Adopting this book

Our hope is that this book will be of use across multiple contexts, including but not limited to university classrooms and other post-secondary learning environments. Given the increasing cross-disciplinarity of many fields, many vignettes are applicable and address themes from sociology to history, human ecology to epistemology.

Whether or not you use every entry in the book in your classroom (which would be surprising and impressive!), we encourage you to formally register your use of the book using our adoption form. This helps in several ways. First, it will allow us to stay in contact with you, if new or revised editions of Showing Theory are released. In the same way, you can maintain contact with us, to provide feedback on how the book is working for you, or to identify errors or omissions that need to be corrected in future editions. And, of course, knowing how many people are using the book—and where and in what contexts—is important feedback for us. It will help us keep making changes that address real needs, while also supporting future efforts to expand or evolve the project more broadly.

The use of “Volume 1” in our title signals our desire for this project to live and grow beyond its initial conceptualization. The current collection serves as a proof of concept, and we hope others will use it as a springboard to create other similar volumes (focused on thematic, disciplinary, or community-driven categories). We can imagine targeted calls for new volumes themed around Indigenous methodologies, critical race theory, political ecology, and many others. Our contributors covered a wide range of terms—some that we solicited, and some that were proposed through their own interest and expertise. Many concepts, however, remain unaddressed. In this way, we hope to spawn (potentially multi-lingual) future editions, remixes, and/or sub-volumes within other disciplines, fields, or faculties.

To that end, please note that Showing Theory is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license, the content in this book may be reused, remixed, repurposed, and maintained at will, provided that no commercial derivatives are created and that all future editions also carry the “share-alike” (SA) license. Any republication of the content, however, must follow Creative Commons terms.