shows how distinctive viewpoints shed light on different facets of social phenomena.

UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY: AN INTRODUCTORY READER, Fifth Edition, contains a collection of classic and contemporary sociological readings selected for their timeliness, diversity, and interest, and accessibility.

One of the most private decisions a woman can make, abortion is also one of the most contentious topics in American civic life. Protested at rallies and politicized in party platforms, terminating pregnancy is often characterized as a selfish decision by women who put their own interests above those of the fetus. This background of stigma and hostility has stifled women's willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion.

Today there are nearly six million children under the age of five living in poverty in the world's richest country. Blanket statements are often tossed around in the political arena, public debate sphere, and progressive rhetoric. But the statistic remains intangible for many Americans, likely because the root causes, effects, and implications are multifaceted and complex, and are often hard to understand for the average American living a much different reality.

Explores the global history and contributions of the feminist revolution.

Surprisingly, Canada has the most progressive sexual assault laws in the developed world, yet the system is failing victims at every stage. Had It Coming is not a diatribe or manifesto, but a nuanced and informed look at how attitudes around sexual behaviour have changed and still need to change.

In Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists, journalist Margo Goodhand tracks down the "rogue feminists" whose work forged an underground railway for women and children, weaving their stories into an unforgettable -- and until now untold -- history.

Poised between historical and metaphorical empires and operating within the conditions of incomplete modernity and economic and cultural dependency, Canada has generated a body of cultural criticism and theory, which offers unique insights into the dynamics of both center and periphery. The reader brings together for the first time in one volume recent writing in Canadian cultural studies and work by significant Canadian cultural analysts of the postwar era.

Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction is the most wide-ranging textbook on genocide yet published. The book is designed as a text for upper-undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a primer for non-specialists and general readers interested in learning about one of humanity's enduring blights.

In Marxism and Criminology: A History of Criminal Selectivity, Valeria Vegh Weis rehabilitates the contributions and the methodology of Marx and Engels to analyze crime and punishment through the historical development of capitalism (15th Century to the present) in Europe and in the United States.

Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support."

Tens of thousands of people are living in Canada without safe secure shelter every night and hundreds of thousands more are precipitously close to losing what housing they have. This book looks at the expenses, options and policies impacting people in Canadian cities to create homelessness.

Mooney, Knox, and Schacht's UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PROBLEMS uses a theoretically balanced, reader-friendly approach to provide a comprehensive exploration of social problems.

In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Doughty blends her mortician's knowledge of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five distinctive questions posed by her youngest fans. In her inimitable voice, Doughty details lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn colors during decomposition? And why do hair and nails appear longer after death?

An Act of Genocide unpacks long-buried archival evidence to begin documenting the forced sterilization of Aboriginal women in Canada.

In A Generation Removed, a powerful blend of history and family stories, award-winning historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines how government authorities in the post-World War II era removed thousands of American Indian children from their families and placed them in non-Indian foster or adoptive families. By the late 1960s an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families.

An explosive examination of the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Highway 16, and a searing indictment of the society that failed them. For decades, women--overwhelmingly from Indigenous backgrounds--have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern B.C. The highway is called the Highway of Tears by locals, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis. In Highway of Tears, Jessica McDiarmid meticulously explores the effect these tragedies have had on communities in the region, and how systemic racism and indifference towards Indigenous lives have created a culture of "over-policing and under-protection," simultaneously hampering justice while endangering young Indigenous women.

Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women.

Julia Christensen documents the rise of Indigenous homelessness and proposes solutions by interweaving analysis of the region's unique history with personal narratives of homeless men and women in two cities--Yellowknife and Inuvik. What emerges is a larger story of displacement and intergenerational trauma, hope and renewal.