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Settler Colonialism and Climate Justice

Climate justice is often whitewashed and lacks proper representation and power held in the hands of Indigenous communities, who have always been and continue to be, the frontline of social and environmental justice movements. White and/or settler fragility and the myth of multiculturalism (among many other things) are intimately connected to the injustices faced around the world today. Whether it is social justice or climate justice, coming to terms with our own complicity with compassion and responsibility respectfully, adds understanding in how to shift and impact climate justice organising that works towards decolonisation. This workshop will be part settler education and part conversation of the barriers/fragilities we face and what tools we have when practising allyship and solidarity to Indigenous and/or marginalised communities.
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Reserve your spot

We’ll be using Zoom for this workshop.

About the facilitator:

Dona is a Vietnamese-Chinese femme who is a spoken word artist, arts based facilitator, community organiser and cultural worker. Her practice is inspired by regenerative patterns within nature, the exploration of her ancestry and liminality, stories of resilience and diaspora, and the expansive and evolving work of what it means to decolonise, to heal, to love, and to seek truth, even in the darkest of places. She loves to dance, play, eat ice cream, take care of her plants, and has a skateboard at home she hopes to master one day.

 

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This event is happening as a part of Sustain’Alive, an event series centred on activism, society, and the planet.

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Montreal, traditional name Tiohtià:ke is located on unceded Indigenous territory. It has historically been a meeting place for many nations, with the Kanien’kehá:ka as the stewards. We encourage you to reflect on your current and historical relationship to this land.

Sustainability Mixer – Winter 2020

Come meet, learn and talk about all the different sustainable goings-on at Concordia!
The Sustainability Mixer is an opportunity to get to know and become involved with established and emerging sustainability initiatives taking place on and around campus.
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Groups from a variety of angles of sustainability, be it social, economic or environmental, will be there to represent and discuss their work.

This event is a great opportunity to network around food and drinks and engage with the wide field of sustainability!

Join us from 6pm to 9:30pm on April 3rd, for an evening full of lively discussion, as well as complementary food and drinks!

Caring for our Conflicts

Many activists agree that the prison industrial complex works against efforts to rehabilitate perpetrators, and undermines attempts at humane communities. When we step outside of the punitive paradigm, what resources are left to deal with conflict in circles of activists, lovers, and friends?

Modern technology has deeply changed our professional, political, and personal lives. How do these new modes of being affect the way harm is perpetrated, processed, and healed? What makes a person “toxic”? When, if ever, is exile appropriate? Is it possible to call in, as opposed to calling out?

Join us for a workshop about restorative justice principles, and an introduction to practical skills to process pain, fight oppression, and pursue justice.

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This event is happening as a part of Sustain’Alive, a weeklong event series centred on activism, society, and the planet.

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Montreal, traditional name Tiohtià:ke is located on unceded Indigenous territory. It has historically been a meeting place for many nations, with the Kanien’kehá:ka as the stewards. We encourage you to reflect on your current and historical relationship to this land.

Collective Care

What does it mean to build sustainable and holistic communities? How can we care for our whole selves—physical, mental, but also emotional and spiritual—as we organize for social justice?
How can we integrate care in the very way we function as part of our collectives and communities?
How can we transform ourselves and our social relations as we seek to transform the world around us?
How can we avoid reproducing societal oppression in our activist spaces?

Too many activists experience burnout, which in many cases is not directly linked to the amount of work but to *how* we carry out that work, to the collective dynamics and associated frustrations. This workshop will be a space to reflect upon our practices and level to which they are sustainable, and put together ideas and practices that have potential to center people and their well-being as we carry out social justice work.

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This event is happening as a part of Sustain’Alive, a weeklong event series centred on activism, society, and the planet.

——

Montreal, traditional name Tiohtià:ke is located on unceeded Indigenous territory. It has historically been a meeting place for many nations, with the Kanien’kehá:ka as the stewards. We encourage you to reflect on your current and historical relationship to this land.

Cross-faculty Sustainability

This event is a cross-disciplinary touchstone opportunity for people of all areas of research and study. Sustainability can mean a multitude of things—strategies for preserving and better utilizing natural resources to work with our environment. It can also mean as economic policies that keep projects and resources going for years to come. The world of social sustainability is more and more heavily discussed in our communities, as we try to forge new ways to keep people happy, engaged, and connected.

In this event, students and researchers across faculties can come together to discuss a wide variety of questions related to this topic.

How is sustainability discussed in your faculty?
What solutions can your area of study bring to our current climate crisis?
Which sustainable initiatives exist in your field of study—at Concordia, and beyond?
What kind of sustainability initiatives do you imagine stemming from your department?
What sustainability related initiatives do you want to learn more about from your faculty?

When: Tuesday, March 12th, 2pm to 4pm
Where: EV 5.777 (Concordia Art Hives)

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This event is happening as a part of Sustain’Alive, a weeklong event series centred on activism, society, and the planet.

——

Montreal, traditional name Tiohtià:ke is located on unceeded Indigenous territory. It has historically been a meeting place for many nations, with the Kanien’kehá:ka as the stewards. We encourage you to reflect on your current and historical relationship to this land.

 

Living Labs

Come join us to learn more about living labs, and how to integrate the concept into your own projects!
Living Labs are experiential learning initiatives. They are touchstones for a methodology which uses research and innovation to help students advance sustainability while learning at the same time. Research and learning are put into action through a collaborative model―students are allowed to practice the very theories they’re engaging with, and enhance their skill base at the same time.
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Students have an opportunity to bring what they are leaning in classes or research, and design projects or initiatives that make that knowledge tangible. This takes learning out of the realm of the theoretical, and into the tangible world. The end product is a meeting of knowledge and skill that can help elucidate complicated concepts into something students and their peers can interact with more easily.

Living Labs work against the ivory tower, cerebral quality of higher education to bring ideas into the world in a way that does what we’re supposed to be doing: letting people learn.

When: Monday, March 11th, 12pm to 2pm
Where: Concordia Art Hive, EV 5.777

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This event is happening as a part of Sustain’Alive, a weeklong event series centred on activism, society, and the planet.

——

Montreal, traditional name Tiohtià:ke is located on unceeded Indigenous territory. It has historically been a meeting place for many nations, with the Kanien’kehá:ka as the stewards. We encourage you to reflect on your current and historical relationship to this land.

Storytelling for Campaign Organising

Interested in learning how you can incorporate storytelling into your campaign strategy?
This workshop will explore the power of storytelling as a tool for community-building and creating transformative social change. We will be discussing the basics of organizing, how and why we tell stories, and how to use storytelling as a way of reclaiming narratives that have been silenced, erased and marginalized. We will end with a story circle to demonstrate the power of storytelling in creating connection and solidarity. There will be space to tie in experiences during this COVID-19 pandemic into discussions.
Register now!
Facebook Event

We’ll be using Zoom for this workshop.

About the facilitator:

Born in Montreal, Harleen Bhogal is a South Asian writer, artist and educator, whose practice is entrenched in feminist and anti-racist principles and community-building approaches. As an educator, she uses arts-based approaches, ranging from visual arts to spoken word, to facilitate grassroots youth programming. Harleen understands that artistic self-expression in safe and loving settings can become a catalyst for collective healing and inducing transformative change, and is dedicated to creating these spaces in her community. Today, as she writes her book of poetry, she remains thankful to be part of the beautiful connection that often accompanies the sharing of our vulnerabilities, and is awestruck by the magic that continues to surround her in her world of joy and madness.

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This event is happening as a part of Sustain’Alive, an event series centred on activism, society, and the planet.

——

Montreal, traditional name Tiohtià:ke is located on unceded Indigenous territory. It has historically been a meeting place for many nations, with the Kanien’kehá:ka as the stewards. We encourage you to reflect on your current and historical relationship to this land.

Sustainability Mixer 6.0

Come meet, learn and talk about all the different sustainable goings-on at Concordia!
The Sustainability Mixer 6.0 is an opportunity to get to know and become involved with established and emerging sustainability initiatives taking place on and around campus.
Facebook event

Groups from a variety of angles of sustainability, be it social, economic or environmental, will be there to represent and discuss their work.

This event is a great opportunity to network around food and drinks and engage with the wide field of sustainability!

Join us from 5pm to 7pm on March 15, for an evening full of fascinating discussions, as well as complementary food and drinks!

Holistic Activist Communities – Part I

Overall goal: To think together through the aspiration of holistic activist communities
What does it take to keep our activist communities from burning out? What practices are needed to sustain our movements in healthy and transformative ways? Come join us for vibrant discussion about how as individuals and as movements we’re mending fractures and building interdependencies. This two session workshop will dive into theory and practice around building strong and healthy movement ecosystems, and creating cultures of emergence and nurturance in pursuit of decolonial ends.

We’ll be using Zoom for this event.

This workshop is split in 2 stand-alone sessions (you don’t have to attend both, although that’d be best) :

Session one (this one):

Let’s take this moment of the covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to gather online and think together about what is working and what is not working in the movements we are part of and about how we can build stronger, more resilient, more powerfully transformative social movements, Jen Gobby will share what she has been learning through her research and activism about strengthening movements and she will facilitate a conversation to draw out the insight and reflections from participants about what it’s going to take to transform systems in these times of multiple, converging crises.

Session two (link here):

Building off of session one, we’ll dive into some conceptual frameworks that embody the ecological principles we strive for in building resilient, sustainable, and transformative movements. Wanting to ground us in the pursuit of decolonization, Brett Cox will share what he’s learned through his research and activism about nurturance culture, solidarity economy organizing, and emergent strategy as explored by Adrienne Maree Brown, facilitating a conversation on how we can see these frameworks in our movements, and critically, as a settler, how these frameworks relate to and help push for decolonial ends that puts land back in the same conversation as climate justice.

 

Facilitators Bio:

Jen Gobby recently completed her PhD at McGill as part of the Economics for the Anthropocene partnership and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia. She organizes with Climate Justice Montreal and has spent the last 5 years doing research with the climate justice, anti-pipeline and Indigenous land defense movements to think together about how we can build more powerful movements towards decolonizing and decarbonizing Canada. She is the founder of the MudGirls Natural Building Collective, did a term in office on the local government, lived-off-the- grid for a decade and did a stint traveling with a sustainability-themed circus troupe! Her book More Powerful Together: Conversations with Climate Activists and Indigenous Land Defenders is coming out in May 2020 published by Fernwood Press.

Brett Cox is a settler originally from so called ‘Brantford, Ontario’, passionate about reconciliaction, climate justice, and finding ways to foster cultural disillusioning amongst the status quo. After finishing a masters’ in globalization at McMaster in the summer of 2018, Brett made his way to so called ‘Montreal’ to pursue a graduate diploma in community economic development at Concordia. Completing his graduate diploma in August 2019, he now works as the internal coordinator for Sustainable Concordia, helping to manifest a sustainable culture at Concordia and beyond, in all the beautiful and intersectional ways sustainability is embodied.

 

——

This event is happening as a part of Sustain’Alive, an event series centred on activism, society, and the planet.

——

Montreal, traditional name Tiohtià:ke is located on unceded Indigenous territory. It has historically been a meeting place for many nations, with the Kanien’kehá:ka as the stewards. We encourage you to reflect on your current and historical relationship to this land.