Responding to Hate: How National and Local Incidents Sparked Action at the UNLV University Libraries

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how an academic library at one of the most diverse universities in the country responded to the 2016 election through the newly formed Inclusion and Equity Committee and through student outreach. Design/methodology/approach: This paper details the context of the 2016 election and the role of social justice in librarianship. It offers ideas for how library diversity committees can address professional development, recruitment and retention efforts and cultural humility. It highlights student outreach efforts to support marginalized students, educate communities and promote student activism. Finally, it offers considerations and suggestions for librarians who want to engage in this work. Findings: This paper shows that incorporating social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion requires individuals taking action. If institutions want to focus on any of these issues, they need to formally include them in their mission, vision and values as well as in department goals and individual job descriptions. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas University Libraries fully supports this work, but most of the labor is done by a small number of people. Unsustainable practices can cause employee burnout and turnover resulting in less internal and external efforts to support diversity. Originality/value: Most of the previous literature focuses either on internal activities, such as professional development and committees, or on student-focused activities, such as outreach events, displays and instruction. This paper is one comprehensive review of both kinds of activities

Currency and Cultural Consumption: Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes

In Lawrence Hill's novel The Book of Negroes, Aminata’s slavemaster, Lindo, gives her an economics lesson, explaining the particular value of the gold guinea coin. Aminata’s realization that the coin is named after Africa and that "From my homeland the buckra were taking both gold and people, and using one to buy and sell the other" is a sophisticated and powerful indictment of the economics of slavery. Starting from this exchange, this article undertakes a textual and paratextual exploration of identity, currency, and the practices of cultural consumption in The Book of Negroes. Published in 2007, the novel has achieved unprecedented success, selling over one million copies in Canada and internationally. This is a notable and perhaps surprising accomplishment given the novel’s subject matter: its explorations of slavery in the Americas, and its narration of the middle passage. This essay explores the material and cultural capital generated by the novel’s popularity. What does it mean in the current global capitalist conjuncture that a novel about the slave trade has generated so much money? In the Canadian context, what might the popularity of the novel, and its narration of pedagogical moments such as the one related above, say about the nation’s collective need to speak, and learn, about its history of slavery, a history that largely goes unacknowledged in dominant national narratives? More broadly, this article also examines the cultural and economic currencies of narrating black diasporic and black Canadian histories through popular literature

On Wanting the Moon: Avant-Garde Women and Ambition

This essay forms part of the catalogue to the exhibition 'Avant-Garde Women 1920-1940', held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, 14 February - 28 May 2012. It considers the place of ambition in the life and work of eight avant-garde women artists

Objectivity and realism : meeting the manifestation challenge

The anti-realist maintains that all thoughts that we may entertain are thoughts whose truth-values we can in principle come to recognise. The realist refuses to make any such claim about the limits of our thinking. The anti-realist purports to arrive at her position on the basis of considerations which relate to the manifestability of understanding, i.e. the idea that grasp of thoughts must be manifested in linguistic abilities. Thus she argues against the realist that this requirement cannot be met unless truth is understood not to extend beyond what we can know. Turning the tables, I argue that it is the antirealist who cannot vindicate her position on these grounds. Some thoughts are apt for objective truth; their truth cannot be equated with their current assertibility. Our grasp of such thoughts is not yet manifested in our ability to assert or deny sentences. Once we have identified patterns of linguistic usage which display our grasp of such thoughts however, it transpires that there is no reason either to believe that their truth-values can in principle be recognised

The Ovidian Bedroom (Ars amatoria 2.703–34): The Place of Sex in Ovidian Erotic Elegy and Erotodidactic Verse

This article constitutes a close reading of the sex scene that closes Ovid, Ars amatoria 2, and an analysis of its contribution to Ovidian first-person erotic elegiac poetry. Lines 703–34 are read comparatively alongside parallel passages, including Amores 3.14 and the end of Ars 3. This study pays particular attention to narrative strategies, erotodidactic instruction, the Latin sexual vocabulary, and wider issues relating to Roman sexuality, including gender dynamics and powerplay. Ultimately, the article argues that this sex scene demonstrates the programmatic and generic importance of sex for Ovid’s first- person erotic elegy and erotodidactic elegies

Japan’s Under-Researched Visible Minorities: Applying Critical Race Theory to Racialization Dynamics in a Non-White Society

Critical Race Theory (CRT), an analytical framework grounded in American legal academia, uncovers power relationships between a racialized enfranchised majority and a disenfranchised minority. Although applied primarily to countries and societies with Caucasian majorities to analyze White Privilege this Article applies CRT to Japan, a non-White majority society. After discussing how scholarship on Japan has hitherto ignored a fundamental factor within racialization studies—the effects of skin color on the concept of “Japaneseness”—this Article examines an example of published research on the Post-WWII “konketsuji problem.” This research finds blind spots in the analysis, and re-examines it through CRT to uncover more nuanced power dynamics. This exercise attempts to illustrate the universality of nation-state racialization processes, and advocates the expansion of Whiteness Studies beyond Caucasian-majority societies into worldwide Colorism dynamics in general

Won\u27t You Be My Neighbor? The Fallout from the Colorado Supreme Court\u27s Decision in COGCC v. GVCA

This Casenote asserts that the Colorado Supreme Court\u27s decision in COGCC v. GVCA, while legally adequate, condones a harmful public policy that necessitates legislative correction. The case pitted two landowners whose property was adjacent to a proposed well that would drill down within a three-mile radius of an underground nuclear detonation site known as the Rulison blast zone, as well as a citizens\u27group from the Rulison area, against the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC). Using different canons of statutory interpretation, the Colorado Court of Appeals and the Colorado Supreme Court reached opposite decisions, but in the end a COGCC rule permitting only surface owners, local governments, and oil and gas operators to request hearings on COGCC permitting decisions was upheld. Thus, the petitioners were denied standing until and unless they actually suffer harm from released radiation. In upholding the COGCC\u27s narrow standing rule, the Colorado Supreme Court pointed to several other ostensible means through which the aggrieved parties could be heard, such as filing a complaint with the COGCC, appealing to their local government designee to request a hearing, or litigating in court. This Casenote first explores the history of the site, the COGCC\u27s regulatory scheme, and the judicial progression from the filing of the complaint to the Colorado Supreme Court\u27s decision. It then explores each of the potential alternate avenues proposed by the Colorado Supreme Court, and attempts to demonstrate why each is insufficient to protect landowners who are legitimately aggrieved by COGCC permitting decisions in which the surface of the well is not located directly on their land. Finally, it explores the possible solution of the legislature applying a form of the Colorado APA\u27s aggrieved party standard-which has thus far been administratively and judicially eliminated from the realm of oil and gas drill-permitting decisions-to all COGCC decisions, including those relating to drill-permit approva