[Recommended Read] In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

Congratulations to the editors of In Plain Sight, Leslie A. Robertson and Dara Culhane, for winning the George Ryga Award.

The CBC quotes Dara Culhane:

The book came out of a research project that started in 1999 called the Health and Home project.

[...]

We were interviewing women and talking to women about the relationship between health and housing for women in the Downtown Eastside, and as we moved into that project and got to know some of the women, they talked often about wanting to publish their stories.

From the publisher's website describing In Plain Sight:

In compiling this collection of seven life stories from Vancouver’s “Downtown Eastside,” the editors set out to create a space for the voices of women who are seldom heard on their own terms—the words of people who are publicly visible yet who, due to the blur of preconceptions that surround Vancouver’s inner city, remain unseen. To many, the women who offer their stories here are “people without history,” defined only by belonging to a neighbourhood branded by layers of stigma. Their diverse histories are rarely included in the cacophony of media depictions of urban poverty: the “drug problem,” “prostitution” or statistics on crime and violence. These women share the stories of their complex pathways from childhood into and out of the “Downtown Eastside,” through periods of addiction and recovery, strength and illness, affluence and poverty. They confront and challenge the familiar stereotypes applied to drug users, to “wayward women,” and to those who live with disease and/or mental illness.

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Tags for information about: for:vsef, DTES

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