March/April 2023 cover

Ontario’s housing tribunal and its new digital dystopia

Ontario's housing tribunal and it's new digital dystopia. Plus: a conversation on health communism, the dark side of birth control and its implications for reproductive justice, an argument for unionizing prisoner workers, and the winners of 2022 Writing in the Margins contest.

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  • The cover of the March/April 2023 issue of Briarpatch magazine is on a maroon background. The cover features the WiFi connectivity symbol in the center of a blue circle. The semicircular bars of the WiFi symbol are an aerial view of cul-de-sacs from above with the last 'bar' of houses fading out. Below the cul-de-sacs/bars are the symbols of an anonymous video conferencing participant with a red muted microphone.
    Magazine

    A principle and a place

    by Sophie Jin   Mar 7, 2023   3 min read

    While the state abandons people it deems disposable, many of the articles in this issue highlight and strategize how to better organize and include people in the margins in our movements.

  • Magazine

    Cause of death

    by Mary Fairhurst Breen   Mar 1, 2023   5 min read

    Sophie didn’t mean to die. She had simply arrived at the point where she was prepared to try anything to feel better.

  • Magazine

    Desire path

    by Andi Vicente   Mar 7, 2023   2 min read

    A photo essay on displacement, grief, and Land Back in the Philippines

  • Magazine

    “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability”

    by Megan Linton   Mar 1, 2023   10 min read

    An interview with Beatrice Adler-Bolton on her new book “Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto”

  • A historical black and white image of a number of people protesting at an assembly, some with signs around their necks that say
    Magazine

    Assembling a digital dystopia

    by Yodit Edemariam and Michael Lawler   Mar 6, 2023   21 min read

    The Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board’s “digital-first” hearing model is silencing tenants and helping landlords evict them.

  • A person sits, kneeling in water, surrounded by mountains and a purple moon. They have a fire in their belly, and long wavy hair with four heads - each one feeing a different emotion (sad, calm, enraged, and nervous).
    Magazine

    Birth control and reproductive justice

    by Hannah Dwyer   Mar 6, 2023   15 min read

    Hormonal birth control has long been a feminist symbol of choice, but without other options, is it truly a choice?

  • A prisoner at Guelph Correctional Centre flexes his bicep. He is prying apart jaws of steer skulls at work for Better Beef Ltd., a private company operating on prison grounds. He is inside the factory and wearing an apron and a hairnet.
    Magazine

    The case for a prisoners’ union

    by Jordan House and Asaf Rashid   Feb 27, 2023   5 min read

    Organizing prisoner workers is the first step toward abolishing prisons.

  • Magazine

    A Marxist reader for disorienting times

    by Kate Jacobson   Mar 7, 2023   6 min read

    A reading list to help leftists face the conditions within which we organize without consolation or despair. 

  • Magazine

    Sand

    by Mahta Riazi   Mar 6, 2023   3 min read

    We song our stories – put them to a beat, draw the melancholy out of them, voices like droplets squeezed out of a braided dish rag on an open balcony.