Simone Elizabeth Saunders’ work is remarkable. She uses tufting—a traditional rug-making technique—to bring fabric to life by mixing fibres, colour, and portraiture. The Calgary-based artist creates scaled-up artwork averaging 70 inches squared, equipped with what is called a tufting gun, which is an automatic hand-held device. “It is such a beautiful process to have this […] More »

When George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by police in the United States, sparking protests across the world, Avnish Nanda, an Edmonton lawyer, approached Bashir Mohamed and Oumar Salifou with an idea for a podcast investigating anti-Black racism and policing in Edmonton. Within a week of launching in June, Is This For Real? had […] More »

  A few years ago, Kisa MacIsaac, an early childhood educator (ECE) and mother of three in Winnipeg, tried to calculate the feasibility of putting three children in childcare for the summer. At 70 dollars per day, she “would have been working for nothing, anyways,” she says. She ended up taking the summer off while […] More »

We are living in revolutionary times. The ground is shifting beneath us every day. We are seeing a radical shift in our collective consciousness about ideas pertaining to abolition and defunding the police. We are beginning to awaken to the idea that we can solve issues of conflict, crisis, and harm in ways that do […] More »

  Sequestered in each of their own homes, neighbours Antonia Lawrence and Emily Carson didn’t have family around when COVID-19 hit. All they had was the group chat shared between their friendly neighbours. Often, involving inquiries for grocery trips, wanting to share food items, and recipes between each other—a system built on the sentiment that […] More »

When it comes to disability, the majority of conversations centre around accessibility and inclusion. Ensuring workplaces are barrier-free, the ongoing fight for a living wage, and equal treatment are among the primary focus. And this makes sense—how can disabled people navigate a world that is structurally ableist? That’s exactly what the Disability Justice Network of […] More »

  Dear Celebrities, The time has come for you to stop posting. We’re tired of it. Stop tweeting, stop snapping, stop dialing up your Rolodex of similarly-famed friends to orchestrate twee, black-and-white videos lamenting any of the society’s various ills. It’s time to take a step back, go to therapy, and realize that while there […] More »

Shaya Ishaq’s work moves fluidly between mediums—words, ceramics, fibres, jewellery—while maintaining a central locus of honouring Black lineages and sparking light toward liberated Black futures. Tenacious and ever-evolving, Ishaq walked away from journalism school and signed up for a hand-building course at a pottery studio in her hometown of Ottawa. “I really fell in love […] More »

Simon Black was watching the news on television with his one-month-old daughter on his lap. A report came on—a bombing of a school bus in Yemen by coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia, which killed dozens of children and injured dozens more. Black had one of those moments that sometimes happen to new parents, a […] More »

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the Flood, an outcast religious group called God’s Gardeners prepares for a pandemic by following a belief system based on pared-down consumerism coupled with kindness toward both human and non-human life. “They view us as twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical […] More »

Dear Audre Lorde, My fingers ache. All I can do since this pandemic started locally is read and write. And not my assignments and essays; none of those thrill me. None get at what I really want to say; none encapsulate the expanse of human suffering we are seeing on our screens and streets. To […] More »