Social Sciences Librarian
Elizabeth Young-Miller
she/her/hers
Contact:
E. W. Fairchild-Martindale Library
Room 511
Room 511
(610) 758-6233
Online Reference Sources
- Oxford Reference Online This link opens in a new windowOxford Reference includes dictionaries, including authoritative dictionaries for many languages, encyclopedias, and companions, featuring more in-depth but still brief entries, e.g. Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization.
- Cambridge Companions Online This link opens in a new windowSeries of authoritative guides, written by leading experts in the field and used by students, scholars and non-specialists. Covers literature, philosophy, religion, classics, cultural studies, and music.
- SAGE Knowledge Books and Reference This link opens in a new windowOnline books, reference works, handbooks, series, and professional development titles across the social and hard sciences.
Books Highlighted in the Syllabus
Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication by Call Number: ebookPublication Date: 2021
Native American DNA by
Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes. In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful--and problematic--scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the "markers" that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them. TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today's science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: "in our blood" is giving way to "in our DNA." This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously--and permanently--undermined.
Call Number: ebookPublication Date: 2013
Pollution Is Colonialism by
In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)--an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada--to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.
Call Number: ebookPublication Date: 2021
