November 2019
Sister Writes: The Work Issue
Sister Writes: The Work Issue is a participatory research creation project that illuminates the hidden experiences of women working in Toronto's services industries. From hotel staff to restaurant servers, nannies to retail workers, women in Toronto's service industry perform essential work. But their experiences -- and the challenges they face due to the devaluation of women's labour -- often go unspoken. We wanted to change that. Over the past year, Sister Writes mounted free creative writing workshops in downtown Toronto, where women worked with professional authors…
Find out more »Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism
Join us for the Toronto book launch for Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, James Steinhoff's Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Pluto, 2019). An exploration of the relationship between Marxist theory and Artificial Intelligence! Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Contemporary machine-learning AI allows machines to increasingly approach human capacities for…
Find out more »FilmSocial Presents: Soylent Green
FilmSocial screens the dystopian cult classic Soylent Green. Saturday, November 30th @ 7:30pm at Eyesore Cinema (1176 Bloor, back room). Soylent Green (1973) brings us to New York in the year 2022. Rising global temperatures combined with food and water shortages only serve to exacerbate capitalism's pathological excess. Charlton Heston stars in this classic sci-fi/police procedural where the characters must navigate a world marked by deep class division, corporate control over valuable resources, police corruption, and the overall monetization of fear…
Find out more »January 2020
Book Launch: On This Patch of Grass
Join us for a discussion of On This Patch of Grass: City Parks and Occupied Land (Fernwood Press, 2019), with author Matt Hern, and respondent Cheryl Teelucksingh. Description Parks are importantly fertile places to talk about land. Whether its big national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks, or humble urban patches of grass, we tend to speak of parks as unqualified goods. People think of parks as public or common land, and it is a common belief that…
Find out more »February 2020
Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada
Join us for the Toronto book launch for Barry Eidlin's Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018) . The comprehensive and systematic assessment ever of explanations for US union decline! The most comprehensive and systematic assessment ever of explanations for US union decline! Presentation by and Q&A with author. Why are unions weaker in the US than in Canada, two otherwise similar countries? This difference has shaped politics, policy, and levels of inequality.…
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