Author: convergencejournal

(this is an excerpt)

By Kerri Flannigan,
Undergraduate student of Studio Arts at Concordia University

Introduction:

Recently I’ve been embroidering stories of growing up in religious surroundings. Stitching becomes a form of meditation, a reflecting and releasing.

Depictions of my mouth washed with soap to cleanse away dirty words. The bible my mom demanded I swear on that I wasn’t dating anyone. (I was). The exorcism I witnessed in my camp cabin when I was 12. Images of guilt, sexual shaming, censorship, and rebellion. For me, depicting the sacred is its undoing, releasing the power these memories still hold over me.

Art comes into contact with the sacred in so many ways.

Art depict the sacred
It resists
It appropriates
It queers
It creates
It undoes the sacred through its own representation
and finds the sacred in the mundane

Depicting the Sacred:

In Christian art, depicting heaven and hell, god and the devil, was speaking to a need to give immaterial divinity a material presence.

Heaven isn’t a physical place, but a condition.

But as the church figured out, it was impossible for people to imagine being without a location or a body.

There was a need to depict heaven and hell as real to be able to understand/desire/fear them.

Hell often becomes an impetus for believing, and in some cases as means of social control or as a justification for colonization.

Art That Responds to the Material Violence in the Name of the Sacred:

There are no words to capture the impact of violence enacted in the hands of the church. But one example is the aggressive assimilation by church-run residential schools, which tore over 150,000 native, Inuit, and Métis children from their homes and left a legacy of abuse and trauma. Many have responded to this violence through art.  Depicting, witnessing, resisting, exposing, and reflecting on this trauma.

Cathy Busby’s We Are Sorry, contains two 20’ x 45’ banners containing excerpts from the 2008 landmark apologies to aboriginal people for Indian residential schools in Canada and the stolen generations in Australia.

The apologies were of major significance, yet occurred in fleeting moments. In We Are Sorry, Busby attempts to give the apologies a renewed and sustained presence.

Artists Who Appropriate the Sacred:

Naji al-Ali, renowned Palestinian cartoonist, was born in Galilee and grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

Naji al-Ali worked for a newspaper and created his character Hanthala. Hanthala is in the foreground of  Naji al-Ali’s cartoons, witnessing and speaking out against Israel, U.S. imperialism, and corrupt Arab regimes.

Naji al-Ali’s art work uses divinity as a source of strength rather than as a role of colonizer or oppressor. He says Jesus is a Palestinian and dreams of returning to his home. He depicts Jesus throwing stones in support of the intifada.

Naji al-Ali was shot and killed in London. He was 50 years old. He remains a hero in the Arab world, and Hanthala, a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
The Perversion of Divinity:

What does it mean to take the imagery of oppression and appropriate it?

Artists explore this question in the subversion of re-interpretations of religious icons, for example in the practice of artists’ queering of saints and religious icons.  This act asserts the right to personally interpret and transform icons to represent one’s own place in the world. To counter the mass of imagery of white, sexist, hetero-normative subjects. To insert counter-narratives to religious imagery. Women as strong. Saints as Homos. For example.

These endeavors always leave a wake of conflict by those unable to reconcile any interventions of sacred images. Alma Lopez’s feminist and lesbian re-interpretations of the Virgin of Guadalupe resulted in violent protest, national debates, censorship, hate mail, and death threats.

Undoing the Sacred Through its Own Depiction:

Bible stories have been depicted for a long time but they’ve always been cleaned up and selectively portrayed.

MC Gaines, who claims to have invented the comic medium, published, Picture Stories from the Bible. When he died his son took over the business and began making these edgy and sexy crime and horror comics instead.

The Catholic Church opposed comic books for some time and in the 1940s even sponsored the public burning of comics. But eventually they came around, recognizing the form’s appeal to young people. Their comics were, of course, cleaned-up and wholesome edits of the Bible.

In 2009 Robert Crumb illustrated The Book of Genesis. The Book of Genesis has a typical western depiction of god, who Crumb says looks like his father. Also, all the main women; Eve, Sarah and Rachel are said to look like Crumb’s wife, Aline. It makes for some odd reading.

Genesis is the story of God’s relationship with fallen humanity. Murder, incest, slavery, and nudity abound. People were scandalized by the Book of Genesis even though Crumb didn’t go out of his way to be graphic.  Crumb’s illustrated Genesis, the chapter of the bible I read when I was seven years old, has a warning on its cover: “Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors.” The literal depiction of the bible became the profane.

Finding the Sacred in the Mundane:

Simulacra is the perception of religious imagery in nature.

When images of Christ and Mary appear on toast and pancakes.

An image of the Virgin Mary appeared as a water stain on a glass façade in Clearwater Florida. Millions of visitors came. And an Ohio Catholic revivalism group bought the building.

The Creation of the Sacred:

Those facing oppression by the church can resist by creating their own interpretation of the sacred. Or those who don’t have a place in religion create their own sacred system and structures.

Atheists Anonymous was founded in the 60s/70s in Winnipeg. Founders had grown up in small/religious/Mennonite communities in Manitoba and wanted to extend help to people wanting to leave their church/community but without knowing how. It was both a telephone hotline and a regular group meeting. People started calling in from across the Prairies as the word spread. Many people in small towns who wanted to leave their community and/or religion (many of whom were Mennonite) didn’t actually know anyone outside of their community, never mind know anyone who wasn’t religious. Atheists Anonymous would leave little flyers around small towns in public but discrete places, people would call, and basically just get support and talk to someone who would listen to them, not judge them, and offer them ways to leave if they wanted. Often these people would come to Winnipeg, and Atheists Anonymous would help them find an apartment and a social circle of people they could talk to about how to settle in to the big city. Many of these people were gay, or just really different from their community, and knew in their heart of hearts they could not, with a good conscience, get married and stay in their small town forever. But for many, up until Atheists Anonymous, their isolation had kept them from leaving.

a contextualized analysis of urban agriculture in Montreal

By Angharad Wylie,
Undergraduate student in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University

This article was prepared in partnership with the Concordia Greenhouse, as part of the Community-University Research Exchange (CURE).

Introduction
In the past few years, the questions of where our food comes from and how it is produced have emerged as key issues in the urban sutainability debate. These questions have fed a resurgence of urban gardening as an answer to urban food security issues and concerns with the globally commercialized system of industrial agricultural production that dominates the urban palate. In North America, Montreal is well known as being home to a strong urban agriculture movement; between community, backyard, rooftop, balcony, collective, and guerrilla gardens, 1.5% of Montreal’s population is involved in urban food production.¹ The purpose of this paper is to dissect the differences between Montreal’s community and collective gardens – and the reasons for citizens’ involvement with them – in order to better understand the roles urban agriculture currently serves here and the direction in which it is evolving.

Urban Agriculture in Montreal: A Historical Perspective
Although there have been various movements of urban agriculture in Canada throughout the country’s history, in the 1970s there was a fundamental change in direction. Prior to the 1970s, urban agriculture was primarily a response to increased demand during war periods and the Great Depression. In 1973, increased fuel costs caused by the OPEC energy crisis were reflected in food prices, which created awareness of the limitations of fossil fuel-based food production, causing the concept of food security to enter the urban Canadian consciousness. By this time, urban gardening was already being practiced in Montreal by Italian and Portuguese immigrants who maintained traditional kitchen gardens on both private and unoccupied public land. In fact, it was the City of Montreal’s attempts to regulate the immigrants’ guerrilla gardening that initiated the preliminary systems of permit distribution and plot allocation which eventually transformed into the organization of community gardens and opened urban food production to a broader demographic. Soon after the first permits were distributed to community garden plots in Montreal, the project was taken out of the city’s hands by the Montreal Botanical Gardens, and by 1985 was made official through a city review of the program which laid out a set of guidelines and marked the creation the Montreal Community Gardening Program.² Once the program had become official, the gardens (forty-one of which were established already by 1981, with numbers continuing to grow fast throughout the 1980s and 1990s) were supported economically by the city government and local organizations, who provided the gardens with physical resources such as tools and seeds as well as hired horticultural specialists who were available on a rotating basis to give advice to gardeners on organic growing techniques.³ These services have prevailed and the numerous community gardens that now exist across Montreal are still greatly supported by the city. The space provided does not meet the needs of the population for space to garden, however, resulting in wait-lists for garden plots being years long in some cases.⁴

Current Trends in Montreal’s Urban Agriculture Movement

Community Gardens:
Montreal is well-recognized as home to Canada’s and possibly North America’s most successful city-level network of community gardens and is the only Canadian city to have hosted the annual American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) meeting (in 2006).⁵ In 2002 the Montreal Community Garden Program was reorganized, and now the eighteen boroughs in Montreal involved with urban agriculture are responsible for their local networks.⁶ Across the city, the program totaled ninety-eight gardens (8459 plots) in 2008, each containing between twenty-five and 255 individual plots,⁷ managed overall by an elected team of volunteers and overseen by the six horticultural specialists, rotating between the gardens, who are available to answer questions and give guidance to new gardeners (though by all accounts, more of the knowledge sharing happens between gardeners themselves).⁸ As of 2006, around 75% of the gardens were protected, either under special Community Garden zoning or as parkland,⁹ and the city also continues to uphold a policy of giving tax breaks to owners of vacant lots who are willing to lease the space to community members for the creation of new gardens on five-year leases.¹⁰ The fact that zoning officials were able to permanently remove the spaces from the development market indicates a decided willingness on the part of the city government to support such projects as part of their vision for Montreal’s future as a green city.
Involving an estimated 13,000 participants,¹¹ the gardens primarily attract older citizens, with more than half of the Community Garden participants being over the age of forty-five, and less than 2% under the age of twenty-four.¹² Though the age diversity of the gardens is not representative of the city’s population, the ethnic and wealth diversity seems more equally represented in the gardens; in 2001, eight gardens had a majority of allophone members (their first language being neither English nor French).¹³ In 2009, between 27% and 61% of the gardeners were from low-income families (below $20,000 income annually), with greater representation in gardens in districts with higher poverty rates, indicating that the Community Garden Program is, in general, a socially-inclusive organization.¹⁴ A 2006 survey conducted by the City of Montreal indicated that the primary motivations for involvement in the community gardens project are equally recreation and food production.¹⁵

As of 2009, the Community Garden plots achieved a high intensity of production, averaging between 27 kg and 87 kg of food annualy (adult consumption averages around 40kg annually).¹⁶ This production has a significant impact on the population’s well-being both socially and economically, and has a high value in a city with the highest rates of poverty in all of Canada.¹⁷

Despite the city’s interest in providing gardening space to its citizens, the community gardens in Montreal have an annual 25% oversubscription and a low annual dropout rate of 10%, a clear indication that the demand for space vastly outweighs the supply.¹⁸ Energy and food prices as well as demand for gardening space continue to rise, but the network has come to a standstill and with the delayed relocation of several gardens closed due to soil contamination¹⁹ it seems unlikely that the city will make the effort required to provide much more space for urban agriculture than currently exists.

Collective Gardens:
While most of Montreal’s urban agriculture fame is due to the city’s community garden program, there is also a multitude of not-for-profit organizations that run an alternative network of urban agriculture projects. The collective garden movement has grown significantly in the second half of the 2000s as the connection has been forged between environmentalism and social justice concerns, and food security-focused organizations such as Action Communiterre have established themselves in Montreal. The political side of the movement is led largely by university organizations such as Food Systems Projects at McGill and Concordia, and the collective gardens associated with these institutions often provide more of a technical educational role than one of active community development.²⁰ On the other hand, the gardens opened by independent organizations operating in various Montreal neighbourhoods have a more specific focus on place-based community development and social relationships rather than politics. The demographic implicated in each of these two categories are somewhat dichotomized with the university-centred programs attracting younger, more middle-class participants, and the community organizations representing a more balanced, but still not entirely inclusive mixture of social classes (between 20% and 61% of gardeners receiving incomes below $20,000 annually).²¹

The primary difference between collective and community gardens, other than the organizations that oversee them, is the way in which they are structurally organized. Collective gardens, rather than being comprised of many small plots cared for independently by individuals or families, are closer to the Victory Garden model (practiced during WWII) of a single larger plot cultivated collaboratively by a team of volunteers. Montreal has seen the development of numerous creative solutions for making use of unused urban space for gardening by means of container gardening, balcony cultivation, vertical gardens, and so on.²² Differences also lie in the reasons for their creation – while the community garden network was created and grew due to demand from apartment or other small residence-dwelling citizens who simply wanted something to replace the back yard space that they did not have, the collective gardens grew from a more politically-conscious motivation to promote public awareness around food security issues.²³ Reflecting the social consciousness basis on which many of the collective gardens were created, many of them have a specific mandate to produce food for community kitchens and food banks: for example, in the case of the Victory Garden Network (an Action CommuniTerre project in NDG consisting of five collective gardens and several backyard plots), one third of the food produced was donated to the NDG food depot and other community organizations.²⁴ Though the actual productivity of Montreal’s collective gardens is lower than that of the community gardens per square metre (averaging 16kg per person for the season),²⁵ the social and educational aspects of collective gardening should be taken into consideration when judging the value of these operations: on a practical level, collective gardens tend to each have a facilitator who provides technical knowledge and guidance to the volunteers while encouraging self-directed learning and a sense of ownership over the project. On a social level, the collaborative working environment – having been created around food security and urban sustainability issues – provides a forum for discussion between community members, lateral knowledge sharing, and a space for community links to form. Taking into account the collective gardens’ relationships with other local organizations, the number of individuals who are involved in some way with the gardens spans far past the estimated 2000 people who volunteer in the gardens directly, to a broader community of approximately 17,000 citizens who volunteer for or benefit from the services with which Montreal’s collective gardens are associated.²⁶The 2010 Réseau de Jardins Collectifs du Québec (RJCQ, established in 1997 to consolidate the network of collective gardens)²⁷ had seventeen members who all together ran sixty-two collective gardens on and around the island of Montreal. These numbers do not include peripherally-affected organizations.

The Future of Urban Agriculture in Montreal
Considering the plateaued support for community gardens in Montreal and the ever-growing immigrant population (who comprise a large portion of the demand for the plots), it seems as though there is a movement away from the community garden network as the dominant incarnation of urban agriculture in Montreal. The desire of the urban population for interaction with the food system on which they rely is leading to ever-growing numbers of organizations linking knowledgeable gardeners with community organizations, housing projects, schools, etc., to incorporate the urban production of food into the lives of a diversity of Montrealers. Though the scale of the collective gardening movement is difficult to see due to the social rather than physical nature of what it produces, the collaboration inherent in collective gardening is important in facilitating the development of a social-aware, active, and mutually-supportive network of community members and organizations. There is a common problem with movements of this type which, like the organic food movement beginning in the 1980s, tend to be somewhat elitist, imposing upper-class values on disadvantaged populations who may be preoccupied with other social problems and not only access to fresh, healthy food.²⁸

In Montreal, however, it seems that the urban agriculture movement is unique in its social inclusivity, and as a result holds true potential as a means to diminish the impacts of economic and social disparity. Despite the fact that the city seems to prioritize the creation of community gardens less presently than it did even a decade ago, and is not pulling its weight in terms of answering citizens’ demands for green space, this does not negate the positive role played by the gardens that do exist on urban spaces and communities. The fact that the community garden network has seemed to reach a plateau in Montreal is perhaps beneficial for the diversification of the urban agriculture movement as it encourages alternative urban gardening practices and the growth of the collective movement (which relies less on re-zoning urban lots, as is the case with many community gardens, and more often makes use of backyards and empty spaces belonging to organizations such as schools, community centres, etc). It is conceivable that with collaboration between the collective and community gardens in a neighbourhood, the two models could complement each other. Prioritization in terms of allocating community garden plots to citizens who demonstrate particular need for and capacity to manage their own plot (experienced gardeners, people who are under the average income level, large families, etc.) would allow for the community plots to be put to their most effective use in terms of improving food security. The neighbourhood collective gardens would serve the need of the citizens who involve themselves in urban agriculture for purposes of recreation and social engagement, and would provide a forum for ecosystem development and community events to take place. The university-centred organizations and other establishments with alternative growing techniques or who host workshops and other learning activities could provide horticultural training and education about the social, environmental, and political concepts that are implicated in various ways with the urban agriculture movement. Urban gardeners could flow between the different types of gardens as their skill and knowledge levels, availability, and need for supplementary food changed over time. This exchange of members could serve to change the community and collective garden networks from isolated scenes to interrelated, rich, and diverse communities.

Endnotes:

1. Thom, Megan. “Cultivating Connections: The Urban Agriculture Movement.” Rooftop Gardens Project. University of Victoria, 2007. Web. 10 April 2011.

2. Cosgrove, Sean. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Program.” Urban Agriculture Notes. City Farmer, Canada’s Office of Urban Agriculture, 2001. Web. 10 April 2011.

3. MacNair, Emily. “Seeds of Success.” Growing Healthy Communities Project. Polis Project on Ecological Governance, 2002. Accessed Web. 10 April 2011.

4. Ibid.

5. Cosgrove, Sean. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Porgram.”

6. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Program.” Ville de Montréal: Jardins Communautaires. World Urban Forum, Vancouver, Canada, 2006. Web. 10 April 2011.

7. Cosgrove, Sean. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Porgram.”

8. Duchemin, E., Wegmuller, F. and A.-M. Legault. “Urban Agriculture: Multi-dimensional Tools for Social Development in Poor Neighbourhoods.” Field Actions Science Report, 1:1 (2008). Web: Facts Reports. Accessed 10 April 2011.

9. Cosgrove, Sean. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Porgram.”

10. MacNair, Emily. “Seeds of Success.”

11. Cosgrove, Sean. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Porgram”.

12. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Program.” Ville de Montréal: Jardins Communautaires.

13. Ibid.

14. Duchemin, E., Wegmuller, F. and A.-M. Legault. “Urban Agriculture: Multi-dimensional Tools for Social Development in Poor Neighbourhoods.”

15. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Program.” Ville de Montréal: Jardins Communautaires.

16. Duchemin, E., Wegmuller, F. and A.-M. Legault. “Urban Agriculture: Multi-dimensional Tools for Social Development in Poor Neighbourhoods.”

17. MacNair, Emily. “Seeds of Success.”

18. Cosgrove, Sean. “Montreal’s Community Gardening Porgram.”

19. DeWolf, Christopher. “More Community Gardens to be Closed.” Spacing Montreal, July, 2008. Web. Accessed 10 April, 2011.

20. McGill Food Systems Project. MFSP, 2011. Accessed Web. 10 April 2011.

21. The only research done on the demographics of the collective garden network in Montreal addresses the economic status of members; unfortunately, no information about ethnic diversity is available.

22. Regroupement des Jardins Collectifs Du Québec. RJCQ, 2011. Web. Accessed 10 April, 2011.

23. Action Communiterre: Learn, Grow, Share. Action Communiterre, 2011. Web. Accessed 10 April, 2011.

24. Ibid.

25. Duchemin, E., Wegmuller, F. and A.-M. Legault. “Urban Agriculture: Multi-dimensional Tools for Social Development in Poor Neighbourhoods.”

26. Ibid.

27. Regroupement des Jardins Collectifs Du Québec.

28. Guthman, Julie. “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Projects.” Cultural Geographies 15: 431 (2008). Pg. 431-447. Web: SAGE. Accessed 10 April 2011.

 

 

 

Research, Experimental Documentary, and Slow-motion Video In Action (Part 1)

Kandis Friesen

On institutional discourses and regulatory imaginations

By Julia de Montigny,
Undergraduate student in Human Environment at Concordia University and member of the Prisoner Correspondence Project at QPIRG Concordia

This paper was presented at the Study In Action Undergraduate and Community Research Conference (March 2011, Montreal).

Introduction
A queer youth geography has yet to be developed; queer youth’s spatially constituted identities and experiences have remained in uncharted territories. Space for queer youth has largely been ignored, undermined, and not been made. Queer youth are rarely brought into focus by queer theorists, geographers, and others with adult power. Youth in particular exist in shifting institutional worlds; their experiences may most often be dictated by the rules of school, organized recreational activities, family, and the state; as such their experiences may be directly shaped according to the pressures, perspectives, and practices of these institutions. My research seeks to undermine the narrow visions of queer youth produced by and through institutional practices and discourses and propose new practices and strategies that function in the interest of queer youth. The questions that I hope to explore in my research are: what are the institutional visions of queer youth produced by those inside and how do the contours of the language and the imagination of these institutions limit or open up spatial possibilities for queer youth?

Purpose
The purpose of my research is varied and ranges from a desire to explore and investigate how queer identities and geographies are understood and controlled by institutional bodies, to challenging the ways that heterosexuality is normalized in adolescent development. By highlighting the ways that everyday public spaces are produced as straight and even homophobic spaces, I want to call attention to the need and politics of the struggle for queer space. I also try to open up the positive potential for social equity and liberation by asserting queer identities in youth cultures. It is my hope that this article contributes to the greater project of destabilizing hegemonic ideas about youth’s sexualities that are used to limit possibilities, standardize desires, and restrict access to space.

Methodology and process
Experiences and questions afforded to me through community work I do in Montreal with youth (queer and otherwise) have allowed me to reflect on the ways that queer youth are excluded and the ways that their presence in schools, urban spaces, and other institutional locations is made invisible.  These insights have allowed me to see the ways that in social interaction queer youth are silenced, their identities are discounted, and they are too often presumed to be straight. These insights and the questions that arose offered the framework of this project’s initial intent, which was to study how queer youth, aged 14-18 find, define, and create space for themselves in Montreal by looking at the role that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ) youth organizations, and high schools more generally, have in the making of spaces for youth. Through qualitative interviews, I wanted to examine how queer youth identities were articulated in general and in high school spaces and community organizations specifically, while considering existing social, economic, and cultural distinctions within the queer communities I was to study. The aim of this project was to draw on experiential knowledge and promote youth’s voices, ideas, and perspectives.

The process of obtaining ethical approval from the Office of Research’s Ethics Board at Concordia University in order to work with queer youth under the age of 18, a “vulnerable population,” provided me with an opportunity to shift my focus. As the process extended through time I realized that I would not be likely to obtain ethical approval and so I began to informally question and examine the concerns and the process of ethical approval. The formal process was organized by the demand that I produce several revised forms, return emails and phone calls, and attend meetings with my supervisors. It began in November 2010 and was only approved in April 2011, but not without a surprising caveat: that the motivation for identifying queer youth as vulnerable (and thus impossible to interview) was that the ethics board understood queer youth as also being street youth. This process and the resulting conversations and implicit assumptions provided me with a solid basis from which to pursue a critical analysis of the institutional discourses on which the members of the ethics board relied. This new project provided critical insights into the powers that shape and influence queer experience, specifically among youth.

To work around the lack of access to queer youth’s own experiences I used two alternative methods to analyze the spaces of queer youth: telephone interviews with public high schools and a discourse analysis of the process to obtain ethical approval. The absence of space to do the research I had originally planned inspired me to develop a new research project. Thus my focus emerges both through my own identity and politics and through a process that provided me with the conditions for meaning-making through research.

Through the use of critical discourse analysis I investigated, and by so doing intervened, into the ways that spaces are both imagined and made to function as sites of social production and personal development for queer youth. I studied the ways that high schools and universities define and regulate queer youth’s identities, spaces, and voices while exploring the assumptions that guided the perspectives and decisions made by those with power inside of institutional bodies.

Discourses are those representations and practices that structure thoughts, make meanings, constitute identities, produce subjects, and make social relations legible (Gregory et al. 2009). In other words, discourses make the world as we understand it; they are those groups of ideas that structure the way a thing is thought, and the way people act on the basis of that thinking. Rose (2007) argues that the power of a discourse lies in their claims of truth. As she puts it:

knowledge and power are imbricated one in the other, not only because all knowledge is discursive and all discourse is saturated with power, but because the most powerful discourses, in terms of the productiveness of their social effects, depend on assumptions and claims that their knowledge is true (Rose 2007: 144).

As such, discourses have the power to limit and restrict alternative ways of imagining the world and the social realities of its subjects.

Results and Discussion
Throughout my research I tried to reveal the spatialized contours of heteronormativity that queer youth navigate in these institutions. I also identified many significant discourses and discursive practices. First of all, I found that institutional policies discursively limit queer youths’ identities. The university imagined queer youth to be victims and vulnerable to further victimization. The possibility that this story (if relevant), not to mention other, more complex stories might be told through my interviews was thus stopped. On the other hand, the discourses that were produced by high school staff I consulted were more varied. Individuals in these institutions seemed interested in opening up diverse ways for queer youth identities to be accepted and articulated. However, some staff members continued to echo heteronormative discourses and the identities of queer youth were limited.

Secondly, I found that ambivalence and uncertainty surrounds queer youth, ultimately making their voices silent and their experiences invisible. For example, I found that the attitude of the ethics board was largely incongruent with the perspectives articulated by the participants at the high schools that I consulted. Overall, high schools did not create space for queer youth because youth were not seen to be at risk, contradicting the vision held by the ethics board. I realize that this position is a little tricky to break down and may encompass contradictory attitudes, but let me attempt to expose the complicated reality that unfolded through my research.

On the one hand, I argued that the ethics board was perpetuating a silencing fear over queer youth by describing them as being vulnerable, at risk, and in danger. On the other hand, I pointed out the ways that it appears that queer youth experiences, as people who may face systemic discrimination are not being taken serious. Ultimately, I maintain both positions because the results of these assumptions in practice are similar; institutions, for a variety of motivations, make little or no space for queer youth. The discourses that were used by the high schools and the ethics board produce limited identities and regulate possibilities for change.

Thirdly, I tried to demonstrate how the spaces and institutions queer youth rely on are by and large created by adults. This process makes it so that queer youth’s needs cannot readily be addressed. Throughout the interview process with high school staff I found myself wondering to what extent my questions even corresponded with the concerns that queer youth might have. I still do not know what queer youth might have wanted to speak about, but the process and discourses produced by these institutions made it so that I could not find out. It is worth noting that none of the high school staff spoke with me about plans to consult youth about their desires or having done that already. The university prevented me from interviewing youth and asking them first-hand what their thoughts and experiences were about how queer space is made or not.  In a way, the fact that space was not made for queer youth by high schools made it so that the staff could not really reveal what the perspectives of queer youth were because they had no reference point.

Fourthly, and finally, these institutional processes contribute to the difficulty queers already face in challenging spatial heteronormativity and make it so that space is not made for queer youth. Many queer geographers have argued that heteronomativity is embedded in the landscape of the city (Davis 1995); throughout this essay I tried to expand on that by showing how heteronormativity may also exist in institutional spaces, in the social practices which they constitute, and in the processes that regulate knowledge production.  Some have suggested that it might be interrupted and undermined through struggles for queer visibility, so I propose that future studies could work with queer youth and promote their voices and experiences and make space for them.

As Rofes put it over two decades ago:

Gay and lesbian youth attend schools throughout the nation, and they have existed quietly throughout the history of (…) education. These students — from every ethnic and racial background, in urban, suburban, and rural schools — have sat passively through years of public school education where their identities as gay and lesbian people have been ignored and denied (1989, 445).

The need to hear queer youth voices is real and this may just be a beginning.

References:

Davis, T. (1995). The diversity of queer politics and the redefinition of sexual identity and community in urban spaces. In D. Bell & G. Valentine (Eds.), Mapping desire: Geographies of sexualities (pp.284-303). New York, NY: Routledge.

Mayr, Andrea. (2008). Language and power: An introduction to institutional discourse. Continuum: London, UK.

Rofes, Eric. (1989). Opening up the classroom closet: Responding to the educational needs of gay and lesbian youth. Harvard Educational Review, 59(4):444-453.

Rose, Gillian. (2007). Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, Cali: SAGE Publications.

Security
Charcoal, pencil, pencil crayon, and water-based ink on paper
Artist: Karen Boyles

This project explores our complex relationship with the environment.  The work investigates the cultural, political, historical, and personal aspects of our reciprocal relationship with the environment. A central theme to the work is the relationship between violence and the environment. The viewer is presented with a broadened perspective on violence in relation to the environment: environments built by violence, violence in security, violence in order, violence found in the banal. The materials employed play a fundamental role in the representation of these ideas.

Artist: Karen Boyles
Karen Boyles is a third-year Studio Arts Major at Concordia University, a community activist, gardener,  and woodworker. Her interest in history, social and environmental justice, and the arts drives her to articulate her concerns through a visual language. Specifically, she employs  a combination of relief printmaking techniques and traditional drawing materials to create visual environments that reflect the conflicts found within our own.

This installation was presented at the Study In Action Undergraduate and Community Research Conference
(March 2011, Montreal).

This introduction is based on presentations by Chris Dixon, Cleve Higgins & Jaggi Singh, and was compiled and written by Jaggi Singh. Chris and Cleve presented on the “Community-based social justice research” panel at the Study in Action 2011 Undergraduate and Community Research Conference, while Cleve and Jaggi have together facilitated community research workshops at QPIRG Concordia.

Chris Dixon is an activist with Sudbury Against War and Occupation and author of the forthcoming book Against and Beyond: Radical Organizers Building Another Politics in the U.S. and Canada.

Cleve Higgins was involved with the IndyClass project at McGill and is currently an organizer with Anarchist Tech Support and the Indigenous Solidarity Committee.

Jaggi Singh a member of Solidarity Across Borders and the Justice for the Victims of Police Killings Coalition; he is also the Working Groups and Programming Coordinator at QPIRG Concordia.

 ***

“Knowledge itself doesn’t make change for the better, it’s people with knowledge that do.”

This is the second volume of a modest but growing Montreal-based undergraduate and community research journal. It’s one of the rare spaces to promote and share a “community-based social justice research” model. What is that model, and how does it differ from traditional ideas of research?

Let’s first break down the term “research,” which can often be intimidating and alienating to many people. Research, simply stated, is “knowledge work.” It’s the diverse things we do in our lives to acquire information, skills, and a deeper understanding of our society. Defined in this way, research is something everyone can engage in and produce.  If you work for a wage, if you’re a parent, if you’re studying, if you’re analyzing current events, you’re doing knowledge work. Social struggles for survival, and for a better society, inherently produce some of the most vital and innovative forms of knowledge.

Unfortunately, many of the ways people undertake grassroots research, as part of their daily lives, and within their communities, is not validated or recognized as such. There are very rare instances where our research can be presented in a respectful, empowering way.

University education in particular trains us to see academics and intellectuals as the specific people who come up with important ideas and understandings about the world, while the rest of us remain spectators to their debates and discussions. More fundamentally, the traditional research paradigm ends up serving the interests of power and privilege, and helps to maintain those very systems that we’re surviving under and mobilizing against.

There are some obvious examples of research in the interests of power – when conducted or funded by the military, by business roundtables, and by right-wing think tanks. In many other cases, though, it’s not so obvious. Still, the overall effect is more or less the same: traditional university-based research basically sustains the idea that ordinary people can’t be trusted to control the institutions that directly affect their lives.

In opposition to “research in the interests of power,” the community-based social justice research model is rooted in the idea of “research as a tool of social transformation.” By empowering previously marginalized and oppressed communities and by providing support to social movements for justice and dignity, research tries to better the world, not reinforce its injustices. Community-based social justice research, like social movements at their best, offers new possibilities and alternatives.

Community-based Social Justice Research	Institutionally-based Traditional Research
Grassroots	Experts
Process-oriented, incremental	Results-oriented, final product
Subjective and rigorous	Presumed objective neutrality
Popular, useful	Corporate, profitable
Collective	Individual
Accessible to everybody	Professionalized
Holistic	Compartmentalized
Prioritizes community accountability	Prioritizes institutional and professional accountability

The values and methods underlying community-based social justice research are synonymous with the ideals that motivate non-hierarchical grassroots organizing in the first place. It’s worth exploring some of those values and methods (they’re outlined in the table above, contrasted with institutionally-based traditional research).

Clearly, a community-based social justice research approach places the emphasis on a collective, interactive process and making holistic links between subjects and people. It’s the antithesis of the ivory tower academy.
As part of a grassroots research method, the community-based social justice research approach respects the constraints of social movements and day-to-day survival. This method validates taking the time needed to actually work with people and movements – respecting their timeframes – as part of an ongoing process. In this method, people are agents of their own knowledge, not objects to be examined, prodded, or studied.

“Subjective rigour” acknowledges that we all bring biases to the research that we do and critiques that presumption that anyone possesses overarching “objective neutrality.” But, at the same time, community-based social justice research does strive for rigour, meaning research that is fact-based, informative, accessible, and reliable. Claiming “objectivity” is certainly no guarantee of accuracy, and the community-based social justice method honestly admits our biases, working within them to share knowledge.

Importantly, research is always accountable to somebody. People who study and work in universities are very accustomed to being held accountable by professional scholars. This happens through all sorts of everyday procedures, including classroom assignments and tests, qualifying exams in graduate school, tenure decisions, and academic publications.

Doing effective community-based social justice research requires an alternative, grassroots accountability, what can be called “movement-based accountability.” When researchers understand ourselves as responsible to movements and people, we have to grapple with important questions: How do we determine what we research? How do we make sure that our research actually furthers social justice struggles? And how can those with whom we work in solidarity hold us accountable?

There aren’t yet many well-developed mechanisms for formally elaborating this kind of accountability, although there is more and more discussion of things like “co-research,” “militant research,” and “movement-based research.”

While there’s a seemingly stark contrast between a traditional research model and the community-based social justice research model, it’s worthwhile to nuance our understanding. There are definitely community-based approaches that can co-exist with the academy and universities can provide some openings for supporting alternative research methods  (the Community-University Research Exchange is one such example).

Within this volume we highlight, in part, university-based research from undergraduates. On one level, this encourages newer students to see themselves as researchers who can be engaged with the community. Moreover, undergraduate research does not have to be perceived as a precursor to eventual graduate work and entry into the academy, but rather something valuable in-and-of-itself as a way of engaging our community in diverse ways.

We are sharing research in this volume in the form of writing and art. This is also a reflection of the diverse ways we can communicate our research, through oral history, skill sharing, popular gatherings, multiple forms of media, and much more.

Ultimately, what distinguishes community-based social justice research is that it is about building capacities – it’s about nurturing and strengthening the knowledge and analysis of people engaged in struggle.

The community-based social justice model of learning and research is not something that is new; different communities and cultures worldwide have applied it in diverse ways, for generations. One of the inspiring books that outlines this model in practice is Paolo Friere’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Fortunately, we have some local models that attempt to put the values of community-based social justice research into action. This journal, sharing the research and expression of artists, activists, undergrads, and community organizers, is one such effort. The Community-University Research Exchange (CURE) and the annual Study In Action Undergraduate and Community Research conference, from which we’ve selected just a few submissions for the content of this year’s Convergence, is another. This triad of projects, affiliated with Quebec Public Interest Research Groups (QPIRG) at Concordia and McGill, is one modest but very important local contribution to the building of an alternative research model and a growing community of researchers, broadly defined, who together converge to transform the world.

teaching environmental justice

kathryn lennon & asha philar

We are students in Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, who developed and led a student-driven seminar course on environmental justice. This presentation will address the process of planning and facilitating an environmental justice course. It will also focus on the challenges and successes we’ve encountered, and how to start discussions about difficult topics in an environmental studies context. We also hope to share resources and ideas with interested participants.

how and why we created the course

As students in Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo, we encountered the assumption that everyone comes to environmental studies with the same understandings of the environment. As women of colour, we found this frustrating, and were especially concerned about the lack of discussion of race in relation to power and environmental decision-making.

We began with the questions: How can we talk about the “environment” as something universal when there are so many different ways of seeing the world”? Why is discussion of race issues absent in our environmental classrooms?

From here, we decided if nobody was teaching such topics, we would have to teach ourselves. We created Environmental Justice, ERS 475/675 as a student-led, for-credit seminar course. It ran at the University of Waterloo from January to April 2010. We had 15 students in the class, and one faculty supervisor. Our class met for 3 hours sessions, once a week.

course description (exerpt from our syllabus)

Environmental justice explores the way that environmental actions, policies and perceptions interact with social inequities. Environmental justice calls for an examination of the way that individuals and communities with less power are disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation, and are left out of environmental decision-making.

Environmental justice is a movement; an analytical framework; a state of being; a conversation for community understanding, advocacy and mobilization; and a political principle. This course offers an overview of environmental justice in theory and practice, and will introduce students to marginalized voices in the environmental movement, and examine ways in which identity shapes our understanding of environment.

The purpose of this course is to create a community of learners who will explore environmental justice topics that are often overlooked in other university courses. This is a peer-taught pilot course. The content of the course will be shaped by the knowledge, experiences and contributions of participants. We will focus on a Canadian context, using local examples. Weekly meetings will model anti-oppressive and interactive ways of learning, and will include guest speakers, readings and student-led activities.

course objectives

1. To gain a working knowledge of key concepts including: environmental justice, environmental racism, privilege, power, and oppression

2. To introduce participants to skills and research methods useful for environmental justice work including: indigenous research methodologies, participatory action research, and facilitation skills.

3. To develop critical thinking skills and use them to analyze environmental issues with an environmental justice framework.

4. To examine and challenge our own assumptions.

5. To hear from voices at the margins of environmentalism

6. To build course content and resources collaboratively.

7. To connect to a greater body of environmental justice research, knowledge and action.

Our learning in this course will be supported by discussions, lectures, group and individual work, readings, and activities. Through theory and reflection, case studies, and real world examples and application, we will explore micro and macro components of an environmental justice analysis. This is a very interactive and collaborative course. Participants must take responsibility for their own learning and are expected to: relate and apply concepts from the class to their life outside of the classroom, to contribute thoughtfully to class discussions, and to actively listen to their peers. Participants will contribute to course learning objectives through readings, discussions and projects, help build a course resource list and lead one activity during the semester.

Course themes include:

•  history of environmental justice, and the canadian context
•  race, class, and gender
•  power, privilege, and oppression
•  representations of environment and wilderness
•  personal position and identity
•  communication and consultation
•  doing accountable research for and with communities not our own
•  rights and laws
•  decision-making and policy

definition gallery

To give you a taste of the activities we use in our classroom, we will now do an activity called the ‘Definition Gallery’. The purpose of this is to critically examine definitions of words such as environment, justice, environmentalism and wilderness. This exercise illustrated how language frames our understanding of the world.

Materials: chart paper, pens

1. Write the words environment, justice, environmentalism, and wilderness on sheets of paper.

2. Ask participants to add definitions of the words to the sheet of paper, either their personal definitions, or commonly used definitions.

3. Discuss the definitions, using questions such as: What were our sources of knowledge? How had we come by our understandings of these words? How had our personal identities shaped our understandings of these words?

discussion questions

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching environmental justice as a for-credit university course, within a postsecondary institution, rather than as a free community-based course, or informal discussion group?

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of working within a system to create change?

• What is your current understanding of environmental justice, of how social inequalities fit in with environmental issues?

• Have you had a chance to learn about environmental justice in university classes?

• Do you have experiences with alternative education?

• Can teaching be a form of activism?

more resources

Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh. 2008. Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction. (Emond Montgomery Publications: Toronto).

Julian Agyeman, Peter Cole, Randolph Haluza-DeLay and Pat O’Riley Eds. 2009. Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada. (UBC Press: Vancouver).

Linda Tuhiwai Smith. 2005. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. (Zed Books: London).

“Green is Not the Only Colour”, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/514/

The Green Justice Kit

http://www.youthactioncentre.ca/English/actionresources/guides.htm

Interview with Robert Bullard, one of the pioneering scholars and activists in the environmental justice movement.

http://www.sundancechannel.com/thegoodfight/projects/robert_bullard

Kevin DeLuca. “A wildnerness environmentalism manifesto: Contesting the infinite self-absorption of humans”.

William Cronon, “The trouble with wilderness: Or, getting back to the wrong nature”.

“Why are Greens so white?” Toronto Star- June 2, 2007 by Peter Gorrie, http://www.environmentaldefence.ca/pressroom/viewnews.php?id=78

Buzzelli, Mark. “Environmental Justice in Canada: It Matters Where You Live”. http://www.cprn.org/doc.cfm?doc=1969&l=eng •

this article is taken from a workshop given at Study in Action 2010, Montreal.

re-con

MYTH: a life sentence means you are in prison for the rest of your life

During the partial ban on capital punishment throughout the 1960s, an average life sentence meant 7-10 years in prison. Now in Canada, a life sentence is 10-25 years in prison. Convictions that can result in a life sentence include first and second degree murder, manslaughter, treason, bank robbery and multiple escapes. Consecutive and indefinite sentences can also become a life sentence. It is also common for your sentence to be increased due to charges incurred while serving time, for failing to comply with correctional protocol. Finally, if we consider how many people die inside before their sentence is completed, a life sentence can mean you are in prison for the rest of your natural life.

MYTH: having completed your time in prison, you are ‘free’

During the partial ban on capital punishment throughout the 1960s, an average life sentence meant 7-10 years in prison. Now in Canada, a life sentence is 10-25 years in prison. Convictions that can result in a life sentence include first and second degree murder, manslaughter, treason, bank robbery and multiple e capes. Consecutive and indefinite sentences can also become a life sentence. It is also common for your sentence to be increased due to charges incurred while serving time, for failing to comply with correctional protocol. Finally, if we consider how many people die inside before their sentence is completed, a life sentence can mean you are in prison for the rest of your natural life.

MYTH: the number of years you are sentenced to is the time you’ll be in prison

When given a life sentence, the number of years you’re sentenced to is the mandatory minimum amount of time you’re required to spend in prison. That is to say that, once you’ve served your time, you become eligible to go on parole. But make no mistake- being eligible for parole does not mean being granted parole. The National Parole Board is the gatekeeper to the outside world for prisoners. They have absolute and exclusive decision-making power over who is granted parole. This could happen much later than the years to which you were sentenced to without parole. For people sentenced to 15 years or more, there’s the ‘Faint Hope’ clause. This clause means that 15 years after conviction, you can apply to go before the parole board sooner. Since the abolition of the death penalty, this clause has been the most hotly contested part of the Criminal Code.

MYTH: a parole violation means you’ve committed a crime

Not necessarily. You can be sent back to prison for breaching a standard parole condition or an individually specific one. A parole violation could mean anything from drinking alcohol to not telling your parole officer about a change in your finances. Even if your parole officer merely suspects that you will breach your parole conditions, that’s grounds enough for sending you back to prison. Parole officer’s overuse of the ambiguous ‘lack of transparency’ as justification for re-incarceration amounts to nothing more than a legalised ‘gut-feeling’.

MYTH: when you’re sentenced to life, you’re the only one affected (you do the crime, you do the time)

Strict parole conditions will not only affect you, but also almost everyone significant to you. Correctional Services Canada is entitled to question, visit, and surveil others in your life – at work, home, and play. Prisoner’s families are not only subject to society’s stigma, but also the psychological and financial burden of a loved one’s longterm imprisonment.

MYTH: prison is easy (‘club fed’)

Suicide rates for prisoners are nearly 8 times that of those on the outside. However deaths in custody are ambiguous because of the common nature of violence from prison guards and police.And if you fail to toe-the-line on the inside, you are not only less likely to get out on parole, but also face the threat of solitary confin ment – which is akin to torture. In Canada, HIV transmission rates are 10 times higher inside prison. Hep C prevalence is 25 times higher. Parole release rates are at their lowest. Considering that you have severely limited access to resources on the inside, it’s not surprising that concerns around health-care make up most of the official complaints from prisoners. Inside the prison walls, you become a kind of non-citizen without many basic rights.

MYTH: harsher sentences prevent people from killing others

Until 1976, a conviction of murder was punishable by death. Since the process toward the formal abolition of the death penalty began in the early 1960s, the life sentence has shifted from 7, to 10, to 20, to now up to 25 years in prison without parole eligibility. Presently, there continues to be a push for longer sentences in hopes of deterring people from committing murder. Yet, studies repeatedly show that harsher sentencing is not necessarily the cause of a decreasing homicide rate. By focussing on the need for retributive justice, the root causes for why one might kill another get lost in the shuffle: how social and economic oppression structure people’s lives and life choices.

MYTH: anyone who kills someone ends up in prison on a life sentence

Our society condones – even honours – many different kinds of killing. From the military to the police, murders are often justified as necessary. The State and corporations are also commonly responsible for less visible violence that can result in death (ex. poor labour conditions or denying refugees asylum), but are not stigmatized in the same way as those who commit interpersonal violence.

MYTH: if you’re sentenced to life you’re nothing more than a criminal

Being sentenced to life does not automatically mean that everything you’ve done in the past is now worthless, nor that you have no potential to contribute to the community in the future. One choice should not necessarily determine the rest of your destiny. Being a son, daughter, parent, friend or citizen cannot be disregarded or erased. When prison staff look down at you as though they are morally superior, it becomes ironic that you must be ‘good’ or ultra compliant yet you are inescapably assumed ‘bad’ and the guards are viewed as inherently ‘good’, while their disrspect and contempt for prisoners makes for routine violence on their part, from their positions of authority.

MYTH: the people incarcerated are the reason prison is dangerous

Lifers spend an extensive amount of time inside a system that is defined by heavy regulation, control, and punishment. The dangers lies in the destructive and restrictive environment of the prison, not in the prisoners themselves. According to the office of the Chief Coroner, between 1986 and 1995 only 9% of all the deaths in custody in Ontario were attributed to homicide. This statistic also does not distinguish between who committed these homicides whether it was guards or other prisoners. According to the same stats, prisoners were 4 times more likely to commit suicide than to be murdered. By concentrating on the “inherent” dangerousness of prisoners sentenced to life, the focus of public discussion often veers away from the brutality and violence of the prison system and its personnel.

MYTH: the people incarcerated are the reason prison is dangerous

If you have been sentenced to life you will be routinely categorized by the Canadian state as a “risk” to this conception of the “public” which

you are now excluded from. You’re inevitably assumed to be a threat, yet parole conditions mean you have to be perfect: a kind of supercitizen. However, lifers on parole accounted for only 0.5 percent of the reported homicide deaths in Canada during the past 31 years. In contrast, in Montreal over the past 23 years, 60 people have been killed at the hands of the police. None of them have been convicted of either voluntary or involuntary manslaughter (this is called police impunity). Yet, who are we still encouraged to trust, and who are we lead to stigmatize and outcast? •

the role of temporary migrant workers in canadian food production

kerri westlake

I will be discussing policies which grant temporary work permits to people living outside of Canada, known as guest worker programs. Although guest worker programs provide permits for many sectors, I will be focusing on agriculture.

I started this research for the McGill Food Systems Project, in response to their request for criteria to help the administration choose between food providers. The goal of the project is to embed environmental and social concerns within the university’s food purchasing policies, which to date have been focused primarily on price and quality. In building the criteria we tried to be cautious of the criticism of environmentalism as a historically white middle class movement that often fails to incorporate social concerns in discussions of sustainability. Examining human health and working conditions was one of the ways we tried to address this issue. I will be expanding on this section of the project, which is actually a work-in-progress. Specifically, I’ll be expanding on the SAWP and TFWP as two increasingly important sources of labour in Canadian agriculture.

I want to begin by mentioning that there are ways in which my race, class, and cis- gender privilege inevitably informs my research both in ways I have tried to be mindful of and in ways that may be invisible to me. Additionally, the scope of sources I consulted was restricted by my English and limited French language skills. This is most evident in what I see as the greatest flaw in my research- the lack of formal incorporation of primary interviews. That said, I have had informal discussions with industry representatives, farmers, workers, and support workers. So thanks so much to those shared their stories and ideas.

Guest worker programs are racist immigration policies which create differential rights for those considered ‘temporary’ compared to those considered ‘permanent’. The distinction between permanent and temporary is based on a gendered and racialized definition of ‘skills’ which is legitimized by the discourse of citizenship. Guest worker programs are based on the exploitation of temporary non-citizens to protect the economic privilege of permanent citizens. This presentation will discuss the ways in which the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) bolster the economic success of Canada’s agricultural industry in a globalizing economy by restricting the rights and voices of temporary migrant workers.

The context in which my research emerged- that is, in the quest for ‘sustainable’ food – is one where much of the current literature calls for increasing local consumption. Often implicit in the argument for local food is a particular image of what it means to eat locally. This image has been taken up in branding and marketing tools, which conjure images of rolling pastures dotted with quaint houses inhabited by a tired but happy white family working in harmony with their domesticated animals to offer up sustenance to urban consumers. Such romantic visions of the Canadian family farm are prevalent in advertising and packaging and underlie much of the current push for local food.

But, not only are such romanticizations premised on the erasure of agriculture’s historic reliance on a precarious and marginalized workforce, such as the use of British orphans in the early 1900s, and interned Japanese Canadians and German POWs during the world wars, but today they are more inaccurate than ever.¹

trends in canadian agriculture

Similar to global trends, Canadian agriculture has been characterized by expansion and consolidation. In the past few decades the number of farms has declined, while average farm size has grown, as has corporate control of these farms.² The percentage of children from farming families who pursue careers in agriculture is also rapidly declining.³

These trends have been in part caused by trade liberalization policies wherein, in order to remain economically viable in a globalizing market, farms must grow larger and larger to gain cost benefits that accompany economies of scale.⁴ In North America, these policies have led to divestment in small scale agriculture, the loss of former export markets, and artificial depression of commodity prices as a result of subsidies. One important consequence is a race to the bottom in terms of production costs, including labour costs.

The trends have meant growing demand for so called “low skilled” wage labour, while the destabilization of local or subsistence economies has created a surplus of dislocated workers. While there has always been a discernable link between the Canadian economy, agriculture and immigration policy, it is particularly tangible in this context. Since the 1960s, the government and agricultural industry have been claiming this labour shortage with increased force.

SAWP and the creation of a ‘reliable’ workforce

Enter the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Initiated in 1966 in an agreement between the Canadian and Jamaican governments, SAWP grants temporary permits to low skilled workers in agriculture if employers, in accordance with the Canadians First policy, could prove that they could not recruit Canadian workers.⁵ It is important to note that the low skill category is based on the devaluation of manual work, and does not accurately reflect the importance of what these workers provide. (Indeed, the process of ‘naming’ – choosing which employees return to work in subsequent years – is so beneficial to employers because of the increased skills a returning employee can offer. Employers can also request workers with specific skills such as experience operating complex machinery.⁶)

Prior to this agreement, labour shortage demands had been largely met with permanent immigration recruitment programs that were highly regulated as to who may or may not enter. Temporary work, agricultural and otherwise, had been an informal phenomenon wherein migrants sought seasonal work in Canada with the expectation of returning to their place of origin.

The novel emergence of state sanctioned temporary labour programs has become a strategy for ensuring Canada’s successful competition in a globalizing economy. A reliable source of cheap labour was and is essential to encourage and maintain capital investment.⁷ But because agriculture is among the most hazardous and low paying sectors it is difficult to find employees. Additionally, the extent to which labour rights legislation applies to agricultural work is based on the relic of the family farm I discussed earlier, where rising costs associated with increased rights were not considered possible.⁸ As a result, to use Quebec as an example, farm workers’ weekly minimum of one day of rest can be postponed, and they are not paid overtime.⁹ These conditions combine to create a sector in which, as government and industry representatives frankly admit, most Canadians will not work.¹⁰

Where Canadian residents or citizens are employed, they are most often poor or recent immigrants, and are often characterized as “unreliable” by their employers. For example, an article in Canadian Poultry Magazine states that a chicken catching company had previously “…had so much trouble finding catchers that we had to accept such unacceptable behaviour [as taking illicit drugs on the job]” but that “a major part of the solution came… when [we] started hiring guest workers from Guatemala…. Workers from Quebec know that they can be replaced”.¹¹ The differentiation between reliable and unreliable workers is often conflated with race, gender, ethnicity, and/or nationality, but as scholar Nandita Sharma argues, “what allows migrant workers to be used as a cheap and largely unprotected form of labour power are not any inherent qualities of the people so categorized but state regulations that render them powerless”.¹² It is by facilitating this conflation that the SAWP and TFWP act to perpetuate racist stereotypes as well as to create severe disincentives for workers to be anything but reliable.

SAWP, which has been expanded since 1966, is a program jointly overseen by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), and the consulate of the sending country.¹³ While Canadian employers dictate the demand for workers and CIC ultimately grants work permits, the sending country is responsible for worker recruitment and all associated costs. Sending countries compete with each other to provide the most reliable workers at the quickest response time, as the remittances sent back now contribute significantly to these economies.¹⁴ These same agents have the role of advocating for workers’ rights but the two conflicting incentives limits worker representation in the event of a complaint and in annual negotiations. Unequal representation is one of many ways in which employers are granted power by this program.

Employers also have full discretion as to which employees return to their farm. Through the process know as naming, employers can request certain workers back by name, in some cases for up to 20 consecutive years.¹⁵ Likewise, employers are granted the discretion to fire an employee for “any significant reason”; the North South Institute has reported reasons such as falling ill, questioning wages, and refusing unsafe work.¹⁶ Since a worker’s permit is tied to a specific employer, to be fired is to lose one’s status in the country. This is important because the threat of repatriation combined with the prospect of not being ‘named’ in the coming seasons engenders fear of speaking out or detesting sub-standard conditions. But, as they are currently set up, the SAWP and TFWP rely on worker complaints to determine whether employers are abiding by the program rules or provincial labour standards; the Commission des normes du travail (CNT) and the Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CSST) will only perform workplace inspections upon receipt of a complaint.¹⁷

In addition to restricting workers’ voices, SAWP is designed such that its workers have fewer rights than their Canadian counterparts. That one’s status is tied to a specific employer means that workers within this so called “labour mobility program” do not have the mobility to freely sell their labour as Canadians do. Also, while Employment Insurance (EI) is deducted off of the paycheques of SAWP employees, their loss of status and repatriation upon losing or finishing a job contract makes it practically impossible to claim EI payments. Similarly, while all foreign workers in Canada in theory have the same right as citizens to contest termination before the law, repatriation again means that this is impossible. What underlies all of these injustices is the threat of repatriation and the fear and silence it engenders.

Many live on the property of their employers, who have full discretion to impose safety, discipline and property rules, often further limiting worker mobility. There have been a number of documented cases wherein employers withheld workers’ personal documents, or refused to grant worker requests to be taken to medical facilities.¹⁸ The availability of documentation in Spanish, the first language of many workers, is limited.

In 1987, true to trade and econ lib trends, the HRSDC relinquished administrative control of the SAWP to Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS). FARMS is a non-profit, member (i.e. employer) funded and driven company. Simultaneously the cap on how many permits were granted was removed, and the number of SAWP workers increased 15 fold the next year. The move also increases employer representation in annual negotiations, particularly unjust considering the inability of SAWP workers to bargain collectively. Collective bargaining rights allocated to the majority of Canadian citizens are denied to agricultural workers in Ontario and Alberta. In Quebec, while not explicitly forbidden, Article 21 of The Quebec Labour Code requires that there are 3 ordinary and continuous employees- obviously a problem for those employed in seasonal or otherwise precarious work.

increasing precarity under the temporary foreign worker program

Despite the clear position of power that employers are already in, they continue to demand a more flexible, less regulated workforce. These demands were met in 2003 with the initiation of both the Live-In Caregiver program, which I unfortunately don’t have time to talk about, as well as the TFWP, an expanded and deregulated program modeled on SAWP.

The TFWP expanded employment possibilities to new sectors and is organized outside of bilateral agreements, meaning that there are no annual negotiations with sending governments and that workers can be recruited from anywhere in the world.¹⁹ This means that if one workforce begins to demand rights, employers can easily hire a completely different set of workers. As one worker observed, this effect can already be seen: “they see that Mexicans are showing their claws and want to defend their rights, so now they prefer Guatemalans because they are more silent”.²⁰

While these programs are purportedly beneficial for economic empowerment and livelihoods of people in so-called developing countries, and are thus used to bolster the image of Canada as benevolent, they are in effect akin to slavery. As Eugenie Depatie- Pelletier argues, the conditions set up by the SAWP and TFWP are in breach of the UN Supplementary Convention of the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, which Canada ratified in 1957. According to this agreement, the “condition or status of a tenant who is by law, custom or agreement bound to live on land belonging to another person and to render some determinate service to such another person, whether for reward or not, and is not free to change his [sic] status” should be abolished at any cost.²¹ SAWP and TFWP workers are both required to live on their employer’s property, as well as prohibited from seeking permanent status once in Canada.

That SAWP and TFWP workers’ permits are tied to one employer goes against the right to liberty and security of the person and freedom of association in Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.²² These rights restrictions stand in stark contrast to those afforded to so called “high skilled” workers or temporary workers coming from wealthy predominantly white countries. Both high skilled workers with a temporary work permit and low skilled workers from predominantly European and Commonwealth countries are allowed to seek permanent status in Canada and neither are restricted to one employer nor repatriated upon termination of employment.²³

It is the conditions which create a precarious workforce that ensure the success of the industries in which these workers participate. In the past decade, Canada has become a net exporter of six out of eight crops where SAWP workers are hired (apples, tomatoes, tobacco, cucumbers, peaches, cherries, ginseng, and greenhouse tomatoes.²⁴ This workforce is becoming what Sharma calls “permanently temporary”, as more similar work programs are implemented and the amount of workers participating in them is overtaking the number of citizens/residents in some sectors.²⁵ For example, in horticulture TFWs now represent 18% percent of the total workforce and 53% of the workforce in SAWP employing sectors.²⁶ People destined to enter the workforce with permanent status have shifted from 57% in 1973 to 30% 20 years later. The remaining 70% were workers entering with temporary status.²⁷

how the discourse of citizenship legitmizes exploitation

The importance of these workers to the Canadian economy is clearly at odds with their temporary, non citizen status but it is precisely their non-citizen status which allows for the legitimization of differential rights that are essential to their economic value. And, as Sharma argues, these unequal rights are naturalized by discourses of citizenship.

For example, in a 1971 discussion in the House of Commons, when asked whether unemployed citizens rather than “offshore” workers could be encouraged to work in agriculture by increasing social benefits, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau replied: “No… the government will not commandeer the work force. The whole political philosophy of the government is based on freedom of choice for citizens to work where they want”.²⁸ It is clear that freedom to choose where one wants to work is a right reserved for citizens but also, that such a statement is not openly acknowledged as contradictory, is evidence of how citizenship naturalizes the existence of two sets of rights.

Of course, differential rights for citizens and non-citizens have been constant throughout Canadian history. The definition of citizenship began as explicitly racialized, preferencing immigrants who would not, to quote former Prime Minister Mackenzie King in 1947, “…fundamental[ly] alter the character of our population”.²⁹ They remained so until the era of multiculturalism in the 1960s. This is popularly proclaimed as the time when Canada moved from a racist state to an inclusive one but, as evidenced by the SAWP and TFWP as well as the issues my co-panelist have discussed, terms of citizenship are still racist.

Throughout the presentation, I have talked a lot about the ways in which Canadian immigration policies restrict the rights and voices of temporary migrant workers, but I also want to make it clear that these policies by no means render these workers without agency. Nor have these conditions been passively accepted by workers. As long as there have been differential rights allocated to temp workers there has been resistance.

I just want to end by saying that the process of developing criteria for McGill’s administration has been a frustrating one that has further solidified in my mind the comments made by last nights’ panelists. To affect change, it is necessary to target capitalism as the root cause of these issues. •

a version of this essay was presented at Study in Action 2010, Montreal

1. Preibisch, KL. 2007. Local produce, foreign labor: Labor mobility programs and global trade competitiveness in Canada. Rural sociology 72 (3):418-449.

2. Ibid.

3. Statistics Canada. 2001. 2001 Census of Agriculture. Government of Canada. Ottawa.

4. Sharma, N. 2008. On Being Not Canadian: The Social Organization of “Migrant Workers” in Canada. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie 38 (4):415-439.

5. Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. 2009. Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program HRSDC Publication Services. [Accessed February 2010]. Available from http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/workplaceskills/foreign_workers/ei_tfw/sawp_tfw.shtml.

6. Preibisch, 2007.

7. Sharma, 2008

8. Choudry, A, J Hanley, S Jordan, E Shragge, and M Stiegman. 2009. Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing Co., Ltd.

9. Gouvernement du Québec. 2001. An Act Respecting Labour Standards. edited by Commission des normes du travail. Quebec.

10. Sharma 2008.

11. Dumont, A. 2010. A Tough Job: Farmers can help make it easier. Canadian Poultry Magazine.

12. Sharma 2008, 425.

13. The program now includes Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Antigua, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Monserrat and Mexico.

14. Brem, M. 2006. Migrant Workers in Canada: A review of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. edited by L. Ross. Ottawa: North South Institute.

15. The threat of refusing to name the family members of a given worker has also been reported; Brem 2006.

16. Ibid.

17. Personal interview with representatives of the CNT and the CSST, November, 2009.

18. United Food and Commercial Workers Union of Canada. 2007. The Status of Migrant Farm Workers in Canada 2006-2007. Toronto.

19. Additionally, unlike SAWP employees, TFWP workers pay for there accommodation, have no minimum requirement for hours worked per contract, and can stay for up to 2 years; Canada, Human Resources and Skills Development. Temporary Foreign Worker Program 2010 [Accessed March 2010]. Available from http://www.rhdcc-hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/workplaceskills/foreign_workers/index.shtml.

20. Choudry et al 2009, 69.

21. Depatie-Pelletier, E. 2008. Under legal practices similar to slavery according to the UN Convention: Canada’s “non white”“temporary” foreign workers in “low-skilled” occupations. In 10th National Metropolis Conference. Halifax.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Brem 2006; Preibisch 2008.

25. Sharma, 2008.

26. Brem, 2006.

27. Sharma, 2008.

28. Ibid, 433.

29. King, William Lyon Mackenzie. 1947. Canada’s Postwar Immigration Policy. Paper read at House of Commons Debates, at Ottawa.

 

svea vikander

I am a Montréal-based visual artist and intern psychotherapist, working with issues of bodily self-determination and body image. The project I presented at Study in Action 2010 is called Life Lines and can be found online at www.onlinelifelines.blogspot.com. In this project, I am interested in creating alternative visual representations of traditionally ‘unsightly’ places. I photograph people’s scars and document their narratives – about how they acquired their scars and about what meaning they find the outside world attributes to them.

Since I began to exhibit the project in 2006, I have received submissions from around the world – people who have photographed themselves and who wish to share their own stories/images. While my work explicitly focuses on a ‘taboo’ or ‘unsightly’ subject area, it is a body-positive, anti-ableist project. In essence, it aims to address the oppression felt by people whose physical appearance marks them as ‘other’, to encourage a safe (and anonymous) exchange of stories and images about personal struggles to overcome illness, disease, accident, violent attack, surgical procedures, etc.; and finally, to encourage viewers to reconsider their ideas about their own bodies, as well as the bodies of others.