Sameness, difference, and cold dangerous winters
I am visiting Sudbury, Ontario, at the moment. I lived here for about a decade, and moved away two and not-quite-a-half years ago. This is my first visit back in…
Scott Neigh
New year, new writing practice
It’s an arbitrary division, but even so, like many other people, as one year draws to a close and another begins, I like to spend a bit of time in…
All of my 2017 book reviews!
In the spirit of looking back on the year that was, this post brings together all of the full book reviews I did in 2017. All are nonfiction books about…
Review: Policing Black Lives
I commented in some social media context or other before I had read this book that I thought it would likely be one of the most important books published in…
Review: From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
If you are on the left, you have probably encountered some version of what has become a pretty standard account of the history between the end of the Second World…
Thinking about how cis men can and should be speaking publically about sexual violence
I’ve been thinking a lot in the last month about how cisgender men can and should be speaking publically about sexual violence and gender oppression. I’ve been thinking about this…
Work-in-Progress #1: An overview of my current projects
So I recently realized that I’m a bit bored with the big projects that take up most of my work time. Not wavering in my commitment to them…just a little…
Reading *The Lorax* to Enbridge! (And opposing the Line 10 tar sands pipeline expansion!)
My first effort at making a video that’s more than just linear editing of a talking head. It’s a little rough, perhaps, but it’s a chance to see some of…
Review: In the Wake
This book develops ways of exploring and describing the relations that constitute Black diasporic life. As I understand it – and I’m sure I’m missing lots – it begins from…
A few thoughts about the NDP leadership race…
A few thoughts about the NDP leadership race… …from a Twitter thread I wrote earlier this evening, in the unlikely event that anyone is interested in what I have to…
Review: Living a Feminist Life
Living a Feminist Life is the latest book from UK-based feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed. I’ve read a number of her other books and find her ideas to be really useful,…
Review: What Love Is
A philosophical examination of romantic love aimed at a lay audience. Some good stuff, but I didin’t like it as much as I’d hoped. It takes a critical, feminist, queer,…
Losing people to the right, emotion, and movement building
I’ve been thinking, lately, about the transition that some people go through from having left politics to having not-left politics. It’s not that it happens all that often, in my…
Less outrage, more action
I’m not one for shying away from thinking or talking or writing about the bad things in the world, but I have really been struck in the last few days…
Review: Dancing on our Turtle’s Back
This is a book from a few years ago by renowned Nishnaabeg author, scholar, and activist Leanne Simpson. It is a book about Indigenous resurgence through learning from, and living…
Review: Revolution at Point Zero
Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch — a feminist reexamination of the origins of capitalism — was, for me, a mind-blowing and paradigm-shifting book. While her essays collected in Revolution…
Review: Hegemony How-To
We need more spaces and more opportunities to think through past, present, and future choices that we face in our movements and communities-in-struggle; this book is an effort to catalyze…
Review: Direct Action
The following review was done for the April 27, 2017 edition of GET LIT, a bookish show that broadcasts on 93.3 FM CFMU. Check out both the written and audio…
Review: Brilliant Imperfection
I can think of few writers whose work better exemplifies radical, deeply thoughtful, passionate, nuanced, and incredibly readable engagement with the social world and its injustices than Eli Clare. Brilliant…
Writing, "okayness," and the limits of learning by listening
Okayness is a sedative. Okayness makes your lids drowsy, your thoughts slow down, your focus turn intwards. Okayness is an outrage. It shouldn’t be — it should be normal, universal,…