The Griots of Oakland

The Griots of Oakland
Author: Angela Zusman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2013-10
Genre: African American men
ISBN: 9780988763111

What is it like being a young African American man? The media repeats the same stereotypes again and again, yet the reality is much more diverse. This eye-opening and beautifully presented book shares the voices and images of a group of young black men in Oakland, interviewed by their peers in a groundbreaking oral history project. The youth share their wisdom on a range of questions, organized by theme and accompanied by portrait photography and materials for further reflection. For students, educators, policy makers, and those who want to gain a better understanding of modern African American culture.

Creating Social Change Through Creativity

Creating Social Change Through Creativity
Author: Moshoula Capous-Desyllas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319521292

This book examines research using anti-oppressive, arts-based methods to promote social change in oppressed and marginalized communities. The contributors discuss literary techniques, performance, visual art, and new media in relation to the co-construction of knowledge and positionality, reflexivity, data representation, community building and engagement, and pedagogy. The contributors to this volume hail from a wide array of disciplines, including sociology, social work, community psychology, anthropology, performing arts, education, medicine, and public health.

Book Club Reboot

Book Club Reboot
Author: Sarah Ostman
Publisher: American Library Association
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2019-03-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0838918867

Is your book club feeling stale or uninspired? Has attendance dropped, or are you struggling to keep your patrons engaged? What you need is a reboot. This resource published in cooperation with ALA's Public Programs Office profiles dozens of successful book clubs across the country.

Ask, Listen, Empower

Ask, Listen, Empower
Author: Mary Davis Fournier
Publisher: American Library Association
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-01-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0838948324

Foreword by Tracie D. Hall Community engagement isn’t simply an important component of a successful library—it’s the foundation upon which every service, offering, and initiative rests. Working collaboratively with community members—be they library customers, residents, faculty, students or partner organizations— ensures that the library works, period. This important resource from ALA’s Public Programs Office (PPO) provides targeted guidance on how libraries can effectively engage with the public to address a range of issues for the betterment of their community, whether it is a city, neighborhood, campus, or something else. Featuring contributions by leaders active in library-led community engagement, it’s designed to be equally useful as a teaching text for LIS students and a go-to handbook for current programming, adult services, and outreach library staff. Balancing practical tools with case studies and stories from field, this collection explores such key topics as why libraries belong in the community engagement realm; getting the support of board and staff; how to understand your community; the ethics and challenges of engaging often unreached segments of the community; identifying and building engaged partnerships; collections and community engagement; engaged programming; and outcome measurement.

Intellectual Freedom Stories from a Shifting Landscape

Intellectual Freedom Stories from a Shifting Landscape
Author: Valerie Nye
Publisher: American Library Association
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0838947379

Intellectual freedom is a complex concept that democracies and free societies around the world define in different ways but always strive to uphold. And ALA has long recognized the crucial role that libraries play in protecting this right. But what does it mean in practice? How do library workers handle the ethical conundrums that often accompany the commitment to defending it? Rather than merely laying out abstract policies and best practices, this important new collection gathers real-world stories of intellectual freedom in action to illuminate the difficulties, triumphs, and occasional setbacks of advocating for free and equal access to information for all people in a shifting landscape. Offering insight to LIS students and current practitioners on how we can advance the profession of librarianship while fighting censorship and other challenges, these personal narratives explore such formidable situations as presenting drag queen story times in rural America; a Black Lives Matter “die-in” at the undergraduate library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; combating censorship at a prison library; hosting a moderated talk about threats to modern democracy that included a neo-Nazi spokesman; a provocative exhibition that triggered intimidating phone calls, emails, and a threat to burn down an art library; calls to eliminate non-Indigenous children’s literature from the collection of a tribal college library; and preserving patrons’ right to privacy in the face of an FBI subpoena.

Black Artists in Oakland

Black Artists in Oakland
Author: Jerry Thompson
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738547251

Celebrates Oakland, California's contribution to the national stage in terms of music, dance, visual arts, and literature over the past half century through vintage images, from the early days of Slim Jenkins's nightclub to the changing styles of Esther's Orbit Room and the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts. Original.

Let the World Listen Right

Let the World Listen Right
Author: Ali Colleen Neff
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2011-01-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1628469412

In the Mississippi Delta, creativity, community, and a rich expressive culture persist despite widespread poverty. Over five years of extensive work in the region, author Ali Colleen Neff collected a wealth of materials that demonstrate a vibrant musical scene. Let the World Listen Right draws from classic studies of the blues as well as extensive ethnographic work to document the “changing same” of Delta music making. From the neighborhood juke joints of the contemporary Delta to the international hip-hop stage, this study traces the musical networks that join the region's African American communities to both traditional forms and new global styles. The book features the words and describes performances of contemporary artists, including blues musicians, gospel singers, radio and club DJs, barroom toast-tellers, preachers, poets, and a spectrum of Delta hip-hop artists. Contemporary Delta hip-hop artists Jerome “TopNotch the Villain” Williams, Kimyata “Yata” Dear, and DA F.A.M. have contributed freestyle poetry, extensive interview materials, and their own commentaries. The book focuses particularly on the biography of TopNotch, whose hip-hop poetics emerge from a lifetime of schoolyard dozens and training in the gospel church.

The Afterlife in Popular Culture

The Afterlife in Popular Culture
Author: Kevin O'Neill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2022-06-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 144086859X

The Afterlife in Popular Culture: Heaven, Hell, and the Underworld in the American Imagination gives students a fresh look at how Americans view the afterlife, helping readers understand how it's depicted in popular culture. What happens to us when we die? The book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by more than 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entry topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing. This book is unique in marrying a historical overview of the afterlife with detailed analyses of particular cultural products, such as films and novels. In addition, it covers these topics in nonspecialist language, written with a student audience in mind. The book provides historical context for contemporary depictions of the afterlife addressed in the entries, which deal specifically with work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Climate Stewardship

Climate Stewardship
Author: Adina Merenlender
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0520378946

Preface : united by nature, guided by science -- Extreme events, life in the new normal -- Big bay to tech town -- A changing harvest -- Keeping forests green and snow white -- Climate canaries -- Los Angeles plants itself -- Riding the California current.