A petition circulating in support of Oliver currently has almost 1000 signatures from PSU students and faculty as well as community members and faculty from around the world. I invite you to add your name and stand with us in solidarity with Oliver.
Book Reviews: The United States, India, and Global (Anti)Imperialism
The four monographs that I review here—by scholars in fields as diverse as history, Asian American studies, and postcolonial literary studies—speak to the durable historical, cultural, and discursive links between Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas and South Asians, in resistance to Anglo-American imperial collaborations.
Losing Alberta: The Narratives of Climate Crisis
In 2021, we have all the tools for tackling the various environmental issues we face; yet in Alberta we have a government committed to expanding the fossil-fuel industry and building pipelines at all costs.
Choosing Real Safety: A Historic Declaration to Divest from Policing and Prisons and Build Safer Communities for All
We, the undersigned, are invested in building safe communities for all. We believe that as a society we are capable of preventing harm and violence differently than the failed punitive approaches governments fund today.
Remembering Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Colour killed by Canadian police
Part of how Canadians define themselves is in opposition to America, particularly when it comes to policing and white-supremacist violence. This list of Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour killed by Canadian police dispels the myth that racist policing is something that happens “over there.”
Spring in Golgotha: A Corona Catechism in Three Parts
In the absence of a belief in divine providence, or a natural order, or the benevolence (let alone competence) of the state, what force brings peace after wartime measures, restores health after times of sickness, rebuilds after breakdown?
COVID-19 Readings and Supports
This page contains links for readings and supports as get through this pandemic together. It will be updated as more information becomes available.
Black Sex Work in Early-1900s Edmonton
Combing through the Edmonton Journal archives I came across the apparent prevalence of Black sex workers in early 1900s and the hostile opposition they faced from the city, police, and newspapers.
24 City: A Worker’s History of Chinese Neoliberalisation
In a striking image from Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, a chic young woman sits in her white Volkswagen Beetle while parked in a blooming canola field; in the distance looms a series of massive, grey residential high-rises. This juxtaposition astutely captures the sweeping changes and strange contradictions of China’s revolutionary century in which Jia’s film, a tribute to China’s working class, takes place.
To Claim Our Time as Queer and Trans People
This speech was delivered on the steps of the Alberta Legislature Building on Trans Day of Remembrance, 20 November 2019.
Otherwise Reproductions: Visualizing Black Trans Labour and Kinship in Sean Baker’s Tangerine
Tangerine’s contribution to the cinematic exploration of work lies in its aesthetics and politics of reproductive labour, and, specifically, its exploration of the structural role of Black trans reproductive labour within capitalist economies.
Love and Politics: Family and Community in Fascist Times
Fascism, on the one hand, infiltrates the highest echelons of power. On the other, it sustains and replicates itself through families and communities.
Sudan Uprising: Poems of Protest
I hope that these poems will encourage and sustain the brave people who are peacefully demanding a more just future for Sudan. I know these verses cannot soothe the wounds of those who have lost loved ones, but I want readers to know that their memory will never be forgotten.
Practical Governance in Housing and Support Services
When undertaking Practical Governance research, the researcher cannot be driven by purely structural critique, nor can they focus solely on trying to promote inclusive relationships separate from questions of power.
Free Speech and the University: A Closer Look at the Chicago Principles
The Chicago Principles proclaim, “without a vibrant commitment to free and open inquiry, a university ceases to be a university.” To that I would caution, if the university stands for everything, then it stands for nothing.
Reflections on Victim-Blaming in the Courts
How can our court system render itself fit for deciding justice in matters of sexual and domestic violence, while simultaneously demonstrating a fundamental ignorance to the social, emotional, interpersonal, and systemic circumstances under which such violence occurs?
Intersectionality: Research, Pedagogy, Circulation – An Interview with Prof. Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro
Prof. Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro provides a rigorous genealogy of the concept and method of intersectionality, carefully outlining its possibilities and limits—its critical power as well as its vulnerability to co-optation—along with a nuanced examination of its key debates.
The New Face of Military Authoritarianism in Brazil
Brazil’s historical experience with a military coup makes it a unique case, as its transition to democracy did not address its wounds. Jair Bolsonaro represents a risk of returning to that dark past, to the time of police state, surveillance and control, freedom restriction, and intellectual censorship. The young and fragile democracy of the world’s fifth-largest county walks on a tightrope.
Liberatory Alternatives and Liberal Containment in Black Panther
The film commodifies alternative politics for mass consumption and profit while also prying open a representational outside to our current colonial reality. It holds in tension the contradiction of feminist, anti-colonial Wakanda with the narrative form of masculine superhero origin story in a massively profitable franchise, pushing at the potential and limits of what can be imagined as alternative.
Jordan Peterson and Citational Practice
Academic critics of Peterson have repeatedly pointed out that while he claims to argue against current research and teaching, he rarely references the work of the scholars and fields he so openly reviles, forgoing the foundational practice of citation—a clear sign that his criticism constitutes in no way serious scholarship.