Why I Don't Homeschool (Even Though I Think It's Better)

I wrote recently about some of my objections to the mainstream, compulsory school system. Having such objections while parenting a six year-old child raises the question of what to do about them. This and at least one future post will reflect on this question.

There are a few different options. Given the nature of my objections, schools that are labelled "alternative" might or might not be able to do much to address them. I have certainly read about some that would go a long way to dealing with at least some of my concerns, but many other alternative schools are not really that different from mainstream schools in important respects.

However, I am considering these questions not in some sort of abstract, ideal space, but in a very real location. Sudbury is a small city that still manages to be the largest city for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, and it has, as far as I am aware, no publically funded alternative schools at the elementary level. It has one private alternative school, a Montessori school. In my understanding, the Montessori approach can be a modest improvement on mainstream schooling, and L attended and benefited from a Montessori pre-school completely unaffiliated with this elementary school. However, there are still elements of the pedagogy that are not ideal, and I have no reason to believe that the aspects of explicit and hidden curriculum that concern me would be much different than in a mainstream school. Moreover, high tuition fees tie institutions of this sort into oppressive and exploitative social relations in additional ways by excluding people and by shaping the character of the school, and privileged people opting out of the mainstream school system in ways that depend on their privilege only compounds the problems with the mainstream system. And it is relevant both to curriculum concerns and to the impact of high fees that I have heard from at least two different people in the community that the Montessori school that exists in Sudbury does not do a whole lot to incorporate concerns about social justice into its practices -- if I'm wrong, I'd love to hear about it, but that's what I've heard. Moreover, despite the fact that we are lucky enough to lead quite economically comfortable and secure lives, it would still be very difficult for us to afford.

That leaves homeschooling. I see this as the best option, in the abstract -- or, more specifically, I see the particular variant of homeschooling known as unschooling to be the best. I think it could be worlds better that mainstream schools in terms of pedagogy, and somewhat better though still far from perfect in terms of the ways in which mainstream schools help to reproduce oppressive and exploitative social relations.

And yet, L attends a mainstream school.

I should start out by saying that I feel very conflicted about this. How acutely bad I feel about it varies, and (perhaps shamefully) I feel less torn now than at certain earlier moments. Nonetheless, I still feel frequently sad and occasionally agonized about the fact that I send this little person who is so important to me into an environment about which I have such deep misgivings. So if you read the following as selfish excuses, and feel a response that amounts to moralistic "shoulding," then I -- well, I don't actually want to hear from you, but it's not like I don't react that way myself much of the time.

The reasons why we don't unschool also have to do with the fact that these decisions are being made not in a thought experiment, not in a laboratory, but in the context of real lives. If we were to homeschool in some fashion, it would be me that would have to do the bulk of the work to accommodate that into our lives -- my partner makes far more money than I ever will, at a good, secure job that she likes a great deal. So it would be up to me. Some of it, I could do. I think I would even be good at it. I think the roles of facilitator, catalyst, and model of self-motivated learning would be ones I could fill quite effectively. After all, a good part of my work life for quite a number of years has, to varying degrees, borne a striking resemblance to unschooling, and it would not be unreasonable to describe the last, oh, seven years or so as my own take on graduate unschool.

However, even enthusiastic advocates of unschooling point out that the decision to do it is going to have a major impact on your life and reshape a great deal of your time. And I know, however shameful it might be to admit, that I would come to resent it. I would resent that it would leave me less able to write and read and research and create in other ways and do all of that kind of work which is so important to how I understand myself. Yes, I recognize that this attachment to work and its incorporation into my sense of self is an internalization of various norms associated with capitalism, with the areligious cultural Presbyterianism with which I was raised, and with dominant forms of masculinity (albeit a slightly peculiar variant because it is fixated on work but not money)¹. Yes, a case could be made that I should tackle that attachment head-on and overcome it. I might be able to do that if I put enough effort into it. But I know it would make me pretty miserable for a pretty long time, and I don't think that would be good for me or for L.

The other way in which I would have trouble doing a good job as go-to unschooling parent is the social aspect. One common objection that non-homeschoolers have to the practice is that it deprives kids of the social environment that comes with school. Even leaving aside the fact that there are plenty of people who had miserable social experiences in school and who would happily have done without it, this is kind of a bizarre objection. Sure, it's different, but an unschooler without any institutional compulsion to engage in externally dictated and largely non-social activities for significant chunks of every weekday and many evenings, and with an injunction to pursue what they enjoy and learn organically through living, would have plenty of potential space for building meaningful, enjoyable, social connections. The tricky part for me is that especially in the early years, much of that would have to be parentally facilitated. And I'm just not very good at that kind of thing. I'm better than I used to be, and I am constantly working on it, but that doesn't change the fact that I am shy and very socially reserved. Even trying, even improving rapidly, there would be a prolonged period in which I would do a poor job of filling this role for L, which I also don't think would be good for him.

So those are basically the reasons. They may not be good ones, but they are what they are. I suppose there are a sprinkling of other things, too. For instance, there are certain strains of anti-authoritarian politics that place a huge emphasis on responding to oppressive institutions and relations primarily by rejecting them and absenting one's self from them to the greatest extent possible. I'm not going to get into the details, and I do still think there is value to that kind of personal refusal to participate, but I also think that it is easy to overemphasize that kind of response and thereby contribute to anarchist purity politics that erase the many ways that many different people resist and at least implicitly endorse a True Way.

So that's it for this post. The third post in this informal series is going to deal with the question of what to do now, given my objections to schools and my decision (however flawed it might be) that I would just not be able to do unschooling.

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1 -- I also recognize that there is a much more positive side to it as well, which is that it represents a potentially much healthier impulse on my part to create.

G8, G20 Summits Attract Rampant Media Spin

The following is an op/ed piece by me published in Sudbury newspaper Northern Life online on June 21 (under a slightly different title) and in the June 24 print edition.

In the next week, people in Sudbury will be seeing a lot in the news about the G8 and G20 summits.

Politicians, big business leaders and bureaucrats from the most powerful countries on earth are gathering in Huntsville and Toronto to talk about the state of the world.

The news will probably include coverage of the ridiculous expense Prime Minister Stephen Harper has imposed on the people of Canada through the ways his government has organized the summit, with the "fake lake," high security costs, and all the rest.

This is important. It will also probably include excessive (and usually poorly informed) attention to the tactical choices of a small number of protesters. This is inevitable.

But I want to encourage people in Sudbury not to be distracted by these ways of framing the story.

Rather, I hope people are attentive to the bits and pieces of information we will be able to find in the media about what really matters — what the G8 and G20 do, and why so many people in Sudbury and around the world oppose them.

From the very beginning of this series of summits in the mid-1970s — in the first year it was called the Group of Six, or G6, and it did not yet include Canada — it has been about powerful people and institutions getting together to make sure that the world continues to work in their interest, to the detriment of the rest of us.

United States-based historian Vijay Prasad has done some important research in the archives from the earliest meetings.

He has shown that a very explicit goal of the rich countries that met was to undermine initiatives then being organized by a number of so-called Third World countries that had recently won their independence from European control.

Today, the world has changed a great deal, and elites — only elites, mind you — from a few of the largest formerly colonized countries have been invited to the party.

That is why, this year, it is permanently expanding from the G8 to the G20.

At times, recent summits have also used rhetoric about addressing problems that matter to ordinary people. Yet, somehow, once the ink on the official communiques has started to fade and their content forgotten, poverty in Africa, or whatever else has been chosen that year to create a veneer of popular legitimacy for the summit, remains as intractable as ever.

This year, the agenda may include things like climate change, and will definitely include the global economic crisis. These are certainly important topics, but given how the G8 and G20 work, what can we expect?

Popular mobilizations against climate change such as those of the climate justice movement have repeatedly pointed out that cap-and-trade and other market-based mechanisms supposedly intended to address climate change will not only be ineffective, they will also likely lead to enriching powerful corporations and intensifying environmental harm to the world's poorest people. Yet, it is just such mechanisms that will be on the table if climate change is discussed in Huntsville and Toronto.

The current phase of elite response to the economic crisis is to push for deep budget cuts.

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, as recently reported by the CBC, is warning of an "age of austerity," and governments around the world are already beginning to cut.

In the earlier phase of the crisis, hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars were pumped by many countries into the pockets of banks and rich people, from the taxes of ordinary citizens and through taking on major public debt.

Now, ordinary people are going to be pushed to pay for this enrichment of the wealthy through cuts to the services and other social benefits that many people depend on.

In these, as in so many other areas, the G8 and G20 are part of institutional arrangements that benefit people who are already powerful, and harm the rest of us.

The protest activities in Toronto include themed days of action in which, at various points, indigenous people, women, migrants, people with disabilities, and people focused on the environment and on war and occupation, can foreground the ways in which the G8 and G20 make things worse for them.

The largest event in Toronto is likely to be a labour march and rally on June 26, in which members of the striking United Steelworkers of America Local 6500 will be participating.

I've heard unconfirmed rumours that they may even be leading the march, because of the tight relationship between the policy agenda of these meetings and the things that the workers are struggling against in the current strike.

From my years of experience in social change efforts, I think it is a pretty safe bet that much of the mainstream media coverage will be unhelpful in understanding these deeper issues.

Yet it is important to understand why our neighbours, our kids, or our co-workers, might be heading to Toronto to protest, and why some of us are staying here in Sudbury and getting active.

Therefore, I encourage people to watch the coverage of events in Huntsville and Toronto with a critical eye, to avoid being distracted by the sensationalized framing that many of the stories are likely to have, and to extract the worthwhile nuggets of content.

And for those who want to take the time to get more detailed information, a great option will be the diverse yet in-depth coverage that will appear online at the Toronto Media Co-op, at toronto.mediacoop.ca

My Objections to Mainstream Schooling, In Brief

I wish that I felt able to homeschool -- or, more likely, unschool -- L, my six year-old. I have in mind two or three short posts talking about why I think that and I why I don't actually do it, and this is the first.

It seems to me that if you have serious concerns about what is, about the ways in which our lives and our world are socially organized, then you also have to have serious objections to compulsory mainstream schooling.

It does not take much exploration of mainstream discussion of schools, either in the present or back when the current model of mass education was first being instituted in the 19th century, to see that one clearly intended result of the school system is to help reproduce what is and to help youth fit into it. The great educational reformers of the 19th century often saw compulsory, state-run schooling as important for producing a working class that met particular moralistic standards of conduct and behaviour and that met the needs of employers in other, more practical ways. Much of today's debates about education also use the language of "labour market needs" and even "individual opportunity" to talk about taking the haphazard cacophony of potentials and impulses in any random sampling of youth and ease that into adulthoods that meet the needs of elites and do not challenge dominant social relations. If, as I said, you object to the violence inherent in the way those social relations are currently organized, you also have to have some concerns with how those social relations are reproduced and the mechanisms by which people are trained to accept them. Schools are far from the only such mechanism, but they are certainly one of them.

There are a number of ways in which this happens in schools. The formal curriculum, the social organization of schools and consequent hidden curriculum, and the immense social pressures on and in any mass institution not to challenge dominant norms all play a part. Youth are relentlessly exposed to discourse and ideologies that both organize and obscure the relations that comprise how things are, which in turn supports the reproduction of how things are. Many youth also experience material consequences of schools being organized in these ways. For instance, mainstream schools are frequently sites where kids of colour experience interpersonal and systemic racism, queer kids are made unsafe, sexual harassment and more subtle forms of sexism are ubiquitous, and so on. Kids who are privileged in those areas and others, on the other hand, have that privilege reinforced and normalized. And all kids experience the organization of the institution and its pedagogy in ways that trains them to obey arbitrary authority and to do pointless work when ordered to or for a reward, and often they emerge with the autonomous joy of learning with which children enter the world battered, if not broken. This happens unevenly, and it reproduces class and other inequalities by pushing different kinds of relationships to learning, to authority, and to work, on different groups of kids, but it is broadly harmful to one degree or another.

Of course it isn't that simple. This is, after all, a short post, a summary. There are educational contexts that are better and worse. The school system is not monolithic. There can be quite cool experiments within the context of mainstream schooling. As well, children and youth are not passive agents, and they take up and resist these things in various ways, and find strategies to co-opt the good things that schools can offer while resisting the harms. I also want to emphasize that this is not meant as teacher bashing -- there are definitely things that individual teachers and teachers as a group can reasonably be held accountable for, but there are many passionate and committed teachers that skillfully use the constrained space in which they work to do positive things with youth. As well, mainstream rhetoric around educational reform is often grounded in attacking the ordinary folk who work in schools -- I can clearly remember the right-wing attack on education by the Ontario government of Premier Mike Harris in the late '90s and the success that the Tories had in getting otherwise smart, fair-minded people to buy into the idea that teachers are the problem with the school system. I don't buy that.

Nonetheless, and without yet making any claims about how we can individually and collectively respond to it, I am pretty firm in my conviction that the social organization of mainstream schooling is a major problem that requires attention.

Sudbury Social Justice News -- June 19, 2010 Edition

This is the text of the latest mailout from a long-running email list that promotes social justice events in Sudbury, Ontario. I've never posted the entire update on my blog before, but I've temporarily taken over sending the updates out for the summer so I thought I would do so this time. Especially since it includes a lot of cool stuff, including a number that are related to opposition to the G8 and G20 summits.

The mailing also included the text of the timely and topical Socialist Project update entitled "The G20, Capitalism and Austerity"

Anyway, here are the events:

EDIT: Please note that the anti-G20 rally has been moved from Saturday the 26th to Friday the 25th. It still begins at noon in Memorial Park

Sudbury Social Justice News - June 19, 2010

UPCOMING EVENTS & MEETINGS:

1) Sunday, June 20: Mine Mill/CAW Workers Memorial Day Services
2) Monday, June 21: Next Meeting of Sudbury Against War and Occupation
3) Monday, June 21: Anti-G20 Banner Making
4) Tuesday, June 22: Sudbury G8 & G20 Forum
5) Thursday, June 24: First Ever General Meeting of the Sudbury Cyclists Union
6) Saturday, June 26: Sudbury Protest Against G8/G20
7) July 12 - July 18: Tentative Sudbury Pride Schedule (with pre-Pride events in late June and early July)




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Sunday, June 20: Mine Mill/CAW Workers Memorial Day Services

JOIN US AT THE 26th ANNUAL WORKERS’ MEMORIAL DAY SERVICES
SUNDAY JUNE 20th, 2010
FINLANDIA VILLAGE – PALVELA KOTI
233 FOURTH AVE., MINNOW LAKE
9:30 A.M.

Worker's Memorial Day - June 20th - A Historical Day In Mine Mill History
June 20th, 1984 - A tragic fall of ground occurred in the Falconbridge Mine at 10:12am, taking the lives of four brothers:

* Sulo Korpela
* Richard Chenier
* Daniel Lavallee
* Wayne St. Michel

June 20th, 1985 - Mine Mill Local 598 holds the first Workers' Memorial Day Service in honour of the four brothers who lost their lives on this date in 1984. The Service was held in Bell Park and was attended by the immediate families, local and Government officials, Legions, Lions, members of the various Police forces as well as numerous representatives from many Unions.
A Short History

On June 20th, 1984, a seismic event measuring 3.5 on the Richter scale struck Falconbridge Mine at approximately 10:12 a.m. in northeastern Ontario. There were about 200 miners on shift that day. The major damage to the mine was between the 3800-foot level and the 4200-foot level.

During the first attempts of rescue, a second seismic event occurred, at which time immediate rescue operations ceased and plans were made to evacuate the mine. Consultation with the Union, Management and the Ontario Ministry of Labour proceeded.

Stench gas was pumped throughout the mine in order to alert other miners of the emergency. Evacuation of the mine was completed at approximately 2 p.m. that day. Twenty- four hour, around the clock rescue operations were immediately set up in order to free four trapped miners.

Voice contact eventually was established with one of the trapped miners. However, after 27 hours, just 15 minutes before the rescue teams could free him, this brave miner passed away. Although rescue operations continued for the other three miners for several more days, regrettably, rescue efforts were not successful in bringing them out alive.

On June 20th, 1985, the Sudbury Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers' Union, Local 598 established the first Workers' Memorial Day, in remembrance of the four miners who lost their lives one year earlier. Janet Moore, recording artist and composer, wrote the song "The Rugged Miner" in memory of the four miners, their wives and families. The song has since become a tribute to all miners throughout the world.

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Monday, June 7: Next Meeting of Sudbury Against War and Occupation

The next SAWO meeting will be Monday, June 21, at 6:30pm at Memorial Park.

Matters to be discussed include: support for striking steelworkers, Indigenous solidarity, John Moore support, organizing against the G20 summit in Toronto, Palestine solidarity, and tabling at summer events.


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Monday, June 21: Anti-G20 Banner Making

Some people who are organizing locally against the G8 and G20 summits will be meeting at 7pm at Myths and Mirrors to make banners. Myths and Mirrors is the painted building (a community artspace) located in Victory Park in the Donovan. It is on Frood Road, north of Kathleen, between Dupont St. and Schevchenko Ave. It is across from 485 Frood. Myths and Mirrors has donated paints and poster materials!

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Tuesday, June 22: Sudbury G8 & G20 Forum
6:30 pm, St. Andrew’s Place, 111 Larch St., Sudbury

This forum, sponsored by the Sudbury and District Labour Council, will include local speakers talking about the impact of the G8 and G20 in a number of areas.

The speakers will be Nina Naumenko on Climate Change; Laura Hall on Women's Issues; Loretta Assiniwai on Indigenous Rights; Mary Laur on Development and Poverty; Jamie West on Mining Transnationals--The Vale Case.

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Thursday, June 24: First Ever General Meeting of the Sudbury Cyclists Union

Thursday, June 24, 6:30 to 8:30, at the downtown branch of the Sudbury Public Library, 74 Mackenzie Street, Sudbury.

Join us for our First Ever General Meeting. We'll be looking for any help in moving the Cyclists Union Forward, so if you're able to volunteer your time, that's great. If you can just volunteer your ideas, that will be wonderful as well.

Let's continue to build on the growing momentum in our community.

We will be establishing a Steering Committee at this meeting to guide the future direction of our organization.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

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Saturday, June 26: Sudbury Protest Against G8/G20

From noon to 2:30 pm in Memorial Park in downtown Sudbury.

Inspired by the upcoming G20 in Toronto, instead of taking the risk to travel to Toronto where there will be over 30,000 law enforcement officers and an insane amount of security, let's have ourselves a protest in our home town, where we will not have such barriers that threaten our safety.

This of course, will be a peaceful protest against the government holding a muti-billion dollar meeting with the head hancho's of the world, did I mention it will be un-televised? No reporters taking down the events and subjects of the media, and everything that is to be discussed, like the end of funding for abortions, will not be consulted with the population of Canada.

Let's show our city, and the people who are unaware of what's going on, that we do NOT stand for the G20!

We will of course have speeches and other things planned, as I myself and many others would love to know more about the what's of the G20. You are encouraged to make your own signs as well :)

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Late June/Early July: Sudbury pre-Pride Events
July 12 - 18: Sudbury Pride

Tentative Schedule -- check http://sudburypride.com/Festival/happenings.html for udpates.

PRE-PRIDE WEEK RUN-UP!

Monday, June 28th
The Canadian War on Queers: Book Launch
7pm, location: TBA
Join us for a special Pride launch of Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile’s new co-authored collection, “The Canadian War on Queers.” Refreshments will be served.

Friday July 9th – Sunday, July 11th
N.O.C.K. Annual Conference
The Plaza Hall Theatre, 45 Main St. E., Chelmsford
2nd Annual BDSM educational conference held by NOCK, Northern Ontario. Community of Kink – www.nock.ca for more details.


PRIDE WEEK EVENTS!!

Monday, July 12th
Flag Raising
1pm, Tom Davies Square
Official flag raising ceremony to mark the beginning of Pride week in Sudbury! Rrefreshments will be served.

X-Posed: 3rd Annual Art Show
7pm, 276 Cedar St.
Our 3rd annual Pride Art Show, X-Posed! Come and see the works of amazing artists from Northern Ontario! Refreshments will be served.

Tuesday, July 13th
Sex (and Gender?) in the City!
7pm, Fromagerie Elgin, 1a-5 Cedar St.
Dr. Jennifer Johnson, Nate Solomon and Dan Rancicot tackle some key issues concerning sex, gender and sexuality.

Wednesday, July 14th
Youth Speak Out!
5:30pm – 7:30pm – location: TBA
Join members of Toronto District School Board and local high school students and teachers to hear what issues are of concern for our youth in school.

Queer Voices of the North – Film Screenings
First show, 8:00pm. Late show,10pm, Rainbow Theatre
Come out to see local shorts from those in the North, including films from the youth digital storytelling series from Sault St. Marie and our very own BAM girls, with “Little House on the Spanish!” Stay for the late show and see “A Single Man”, featuring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

Thursday, July 15th
Poetry OUT LOUD, 3rd Annual Open Mic Night
8pm, Fromagerie Elgin, 1a-5 Cedar St.
Come read, laugh and sing at our annual open mic night.

Friday, July 16th
Pride’s 1st Annual Ladies* Golf Tournament
12noon, Cedar Green Golf Course, Garson
Nine hole best ball tournament, with dinner, celebrity MC and prizes, prizes, prizes! Think you can get a hole in one? Step up to the challenge and you could win an outstanding prize valued up to $10 000.00! Yup, you read it right!! Email golf.sudburypride@gmail.com for details and information on how to register
You can also click HERE to download our registration form in Word format. (*All those who self-identify are welcome to play!)

Youth Pride Games
11am, Tom Davies Square
Scavenger hunt, games and prizes! Join us for our 3rd annual Youth Pride Games, brough to you by the Youth Pride Committee.

Outdoor Dance
7pm-11pm, Tom Davies Square
All ages outdoor dance with special guest DJ!

Mature Men's Dinner
6pm, Howard Johnson Plaza-Hotel, 50 Brady Street
Gay men's dinner with special guests, the Prime Timer's from Toronto!

Saturday, July 17th
Softball Game and Home Run Derby
12pm, Delki Dozzi Park
$5 gives you a chance at some great prizes in our Home Run Derby. Join us for a game of softball afterwards, with free tshirts provided by our community sponsors, Access Aids and Sudbury Sexual Assault Crisis Centre!

SnoBears Family n Friends BBQ
Time: 5:00 to 7:00 pm , Delki Dozzi Park 3 Mary Street.
Join the SnoBears, their families and friends for their 4th annual BBQ. This event is open to everyone. This year is a choice of Steak ,Chicken Breasts or a Vegetarian alternative . Salads , and deserts. Tickets are $15.00 /children 10 and under free. Please pre-register for children meals. For Tickets contact Dallas at 507-9476 or dallas@snobears.ca

Sunday, July 18th
Annual Pride March and Rally
12:30pm Memorial Park
Come out to the 14th annual Pride March. Meet at Memorial Park with your noise makers, flags and signs!!

Family BBQ
Join hosts from HOT 93.5 and musical acts for our annual Family BBQ! Games for the kids all day, Community fair and more prizes!
1:30pm, Tom Davies Square

Closing Ceremonies
3:45pm, Tom Davies Square
Help us lower the flag and close out our week of celebration

One Observation About the Political Environment in Sudbury

The intent of this post is to make one quite elementary observation about the local environment in which I am engaging in reflections and making choices about political engagement. I may be completely off-base, and if so I want to be told so, especially since five years of living here hasn't been enough for me to shake the sense that I don't really know what's going on politically in Sudbury.

That observation is this: Right now, Sudbury is a local context marked by stark social divisions but relatively little public, collective social struggle. I think this is actually true in a lot of places right now, despite the heavy weight of multiple crises making things worse for ordinary people, with the promise of more to come.

This observation requires a couple of disclaimers. One is the fact that Sudbury is a mining town that is currently in the middle of the longest strike in its history, which could be taken to contradict the point I'm making. A lot of people are suffering pretty severely thanks to Vale Inco's attack on the working people of Sudbury. The strike is not small or trivial, and it is very public and collective. I understand it as very much a struggle against neoliberalism. Depending on how it resolves, it may even spark a new and more generalized cycle of struggle locally -- I'm not sure how likely that is, but it is possible. In making my point above, though, I'm kind of bracketing this particular struggle. I'm doing this because despite its size and importance, the fact that it is happening is more a reflection of the reorganization of the global mining industry and of industrial production more generally than it is a reflection of local political conditions. And the fact is, despite some interesting community stirrings like the CANARYS group, so far it has not strongly drawn from or fed into broader sorts of overt struggle in the community. So it is a special case that may but so far has not had a more general impact. At least this is how it seems to me -- if I'm wrong, please tell me!

Another disclaimer is that by making my point above I am not indulging in the too-common hubris among certain privileged activists of claiming that nothing is happening. That is not my point at all. I start from the assumption that struggle and resistance are always happening, wherever you have some lives organized into suffering and oppression in order that other lives might be organized into privilege. There are a number of different modes and moments of struggle, however, which vary in terms of how collective, how visible, how public, and how confrontational they are, among other variables. I think there are good reasons to try and catalyze opportunities for struggle to become more collective and public, and at least sometimes confrontational, but all too often that priority can translate into ignoring or denigrating the less visible, less flashy, but absolutely crucial moments and modes of struggle. Everyday resistance, everyday acts of mutual aid and support, everyday acts meant to heal the wounds that oppression has carved in one's own flesh and the flesh of loved ones are political acts, and it is not up to someone who does not share those experiences to pontificate on when energy is best spent in those moments versus other kinds of moments.

So, with those points in mind: Relations of oppression and exploitation are at least as much a fact of life in Sudbury as anywhere else. Speaking from my own partial, limited, and privileged view of things, divisions based on poverty and based on racialization (with particular visibility for the white settler/indigenous divide, but with white supremacy more generally quite overt and close to the surface) seem to be particularly stark here, but I'm in no position to conclude that struggles by people with disabilities, women, queers, and gender non-conforming folk, are happening in any less harsh conditions than that.

Struggle against these things happens every day in Sudbury. Moments of people sharing oppositional sentiment and even coming together to do things happen too -- there are state-funded organizations by and for women, and by and for indigenous people, that do crucial things to help people survive awful situations; there is a vibrant Pride week; there is significant if largely passive sentiment in support of working people and against at least certain aspects of neoliberalism; there is a fairly lively network of people and groups responsive to various, mostly mainstream, understandings of green politics.

But, despite all of that, struggle mostly does not -- in this place, in this moment -- tend to be public, collective, and based in ordinary people mobilizing. At least, as far as I can tell.

This is the place, this is the moment, in which people in Sudbury must make decisions about how to act in the world. I suspect it is similar in a lot of places.

What I'm Up To

I mentioned in a recent post that the book that has absorbed as much writing time as I could throw at it for many, many years is now done. Almost a month ago, I finished moving commas about, adding unnecessary extra references, and fretting about formatting, and moved on to the next stage of figuring out how it will reach publication. It is still unclear how all of that will unfold, but for the moment it is off my plate.

The obvious question is, what next?

Along with being obvious, this question is also large and scary, and since I tend to be a cautious and private person, I'm not going to use this forum to explore it in detail or to speculate about some of the larger possible answers that are in contention. However, some of my thoughts about what next are directly relevant to this space, so I will share them.

One of the things that I would like to accomplish is to have more writing -- more forms of writing on more topics -- published in more places beyond this blog. Cultivating new venues has never been a core strength for me, but now that I am no longer pre-occupied with a multi-year behemoth (and intent not to commit to the next one for some time) it seems like a useful focus. I have some vague notions about how I might begin moving in that direction.

One, which is largely unconnected to the rest, is to return to devoting small but consistent chunks of time to playing with short fiction for the first time in around a decade. It may lead nowhere and it is not something that will be mentioned much in this space unless I get something published somewhere, but I still thought I would note it.

More generally, I am looking to write thoughtful nonfiction of any form or length in the following clusters of interest:

• sexuality/gender/relationship practice/shame
  
• history/race/gender/nation
  
• taking action, in both everyday and more collective contexts
  
• popular culture

Obviously all of these things intersect -- it makes no sense to talk about any of these things without thinking about race and gender and capital and all the rest. These categories are broad but not completely unfocused. They capture a couple of the larger possibilities I have in mind as possible future projects. They allow for the journalistic writing to which I have returned in a small way over the last year, and which I may or may not do more of in the coming year. They also allow for ongoing interest in history from below.

In moving forward, I am not yet at the stage of making decisions to write X about Y to submit to Z. If you have any suggestions about what any of those variables might be, given the interests I've just described, please let me know. But at the moment, it is more a matter of reorienting my reading and writing practices to more closely match what I have just described.

In terms of reading, I hope to expand the amount of fiction I read, and to loosely orient my non-fiction reading around the clusters of interest named above -- not rigidly, because I've just emerged from several years of my non-fiction reading being largely determined by a specific writing project and I need a bit more flexibility, but loosely.

I will engage in a slow but persistent search for places I might want to have my writing published, and experiment with doing writing that both expresses what I want to write and that is consistent with what these other venues might want to publish. Not quite sure how that is going to work, but I will stumble on through. (Suggestions for possible venues are actively invited!)

Finally, I will be working at shifting my everyday writing practices. This includes a number of aspects, some of which I will probably only ever be semi-conscious of. One of the key ones, however, will be working at translating flickers of interest or ideas into writing in a much more fluid way than has sometimes happened in the past. I have had something of this practice at points in the past because of blogging, but that has been narrower than I want to develop in the future, and it is also not something I've been quite as attuned to in the last year or two. I hope, through doing this, to broaden the possible starting points for my writing, broaden the areas that I feel comfortable writing about, and smooth the process by which flickers of interest become finished pieces of writing. Some of what I produce that way will be bloggable and will end up here. However, some of it will not, and will end up elsewhere or nowhere public.

The longer term result of all of this will, I hope, be more writing by me on more topics in more places. More immediately, the results are less clear. It may all be interrupted by book stuff anyway, or by a non-writing employment opportunity too good to refuse, or by me plunging into some other large project because it is too shiny and wonderful to stay away from. Or I might just decide next week that this approach isn't working, and, without fanfare, start doing something else.

But, maybe, possibly, for now, there might be more content and broader content on this blog. No promises, though.

Review: Canada and the Cold War

[Reg Whitaker and Steve Hewitt. Canada and the Cold War. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, Ltd., Publishers, 2003.]

It has been very hard for me to avoid hyperbole as I write about this book. It is, in many ways, quite an unremarkable book, with some basic useful information and perhaps a few elements of form worth examining if you are interested in writing accessible history. It may not even really deserve a review, let alone a rant. But its liberal nationalist politics, while almost invisible given that a great proportion of the writing about Canadian history targeted at non-specialists comes from a similar place, are very troubling.

The book's focus, the Cold War, is not something covered quite as exhaustively in Canadian historical writing as it has been for some other countries, so that is kind of interesting. I bought the book at least five years ago when I was trying to find particular kinds of history from that era, but I ended up not reading it then -- I think partly because it became evident from flipping through it after it arrived in the mail that the book just didn't have what I needed and partly because my plans for my own work shifted around that time. If read critically -- an important caveat, with more detail below -- it is a potentially useful resource from which one can extract some decent basic information about certain aspects of the Cold War era in Canada.

It is also mildly interesting for how it is written. I think it might be intended as a text book for high school or early undergraduate students. It engages with history through stories focusing on a particular person, event, or theme, each of which is no longer than a few pages. Its writing is fairly simple. It also has plenty of archival photographs. None of these things are wildly innovative, but they are still useful examples of particular choices in the writing of history.

My urge to rant against this book comes from the way that its liberal nationalist approach to history results in unhelpful and inaccurate ways of understanding the past and the present, and therefore of preparing readers to think about the future. The reason that I want to be restrained, though, is to avoid erasing nuance. Liberal nationalist history infuriates me, but it is not the same as, say, the bigoted ignoramuses on the Texas Board of Education who decided to introduce various lies and distortions at semi-random in their history curriculum in the service of their crude white Christian nationalist vision. Liberal nationalism, like liberal-democratic thought as a whole, tends to be more sophisticated, to follow rules, and to allow for a certain amount of self-criticism of the nation in question. In fact, within certain bounds, some of the the critical material in Canada and the Cold War is quite useful -- it doesn't contextualize them all that well, but at least it talks about various ways in which the Canadian national security state ruined the lives of ordinary people, for instance, and has a section on Dr. Ewen Cameron's horrific 'depatterning' experiments at McGill University that fed into CIA torture techniques. Even that limited space to be self-critical can be important.

However, with all respect due to nuance, sophistication, and limited but real self-criticism, liberal nationalist history is still pretty destructive in its own right.

It is a time-honoured liberal-demoratic tradition to espouse universalism while defining underlying rules such that the impact of whatever practice or discourse is at hand becomes partial and unfair -- declare all people as equal, for instance, and then define people with dark skins and/or ovaries as not really "people" or claim they are as equal as their supposedly inherently limited capacities allow, to give a couple of classic examples. This book sets out to tell fair and honest history, I'm sure, yet it incorporates into its practices a number of features which mean that the result is anything but.

One key way in which this happens is that the book takes a key feature of the social and rhetorical organization of the Cold War period and instead of treating it with rigorous skepticism and critical analysis, it gives it some minimal criticism in passing and largely accepts it as the basic framework for organizing its narratives. This key feature is the intense polarization of that era between East and West, Russkies and Yanks, Communists and capitalists. In telling the history of that era, and despite a few moments of being shallowly critical of the polarization, this book largely accepts it as the basis for its storytelling. I mean, you can imagine a way to tell these stories that is critical of all and sundry, that take as its baseline the real suffering and struggles of real people and an eye for justice, that treats every institution, every hierarchy, every piece of received wisdom with a critical eye. You can imagine a way of telling histories that happened in the midst of that polarization that acknowledge polarization's power and significance while refusing to be trapped by it. This book does not do that. Instead, it largely accepts that polarization as a frame for understanding the era.

One of the ways it does this is by applying different kinds of analysis to the two sides. Problems with the capitalist side are treated as isolated problems with specific people, policies, or practices, while problems with the Communist side are treated as signs of systemic flaws. It assumes that understanding the conflict in terms of capitalist "good guys" (a few of whom sometimes go too far) and Communist "bad guys" (trapped by an inescapable and evil system) is a reasonable way to approach the era, with no real effort to examine how any of this was socially produced on either side. Capitalist social relations are ignored and the social relations understood as "Communist" in this book are subjected to crude caricature, rather than paying rigorous attention to both. Even worse than painting a picture of the Communist side that is almost completely useless for understanding the violence and oppression in that sphere and the various forms of resistance to it, it largely erases the immense amount of suffering organized into the world by capitalism and the various ways ordinary people resist that.

Even when it is directly relevant, the social and historical context of the capitalist side is ignored. For instance, it talks about lives ruined by Canadian and U.S. state witch hunts for Commies and queers, but treats this as an unfortunate exception to the standards of fairness supposedly inherent to liberal jurisprudence rather than exploring the ways in which this is no accident but a feature that has always been part of liberal-democratic legal systems, from colonization to concentration camps to national security certificates and the Canadian implementation of the 1267 Regime today. It similarly describes the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War as an example of "excesses" in the context of war rather than as one of many indications of the ways which white supremacy has shaped Canadian settler institutions throughout their history.

It completely ignores colonization and the ways in which capital has preyed on the mostly non-white peoples of the world over several centuries. There is some reference to struggles to decolonize, but only in passing and only in reference to proxy struggles between the superpowers. This means that readers have inadequate context to understand why there was massive popular support for things like the Cuban Revolution -- the book describes Batista as "pro-American" but doesn't talk about how corrupt and awful he was, for instance. And it leaves intact the definitive frame for the era as the polarized struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, when it would be just as useful to examine Canada's role in the great drama of decolonization struggles that marked the same years. And, of course, even though the book includes a chapter on the 1980s, and the onslaught of neoliberalism that began in the late '70s is very relevant both to the conventional Cold War frame (given that it is about unshackled capitalism triumphant) and the decolonization frame (given that it is about reimposing Western dominance on the rest of the world), it is not mentioned.

A particularly egregious example of double standards being smuggled into the text is the presence of a section on Ukrainian Canadians and their relationship to the oppression of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, but the almost complete absence of any discussion of indigenous peoples in Canada in that era apart from a one-sentence aside about "Red Power" organizing. The other side's mistreatment of entire peoples is admissable because it is commonly recognized and it can be framed as being about the Cold War. Our genocidal mistreatment of entire peoples is not mentioned. I can only guess at the reasons, but I would speculate that it is because in mainstream, liberal nationalist history the crimes of official enemies get categorized and understood differently than our own crimes -- that is, ours are often not understood as crimes at all. And even when they are, well, it can be dismissed as not being relevant to a text on Canada and the Cold War, so it is easy enough not to talk about it.

Add to all of this the book's active propagation of many of the myths of the good liberal Canada -- Canada as moderating influence on the United States, Canada as welcoming, Canada and its "peacekeeping" as purely benevolent exercise rather than as colonial activity, all that stuff. Liberal and left nationalism in Canada are built on exactly the sort of examples, particularly comparisons with the United States, that fill this book, notwithstanding the fact that the book occasionally (though gently) complicates the picture a little bit. The bulwark of smugness these examples inflate is a tremendous barrier to getting Canadians, including those with liberal and leftish sensibilities, to think critically in any consistent way about their own country. And that, it seems to me, is tremendously politically destructive. In the context of this book, it defuses a lot of what could be useful about the actual (if limited) critical content about Canada and the Cold War that it contains.



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

Review: The Wages of Whiteness

[David R. Roediger. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised Edition. New York: Verso, 2007 (1991).]

The Wages of Whiteness is a classic in the academic study of whiteness, a field of anti-racist analysis that arose out of a long history of African-American thinkers reflecting on their oppression and on the people who enact it. The book brings together important scholarship around race with the kind of working-class history from below pioneered by E.P. Thompson and others. It examines processes of racial formation and class formation in the United States, most thoroughly between the Revolution the end of the Civil War, especially the first half of the 19th century, with some brief attention to periods before and immediately after that. The question it tries to answer is why the white working class in the United States has so often chosen to side with the white owning class against working class peoples of colour, rather than the other way around. How and why did white workers come to understand themselves primarily as white workers?

I am not going to attempt a comprehensive review. Partly this is because, as the author discusses in the preface to the current edition, it is a book that has been talked about a lot. Reviews of Wages include attacks on it that bear little relation to its actual content or political project, praise that elevates it perhaps too high and distorts its actual significance in the field, along with lots of solid critique that has informed the subsequent work of Roediger and many other scholars in the area. I'm not familiar with the details of many of those responses, but my sense is that the key valid criticisms include its very brief treatment of the role of colonization, settlement, and anti-indigenous racism in the formation of white working-class identity in the United States, and inadequate attention to the gendered aspects of these processes. I also found that while I appreciated that it was a reasonably short and engaging read, there would be value to more detailed and exhaustive documentation in certain areas, particularly to bolster some of the arguments based in readings of white working-class culture.

Mostly, I just want to make a few fairly personal points about my reaction to the book. The first -- which is also partly why I hesitate to attempt a more comprehensive review -- is that it reminded me how little I really know about 19th century U.S. history. I know a fair bit more about 20th century U.S. history, or Canadian history from both centuries, but I've never had much occasion to learn about what went on south of the border a century and more ago. I really appreciated this opportunity to encounter some of that history in a way that foregrounds issues or race and class (though, as I said, not so much gender) in how it tells it.

Part of why that was so fascinating was comparing it with Canadian history as I read. Though the two countries share a continent, and have many core similarities -- the whole continent is basically one white-dominated, Christian-dominated, patriarchal, capitalist society grounded in the settler colonization of Turtle Island -- the shape of their histories, particularly in that era, were quite different. In the United States, small-r republicanism was a dominant element in the political culture, while in Canada it remained subordinated to a spectrum that stetched the relatively short distance from Tory-flavoured to more liberal-flavoured English liberalism. The organization of making and doing was quite different in important respects, especially in terms of slavery. There was certainly chattel slavery in Canada, but it never had the mass character or the large-scale role in production that it had in the U.S. or the Caribbean. White Canadian benefit from slavery was still significant, but much of that was less direct than in the U.S., often flowing from relationships with the U.S. and the British Caribbean.

Another key element was a difference in timing -- urban, capitalist ways of organizing production and social life more generally took shape later in Canada. I would imagine this is because there was fairly large scale settler colonization earlier in a much larger area of what would become the eastern United States than was true in what later became Canada. Yes, there was already evidence of an organized working class in Halifax before the end of the 18th century, but by and large this difference in timing means that history north and south of the border in the 19th century feels quite a bit less similar than in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

All of this means that processes of racial and class formation in that era would likely look quite different in Canada than they do in the United States -- still reflective of the imposition and resistance to white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, but put together differently. So I'm surprised that I haven't encountered anything quite like this book in the Canadian context. I'm not sure exactly what such a book would look like. It would have to have much more emphasis on the relevance of settlement and the conquest of indigenous peoples in the development of self-consciously held whiteness among Canadian working people. There would probably also be more reason to emphasize regional differences, particularly white-Asian encounters on the West coast and white-Black on the East coast. Another major difference would be related to the importance of republican ideologies in the United States, which both contributed to and were significantly reinforced by the Revolution, and which were central to racial and class formation in the U.S.

That actually leads into my final point, which is not reflecting on Canadian versus U.S. histories in the 19th century, but is rather an expression of fascination and surprise at the ways in which the contemporary elite-directed but somewhat populist right-wing discontent of the Tea Party and associated ilk really does, as they claim, flow from certain features that were crucial during and shortly after the American Revolution. I know this isn't a new idea, and in the last year or more I've come across a few pieces that trace longer histories of right-wing populism and populism more generally in the U.S., but I found it particularly striking to see the parallels in this book, because this book was written many years before the Tea Party was a glint in Bill O'Reilly's cold, cruel eyes.

Now, I don't have the knowledge to draw out all the richness of these connections, or to trace how similarities in shape and style relate to actual material connections over the years, and I'm not inclined to take the time. But they are still striking. Both in certain sectors of the Revolutionary public of the late 18th century and the Tea Partying public of the early 21st century, there is a taste for politics organized around paranoid fantasies of what nefarious Others are up to rather than actual analysis. In the period of the Revolution and after, it was common for small-r republican (which is not the same as big-R Republican today, I should stress for non-U.S. readers) artisans and other ordinary people to be concerned about the possible connivance of the powerful with the powerless to deprive them of their rights. This, apart from bearing little relationship to reality, sometimes involved important opposition to the powerful but too often degenerated into attacks on the easier target -- that is, those with less power. Much right-wing rhetoric in the U.S. has a very similar shape today, warning of conspiracies between Black and Brown folks and elite liberals to take away the rights of ordinary white people. Today, this is very clearly organized around whiteness and the supposed threats to the white "us" by various, mostly non-white Others. Back then, that aspect was similar, though less firmly established. The threat that emancipated slaves might pose loomed large in the white small-r republican imagination.

And all of this, both past and present, is organized around a particular understanding of "liberty" that has its roots in the experiences and desires of those republican artisans of the Revolutionary period. This understanding became crystallized because of its role in creating unity during the process of the Revolution. It had deeply troubling aspects even then, but it at least had, for a brief period, some material basis in the existence of large numbers of independent producers in the former Thirteen Colonies. Capitalism being capitalism, that was not true for long, yet that particular way of understanding liberty has remained, for a significant number of people, highly influential. Transposed into the context of 21st century capitalism, this understanding of what liberty is and should be is completely ungrounded and perverse, and largely serves as cover for elite self-interest and white supremacy. Yet, as the Tea Partiers claim and as most liberals seem to want to deny, it does actually have some basis in that holiest of U.S. nationalist moments, the American Revolution.

I don't know enough to know what to make of all of that, but it does seem to me that the liberal huffery-puffery about the Tea Partiers that refuses to see the movement's basis in longstanding features of social relations and political culture in the United States and rather treats it as novel is a sure recipe for more bad stuff. Only acknowledging and tackling those longstanding features can lead to effective opposition to the current right-wing surge in the U.S.

Anyway. This is an important book to read if you want to understand the past and present of the United States.


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

"The People Have Won"???

According to a story in Northern Life, a local newspaper, Sudbury city council voted not to allow for boarding houses and rooming houses in areas outside the city core. This would not have been in areas primarily zoned for single family dwellings, but in areas already zoned either for commercial use or for multi-residential dwellings, and already near high-traffic roads.

A grouping described as "200 irate home owners" attended a planning committee meeting earlier this week, voiced their opposition, and the proposed change was scrapped in favour of further study and consultation.

The quote that is the title of this post, "The people have won," comes form Joscelyne Landry-Altmann, Ward 12 councillor.

Let's be clear, though, exactly who has won and what exactly they have won.

In the late 1990s, the mayors of the ten largest cities in Canada declared homelessness a national disaster. Research at the time in many cities -- I was involved in some of this research in Hamilton, Ontario -- demonstrated quite clearly that poverty, lack of affordable housing, and lack of supports for people who need them were the basic causes of this homelessness. I'm not as up on the most recent stats as I would've been six or seven years ago, but my understanding is that lack of affordable housing is still a massive problem in most places in Canada, far too many people are still living in poverty, and an unconscionably large proportions of them still experience relative or absolute homelessness. Despite some tinkering with emergency response systems over the last decade, governments with the resources to make a difference have steadfastly refused to invest in the kinds of programs that would significantly increase the supply of affordable housing (that is, social housing) or significantly reduce poverty. The Liberal Ontario government and the Conservative federal government have not wavered from their greater concern with pleasing bankers than meeting the needs of poor people -- again, despite some Liberal tinkering that is more cosmetic than substantive.

Rooming houses and boarding houses are far from ideal solutions. Treating them as a final answer to the problems of poverty and lack of affordable housing institutionalizes the idea that some people -- that is, poor people -- do not deserve the comfort and dignity that most of us take for granted. They are, at best, a temporary measure. However, given the state of things, rooming and boarding houses are an absolutely necessary measure.

In the article, the only population explicitly referred to as losing out from this city council decision is students. That's true, but it leaves out the fact that there are large numbers of non-students living in poverty in this city who need housing too, and who have very few options. Increasing the number of rooming and boarding houses, and regulating them appropriately, is an important step within the powers of the municipality to take the edge off some of this need -- it's not a massive investment in social housing and anti-poverty programs, which is really what we need, but it's at least doing something to respond to the need.

So when Landry-Altmann says, "The people have won," what she really means is that middle-class people have won. The implicit content is that middle-class people matter, middle-class people count as "the people," while people living in poverty don't matter, or perhaps don't even count as "people." These complaining middle-class people are, according to the article, concerned about noise and littering problems. The focus on noise and littering, however, is a kind of stand-in that can be publically voiced without coming across as too overtly prejudiced. As is so often true in Canadian political discourse, civility is given far greater importance than substance. What these concerns boil down to is a focus on the supposed impact that these unwanted Others will have on neighbourhoods that they consider to be theirs. They aren't really that bothered by a particular way of organizing housing, what they object to is having to live near particular 'kinds' of people. These middle-class homeowners object to young people. They object to poor people. They don't appear to care what happens to young people and poor people -- the article says nothing about these homeowners threatening to stage a sit-in at MPP Rick Bartolucci's office until the provincial cabinet pledges hundreds of millions of dollars to build new social housing, for instance, or organizing a mass movement to make similar demands of Ottawa -- they just don't want to have to live near them.

This is the people winning? Keeping unwanted Others out of particular neighbourhoods?

That's a pretty shameful way to look at it. It seems to me, rather, that this is yet another instance of the people losing. All of us are losing because privileged people have succeeded in pushing for the needs of people living in poverty to be, once again, treated as a low priority. This kind of dynamic is one of the ways that the elite attacks on ordinary people that make up neoliberalism manage to survive and grow.

And it is also a sign that we are not winning that this is the question that is most visibly being asked -- massive new investments in social housing and reducing poverty are not even on the table, despite the level of suffering in so many communities. That is incredibly shameful. And I won't even get into the barriers to talking about the social relations that cause the problems of poverty and homelessness in the first place, and to pointing out that things don't need to be this way.

Movement History Update

As some readers of this blog may be aware, my central project for quite some time has been writing a book based on oral history interviews with long time activists from a wide variety of Canadian social movements. The plan, at least for the last bunch of years, has been to present the material not as traditional oral history but using a subset of the interviews with generous helpings of historical and political context as an entry point into various bits and pieces of Canadian and movement history that don't usually get told. This is a reposting of the latest update from the project's site (and the first such update in an embarassingly long time).

Lots of news since the last update. The biggest piece is that the manuscript is DONE!!! I can't tell you how exciting that is. The final chapter was completed some time in the new year, then I spent a few months doing various sorts of editing work on the entire book. It was completed a couple of weeks ago. I've sent packages to the three publishers with whom I've had interactions over the years who still appear to be open to considering the project, to let them know it is finished. It's still early -- the publishing industry is nothing if not slow -- but since I sent the packages, I've already had a supportive but quite inconclusive interaction with one of the publishers (with the promise of further interaction after they've had a chance to examine what I sent more closely), and am waiting patiently for more definitive responses from all three. At the moment, that is the plan: Wait to hear from those three, then take further steps based on what I hear.

In other, and much sadder, news, interview participant Wey Robinson passed away on May 24, 2010. Wey was a long-time anti-poverty activist in Ontario. Perhaps the most visible struggle in which Wey was a core organizer was the winning of rent control in Ontario in the 1970s, but their involvement spanned decades. (Wey was also the only trans person among the 50 that I interviewed, though very little of their collective, public activism focused on those particular experiences -- I'm not sure what pronouns Wey was using at the the time of their death, so I'm using "they/their.") Wey was not only someone I interviewed but someone I worked with for years in activist settings in Hamilton, Ontario, and from whom I learned a great deal. I last saw Wey a couple of years ago when I stopped by for a visit during a trip to southern Ontario. At that point, their mobility was significantly restricted but their commitment and contributions to the struggles of people living in poverty remained sharp and fierce. Wey will be greatly missed.

In the next week or so I will likely be sending out an update on the project by email to those who have previously indicated interest in it. I am also considering revamping the web site -- the way I have thought about this so far is that I would keep the content the same but move it over to blogspot or some other convenient web publishing engine, as right now it is published using hand-written code that is old and unnecessarily clunky. We will see...