Read This is a Scout column that details book selections by authorities, luminaries, institutions, and locals that share deep affections for the written word. This week, Carly Diab, Natalie Craig, Emma Somers and Cybele Creery – all of Emily Carr University Library – put together this selection of four books to combat the feeling of apathy and hopelessness by encouraging the reader to engage in acts of solidarity and resistance.

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1. Streetopia. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Booklyn, 2011.
Reviewed by Natalie Craig
In response to growing concern about redevelopment plans in San Francisco’s Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighbourhoods, writer Erick Lyle and artists Chris Johansen and Kal Spelletich invited over 100 artists and activists to participate in an anti-gentrification art fair. The team collaborated with neighbourhood residents to brainstorm strategies for improving city life without causing massive displacement. ‘Streetopia’ documents artwork, projects, and ideas from this event and suggests possible alternatives for cities like Vancouver that are facing similar issues. It’s a welcome reminder of our collective strength and the importance of protecting existing communities and the people that already live there.

2. First Contract: Women and the Fight to Unionize by Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge. Between the Lines Publishing, Toronto. 1986.
Reviewed by Emma Somers
The dramatized recounting of a group of Canadian working women fighting to Unionize their workplace, First Contract is a weird and wonderful collection of pre-photoshop photo collages and personal stories. The authors, Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, have been producing socially engaged art since the mid 1970’s. First Contract is funny, poignant and a strong reminder that it was our Moms, in their classic “Mom Jeans” who forged these difficult feminist paths in the workplace. All these women remind me of my own Mom, a Union Shop Steward at her job, the primary caretaker of her kids and the home we lived in and someone who fought hard against discrimination and for higher wages and the safety of her co-workers.

3. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Reviewed by Cybele Creery
“No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain,” say Susan Sontag in the last book published before her death in 2004. Does a viewer have the right to feel someone else’s emotions that are represented in a photograph? Is it possible to have genuine empathy when looking at other people’s images of pain or is there always a remove, an otherness? Empathy is key to solidarity, but there are ethical considerations as well. Sontag offers a considered analysis of many issues which continue to be highly relevant 13 years after this book came out.

4. Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia. Oakland: AK Press, 2013.
Reviewed by Carly Diab
This book includes insightful and impassioned essays on immigrant rights movements, with contributions of personal stories from organizers and writers. It recommends working towards decolonization and using effective strategies in social rights movements as methods of undoing border imperialism. The writings inspire the reader to engage in social justice with commitment, accountability, responsibility and awareness in order to reimagine and improve the world we live in.