I noticed during my year-end/new-year reflections this year that I had fallen into a common-to-me pattern: Most of my nonfiction reading in the previous six months had been things that I selected for their content not for their writing. I get why this happens, because I do often need to read a lot of things …
Month: January 2019
LaMeia Reddick is a community worker and consultant in Halifax. Ted Rutland is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University in Montreal and the author of Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax (Univeristy of Toronto Press, 2018). Scott Neigh interviews them about about the long …
Cindy Blackstock is a member of the Gitksan First Nation, a social worker, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, and the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. She is also the most visible face of the long-term effort to get the Canadian government to end the ongoing …
A collection of essays on disability justice by sometime-Toronto-based disabled femme of colour activist, writer, and performer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. A wide range of different kinds of pieces, to deliberately capture the broad spectrum of shared knowledge – from get-through-the-day life hacks to no-holds-barred critique to expansive dreaming – that a commitment to disability justice …
Coming of age novel with a late-revealed sprinkling of what would conventionally at least be understood as the fantastical. Set in northern British Columbia and centred on an Indigenous guy the same age as my own kid as he navigates messy family stuff, messy friendships, selling weed cookies, helping out the older couple next door, …
Natalie Drolet is the executive director and staff lawyer for the Migrant Workers’ Centre BC (MWC), a non-profit organization that provides free legal assistance to migrant workers in British Columbia, and engages in public legal education and policy advocacy. Scott Neigh interviews her about the work of the MWC to challenge the injustices that migrant …
Fantasy set in what the cover copy describes as “the southern tip of an African continent that could have been.” A society in which nearly everyone is a twin, life opportunities are determined by the division of the seven vices and seven virtues between each pair, and proximity with your twin is necessary for survival. …
This week has included two Talking Radical interviews — yesterday with paediatric emergency physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain (below), about last year’s #AHand2Hold campaign that won an important victory vs. medical colonialism and systemic racism in health care in Quebec; and today with LaMeia Reddick (top left) and Ted Rutland (top right) about histories and present realities of anti-Black citybuilding …
Geraldine McManus is a Two-Spirit Dakota woman of the Bear Clan. She is the driving force behind the Spirit of the Buffalo Camp, a prayer camp in rural Manitoba on the US/Canada border that sits on top of where Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline runs. Scott Neigh interviews her about about her opposition to …
A…political art intervention and act of cultural criticism, I guess? The author – a writer, artist, curator, and activist in the UK – has produced a manifesto and collection of documents from an imagined Shy Radical movement. This movement brings together people who are shy, introverted, socially anxious, on the autism spectrum, or otherwise oppressed …