Welcome to our Faculty Bookshelf, which showcases books authored or edited by faculty members in the School of Social Work. Books are arranged first by their year of publication and then alphabetically by title. Descriptions of each book are taken from their publishers' websites. Hyperlinks in the books' titles will bring you to the publisher's website, and hyperlinks in the authors'/editors' names will bring you to their faculty profile pages.

2026

Black Girl in the Ring (Breakwater Books, 2026) by Delores V. Mullings

Juxtaposing experiences of discrimination with love and resilience, this debut poetry collection is a critique of intimate and institutional violence and hostility, entwined with a celebration of beauty and fierceness. This collection of free verse, haiku, and narrative poetry takes the reader by the hand and walks them through these parallel experiences from a personal perspective.

De-colonizing Journeys: Confronting Colonialism through Circle Work (Fernwood, 2026), edited by Giselle Dias, Julia Janes, Kathy Absolon, Jessica Hutchison, Jennifer Poole, and Carla Rice

This transformative collection features Indigenous and settler peoples who engaged in years of circle work to unpack how colonialism affects their lives and professional practices. Guided by circle work, digital storying, and land-based teachings, this is an intimate encounter with Indigenous knowledge and lived accounts of people who chose to wake up, to feel, and to act differently in the world.

Exploring Attitudes about Sexual and Gender Diversity: Resilience Skills for LGBTQIA+ People and People with a Different or No Label (LGBTQIA+ Peacebuilding Project, 2026), edited by A. Lee Beckstead, Sulaimon Giwa, and Iva Žegura

Drawing on research and personal reflection, this book explains key concepts and evolving language related to sexual orientation and gender identity and examines why certain attitudes persist, how they can change, and how people can engage across differences in ways that support well-being and constructive relationships. It also provides a research-informed and inclusive response to the question, “Can people change their sexual orientation or gender?” while encouraging curiosity, intellectual humility, and openness when engaging with complex and sensitive topics.

Living True to Yourself: Resilience Skills for LGBTQIA+ People and People with a Different or No Label (LGBTQIA+ Peacebuilding Project, 2026), edited by A. Lee Beckstead, Sulaimon Giwa, and Iva Žegura

Drawing on research and personal reflection, this book explains how sexual and gender identity can develop over time while showing how stress and stigma shape that process and how to respond in ways that support stability, purpose, and well-being. This is not just a book about “being yourself,” it provides clear ways to strengthen personal, social, and spiritual resilience. 

Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies, 2nd edition (Canadian Scholars, 2026), edited by Idil Abdillahi, Geoffrey Reaume, B.A. LeFrançois, and Robert Menzies

Over the decade since the first edition of Mad Matters was published, Mad Studies has exploded into a new field of study across Canada and around the world. This thoroughly updated and expanded second edition continues the legacy of the groundbreaking first edition by presenting more critical voices that convey the lived experiences of psychiatrized people and which challenges dominant understandings of “mental illness.”

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2025

In Her Arms: Love and Legacy of Black Mothers and Daughters (Demeter Press, 2025), edited by Eboni-Rai Mullings, Olasumbo Adelakun, and Delores V. Mullings

In Her Arms is a powerful collection of nonfiction stories, essays, and poems that center the intimate, complex relationships between Black women and their mothers, grandmothers, and daughters. The book's contributors explore how they have been mothered and how they mother, often while navigating the clash between Western cultural norms and traditional African or Caribbean parenting values.

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2024

Feel Secure in Yourself: A Guidebook for LGBTQIA+ People and Those with a Different Label or No Label (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), edited by A. Lee Beckstead, Jacks Cheng, Sulaimon Giwa, Mark A. Yarhouse, and Iva Žegura

This guidebook is designed to increase readers’ personal resilience, self-acceptance, and growth from minority stress and encourages readers to clarify their beliefs and improve their relationship with themselves to develop self-awareness, self-value, and self-direction. Conflicts can be resolved as readers develop knowledge of themselves and others and consider resilient ways of experiencing sexual and/or gender diversity.

Q Policing: LGBTQ+ Experiences, Perspectives, and Passions (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), edited by Roddrick Colvin, Angela Dwyer, and Sulaimon Giwa

Q Policing features eighteen contributors from around the world who explore the nature of the relationship between LGBTQ+ communities and the police. The book incorporates a variety of voices, data sources, and methodologies, but contributors share an intentional focus on race, age, sex, gender, and other identities that helps explain and contextualize queer people’s experiences around and in policing.

Relate to Other with Confidence: A Guidebook for LGBTQIA+ People and Those with a Different Label or No Label (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), edited by A. Lee Beckstead, Jacks Cheng, Sulaimon Giwa, Mark A. Yarhouse, and Iva Žegura

This guidebook is designed to increase readers’ social resilience and assertiveness in response to minority stress. It highlights the need for belonging and community building and a safe, collaborative, and peaceful coexistence with our diverse, pluralistic cultures.

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2023

A Toast to Hope: Stories at the Centre of Us (Engen Books, 2023), edited by Sulaimon Giwa, AJ Ryan, Sarah Thompson, and Ailsa Craig

Engen Books is proud to announce they have partnered with Quadrangle NL again to make this collection a reality, celebrating 2SLGBTQAI+ writers and stories. This collection features fifteen astonishing short stories hand-picked by editors Sulaimon Giwa, AJ Ryan, Sarah Thompson, and Ailsa Craig.

African, Caribbean, and Black People’s Resilience During Covid-19 (Demeter, 2023), edited by Delores V. Mullings, Jennifer Clarke, and Olasumbo Adelakun

This collection provides critical discussions on the complexities of resilience in Black communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. It specifically highlights the resilience of African, Caribbean, and Black people, aged 12 to 85 years, from Nigeria, South Africa, Jamaica, England, Canada, and the United States, showcasing their strengths, determination, courage, contribution, leadership, innovation, creativity, cooperation, and community involvement through the sharing of reflections, essays, stories, journals, artwork, and poetry.

HIV, Sex and Sexuality in Later Life (Bristol University Press, 2023), edited by Mark Henrickson, Casey Charles, Shiv Ganesh, Sulaimon Giwa, Kan Diana Kwok, and Tetyana Semigina

Containing work from scholars in Bangladesh, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Switzerland, Ukraine, the UK and the US, and research from India and Kenya, this book explores the experiences of sex and sexuality in individuals and groups living with HIV in later life. Contributors consider the impacts of stigma, barriers to intimacy, physiological sequelae, long-term care, undetectability, pleasure and biomedical prevention.

Transforming Community Policing: Mobilization, Engagement, and Collaboration, 2nd Edition (Emond, 2023) by Hugh C. Russell and Sulaimon Giwa

Transforming Community Policing demonstrates how police can empower community actors to address complex social issues in a way that fosters community growth and development, minimizing the need for police-led emergency response. Drawing on years of experience and community-based research, authors Hugh C. Russell and Sulaimon Giwa provide readers with the information necessary to promote and maintain communities that are happy, healthy, and safe.

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2022

Critical Social Work Praxis (Fernwood, 2022), edited by Sobia Shaheen Shaikh, B.A. LeFrançois, and Teresa Macías

In this innovative, expansive and wide-ranging collection, leading social work thinkers engage with social work traditions to bridge social work theory and practice and arrive at social work praxis: a uniting of critical thought and ethical action. The text helps students understand how to extend theory into praxis and gives instructors critical new tools and discussion ideas.

Racism and Gay Men of Color: Living and Coping with Discrimination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) by Sulaimon Giwa

This important book will inspire advocates and activists, students and scholars, and will become indispensable in university and college courses on sexuality and race studies. Giwa warns against the denial that underlies much monolithic racism and highlights the strategies used by gay men of color to counter racism in their communities and to lead strong, effective lives.

Transforming Social Work Field Education: New Insights from Practice Research and Scholarship (University of Calgary Press, 2022), edited by Julie L. Drolet, Grant Charles, Sheri M. McConnell, and Marion Bogo

Transforming Social Work Field Education encourages the adoption of research and scholarship into the practice of social work field education. It offers current theoretical concepts and perspectives that shape social work field education and provides case studies of practice research grounded in the experiences of diverse communities and countries.

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2021

Acceptance: Stories at the Centre of Us (Engen Books, 2021), edited by Ailsa Craig, Sulaimon Giwa, AJ Ryan, and Sarah Thompson

Engen Books is proud to announce they have partnered with Quadrangle NL to make this collection a reality, celebrating 2SLGBTQAI+ writers and stories. This collection features twenty-two astonishing short stories hand-picked by editors Ailsa Craig, Sulaimon Giwa, AJ Ryan, and Sarah Thompson.

Africentric Social Work (Fernwood, 2021), edited by Delores V.  Mullings, Jennifer Clarke, Wanda Thomas Bernard, David Este, and Sulaimon Giwa

The first of its kind in Canada, this book provides an invaluable resource for students and practitioners alike by presenting a dynamic approach to African-centred service provision that is ethical and culturally relevant. The book’s contributors present a broad spectrum of personal and professional experiences as African Canadian social work practitioners, students and educators, and address issues that African Canadians confront daily, which social work educators and potential practitioners need to understand to provide racially and culturally relevant services.

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2016

Addiction, Modernity, and the City: A Users’ Guide to Urban Space (Routledge, 2016) by Christopher B.R. Smith

Examining the interdependent nature of substance, space, and subjectivity, this book constitutes an interdisciplinary analysis of the intoxication indigenous to what has been termed “our narcotic modernity.” Tracing the parallel evolution of “addiction,” the (late-)capitalist cityscape, and the pathological project of modernity, the four parts of this book together constitute a users’ guide to urban space.

Critical Approaches to Harm Reduction: Conflict, Institutionalization, (De-)Politicization, and Direct Action (Nova, 2016), edited by Christopher B.R. Smith and Zack Marshall

Themes prominent throughout this book include an overtly critical analysis of the multiplicity of contextual deployments of harm reduction, a recurring focus on elevating the value of experiential knowledge and the fundamentally important, central role of people with direct lived experience. Additionally, the centrality of direct action tactics in the innovation of user-based forms of harm reduction in policy, practice, and philosophically-based contexts are discussed.

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2014

Emerging Perspectives on ‘African Development’: Speaking Differently (Peter Lang, 2014), edited by George J. Sefa and Paul Banahene Adjei

Emerging Perspectives on ‘African Development’: Speaking Differently discusses numerous areas of interest and issues about Africa, including contemporary challenges and possibilities of development. The book critically engages the many ways of presenting ‘development,’ highlighting the interplay of tradition and modernity as well as contestations over knowledge production in ‘post-colonial’ Africa.

Psychiatry Disrupted: Theorizing Resistance and Crafting the (R)evolution (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014), edited by Bonnie Burstow, B.A. LeFrançois, and Shaindl Diamond

Psychiatry Disrupted goes beyond theorizing what is wrong with psychiatry to theorizing how we might stop it. Introducing readers to the arguments and rationale for opposing psychiatry, the book combines perspectives from anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry activism, mad activism, antiracist, critical, and radical disability studies, as well as feminist, Marxist, and anarchist thought.

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2013

Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies (Canadian Scholars, 2013), edited by B.A. LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume

With contributions from scholars in numerous disciplines, as well as activists and psychiatric survivors, Mad Matters presents diverse critical voices that convey the lived experiences of the psychiatrized and challenges dominant understandings of “mental illness.” The connections between mad activism and other liberation struggles are stressed throughout, making the book a major contribution to the literature on human rights and anti-oppression.