The U.S. incarceration machine imprisons more people than in any other country. Music-Making in U.S. Prisons looks at the role music-making can play in achieving goals of accountability and healing that challenge the widespread assumption that prisons and punishment keep societies safe.

The book’s synthesis of historical research, contemporary practices, and pedagogies of music-making inside prisons reveals that, prior to the 1970s tough-on-crime era, choirs, instrumental ensembles, and radio shows bridged lives inside and outside prisons. Mass incarceration had a significant negative impact on music programs. Despite this setback, current programs testify to the potency of music education to support personal and social growth for people experiencing incarceration and deepen social awareness of the humanity found behind prison walls.

Cohen and Duncan argue that music-making creates opportunities to humanize the complexity of crime, sustain meaningful relationships between incarcerated individuals and their families, and build social awareness of the prison industrial complex. The authors combine scholarship and personal experience to guide music educators, music aficionados, and social activists to create restorative social practices through music-making.

Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the two brothers who lived next door began an insidious crusade to push them out. They followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her inside her car. As they broke boundary after suburban boundary, she found herself implicated in their violence.
Human/Animal merges personal narrative and cultural criticism to unleash the complicated relationship between instinct and action, violence and regret. This bestiary-in-essays wrestles with American colonialism, horror films, feminism, and gender studies to confront the intrusive neighbors the author could not. Ultimately, this book asks larger questions about civility, care, and the line between human and animal.
Illustrated with the author’s own sketches, Human/Animal grapples not only with Reilly’s place in her neighborhood, but with America’s past and current political climate.

An ethnographic look at the techno and house music of the Arab diaspora in Canada

This book analyses electronic music soundscapes as a way of exploring the lived experiences of cosmopolitan, Arab-identified individuals living in Toronto and Montreal. By deconstructing the soundscape into various ‘Arabscapes’: samples of Arabic music in house and techno tracks, examples of Arabic language performance, Orientalist conversations, and sonic responses that jam Orientalist messages, Fulton-Melanson argues that Arabscapes ‘sound’ the Arab diaspora in multicultural Canada in the way they unveil the experience of memory and nostalgia, presence and absence, racism and (mis)interpellation, and the various subtle realities that one must consider when ethically navigating such cultural complexities.

Deyohahá:ge:, “two roads or paths” in Cayuga language, evokes the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum, known as the “grandfather of the treaties.” Famously, this Haudenosaunee wampum agreement showed how Indigenous people and newcomers could build peace and friendship by respecting each other’s cultures, beliefs, and laws as they shared the river of life.

Written by members of Six Nations and their neighbours, this book introduces readers not only to the 17th-century history of how the Dutch and British joined the wampum agreement, but also to how it might restore good relations today. Many Canadians and Americans have never heard of the Covenant Chain or Two Row Wampum, but 200 years of disregard have not obliterated the covenant. We all need to learn about this foundational wampum, because it is resurging in our communities, institutions, and courthouses—charting a way to a future.

The writers of Deyohahá:ge: delve into the eco-philosophy, legal evolution, and ethical protocols of two-path peace-making. They tend the sacred, ethical space that many of us navigate between these paths. They show how people today create peace, friendship, and respect—literally—on the river of everyday life.

How do you tell the story of a feminist education, when the work of feminism can never be perfected or completed? In A Sentimental Education, Hannah McGregor, the podcaster behind Witch, Please and Secret Feminist Agenda, explores what podcasting has taught her about doing feminist scholarship not as a methodology but as a way of life.
Moving between memoir and theory, these essays consider the collective practices of feminist meaning-making in activities as varied as reading, critique, podcasting, and even mourning. In part this book is a memoir of one person’s education as a reader and a thinker, and in part it is an analysis of some of the genres and aesthetic modes that have been sites of feminist meaning-making: the sentimental, the personal, the banal, and the relatable. Above all, it is a meditation on what it means to care deeply and to know that caring is both necessary and utterly insufficient.
In the tradition of feminist autotheory, this collection works outward from the specificity of McGregor’s embodied experience – as a white settler, a fat femme, and a motherless daughter. In so doing, it invites readers to reconsider the culture, media, political structures, and lived experiences that inform how we move through the world separately and together.