Briarpatch Articles

The Yukon is caught between millennia of geological change and the accelerated effects of climate change. These photos capture the natural chaos, change, and destruction of an ever-shifting landscape.

Through handshakes behind closed doors, with refugees as commodities and borders as bargaining chips, our migration system is crumbling

Unearthing Justice is the handbook Canada’s environmental movement needs. Anna Bianca Roach reviews Joan Kuyek’s new book about the mining industry and its discontents.

How can immigrant settlers – weighted by our own racial memory of land and its loss – cultivate ethical relationships with the land here?

Resource Movement asks – earnestly – how can a group of rich kids help advance social justice movements?

Since September, a wave of protests has swept across the globe. Inequality and its violent maintenance is at the heart of the discontent.

After two months on strike, CUPE 3903 members were feeling worn out. That changed when, one night – armed with a Rototiller, under cover of darkness – they decided to plant a community garden on the picket line.

In the Yukon’s northernmost community, the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is reckoning with how to preserve their land and culture, amid a warming climate and an influx of tourists

Digital platforms boast that they’ve “democratized” cultural production. But getting to use something and having a meaningful say in its operation are two different things – and only one is really democratic. But what would truly democratic platforms and cultural production look like in Canada?

The story of climate justice organizing in Alberta, at the heart of the tarsands, is the story of a group of young activists learning what it means to lose, and keep on fighting

On August 5, 2019, the Indian government issued a constitutional order stripping the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status. These emails between two friends in Pakistan and Kashmir present the international crisis as it unfolds in real time through the eyes of two young women.

What does it mean when “choosing love” isn’t an individual act, but a collective effort of building a world in which all of our material needs are met? estefania alfonso falcon reviews Kai Cheng Thom’s I Hope We Choose Love.

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.