Liberal Arts and the Humanities
113 Gender, Race, Sexuality, Social Justice
Case Studies
Cases on Social Issues: For Class Discussion – 2nd Edition (CC BY-NC)
These realistic, emotional cases are designed to help students grapple with ethical issues related to discrimination, diversity, equity, inclusion and general social issues in the workplace. These valuable cases are appropriate for upper-level undergraduate or graduate students in the humanities, business, healthcare, agriculture, environmental studies, Indigenous studies, land use studies, law and more. In addition to the background description and scenario, each case comes with modifiable discussion questions, notes on teaching strategies, and a reading list.
Collections
Labor Studies & Work (Temple University Press)
Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, TU Press has reissued 32 outstanding labor studies books and made them freely available online. Chosen by an advisory board of scholars, labor studies experts, publishers, and librarians, each book contains a new foreword by a prominent scholar, reflecting on the content and placing it in historical context.
Courses
Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies (CC BY-NC-SA)
Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. This course connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns.
Everyday Social Justice (CC BY-NC)
This website is for people who want to learn about social justice, or for folks who teach it. It has all of the teaching materials for my courses on social justice, so you could walk yourself through it or talk about it with a “book” group! The classes use conversations instead of lectures, so I use pop-culture materials to cover what would usually be the lecture in a traditional classroom. The 2-hour lessons are all conversation-based, so you’ll see the prompts that get people talking about real-life scenarios. I teach from an intersectional feminist perspective, so we’re always talking about the ways that all oppressions connect; the similarities between racism and classism, the connections between sexism and ageism, the ways that ableism affects transphobia. One of the hardest things about my job is talking to people about the worst parts of humanity, the ways we hurt each other on purpose. These courses help you think about ways of doing better through empathy, compassion, and patience.
- Intercultural Women’s Studies (CC BY-NC)
- Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies 101 (CC BY-NC)
- Introduction to Queer Studies 101 (CC BY-NC)
- Women, Social Change and Activism (CC BY-NC)
Images
The Gender Spectrum Collection (CC BY-NC-ND)
A stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities—people with careers, relationships, talents, passions, and home lives.
WOCinTech (CC BY)
This collection provides images of women of colour in technology: entrepreneurs, software engineers, infosec professionals, IT analysts, marketers, and other people who make up the tech ecosystem.
Monographs
Feeling Gender: A Generational and Psychosocial Approach (CC BY)
This book explores how feelings about gender have changed over three interrelated generations of women and men of different social classes during the twentieth century. The author explores the ways in which generational experiences are connected, what is continued, what triggers gradual or abrupt changes between generations – and between women and men within these generations. The book explores how new feelings of gender gradually change gender norms from within, and how they contribute to the incremental creation of new social practices.
Feminism and the Politics of Childhood (CC BY)
Feminism and the Politics of Childhood offers an innovative and critical exploration of perceived commonalities and conflicts between women and children and, more broadly, between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This unique collection brings into dialogue authors from a range of social science disciplines, activist organisations, and theoretical perspectives. They address topics such as gender, generation and intergeneration, relationality, power, exploitation, solidarity, and emancipation in a variety of situations, including refugee camps, care labour, domestic violence, and childcare and education.
Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity (CC BY-NC-ND)
This volume offers vivid accounts of the diversity of living transgender in today’s world. The first section, “Emerging Identities,” maps the ways in which social, cultural, legal and medical developments shape new identities on both an individual and collective level. Rather than simply reflecting social change, these shifts work to actively construct contemporary identities. The second section, “Trans Governance,” examines how law and social policy have responded to contemporary gender shifts. The third section, “Transforming Identity,” explores gender and sexual identity practices within cultural and subcultural spaces. The final section, “Transforming Theory?”, offers a theoretical reflection on the increasing visibility of trans people in today’s society and traces the challenges and the contributions transgender theory has brought to gender theory, queer theory and sociological approaches to identity and citizenship. Featuring contributions from throughout the world, this volume represents the cutting-edge scholarship in transgender studies and will be of interest to scholars and students interested in gender, sexuality, and sociology.
Supplemental Materials
Equality Archive (CC BY-NC-SA)
Equality Archive is a reliable source for the history of sex and gender equality in the United States. It is a theater for history and social justice with the goal to provide a forum for curious people. We know feminism is intersectional: as you explore one entry, you will find connections–intersections–with others. You can follow issues, people, and history by browsing images, or you can search information by using the key words.
Feminist Adult Educators’ Guide to Aesthetic, Creative and Disruptive Strategies in Museums and Community (CC BY-NC-ND)
From the University of Victoria, this is a collection of imaginative aesthetic, arts-based and arts-informed methods, strategies and approaches to educating and research across community and institutional settings. This collection is a culmination of our responses to a deeply troubled gendered, colonial, unjust and unsustainable world and the role we know that art and creative practices can play.
LGBT+ Healthcare 101 (CC BY)
Digital story interviews with LGBT+ volunteers, ‘LGBT+ Healthcare 101’ presentation, and a secondary school resource, created by and for University of Edinburgh medicine students. The resources were created as part of a project to address a lack of awareness and knowledge of LGBT+ health, and of the sensitivities needed to treat LGBT patients as valuable skills for qualifying doctors.
The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future – 2nd Edition [PDF] (CC BY-ND)
A document providing an overview of the Transgender Archives housed at the University of Victoria, which encompasses a distinctive range of materials, from organizations’ business records to audio histories, from conference programs to pornography, from medical textbooks to self-published newsletters.
Textbooks
The American LGBTQ Rights Movement: An Introduction (CC BY-SA)
A peer-reviewed chronological survey of the LGBTQ fight for equal rights from the turn of the 20th century to the early 21st century. Illustrated with historical photographs, the book beautifully reveals the heroic people and key events that shaped the American LGBTQ rights movement. The book includes personal narratives to capture the lived experience from each era, as well as details of essential organizations, texts, and court cases that defined LGBTQ activism and advocacy.
Antiracism Inc. (CC BY-NC-SA)
This book traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it.
Badass Womxn in the Pacific Northwest (CC BY-NC)
This zine is a collection of biographies and portraits of badass womxn in the Pacific Northwest. Undergraduate students collaborated to create this resource that fuses multilingual poetry, art, and writing to celebrate and honor some of the strongest people you might not have heard of. It was created in an interdisciplinary gender, women & sexuality studies classroom.
Contemporary Families: An Equity Lens (CC BY)
Created with students, approaches contemporary families from an equity lens, this book asks two questions relevant to the Difference, Power, and Discrimination outcomes at Linn-Benton Community College and Oregon State University: “What do families need?” and “How do society and institutions support or get in the way of families getting what they need?”
Dress, Appearance, and Diversity in U.S. Society (CC BY)
This book introduces topics about identity, dress, and the body. Through the content, readers explore how individuals and communities use dress as a way to communicate (i.e. “negotiate” in fashion studies) their various identities. There is heightened attention to social justice, power, privilege, and oppression. That is, the content focuses on the experiences of historically marginalized communities and the ways they navigate dress and dressing their bodies in different contexts. In the first part of the book, readers are introduced to concepts and theories related to fashion, clothing, dress, and/or accessories. In the second part, readers examine the role that fashion, clothing, dress, and/or accessories play in identity development for individuals in marginalized communities in the United States.
Global Femicide: Indigenous Women and Girls Torn from Our Midst (CC BY-NC)
Laying our Canadian stories alongside the global phenomenon of femicide in other colonized countries such as Mexico and Guatemala, this book underscores the common, interlocking effects of racism and sexism on Indigenous women. Family members, scholars and researchers, artists, activists and policy-makers provide their decade-long perspectives, providing testimony and evidence that sexualized and racialized violence is not only a product of historic colonization but continues to manifest in entrenched systems of colonization and global femicide.
Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach (CC BY)
Designed for an introductory course, this textbook takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of LGBTQ+ issues that helps students grasp core concepts through a variety of different perspectives.
LGBTQ+ Studies: An Open Textbook (CC BY)
This textbook is designed to provide an introduction to and an overview of LGBTQ+ Studies for the introductory level college student and the curious public.
Our Lives: An Ethnic Studies Primer (CC BY-NC)
This is an introduction or primer to ethnic studies, not a comprehensive review of the literature. We identified and included major concepts, theories, perspectives, and voices in ethnic studies with research from anthropology, history, political science, psychology, and sociology to offer an inclusive approach for critical inquiry.
A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology) (CC BY)
The goal of this open educational resource is to briefly introduce the reader to the role structural racism plays in each of the academic disciplines discussed throughout it, with the caveat that there is much more to tell. The goal of this book is not to tell the whole story, merely to invite further investigation, as a primer is intended to do. We will briefly define each discipline and move into a sampling of the impact structural racism has had on that specific area. While much of this book is historical, it also looks at present day effects and sadly, incidents of individual and structural racism that are still happening today. In some cases, we also highlight great thinkers of colour, LGBTQIA+, or women who were overlooked, or ways in which individual academic fields are confronting this historical legacy in hopes of changing it.
Persistence is Resistance: Celebrating 50 Years of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies (CC BY-NC)
A collection celebrating 50 years of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. Contributors are a diverse group of scholars, from undergraduate students to faculty emeritus, representing twenty-two institutions. Essays cover GWSS’s history, praxis, and implementation.
Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience (CC BY-NC)
A comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.
What We Now Know about Race and Ethnicity (CC BY-NC-ND)
Attempts of nineteenth-century writers to establish “race” as a biological concept failed after Charles Darwin opened the door to a new world of knowledge. Yet this word already had a place in the organization of everyday life and in ordinary English language usage. This book explains how the idea of race became so important in the USA, generating conceptual confusion that can now be clarified. Developing an international approach, it reviews references to “race,” “racism,” and “ethnicity” in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative politics and identifies promising lines of research that may make it possible to supersede misleading notions of race in the social sciences.
Websites
Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (CC BY-NC)
The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony collects and makes available the oral histories of people who presently or at one time identified as same-sex and same-gender attracted women. Materials in the Archives include oral history audio and video recordings, radio and television programs, and associated materials.
Media Attributions
- BC Map © Adamwashere is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license
- Canada Map Icon © Icons8 is licensed under a CC BY-ND (Attribution NoDerivatives) license