The 440 Parkside Collective is an Indigenous-led land restoration project based in High Park in Toronto. Together, we care for a 10,000 square foot growing space in the 400-acre park, in addition to organizing learning opportunities and ceremonies to tend to our responsibilities with lands, waters, and all relatives in this urban context. The 440 Parkside Collective developed out of relationships formed through the work of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle and Asemaa Circles projects since 2019. In 2023 the 440 Parkside site was recognized as a National Healing Forest by the David Suzuki Foundation.
Read The 440 Parkside Collective’s essay, “Gekinoomaadijig Mashkiki Gitigaaning Endazhi-Baakwaanaatigikaag: Restoring Land Relations Through Indigenous Leadership in an Urban Park” here.
activist/aesthetics is a horizontally organised research collective that studies the intersections of material culture and progressive politics. Originating as a reading group at the University of Cambridge, a/a highlights the collective efforts of academics, artists, and activists working in the joint spaces of visual culture and political organising. They can be contacted at activistaesthetics2023@gmail.com. (Individual bios for a/a’s members are available following their essay).
Read a/a’s visual reflection on the Activist Aesthetics conference here.
Sadie Barker (she/her) lives on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ land, is a PhD candidate in the department of English at Concordia University and co-editor at Refractions. Her research thinks about the postcolonial studies as it bears upon questions of popular culture, genealogies of subjectivity and structures of feeling, aesthetics, and theories of genre. Alongside editing and grad-schooling, Sadie is a curator for the Gender Equity in Media Film Festival and a researcher at the UPenn Cultural Heritage center.
Read our Letter from the Editors here.
Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, educator, and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Tkaronto (Toronto) whose work draws on sound studies, feminist theory, critical disability studies, and cultural theory to examine sonic social relations and materiality through entanglements of resistance and care within contemporary artworks and creative practices. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Visual Culture, Critical Inquiry, International Studies in Literature and Environment, the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, and Sonic Scope: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture. Her research has been supported by several scholarships and grants including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a MITACS Accelerate Fellowship, and a Susan Crocker and John Hunkin Scholarship in Fine Arts.
Read Collins’ essay, “Care in/as Resistance: Excess, Chorus, and Liminality in Sonia Boyce’s ‘Feeling Her Way,’” here.
Ingrid Monsivais Ibarra (she/her) studied Economics and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, industrial relations, and the politics of migration. She is particularly interested in the social dynamics embedded in labour experiences, including the relationship between work and identity, and the way in which both of these are influenced by colonialism and neoliberalism.
Read Ibarra’s essay, “Care-Imperialism and the Feminization of the Global South in Canadian Policy,” here.
Priscilla Jolly is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. She co-founded and co-edits Refractions. Her research interests include speculative fiction, tropes of placemaking, environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. Can talk about movies, TV and houseplants.
Read our Letter from the Editors here.
Zinnia Naqvi (she/her) is a lens-based artist working in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Her work examines issues of colonialism, cultural translation, social class and citizenship through the use of photography, video, the written word, and archival material. Recent projects have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design, and elaborate still-lives. Her artworks often invite the viewer to consider the position of the artist and the spectator, as well as analyze the complex social dynamics that unfold in front of the camera.
Naqvi’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally. She is a 2022 Fall Flaherty/Colgate Filmmaker in Residence and recipient of the 2019 New Generation Photography Award organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Naqvi is member of EMILIA-AMALIA Working Group, an intergenerational feminist collective. Naqvi received a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. She is currently a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.
Read Naqvi’s perspective piece, “Dear Nani,” here.
Katie Sullivan is a mad & disabled third-year undergraduate, double majoring in Medicine, Health, & Society and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. Sullivan is also a member of the Critical Design Lab and the Doctors with Disabilities Podcast. She primarily situates her scholarship and organizing efforts in critical disability and access studies; Sullivan is interested in examining online disability communities, feminist science and technology studies, disability-as-method, critical access, and the sociospatial politics of chronic illness and pain. Previous projects include coalitional involvement in creating the UW Madison Disability Cultural Center, research on linguistic elements of online ableism, and digital ethnography of virtual medical resources.
Read Sullivan’s essay, “None of us is well”: Cripping Health Communism and Embracing Care,” here.
Chase R. Thomson (he/they) is an emerging educator, writer, and artist working at the intersection of queer & trans theory, archival studies, and critical arts practice. In particular, Chase is intrigued by the capacity of literature, fashion, and photography (archival and modern) to help form confident identities for queer, trans, and Two-Spirit individuals and communities. Chase is currently a PhD student in Adult Education and Community Development at OISE - University of Toronto and has recently completed his MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University. With years of work as an educator in both Canada and Germany, Chase continues to engage in public pedagogical projects that mobilize knowledge for those outside of the University. Additionally, Chase seeks to use this work to emphasize the power of interdisciplinary research–hopefully blurring the colonial boundaries of disciplines and knowledge production within higher education.
Read Thomson’s essay, “The Importance of t4t Care Webs, Witness, and Affirmation in Casey Plett’s Little Fish,” here.
amanda wan (they/them) is a queer chinese femme and a settler based on the unceded, occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. They are a recent graduate of the MA English program at UBC, where their thesis project followed Audre Lorde’s conception of erotic power to ask about practices of relationality that may be illegible within post-Cold War conceptions of modern subjectivity, but that are palpable nonetheless. Centering the ambivalent aesthetics of techno-Orientalism in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu and the production of the refugee figure in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, their thesis asks how erotic power takes racial form and style through the queer Asiatic body. Their thesis is available to read online at UBC cIRcle.
amanda also creates poetry and artwork in the form of zines, illustrations, and published writing in Room Magazine, ReIssue.pub, Augur Magazine, LooseLeaf Magazine, and elsewhere.
Portrait credit: Divya Kaur
Read wan’s review of Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America here.
Christina Wiendels recently earned her Ph.D. in Early Modern Studies from McMaster University. Her thesis, titled “God and Humanity in John Milton’s Paradise Lost,” argues that in Paradise Lost self-identity, both earthly and divine, emerges and becomes fully realized only through relationships with others. She has been an instructor of record twice (as a Teaching Fellow for English 1F03/E The Written World) and a teaching assistant for six years in a wide variety of undergraduate courses at McMaster. Christina has also worked as a research assistant for six years at Brescia University College, an affiliate of Western University. Presently, she is a part-time professor at Fanshawe College, where she is teaching WRIT (Writing) and COMM (Communications). She is also currently working at a bookstore in London. Christina welcomes correspondence regarding literature and pedagogy at cwiendels@fanshawec.ca.
Read Wiendels’ essay, Interrogating the ‘Social Good’: (Un)Happiness for Racialized and Gendered Bodies in Taylor’s “The Devastating Boys” and Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen,” here.