Briarpatch Articles

More strategies for challenging patriarchal white supremacy in labour

Lessons for the climate justice movement from the University of Toronto fossil fuel divestment campaign.

Mainstream feminism’s wildest dreams involve women being represented at the top of their fields. It’s a depressingly bland and narrow dream. This issue of Briarpatch thinks bigger, asking: how can we ensure all women are safe, healthy, cared for, and free?

An interview with Chantelle Spicer and Tashia Kootenayoo on rooting our movements in consent.

Canada’s predatory lending crisis is no accident.

The archives of Canada’s security state are being strangled by secrecy, censorship, and years of delays.

An interview with Chris Dixon on doing research with social movements.

How do we avoid a world in which human creativity and knowledge becomes just another occasion for commerce?

Future worlds and survival in a changing present gripped by the Anthropocene are on everyone’s minds, and now is the time to dream and lean into what’s coming.

Nearly two years after the summer of 2020, donations and public support for Black police abolitionists on the Prairies have dried up. Meanwhile, police budgets keep growing.

If you’re like me, your path out of this prison will follow the path of grief: denial, anger, negotiation, depression. But only acceptance and behavioural modification open the Big Locked Door. The staff say you are here to get better, but you are here to mourn your illusion of sanity.

nowhere is a prison / is a psych ward / is a suicide / is a death / from ‘natural causes’ is a mass grave

Three years after leaving my family’s home and leaving the double life I was living as a closeted queer Muslim teen, I moved back. With this series, I explore how my relationship with religion, family, and my own queer identity has grown and has manifested in the atmosphere of our home.

If we could reimagine our world in order to put trans women’s well-being at its centre, maybe we could make the system more equitable and safe for all parents and children. 

In Carlyn Zwarenstein’s new book, “On Opium,” she forces us to reconsider everything we’ve ever thought about pain and opioids. Her call to action is unmistakable: policies that criminalize and dehumanize drug users will continue to drive the opioid crisis.

After revelations of rampant sexual violence and abuse in Regina’s non-profits, where can survivors turn for justice?

Police-free schools means kicking cops out, keeping them out, and much more.

In 2018 the Kaska Dena created their own hunting permit system, to protect their land and the animals that share it. In doing so, they amplified a complex dispute between the Kaska and settler governments about who has authority over the land.

In British Columbia, a little-known arm of the RCMP is dedicated to enforcing injunctions for resource extraction companies. Interviews with land defenders, a C-IRG commander, and an anonymous source reveal details about their history, training, and practices.

The fight to protect old-growth forests – one of the last few places where it’s possible to witness land before capitalism.