The LWWRC Summer ‘25 Reading List to Engage with Our Clusters

Covers of the books that are mentioned in this blog post.

The Live Work Well Research Centre (LWWRC) is home to five research clusters exploring complex themes and the ways they influence work, family, and well-being in all their diverse forms: “All My Relations” Indigenous Ways of Knowing; Disabilities, Access, and Inclusion; Displacements, Emergence, and Change; Reimagining Care; and Sexual and Gender Diversity.

In the past, the Centre has developed engagement lists for our members to further understand our research clusters. Now that summer is finally here, we have pulled top picks from previous engagement lists and also added new suggestions to the mix. Check out our book recommendations below, and stay tuned for future engagement lists featuring podcasts, movies, and TV shows!

“All My Relations” Indigenous Ways of Knowing

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a balancing act between prose and poetics. Readers are taken on a journey of small moments in the lives of seven characters, rather than in a linear narrative. This book challenges the Western notions we have of storytelling. Additionally, this book deconstructs the gender of language, referring to each character using they/them pronouns. Important to note is the inclusion of several other-than-human characters. Through the unconventional characters and storytelling, readers are encouraged to reframe the way they view the world. This book is good preparation for the Nokom’s House project that the cluster is working on, which will be a hub for land-based research and Indigenous languages preservation.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, focuses on the powerful relationship between humans and the natural world from both a cultural and scientific perspective. The author explores the valuable ways that knowledge is passed down in Indigenous cultures and the implications this knowledge sharing has for the ways we interact with the earth. A key theme to take away is how Indigenous ways of knowing can enhance our relationships with the natural world. This book is a great companion to cluster lead Kim Anderson’s Strength in Relations: Generating Possibilities for Indigenous Language Journeys project which investigates the concept of Indigenous relationality and the social aspects of Indigenous languages.

Disabilities, Access, and Inclusion

Out of My Mind

Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper follows eleven-year-old Melody Brooks, a young girl with cerebral palsy who cannot speak or walk. Melody is extremely intelligent but struggles with the inability to share her thoughts with others. However, Melody’s life changes when she acquires a communication device that can help her convey her thoughts to others. This book is a great starting point for those hoping to learn more about the Disabilities, Access, and Inclusion cluster as it focuses on the disability of a young girl and the importance of access and inclusion for bettering the lives of the disabled. Through projects like the Canadian Feminist Disability Coalition and EDID-GHDI, this cluster conducts research on the experiences of disabled women and girls.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, is a collection of essays and stories written by disabled writers, artists, and activists. The general theme of these stories is navigating society as a disabled person in a world that was not built for your needs. The stories and essays include many diverse voices from the disabled community, homing in on the intersectional properties of disability, race, class, gender, and sexuality. In the Disabilities, Access, and Inclusion cluster, researchers highly value the views and experiences of those in the community, and many of the research projects, such as the EDID-GHDI partnership, are guided by disabled individuals across the world.

Displacements, Emergence, and Change

The Hate U Give

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is a novel that centres its protagonist Starr Carter in Garden Heights, a poor, predominately black community in America. Starr feels displaced as she attends a school with a large population of white students. She is torn between fitting in at her white school and living in her Black community. The area she lives in faces economic disinvestment, structural inequalities, and high statistics of police violence. Starr sparks political and social change when she speaks out about the police brutality against one of her black friends. This book is a great place to start when exploring the Displacements, Emergence, and Change cluster as it deals with the act of marginalization within one’s community as a result of political and economic forces outside one’s control.

Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast

Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant explores the ever-changing relationship between humans and fire. The story begins with an account of how Fort McMurray, the leading Canadian petroleum plant, was overrun by wildfire in 2016. Vaillant implores that this devastating occurrence is not a one-time event as, in the face of climate change, fire becomes more and more of a natural disaster around the globe. This book highlights the challenges that the Displacements, Emergence, and Change cluster focuses on. With its topic of how communities react to displacements and change, this book is a good tool for understanding what kind of landscapes this cluster investigates.

Reimagining Care

The House in the Cerulean Sea

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune is a novel which follows Linus, a government social worker, who is sent to investigate a house on the ocean in which various magical children reside. Over the course of the novel, Linus is challenged with changing his perception of these children who are labelled as “dangerous.” He must evaluate their livelihoods and then fight for them against twisted government systems. This book illustrates the complexity of care systems, and the need to reimagine how care is practiced, which are topics explored through the research conducted by the Reimagining Care Cluster.

Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University

Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University by Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern discusses the reality of navigating university and academia in a way that benefits everyone. Through collaboration, care, equity, and justice it is possible to combat the discriminatory, hierarchal, and individualistic foundations that many universities are built on. Hawkins and Kern draw on examples from around the world where course design, conferencing, administration, research teams, and workloads have been modified to transform academia for the better. This nonfiction work is a great reflection of the Reimagining Care cluster, which tackles systemic concerns and revitalizes care in a variety of institutions.

Sexual and Gender Diversity

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a coming-of-age novel set in the 1980s. It follows the story of Aristotle and Dante as they discover their queer identities against a Mexican–American cultural backdrop. This work of fiction uncovers the complexity of sexual and gender diversity and the intersections of race and cultural obligation. The work of the Sexual and Gender Diversity cluster heavily focuses on queerness across multiple cultures, geographies, and time periods, making this book a good place to start in understanding the work of the cluster.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of the Identity

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler is a critical examination of the notions of masculine and feminine. Famous for Butler’s claim that gender is a performance, this text is a necessary examination of societal constructions of gender and sex. This text is a great starting point in understanding the work of the Sexual and Gender Diversity cluster. A continuous theme in this cluster is the various and diverse representations of gender across cultures and how these representations connect to families, work, and well-being. Butler’s book takes a queer-inclusive perspective to emphasize how gender is decided by how individuals present themselves each day rather than their biology.