Briarpatch Articles

There’s no rulebook for transformative justice work. What we have and are being given are principles, beliefs, guidelines, and personal experiences. We must use these offerings iteratively, as tools to grapple with our own spaces and our positions within them.

The argument for a reduced work week asks: why do we work to produce so much more than we can possibly use? Why not work less, waste less, distribute better, and enjoy the age of abundance that we’ve been promised?

Teachers bargaining for the common good contains the seed of radical change – and I mean “radical” in the same way that Angela Davis uses it, meaning “grasping at the root.”

Briarpatch editor Saima Desai talks to two judges of our Writing in the Margins contest about Idle No More and MMIWG, ethical kinship, writing queer sex, and their forthcoming work.

If sex were factored out of the equation, sugaring would look a lot like the precarious gig economy jobs of Uber drivers or bike couriers. And – like in other web-based jobs – sugar babies in Montreal are struggling to develop collective strength with their fellow workers.

In Honduras, women maquila workers are fighting back against the multinational garment companies that they say are endangering their health and safety.

Canada’s prison farms are being reopened. But when prisoners will be paid pennies a day, and the fruits of their labour will likely be exported for profit, there’s little to celebrate.

Toronto Pearson Airport is Canada’s largest workplace. There, workers are building up an organization that aims to match the airport’s power.

How have restrictive new laws like America’s FOSTA/SESTA and Canada’s PCEPA impacted sex workers’ labour conditions? Lindsay Blewett reviews Red Light Labour: Sex Work Regulation, Agency, and Resistance

In mainstream media, labour journalism has been replaced by financial reporting and business sections. But journalism students are raising the labour beat from the grave.

Can Alberta’s labour movement rise to the challenge presented by the new UCP government?

Corporate, for-profit planning, aided and violently enforced by the settler colonial state of Canada, will not bring about a just transition.

The climate crisis is the biggest story of our time, but it’s a story that’s extremely difficult to tell. And as corporate owners shutter local newspapers, we’re losing our best tool in understanding what climate change looks like on the ground, and our best method to empower people to fight back.

Corporate media owners are killing local newspapers – which is making it difficult for everyday people to understand the on-the-ground impacts of the climate crisis.

Conversations with disabled, trans, and racialized survivalists who are changing what it means to be a disaster prepper

End-of-life doulas are gaining popularity, as people begin to resist highly-medicalized palliative care and seek a gentler, more personalized death. But will they ever be integrated into Canada’s public health system?

In every sense that matters, poverty is a 2S-LGBTQ issue. So why aren’t mainstream Canadian 2S-LGBTQ organizations treating it as such? And who’s picking up their slack?

If “the 1990s were Black,” why is anti-Blackness still cemented into Canadian society today? Phillip Dwight Morgan reviews Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi’s BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.

In the preparation for a global general climate strike on September 20 – that’s centred around a tactic that came directly out of the labour movement – where are the unions?

The struggle over whom Winnipeg’s downtown library belongs to serves as an unexpectedly sophisticated example of what’s possible when leftists organize outside of the electoral sphere and commit to winning a single protracted struggle.