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Books

Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education

Nieto, Sonia

1992; White Plains, N.Y.: Longman Publishing Group

The book explores the meaning, necessity, and benefits of multicultural education for students from all backgrounds. The author explains in clear, accessible language how personal, social, political, cultural, and educational factors interact to affect the success or failure of students in our schools, and offers a research-based rationale for multicultural education.

Shows the impact on learning of racism, discrimination, teacher expectations, ethnicity, language, social class, and school policies and practices
Provides a conceptual framework for multicultural education and many suggestions for implementing multicultural education in the classroom
Includes ten original case studies that complement and illustrate the theoretical analyses- and give students’ voices a central place in this book
Challenges and engages readers in an interactive dialogue

All Our Sisters: Stories of Homeless in Canada

Scott, Susan

2007; Peterborough, ON: A Garmond Book

Though they account for only a small portion of the formal homeless statistics, there are many more women living on insufficient funds, with violent partners, in unacceptable dwellings, or in other fragile circumstances that are too often overlooked. They are our mothers, our daughters, our aunts, our nieces, our wives- they are our sisters- and they remain largely invisible compared to homeless men.

The author interviewed more than 60 women facing homelessness across Canada. Part of her agreement with these women was to tell their stories in the way they would want to have them told. With uncompressing honesty and a deep sense of empathy, Scott recounts their stories while highlighting the many underlying problems they face. These include personal histories of abuse, addiction, and violence, as well as systemic conditions of gentrification, a paucity of affordable housing, and a lack of social services sensitive to women’s needs.

A Manual of Structured Experiences for Cross-Cultural Learning

Editors: Weeks, William H., Pedersen, Paul B.,& Brislin, Richard W.

1979; Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc.

This is a collection of exercises that have been used successfully in training programs and classrooms. Designed to stimulate learning and interaction in multicultural groups, each exercise has clearly stated objectives and easy-to-follow instructions. This manual is a basic reference for trainers and educators.

Best Practices for Social Work with Refugees & Immigrants

Potocky-Tripodi, Mariam

2002; New York: Columbia University Press

Social work practice with refugees and immigrants requires specialized knowledge of these populations, and specialized adaptations and applications of mainstream services and interventions. Because they are often confronted with cultural, linguistic, political, and socioeconomic barriers, these groups are especially vulnerable to psychological problems. Among these problems are anxiety, depression, alienation, grief, even post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as biological concerns stemming from inadequate or underutilized medical services. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive guide to social workers with foreign-born clients that evaluates many different strategies in light of their methodological strengths and weaknesses.

Part I sets forth the context for empirically based service approaches to such clients by describing the nature of these populations, relevant policies designed to assist them, and service delivery systems.

Part II addresses specific problem areas common to refugees and immigrants and evaluates a variety of assessment and intervention techniques for each area. Maintaining a rigorous empirical and broadly pan-cultural approach throughout, the author seeks to identify the most practical “best practices” to meet the various and pressing needs of uprooted peoples.

Beyond the Narrow Gate

Chang, Leslie

2000; New York: A Plume Book

In 1937, the year the writers’ mother was born, the city of Nagking was destroyed by Japanese invaders with instructions from the Emperor to “kill all; destroy all; burn all.” Eleven years later, when the Red Army marched into China, Han Man-li’s family fled to Taiwan. There, at an elite school in Taipei, Han Man-li met Xiao Mei, Ling and Ma-hua. A few years later, with students visas and scholarships in their possession, the four friends left their homeland, passing through the “narrow gate” of the First Girl’s School on their way to America.

But for Han Man-li, Xiao Mei, and Ma-hua- now Mary, Dolores, Suzanne, and Margaret- their journey was just the beginning. In cities as far apart as New York and Los Angeles, from the biology lab of a women’s college to Wall Street to the glided Chinese ghetto in California’s Palos Verdes, Leslie Chang documents the choices and compromises they made, the struggles they faced, and the rewards they ultimately found.

This book is a moving, insightful portrait of what it means to be a foreigner in America, to move from world to world without ever belonging to either- a truth that is at the heart of the immigrant experience.

Bioethics Beyond the Headline: Who Lives? Who Dies? Who Decides?

Jonsen, Albert R.

2005; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefilef Publishing Group, Inc.

The field of bioethics asks fundamental questions- Who lives? Who dies? Who decides? – that are relevant to us all. Too often, the general public’s sole encounter with these weighty issues is through sound bites fed to us by the media- where complex, difficult matters are typically presented in superficial and inaccurate terms. In this book, the renowned bioethics Albert R. Jonsen, equips readers with the tools and background to navigate the fascinating and complex landscape of bioethics.

An engaging sampling of key concepts and debats in bioethics, including euthanasia, assisted reproduction, cloning and stem cells, neuroscience, access to healthcare, and even research on animals and questions of environmental ethics-areas typically overlooked in general introductions to bioethics are discussed in the book.

Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada

2001 - Lawrence Hill

Toronto: Harper Flamingo Canada

As the son of a black father and a white mother – American immigrants who in the 1950s and 1960s became famous pioneers in Canada’s human rights movement – Lawrence Hill begins this book with personal stories about how his parents met and married, what it was like growing up in an otherwise white Toronto suburb, and how his own children are beginning to forge a sense of racial identity in a county in which such issues are fervently ignored. Hill also looks beyond the personal, sharing his coast-to-coast interviews with Canadians of black and white parentage, and delves into provocative and fascinating subjects. This courageous, sensitive and often humorous book will enrich the way Canadians discuss matters of race and racial identity.

Caring For Patients from Different Cultures: Case Studies from American Hospitals

Galanti, Geri-Ann

2nd ed.; 1997; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanian Press

What happens when a Cherokee patient summons a medicine man to the hospital, or when an Anglo nurse refuses to take orders from a Japanese doctor? Why do Asian patients rarely ask for pain medication, while Mediterranean patients seem to seek relief for even the slightest discomfort?

The author argues that if the goal of the American medical system is to provide optimal care for all patients, Health-care providers must understand cultural differences that create conflicts and misunderstanding. This can result in inferior medical care. This new edition includes five new chapters and 172 case studies of actual conflict that occurred in American hospitals. With new chapters on pain, dietary practices, staff relations, death and dying, and mental health, the new edition is more comprehensive and has been designed for easier use. Each case study is extensively cross-referenced in the index, and there is a comprehensive bibliography arranged by both topic and ethnic group.

Bullets on the Water: Refugee Stories

Editor: Grouev, Ivaylo

2000; Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press

Civil war in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda, ethnic clashes in Russia – theses events and others like them have resulted in an increasing number of refugees throughout the world. This book is a collection of engrossing first-person narratives by some of those who fled their home-lands because of ethnic, religious, or political conflicts. Their stories recount not only the terrible situations that forced them to leave but also their experiences carving out a new future in Canada.

Children in War

Alan & Susan Raymond

2000; New York: TV Books

This book is based on their acclaimed television documentary, telling the tragic story of life during wartime through the voices of children in Bosnia, Israel, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland. The stories, drawings, and photo images tell us of atrocities they have witnessed, losses they have suffered, and in some cases, hope that still prevail.

The war in Bosnia lasted three years, produced three million refugees, and killed fifteen thousand children. Terrorism has been a way of life for Israeli children who live with the constant threat of suicide bombing and shelling attacks. At the same time, Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank have grown up under the oppression of Israeli military occupation. In Rwanda, eight hundred thousand people were killed in a mere three months, three hundred thousand of them children. The children of Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, have never known a lasting peace, and few think it will be achieved in their lifetimes.

Candid interviews with children in each of these countries, as well as psychologists and social workers who have helped many of these children deal with their trauma, display a wide array of emotions and provide startling insights into the complex causes of war and its real effects.

Chinese Whispers: Cultural Essays

Jose, Nicholas

1995; Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press

Novelist Nicholas Jose is a provocative and intelligent commentator on Australia's relationship with Asia. In this book, he writes about politics, travel, people, history, art and literature, exploring the connections and disconnections, the dreams and nightmares, as Australia seeks its role in a changing Asia.

Communication Highwire: Leveraging the Power of Diverse Communication Styles

Saphiere, Dianne H., Mikk, Barbara K., & Devries, Basma I.

2005; Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc.

No matter where we live or what we do, we deal with people using a wide variety of communication styles every day. At work, in the marketplace and at home, diversity in communication styles presents rich opportunities, yet too often people misunderstand each other. This book is an important breakthrough for managers, team leaders, community leaders, educators, trainers, and facilitators as they help individuals and teams overcome frustration, prevent mistakes and save time and money. World-class intercultural trainers and educators share their strategies and techniques- and, most importantly, their tools – to leverage diversity in the modern world.

Coping with the Final Tragedy: Cultural Variation in Dying and Grieving

Editors: Counts, David R. & Counts, Dorothy A.

1991; Amityville, New York: Baywood Publishing Company, Inc.

The people of each society express grief in their own, singular way. Nevertheless, dying, the loss of loved ones, and the pain of grief are common to all humans. The book is a useful resource for cross-cultural studies of the processes of dying and grieving.

Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication

Editor- Gudykunst, William B.

2003; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications

This book provides an extensive overview of cross-cultural variations in communication.

Intercultural communication is a relatively new area of research in the communication discipline but has made tremendous progress in recent years. The book maintains that understanding cross-cultural communication is a prerequisite to understanding intercultural communication. Part one of the book discusses cross-cultural communication – the comparison of communication across cultures. Part Two examines intercultural communication- the communication between people from different cultures.

Cross-Cultural Caring: A Handbook for Health Professionals

Editors: Waxler-Morrison, Nancy; Anderson, Joan M.; Richardson, Elizabeth, &. Chambers, Natalie A

2nd ed.; 2005; Vancouver, BC: UBC Press

As North America’s ethnic populations increase, health care and social service workers are recognizing that in order to provide culturally sensitive and effective treatment programs they must be more aware of the particular needs of their ethnic patients. Cross-Cultural Caring: A Handbook for Health Professionals looks at Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian, Chinese, Japanese, Iranian, South Asian, and Central American ethno-cultural groups. It stresses the need to understand both the cultural beliefs and the daily life concerns facing immigrants, such as work, income, child-rearing, and aging all of which impinge on health.

Reflecting the questions health professionals most often ask about immigrant groups, each chapter describes one ethno-cultural community, discussing such issues as childbirth, mental illness, dental care, hospitalization, and death, as well as common reasons for emigrating and challenges in adjusting to a new culture.

This book also provides statistics and analysis, responds to changing trends in immigration, addresses the special circumstances of refugees, and provides real-life stories of the experiences of immigrants and refugees.

Cross-Cultural Dialogues: 74 Brief Encounters with Cultural Difference

Storti, Craig

1994; Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc.

How much communication lurks in common conversation? According to the author, so much that many of our most common, seemingly innocent exchanges – in social settings, on the job, in the world of business – are cultural minefields waiting to explode. These explosions – cultural misunderstanding – can cause confusion, irritation, even alienation. At the workplace and in the world of business these explosions undermine communication, threaten important relationships, and cost a great deal of time and money; away from work, strain, even endanger, personal relations.

This book is a collection of brief conversations (4-8 lines) between an American and someone from another country and culture. Short as each dialogue is, it has buried within it at least one, and usually several breaches of cultural norms which the reader is challenged to figure out. And a challenge it is: the exchanges are so brief and innocuous that even the wariest among us are sandbagged by the dialogue’s hidden subtleties.

Ten cultures are represented by the non-Americans in the dialogues: Arab/Middle Eastern, British, Chinese, French, German, Hispanic, Indian, Japanese, Mediterranean/European, and Russian. The dialogues are grouped according to the setting in which they occur: social, workplace, and business.

Cross-Cultural Practice: Assessment, Treatment, and Training

Gopaul-McNicol, Sharon-ann & Brice-Baker, Janet

1998; New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Many mental health professionals are faced with the daunting challenge of working with patients with a vast array of beliefs, values, customs, and behaviours. This book helps clinicians meet the challenge of assessing and treating diverse clients by arming them with a bold new multicultural approach. Using numerous case examples drawn from their years of practice with Asian, Caribbean, African American, and Hispanic clients, the authors:

Describe proven techniques for assessing culturally diverse children, parents, and couples
Develop a proven Multicultural/Multimodal/Multi-system (Multi-CMS) approach to intervention
Expose the cultural biases at the cores of conventional mental health training
Outline the major competencies needed to develop a trainee’s multicultural skills and develop skills and develop alternative approaches to clinical training

Cross-Cultural Rehabilitation: An International Perspective

Editor: Leavitt, Ronnie L.

1999; London: W. B. Saunders

In today’s multicultural society, an improved understanding of people from varying cultural and ethnic groups has become increasingly significant to those working in the field of rehabilitation. The need to have an awareness of and sensitivity toward the issues involved is now essential to the effective day-to-day practice of this group of professionals. This book has been written specifically to help meet this need.

Key features:

Cover all aspects of cultural and racial issues relevant to the practice of rehabilitation professionals
Includes coverage of specific selected environments within which rehabilitation therapist may find themselves working
Relevant to all rehabilitation professionals in whatever country or context they may be working
Evidence-based and well-referenced
Edited by a North American physical therapist with contributions from an international multidisciplinary team authors.

Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine (The)

Loustaunam, Martha O. & Sobo, Elisa J.

1997; Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey

Summarizing the vast literature on culture and caring in a lively and jargon-free fashion, authors introduce readers to the practice of culturally sensitive health care. With engaging example, they describe the special approaches sociologists and anthropologists take to health, clearly illustrating the main concepts used in the two fields. The authors demonstrate the ways in which cultural and social factors shape medicine and health care. After a discussion of culture, the social structure and the impact of poverty, class, gender, and family patterns on health, illness and care-seeking, they explain the similarities and differences of medical systems cross-culturally. The authors call for a more flexible and culturally sensitive system of health care that expresses caring in more holistic ways, and offers examples as to how this might be accomplished in the increasingly multicultural USA.

Cultural Diversity: A Primer for the Human Services

Diller, Jerry V.

2nd ed.; 2004; Brooks/Cole – Thomson Learning

Filled with essential information and practical applications, this book helps you to provide culturally sensitive services to clients. General principles of cultural competence, racism, culture, and the process of cross-cultural service delivery are covered, as well as providing cultural information on specific populations.

Cultural Diversity: A Primer for the Human Services also includes expanded treatment of racial identification models, many real-world examples, and case studies. This book also contains interviews with five professionals, each from a different ethnic background – Latino/Latina, Aboriginal, African American, Asian American and Jewish American – to give you hands-on clinical suggestions and cautions. Self-awareness exercises are included to help you to recognize any prejudices you may have, so that you can be more effective in working with diverse clients.

Culture and Clinical Care

Editors: Lipson, Juliene G. & Dibble, Suzanne L.

2005; San Francisco, CA: UCSF Nursing Press

This book is inclusive of all clinicians and other health providers, such as chaplains and social workers. It is a practical guide rather than an academic text for college or university coursework, although some might use it for that purpose. It is also not a cookbook for providing health care to any particular patient in a designated cultural/ethnic group. Rather, its guidelines alert clinicians to issues that may affect health care. If clinicians have doubts or questions, they should ask the patient and family.

Culture and Health

MacLachlan, Malcolm

1997; Chichester:John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This book explores the fascinating interplay between culture and health. Physical and mental symptoms often point beyond the individuals who experience them, to the communities and cultures to which they belong. This book is concerned with helping students and clinicians think through the practical implications of working with people from different cultures. It covers the assessment and treatment of illness as well as the promotion of health, introducing new techniques such as the Problem Portrait Techniques for assessment, and Critical Incidents Analysis as a form of treatment. Drawing on psychological, sociological, anthropological and medical research, the book contains many case studies and each chapter ends with guidelines for good practice.

Culture-Infused Counselling: Celebrating the Canadian Mosaic

Editors: Nancy Arthur and Sandra Collins

2005; Calgary, AB: Counselling Concepts

Canada is a nation steeped in multiculturalism – from our earliest historical roots to our current social context. What it means to be Canadian, what it means to be a psychologist or counselor in Canada, what it means to practice in an ethical and competent manner, cannot be separated from an examination of culture and cultural differences. We are our cultures, personally and professionally.

Whatever the context of your practice, you will encounter clients who differ from you in worldview and cultural background. How prepared are you to respond effectively to differences across ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, socioeconomic status, and other factors that impact how people view you, view themselves, and view the world around them?

Culture-Infused Counselling: Celebrating the Canadian Mosaic provides a comprehensive foundation for building self-awareness, self-confidence, and professional competency. It will expand your awareness of cultural issues in Canada, stretch your theoretical and practical frameworks, and challenge you to widen your view of professional activities and roles, including responsibility for social justice.

This book offers a theoretical framework and practical guide for understanding our own personal culture, for increasing awareness of the culture of our clients, and for infusing culture into all aspects of our professional practice. The focus is on the development of multicultural competence by responding to the following key questions:

What is culture?
Who is culturally different?
What are the aspects of cultural differences on interpersonal communication and the development of an effective working alliance with clients?
How does culture affect understandings of healthy development and of personal, interpersonal, and systemic problems?
How do cultural differences affect the goals of counselling and the change process?
What does it mean for a practitioner to be multiculturally competent?
What specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills do you need to work effectively with clients from diverse cultural backgrounds?

Culture and the Clinical Encounter: An Intercultural Sensitizer for the Health Professions

Gropper, Rena C.

1996; Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press

Accurate cross-cultural communication may mean the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful medical intervention. The author uses critical incidents to educate health professionals about the importance of cultural differences in health care delivery. Each incident presents a cross-cultural conflict or problem in a clinical context, for which the reader must choose the best of four possible explanations.

Among the twenty-three cultures represented in the incidents are African American, Asian American, Dominican, Filipino, Haitian, Latino American, Mexican, Native American, Rom (Gypsy) and Vietnamese.

Destination Canada: Immigration Debate and Issues

Li, Peter S.

2003; Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press

Canada has a long history as an immigrant nation, and today depends on immigration for its future growth. Nevertheless, the standard immigration discourse portrays non-white immigrants as undermining the nation’s cohesion, and unsolicited immigrants (family class and refugee) as costly burdens to Canadian society.

Although the debate over immigration is often framed in terms of short-term costs and benefits, the studies and statistics that Peter Li reviews in this book show that, even in the short term, immigrants contribute substantially to economic growth, population increase, cultural enrichment, and urban vitality. At a time when economic globalization and social inequalities are increasing international migration, Canada has more to gain in the long term by expanding immigration. Professor Li also argues that Canada has an obligation not simply to select the most highly skilled candidates, but to do its part in redressing social inequalities.

Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques, and Bodies

Editiors: Berg, Marc & Mol, Annemarie

1998; Durham: Duke University Press

Western medicine- especially in contrast with non-Western traditions of medical practices- is widely thought of as a coherent and unified field in which beliefs, definitions, and judgments are shared. This book debunks this myth with an intercultural collections of essays that reveal the significantly varied ways practitioners of “conventional” Western medicine handle bodies, study test results, configure statistics, and converse with patients.

Combining theoretical work with interviews and direct observations of the activities and interactions of doctors, nurses, technicians, and patients, the contributions to this volume provide comparative studies of specific cases. Individual chapters explore topics such as the contested domain of fetal surgery in a California hospital, the construction of gender identity before trans-sexual surgery in Germany, and differences in the treatment and definition of pain by two clinics in France.

This book advances earlier studies on medicine’s social diversity and regional variations to expose significant differences in the presumptions and decisions that affect patients’ lives, and marks a dramatic developments on both the study of medicine and in science studies generally. Revealing the ways in which the bodies and lives of people are constructed as medical objects by practitioners, technologies and textbooks, this collection calls for and initiates new, more textured theories of the body and investigations in medicine and the practice of science.

Discrimination, Harassment, and the Failure of Diversity Training: What to Do Now

Hemphill, Hellen & Haines, Ray

1997; Westport, CT: Quorum Books

Billions of dollars have been spent on the wrong solution to the complex, sensitive and emotionally charged issue of discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Companies originally invested in the diversity training in order to meet Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity requirements, to reduce litigation costs, and to buy social peace. The result was often more social conflict – divisiveness, hostility, backlash, and an increase in litigation. This book offers a new, simple and effective solution to organizations that includes the need to: establish, publish and enforce a zero-tolerance policy against discrimination and harassment; develop standards that define unacceptable professional workplace behaviors; and provide the relationship skills training necessary for all employees to meet the company’s behavioural standards.

Diversity training failed because its focus was on the awareness, understanding and appreciation of differences rather than teaching basic skills to help employees relate more effectively with each other regardless of their differences. Companies have the right to require professional behaviour from their employees. They do not have the right to ask their employees to change their personal values and belief systems. This book provides a blueprint for a skill-based solution to the elimination of discrimination and harassment. It emphasizes the development professional relationship skills to help employees work more effectively with their bosses, their peers, their team members, their customers, and all those individuals different from themselves. Two unique training modules are the core of the workplace relationship skills program: “Managing Your Individual and Organizational MindTalk” and a “Workplace Relationship Skills Toolkit.”

Diversity at Work: The Business Case for Equity

Wilson, Trevor

1997; Toronto, ON: John Wiley & Sons

Diversity at work: the Business Case for Equity explains why you should strive for a more diverse and equitable workforce: not because you have to comply with legislation and not to feel warm and fuzzy inside, but because it makes good business sense. This book is a hands-on, practical guide to the way and how-to of striving for diversity and equity in the workplace:

Creating a fair employment system for all employees
Accommodating and valuing difference
Hiring and retaining the best-qualified person for the job
Basing all recruitment, hiring, and promotion decisions entirely on merit and equal opportunity
Overcoming backlash associated with controversial affirmative action and employment equity legislation
Successfully implementing a sound and effective diversity strategy in your organization
Achieving improved bottom-line results

Diversity, Culture and Counselling: A Canadian Perspective

France, M. Honore, Rodriguez, Maria Del Carmen, & Hett, Geoffrey G.

2004; Calgary: Detseling Enterprising Ltd.

Canadian society encompasses a variety of cultural, ethnic and religious groups. It is essential for the counselor to understand the beliefs and thought processes of individuals within these various groups in order to establish rapport and understanding, as well as make the counseled individual feel comfortable.

This book is based on the beliefs of diversity and the importance of culture, the multicultural counselling offers an approach to working with people from different ethnic, racial, religious backgrounds and sexual orientations. Understanding the causes and costs of stereotypes and biases is vital if counsellors are to bridge the ethnic and racial divide. Being secure in one’s own identity, culturally and racially, can only help to ensure that people accept and respect individual and collective differences. This book provides necessary background information relative to many of the diverse cultural groups in Canada.

Diversity Directive: Why Some Initiatives Fail and What to Do About It (The)

Hayles, Robert & Russell, Armida M.

1997; New York: McGraw-Hill

In recent years, organizations across America have implemented diversity programs designed to produce inclusive corporate cultures and thereby strengthen their ability to compete globally. Businesses are realizing they must rethink how they market their products, hire and manage employees and develop internal processes to take advantage of the attributes a diverse workforce and client base offer.

The book provides a proven step-by-step process for initiating or revitalizing your corporate diversity efforts. The authors realize the growing need to specify the competencies necessary for diversity work, and they do so by describing various models and strategies and by explaining when to use them for maximum effectiveness.

The book blends models, recommended action and real world applications to help organizations develop tactical action plans.

Why you must start with a broad, inclusive definition of diversity
How to use powerful developmental models to assess, diagnoses and guide the design of interventions
How to avoid the major obstacles and over-looked factors of a diversity initiative
Why effective diversity efforts use a measurement system to monitor progress regularly
How diversity work is a viable business tool and process that goes beyond affirmative action

Dying for a Home: Homeless Activists Speak Out

Crowe, Cathy

2000; Toronto, ON: Between the lines

Homelessness is no longer Canada’s dirty little secret. Activists like street nurse Cathy Crowe reveal our epidemic of homelessness to be an unnatural disaster, a disaster of our own making. This very moment, as you read these words, a quarter of a million Canadians are either homeless, or disgracefully underhoused.

How can we bring relief? Why not ask some of the victims themselves? In this groundbreaking book, Crowe has done exactly that, inviting ten formerly homeless Canadians to tell their own stories in their own words.

The ten people you will meet in theses pages have fought for decent housing for themselves, and for others. Their life experiences will challenge your assumptions and arouse your indignation. Their words will call you to action.

Ethnocultural Factors in Substance Abuse Treatment

Editors: Straussner, Shulamith L. A.

2003; New York: The Guilford Press

This book presents a culturally informed framework for understanding and treating substance abuse problems. From expert contributors, chapters cover specific ethnocultural groups in the United States, including Americans of African, Native American, Latino, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian decent. Authors examine how ethnocultural factors may affect a person’s attitudes towards alcohol and other drugs, patterns of substance use, reasons for seeking treatment, and responsiveness to various interventions. Featuring a wealth of illustrative clinical material, the book makes concrete recommendations for more competent, effective assessment and intervention. It also guides clinicians towards greater awareness of the ways their own ethnocultural background may affect their interactions with clients.

Experiencing Difference

Edited by James, Carl E.

2000; Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood Publishing

Difference is a fundamental aspect of our human experience. This anthology emerges from the editor’s attempts to navigate the complex, variable and unpredictable materiality of difference. The contributors present the various ways in which difference is experienced, interpreted and articulated. They tell of when and how they are named and/or recognized as different by others, and of their own naming and recognition of themselves as different. The essays show that gender, social class, ethnicity, race, region, appearance, dis/ability, sexuality, twin-ness, age, religion and occupational status are experienced and lived in multiple, complicated and contradictory ways. How the writers and other make sense of their differences is related to context, space and interaction. Difference, then, as the essays demonstrate, is relational, fluid, multiple and contextual, and therefore must be thought of in complex ways. Contributors have written in different styles and genres, which represent their respective voices and preferences. Through essays, written in narrative, journalistic and academic forms, short-stories, letters, conversations and dialogues – contributors thoughtfully communicate their stories in ways that maintain interest and attention, as well as facilitate as appreciation of the layered complexities of difference.

Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories, and Synthetic Cultures

Hofstede, Gert J.& Pedersen, Paul B.

2002; Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press Inc.

Exploring Culture brings Gert Hofstede’s five dimensions of national culture to life. Synthetic cultures, the ten “pure” cultural types derived from the extremes of the five dimensions, are introduced. These cultures consist of the attitudes, beliefs, positive and negative concepts, norms, rules, self-definitions, values, etc. that are typically found at the extreme poles of each of the five dimensions.

This book approaches training through the three-part process of building awareness, knowledge and skills. It leads the reader through the first two components with more than 75 activities, dialogues, stories and incidents. The book can be studies by individuals, or the materials can be used by trainers working with individuals or teams.

Handbook of Racial-Cultural Psychology and Counselling: Training and practice (Vol. II)

Carter, Robert T.

2005; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This book is composed of two parts: training for racial-cultural competence and critical issues in racial-cultural practice.

Health, Healing, and Religion: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Kinsley, David

996; New Jersey: Prentice Hall

Healing is a central concern for most religions. In almost every culture throughout the world, there remains an inextricable link between the ways in which health, sickness, and healing are related to religious or moral concerns, themes, and practices. This book offers fascinating insight into this special bond. What’s more, Kinsley explores the dichotomy and interrelationship between modern, scientific medicine and earlier to alternative forms of medicine, stressing the ways in which aspects of traditional medicine and healing persist in modern medicine.

More specifically, Health, Healing, and Religion:

Presents important themes and characteristics in traditional medical cultures that illustrate the interrelatedness of religion, health, and healing.
Discusses Christianity while showing how many of the characteristics of traditional cultures apply to Christian materials.
Examines modern medical culture, illustrating how it is characterized by many traditional features.

Health and Illness: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia

Levinson, David & Gaccione, Laura

1997; Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc.

To most Westerners, health is strictly a matter of science. Disease, we are convinced, is caused by microorganisms, tumors, and chemical imbalances, and treatment is a simple matter of identifying the specific cause and eliminating it or relieving the symptoms. Case closed.

But people in hundreds of other societies around the globe find this Western view narrow and unimaginative. They view health as, for example, a matter of balance between humans and their culture or their larger natural environment. Often they explain disease not as a mechanical failure of the body but as a spiritual disorder or the result of the evil intentions of others. And to the astonishment of Westerners, many of these blatantly unscientific health care systems are quite effective.

This book introduces readers to a colourful array of traditional and alternative healing systems from around the globe, such as:

Aromatherapy, the use of fragrance to soothe physical and mental complaints, a healing system that goes back to the days of Cleopatra.
Humoral medicine, a system described by the Ancient Greeks, according to which four humors – blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile – were thought to circulate through the human body. Too much of any one humor resulted in imbalance or disease.
Tratrak meditation, from Hinduism, wherein one stares unblinkingly to a flame until the eyes tear in order to enter a tranquil state.

Healthcare Professional's Guide to Clinical Cultural Competence (The)

Editor: Srivastava, Ravi H.

2007; Toronto, ON: Mosby

Today’s evidence in healthcare research clearly supports the significant role that culture plays in the interaction between healthcare professionals and clients.

This book serves as an introduction to developing cultural competence, an important aspect of providing client-centered care. Cultural competency emphasizes the idea of operating effectively in different cultural contexts.

Using a unique framework that moves beyond cultural sensitivity, cultural knowledge, and cultural awareness, this book focuses on learning and acquiring the necessary skills to identify with, and care for, the diversity of cultures encountered in a variety of healthcare settings.

In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture

Barme, Geremie R.

1999; New York: Columbia University Press

This book is a study of the graphomania that has once made China one of the greatest writing and publishing nations on the planet. It is the continuation of more than a decade of work on contemporary Chinese cultural issues. The book also provides a summary and, by necessity, a highly selective history of cultural politics and purges in China from the late 1970s to the present. It highlights certain individuals and incidents that lluminate some of the most intriguing aspects of cultural development on the mainland.

Leadership in a Diverse and Multicultural Environment: Developing Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills

Mary L. Connerley & Paul B. Pedersen

2005; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc.

Leadership in a Diverse Multicultural Environment provides leaders with the tools necessary to effectively interact with all individuals. Effective leaders can shape the culture of their organization to be accepting of individuals from all races, ethnicities, religions, and genders with a minimum of misunderstandings. Although much of the research related to multiculturalism has focused on expatriates and international assignments, this book also includes research on leaders in domestic organizations.

This book is well grounded in solid research that:

provides a “culture centered” leadership perspective allowing organizational leaders the opportunity to attend to the influence of culture;
helps the reader find examples of how multicultural awareness can make their leadership task easier; and
promotes an organizational cultural that is more satisfying to both individuals and their leaders by embracing and celebrating differences.

Lessons from the Intersexed

Kessler, Suzanne J.

2002 New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press

From the moment intersexuality - the condition of having physical gender markers (genitals, gonads, or chromosomes) that are neither clearly female nor male- is suspected and diagnosed, social institutions are mobilized in order to maintain the two seemingly objective sexual categories. Infants’ bodies are altered, and the “ambiguous” is made “normal.” As Kessler argues, the way the medical and psychological manage intersexuality is guided by our culture’s beliefs about gender and genitals rather than by the needs of the child.

Interviews with pediatric surgeons and endocrinologists as well as parents of intersexed children and adults who were treated for this condition in childhood lead Kessler to propose several new approaches for physicians in dealing with parents and children. Beyond the medical sphere, the author also evaluates a political vanguard intent on gaining acceptance by physicians and society at large of an intersexed identity.

The book explores the possibilities and implications of suspending a commitment to two ‘natural” genders. It addresses gender destabilization issues arising from intersexuality and compels a rethinking of the meaning of gender, genitals, and sexuality.

Making it Happen: A Non-Technical Guide to Project Management

Kyle, Mackenzie

1998; Toronto, ON: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd

This book provides a fresh and clear approach to project management. The book is written in the form of a novel, it covers the basics of project management in a friendly, interesting, and memorable way.

Will Campbell, a reasonably competent middle manager, is suddenly thrust into managing a high-profile project that could make or break his career. With no project management experience, and armed only with the guidance of his eccentric mentor, Martha, Will learns the hard way. As Will navigates the rough seas of company politics, treacherous competition, and a project swirling out of control, he narrowly evades many pitfalls, and masters some indispensable project management tools along the way.

Against the backdrop of this personal drama, a simple, rational approach to project management unfolds. Will’s ability to grasp these principles is the key to his survival, and could be the key to yours. The book enables the reader to transform risky, real-life situations into success.

Provides a simple, non-technical approach, useful to any business person involved in teams or managing projects.
Offers practical tools and principles that will make any project a success: from office moves to product roll-outs, systems implementations to training program delivery, and everything in between.
Boxes, definitions, and charts highlight key points and practical project management tips.

Managing Intercultural Conflict Effectively

Ting-Toomey, Stella & Oetzel, John G.

2001; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publication

Intercultural conflicts often start with different culture-based expectation of how a misunderstanding should be handled. If the cultural parties persist in their ethnocentric ways of approaching the conflict, the initial misunderstanding can quite easily spiral into a complex, polarized situation.

This book is for readers who want to better understand the intercultural conflict process and learn how to manage it. The book is illustrated with examples, conflict dialogues, and critical incidents in order to illustrate the complexity of intercultural conflict interaction. Constructive guidelines on how to manage intercultural conflict are also offered.

Managing Intercultural Conflict Effectively addresses such issues as:

Why we should pay attention to intercultural conflict?
Intercultural conflict in intimate settings
Small group conflict
Workplace conflict
Intercultural conflict experience

Promoting Health in Multicultural Populations: A Handbook for Practitioners

Huff Robert M., & Kline, Michael V.

1999; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications

This book is an indispensable resource that offers not only a wealth of information and examples about specific cultural groups in North America but also assessment and implementation guidelines for health promotion in any cultural community. The first part of this handbook explores the context of culture, cross-cultural concepts of health and disease, conceptual approaches to multicultural health promotion, and suggestions for planning health promotion for multicultural populations. Subsequent parts discuss Hispanic/Latino, African American, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian American, and Pacific Islander populations. Each of these parts comprises three chapters describing the characteristics of the population, providing guidelines for practice and offering a case study that demonstrates the points made previously in the section. The book concludes with an examination of the editors’ cultural assessment framework and a look at the future of multicultural health promotion and disease prevention.

Race, Ethnicity, and Health: A Public Health Reader

Editor: LaVeist, Thomas A.

2002; San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Despite the great strides that have been made in the health status of Americans in the twentieth century, the health profile of the USA’s racial and ethnic groups lags behind. Soon the USA will be a majority of minorities. How will the USA respond to these lingering health disparities?

A compendium on one of the most crucial topics confronting those in public health and health policy, this book brings together the best peer reviewed research literature from the leading scholars and faculty in this growing field. The book provides a historical and political context for the study of health, race, and ethnicity with key findings on disparities in access, use and quality. This book also examines the role of health care providers in health disparities and discusses the issue of matching patients and physicians by race.

Refugees as Immigrants: Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese in America

Editor: Haines, David W.

1989; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefilef Publishing Group, Inc.

Commencing with the fall of American-supported governments in 1975, a continuing exodus from Indochina has brought to the United States a new Asian-American population that is impressive in size, rate of growth, socio-cultural diversity, and complexity of adaptation. Recipients of considerable attention from the public, and the wide range of governmental and private organizations that have been involved in resettlement programs, these refugees have had to face not only loss of country, friends, and often family, but also the rigors of adjusting to a society vastly different from the ones they left. Their experience constitutes an important, and in many ways, unique chapter in American immigration history.

The resettlement of refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam has also generated an unusually broad range of research. This volume brings together for the first time the work of those responsible for essential surveys of the first decade of Southeast Asian refugees resettlement in the United States. The authors discuss the details of initial employment to the longer term issues of community development and generational change, from aggregate patterns in adaptation to the distinctive histories of specific groups. The contributors of this book provide an introduction to, and a rich source of documentary detail on the complex story of this important new segment of American immigration.

Removing Barriers II: Keeping Canadian Values in Health Care

Editor: Masi, Ralph

2000; Vancouver Richmond Health Board

The objective of the Removing Barriers initiative is to bring health issues of vulnerable or marginalized communities to the attention of health care professionals, agencies, organizations and systems across Canada. A national consensus statement, Declaration on Values in Health Care in Canada, was developed as a result of the Removing Barriers initiative to reflect policy directions for inclusion, diversity and social justice within health care.

The Removing Barriers II National Symposium was held in Vancouver, BC in May 2000. The theme – Keeping Canadian Values in Health Care – focused on the principles of the Canada Health Act: Universality, Accessibility, Public Administration, Comprehensiveness, and Portability. By exploring these principles in the context of the country’s current needs, the intent was to build on the Canadian health system success and ensure its continuity into the new millennium.

Responding to Diversity in the Metropolis: Building an Inclusive Research Agenda

Editor: Abu-Laban, Baha & Derwing, Tracey M.

1997; Edmonton, AB: Prairie Centre of Excellence

Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business

Trompenaars, Fons & Hampden-Turner, Charles

2nd Ed; 2002; London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing

The book dispels the idea that there is only one way to manage and encourage us to understand our own culture in the workplace before managing or doing business with other national cultures. The authors reveal the seven key dimensions of business behaviour and how these combine to create four basic ‘types’ of corporate culture: the Family (e.g. Japan, Spain, Belgium); the Eiffel Tower (e.g. large French and German companies); the Guided Missile (e.g. US, UK); and the Incubator (e.g. start-up companies in Silicon Valley).

Social Determinants of Health: Canadian Perspectives

Editor: Raphael, Dennis

2004; Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars' Press, Inc.

Genetics and traditional risk factors such as activity, diet and tobacco use are not the best predictors of whether we stay healthy or become ill. What then, are the predictors of adult-onset diabetes, heart attacks, or stroke, and many other diseases? Social determinants of health provide the answer. Social determinants of health are the socio-economic conditions that influence the health of individuals, communities and jurisdictions as a whole. These determinants also establish the extent to which a person possesses the physical, social, and persona resources to identify and achieve personal aspirations, satisfy needs, and cope with the environment. This perspective is the key to understanding patterns of health and illness in Canada today.

Uniting top academic and high profile experts from across the country, this contributed volume is the first of its kind published in Canada. It summarizes how socio-economic factors affect the health of Canadians, surveys the current state of eleven social determinants of health across Canada, and provides an analysis of how these determinants affect Canadian’s health. In each case, the book explores what policy options would contribute to better health outcomes, and how to ensure that these options are pursued.

Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank

Fuller, Robert W.

2003; Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers

This book takes the analysis of discrimination beyond racism and sexism to reveal a form of injustice that everyone knows, but no one sees: discrimination based on rank, or “rankism.” Low rank – signifying weakness, vulnerability, and the absence of power – marks people for abuse in much the same way that race, religion, gender, and sexual orientations have long done.

The book explains our reluctance to confront this phenomenon, and argues that abuse based on power differences is no more defensible than that based on differences in colour or gender. It unmasks rankism, demonstrating its pervasiveness and corrosiveness in our personal lives, social institutions, and international relations. Illuminating the subtle, often dysfunctional workings of power in all our interactions – whether on the individual, societal, or global level – it presents rankism as the last obstacle to equal opportunity, bring into focus a “dignitaries” revolution that is already taking shape, and offers a preview of a post-rankist world.

Strangers at the Gate: The 'Boat People's' First Ten Years in Canada

Beiser, Morton

1999; Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press

Twenty-seven million people in the world are refugees. In this book, Morton Beiser puts readers in touch, emotionally and intellectually, with the reality of refugees in Canada. In the process, he dispels key misconceptions about immigrants in this country and reframes central debates on refugee policy.

The book describes Beiser’s ten-year study of 1,300 ‘Boat People’ admitted to Canada between 1979 and 1981. It chronicles the former refugee’s struggles to learn English and to establish themselves economically in their new environment, and show that, contrary to popular opinion, they use fewer health and social services than indigenous Canadians.

Although most refugees in most resettlement situations succeed remarkably well, no country, Canada included, offers newcomers the welcome they need and deserve. This book has a number of goals:

to inform public debate by documenting the successes and failures of a large group of refugees resettling in Canada;
to contribute to a growing literature on human resiliency; and
to distill policy and practice implications from research findings.

The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family

Elliott, Duong Van Mai

1999; New York: Oxford University Press

This book is an extraordinary narrative woven from the lives of four generations of her own family, illuminates fascinating- and until now unexplored –strands of Vietnamese history. Beginning with her great-grandfather and continuing to the present, the author traces her family’s journey through a long era of tumultuous change. She tells of childhood hours in her grandmother’s silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village. She reveals the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left their staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh and then spent moths sleeping with her infant son in jungle camps, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. She follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon- including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of departing American helicopter. This often haunting, often heartbreaking, and always mesmerizing story of what the Vietnamese have experienced will forever change our perception of the modern history of Vietnam.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

Fadiman, Anne

1997; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

This book explores a clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia’s parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy.

Transcultural Nursing: Assessment & Intervention

Giger, Joyce N. & Davidhizar, Ruth E.

4th ed., 2004; St. Louis, Missouri: Mosby

The concept of transcultural nursing is relatively new to the nursing literature. In fact, it has been only been in the last three decades that nurses have begun to develop an appreciation for the need to incorporate culturally appropriate clinical approaches into the daily routine of client care. With changing demographics, it is imperative that nurses develop not only sensitivity but also cultural competence to render safe, effective care to all clients.

This book is divided into two parts. Part one, focuses on theory, and six chapters describing the six cultural phenomena that makes up the authors transcultural conceptual theory of assessment. Part two contains chapters by contributing authors in which the six cultural phenomena are systematically applied to the assessment and care of individuals in specific cultures.

Unequal Relations: An Introduction to Race, Ethnic and Aboriginal Dynamics in Canada

Augie Fleras & Jean Leonard Elliott

3rd ed.; 2000; Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall Allyn & Bacan Canada

This third edition focuses on race, ethnic and aboriginal dynamics in Canada. On one side, Canada is becoming increasingly open and tolerant. To the other, racial politics and ethnic conflicts continue to threaten, distort and dismember. Consider only the anomalies that Canadians confront: Race matters at a time when many think it shouldn’t. ethnicity is not always about cuddly attachments for display in festivals and food courts. The book is part analysis, part conscious raising, and part antiracist in objective and style.

Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Westerners

Nydell, Margaret K. (Omar)

3rd ed; 2002; Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press

From the rise fundamentalism to the historically uneasy relationship between the Arab World and the West, the author has expanded her highly respected book to bring today’s complex issues into clearer focus. This third edition of the book introduces the reader to the complexities of Arab culture and Islam in an evenhanded, unbiased style. The book covers such topics as beliefs and values, religion and society, the role of the family, friends and strangers, men and women, etiquette, and communication styles.

Who Can Ride the Dragon? An Exploration of the Cultural Roots of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Huan, Zhang Yu & Rose, Ken

5th ed.; 1999; Brookline, Massachusetts: Paradigm Publications

The book evokes the essence of Chinese medicine by revealing its roots deep in the language and thought, beliefs and customs of the Chinese people. You will discover the depth and subtlety of traditional Chinese medicine and make its characteristics expressions and concepts your own, learning to integrate its theories and techniques into your daily life.

Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Disease

Editor: Radley, Alan

1993: London: Routledge

In the recent years as experienced by patients has emerged as an approach to understanding sickness and health. Descriptions of the everyday situations of people with particular disease provide a commentary upon the nature of symptoms and the relation of the body to society. This approach stresses the biographical and cultural contexts in which illness arises and is borne by individuals and those who care for them. It emphasizes the need to understand illness in terms of the patient’s own interpretation, its onset, the course of its progress and the potential of the treatment for the condition.

This book examines people’s experience of illness and their understanding of what it means to be healthy. It brings together, for the first time in one volume, contributors from a variety of fields who use a biographic and cultural approach.

You & Yours

Nye, Naomi S.

2005; New York: BOA Editions Ltd.

Collection of poems. Naomi Shihab Nye won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2005




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