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Radio: A framework for a decolonial just transition

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Scott

Emily Eaton and Bronwen Tucker are two of the six co-authors of The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada (Between the Lines, 2023), which outlines a framework for working towards not only a just transition away from fossil fuels but an explicitly decolonial just transition. Scott Neigh interviews them about the intertwined character of the climate crisis and colonization, about the book, and about the struggle for a decolonial just transition.

You’ve probably heard the argument before – rather than focusing on a narrow vision of decarbonization, the climate movement must recognize the roots of the climate crisis in colonization, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on, and must therefore understand its struggle expansively as an effort to challenge and transform all of those things. As Eaton put it, we face “overlapping crises, including environmental crises. But also this longstanding crisis, ever since colonization, of the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and rights, and really theft of land and Indigenous life” combined with “deepening inequalities” along many different axes. “We are seeing all of these compounded, and the solutions that are being proposed by many of the people with positions of power, we don’t think are adequate.”

Eaton continued, “If we concentrate on just decarbonizing society … without focusing on the other issues that are at stake, what we’re really going to end up with is a society that has greened theft. We know that so-called Canada is based on the theft of Indigenous lands and life and we see a just transition as a potential entry point into reexamining and remaking those relationships that allow us to live in a good way on these lands.”

There are still plenty of people in environmental organizations and the climate movement who just flat-out reject an expansive, intersectional vision of climate justice, but there are also plenty, perhaps more, who recognize that there is something to it. The challenge, though, is moving from the level of accepting at the level of intention and rhetoric the need for such a just transition and for the broad movement of movements it will take to get there, to actually figuring out what we need to be doing, collectively, to make it happen.

The End of This World thinks through these issues in grounded, practical ways. It lays out both the case for and a tentative framework to begin working towards an explicitly decolonial just transition. The team of authors – the other four are Angele Alook, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, and Crystal Lameman – was brought together with an eye to assembling the necessary skills and experiences to do that. The six collectively bring together many years of experience in Indigenous activism, the labour movement, youth and other community-based climate organizing, international climate work, various other social justice movements, radical scholarship, and grassroots journalism. Tucker has been involved in a range of climate organizing in Montreal and Edmonton, and her current day job is related to the international side of climate justice work. Eaton is a professor in geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina, and her academic and activist work has touched on a range of social justice struggles, including climate and Indigenous solidarity.

The process of writing was a collective one. Eaton said, “We decided, in order to do this well, that we had to be co-authors, not just sort of co-editors where each person would write one chapter and each chapter would have a particular perspective, but that we needed to really integrate all of these themes in each chapter. So that was both a very rewarding process and also time consuming. Like, we met for years on end in meetings, fleshing through the ideas and the principles and everything that would be at the centre of each chapter, and really supporting one another, I think, in the writing and the revising. And in the craft of it.”

Tucker explained, “Winning a kind of climate justice future means working really deeply across movements and issues, and not having things in silos. And so I do think the collective nature of how we wrote it and our different kinds of backgrounds is really a nice mirror of that future that we want to see.”

The book’s title is meant to accomplish a few different things. In part, the authors hope that it conveys the magnitude of what we face – that “we need really dramatic and bold change and not just tinkering,” Tucker said. It is also “poking a bit of fun” at the “culture of nihilism” that has risen during pandemic and that has been “weaponized in a way to try to make people disengage,” with the hope that they can “play on that a little bit and maybe encourage some more folks to engage or re-engage.” And finally, it is a recognition of the impact of centuries of colonialism, slavery, and genocide on many peoples around the world, including many Indigenous peoples, and that “for lots of communities, this is not the first apocalypse.”

The book begins by starkly laying out the crises we face, particularly the climate crisis and colonization and how they are bound together, and also the current troubling orientation of the Canadian state in that context. Then it explores the kinds of things that we need to be working towards as part of a decolonial just transition. And the final chapters are about what we need to be doing to make it happen.

The book’s decolonial emphasis is both thoroughgoing and practical. It began, Eaton said, from Indigenous understandings of the treaties. Then, the authors asked, “What would Canada look like if we took those original frameworks that allow for settler existence in these lands as frameworks for thinking about how to live well together?” And it applies those frameworks throughout. That includes to questions where the relevance is obvious, like the importance of supporting Indigenous-led land defence struggles and LandBack. But it also includes applying it in lots of other key areas that most settler writers and settler-majority movements completely detach from any considerations of colonization and decolonization – things like how green infrastructure programs should work, what we should be doing to defend and expand public health care, the importance of workers’ struggles, and lots of other things.

Tucker said, “‘We can’t have climate justice without Indigenous rights’ is maybe a bit of a slogan that’s, I think, pretty well understood or used at this point. But I think some of those more concrete, like, how we actually enact that is less understood.”

As well, the book has a staunch movement-building orientation. The final two chapters in particular take that up, using an approach that will likely be accessible for people who have not really thought about movements before but that still gets past platitudes and into the practical, substantive questions of doing grassroots political work.

In the face of the climate crisis and the ongoing crisis of colonization, Tucker said, “One thing that really gives me hope is … a mindset shift that has been really helpful for me, of reading and understanding a bit more about social movement history. And knowing that even though our challenges are maybe different today than what they have been in the past, that there’s this legacy of communities and people banding together against pretty harsh odds and often winning really cool things out of that. And, you know, still persisting today, even if we didn’t win all of those things.”

As well, she also derives hope from the fact that “a lot of the solutions we talk about [in the book] are really politically popular. Taxing the wealthy and corporations is really popular. Defunding the police actually polls pretty well. 72% of people support accelerated action to implement the calls of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And we even saw pretty popular support for, like, Wet’suwet’en blockades in February 2020.” She continued, “We certainly don’t have the movement infrastructure to win those quite yet, but almost everyone stands to benefit from a just transition and a decolonial future. And so there’s that gap of a lot of the work to get there, but … the odds, in a lot of ways, do still feel on our side.”

For Eaton, working on The End of This World was itself a source of hope. Many of the ideas it contains are things she has thought and written about for years, but “having that vision laid out in one place and thinking about what kind of power we need to build, what kind of [social movement] infrastructure we need to build, what kind of offensives we need to take in order to bring this into being, was a really hopeful process. And we’re hopeful that our readers also enjoy being part of that and also be able to reflect for themselves on how they might fit in, and also what they might change or refine in the vision, or how to do it locally, what’s appropriate to their communities. All of that, I think, can be a really empowering and hopeful process.”

Tucker said that among other things, with the book they are “hoping to get to people who maybe are already involved in some social movement work or are have been maybe thinking about it, and hopefully giving people some tools or like a starting point to adapt from, for maybe how to get involved themselves.”

“We tried to write a book, I think, that would allow many different movements and many different struggles to see themselves in the book,” Eaton said. So, for instance, there are lots of people very concerned at the moment with defending public services of various kinds. So the book tries to ask things like, “How can we do that in a way that also then merges with these issues around Indigenous sovereignty and rights? Or that also promotes decarbonization, but in a way that is fair and just? And so sort of articulating or bringing together a bunch of issues that we know are popular, that movements have a long history of struggling for, and hoping to see that we can sort of hold each other up in this work and create this project together.”

Talking Radical Radio’s ten-year weekly run will be ending at the end of February 2023 – read more here!

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Photo by Scott Neigh.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

Posted in Episode, Radio | Tagged Bronwen Tucker, climate crisis, climate justice, decolonization, Emily Eaton, indigenous, intersectionality, just transition, The End of This World | Leave a comment

Radio: Challenging mis- and disinformation about sexual health and rights

Posted on February 7, 2023 by Scott

Victoria Romero and Emily Tang are university students and members of the National Youth Advisory Council for Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights. Matthew Johnson is the director of education for MediaSmarts. Scott Neigh interviews them about issues of mis- and disinformation when it comes to sexual health and rights, and about this year’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Awareness Week (or SRH Week) campaign.
Action Canada engages in public education, health promotion, service provision, and policy advocacy related to sexual and reproductive health and rights in Canada and globally. MediaSmarts focuses on promoting digital media literacy among youth by providing a wide range of educational resources for teachers and parents, and to a lesser extent for youth themselves.
SRH Week is an annual campaign from Action Canada that focuses on a topic related to sexual health and rights. It offers events and resources on that topic to the general public, to health care providers, and to other audiences. This year’s SRH Week runs from February 13 to 17. Its theme will be “Get the Facts!”, and it includes a focus on the problem of mis- and disinformation.
The information environment that surrounds us today is, to put it mildly, challenging. Not that there is anything new about dominant ways of knowing the world that exalt the already-powerful and further marginalize the oppressed, and there is a long history of the use of disinformation as a tool to accomplish nefarious ends. But as technology has shifted, we have ended up with an information system that is more chaotic, harder to navigate, and seemingly more vulnerable to manipulation than ever before. Mainstream institutions that produce and circulate knowledge – like schools, newspapers, and governments – continue their role in reproducing settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, cissexism, and more. But there seems to be more space today for reactionary movements, from last decade’s “GamerGate” to today’s growing far right, to use sensationalism, distortion, and deception to grow their base and make all of those things sharply worse.
The prevalence of misinformation and disinformation when it comes to sexual and reproductive health and rights is also nothing new. Whether we found out about them via formal school curriculum, chains of speculative whispering among peers, or awkward conversations with parents, very few of us have ever been lucky enough while growing up to have opportunities to learn about bodies, sexuality, relationships, and all of the messy social stuff surrounding them in accurate, comprehensive, just, and liberatory ways. And what is available, in the words of Tang, is “very often very cis, hetero, and white oriented.”
In some ways, you could argue that things have gotten better over time – with the internet, there is more opportunity for young people to seek out good information for themselves, compared to past decades when the only options were to ask an authority figure, cross your fingers that your school might be one of the few to offer decent sex ed, or work up the nerve to see what you could find in a public library. But while it may be more possible to find good information today than in the past, the good stuff is often diluted in a sea of information that is wrong, harmful, and even malicious. Romero said, “While there is a lot of very good factual information [online], there’s also a ton of misinformation and disinformation. And one thing that I’ve seen personally is there is a large lack in understanding of how to tell the difference between the two.”
Barriers remain a factor, whether that is the uneven availability of internet access or the fear of getting caught searching particular topics. MediaSmarts leads the longest running research project in the world on youth and digital media literacy, and Johnson said that only around 1 in 5 youth in Canada today report seeking out information about sexual health and relationship issues online. The rate is about twice that for queer and trans youth, which Johnson said suggests there is an even greater lack of good information in other sources that is relevant to their needs.
In addition, sex-related misinformation circulates widely due to things like the reach of social media influencers who just don’t know what they’re talking about and the pervasiveness of clickbait. Memes and jokes that are stigmatizing, oppressive, or just plain wrong travel far and fast. Of course, it can be really hard to know where to look for good information, and it can be hard to recognize it when you find it. And finally, there is the deliberately circulated disinformation, particularly from sources pushing a range of right and far-right political agendas – from the demonization of LGBTQ people, to lies about abortion, to all sorts of things that are meant to amplify sexual stigma and shame.
Johnson agreed that there are people and organizations that are “intentionally promoting disinformation about sexual health topics – whether that is disinformation around transgender issues, whether that’s disinformation around sexual orientation, whether it’s disinformation around abortion.” He continued, “There are certain groups that are targeted more often. And also groups that are more often, you might say, demonized – groups about whom there is more disinformation being spread and where there are organized campaigns of disinformation aimed at them. And who are in many cases used as rhetorical tools for broader political ends.”
Overall, Johnson said that MediaSmarts’ research indicates that young people are using “more and better strategies” to verify information that they find compared to even a few years ago, and are more likely to verify sources outside of school contexts. Nonetheless, often those strategies are not well suited to today’s information environment, rife as it is with deliberate deception.
Older strategies, which are still often taught in schools, include investigating what an organization says about themselves on their website, “which made sense in an information environment where you could assume that people weren’t just flat out lying about who they were or just things in general.” Today, MediaSmarts focuses on teaching what Johnson calls “lateral reading, where you actually don’t take the source’s word for anything, and you don’t look too closely at the source until you verify that it is reliable.” Investigating the sources of disinformation can help people understand larger trends in who is targeted and why, and the political motivations behind disinformation campaigns. With a laugh, Johnson said, “The demand for mis- and disinformation is equal across the spectrum, but the supply absolutely is not.”
An additional challenge has to do with how youth relate to sources that they encounter online. Johnson said, “The research has shown that for most young people, in fact, the issue is not that they are not skeptical enough, but that they are equally skeptical of all sources – what’s sometimes called trust compression, where because they don’t know how to verify a reliable source, and because they’ve been told – in many cases, many, many times – not to trust everything they see online, but they haven’t been told how to find out what they can trust, they’re equally skeptical of every source.” This can lead youth to select sources in other ways, like their personal feelings or the strength of their parasocial relationship with the content creator in question.
Johnson said, “That’s why most of our materials, including our materials about verifying information on sexual health, don’t just look at how to debunk false information or recognize unreliable sources, but also focus on how to tell when something is reliable and how to find reliable sources.”
This year’s SRH Week is intervening in all of this. It is circulating resources with inclusive, evidence-based information about sexual and reproductive health, and offering supports to people to help them develop media literacy skills for figuring out how to navigate our information environment around these topics. And MediaSmarts has its own spectrum of resources and programming, both for media literacy in general and a few specific to questions of sexual health.
Romero argued that it is important to have a civil society organization like Action Canada putting on this kind of campaign, rather than counting on mainstream institutions like schools, governments, or the mass media, given “how especially younger demographics are viewing information, perhaps from bodies of authority like the government or, you know, your health services in your province.” She continued, “I find that a lot of younger people are a bit apprehensive to our traditional structures and systems in society … rooted in colonial violence. And how there has been a certain bias in a lot of information coming from authority for a very long time.”
Tang added, “Mass media and also school systems are often funded by the government. And so there is potentially some bias there. … Depending on which school system you went to, you might have been taught maybe information that is often misleading.” It is important, therefore, for there to be initiatives that communicate information about sexual health and rights in ways that are “inclusive” and “accessible.”
And of course there is value not just to consuming better information and to becoming a better consumer of information, but to intervening ourselves in the information landscape. Tang, for instance, emphasized the importance of ensuring that there are people with a range of experiences of oppression in positions of “power and authority” within the institutions in our information system. Romero argued for “involvement from the communities, or the demographic, or groups that the information or the source is trying to reach.”
Romero said, “If you know an organization is putting out perhaps not disinformation, but maybe misinformation around abortion or … emergency contraceptives, then maybe we should be taking a look at why, or how. What is their motivation behind that?”
“Why are we allowing these bodies to put out this information?” Romero continued. “Like, do they have a harmful motive? Are they intending to shame people? Are they intending to perhaps direct people to a certain, you know, moral standard? And it just really comes down to questioning why and pushing bodies on why they are still continuing to do so.”
Johnson said, “A part of this is teaching young people about their power as as citizens and as consumers. That one of the benefits of being online is that we all have a voice. And we can use that voice to change things in our online spaces. We can use that voice to change the values of our online spaces. We can use that voice to change the ratio of good to bad information. Because our information ecosystem isn’t affected only by our decision not to share bad information, but we can actively improve it by sharing good information.”
As well, he continued, “We can also use digital tools to participate as citizens, to change how governments do things, to change curriculum.” He cited as an example high school students who successfully organized in Ontario a number of years ago to get consent education added to health curriculum. “A really important part of digital media literacy is teaching young people and all people that they have the power to use digital tools to make a difference.”
For Tang, it comes down to this: “How do we make [sexual health] information more inclusive for everyone – [more] trans inclusive … more pro-choice … more culturally sensitive and inclusive?”
Episodes of Talking Radical Radio on SRH Week in earlier years include “Next steps for sexual and reproductive rights activism in Canada,” “Centring BIPOC youth in questions of sexual health and rights,” “Sex ed, health, and justice,” and “Sex positive parenting and social justice.”
Please read about the big changes coming for Talking Radical Radio in 2023!
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Rawpixel
Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

Posted in Episode, Radio | Tagged Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, Emily Tang, knowledge production, Matthew Johnson, MediaSmarts, sex ed, sexual health, sexuality, SRH Week | Leave a comment

Radio: From police-free schools to policing-free schools

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Scott

Hailey Yasmeen Dash and Mae Mason are members of the Asilu Collective, which Dash described as “a grassroots abolitionist collective fighting and organizing for police-free schools, but also policing-free schools, and to eliminate policing culture, infrastructure, and practices in schools across Ottawa.” Scott Neigh interviewed them about the group’s origins, its successful campaign to end the School Resource Officer (SRO) program in Ottawa schools, and its shift to a broader focus on the problem of not just police but policing in schools.
The racial justice uprising of 2020 brought new attention and energy to the centuries-old struggles against white supremacy, anti-Black racism, and police violence. Catalyzed by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it brought people to the streets across the US and Canada, and around the world. It pushed significant elements of mainstream opinion to support defunding the police and introduced a new layer of activists and organizers to the broader goal of police and prison abolition.
It was this context in which Dash and two of her friends founded the Asilu Collective in Ottawa. At the time, the three of them were fairly recent graduates of Merivale High School. Like many other school boards in Ontario, theirs had a program that placed police in schools under the name of School Resource Officers.
The SRO programs were created in response to provincial legislation passed in the early 2000s that was ostensibly about school safety. That justification depends, however, on an understanding of “safety” and of how schools work as institutions that erases the experiences of racialized students – particularly those who are Black and Indigenous – and of students who are marginalized in other ways. Both research from across North America and an endless litany of personal accounts have shown that the presence of police makes schools less safe for many of those students. Dash used the language of the “school-to-prison pipeline” to capture the range of practices, including the presence of police in schools, through which Black and Indigenous youth have become vastly overrepresented in Ontario detention facilities.
And as Mason pointed out in the interview, while the use of the word “resource” in the name of the program suggests police presence as a sort of holistic good for the entire school, they are primarily a resource for administrators and teachers in managing conflict – and they do so in a way that actually makes it easier for administrators to not bother with the work of avoiding and preventing issues, and directs supposed solutions in punitive and carceral directions. Defenders of the SRO program sometimes claim that its role includes prevention, but according to Dash what that actually translates into on the ground is what you might call “preemptive policing” – that is, not working to address root causes and avoid conflict, but instead “assuming the children and youth in these schools are criminals and they are going to commit some sort of crime and they are, like, worthy of punishment, before anything even happens. And that’s why the school resource officer exists.” She herself saw plenty of instances of administrators “weaponizing policing in schools,” particularly against younger racialized boys.
Mason said, “In reality, what’s needed in these schools – in all schools, and in all spaces with youth – is, one, the chance to make mistakes, and two, the supports to prevent those mistakes from becoming really traumatizing to the youth and everyone around them. And the supports to be able to navigate conflict in a way that will actually rectify it and prevent it from escalating or happening again in the future. Which is obviously something that we don’t see with policing.”
Black and other racialized communities have been challenging the presence of police in schools for a long, long time – since long before SRO programs were formalized – and the 2020 uprising felt, to Dash and her friends, like an important moment to join in that work. (Mason joined the collective in early 2021, after learning about it through involvement in community advocacy related to the police budget.)
They started with a petition. They hosted teach-ins, as a tool for political education and to draw other youth into the work. They spoke to racial justice and other justice-focused clubs in different schools. In September of 2020, they started exerting public pressure on the Ottawa Carlton District School Board (or OCDSB), demanding that the SRO program be cancelled. They exerted pressure through mobilizing community attendance at board meetings, as well as by encouraging people to email and phone their trustees. They were very clear that they were not interested in another study of the issue, arguing, Dash said, that such research “has been done time and time again, even in Ontario,” and instead the program should be ended immediately.
Despite this, the OCDSB went ahead with a study, so in response, the Asilu Collective launched their own effort to give past and current students a venue to anonymously share their experiences with SROs. Mason said, “We wanted to make sure we were collecting our own data from the community in order to better hold Ottawa Carleton District School Board accountable in their own collection of data.”
Ultimately, the OCDSB report recommended ending the SRO program. There was then a period of public debate about it, which was very challenging, particularly for those most targeted by policing. As Mason said, “We had to hear all the trustees debate if those experiences were enough to change or end a program that had been found to have been perpetrating human rights abuses in schools.” In the summer of 2021, the OCDSB voted to end the program. In response to the loss of the program’s largest client, the Ottawa Police Service cancelled it in its entirety, meaning it was gone from the other three school boards in the city as well.
This was an important victory, and one well worth celebrating. But the Asilu Collective knew it was only a start. In conversation with other groups doing similar work across so-called Canada, the collective had been coming to recognize the importance of demanding not just police-free schools but policing-free schools. Police enact certain kinds of surveillance, regulation, and harm that disproportionately target Black and Indigenous people, and people marginalized in other ways. But they are far from the only source of such things – lots of other institutions and people enact the same kinds of surveillance, regulation, and harm.
In school contexts, that means a few different things. Some of the policing functions that had been done by SRO officers were taken up by administrators and teachers, whom Mason said “escalate their own policing in order to maintain a relatively similar status quo in their schools.” Other practices through which marginalized students are policed in schools had always been done by people other than the cops, and those just continued. And the administration could still call the police in under some circumstances – and in their work supporting families, Asilu saw instances where administrators exaggerated or escalated circumstances to allow them to do so. And in some key respects, provincial legislation continues to tie the operation of schools to formal policing, even without an SRO program – “There are tons of legislative expectations of policing that are set within schools through things like the Education Act and Safe Schools legislation as well,” Mason explained. “Principals and administrators and teachers have legislated duties to uphold certain carceral standards.”
Mason said, “We have legislative expectations to police students. We have curriculum-based expectations to police students. … Along with, you know, all of the policing that administrators do on top of that in the halls, and in the bathrooms, and in the classrooms, it just leaves very little room for the students to be children and to be youth, and to explore, and to be curious, and to trust that school is a place that they can do that.”
With all of that in mind, after the win in 2021, the Asilu Collective decided to focus more on direct advocacy work, in support of students and families dealing with disciplinary processes and other specific injustices related to policing in Ottawa schools. They developed relationships and support networks with some of the small subset of teachers and other education workers who share their abolitionist agenda (and who also often face significant consequences for taking that position). They also did mutual aid work, community crowdfunding, set up a reporting tool to allow students to share their experiences anonymously, and ran a book club for youth as a political education measure.
More recently, in their work to support students and families, they have pivoted away from a focus on advocacy directed at schools and towards an even greater emphasis on building networks and resilience throughout the community, both to directly support people in ways that don’t depend on the state, and to build the kinds of relationships and capacities that will be needed in the future for more profound challenges to the status quo. Mason explained, “A lot of the stuff that is happening within schools is very entrenched. And having a bigger network to be able to confront those really big obstacles, and help parents connect with each other and speak with other people in their community is really powerful to be able to, you know, not feel so alone in these struggles.”
Dash said, “That pivot is really about recognizing that these networks of community care, they must be done to create a sustainable movement for ourselves and the folks that we support. And it’s so, so important that we do all of this outside of the state.” She said that the “work of dismantling” existing systems, as in the win against the SRO program, is “super important too.” However, she continued, “Cops are still showing up in schools and policing is still happening in schools, so we have to arm youth and their parents with knowledge and skills on, like, how to protect each other. Because at the end of the day, we keep each other safe. And we’re all we have in this white supremacist, settler colonial hellscape that we’re all living in, unfortunately. … This all has to be done outside of the state. And that even includes, for example, engaging too much with the school boards. It was very difficult for us to constantly be attending meetings with school board trustees who were very condescending, they were racist, they were ableist, they were completely dismissing the experiences of so many racialized and other marginalized youth and their families. And so that is hard to go up against all the time. And so, turning away from that, and supporting youth and their families in other ways is something we want to continue to prioritize.”
Mason concluded, “Wins don’t happen by motion or by vote, or by any kind of action that these trustees and other institutional powers take. They happen because of the strength and the cohesion of the community, and its power. So, tapping back into that, and placing the value into the community that is deserved – that’s something that we have to focus on, and build ourselves.”
Please read about the big changes coming for Talking Radical Radio in 2023!
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: PPD / Pixnio
Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

Posted in Episode, Radio | Tagged Asilu Collective, education, Hailey Yasmeen Dash, Mae Mason, Ontario schools, Ottawa, police, police abolition, public education, school-to-prison pipeline, Talking Radical Radio | Leave a comment

Radio: Infrastructure and support for climate justice organizing across Canada

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Scott

Jacqueline Lee-Tam is the director of the Climate Justice Organizing Hub and Sara Adams is its anglophone coordinator. Scott Neigh interviews them about the work of the Hub providing supports to grassroots organizers across so-called Canada.
The moments of social movement struggle that make mainstream headlines are just a tiny fraction of what movements actually involve. Even accounts that acknowledge that without a certain amount of work to organize and mobilize, the railway line couldn’t be blocked, the picket wouldn’t be strong, the tens of thousands wouldn’t show up to the demonstration, often fail to capture everything else that goes into making such moments possible. There’s a lot to that “everything else,” but one element of it is a range of kinds of social and physical infrastructure – “infrastructure of dissent,” to borrow a phrase from radical sociologist Alan Sears. All movements need it, these days we don’t have much of it, and today’s interview participants are part of a project that is a particular form of it.
Lee-Tam got her start in anti-pipeline struggles as a high school student in Vancouver. Adams was involved in environmental activities in high school, but really plunged into climate organizing as a university student in Ottawa. Both now live in Tiohti:áke (or Montreal), where the Hub is based.
Lee-Tam described the Hub as “a support structure for grassroots organizing” across so-called Canada. She explained, “Folks come to us with their questions and their their roadblocks when it comes to organizing, and we help them move through those roadblocks.” They use training, workshops, coaching, mentorship, events, peer-to-peer learning, and online tools to support and build capacity among organizers. They are also bringing a wide range of resources related to organizing together in a Hub wiki, a sort of “archive of activist knowledge that is ever-growing.”
The Hub was founded by Tom Liacas, who has a history of involvement in grassroots activism and organizing, and has worked extensively in the NGO sector. He saw a need in grassroots contexts for the kinds of supports that the Hub now provides, and he was pretty sure that his experience in the world of foundations and funded organizations might allow him to access the resources required to set something up to provide such supports. And he was right – he got some funding, got the Hub going, passed leadership along to younger activists embedded in a range of movement contexts (including Lee-Tam and Adams), and moved to an advisory role.
A key factor that enabled the founding of the Hub was a shift in the priorities of funders. Historically, foundations concerned with the climate crisis have mostly put their resources into NGOs and into things like research and policy development – approaches that are institutional and, in a certain sense, “safe,” according to Lee-Tam. But the youth-led climate movement upsurge in 2018 and 2019 shook things up. It created an opening in climate-focused institutional spaces to recognize what activist and organizers have always known – that real change is powered not by NGOs but by the grassoots.
Lee-Tam said, “Oftentimes, people think that the win happens when a policy is passed. But if you look at the timeline preceding that win, there’s almost always grassroots organizing that put the issue on the map on the first place.” The youth climate movement pushed funders to recognize that “the grassroots space really can achieve a lot. They have people power that is necessary to really push the dial on issues and to build up the public pressure necessary to force the hands of politicians.” She said it remains “an uphill battle in terms of making the case – helping funders to realize the importance of grassroots organizing,” but there is a somewhat greater openness today.
In its first year, the Hub worked mostly in French and exclusively in Quebec, and only at that point expanded its focus to include English Canada. Its approach has been to begin by talking with people already doing grassroots activism and organizing, to find out what questions they have about their work and what difficulties they are facing, and to build programming to address those things. The organization launched in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, so some of its initial work was responding to things like the transition to online and distanced organizing. But a lot of it has been about what Lee-Tam described as “the eternal questions of grassroots organizers” – things like, how do we structure ourselves? How do we work together? What does it look like to think strategically? How do we deepen and broaden our analysis? How do we navigate conflict? And so on.
Lee-Tam said, “We started building out programming that responded to these most frequently asked questions, and did ad hoc coaching and mentorship with other questions.” They currently work with about 2500 organizers from across so-called Canada, and are keen to connect with more.
According to Adams, the landscape of the climate movement looks very different today than it did during the pre-pandemic upsurge. She said, “2019 was this incredible year of momentum and this height for the climate movement that was unprecedented. And then we have the onset of the pandemic and other crises intersecting with it as well.” Because of that, today is “a time of rebuilding, of figuring out how to put the bricks back in place and … how we move in this space, and how we welcome more people into this space, how we build more solidarity and power together.”
A crucial element of the Hub’s work is its expansive understanding of the kind of organizing that the climate crisis requires. Adams said that “decarbonization and cutting down on emissions” is “not enough.”
She explained that a too-narrow focus on emissions “is not actually getting to the structural issues that are creating our moment of crisis – of what I’ve also heard referred to as permacrisis, or continual intersecting crises of economic inequality, racial inequality,” and other axes of oppression. “They are not all separate struggles or separate issues, but they all are coming to a head and are all connected to the climate crisis and to creating the climate crisis. And a knowledge of that intersection of all of these crises is essential to realizing that our way out of this is solidarity between movements, solidarity between all of these struggles, between these communities.” We need to move forward “by building power together, by linking these issues, and realizing that we need a convergence of struggles, of people, of communities to come out of this, to build the people power necessary, to take to the streets, to put the pressure, to create alternatives, and to fight for them – alternatives to the current order.”
Lee-Tam summarized, “What we need to build is a movement of movements.” She argued that there is both a “moral imperative” to build solidarity with many different struggles but there is also the “strategic side.” She said, “If we are going to win, we need the people power to win. And a siloed climate movement that focuses only on emissions reductions, or [electric vehicles], or whatever, is not going to have the broadest reach that it needs to win. And so, necessarily, the focus moves away from from, say, emissions reductions, to being a more complex vision of the world that we want.”
Along with the general work of “rebuilding capacity” and “bringing people in,” Adams sees a few different kinds of work happening today in different contexts across the climate movement. Indigenous solidarity remains vital. Particularly on campuses, organizing for divestment from fossil fuel industries is a big priority. And in a lot of places, climate organizers have turned their attention to “local struggles” and “campaigns on material conditions close to home.” This includes struggles focused on things like housing and transit, approached through a climate justice lens, and on a vision of change based on “talking to and working with our neighbours.”
The work towards the next big climate movement upsurge seems to be particularly promising in Quebec. Lee-Tam said that a group of youth climate organizers are “building up towards an unlimited general strike” among students. She said that some folks who are involved in the Hub and its community are part of that work. In addition, there is a youth-led initiative calling on students to reduce their course load or even drop out entirely to spend their time on climate movement work. Because of differences in cost of living and social supports, such an initiative is possible in Quebec in ways that it would not be in other parts of Canada. As well, Lee-Tam said, “Obviously, this is not something that everyone can do. But it’s a really cool initiative that’s collecting testimonies of people who have grappled with this idea, people who’ve tried it, people who are doing it, and we have a number of team members who work part-time at the Hub, but conserve a lot of their time as well for organizing.”
Across all of these different kinds of work, and across so-called Canada, Adams said, “Groups are in need of support at this moment – and always, but especially at this moment of rebuilding. And so that’s where we come in.”
She continued, “Fundamentally, the Hub is about capacity building and education, of transferring knowledge, of giving folks opportunities to skill up, to understand their role within the social movement ecosystem, their strengths as individuals and what they can bring to these spaces that also brings them joy, that also brings them sustenance, and that brings them community, and that keeps this work sustainable for themselves and for their communities.” Their work aims to provide “resources that really fundamentally get down to thinking intentionally about how we make change happen at a structural level, how we design – intentionally – processes, campaigns. And then also things like how we show up for disability justice in our spaces with access culture, how we show up for racial justice, how we build anti-oppressive systems into our organizing, so that we can win and work together and build solidarity in the ways we need to affect change.”
“That’s really where the Hub comes in,” she concluded. “We want to support grassroots groups move through these big questions, these big visioning and structural conversations, with the tools and the knowledge and the history necessary to make sure they are effective.”
Please read about the big changes coming for Talking Radical Radio in 2023!
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Jasmin Sessler / Wikimedia
Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

Posted in Episode, Radio | Tagged climate change, climate crisis, climate justice, Climate Justice Organizing Hub, infrastructure of dissent, Jacqueline Lee-Tam, Sara Adams, solidarity | Leave a comment

Radio: Advocacy for Halifax cyclists

Posted on January 17, 2023 by Scott

Peter Zimmer and Camila Fisher are avid cyclists and members of the Halifax Cycling Coalition, an organization committed to making their city safer and all-around better for cycling. Scott Neigh interviews them about the challenges that cyclists face in Halifax and about what the coalition is doing to make things better.
Zimmer has been using a bike to get around since at least the early 1960s and has been involved in the Halifax community in lots of different ways since he moved there in 1969. At 80 years old, he’s still going strong – he gets around using an e-bike and he chairs the coalition. Fisher’s involvement in environmental groups started when she was a university student in California in the late 2010s, and she is in her second year on the coalition’s board after returning to Halifax from a year abroad doing a Master’s degree in the UK.
According to the pair, notwithstanding occasional rhetoric to the contrary from the municipal government, Halifax does not have great cycling infrastructure – or, really, great infrastructure of any sort for all of those people that Zimmer described as “vulnerable road users.” With that phrase, he means everyone getting around the city by any means other than a car, including pedestrians, cyclists, those using mobility devices, transit riders, and so on.
Fisher said that the city is “very car-based.” She continued, “Lot of the streets aren’t planned for biking. They’re dangerous. You’re going on streets that people are driving down really quickly. Cars usually aren’t used to seeing bikes around. … If you [aren’t] living in central Halifax or downtown Dartmouth, you pretty much need a car to get around or else you’re going to be taking public transport. But, you know, it’s not planned very well. The buses don’t run very frequently. And there is a sort of stigma attached with any sort of transportation mechanism that’s not your car.”
An additional challenge, according to Fisher, is that even a lot of people who “have bikes wouldn’t see themselves as a cyclist. And they wouldn’t be using those bikes for non-recreational purposes.” In other words, they might go trail biking in the summer or bike around the block with their kids for fun, but they would be unlikely to use their bike as a day-to-day mechanism for getting around the city. She said, “I think there’s kind of a cultural shift that, in my eyes, needs to happen to make cycling an option for everyone. And that starts with the infrastructure. Because a lot of the reason people don’t see themselves as cyclists or use their bikes to get around is because, really, it’s not safe in many places.”
Zimmer said that while the Halifax Regional Municipality has at times proclaimed its commitment to safety for cyclists and pedestrians, “Frankly, they’ve done a very poor job of making much progress on those goals. They don’t take it seriously.” He said that even when the city has endorsed principles that sound promising, when those ideas filter down into what is actually implemented in terms of urban planning and road design, they are “considered grudgingly and last.”
The Halifax Cycling Coalition was founded in 2008, in response to a cyclist being killed by a car the year before. Originally started by a small committed group, it gradually grew, and in the mid-2010s was able to obtain some funding and hire an executive director. Precarious and project-based funding and barriers to being able to pay a living wage have meant that they have seen a great deal of staff turnover and therefore have never had as much stability and increased capacity as they had hoped. At the time of the interview, the coalition was once again working entirely on a volunteer basis. Nonetheless, they have managed, over the years, to accomplish a great deal
According to Fisher, the coalition’s work falls into three broad categories. The first is advocacy. Depending on the issue, this might be focused at the municipal or provincial level. It is, for the most part, reactive – supporting, opposing, or otherwise providing input into existing proposals for transportation-related legislation, decisions about road infrastructure, transportation planning, and so on. And they do this advocacy in all of the ways that you would expect, including researching the issue, meeting with politicians, making public presentations to government bodies, publicizing issues and demands through their networks, and doing lots of media work.
In terms of how it happens, she said that the group’s advocacy is often “project-based” and “person-based,” meaning that it is often focused on a particular initiative and that within the coalition, any given instance tends to be driven by one staff person or board member.
Fisher gave an example from late 2022. A member of the coalition heard an interview with a city staffer that revealed that the “all ages and abilities bike network” that the city had committed to completing by 2024 was substantially delayed, with only 40% done and a possible completion date of 2028. The member brought it to the coalition’s attention, and “one of our board members mobilized us all around creating an immediate press response, a press release to respond to this.” As the “foremost voice around cycling in Halifax – our response, it really means a lot. And it means a lot to the city [government], and we know that.” They also have considerable reach within the community through their mailing list and active social media presence, which they used to let members and supporters know about the issue. This generated a substantial community response. Quite quickly, a city councillor reached out, opening further opportunities for the coalition to exert pressure on the city. “So that’s how we get the message out. And that’s how we drive further advocacy.”
The second aspect of the coalition’s work is education. Over the years, they have offered lots of courses and workshops for residents of Halifax who are interested in everything from the practical basics of urban cycling to the details of specific bike-related issues. They, again, use social media and their newsletter to keep members and supporters up to date, and they’ve produced a cycling guide for the city that has been translated into multiple languages. And the final aspect of their work is organizing public events, often mass bike rides, to build community and to build the capacity and visibility of the organization.
There are lots of ways the group would like to enhance their work in the coming years. They want, for instance, to make sure they are doing as much as they can to focus on the cycling and other transportation needs of low-income and newcomer communities, and of parts of Halifax outside of the urban core. They want to shift from being reactive to being pro-active in their advocacy. And they are working on ways to be able to hire staff in a more sustainable way and pay them a living wage, as a path to growing the group’s capacity.
Fisher said, “We haven’t necessarily had the most unified or coordinated approach to advocacy. But certainly, we’ve been impactful where we focus on a single project. Moving forward, I think, I would like to see our advocacy more coordinated, and more pro-active. … Rather than waiting on the city’s lead, and waiting until things are happening for us to say, hey, this can be made better, and get our two cents in, I think it’d be really useful for us to, you know, start by identifying some things that we think should exist that don’t exist, and making those happen here.”
Zimmer said that his “five-year goal” is “to say it’s not good enough to make the streets safe in the dense urban core. We have to figure out ways that the streets throughout the city can be linked by cycling or multi-use pathways, and make the streets there safer in the outlying areas.”
Fisher added, “One of the questions that I ask myself is what would it take for someone in one of the suburban areas or somewhere that’s not the city centre to feel comfortable biking to get what they need to get, to do what they need to do? What would it take for someone that lives in [one of these areas] to be able to hop on their bike and go get groceries? So we’re talking not only about street design, but about urban planning.”
Please read about the big changes coming for Talking Radical Radio in 2023!
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Ryan Sharpe / Wikimedia
Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

Posted in Episode, Radio | Tagged active transportation, Camila Fisher, cycling, Halifax, Halifax Cycling Coalition, Peter Zimmer, sustainable transportation | Leave a comment

Radio: Decolonizing and Indigenizing the map

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Scott

Steve DeRoy is a cartographer and a co-founder of the Indigenous Mapping Collective. Scott Neigh interviews him about the importance of mapping and about the collective’s work to build Indigenous peoples’ capacity to, as their website puts it, “map their lands, share their stories, and decolonize place and space.”
Colonization is, to a great extent, about land. On one level, it is about taking control of land. But is also about defining land (in particular, defining it as property), about imposing colonial names on the land, and about determining which stories of the land are elevated and which are suppressed. One tool which European empires and settler states have historically employed as they have done all of these things is mapping, or cartography – the dominant modern practices of which emerged in conjunction with colonization. DeRoy said, “Maps are not necessarily a passive tool – they’ve been used to assert power over territory. … Although maps can be used as a communication tool, the underlying notion is an exertion of power and knowledge.”
But Indigenous peoples have always had their own practices of mapping their territories – and, of course, their own names for, stories of, and practices of being in relation with the land. Indigenous peoples today are not only asserting that these things have survived the last five centuries of colonial violence, but are making very clear that, today, these must be central to what happens on the land. And mapping is one tool that they are using to do this.
Steve DeRoy is Anishinaabe, from the Buffalo Clan, from Ebb and Flow and Lake Manitoba First Nations in Treaty Two territory in Manitoba. A survivor of the Sixties Scoop, he grew up in southern Ontario.
As for cartography, he said, “I kind of fell into it.” As a student, he loved both art and science, and when a neighbour who worked with it showed him the kind of mapping software that gets described as a Geographic Information System (GIS), he loved it for its capacity to combine scientific analysis with amazing aesthetics. And during his time studying cartography in college, he met someone from a northern First Nation who talked about the ways in which his community was using maps to do things like document community knowledge and community land use activities, as part of processes related to forestry development in their territories.
DeRoy said, “I just thought, wow, what a creative way to use maps and tell a story. And so for the first decade of my career, I really surrounded myself with people that were much smarter than me, that were doing this kind of work and that were involved in using maps to communicate, defend, and articulate the rights of Indigenous peoples through maps.”
Then in 2009, he and some friends came together to co-found the Firelight Group, an Indigenous-owned consulting company that works with Indigenous communities in environmental impact assessments, government regulatory processes, and a range of other policy, planning, and research work. Their goal is to put Indigenous communities “in the driver’s seat” in research and planning activities – “they would be the ones that would be defining what the research would look like” while the Firelight Group provides support. He observed, “The legacy of research in many Indigenous communities has been somewhat of an extractive process. So we wanted to change that.”
In the early 2000s, DeRoy had been part of organizing a gathering which had brought Indigenous people together to talk about how their communities were using and could use mapping, and even years later it still seemed like a very relevant conversation. A little more than a decade after that, he was at an event hosted by Google to help people learn how to use some of the company’s mapping-related tools. And inspiration hit – why not bring Indigenous participants together in an event that combines conversation about ways that different Indigenous communities make use of mapping with hands-on opportunities for participants to learn how to use the tools to do those things. The first Indigenous Mapping Workshop happened in Victoria in 2014. This now-annual event eventually spawned the Indigenous Mapping Collective and remains a centrepiece of the collective’s work.
DeRoy said, “We brought Indigenous peoples together from all over Turtle Island to come together, to network, and see each other, and hear each other, and make those connections, and develop those synergies amongst one another…. People are working in these spaces, often in isolation in their own home communities, and they come together and they realize they’re not the only ones out there doing this type of work and that there’s other people, other folks that are are dealing with similar challenges.”
He is constantly impressed with the range of ways that Indigenous communities find to make use of mapping technologies. Many, of course, are using them to intervene in processes related to resource extraction or state regulation on their lands. Others are using mobile mapping tools to monitor and document how climate change is impacting their territories. Some are using digital mapping tools as part of sharing knowledge and teachings across generations. Some are using them to understand and visualize the cumulative effects of all of the many disparate colonial impacts on their territory, and the resulting implications for their ability to exercise their rights. And there are lots of other examples
“The cartographer – the ones that are holding the pen – really wield great power to define place and space. And we’ve seen that over time here in Canada with colonization. By consciously excluding Indigenous peoples from the map, it reinforced the idea that no one was here, and it could be colonized by foreign interests. So a lot of our work is really about how do we enable Indigenous peoples to be able to use maps to decolonize. And while decolonizing the map, Indigenous peoples are now in a position of Indigenizing the map and telling stories of their rights and interests, how they might be able to protect those ongoing Aboriginal and treaty rights, those constitutionally protected rights. But also how do they assert and acknowledge those rights, and ensure those rights are being enforced.”
He said that these “decolonized and Indigenized” approaches to making and using maps are challenging the historical devaluation of Indigenous knowledge, and combining Western and Indigenous ways of understanding the world. “We’re seeing the braiding of these two different knowledge sets. And giving weight to each of them is equally important, but also recognizing that there’s value to that Indigenous way of doing research.”
The collective also hosts a monthly speaker series, and maintains an online platform with a range of resources and tools for its nearly 2500 members. And, crucially, the collective and its various events are a way for Indigenous communities to let the companies that make digital mapping tools know what they want, want they need, and what they expect as the technology evolves.
“I think that there’s real value in Indigenous peoples leading their own engagements and being a part of that research, and applying these maps and tools,” DeRoy continued. “I think Indigenous peoples are reasserting their voice by holding the pen and being able to define their own processes through maps. … And by having all the necessary data to weigh the pros and cons of particular issues, I think it enables Indigenous peoples to be the drivers of their own destinies. And so I think Indigenous mapping plays an important role for helping Indigenous communities define what that looks like … [and] for being able to communicate those interests and desires, and those perspectives.”
Please read about the big changes coming for Talking Radical Radio in 2023!
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Used with permission of the Indigenous Mapping Collective.
Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

Posted in Episode, Radio | Tagged decolonization, indigenous, indigenous knowledge, Indigenous Mapping Collective, Steve DeRoy | Leave a comment

Transcript: Building visibility, equity, and impact for Asian Canadian artists

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Scott

The following is a rough transcript of the episode of Talking Radical Radio for the week of January 2 to 6, 2023.

Scott Neigh 0:08
My name is Scott Neigh. And this is Talking Radical Radio

Theme music

Shawn Tse 0:30
When we talk about the inequities that Asian Canadians face in all types of sectors, we are lacking a lot of data. Really the only data that we know is pretty surface and already beaten into, I think, our society’s consciousness — the lack of representation. We need to start building, I would say, more nuanced data and more nuanced ways of signaling to our systems that go beyond the representation piece because it’s not just about representation.

Scott Neigh 1:01
That’s the voice of Shawn Tse. He’s today’s guest on Talking Radical Radio. This show brings you grassroots voices from across Canada. We give you the chance to hear many different people who are involved in many different struggles talk about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and why they’re doing it, in the belief that such listening can strengthen all of our efforts to change the world. In Canada, the dominant shape of the art sector can largely trace its history to a Royal Commission headed by future Governor General Vincent Massey, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A fairly explicit exercise in nation building, it produced a vision of the arts that was — unsurprisingly — Eurocentric, white dominated and settler colonial. A lot has changed since then, as institutional and funding practices in the arts sector, not to mention the nation more broadly, have been challenged and changed by the relentless work of Black, Indigenous and racialized people, and by a range of people of all backgrounds with a different vision of belonging and thriving in northern Turtle Island. Nonetheless, much work remains to be done to realize a vision of the arts in this country that is fully equitable, inclusive, and just. Shawn Tse is an artist, filmmaker, and community organizer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta, in Treaty Six territory and the Métis homeland. Tse grew up in Toronto. He was always very involved in music and theater, and he attended film school. But he didn’t have any insider connections in the industry and he didn’t see a lot of space for stories based on racialized experiences back then. So after graduating, he decided to become an educator and spent a decade teaching English in various places in Asia. It took the revolution in high quality, affordable digital technology to bring him back to filmmaking. He moved back to Canada and launched his own production company, Fallout Media, in 2016. A lot of his filmmaking work has happened in community-based settings, often in collaboration with nonprofits, newcomer organizations, and arts based organizations, and often grounded in Edmonton’s Chinatown. Through those relationships, he learned a lot about a range of social justice issues and inequities, and they became an increasing focus for him. Today, he sees much of what he does as bringing together art and filmmaking with community organizing. In 2019, Tse heard about a Montreal-based organization called Festival Accès Asie that was hosting an Asian Heritage Symposium, bringing together people from across Canada involved in various kinds of community work in Asian-Canadian context. And pretty soon he got involved in the working group that was guiding it. A little later on, through the symposium itself, through written surveys, and through consultations with community organizers and with arts organizations in lots of different Asian-Canadian communities, this informal group began to develop a more robust sense of what Asian-Canadian artists need — primarily, according to their findings, visibility and connection. So, with Festival Accès Asie as the lead agency, they applied for and got grant funding to produce an online platform to meet those needs called the CanAsian Arts Network. Much of the work of developing the platform was technical — it involves taking their insights into community need, and figuring out how to implement a useful and accessible online space to address them. A key element of this site allows Asian-Canadian artists to make searchable profiles, including in depth discussion of their arts practice and a portfolio. In conjunction with the site’s other tools for sharing content and for focused collective conversation, they hope that this will facilitate the growth of networks of artists across different communities and contexts. They hope it will also make it easier for Asian Canadian artists to find and connect with opportunities. In the platform’s vision of justice and equity, a key priority is contributing to reconciliation and decolonization, including by catalyzing related conversations in Asian-Canadian arts contexts, and bringing Asian-Canadian and Indigenous artists together for discussion and collaboration. In 2023, the network will be hosting 16 digital literacy workshops as well as other events to help Asian Canadian artists build their knowledge and skills. And the broader vision is to have the online platform of the CanAsian Arts Network and the periodic in person Asian heritage symposium do complimentary work, all the while continuing to evolve as the needs of artists and communities shift, and hopefully contributing to the larger ongoing work of developing an arts sector in Canada with a broadened understanding of the arts and to more just and equitable practices. I speak with Tse about the development and work of the CanAsian Arts Network.

Shawn Tse 5:28
Hi, my name is Sean Tse. He/him pronouns. I’m based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Treaty Six territory, Métis homeland. I’m an artist, a filmmaker, community organizer, and doing a project called AanAsian Arts Network, which is a platform bringing more visibility to Asian-Canadian artists across our country. I’ve always been very active in performing arts. I grew up in a home where music was a big deal. So I played a lot of music, and then was part of doing a lot of theater growing up. And then eventually I found my way into film through film school. I think film is my core practice right now. The path into film, there was kind of a side turn. Because after I graduated, I ended up going to Asia to teach English. It wasn’t until really the digital age, that really developed closer to the end of my time in Asia, where I started getting back into film. It was much more affordable and accessible for someone like me that didn’t really see necessarily a future in film, because I didn’t really have any great networks. I also didn’t really see a lot of stories that really wanted to centre around the racialized experience, back when I graduated. And so yeah, that technology allowed to break some of those barriers in terms of being able to capture and create stories that I wanted to tell as, you know, a very small crew, or even one-person crew. I decided to come back to Canada and start my own production company called Fallout Media. And I have been working on this media production business since 2016. Most of the work that we’ve been doing at Fallout Media has really been focused around social change-type projects. So, working with a lot of nonprofit, and community, and arts-based projects. And those skills of building a business and also having to coordinate sets and coordinate shoots — a lot of those skills were transferable towards community organizing. And I’m very grateful for those connections specifically in the newcomer and nonprofit spaces. That’s how I started becoming more aware of the different social justice issues, inequities — just being part of a community that really surfaced a lot of the untold stories in our municipality. And through that, my career just continued to build off of learning more about grassroots organizations and how they’re connected and how they are, in many ways, forgotten within our high-level systems. That’s basically how I got into and continue to work in both filmmaking, art, and community organizing. COVID was quite pivotal in taking my work beyond the local, municipal, even provincial context. I heard in 2019, that a Asian heritage festival organization, Festival Accès Asie, based in Montreal, was creating this Asian Heritage Symposium. And it was the second annual one. And I was like, What is this? And how do I not know about this? That put a bit more on my radar that there was this world out there where folks from across Canada who identify as Asian Canadian were meeting up. That event initially was supposed to be just in person, but it switched to virtual. And that’s really how Edmonton was reached out to and folks in the community here that were already organizers were invited to participate. And so I joined a working group that helped steer what this virtual symposium was going to look like. And that’s how I got connected with this network, or this growing idea of what this network would be. Because eventually, through the symposium, we were able to build some data and build some proof around what were the needs of Asian-Canadian artists from across Canada. And one thing that was identified, especially over COVID, is the lack of infrastructure for folks to connect within the virtual space. And so really the prompt for those needs helped generate the grant that was eventually developed and led by Festival Accès Asie, which is the folks that ran the symposium to put in an application for Canada Council to get a digital strategies grant. Through that support of Canada Council, and then also Festival Accès Asie, the community has been able to take it forward to launch within the last few months, this digital platform to serve the community that identifies as Asian-Canadian artists, and bring visibility and ways of connection within the virtual space.

Scott Neigh 10:31
How did you go about engaging with the community in order to assess what Asian-Canadian artists need?

Shawn Tse 10:36
The symposium itself had a number of different workshops that had surveys. We also, when we did finally get the grant or developing the grant itself, had three written surveys for Asian-Canadian artists, but also presenters and folks within industry who would be looking to hire or to invite Asian-Canadian artists to some of their events. So we built some data really around what it would look like and what would the needs be within a digital space. That’s how we generated the idea around visibility and connection as some of the core needs. The other aspects, in terms of consultation, we have a digital council, which is a group of folks from all over Canada who are Asian-Canadian organizers or part of Asian-Canadian organizing arts groups. And they are really important to consult with to shape also how this platform is created, and how it also is outreach to the community. Some of the other things that I’ve done as part of the project is community consultations. Thanks to being able to host virtual engagements, we’ve been able to do a number of different types of community conversations and build more qualitative data around what the specific needs and the functions would be. You know, we know about visibility and we know about wanting connection, but the community conversations really helped to get us closer and closer to real life examples and real life use of what visibility would look like and what connections would look like.

Scott Neigh 12:24
What work was involved in going from this understanding of need to actually establishing the CanAsian Arts Network?

Shawn Tse 12:31
This is a digital platform, so a massive part of it is just tech. And most of the grant funds really went towards a professional web design company to basically take all the information that we had and build it into code, from scratch. And so that was the next stage. You know, here’s what we’ve heard, here are the different functions that we really like, and then negotiating and navigating what that would look like technically and stylistically, as a platform itself. And so most of the work that I’ve been in is, you know, doing a lot of testing and doing a lot of meetings with the tech folks to try to improve the ways that we can make this, at least from a back end perspective, more accessible for the community.

Scott Neigh 13:21
What are some of the key features of the platform that implement the vision you had developed?

Shawn Tse 13:25
If you are an Asian-Canadian artist and you would like to join, it’s a very simple signup form. Once you’ve signed up and your account is approved, you can create your own page where you have a portfolio, where you can really talk a bit more in depth about what your practices. And how that links to the website itself, there’s a directory where you can use all sorts of filters and search functions to really find folks in your community. So I do a lot of organizing in my local Chinatown here in Edmonton. And so within the directory of artists, if you put in the word Chinatown in the search bar, you’d be able to find other artists — myself in there as well — that do specifically Chinatown type art projects. So that’s a really, really important tool and function of visibility, because I think that — and this kind of relates more to my own personal journey in arts, a huge part of me staying within the Chinatown organizing is being able to build connections outside to other folks in their Chinatown. So, you know, I’ve connected with people in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and these kinds of connections have allowed me to share notes and think about certain tools and different strategies in thinking about community organizing in Chinatown here. So those are the types of concrete ways that I can see these kinds of connections being built with other artists, is that naturally you’re going to find folks that you didn’t know in other parts of the country that are doing potentially similar types of themes or topics or practices. And on the website, you’ll be able to either message them, or create a group, or create an interest group. And that’s other ways of connecting. Yeah, there are so many other functions as well. There’s resources, there’s events that you can post, there’s articles that you could write and share. And so, yeah, there’s a number of ways that folks that are in the community can really promote the work that they’re doing, and just bring more visibility to other folks who are interested in this type of cultural and arts material to outside of your networks.

Scott Neigh 15:37
What’s your sense of the community’s response to and uptake of the platform so far?

Shawn Tse 15:42
We’ve hit some of our targets in terms of populating the directory. I don’t know exactly what the number is, but I think we’re close to 300 right now. And so in the few months that we’ve had, and through more word of mouth and social media sharing, we’ve been able to get a nice number of artists be active in the space. We are developing some different workshops and content. This is kind of an ongoing question in terms of having a platform that goes beyond just kind of a static and self-empowered or self-instructed type of website to one that is more dynamic and engaged with folks. That’s the next steps, in terms of where we’re going nd what we know folks are looking towards. Like, how do we generate content or generate activities so that people have, you know, not just this tool to bring visibility to their platform, but also a way to engage community and their own educational learning within the arts and cultural sector?

Scott Neigh 16:45
What have you been doing to get word out about the platform?

Shawn Tse 16:48
We have a great communications strategist, Michelle, based in Montreal, and they’ve been working on a number of different ways of promoting the platform. That’s kind of an ongoing process, right? For now, most of our community outreach has been word of mouth and through social media platforms, and posting this very preliminary foundation step of, you know, are you an artist that identifies as Asian-Canadian that wants to have more visibility and connect with other artists across Canada? So that is a very general kind of pitch to gain the interest and get folks to just sign up. And now we’re in that step of building content that really speaks to getting them engaged and stay connected with the platform itself. So we’ve also developed a blog and, like, encouraging folks to upload their events so that other folks are able to attend and/or see what are the different activities that are out there in Canada that are focused around our community.

Scott Neigh 17:54
What are the paths that you see connecting the functionality of the platform and the things it brings to the community around visibility and connection to the larger challenges that Asian-Canadian artists experience in terms of, you know, their work, and the broader arts community, and the Canadian context as a whole?

Shawn Tse 18:12
I think there’s a number of things. Reconciliation or decolonization is a really important framework right now within the platform itself. People’s experiences within the Asian-Canadian community are varied, right. And I think, like, in Canada as well, everyone is either learning or has already developed specific practice in how they’re engaging within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 94 calls to action. So we have put that front and centre as a way to really prompt our community to also recognize there’s work for us as a community and as individuals to really engage in how are we in solidarity with indigenous community. And so that, I think, is one of the really important emphases that we’ve really established as part of the core to why we’re doing this work. And to be very clear and honest, because of our lack of, I would say, community knowledge around this, we’re working towards this. We need help, right? And so that’s why we have an Indigenous consultant really helping us think about not just what a platform would look like in talking about decolonization, but also, within the consultation but also the content that we are producing, how are we making it so that it’s not just a tokened concept. You know, like, you can have your land acknowledgement and stuff like that, but what are the very specific actions and what are the concrete ways that we are furthering this conversation around Indigenous sovereignty and intercultural solidarity? Some of the content that we are building right now is around bringing together Asian-Canadian artists and Indigenous artists to talk about what it is to work together interculturally. Those talks will be released in the new year. But these are some of the ways that we’re navigating these new futures and these new places that really, really we need to invest in. So that’s, that’s one big, big, big, big one. Some of the other ways I would say, we talk about changing paradigms around the way that we look at arts. There’s a hope for a different language when it comes to who is an artist. One of the biggest things that we know from our consultations is kind of this homogeneous labeling of what art or an artist is, and that is very much dictated by our governments, our arts councils, and our federal, provincial and our municipal granting agencies in arts. For a lot of folks who are artists, they rely on these high-level decision makers and gatekeepers to tell us who is an artist and who is not an artist. And I think culturally speaking, especially if you’re a person that’s practicing, you know, a cultural-based type of art — like if I was playing guzheng. Like, there’s no school here for specifically getting some sort of university accreditation for that. And so does that make me not a professional artist if I’ve trained in guzheng for 20 years? So I think that there’s parts of that that we’re also trying to hopefully make some paradigm shifts on what is accessible, or what is considered art within Canada. There are folks that are constantly going on to the website that say, you know, why isn’t this practice more highlighted. For example, spoken word poetry — why isn’t that a title? There is a lot of potential barriers to even wanting to sign up for something like this, because there are a lot of different artists that have different labels or different types of ways that they want to express themselves and consider themselves artists, that potentially this platform does not yet unearth. So that is an important part of the work that we need to do, is not only signaling to our high-level systems that the artists within our community have signaled that they don’t necessarily feel included, but how do we also include them, and then also be a voice making sure that the arts sector is accessible to them? Segueing into the more high level, for the most part, our world is very data-centric. So when we talk about the inequities that Asian Canadians face in all types of sectors, we are lacking a lot of data. Really the only data that we know is pretty surface and already beaten into I think our society’s consciousness, is the lack of representation, right? There’s a lot of conversation still around lack of representation, and how do we increase representation, how do we get folks into roles that have more power. But, yeah, we need to start building I would say, more nuanced data and more nuanced ways of signaling to our systems that go beyond the representation piece. Because it’s not just about representation. There’s a lot more that we can do when we think about, structurally, how do we create safe spaces and spaces where folks do feel empowered to improve our systems? How do we take some of these criticisms that are within this platform and within this community, and generate that to signal to our larger systems to say, these are the types of additional — I would say a bit more complex — ways of looking around how we can generate better systems. As an organizer myself, I’m really interested in seeing how a platform like this can really inform and make more complex and detailed feedback around how our infrastructures or our systems are changing, and how they potentially could change to make things more barrier free and accessible and inclusive.

Scott Neigh 24:09
And building on that, what can you say at this point about the kinds of changes consistent with but going beyond the goals of the CanAsian Arts Network that need to be made by arts funders and by mainstream arts organizations?

Shawn Tse 24:22
I do think that institutions want to develop practices of change. I don’t see that as one of the problems. It’s just right now, when we talk about, you know, gatekeeping and these high-level institutions, it’s slow. It’s slow, because we need organizers on the ground to bring attention or to figure out strategies so that high-level can understand it in a way that they can also see a way for them to engage and make changes. So there’s a process, right? As someone that does move into these different spaces — like grassroots to even institutionalized spaces — my recommendation really is about how do we invest in grassroots organizers to stay and continue and sustain careers in this type of work. Because really, a lot of our institutions and our high-level systems and our governments, they need the grassroots folks to inform them how to move forward. So there has to be just a bit more of that kind of synergy that really invites everyone to be engaged. And what we do see is that when you are an institution that has, like, a good financial backing and, you know, health benefits and things that are like very stable, they will continue to prosper and live on. But grassroot organizations, it’s much more volatile, it’s a lot harder to sustain. And so the reality is, the burnout is so real. There’s so many passionate folks out there that have to walk away because life happens. So how can institution and government and these more stable access points actually invest in grassroots partners that they’ve always partnered with, to encourage them to keep going?

Scott Neigh 26:16
What does the network have coming up in 2023?

Shawn Tse 26:19
We have some really exciting digital literacy and community conversations that will be coming out in 2023. There’ll be 16 digital literacy workshops. We are focusing on helping Asian-Canadian artists learn about, you know, business and arts, social media, the digital space, and also a really important theme, like I had mentioned before, decolonization. And then the community conversations will be invites to a panel and we will talk about some of the gaps and some of the different topics that folks in the community have flagged. It’s also been really exciting meeting up with all these really great leaders in not just the Asian community but the Indigenous and the BIPOC community, to see how we can move together when we talk about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Scott Neigh 27:15
You have been listening to my interview with Sean Tse about the CanAsian Arts Network. To learn more about the network, go to canasianarts.com. To find out more about Talking Radical Radio, the guests, the theme music, and the ways that you can listen go to talkingradical.ca and click on the link for the radio show. On the site, you can sign up for email updates or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, SoundCloud and other platforms. I’m Scott Neigh, a writer and media producer based in Hamilton, Ontario and the author of two books of Canadian history told through the stories of activists published by Fernwood Publishing. Thank you very much for listening and I hope you tune in again next week.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged anti-Asian racism, anti-racism, arts, arts and culture, CanAsian Arts Network, Shawn Tse, Talking Radical Radio, transcript | Leave a comment

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