From the Briarblogs

Announcements

  • Call for submissions - Workplace activism, the labour movement and the economic crisis

    Striking Back: Workplace activism, the labour movement and the economic crisis
    “Economic theory suggests that the convulsions of the capitalist system will eventually be resolved by the destruction of capital and a restoration of profit and production. Crisis theory predicts that unresolved contradictions only get worse. If an alternative force is not present,  there is [...]

  • Call for submissions

    Education for a change: The education system and the work of building a better world

    Who could bear to hold privilege that meant the suffering and death of others if they had not been trained from early childhood to see these others as not real? Who would tolerate, for even an hour, the inhuman conditions imposed by the privileged, if they had not been trained from early childhood to feel themselves not fully entitled to life?
    -Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories

    If you plan for a year, plant rice.
    If you plan for ten years, plant trees.
    If you plan for 100 years, educate your children.
    -Chinese proverb

    The education system, broadly conceived, represents both our best hope of emancipatory change and the primary mechanism for replicating the status quo. In this time of economic upheaval, the dual potential of the education system - to either prolong injustice or empower groups of people to confront it - becomes increasingly apparent and more hotly contested. In our September/October issue, “Education for a Change,” Briarpatch will surveying this contested space, exploring the challenges as well as the opportunities the current moment presents to allow us to rethink the ways we share knowledge (and consequently power) with one another, with our children, and with the children of others.