We live in a culture that tells us to face the world’s problems on our own—but any chance we have of making transformative change can only come from organizing collectively. This past year, governments around the world responded to sustained popular pressure—Portugal announced a radical plan to tackle the housing crisis; Chile signalled that it …
David Spaner is a long-time writer based in Vancouver and the author of Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983 (Ronsdale Press, 2021). Scott Neigh interviews him about the book and about the uprising against a right-wing government in British Columbia that it documents. Despite happening well within living memory, being one of the largest grassroots …
Thanks to Sharmeen, Thania, and Kieran for the interview just now about Upping the Anti! We talked about the journal, the relevance of theory to radical struggles, and the challenges of grassroots media. Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio soon!
Scholarly. Edited collection. Pieces from a range of authors examining how people in different social movements and communities-in-struggle have engaged with material and ideas from earlier movements and made use of them in political education and struggle in the present. Read it because I thought it might be useful to something I’m working on. Turns …
A book about struggles for social change in the Muslim Middle East, mostly focused on Iran and Egypt but with scattered references to other countries as well. The first edition was written not long before the Arab Spring and laid out an analysis that didn’t quite predict the uprising but that described dynamic circumstances allowing …
A multi-author collection edited by three of the core members of Black Lives Matter – Toronto. Personal essays, dialogues, scholarly essays, poetry, photo essays. Includes accounts of the iconic moments of BLM-TO’s founding and early years of action, but ranges far beyond in its exploration of Blackness and Black struggle in Canada today. I’m a …
History. Published 25 years ago, this is an early book by a prominent historian of US social movements. Examines everyday resistance and/or cultural politics and their interface with more formal social movements in a number of African American contexts across the 20th century, from everyday struggles on public transit in Birmingham under Jim Crow, to …
This is an eclectic collection “written and gathered” (as the author credit puts it) by organizer, facilitator, and writer adrienne maree brown. It contains many, many different kinds of pieces – both newly written and older re-published work by brown herself; pieces by other people, and pieces where other people are in dialogue with her; …
A book by a life-long activist and retired scholar thinking through the many varieties of a kind of moment familiar to anyone invested in questions of justice and liberation: When we know we could speak, we should speak, perhaps at least part of us wants to speak, and yet we remain silent. This might be …