Creating Through the Crisis #30 In the last month, I’ve been taking some steps to change the technological infrastructure that permeates my everyday life. As I’ve done so, I’ve of course learned some technical things. But I’ve also gained greater appreciation for some very basic but, I think, important social and political realities of online …
Creating Through the Crisis #29 Generally speaking, I’m uncomfortable telling other people what to do. I know and respect people who make use of their platforms in that way — at their best, they offer guidance to movements, advice to individual organizers, suggestions about the positions that people should take with respect to the news …
Creating Through the Crisis #28 – The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom by Thulani Davis Despite how much I’ve thought about it over the years, I don’t feel like I have a very good answer to the question of what a piece of writing can do in the world, in a …
Creating Through the Crisis #27 I’ve blogged since blogging was young. And I’ve decided I’m going to do it again in a concerted, ongoing way…though perhaps oriented a bit differently than I have in the past. From 2004 to 2023, I did it at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land. My posting was always irregular, …
(Originally published at The Media Co-op.) Melanie Andita is an organizer based in the Vancouver area. An immigrant from Indonesia, Andita’s political journey started when she was a student at Simon Fraser University (SFU). She initially got involved in campus-focused actions – things like challenging the inadequate public health measures being taken by the university …
I talked in “Creating Through the Crisis #25” about a number of the things that I’m working on, these days. Or, at least, I alluded to them. Among other things, there’s a major strand of work that I hope will become a book project, and there are several smaller strands, some of which intertwine with …
Hi. So. I’m back. I mean, I was never gone. But I haven’t written a Creating Through the Crisis post since May of last year. This month, though, my work life is entering a new phase and I think one element of that will be using this sort of blog-ish writing as a tool — …
(Originally published at The Media Co-op.) Martha Paynter is a nurse, a writer, and an academic based in New Brunswick. Her participation in grassroots political work began when she was in her teens and twenties, with a focus on reproductive rights. In those years, she fundraised for legal efforts in defense of abortion rights, escorted …
(Originally published at The Breach) By all accounts, this year has been a grim one. Genocidal violence continues unabated in Palestine and Sudan. Authoritarianism is rapidly consolidating in the United States. In Canada, the housing crisis is worsening, while chaotic, tariff-driven policies from our southern neighbour deepen economic uncertainty. Meanwhile, the nationalist “elbows up” rhetoric …
(Originally published at The Media Co-op.) Editor’s note: We are pleased to be publishing an excerpt from Listen!: Knowing the World and Fighting to Change It, by Scott Neigh, who is also a Media Co-op editor. In the book, Neigh, drawing on his extensive experience interviewing people who are active in social movements, examines how …