"Controversies in Working-Class Consciousness: Ford Nation versus the Toronto Left" is the subject three speakers will tackle at the next Global Labour Research Speaker Series Wednesday.
The event will take place Feb. 25, from noon to 2pm, at S701 Ross Building, Keele campus.
The following are the three panellists:
Joel Davison Harden
Harden teaches in the Department of Law & Legal Studies at Carleton University and is an advisory board member for Our Times Magazine. His book Quiet No More: New Political Activism in Canada and Around the Globe was released in 2013. He was previously the registrar of the Labour College of Canada and director of the Education Department for the Canadian Labour Congress.
Maureen O’Reilly
O’Reilly is president of the 2,100-member Toronto Public Library Workers Union Local 4948, CUPE. She was elected just two months before Rob Ford became mayor in 2010 and has lived to tell the tale. From 2011 to 2012, she led the successful fight back campaign against a 10 per cent cut to the library budget that prevented library closures and service hour cuts.
The campaign touched the hearts of Torontonians, which led to the derailment of the gravy train mantra. The 2012 library strike that followed was largely about stopping the further advancement of precarious work into library workplaces and the protection of good jobs. O’Reilly continues to be a strong advocate not only for library workers but for the communities most people want.
Rinaldo Walcott
Professor Walcott is the director of the Women & Gender Studies Institute. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Walcott has published on music, literature, film and theatre, and policy, among other topics. All of his research is founded in a philosophical orientation that is concerned with the ways in which coloniality shapes human relations across social and cultural time.
He is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997, with a second revised edition in 2003). He is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000) and the co-editor with Roy Moodley of Counselling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010). In all of his research and publication, he focuses on black cultural politics – histories of colonialism in the Americas, multiculturalism, citizenship and diaspora – gender and sexuality, and social, cultural and public policy.
For more information, visit the Global Labour Research Centre website.
The Global Labour Speaker Series at York University is a collaboration of the Global Labour Research Centre, the Work & Labour Studies program, the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and the Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Gender and Work.
The event is co-sponsored by York University’s departments of social science, sociology, geography and political science in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LAPS); the Office of the Dean, LAPS; and the Office of the Dean, Osgoode Hall Law School.