尤物视频

Exploring the intersections of labour, education, and resistance, this panel highlights innovative approaches to organizing.

This panel highlights innovative approaches to organizing—from Steff Ling’s working-class knowledge system empowering art workers to Jade Ho’s language school fostering cross-cultural solidarity in Vancouver’s Chinatown, to John-Henry Harter’s classroom tools challenging dominant class narratives. Together, these efforts reveal the transformative power of collective working-class knowledge, decolonial practice, and grassroots education in the fight for social justice.

Working-class knowledge systems: On being scholars of our own exploitation and liberation - Steff Huì Cí Ling 林惠慈

A working-class knowledge system is a theoretical framework Steff is developing in her PhD research to connect what workers know about what they do with organizing and being in solidarity with broader social movements. Currently, she is employing a working-class knowledge system that employs workers’ inquiry to establish workers’ standpoints, analyze social composition, and mobilize what she calls “decolonial potential.” In this presentation, Steff will discuss aspects of this working-class knowledge system as it has been applied to organizing with art workers and examining land and labour exploitation in the non-profit cultural sector.

Steff Huì Cí Ling 林惠慈 is a cultural worker, labour researcher, and occasional critic and film programmer living as a guest on unceded territories. She is a PhD student in Sociology at 尤物视频 where she works as a teaching and research assistant in Sociology, Labour Studies, and the School for Communications. Her research is concerned with the political tradition of workers’ inquiries and its application to the cultural sector to unsettle labour’s role in the reproduction of private property. She is a core member of the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance.

Solidarity Education: Starting an Organizing Language School in Vancouver's Chinatown - Yi Chien Jade Ho 何宜謙 (she/they)

In this talk, Jade will report and reflect on the collective effort of starting a language school that focuses on cultivating capacity and skills to organize for labour & housing justice and building solidarity between precariously housed Chinese tenants and Indigenous residents in Vancouver's Chinatown and Downtown Eastside. Recognizing that language is a key site of colonial domination, the school gives community members and youth organizers the opportunity to reconnect with their own cultures while building capacity for cross-cultural coalitions to facilitate further organizing in the neighborhood. This project shows the radical potential to cultivate collective power through approaching organizing as resistance and solidarity education.

Yi Chien Jade Ho 何宜謙 (she/they) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria. Her work supports cross-racial tenant organizing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown in combatting housing exploitation, toxic drug supply crisis, racism, and colonial policing and neglect. They have also been an organizer in the areas of labour, housing justice, and anti-racism.

Teaching and Learning Roles of Resistance in the Classroom - John-Henry Harter

This presentation will examine how role plays, games, and simulations can be used in the classroom to challenge dominant discourses around class and working-class resistance. John-Henry will be using roles plays from his book (cowritten with Mark Leier) Roles of Resistance: Game Plans for Teachers and Trouble Makers to demonstrate how we can teach in a way that does not ignore the working class as agents of their own history and thus challenges the structures that oppress us.

John-Henry Harter is a lecturer in history and labour studies at 尤物视频. He is an award winning teacher whose research and teaching focuses on both environmental and labour history as well as pop culture and teaching. He has published in both academic journals and popular magazines. He lives with his partner and two dogs on the West Coast of what we call Canada. When not teaching or writing he is consuming far too much coffee and reality TV.