Books
Here is a list of some recommended books, relating to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
If you have any other recommendations that you would like us to include please email hr-equality@qmul.ac.uk.
Content Warning
Some of the following books and resources may have content and refer to sensitive issues that some individuals may find upsetting or distressing. If you feel uncomfortable with anything you encounter then please stop your activity, it is important that you look after your own wellbeing.
These resources have been gathered from a variety of sources, so the views shared in these resources do not represent that of Queen Mary.
Below are some topic areas to guide your exploration, but many of the books and resources explore multiple issues in an intersectional way.
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The First Man by Albert Camus
- The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken
- A Son of the Circus by John Irving
- Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon
- Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People by Frances Ryan
- Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
- Mean Little Deaf Queer by Terry Galloway
- Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kussisto
- Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio and Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection by Anne Finger
- The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken
- Wonder by R.J. Palacio
- Sebastian by Christoph Fischer
- Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison
- Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper
- House Rules by Jodi Picoult
- Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
- Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience by Eileen Cronin
- Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's by Thomas DeBaggio
- Taking up Space by Chelsea Kwakye, Ore Ogunbiyi
- My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud
- Difficult Women by Helen Lewis
- Skint Estate by Cash Carraway
- Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild
- I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchú and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray
- Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines by Domitila B. De Chungara
- Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran by Shirin Ebadi
- Washing the Dust From Our Hearts edited by The Afghan Women's Writing Project
- We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
- Freedom by Margaret Atwood
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (short edition) by Mary Wollstonecraft
- Second Sex (short edition) by Simone de Beauvoir
- The Beauty Myth (short edition) by Naomi Wolf
- The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial by Maggie Nelson
- Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor by Adrian Fort
- Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
- The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
- Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
- Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
- Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
- Eleanor and Hick, the Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn
- Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identify, Faith, andFamily by Garrard Conley
- The Gods of Tango by Carolina De Robertis
- On Being Different: What it Means to be a Homosexual by Merle Miller
- The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
- Gender Outlaw, on Men, Women and the Rest of us by Kate Bornstein
- A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
- The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff
- The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan
- Stung with Love by Sappho
- How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
- Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
- Believe Me by Eddie Izzard
- The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
- De Profundis and Other Prison Writings by Oscar Wilde
- The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp
- My Two Moms by Zach Wahls
- The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis
- In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney
- Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
- Gentrification of the Mind: The Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman
- Speak its Name! Quotations by and about gay men and women
- Tales of the City by Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr
- LGBT People and the UK Cultural Sector: The Response of Libraries, Museums, Archives and Heritage since 1950 by John Vincent
- Rory’s Boys by Alan Clark
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
- Small Island by Andrea Levy
- Race by Toni Morrison
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- To Sir, With Love by ER Braithwaite
- Colour Bar by Susan Williams
- The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
- They Can't Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- Introducing George the Poet by George the Poet
- Home Going by Yaa Gyasi
- Kumukanda by Kayo Chingonyi
- The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo
- Changing my Mind by Zadie Smith
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano
- The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois
- What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
- Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara
- Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair by Lisa Jones
- The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
- Kindred by Octavia Butler
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939 to 1948 by Stephen Bourne
- High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney
- The Empire of Progress: West Africans, Indians, and Britons at the British Empire Exhibition 1924-5 by Daniel Stephen
Critical race theory: An introduction, Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. (2012). NYU Press.
Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 11, no. 1: 7–24, Ladson-Billings, G. (1998)
Critical Race Theory, Rollock, N. & Gillborn, D. (2011).
- The Sugarcoated Language of White Fragility, The Huffington Post Blog by Kegler, A. (2016)
- The unexamined whiteness of teaching: How white teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies. Race Ethnicity and Education 12 (2), 197–215, Picower, B. (2009)
- Wildman, S.M., with A.D. Davis. 1997. Making systems of privilege visible. In Critical White Studies: Looking behind the mirror, ed. R. Delgado and J. Stefancic, 314–19. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press
- The Noughts and Crosses series, Blackman, M (2002-2006).
- White Privilege: The myth of a post-racial society by Bhopal Kalwant (2018)
- Aiming Higher: Race, Inequality and Diversity in the Academy, London: Runnymede Trust Alexander, C. & Arday, J. (2015) (Eds)
- Universities do not challenge racism says UK’s first Black Studies Professor, The Guardian, Andrews, K. (2016)
- An apartheid of knowledge in academia: The struggle over the “legitimate” knowledge of faculty of color. Equity & Excellence in Education 35 (2), 169–80 Delgado, B.D., and O. Villalpando. 2002.
- Academic flight: how to encourage black and minority ethnic academics to stay in UK higher education ECU (2015)
- The experiences of international staff in UK higher education ECU (2013)
- Letter to my Unborn Daughter, My career in the academy – reasons for my mental breakdown, Rollock, N. (2016), in G. Ladson-Billings & W. Tate (Eds) Covenant Keeper: Derrick Bell’s Enduring Education Legacy, New York: Peter Lang
- Unspoken rules of engagement: navigating racial microaggressions in the academic terrain. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25 (5), 517-532, Rollock, N. (2011)
- White Fragility: Why its so hard for white people to talk about racism, Diangelo Robin (2018)
‘I too’ student campaigns:
- Embodying diversity: Problems and paradoxes for black feminists. Race Ethnicity and Education 12, (1) 41–52 Ahmed, S. (2009)
- When racism and masculinity collide: some methodological considerations from a Man of Colour studying Whiteness, Whiteness & Education, 1 (1), 15-25Cabrera, N. (2016)
- White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. In Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror, McIntosh, P. (1997) ed. R. Delgado and J. Stefancic, 291–9. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press
- Race, Class and the ‘Harmony of Dispositions’, Sociology, 48 (3), pp445-451, Rollock, N. (2014)
- Why White People Shouldn’t Impose Their Feelings Into Conversations on Race, Collins, S. (2017), Everyday Feminism Online Magazine
- The Colourblind Doctrine, Edusi, C. (2014), MediaDiversified
- Pedagogy of fear: Toward a Fanonian theory of ‘safety’ in race dialogue. Race Ethnicity and Education 13, no. 2: 139–58 ,Leonardo, Z. & Porter, R.K. (2010)
- Why is it so hard to talk about race in UK universities? The Conversation, Rollock, N. (2015)
- Why I am No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Eddo-Lodge, R (2017)
- Equality and Diversity in the Workplace, London, Ashe, S. & Nazroo, J. (2016)
- Racism at Work by Kandola, B (2018)
- Staying Power: The History of Black people in Britain, Fryer, P. (1984) London: Pluto Press
- Reimaging Britain: 500 years of Black and Asian History, Ramdin, R. (1999), London: Pluto Press
- Black and British: a Forgotten History, Olusoga, D. (2016), London: Macmillan
- Jews in Britain, Leventhal, M. & Goldstein, R. (2013), Shire Publications
- Asians in Britain: 400 years of history, Visram, R. (2002) Pluto Press
- Olusoga, D (2016) Black and British: A forgotten history, Pan MacMillan, London. Award winning work sharing over 2000 years history of the "British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean"
- Rukus! The Black Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Cultural Archive catalogue
- Black Tudors by Kaufman M (2017)
- White Fragility in the Workplace
- Why Gender Equality Is Good for Everyone — Men Included by Michael Kimmel (TED Talk)
- The Race of Life (white privilege)
- Brown eyes/Blue eyes (21 mins- 34 mins)
- Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answerbyMarlon James
- If Microaggressions Happened to White People
- BERA keynote
- Robin Diangelo White Fragility
- Kimberle Crenshaw on Intersectionality
- Michael Kimmel: ‘the day I became a white middle class man’
- BBC Micro inequities: Where are you from game?
- ‘Jonathan’ Goodness gracious me clip