Organize!

Building from the Local for Global Justice

Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, Eric Shragge, Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, Eric Shragge

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781604867268
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What are the ways forward for organizing for progressive social change in an era of unprecedented economic, social, and ecological crises? How do political activists build power and critical analysis in their daily work for change?

Grounded in struggles in Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, as well as transnational activist networks, Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice links local organizing with global struggles to make a better world. In over twenty chapters written by a diverse range of organizers, activists, academics, lawyers, artists, and researchers, this book weaves a rich and varied tapestry of dynamic strategies for struggle. From community-based labor organizing strategies among immigrant workers to mobilizing psychiatric survivors, from arts and activism for Palestine to organizing in support of Indigenous Peoples, the authors reflect critically on the tensions, problems, limits, and gains inherent in a diverse range of organizing contexts and practices. The book also places these processes in historical perspective, encouraging us to use history to shed light on contemporary injustices and how they can be overcome. Written in accessible language, Organize! will appeal to college and university students, activists, organizers and the wider public.

Contributors include: Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, Eric Shragge, Devlin Kuyek, Kezia Speirs, Evelyn Calugay, Anne Petermann, Alex Law, Jared Will, Radha D'Souza, Edward Ou Jin Lee, Norman Nawrocki, Rafeef Ziadah, Maria Bargh, Dave Bleakney, Abdi Hagi Yusef, Mostafa Henaway, Emilie Breton, Sandra Jeppesen, Anna Kruzynski, Rachel Sarrasin, Dolores Chew, David Reville, Kathryn Church, Brian Aboud, Joey Calugay, Gada Mahrouse, Harsha Walia, Mary Foster, Martha Stiegman, Robert Fisher, Yuseph Katiya, and Christopher Reid.

Book Contributors

Brian Aboud is a sociologist specializing in migration, ethnicity, and racism studies. He teaches in the Humanities Department at Vanier College, Montreal. His research and writing focus largely on the governmental regulation of migrant entry at the turn of the twentieth century in Canada especially in respect of migration from Ottoman Syria and on the Syrian-Lebanese presence (in Montreal and Quebec particularly) that resulted from those migrations. He earned his doctoral degree in sociology from the Australian National University.

Maria Bargh (Te Arawa, Ngati Awa) is a lecturer in Maori Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She has a PhD in political science and international relations and has edited two books, Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism (2007) and Maori and Parliament (2010). Her current research looks at sustainable self-determination for Maori with a particular focus on renewable energy.

Dave Bleakney started at the post office in 1987 and is currently an elected national representative for education in the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) where he writes and delivers curriculum based on popular education techniques. He was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, and left looking for a job. He is active in settler-Indigenous solidarity and anti-capitalist globalization projects.

Émilie Breton has been active in social justice struggles for a number of years: in the student movement, a feminist collective, as well as in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist groups. Recently, she has been involved with Project Fly Home and her interests have focused more specifically on issues related to racism and Islamophobia. She has been a member of CRAC for the past four years, and is currently working to complete a monograph on the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC). For her master’s degree, in political science at UQAM, she is conducting research on anarchist organizing in Montreal.

Evelyn Mondonedo Calugay earned her graduate diploma in Nursing and worked for ten years in the Philippines before immigrating to Canada. She retired in 2005 after thirty years’ work in a Montreal psychiatric hospital. The mother of three grown boys and grandmother of seven, Evelyn became an active member of PINAY (Filipino Women’s Organization in Quebec) in 1995 and has been a full-time (volunteer) organizer since 2005. She assists members in resolving labor problems, immigration papers, and violation of their individual rights. Evelyn is also involved in organizational work for the empowerment of PINAY members through education, self awareness, and skills development and she actively participates in the advancement of the organization’s campaigns for policy change concerning labor, immigration, and other women’s related issues that are perpetuating the day to day struggle of our members who are with a precarious status. Evelyn’s personal experiences growing up and in her adult life were the push factors for her active involvement in PINAY. Her children helped raise her political awareness and encouraged her to become part of the movement for change in the Philippines, a movement addressing the root causes of problems experienced by Filipinos at home and abroad.

Joey Calugay was born in the Philippines during the tumultuous years leading up the declaration of Martial Law by Dictator Ferdinand Marcos. His family fled the economic hardships and social unrest of the Philippines in exchange for the harsh winters of Quebec in the mid-1970s. Joey’s first organizing experience was with the Montreal Coalition of Filipino Students first helping to set up public forums around Philippine-related issues and then as an organizer for a local campaign to get justice for a group of young Filipinos after they were discriminated against by a well-known Montreal clothing retailer. The campaign was a success and it helped to galvanize his belief and understanding of “people power” and its potential for social change. His activism led him to experience organizing methods in various sectors including union organizing in Montreal’s textile and garment industry. He is currently a community organizer for the Immigrant Workers Center and is a part-time filmmaker.

Dolores Chew, who was born and raised in Kolkata, India, combines academic expertise with grassroots activism and finds “migrant feminism” the most apt description of what grounds her positions. She is a founding member of the South Asian Women’s Community Center in Montreal and the 8th March Committee of Women of Diverse Origins, a historian at Marianopolis College, a research associate at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Concordia University and is on the editorial committee of the journal LABOUR, Capital and Society/ TRAVAIL capital et société.

Aziz Choudry is assistant professor of international education in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. He is coauthor of Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants (Fernwood, 2009), and coeditor of Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He has over two decades of experience working in activist groups, NGOs and social movements in the Asia-Pacific and North America as a researcher, educator, and organizer.

Kathryn Church is associate professor in the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University, Toronto where she teaches community organizing and research methods. From 2002 to 2009, she directed the school’s research program through the Institute for Disability Studies Research and Education. Her research practice is an experiment in fusing ethnographic studies of ruling with arts-informed methods of writing and representation. Comfortable with both scholarly and popular writing forms, she is among a handful of academics who have documented the activist work of the Canadian psychiatric survivor movement. She consulted to the documentary film Working Like Crazy and has curated two exhibits, most recently Out from Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember (with Catherine Frazee and Melanie Panitch).

Radha D’Souza is currently reader in law at the University of Westminster, London. Her research interests include global and social justice, social movements, law and development, colonialism and imperialism, social theory, socio-legal studies in the “Third World,” and water conflicts. She teaches law and development and has previously taught in sociology, development studies, human geography, and public law and legal theory. Radha is a social justice activist and practiced as barrister at the High Court of Mumbai in India.

Jill Hanley is associate professor in the McGill School of Social Work, where she teaches community organizing, social policy, and applied research. Her research focuses on access to social rights (especially labor, health, and housing) for precarious-status migrants and the organizing strategies used by migrants to access these rights. She is cofounder and an active member of Montreal’s Immigrant Workers Center.

Mostafa Henaway is a Montreal-based community organizer with the Immigrant Workers Center (IWC) for the past four years and Tadamon! (solidarity in Arabic) Montreal. The IWC is an education and campaign center for immigrant workers in Montreal. It supports individual workers coming to the Center for advice and builds wider campaigns around these specific problems on a wide range of issues relating to the rights of immigrant workers. Mostafa Henaway has been active with immigrant worker organizing with taxi drivers in Toronto and involved in antipoverty work in Toronto with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, and is an independent writer and radio producer.

Robert Fisher teaches community organizing and social theory at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. His most recent books include an edited collection, The People Shall Rule: ACORN, Community Organizing, and the Struggle for Economic Justice (2009), and Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing (2010), coauthored with James DeFilippis and Eric Shragge.

Mary Foster is active in social justice organizing in Montreal, especially on issues relating to immigration and national security. She was active in the Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui from 2003 to 2009 and other community initiatives such as Solidarity across Borders and the People’s Commission Network.

Sandra Jeppesen has been involved in many anarchist projects including Who’s Emma, Resist (Toronto), the random anarchist group, tao communications, Active Resistance, Uprising bookstore, Block the Empire/Bloquez l’Empire, the Toronto Anarchist Bookfair, the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair and the CRAC collective. She has produced a punk-anarchist novel called Kiss Painting; academic articles on postanarchism, antipoverty activism, anarchist sexualities, and antiracist pedagogy; zines and workshops; poetry and theory; buttons for the Emma Goldman Memorial Combat Group; spoken-word performances, guerrilla texts, culture jams and other trouble. She is employed as an educator and researcher at Lakehead University, Orillia.

Yuseph Katiya has an MSc from Concordia University’s Department of Geography, Planning and Environment. His current research focuses on urban entrepreneurialism and culture-led regeneration in Montreal, Quebec. He is active in social movements and the Planners Network. He can be reached at [email protected].

Anna Kruzynski has sought, over the last fifteen years, to conjugate activism and intellectual work. She is currently assistant professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Montreal. Although she has been active in mainstream community organizations and social movements, her heart lies with the more radical fringes of the larger global justice movement. She was first involved with a radical feminist collective and is now a member of a neighborhood-based antiauthoritarian affinity group working toward the self-management of all aspects of community life (www.lapointelibertaire.org). Her research activity, using participatory action research methodologies, aims to accompany activists and organizations in their efforts to document and analyze their praxis. She worked with the Popular Archives of Point St. Charles to document the history of activism in that working-class Montreal neighborhood and is now working with the CRAC on a large-scale study of antiauthoritarian organizing in Quebec.

Devlin Kuyek is a Montreal-based researcher and activist with GRAIN (www.grain.org), a small international organization based in Barcelona that works with social movements around the world to support peasant agriculture and food sovereignty. He is author of Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada and a member of the steering committee of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN).

Alexandra Law is a teacher at Dawson College, a Doctoral candidate at the Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal, and a member of the Quebec Bar. She volunteers with the Immigrant Workers Center in Montreal. Alexandra gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Edward Ou Jin Lee is currently a doctoral student at the McGill School of Social Work. His primary research interests include participatory, digital, and visual research methodologies in conjunction with critical race, feminist, and antioppression theorizing. His doctoral research examines the relationship between migration and sexuality...