Speaking Out

The only book written by Jack Layton (1950-2011) on his political life and vision, this is the former NDP leader's passionate call to action and will inspire all Canadians to embrace a better future. On August 22, 2011, Jack Layton, Official Opposition Leader, died as he lived, with dignity, bestowing to his country a message of hope. Canada was in mourning and within hours of his death, tens of thousands of Canadians -- from NDP supporters to political opponents -- paid tribute to the man and his legacy through public vigils, memorials, and expressions of grief. Originally published in 2006, Speaking Out Louder represents Layton's "blueprint for Canada" Highly acclaimed and powerfully written, this book captures Jack Layton's political vision and exemplifies the optimism that marked his life's work. In it he shares personal stories and fascinating, behind-the-scenes details of his career in national politics and talks about the big issues (poverty, AIDS and healthcare, childcare, housing, education) and the ideas that work for Canadians.

This is the first critical study of feminist practices of ‘speaking out’ in response to rape. This book argues that feminist anti-rape politics are characterised by a belief in the transformative potential of women’s personal narratives of sexual violence. The political mobilisation of these narratives has been an incredibly successful strategy, but one with unresolved ethical questions and political limitations. The book explores both the successes and the unresolved questions through feminist archival materials, published narratives of sexual violence, and mass media and internet sources. It argues that that a rethinking of the role and place of women’s stories and the politics of speaking out is vital for a rethinking of feminist politics around sexual violence and key to fresh approaches to combating this violence.

A critical analysis of the rhetoric and reality surrounding human rights commissions and tribunals, Canada's most contested administrative agencies.

50 Scientifically-Supported Techniques to Create More Confident and Compelling Speakers

Focusing on the female voice in public contexts, language and gender specialists consider the barriers and opportunities encountered by women in gaining recognition in politics, law, the church, education, business and the media, where people are increasingly judged by their speech and where male and female speech is often evaluated differently.

Linde Zingaro, a lifelong social service worker and activist, interviewed many colleagues who chose to speak out and the consequences that befell them for doing so. She relays their stories here—as well as her own-- and uses these experience to create a blueprint to help other workers, activists, and community researchers to speak freely in the interests of a more just society.

Many professionals in health, education, and community service roles are caught in a particular bind of identity—they live in a complex social borderland of credibility and professional authority while experiencing or having experienced the same discrimination, violence or trauma that they are committed to conquering. For some, the disclosure of their own stories of marginalization has become a tool for advocacy, for telling a larger truth; for others, self-disclosure is a more personal action, intended to assist isolated others in developing trust and connection. Linde Zingaro, a lifelong social service worker and activist, interviewed several colleagues who have chosen to speak out in this way, talking with them about their ethics and intentions, and collaborating to identify some of the risks of negative personal and professional consequences for the practitioner. She uses their voices—and her own—to illustrate some of the ways that these people have learned to safely and effectively use the transformative potential of storytelling as significant social action. This examination of speaking out as a meaningful social practice may help other workers, activists, and community researchers in their efforts to be heard in the interests of a more just society.

In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.