The directional growth of plant roots towards water availability is what scientists call hydrotropism. The latter half of the term, “tropism,” is meant to describe the physiological response of an organism to a stimulus. Aside from any dry, technical definitions,… Read More

For a period of one month, beginning on 27 February 2015, teaching assistants at the University of Toronto were on strike. Advocating for fairer funding packages, hundreds of students took to the streets of the city in an attempt to… Read More

Born in Harlem, James Baldwin was 63 years old when he died in 1987, his life bearing witness to significant social upheavals including the African-American civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and the… Read More

Part 2 of 2: Urban vignettes from São Paulo by Todd Lester In part one of this blog, I wrote about the continuum of urban space—spanning public to private—for which the locations of My Two Muggings serve as extremes. In… Read More

Paradigm shift is not the evacuation of power, but rather its redistribution. Speaking at the University of Toronto in early February, feminist scholar Rosi Braidotti speculated on the impotence of the classical humanities to explain the entwined nature of contemporary… Read More

If a community is a safe haven from a world where people are ordinarily crushed and diminished into spectators as Paulo Freire wrote in Education for Critical Consciousness (1973), then I have a story to tell. It will be awkward… Read More

Dear Carolee: Carolee Schneemann in Letters Organized by Kunstverein Toronto G Gallery 27 November 2014–10 January 2015   CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN Since the late 1950s, the life of Carolee Schneemann (1939–) has been expressed through her artistic practice, first with the… Read More

Part 1 of 2 urban vignettes from São Paulo Perhaps the title sends a shiver of alarm, but a positive side of the story is that in two different mugging incidents in São Paulo, I was not harmed despite both… Read More

The built city shifts from being an articulation of zones and maps and blueprints to something that has tone, tempo, and flavour when its inhabitants step out of their doors, enter the streets, and make their paths through the unfolding… Read More