The following is a list of new ebooks received by the Library during February 2021 ordered by title. More complete details, as well as listings from previous months, are available on our website’s New Books page in the form of downloadable Excel spreadsheets.
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New Books – February 2021
The following is a list of new books received in the Library during February 2021 ordered by classmark. More complete details, as well as listings from previous months, are available on our website’s New Books page in the form of downloadable Excel spreadsheets.
Read more ›Illusory equality and the hidden traps of promoting diversity
I would like to round out this LGBTQ+ History Month blog post series examining equality and discrimination by reviewing some of the traps that lurk in the pursuit of equality and dignity for all people. Much deliberate discrimination is disguised as an action to increase or ‘rebalance’ equality, while the equality and diversity movement itself has caused as many problems as it has solved. Let us consider these in turn.
MysteryFest 2021
Fascinated by crime? Grab your ticket now for MysteryFest 2021: a crime-and mystery-themed BookFest over Zoom for 2021. Among others, join best selling author Leigh Russell being interviewed by a fellow crime author and resident criminologist Dr Nick Pamment who will talk about Wildlife Crime.
Click this link for full details and to buy your £5 ticket.
Undoing discrimination
If people are all good, where does discrimination come from?
Discrimination does not happen “because of a person’s sexuality”, it happens because people are homophobic. Discrimination does not happen “because of a person’s race”, it happens because people are racist. Discrimination doesn’t happen “because gender exists”, it happens because people are sexist and transphobic.
Discrimination happens because everyone is prejudiced in all manner of ways. We have grown up being influenced and conditioned to see the world in certain ways from the moment we arrived into it. Inequality seems very normal to us because we know no different. We all therefore need to look inside and learn to accept the ways in which we naturally discriminate, to accept the uncomfortable parts of ourselves and through doing so enable ourselves to change.
Getting around the warnings when accessing Cite Them Right
If you try to use a bookmarked link to get into the library reference help platform Cite Them Right, you may be presented with a warning message advising your connection is “not secure”. This appears to affect all browsers.
All our services remain fully functional and entirely safe to use. We are investigating why some links into this resources but not others are producing this error.
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Posted in Uncategorised
Diversity and the myth of meritocracy
Following on from the white privilege and heterosexual privilege questionnaires in my last LGBTQ+ History Month blog post (find them here if you haven’t taken them yet – they are really quick and I promise you will find the results of one or both very interesting!), I want to recapitulate briefly how white, heterosexual (straight) men have enormous yet invisible advantages over others. Anyone who is white, able-bodied, free from developmental difficulties, heterosexual, identifies with their anatomical birth gender, and who is male inherit an unearned position of privilege as their birthright.
Posted in Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Tagged with: diversity, equality, lgbt, LGBTQ History Month
Grab your popcorn and settle in for a free film this weekend!
Stream new release film Monsoon (12A rated) for free this weekend as part of the ongoing online LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Streaming starts from 7 pm tomorrow night but you can watch the film at any time in the next 72 hours, so you have the whole weekend to enjoy it.
Click this link to buy your tickets. If you are one of the first 100 to buy your tickets on Saturday 13 February, be sure to enter promo code Monsoon50 at the checkout to stream the film for free!
Some people reported problems purchasing tickets on mobile devices. We apologise to anyone affected. If you have any difficulties buying tickets, please try using the desktop website instead.
Watch this space and don’t miss next week’s new release film, Cocoon.
LGBTQ history is more than just a history of middle-aged white gay men
Since 2015 there has arisen a united campaign against discrimination in the UK that began with the Black Lives Matter movement and has since expanded to include the prejudice and discrimination faced by all those who span different groups that face discrimination and so experience the intersectional discrimination as a result of being, for example, black and gay, a woman and trans, or black and disabled. With the mission of ending “state-sanctioned racialised sexism, Islamophobia, classism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia”. To this we should add the emerging problems of biphobia and ageism – the discrimination faced by bisexual, polysexual and pansexual people from within and without the LGBTQ+ community and the prejudicial assumptions and discrimination against both the old and the young, respectively.
Getting your hands on printed library stock at home
In my last post, I explained what you can do if you visit the library building. Since you will probably never want to do that, I wanted to outline how you can get all the same printed resources from the comfort of your own home!
Postal loans
If you are self-isolating or cannot travel to the library, you can fill in an online form and ask us to post books to you for free.
Getting hold of chapters and articles only available in print
If you only need a single chapter from a book or a single article from an issue of a journal we only hold in print, you can complete a form and ask us to email a scan to you. These restrictions are imposed by our copyright licenses and so if you need to read more than these amounts, you will have to travel in.
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