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    boots

    the Similkameen they say are the strong
    the frayed the twisted, the worn, we feel that

  • Magazine

    Desire path

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

  • 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

    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

    A Marxist reader for disorienting times

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

  • 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

    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

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

  • Magazine

    Sand

    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.

  • Magazine

    “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability”

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

  • Magazine

    Cause of death

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

  • 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

    Organizing prisoner workers is the first step toward abolishing prisons.

  • Magazine

    Journalism with movements in the South

    When journalists insist the world’s problems, no matter how big or small, are caused by U.S. government interference, grassroots struggles against austerity and authoritarianism fall out of view.

  • Four pieces of media against a blue background: a book cover for Indigenous Media Arts in Canada, a movie poster for Writing With Fire, a movie poster for Tell The Truth And Run, and a book cover for the Community Radio Toolkit.
    Magazine

    A reading list on alternative and grassroots media

    Alternative media’s promise is that all people have a right to participate in making media, free of commercial and government control. These are a few of the guiding voices on how to build media for people, not profit.

  • A digital collage showing an underwater ecosystem. Fish swim near fish-shared lures with Google logos for eyes. At the top, a dragnet made of interlocking Meta logos looms over the fish.
    Magazine

    The dangers of Big Tech funding journalism

    Google and Meta are spending millions on programs and awards to help news outlets in crisis. What’s at stake when tech giants are allowed to brand themselves as the saviours of an industry they helped destroy?

  • An illustration of a person with six arms. They have brown skin and black locs. With their many arms, they are frantically sipping an energy drink, typing on a laptop, holding a cell phone to their ear, waving a newspaper, and holding a
    Magazine

    Independent media’s bad labour problem

    From union-busting to systemic racism, when bad labour practices have embedded themselves in the very publications trying to write into existence a more just world, what is to be done?

  • An illustration from the perspective of a person working at a laptop. Looming over their laptop screen is a wide man in a suit and Canadian flag brooch, his hands grabbing the laptop screen. Beside the laptop is a sticky note that says
    Magazine

    Doing anti-imperialist journalism while the world marches to war

    After Russia invaded Ukraine, anything other than support for sending unlimited weapons to Ukraine was painted as pro-Russian propaganda. What does anti-war journalism look like in a climate of social media harassment and state attacks?

  • A digital illustration of a ship (similar to the one on the New Brunswick Flag) sailing on an inky purple sea against a yellow sky. The sail on the ship is a newspaper copy of the NB Media Co-op.
    Magazine

    “Don’t hate the media, be the media”

    How New Brunswick’s Media Co-op is standing up to the Irvings’ corporate power

  • A collage of magazine clippings from New Breed, showing Métis people cooking, meeting, and protesting, along with headlines like
    Magazine

    Métis militancy and Saskatchewan media

    In the ’70s and ’80s, Saskatchewan’s left was chronicled by two formidable magazines: New Breed and Briarpatch. This is the story of how they made grassroots media in Saskatchewan.

  • An illustration of a gaggle of Briarpatch community members: someone wearing a sasquatch costume, people holding cameras, ice skates, a baby, a receipt, and a stack of magazines.
    Magazine

    The people’s magazine

    The funny, strange, and dogged ways that Briarpatch’s readers have helped this magazine reach its 50th anniversary

  • The covers of four archival issues of Briarpatch, against a light blue background
    Magazine

    50 years of editing Briarpatch

    Four editors reflect on decades of editing Briarpatch: what they learned, the stories that challenged them, what’s changed, and what’s stayed the same.

  • A photo of copies of Briarpatch from 2009 strewn across a wooden table. The cover of the topmost issue shows a police in riot gear looming behind a woman, with the words
    Magazine

    File rejected

    In 2009, Briarpatch’s $33,000 application to the Canada Magazine Fund was rejected, without explanation, by Stephen Harper’s Minister of Canadian Heritage. It would take an access to information request to reveal that, behind the scenes, the fund’s staff were also being stonewalled by the minister’s office.