What Does This Article Tell Us About "Canada"?

Today, I want to do an experiment. Back in January, I wrote a post beginning the work of thinking through what it means to write (about) "Canada" in some of the ways I'm interested in doing so. The idea was for that to be one little piece feeding into a larger project -- one with a more specific and not-yet-made-public focus. Since then, I've done some other (non-public) writing to lay more of the groundwork for that project. Based on that, it now looks like I have a lot, lot, lot of research and reading to do before I can really do too much more writing for the project proper. I don't really like that, because I don't want the thinking and scribbling I've done so far to just fade away from my consciousness and practice, in part because it is still so fragile and tentatively developed but also because it would risk leaving the research to flounder along ungrounded. However, plunging forward directly with the writing just wouldn't make sense at this point. So what I want to do is find ways to do related work that is short and immediate and related, even if it doesn't contribute directly to the larger project.

So. What I want to do today -- and this may be a one-of, or it may lead to more or other things -- is to take a recent news article and ask the question in this post's title: What does this tell us about "Canada" (where that quotation-marked word is used not to point towards some underlying essence or simple unity, but rather to an uneven, arbitrary cluster of relations, practices, images, and ideas whose interconnection under the sign "Canada" must be explored and explained)?

I'm looking for questions it may prompt me to ask, new-to-me elements linked somehow to "Canada," and connections it may make between such elements. Obviously, this way of approaching it may allow me to inch beyond my already-existing understanding of things, but it still depends a lot on what I already understand about "Canada," so there are likely to be loads of things I miss. But I hope that by paying close attention to a piece of writing that would be legible to a wide audience and what it says (or don't say, or presumes) about "Canada," I can continue to the work of clarifying for myself some of the important elements clustered under "Canada" and developing ways to write about it all. Which, as with most things I write on this blog, may or may not be of interest to anybody else, but will be useful to me.

The article I've chosen is a CBC investigative report called "Shipbuilding contract holds $250M mystery: Cost of arctic patrol ships' design sparks warning of another procurement 'fiasco'". The focus of the article is that the federal government is paying Irving Shipbuilding in Halifax $288 million just to design new arctic patrol ships, something that multiple experts quoted in the article say should cost somewhere around a tenth of that or even less, and an amount that is in excess of what other countries have paid recently to both design and build similar ships. The government and the shipyards have both issued material intended as clarification and rebuttal since the story first appeared, which has been incorporated into the revised version of the story currently linked above, but none of the new material actually explains the mystery identified in the title of the article.

A good place to start, given what I'm trying to achieve, is to look at how "Canada" is most directly present in the article. And it seems to be present as one of the central agents in the story that piece is trying to tell -- it is about "Canada's ambitious shipbuilding program," about "the Canadian project," and about the question of "why Canada would pay so much more" (emphasis added). Now, the post I've linked above already makes clear that I really don't buy the myth of a single, unitary thing called "Canada," particularly one that can be easily treated as having agency. If you look a little more closely at this article with that in mind, it seems like there is a complicated but largely assumed and unnoted slippage going on among a few different things connected with "Canada." Sometimes "Canada" seems to be pointing towards the whole, vast conglomeration that can be seen to cluster under that word, or at least is being allowed to blend into that broadest of meanings. At other times in the piece it seems to be indicating that particular cluster of people and organizations and practices and ways of organizing lives that we might summarize by calling "the Canadian state." At other times, specific people are mentioned as being able to speak for "Canada" -- in places, that is unnamed "officials," and in others it is named politicians, Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose and Defence Minister Peter MacKay. Again, there appears to be slippage happening among different things, as civil servants, the government as a whole, and ministers of government are all participants in state relations, but they are not the whole of what gets reified as "the state" yet they are presented as speaking for that whole...which, as I said, in how the article is written, is allowed to blend into or even rhetorically substitute for the conglomeration that is "Canada" as a whole. I have a feeling this gets at something central about the social work that "Canada" -- the nation, the state, the imagined community -- performs, though I'm not sure there's raw material to explore it more here.

This agent "Canada" is, of course, doing something in the article: buying "a fleet of new Arctic offshore patrol ships" whose role is, at least in part, "to assert Canadian sovereignty in the North." This points to a number of key features of what nations and state relations are (or are supposed to be) both in general and specifically in the Canadian case. When the article says "sovereignty", for instance, it invokes a particular version of sovereignty, in which the world is divided into nation-states that have exclusive control over clearly defined units of territory. The very need for this kind of ship points towards clear boundaries that Canadian state relations claim the right to surveil and enforce. This is very different from, for example, the medieval European understanding of sovereignty, or the pre-contact indigenous Turtle Island understanding(s) of sovereignty. Which leads to questions of why this understanding of sovereignty is the one that is treated as natural and inevitable, why this social form is treated as belonging to and having power over particular territories, and how all of that came to be. It also points towards questions about why this particular cluster of people, practices, and relations -- Canadian settler state relations -- gets to claim this kind of sovereignty over this specific territory, which in turn points towards histories of colonization and conquest.

The action being taken to obtain ships also has a form that presumes various important things. For one thing, not only do these various elements of the overall conglomeration of "Canada" get to speak for the whole, at least in certain ways and at certain times, but they also seem to have the ability to amass and allocate resources (in the form of money) in its name. It doesn't say much about how these resources are amassed or how decisions about expenditure are made, but it is treated as unremarkable for their allocation to integrate state relations into a particular way of socially organizing making and doing, which it doesn't name but which we can call capitalism. That, of course, connects "Canada" to a whole vast literature and series of debates, but my own position would be that the social relations that fit that description depend on and reproduce exploitation, violence, oppression, and other sorts of nastiness. The unremarkable character of the intimate connection between "Canada" and these ways of organizing making and doing is significant, if hardly surprising.

Though it is a bit farther removed from the specifics of the article, a few hints can be gleaned about some of the features of this way of organizing making and doing that are relevant to larger discussions. For instance, the name of the firm in question, "Irving Shipbuilding," points towards details of class relations in Canada if you know what to look for -- "Irving" is the name of one of the richest families in the territory over which Canadian state relations preside. The mention that "Canada's shipyards have been in decline for 30 years" and the possibility of "recreating a world-class shipbuilding capacity" point towards (a) the fact that capitalist relations of production are more expansive than just one state (and, it is easy enough to learn elsewhere, are global); (b) the specific wave of changes that global capitalist social relations have undergone in the last 30 years, including shifts in where many types of manufacturing occur; and (c) competing ways of framing and responding to these things -- in particular, the left-nationalist framing, which this piece seems interested in invoking at least in a small way, which talks about "Canada" as having and then losing; but also (by implication through absence) at least one other approach which recognizes that the social organization of capitalist production has always been globally unequal in complicated ways that almost invariably are connected to racialized/colonized/formerly colonized workers being subject to much greater violence than white/colonial workers, though this inequality is used to both privilege and attack the latter group in different ways and at different times.

What is explicitly questioned in the article is not the fact of this way of organizing things, but the details. How much money? Allocated how? Spent on what, exactly? That these kinds of questions are asked implies that there are "right" and "wrong" ways -- or practices widely accepted as such, at least -- to engage in this sort of making and doing. We don't learn much about that distinction beyond the idea that paying too much is suspicious. But, interestingly, the fact that this is a legitimate area of questioning may be a hint that the supposedly agentless, absolute rules of the so-called "free market" that we are taught to respect and not question are really not as agentless and absolute as all that, but rather are created, policed, and enforced by human activity -- that is, human choices and actions, and active policing, define what is supposedly "right" and makes sure they happen, which means other choices, other actions, could create more just ways of organizing making and doing. In this case, someone seems to have violated those rules, and the article is seeking an explanation and perhaps someone to blame.

The article provides relatively little indication that this purchase might be part of a larger series of interrelated changes, though I would argue that it is. Partly, these are changes in the military (and militarized, and militarist) aspects of the state and social relations connected with "Canada" -- see here for discussion of a book that talks about some of this. (The mention of the F-35 fighters is perhaps a hint that the purchase of these ships is part of something bigger, but even so it isn't really enough to go on unless you know the context.) Beyond that, I would argue that these changes related to militarism cannot be properly understood without seeing them as integral to even broader changes in social and state relations in that time, though at present I don't think I would be able to make a completely convincing and concrete case to that effect.

It is, by the way, through the largely unmade connection between the focus of this story and larger social shifts that one way to connect the story to gender can be found, and the article itself hints at this -- the mention of criticism of Harper's choice of these particular ships as "slush-breakers" has a whiff of the ways in which competing posturings about masculinity can be so central to party-political competition. As well, one way to talk about the larger shifts in state and social relations of which this purchase is a part frames it all in terms of state and social relations returning to a more traditional reflection of masculinity-associated elements (e.g. an increasing emphasis on militarism) and a devaluing of elements typically associated with femininity (e.g. aspects of collective caring through welfare state measures).

A final element presumed by the article is, of course, that someone is reading it and cares about it. That someone is, presumably, in some way connected with the overall cluster that is "Canada." As well, something about who the author presumes his audience to be can be understood from the article's focus -- though the word "taxpayer" occurs only once in the article, in a quote from one of the experts on the shipbuilding industry, the questions that are treated as important in the piece are whether the resources allocated through Canadian settler state relations correspond to the goods and services being thus acquired -- that is, are we getting value for our money. None of the other possible questions, whether to-the-root radical or (more realistically) more immediate questions less about value-for-money and more about what values are reflected in what the money is spent upon, are treated as important -- which is to say, acknowledged to exist as questions at all. This, I think, means that the piece is written such that it regards its intended audience as "taxpayers" rather than, say, "citizens" (itself full of problems and limitations) or any of the many other ways that audience might be understood.

So. I'm sure there's more in there, though that's about as much as I care to wring out at the moment. It may be of marginal interest to readers, but writing it has been useful to me, I think more useful than I had expected -- not so much because it has told me much of anything new but because it feels like a step in thinking through some of the ways I want to be able to talk about connections and relationships in the context of "Canada."

Drowning in Information, Thirsting for Knowledge (About Movements)

It's no great novelty to observe that anyone today with the resources and inclination to own the right kind of cellphone can instantly access more information than was available to, say, the President of the United States fifty years ago. We are awash with information, bathed in it, saturated by it. There are a lot of opinions out there about what exactly that implies about us and about the social world we live in, many of them quite silly, but I do think this fact is relevant to something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Through a combination of chance and following my inclinations, I have ended up involved in several different things which mean I spend a lot of time paying attention to how information about organizing (or activism, or social change work, or struggle) moves around. On the local level, I am the current curator of Sudbury Social Justice News, an email newsletter sharing local social justice (and, more recently, environmental) events with interested subscribers in the city. It was started perhaps a dozen years ago by one friend; made a bit more systematic and technically smooth by another friend a few years ago, who looked after it for awhile; and, after periodic guest stints while that friend was out of town, since last spring I have been its regular maintainer. This means constantly being on the look-out for local event information to include in the mostly-weekly updates. Beyond that, I am also involved in Grassroots, the Sudbury working group of The Media Co-op network. I do a bit of grassroots journalism for the site, but mostly am involved with organizing and editorial work -- which means, in large part, dealing with information from and about local groups related to change-work, and seeking to build relationships with and readership/writership among them.

On a larger scale, my new-ish podcasting/broadcasting project, Talking Radical Radio (browse all episodes so far here) means that I am constantly looking to learn about groups, projects, and initiatives engaged in interesting social change work (broadly understood) in all different parts of the country. This means pursuing both online written sources of info as well as word-of-mouth sources in various regional and national networks with which I'm connected. I'm also on the advisory board of the radical political journal Upping the Anti, which is a much less week-to-week sort of thing but which does mean connecting with active folks in other places and still sometimes encountering word about social change efforts across the country (and beyond). As well, though it is no longer a current focus of work, it is a reference point for me (and source of one of those networks just mentioned) that years ago I put rather a lot of effort into connecting with long-time activists in different parts of the country in order to do oral history interviews with them for the project that ended up resulting in my first books. And, finally, I spend lots of time -- probably too much time -- reading about all of this stuff in lots of different sources because I can't help myself.

The first point that has become clear to me from all of this work is that the flood of information that surrounds us makes it harder, sometimes, for us to perceive the significant unevenness in that flow. It feels like everything, at any time, is at our fingertips, but that's really not the case -- some things come to us effortlessly, other things can easily be found with a little work, while still others remain hidden despite the most heroic of efforts. Now, there are some aspects of this unevenness that, while they might be shocking to some in the general public, will come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has been involved in social movement-ish activity. To explain that portion of the unevenness, many people who are involved in movements point out that the powerful institutions that comprise the dominant media are simply not going to produce substantial content that will undermine the status quo in which they are embedded and on which they depend for returning substantial profit to their owners -- the very usefulness of these institutions to powerful interests is connected to the best of them exhibiting a certain limited openness and a modest commitment to following (limited and always-problematic) rules to produce knowledge about the world, which is the basis for reactionaries screaming about liberal bias in the media, and there are certainly better and worse ways that the basic criticism gets made, but I think it is a fundamentally accurate point.

That part is important. It may even be the most important part, as I think the dominant media is still the single biggest way in which people learn about the world and about efforts to change it. But I'm not only interested in that information flow, but also the ways in which it flows or does not among people who are already actively engaged in seeking out and circulating information about struggle. We've always had word-of-mouth, and with the burgeoning use of email, online media, social media, and the autonomous self-publishing and circulation of information by other mechanisms, it is possible to connect with lots that the dominant media is unlikely to circulate. So the information flood that surrounds us can make us forget about how uneven it all is, but then focusing too much on the flaws in the dominant media can lead us to neglect how uneven all of these other aspects of information flow are as well.

So, for instance, one of the tools that I've been experimenting with to get leads about groups/project/initiatives that I might do a radio show on is Google Alerts. This service from the search engine behemoth emails you an alert whenever your specified search terms appear in new content online. I have a fair number set up in which I combine the names of mid-sized Canadian cities with keywords that are associated in one way or another with social movements of various sorts -- things like "union" and "feminist" and "anti-poverty" and "social justice" and "LGBT." The relative lack of leads, or even of somewhat relevant content, that this nets for me is in part about the failings of the dominant media -- newspapers don't write about these things very much, so they don't appear in search engines very much. However, I don't think that's all. Google doesn't just index the online presence of newspapers, it keeps tabs on the entire web, and I don't get a flood of notifications about relevant material on more marginal sites either. Of course their algorithm might be such that it excludes more marginal blogs and so on just as a matter of course. But even granting some biasing of the results in that fashion, I think it also indicates that lots of information about lots of the things that go on in any city -- and I know from my involvement in Sudbury and, at earlier points, in other cities that they do happen -- doesn't end up even on that kind of site. Much of it remains isolated in the immediate environment of the people who actually did the work. That is, it does not enter the flood, so even if we swim out of the larger currents to the more out-of-the-way eddies and pools to look for it, there's no guarantee we'll find what we want.

Another way that this unevenness happens is, I think, through patterns of attention and how those are replicated in the ways in which information gets shared via social media. (The norms instilled in us in major ways through the dominant media are a part of this, of course.) I don't think my experience gives me enough basis to do more than speculate about this, but I think they are fairly grounded speculations. Partly I'm drawing on my own experience of being a fairly avid follower of people who share movement-relevant info on both Facebook and Twitter, and partly through what I've been able to observe about how various pieces of my own work get circulated or don't. I won't try to tease out details, but I will say this: Even granting the limited time most of us have to engage with all of the possible content that comes our way, more often than not what most of us pay attention to, what we engage with, what we share, what we consider as somehow relevant to or about us, versus what content that floats by us that does not catch our attention in those ways, often flows from and reproduces aspects of the oppressive social relations we claim to be working in-and-against (even as it may oppose others). As a fairly banal example, white people are just as shaped by the white supremacy/racism that permeates our society as people of colour, but are much less likely to regard it as about us and therefore much less likely to read/share/care about material that focuses on it. I think there are a many other kinds of examples that could be cited, too, that are built from this basic phenomenon.

Along with making it harder to see this unevenness, the overwhelming flow of information that surrounds us also makes it hard for us to appreciate the truth and significance of two other points that sound more obvious than they actually are: the default state is not-knowing and any instance of knowing is a product of work. We're so used to just knowing, or just being able to know after a few keystrokes and a click, it's easy to forget that the default state in relation to pretty much anything that isn't our own immediate experience is not knowing, and that just because we don't know doesn't mean that whatever-it-is doesn't exist or doesn't matter. So finding out that local environmental groups who are pretty politically compatible and who exist in the same small city often don't know what each other is up to should definitely be seen as regretable, as a problem to be work on -- and they are -- but it shouldn't be surprising. When a particular union local in Sudbury is inspired to start making public noise about a particular issue and they don't bother to tell any of the most likely potential community allies, well, that shouldn't be a surprise either -- they don't know, we don't know, and of course that's where things start from.

Moreover, one common and initially surprising experience I've had in asking other progressive-ish people for suggestions for the radio show has been a relative paucity of responses. Given how generous people were sharing suggestions for my long-ago interview project, I know it's not a matter of activists being inherently suspicious and unhelpful when it comes to these sorts of requests for information. But, for some reason, lots of people I've asked in this current search whom I would've expected to be full of ideas have none whatsoever, and many others can only come up with an idea or two from that very short list of groups/organizations that lots of people have already heard of. Partly, I think, this is about patterns of attention, as described in the last paragraph -- I think a lot more people identify in a passive way with movements as good things than actually pay much attention to the nuts and bolts of what is being done and how it is being done, or see that kind of information as in any way relevant to their own lives, so a number of people I might've expected to have their finger on the pulse of a particular kind of organizing in the city or in the country don't actually pay much attention to it. Probably a bigger part, though, is again that not-knowing is the default, and going from not-knowing to knowing is a product of work being done -- and not just being done by the individual who ends up knowing, though of course being done by them as well, but a whole range of socially co-ordinated work by multiple people situated in multiple ways. Part of what the onslaught of information in our lives obscures (and this is perfectly consistent with lots of other default understandings in our culture) is the fact that knowing, just 'cause, that celebrity X cheated on celebrity Y, or that the Leafs failed to make the playoffs again, or what politician Z said last week about gun control, are all the product of a great deal of socially organized work allowing us to know these things. And if that work isn't happening when it comes to organizing/social change work, or if it is happening in ways that require significant effort to encounter the knowledge thus produced, then that is going to reinforce patterns of attention that relate to movement-building in passive ways and result in (among many more politically significant consequences) fewer people having fewer suggestions for me than I might have predicted before I started.

Just as this post started with an obvious point, it is going to end with one: If we can't count on the dominant media, if the default is not-knowing, and if knowing requires socially co-ordinated work across multiple sites by multiple people, then we really need more people doing more and different kinds of work if we want to produce and circulate the kinds of knowledge that will support movements. Now, this could easily just end up being a pitch for more people to get involved in producing independent media (hint: Sudburians, write for us!). Certainly I think that would be useful. But I also mean it more expansively than that -- it's not just a matter of taking on some new, specialized form of practice, i.e. grassroots journalism, but it's also about being a bit more deliberate and a bit more critical in how we navigate the flood in our everyday lives. It means recognizing that whoever we are, however we are located, we already do work that is related to how efforts to create social change become known (or don't). If we spend at least a little bit of time reading or viewing or listening to content about the world and about efforts to change it, then that includes us. If we at least occasionally use social media or even old fashioned verbal recommendation to direct other people towards particular kinds of content, we are doing that kind of work. Moreover, at least some of you are already involved in collective efforts of one kind or another to create change, and that too intrinsically means that you are part of the work through which knowledge about social change is produced and circulates. All I'm saying is that we can take up those roles a bit more deliberately. We can work against the ways in which our deeply engrained patterns of attention remarginalize knowledge that is already marginalized, even when we think we're posting all sorts of politically rad stuff. We can begin to work on relating to what we encounter on social media not just as individuals with consumption practices that we might change, not just as spectators to a rapidly deteriorating world, but as potential subjects of collective liberation -- even if we don't march down and join up with some group, we can recognize that we have that potential, that content about relational practices and collective actions are in fact relevant to us, and we can start to pay attention to things that address us as such. And in the groups that we are already a part of, we can tweak how we do what we are already doing to be more attentive to the importance of including work that is about producing and circulating critical knowledge. It might be a few coalition-focused meetings a year. It might be recognizing that my union local may need community allies in the future, and doing preemptive work to figure out who they might be. And I'm pretty sure that, even given our inevitably scarce time and energy, it can mean a whole lot more than that too.

Don't be fooled by the flood of information that surrounds us. It is only by recognizing its multiple forms of unevenness and doing the work do turn not-knowing into knowing that we can produce and circulate the kinds of knowledge necessary to support the kinds of social movements that might have the kinds of impacts that we want.

Canadian Social Change Podcast, Six Weeks In

Six weeks ago, I announced the launch of a new radio/podcasting project called Talking Radical Radio. It's a weekly, half-hour show that broadcasts in-depth interviews with people involved in a wide range of social change activities across Canada and gives them an opportunity to reflect on what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

So far the show is exceeding my expectations, and I'm very excited about what it's going to be able to do over the longer term. It is currently podcast on well-known progressive news and analysis site Rabble.ca -- you can browse the existing episodes on the Rabble site itself or you can go to this page to subscribe to it using a range of podcatchers, as well as iTunes. It is currently broadcast over the airwaves every Wednesday morning at 8am on 96.7 FM CKLU in Sudbury, Ontario, and I'm hopeful that other campus and community stations will pick the show up as I move forward.

To visit the show's online home, click here. But just for a taste of what I've done in the first six weeks, you can check out on rabble shows about

• grassroots feminist organizing that won women's studies curriculum for Ontario high schools;
  
• climate justice organizing in Vancouver that emphasizes solidarity with frontline indigenous communities;
  
• struggles by the Black community in north-end Halifax to save a closed school building as a community space;
  
• efforts by militants in Hamilton, Ontario to use direct action to combat wage theft;
  
• a longstanding organization in Calgary that provides support and infrastructure for numerous grassroots initiatives;
  
• shop-floor worker organizing in the social serivce agency sector in northern Alberta
  
• and, Vancouver-based efforts to present grassroots histories in accessible, engaging graphical ways

Upcoming shows will feature the R3 Collective, a group of anti-colonial and social justice-focused musicians and performers; a former student who was a core organizer at an anglophone university in Quebec that in only one year transformed its political culture and successfully took up the general assembly-based organizing model used in the province's francophone universities, in the lead-up to last year's massive and successful student strike; an individual involved in queer organizing in the far north of the country; and, a militant from Winnipeg Cop Watch.

If you know of some kind of neat social change work going on anywhere in Canada (but especially outside of Ontario, and outside of the Vancouver/Montreal/Toronto nexus), please email me at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca!

Other Pieces of Writing

Here is a list of other work from the last number of years that doesn't fall into the categories of online journalism for The Media Co-op since September 2012; presentations, talks, and workshops; or episodes (listed on Rabble.ca) of Talking Radical Radio.

• "Ontario Teachers Rally Workers." The Dominion, Issue #87, p. 6. March/April 2013.
  
• "Eli Clare's Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation -- A Genderqueer Classic Revisited." Rabble.ca Book Lounge. March 29, 2012.
  
• "Co-operative Corner." Eat Local Sudbury eFlyer, weekly from January 11 to March 21, 2012.
  
• "Local Food and Co-operatives." rethink news, Issue #15, p. 2, February 3, 2012.
  
• "New Book Explores the Legacy of Colonization and Decolonization for Native American Rights." Left Eye On Books: Progressive Book News and Reviews, September 27, 2011.
  
• "Imperialist Canada: A Review." Left Eye On Books: Progressive Book News and Reviews, May 20, 2011.
  
• "Resisting Austerity: Don't (Just) Show Me the Money," New Socialist Webzine, April 18, 2011.
  
• "Feelings About Masculinity." XYOnline, January 7, 2011.
  
• "Neo-liberalism and home care." Linchpin, pp. 6-7, December 2010. (Also: Z-Net)
  
• "Striking in a Time of Austerity: The NOSM Strike in Northern Ontario." The Bullet: Socialist Project E-Bulletin, No. 417, October 3, 2010.
  
• "Challenging masculinity is about much more than 'unloading this junk,'" XYOnline, August 18, 2010.
  
• "Review: Men and Feminism," XYOnline, August 14, 2010.
  
• "One day longer? The Vale-Inco strike comes to a close," Linchpin.ca, July 21, 2010. (Also published: Z-Net, Socialist Project, Reinventing Labour, Toronto Media Co-op, Canadian Dimension, CUPE 3907)
  
• "Becoming the media in Sudbury," Linchpin.ca, June 24, 2010. (link broken)
  
• "G8, G20 summits attract rampant media spin," Northern Life, p. 8, June 24, 2010.
  
• "Israeli Apartheid Week hits Sudbury," Linchpin.ca, April 4, 2010. (link broken)
  
• "Offering support for strikers as the rich get richer," Northern Life, p. 7, February 16, 2010.
  
• "Campaign seeks to clear John Moore's name," Linchpin.ca, December 8, 2009. (link broken)
  
• "Students and Steelworkers march against poverty," Linchpin.ca, November 7, 2009. (link broken)
  
• "Nickel, Neoliberalism, and Nationalism," Linchpin.ca, August 1, 2009. (Also published: Z-Net, New Socialist.)
  
• "Elections: all we can hope for?" Linchpin, Issue 6, Oct/Nov '08, p. 3. (link broken)
  
• Neigh, Scott. "A Tool Against Apartheid -- Review of Grace-Edward Galabuzzi's Canada's Economic Apartheid." Upping the Anti #6, May 2008.
  
• "Traps In Our Outrage", pp. 222-229 in Skyla Dawn Cameron, lead editor. Nothing But Red, Lulu.com, 2008. (post)

Recent Presentations, Talks, and Workshops

The following is a listing of presentations, talks, and workshops given for various purposes in the last several years. If you are interested in having me do one of them, or something similar, please be in touch at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.

• "15-Minute Mini-Workshop on Writing Good Media Releases and Getting Your Message Out." A workshop for Grassroots: Sudbury's Media Collective. Delivered to:
  
  • Sudbury Green Gathering. April 8, 2013.
    
  • Board of the Sudbury Social Planning Council. April 8, 2013.
    
  • Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty. February 26, 2013.
• "Writing Process and Grassroots Journalism." A workshop for Grassroots: Sudbury's Media Collective. December 5, 2012.
  
• "Our Movements and Our Histories." Book launch talk for Scott's two books of Canadian history through the stories of activists, Gender and Sexuality and Resisting the State -- learn about them here and buy them here. Delivered at:
  
  • Concordia University in Montreal. March 5, 2013.
    
  • Octopus Books@UnderOneRoof in Ottawa. February 13, 2013.
    
  • University of Waterloo. January 13, 2013.
    
  • University of Windsor. November 14, 2012.
    
  • University of Toronto. November 13, 2012.
    
  • McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. November 8, 2012.
    
  • The Formagerie in Sudbury, Ontario. November 6, 2012.
• "Active Remembering and History From Below." Book launch talk for Scott's two books of Canadian history through the stories of activists, Gender and Sexuality and Resisting the State -- learn about them here and buy them here. Delivered at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. November 6, 2012.
  
• "Ambiguous Potential: Grounded in the Present and Looking to the Future." Presented at Practicum Colloquium 2012, Interdisciplinary Humanities M.A. in Interpretation and Values. April 19, 2012.
  
• "Moving Forward Co-operatively." Presentation and workshops for Eat Local Sudbury, Sudbury, Ontario, February 20, March 2, March 3, March 8, and April 11, 2012.
  
• "Active Remembering and Community History." Presented at New Frontiers 2012, York University, Toronto, Ontario, February 25, 2012.
  
• "Don Weitz and New Left Anti-psychiatry in Ontario." Presented at International Workshop -- Disability: Definitions, Representations, Classifications, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, February 7, 2012.
  
• "Engaging With John Holloway." Guest speaker, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, October 11, 2011.
  
• "Workshop on Opinion and Political Writing." Session #2 of All of Us Are Writers -- Writing for Social Change. Sudbury, Ontario. May 14, 2011.
  
• "Talking Radical: Active Remembering and Histories From Below," presented at Windsor Radical History Conference, February 5, 2011.
  
• "National Security Certificates: Organizing Against Secret Trials in Canada." Presented at Canadian Security Into the 21st Century: (Re)Articulations in the Post-9/11 World, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, March 5, 2008.
  
  

Reluctant Promotions; Or, Informal Research on the Canadian Academy

Over the course of a recent fortnight, I used any time not otherwise committed to engage in a mind-numbing and potentially pointless task: I have gone through the web sites of pretty much every English-language university in Canada looking for faculty whose declared research and/or teaching interests connect in some way to my books, customizing for each a cover letter, printing that letter, addressing an envelope, and putting the letters plus a flyer for each book in said envelope, and then sending it. While there is lots of labour that fills the everyday lives of lots of people that is orders of magnitude less pleasant than this, I still had unaccustomed difficulty forcing myself through it, and I'm happy it's done. I sent somewhere between 200 and 250 packages.

Part of the difficulty was, as I said, serious doubts about how much point there is to it. There are a number of reasons for these doubts. One is a certain amount of knowledge of how academic work is organized -- the regular need to resist distraction in the face of multiple external demands means, for many academics, deliberately tuning out that which is of genuine interest to be better able to focus on that which has to be done. So even if I do find the right people, the vagaries of academic life mean there's a good chance these letters won't get any attention and will instead go straight into the blue box or be lost in chaotic piles of paper. And targeting based on interests declared on official web pages is at best an approximation. To make it all manageable, I confined myself to History, Political Science, and Sociology, plus interdisciplinary areas like Women's and Gender Studies, Canadian Studies, Labour Studies, and a few others, so I'm sure I missed appropriate people by excluding their departments. I think I had to do it this way to make the task manageable, but I'm sure I missed people because of it. As well, I think interest in my books is likely to correlate better with political sensibility than with scholarly interest, and that is close to impossible to gauge from most faculty profiles, so there will be plenty of false positives as well as an unknown number of false negatives. However, I did the first handful of these a few months ago and actually got a supportive email in response from a Labour Studies prof on the West coast. And a friend who is a Women's Studies prof said she gets a couple such letters a month and, if they are well targeted, she does act on them. So I have persevered.

This work has been, of course, a form of research. Not only was I locating and applying the very narrow form of information that was my primary target, but as a way to ease the boredom I was also observing and processing lots of other things along the way. And in so doing, I've come up with a handful of observations about Canadian universities. These observations don't form any kind of neat whole, so I'll present them as a list rather than trying to force them into a single story.

• Humanities and social sciences departments hire shamefully few faculty of colour, on average. There are exceptions, including a couple of quite prominent departments at quite prominent institutions, but the whiteness of the Canadian academy, at least in the areas that I was inspecting, remains intense. It really illustrated for me one of the points made by Malinda Smith's essay in this collection -- though white women continue to face barriers and at times a rather chilly climate in Canadian universities, they have been the primary beneficiaries of strategies to dismantle barriers, while women and men of colour remain the "other Other" and continue to be excluded in much more profound ways.
  
  
• It was interesting to see what kinds of departments brought together a high proportion of academics whose work would actually interest me. Note that this is quite a different question from how many should get promo packages -- some people who work on social movements really don't do much that interests me, and my interests extend far beyond what might make people potential recipients of information about my own recently published books. And the institutional location that most consistently presented the most interesting-to-me work by the highest proportion of members was Women's and Gender Studies departments. A couple of the more obviously left-leaning Labour Studies departments were not far behind but Labour Studies as a whole was much more mixed, given the emphasis in some departments on labour relations rather than labour-as-movement. Sociology and History departments always had a real mix -- not surprising, I think -- and Political Science departments almost always rated the lowest in interesting-to-me work. (Even the supposed marxist haven of York University's poli sci department actually contains far more people doing what appears to the non-initiate at least to be fairly conventional and not-super-interesting-to-me poli sci along with the cluster of marxists whose names are well known in certain circles. Not only that, but my enthusiasm for the brand of political economy that is most often produced by some of said lefties has its limits.) There was variation in Women's and Gender Studies as well -- on the positive end of that, I was surprised to find, for instance, how many members of that department at Queen's University I had already read and liked without realizing that's where any of them teach -- but for whatever reason, even the less interesting-to-me and more politically staid Women's Studies departments tended to have at least some members whose work caught my eye.
  
  
• Getting this kind of overview of the work that gets done in Canadian universities reinforced my existing sense of the disciplinary boundaries and other aspects of the social organization of knowledge and its production in academic settings as arbitrary and weird. I know the arguments for having disciplines with continuity over time, and I can get behind at least some of them -- for instance, having agreed-upon standards and practices that are changed incrementally is one way to ensure that knowledge production is a collective, cumulative enterprise, and there are at least theoretically social benefits to doing that rather than having all knowledge production organized as a series of neoliberal and individualized ad-hoceries. I also can appreciate that however you organize such semi-stable traditions, there will be arbitrary aspects. That said, my own sensibility when it comes to both politics and knowledge production (are they even worth naming as separate things? :) ) is towards seeking connection, and towards broad acquisition and synthesis. And getting to take a bit of an overview and see some of those lines across which many academics would say, "Oh, well, that over there has nothing to do with me and my work" really made it clear to me that there are serious problems with how it all works in practice.
  
  
• A much smaller proportion of the work that gets done, at least in the areas I was looking at, is truly as irrelevant to people's lives as populist objections to academic knowledge production usually claim. The connections are not always obvious or direct, and sometimes they are not at all good, but complete absence is not as ubiquitous as some people think. (And, anyway, I want to live in a world where pursuing something because it is beautiful or interesting is something open to anyone, so while I'm all for criticizing how universities use resources in a world in which so many people's lives are organized into exploitation, oppression, and need, I think we want to be strategic in how we do that.)
  
  
• Another populist objection is that universities are overrun by radicals. This is, sadly, not true. The kernel of truth at the heart of this is that universities have developed ways of producing knowledge that are generally rule-based, which increasingly powerful right-wing politics of knowledge production exemplified by Fox News tend to object to on principle, and are often either already open to or can with struggle be opened to considering inputs that those right-wing politics of knowledge production would rather rule out of bounds on principle. Being rule-based and having a certain kind of openness are aspects that make academic knowledge production useful to capital and to the demands of ruling, so they are not easy for powerful institutions and interests to just dismiss. The rules and the shape and the limits, and particularly the institutional relations and practices in which all of them are embodied and enacted, often have serious problems with them, when considered from the perspective of movements seeking justice and liberation, but the very fact of being rule-based and having a certain kind of openness provides openings for struggle. The right would rather not allow even those openings. All of that said, the actual proportion of knowledge production that happens in universities that you might describe as "critical" remains a fairly small proportion. And much of what is nominally critical sounds radical but is actually pretty ungrounded so it is not in and of itself threatening to established interests. I think much of that class of knowledge can, with work, be reappropriated and reformulated in ways that are more directly useful to movements, but far too little of it already, in and of itself, serves the kinds of radical goals that its internal rhetoric might claim. And the proportion of academically produced knowledge that is already both critical and grounded is quite tiny.
  
  
• A very significant proportion of the knowledge production that happens in universities happens in the service of ruling. Which isn't to endorse the blanket rejection of anything with any connection to the academy as irrevocably tainted, which you sometimes run across -- there is still the "critical and grounded" and "critical but ungrounded" material, and even some of the knowledge that is produced in the service of ruling can be reapporpriated and reoformulated for just and liberatory ends. And choices about how to relate to at least some of the knowledge produced in the service of ruling is complicated by the fact that much of it happens in the name of a kind of top-down version of societal "helping" that mixes ruling in with the allocation of certain sorts of social goods to meet real human needs. But it is still ruling. Even with those provisos, however, the involvement of academics in projects of ruling (many, I would bet, without any real appreciation that this is what they are doing) is extensive and depressing.
  
  
• Finally, in line with a number of the other points above, this exercise has, for me, affirmed my conviction of the need for much greater support for knowledge production grounded in movements, including that which is committed to building movement-useful knowledge from the ground up but also academic and community-based knowledge production that is open to "steal[ing] from the university" -- work that will "abuse [the academy's] hospitality" and be "in but not of it" (from here).

Review: Warrior Nation

[Ian McKay and Jamie Swift. Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012.]

The idea that the well-funded and aggressively waged campaign by the Harper government, important state institutions like the military, their supposedly-but-not-really independent extensions into the population like the Legion, many elements of the dominant media, the grassroots right-wing, and Don Cherry is not just about its ostensible object -- the military itself -- but about transforming the nation, our imaginations, and our expectations for life is far from new. I think the first time I wrote about it was at least five or six years ago, and I certainly didn't come up with it myself. Nonetheless, there has been curiously little writing, conversation, and action on the broader Canadian left to flesh out this insight and to act against it. I think this lack is connected both to the almost complete inability in the last decade of organizers to turn passive but solidly anti-war public opinion into action that might actually challenge Canadian complicity in war and empire, and to the success of said right-wing campaign in mobilizing a significant chunk of the centre-left into both a deeply felt support for some aspects of it (e.g. "support our troops") and an often willfully held ignorance by such centre-left supporters about the actual political implications of that support. This book, a collaboration between one of Canada's foremost academic left historians and a long-time writer on social justice issues, is a welcome attempt to change that.

The book is both polemic and popular history. It weaves together the broad sweep of events, moments of focus on the biographies of key individuals, and the drama of specific controversies. It extends from the earliest days of what later became a specifically Canadian military (as opposed to an undifferentiated extension of the British imperial military) in the late 19th century and some of its connections to colonial action in Africa, up to the present day. McKay and Swift trace a trajectory from origins in the British empire to the Pearsonian liberalism of the middle and late twentieth century to the project of the "new warriors" and "warrior nation" that is ascendant but still not hegemonic today. The project that the book takes up is important and the authors do some important work towards realizing it, and I hope it stimulates lots of discussion and further action.

In the spirit of such discussion and action, I also have a number of concerns that spring from the book but are very much relevant to the political questions we have to try and answer as we move forward. The first has to do with where the book starts. Its authors would, I'm sure, have no hesitation at all about acknowledging the significance and the horror of colonization on Turtle Island, and indeed I think there are moments where that happens in passing in the book. But I think not starting in a substantive way with that particular piece of militarist and imperial history in this part of the world means that later moments of their account do not centre the colonial past and present as vigorously as they could -- they don't deny it, but it isn't as central as it needs to be when considering Canadian society and its relationship to the military in the middle of the twentieth century and in the early years of the twenty-first. And I think we can't let that drift too far from our field of vision, because it is an important antidote to taking too seriously the myths of Canadian innocence and virtue that have always been so central to how Pearsonian liberalism and its permutations hid the uninterrupted complicity in war and empire in the garb of peacekeeing and supposed benevolence.

Related to that is the fact that it feels that the book never quite finds a rhetorically stable and politically solid way to talk about the phase of Canadian behaviour in the world immediately preceding the Harper right's attempted turn towards hard nationalism and glorified militarism. It's not that it does not talk about the flaws and problems of, for instance, peacekeeping and its role in the progressive Canadian self-image -- it's very clear about Canadian complicity in the U.S.-lead destruction of Vietnam and surrounding countries, for instance. And it's not that it entirely buys into the self-deception necessary for the left-nationalist nostalgia for an independent Canada that never was. Yet in its efforts to illustrate the character and direction of the current shift, it allows far more of those harmful myths that dominate the narratives of progressive Canadians to enter into its accounts than I think it should if it really wants to direct discussion in politically useful ways. Sometimes it makes clear that the "before" was not at all the benevolent glory that contemporary left-liberals deceive themselves into believing, but at other times it does not do nearly enough to make clear that while the "after" is worse than the "before", we really need to remember that it is a transition between "deeply troubling complicity in violence and empire" to "even worse complicity in violence and empire." It's possible that there was some deliberate political calculation in how it talks about it all. I'm skeptical, but I'd be willing to talk about whether deliberate mobilization of centre-left nostalgia for good ol' days that never were is worth mobilizing in an attempt to create a future that is not just better than today but better than the past they mis-remember. But my starting position in those discussions is that anything other than ruthless refusal to romanticize the myth of the peacekeeper or to allow even momentary soft-focus semi-erasure of Canadian complicity in violence and empire is not going to help us get to where we want to go.

It's not really the focus of this book, which is both historical and centred on the military and militarism, but one of the things that I think is most intriguingly lacking in even clearly left-of-centre discourse in the last ten years is detailed examination of how the mobilization of certain sentiments through military symbols and actions abroad is part of a larger program of social transformation. There is some of this in the book, and there are bits and pieces you can find elsewhere -- and I certainly haven't done much to investigate or write about it myself -- but it has always struck me that there is a lot more to be said about exactly how it is all happening, and I think I hoped that more of that would be in this book.

And, finally, I think there is lots more to say and think about deeper questions about how the trajectories described in this book connect to elementary aspects of current social relations. Again, I don't think the authors of this book would need much convincing that these are important questions, and it just wasn't their project here, but I think we need more people doing more work to produce movement-grounded, materialist explorations of how the transition at the centre of this book relates to basic aspects of social organization and socially organized collective identification. I think that effectively working against even the more immediate aspects of the transition to a more overt and celebratory complicity in war and empire requires having those conversations about deeper questions as we do the work.

I think this is a much-needed book and I'm glad to see that it is getting as much discussion as it is among left-inclined folks in Canada. And I hope the discussion that it sparks broadens and expands so that we might inch ourselves towards an approach that will actually begin mobilizing people in a more-than-fringe way to challenge Canadian complicity in war and empire.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Review: The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance

[Robin Tudge. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance. Toronto: Between the Lines and London: New Internationalist, 2011.]

This will be a little review of a little book. It is a useful resource -- part of a series of small, focused No-Nonsense Guides put out by Toronto publisher Between the Lines -- but it is also one that has limits and should be read with a certain amount of caution.

There are two main strengths to the book. The first is its sense of urgency. Despite the problems with the book I note below, the ever-increasing amounts of data that are collected about each of us by states and by for-profit corporations, and the ever-increasing sophistication with which disparate pools of data are connected both to each other and to various mechanisms to regulate and discipline us, are not understood as broadly as they need to be nor treated with sufficient urgency even by some of those who have a sense of the scope of the problem. On that level, a bracing call to wake up already and pay attention to the issue is certainly welcome.

The other main strength of the book, and perhaps the one that matters more to me, is its usefulness as a piece of reporting and a collation of a great many sources. I did notice a few problems with referencing, but by and large it seems to make good use of reports (both establishment and dissident), scholarly research, and pieces published over the years in the mass media, as well as the words of whistle-blowers from within organizations that do various pieces of the work that the book describes. Moreover, bringing it all together into one volume helps give a sense of the scale of the problem and the sweep of its trajectory in a way that is easy to miss when all you see is an out-of-context article here and an isolated news story there. I think anyone looking to investigate further will find this book a good first stop in terms of tracking down important resources.

That said, there is lots that makes me more hesitant about the book too. For one thing, even before getting into the substance of its politics, despite being co-published by a Canadian publisher, the book has very little to say about how all of this has been implemented here. That would be nice to know about.

But there's a lot more than that. The book is fairly narrowly focused on questions of surveillance, and is obviously written to appeal to people with a broad range of politics on other issues. While understandable from the perspectives of winning converts to a narrow cause and of selling books, I think that approach almost always leads to shoddy politics. In this case, the fairly singular focus on surveillance and the consequent state and corporate regulation and discipline leads to a fairly flat understanding of power. Thankfully it is robust enough that it recognizes private tyrannies (capitalist corporations) as well as public tyrannies (states), but it still is almost entirely organized around "freedom from" rather than a richer understanding of "freedom to" or of "thriving", and that leads it towards ... well, in some places, the flavour is almost right-libertarian, whereas in others it is a particular kind of U.S. American liberalism. And I think as urgent as surveillance is, as part of broader questions of power, oppression, and resistance, thinking of them only in terms of "freedom from" is dangerous and will likely create that freedom for people who are already privileged while merely reshaping the cage slightly for most of the rest of the people on earth.

In a related problem, it presents enforcing a "right to privacy" as the answer to surveillance, and "privacy" as an unambiguous good. While there are plenty of examples historically of strategically-deployed struggles for privacy winning gains for ordinary people, and I'm certainly not taking any absolute position against doing so now, it's a lot more complicated than that. "Privacy" and how it is put together socially can be a component in a lot of gender and sexual oppression, for example. A more liberatory response to the issues raised by this book may struggle not for "privacy" but for a way of organizing our lives that does not depend on an axis between "public" and "private" as currently constituted.

There are points where the shallow, Cold War liberal or even libertarian rhetoric is thick enough to make you cough and splutter. For instance, in its potted history of surveillance -- some of which is useful, mind you -- it frames the world in terms of "communist" and "fascist" and "democratic", which is itself a sign of simplistic liberalism to follow, and then it frames the surveillance/regulation problems of the first two earlier in the twentieth century as systemic while the excesses of the latter are blamed on the power hungry machinations of one man, J. Edgar Hoover, and it proceeds to pine for a time when the true principles of democratic freedom were more freely adhered to in the U.S. of A. While Hoover is someone who belongs in the 'evil' category in any just accounting of history, this framing ignores the reams and reams of work showing that liberal-democracy has also been systemically violent, nasty, and oppressive, from the get-go -- it just organizes and distributes it all a bit differently.

I could do some more detailed dissection of the book's limitations, but I promised a short(ish) review and I really have other work that I should be doing, so I'll just note general themes. A particularly egregious one, given how surveillance and the disciplinary practices attached to it have played out in the last decade and more, is the seriously underplaying of the centrality of racialization and white supremacy in how surveillance is organized and experienced. Then there is the book's tendency to not always be careful in distinguishing among what happens now, what theoretically could happen and probably will at some point, what technically could happen but probably won't, what various political actors wish to happen and that may or may not actually happen, and what state/corporate/surveillance industry insider rhetoric claims in denial of the complexity and unevenness of how huge bureaucratic and technological systems inevitably function. The little hypothetical scenario with which the author opens the book is perhaps the most egregious example, but far from the only one. And while that kind of approach might help to produce a sense of short-term urgency, it can lead to misidentifying the problem. And, in fact, it can be one part of another larger problem with the book, that it consistently gives too much power to that which we struggle against and underemphasizes our capacity to make change through struggle. This can lead to a circumstance where dissatisfaction with the status quo is urgently felt but leads to little or no activity, and that is not a good thing.

This has not been as little a review as I intended. Sorry! In any case, the book's urgency is important and the resources that it collects are useful, but read it with caution: Its political and rhetorical limitations nudge the reader towards a politics that will be woefully insufficient to truly address, in a just and liberatory, practices of surveillance and the oppressive and exploitative social relations in which they are embedded.

Review: Moving Politics

[Deborah B. Gould. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.]

When I started reframing some of my prior preoccupations as, in part, an interest in how emotion and other feelings in the body are intertwined with/produced by/produce the social world, this was pretty much the only book that I was aware of that I knew I would want to read. It didn't end up being the first relevant book I got my hands on, but after reading it I am no less sure of its importance to whatever I end up doing to pout my interest in this area to work.

The book is an examination of the rise and decline of the direct action AIDS movement in the United States, particularly iconic group ACT UP, in the 1980s and early 1990s. The author herself was a core militant with ACT UP/Chicago, and she bases the work on her experiences, on many interviews with other participants, on archived movement material, and on articles published in the queer press in those years. Gould periodizes the work by looking at, roughly, the years between AIDS emerging and the turn to direct action, then the meteoric rise of ACT UP and similar groups, and finally the years in which the need for radical change in the face of AIDS was no less but ACT UP declined in most cities and nationally. Even just as a fascinating history of a fascinating movement, this book is an important contribution. Perhaps not surprisingly given its theoretical focus, it not only gives a very useful account of events and the context in which they happened, but it powerfully evokes mood, tone, feeling at different points along the way -- the grief and rage of having so many friends die, the bubbling sexual energy that was so much a part of early ACT UP, the joy that can come from acting directly and collectively when action is absolutely necessary, and so on.

Of course, it's easy when you're not yourself the writer to ask for more. It's already a lot of book -- not a hard read, but not a quick one either -- so it's even more unfair than usual to ask it to do more than it does, but as is always the case there are other aspects of the history that I would be interested to see. For instance, the book focuses primarily on Chicago, New York, and the national scene, and I'd be interested in how things went down in other places, especially smaller centres. As well, in exploring the complex interweaving of diverse experiences and diverse politics within the movement, the book pays a great deal of attention to positive/negative status, to gender, and to political analysis (and how it should not be assumed to map simply onto identity), but I felt it all would've been enriched through drawing more than the book did on the (presumably diverse) voices of gay men of colour both within and outside the movement. I also would've liked to have seen more consideration of the presence/experience/role of non-monosexual men. There was certainly even less space then than there is now for men to take on identities that are not "straight" or "gay", but the book had some limited discussion of men with non-monosexual practices in the context of the sexual environment of ACT UP -- particularly, how the sexually charged and enthusiastically transgressive atmosphere of the movement included space that was never uncomplicated but that was nonetheless embraced by some participants for gay- and lesbian-identified activists to experiment sexually across gender. This is one of a number of ways in which the direct action AIDS movement was a crucible from which 'queer' sensibility and politics and sexuality emerged later in the '90s. As important as this aspect is, I'd be interested in seeing that situated in a broader analysis of how relatively reified monosexual identities, and experiences of fitting or not fitting them, were important both to building and to constraining the movement and various people's affective identification with and participation in it. And, of course, I'd be interested in knowing more about how the direct action AIDS movement happened in the Canadian context -- thankfully, a couple of good friends are in the early stages of putting together a project to do some of that work, and I'm excited to see what they produce over the coming years.

Another part of what this book does is intervene in academic theorizing about movements. Generally speaking, I don't have a whole lot of interest in that body of scholarly work which describes itself as "social movement theory." There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part it tends to objectify movements and to ask questions that end up being of relatively little interest or use to movements themselves. So I don't necessarily identify with this book's impulse to present that body of work as one of its origin points. However, I do think its interventions in that field could be of considerable use if broadly taken up. In particular, I think its focus on emotion and on a kind of holisitc history both contribute to a whole-person basis for understanding movements, rather than the reified and abstracted tendency that dominates social movement theory, and its extreme caution about proposing excessively generalized answers to abstracted questions about movements is also useful. That said, there are still echoes of a kind of problem-posing and question-answering that occasionally rubs me the wrong way, but for the most part it is only echoes.

Perhaps the most useful part of the book, beyond the history itself, is its theoretical work around emotion. The idea that we should think of ourselves, each other, and our movements as simultaneously embodied, emotional, and rational, rather than only one or the other, or all but in discrete and separated ways, is not new in many feminist and anti-racist spaces. However, the lack of space for this understanding in many dominant ways of talking about the world -- definitely in academia, and certainly in many movement contexts as well -- means that the tools to mobilize this understanding in talking about the social world, movements, and how our lives are woven through and by them, are far more limited and underdeveloped than they should be. Gould's contribution is not so much to settle how best to do this, but to insist that we must and to offer both her overall example, which in most cases I find convincing and compelling, and a collection of specific conceptual tools that are useful suggestions along the path of figuring it all out. Certainly among these are some that I am interested in but not yet entirely convinced by. For instance, her notion of "emotional habitus" to talk about the repetitive, socially organized, locally normative practices which shape and regulate emotional life and emotional possibility seems quite powerful as something that "locates feelings within social relations and practices" (25), not to mention being compatible with understandings I already hold about how our lives are socially organized. Yet I am cautious because it seems to me that it is a way of talking about it all that is very prone to substituting naming for explanation -- "Why did X happen? Oh, because of the emotional habitus of the group." I don't think she particularly falls into that, but I wonder if there might be other ways to frame it that would do more to keep lived practices front and centre. Or to take another example, this book's account gives significant power to "emotives" -- statements which not only express how we are feeling but that, as we make them, give shape and specificity to the affective energy we experience in a given situation. This seems plausible to a certain extent, and I certainly agree with Gould's emphasis on distinguishing between affect (visceral intensity that is not-yet-named and not-yet-directed) and emotion (energy that has been taken up into language and named, and therefore has specificity and direction), but I would want to do a lot more reading and thinking about how micro-level social production and regulation of affect and emotion happens before giving quite as big a role to emotives in that process. Those reservations notwithstanding, I think the work that Gould does in this area is tremendously useful and important.

I think perhaps that what is most useful about how she goes about this work is in some ways what distinguishes what she does from more conventional social movement theory. That is, in my experience, when I'm trying to make a decision about how to act in a movement context, as a writer, or in other aspects of everyday life, mostly how I do that is a sort of ad hoc empathetic and imaginative modelling of the context in which I'm acting and of the other actors in that context rather than by applying anything that resembles an academic analytical model. Gould's analysis is very grounded in the material circumstances it seeks to explain, and it is very descriptive and rich in detail. And that is exactly the sort of source material you need for the kind of empathetic and imaginative modelling that is the basis of how individual and group decision making actually happens in most cases -- not some proscriptive approach that does violence to your experience by telling you how to abstract it and rip it out of context, but rich and nuanced examples that model for you how it all went and how tools were used in other situations that you can then take up and adapt as necessary. I think, actually, both ACT UP as presented in her work and the model of her doing of the work itself are both examples of this that readers can learn from. Even things as deceptively simple as her modelling of how to take up newspaper accounts and transcribed interviews and read them for emotion, even when emotion is not the explicitly communicated content of the text, is incredibly useful as a kind of example of listening that can be applied in making knowledge about the world, in making movements, and in making knowledge about/for movements.

Similarly, it is in that mode that her analysis of ACT UP struck me as most immediately useful in applying it to other movement-relevant situations. One example of this sort of resonance that struck me very forcefully as I read the book was ways in which her thinking about the sudden turn to direct action by AIDS activists in the mid 1980s might provide us with ways to start thinking about the sudden tactical shift in indigenous organizing that happened in the initial upsurge of Idle No More. I'm not sure I have anything of much use to say about that at this point, but I bet that a sort of deep listening to emotion will be as useful in learning from Idle No More as it is in Gould's account of ACT UP. And the ways that she talks about things like polarization within movements, both in terms of tactics and in terms of narrow vs. intersectional politics, are useful models for thinking through the dynamics of similar polarizations in other movements. As are her discussions of movement decomposition and withdrawal, of questions of respectability, of the emotional and political implications of queer ambivalence, and many other things.

So. I look forward to figuring out how make use of what this book offers. Unfortunately, I don't necessarily expect a lot of other people to pick it up -- the history it tells is quite specific, and it is not a small book -- but I think its theoretical insights could be tremendously useful for those of us who are involved in building movements, those of us who are involved in producing knowledge about movements, and those of us who try our best to be involved in both.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Announcing Takling Radical Radio!

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new broadcasting/podcasting project, Talking Radical Radio. This weekly, half-hour show brings you grassroots voices from across Canada. It uses in-depth interviews that will concentrate not on current events or the crisis of the moment, but on giving people involved in a broad range of social change work a chance to take a longer view as they talk about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

If you happen to live in Sudbury, Ontario, you'll be able to listen every Wednesday morning at 8 am on 96.7 FM CKLU. For most people, though, the best way to tune in is through the show's page on the Rabble Podcast Network, part of Rabble.ca. The debut episode can be found here -- it features an interview with Alex Diceanu of Steel City Solidarity in Hamilton, Ontario about that group's experiments in using direct action tactics and a new sort of organizational form to challenge instances of wage theft by employers.

Upcoming coming episodes include Robin Folvik of Vancouver's Graphic History Collective on March 6 and Gerald Wehatley of Calgary's Arusha Centre on March 13. In the following weeks, look for Sheetal Rawal and Dilani Mohan of The Miss G Project based in Toronto, Ontario, talking about their eight-year struggle to get women and gender studies curriculum in Ontario high schools; Pastor Rhonda Britton of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church talking about organizing efforts in Halifax, Nova Scotia to keep a closed school building as a resource for the community; and an organizer with Winnipeg Cop Watch from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

If you think this is an interesting project, along with listening, there are other ways you might want to support it:

1. Suggest topics for future shows! Check out these criteria for participants and tell me about grassroots organizations, groups, projects, or initiatives doing interesting social change work in the Canadian context by emailing me at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.
   
2. Get the show picked up on your local community or campus radio station! In the coming months, I will be working hard to get the show picked up by community and campus stations in different parts of the country, and if you are a volunteer, staff, board member, or avid listener of such a station, you can help me out. Again, be in touch at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.