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Resilience

My piece on how prayers were entered into the record during the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline hearings is part of this beautiful collection of essays, published by Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and co-edited by Susie O’Brien and Cheryl Lousley. Read their introduction here, drawing links across case studies and conceptualizations of environmental futurity.

For the latest on the Enbridge Northern Gateway project:

To consider how it might connect to other pipeline projects:

And, you should read Tyler McCreary’s piece on the hearings, “Beyond Token Recognition: The Growing Movement against the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project,” in A Line in the Tar Sands.

 

 

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Summer updates

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“Tout Cela Est…”

poster

In 2014, in the midst of Quebec’s provincial election, Mariam Esseghaier, Marie Eve Lefebvre and I finished and released our online documentary, “Tout Cela Est…: Communicating the Charter of Quebec Values/Communiquer la charte des valeurs québécoises.”

Since, we’ve spent a great deal of time reflecting on the video project, how it was meant to intervene in the Charter debate in 2013-14, and how we might recommend others approach similar mixed academic-journalistic-activist interventions given limited time and resources. With thanks to the Canadian Journal of Communication‘s special issue editors, Sandra Smeltzer and Leslie Regan Shade, as well as to everyone who ever took time to be interviewed, to translate parts of the video, to help us with our website, to ask questions during conference presentations, and finally to edit or recommend changes to our Research in Brief, here is our final written piece, “‘It won’t go viral’: Documenting the Charter of Quebec Values and Talking Theory on YouTube.”

 

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Twelve years later …

Today I dug up a story I wrote for The Standard in St. Catharines, Ont., published Dec. 29, 2004. As I described in the tweets below, it’s a story that has always stayed with me, but one that has more resonance at the moment, as we hear of more people risking so much to seek asylum here.

For more resources on the Safe Third Country Agreement, see:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Journalism futures

I’ve published two pieces this fall that take up questions of the future of journalism in Canada, both written since the latest announcement of another round of Postmedia buyouts and Rogers Communications Inc.’s decision to scale back its magazine printing schedules.

My review of Vivian Smith’s (2015) book, Outsiders Still: Why Women Journalists Love–And Leave–Their Newspaper Careers, appears in the latest issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication.

My story about Taproot Edmonton, a new project to enliven local journalism in Edmonton, appears in J-Source.

Both of these pieces raise questions about what journalists’ working lives will look like in the future.

For further reading & listening:

“As the ink fades,” by Jaren Kerr

“Women and newspapers,” on Canadaland

 

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“Freedom Train: Mobilizing alternative media”

An article I have been working on for some time was published in the International Journal of Communication in August. Here is the abstract:

“In 2012, as efforts grew to move more Canadian oil into international markets, members of a group of First Nations communities undertook a cross-country protest to protect their lands from pipeline encroachment. This analysis of documents produced and shared by organizers of Freedom Train 2012 maps modes of mobilizing participation across media spaces. Drawing upon alternative media literature, this article proposes a turn from analyzing how protest movements use media tools to how protest movements can be understood as forms of alternative media. The article concludes by advocating further study of alternative media practices to attend to how traditionally marginalized voices and cross-community communication networks contest industrial, governmental, and mainstream media power.”

Here is a direct link to the article: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4907/1773

And, you might also be interested in this short documentary about Freedom Train 2012: http://www.yinkadene.ca/freedomtrain/