Political Science Social Policy
Sick of the System
Why the COVID-19 Recovery Must Be Revolutionary
- Publisher
- Between the Lines
- Initial publish date
- May 2020
- Category
- Social Policy, Capitalism, Public Health
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781771135290
- Publish Date
- May 2020
- List Price
- $9.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Families left grieving; small businesses shuttered; communities in lockdown; precarious workers set adrift; health care workers stressed beyond endurance. The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core. But the cracks already ran deep.
Featuring essays on poverty, health care, incarceration, basic income, policing, Indigenous communities, and more, this anthology delivers a stinging rebuke of the pre-pandemic status quo and a stark exposé of the buried weaknesses in our social and political systems. As policy makers scramble to bail out corporations and preserve an unsustainable labour market, an even greater global catastrophe – in the form of ecological collapse, economic recession, and runaway inequality – looms large on the horizon.
What can we do? From professors to poets, the authors of Sick of the System speak in one voice: We can turn our backs on “normal.” We can demand divestment, redistribution, and mutual aid. We can seize new forms of solidarity with both hands. As the world holds its breath, revolutionary ideas have an unprecedented chance to gain ground. There should be no going back.
About the authors
James T. Brophy is a career activist, researcher, and advocate focussing on occupational and environmental health. He received his doctorate from the University of Stirling on occupational risks for breast cancer. He is a former executive director of the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers (OCHOW) in Windsor and then Sarnia, where he and his partner, Margaret Keith, helped to document one of the largest cohorts of asbestos diseased workers in Canadian history. In recent years, he collaborated on research exploring violence against health care workers and on the lived experience of inadequately protected health care staff working during the pandemic. He lives in Emeryville, Ontario.
James T. Brophy's profile page
nicole marie burton (she, they) is a comics artist and children’s book illustrator living on unceded Algonquin land. Born in the US and now based in Ontario, she is a founding member of the Ad Astra Comix publishing collective. nicole’s work focuses on comics with social justice themes, including topics from Canadian history to the science of climate change. Her published works include The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet, The Boy Who Walked Backwards, and a chapter in the anthology Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working Class Struggle.
nicole marie burton's profile page
John Clarke has been involved in anti-poverty struggles since he helped to form a union of unemployed workers in London, Ontario, in 1983. He is a founding member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and worked as one of its organizers from 1990 to 2019. He is currently the Packer Visitor in Social Justice at York University in Toronto.
Anita Girvan is assistant professor of cultural studies, Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada.
Harry Glasbeek is Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He has also taught at the universities of Melbourne and Monash in Australia, and the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of ten books including Class Privilege: How Law Shelters Shareholders and Coddles Capitalism and Wealth By Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy.
Hugh Goldring is a writer from Ottawa, Ontario, Algonquin territory. As one half of Petroglyph Studios, he works full time writing comics with social justice themes in partnership with scholars, unions, activists and NGOs. He is part of the Ad Astra Comix publishing collective which published his first graphic novel, The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet. He was active in the Occupy movement and has been involved in several Food Not Bombs chapters. He has spent the last 5 years traveling across the United States, visiting with anti-fascists, migrant rights activists and anti-capitalists, trying vainly to make sense of it all.
Hugh D.A. Goldring's profile page
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative works published in Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and was nominated for several awards. His first poetry collection, Creeland, published in 2022, was nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award.
Andrew Jackson spent most of his career as Chief Economist and Director of Social and Economic Policy with the Canadian Labour Congress. Since retiring from the CLC in 2012 he has been senior policy adviser to the Broadbent Institute, and spent two years as the Packer Visiting Professor of Social Justice at York University. He is currently an adjunct research professor at Carleton University. He writes a bi-weekly on line column for the Globe and Mail and is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues which is now in its second edition.
Emma Jackson is an organizer for 350.org. and Climate Justice Edmonton.
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University, where she was named the 15th Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies in 2017. She was Halifax’s Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She is the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. Her work focuses on social justice issues, such as feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. Since 2016, she has co-hosted a radio show called Black Power Hour on CKDU-FM where listeners from prisons call in to rap and read their poetry, providing a voice to people who rarely get a wide audience.
Margaret M. Keith is an occupational and environmental health advocate and researcher, focussing particularly on women and work. She earned a PhD from the University of Stirling. Margaret served as Executive Director of the Windsor Occupational Health Information Service before joining the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers in Sarnia. She and her partner, Jim Brophy, assisted the First Nation’s community of Aamjiwnaang near Sarnia in exploring health problems related to environmental pollution from the adjacent petrochemical industry. Margaret was co-author of an internationally recognized research article documenting a skewed sex birth ratio uncovered after examining Aamjiwnaang birth records. She lives in Emeryville, Ontario.
Margaret M. Keith's profile page
Gary Kinsman was one of the first three employees of the AIDS Committee of Toronto, a member of AIDS ACTION NOW!, the Newfoundland AIDS Association, the Valley AIDS Concern Group in Nova Scotia, and now the AIDS Activist History Project (https://aidsactivisthistory.ca). He is currently involved in the Policing the Pandemic group. He is also the author of The Regulation of Desire, and co-author of The Canadian War on Queers. His website is https://radicalnoise.ca.
Julie S. Lalonde is an internationally recognized women’s rights advocate and public educator. Julie works with various feminist organizations dedicated to ending sexual violence, engaging bystanders and building communities of support. She is a frequent media source on issues of violence against women and her work has appeared on Al Jazeera, CBC’s The National, TVO’s The Agenda, Vice, WIRED magazine and FLARE, among others. She is a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case.
Julie S. Lalonde's profile page
Wayne Lewchuk is a professor of labour studies and economics at McMaster University.Marlea Clarke is an assistant professor in political science at the University of Victoria and a research associate of the Labour and Enterprise Policy Research Group (LEP) at the University of Cape Town.Alice de Wolff is a research coordinator who has managed projects and organizations related to equity, employment, adult education, and international development. She was a member of York University's Alliance on Contingent Employment.
Robyn Maynard is an assistant professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at the University of Toronto-Scarborough in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, with a graduate appointment in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the St. George Campus. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present and the co-author of Rehearsals for Living. She has published writing in the Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal, and a number of peer-reviewed book anthologies. Maynard’s research and teaching focus on transnational Black feminist thought, Black social movements, policing, borders and carceral studies, Black-Indigenous histories and praxis, Black Canadian studies, as well as abolitionist and anti-colonial methodologies.
Jane E. McArthur is a PhD candidate in sociology/social justice at the University of Windsor. Her dissertation research focuses on the understandings and strategies women workers have of risks for breast cancer in their working environments. The focus of Jane’s work outside her dissertation has been community-based environmental and occupational health research, education, communication, and advocacy. She is a mother of two school-age children and together they participate in the local climate justice movement.
Jane E. McArthur's profile page
Alexander McClelland is a sociolegal researcher and Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa in the Department of Criminology. He is currently examining issues of confidentiality for research with criminalized people. His work focuses on the intersections of life, law, and disease, where he has developed a range of collaborative and interdisciplinary writing, academic, activist, and artistic projects to address issues of criminalization, sexual autonomy, surveillance, drug liberation, and the construction of knowledge on HIV.
Alexander McClelland's profile page
Karen Messing is an award-winning (including a Governor General of Canada award and YWCA (Montreal) Women of Distinction) and internationally recognized expert on occupational health. She is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles and the book One-eyed Science: Occupational Health and Working Women. She is also the editor of Integrating Gender in Ergonomic Analysis, which has been translated into six languages.
Justin Piché is associate professor in the Department of Criminology and director of the Carceral Studies Research Collective at the University of Ottawa. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, a founding member of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, and researcher for the Carceral Cultures Research Initiative. His research examines how criminalization and confinement is justified and resisted during state campaigns to expand carceral controls and in popular culture.
Elaine Power is a Professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her research lies at the intersection of food, poverty and public health. She created and taught the Queen’s course, HLTH 101, The Social Determinants of Health, which explores the “upstream” determinants of health, including income, racism and white privilege, education, gender, colonialism and their intersections. She is the co-founder of the Kingston Action Group for a Basic Income Guarantee and a passionate advocate for basic income.
Gina Starblanket is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. Gina is Cree/Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4 territory. She holds a PhD and MA from the University of Victoria and a BA (Honours) from the University of Regina. She has critical work in the 2nd edition of Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Fernwood Publishing, 2017) and in an edited collection entitled Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings (University of Toronto Press, 2018). She is co-editor of the 5th edition of Visions of the Heart: Issues Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada (forthcoming Oct 2019) and also has forthcoming work in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. Her work is centered in Indigenous politics and Canadian politics, and takes up issues surrounding treaty implementation, gender, feminism, identity, decolonization, resurgence, and relationality.
Gina Starblanket's profile page
Kingston writer Jamie Swift is the author of a dozen books, most recently The Vimy Trap, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War (with Ian McKay), finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the Canadian Historical Association Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History. He has held the Michener Foundation fellowship for public service journalism and was a longtime documentary producer for CBC-Radio’s “Ideas.” In addition to the writing life, he is a social justice advocate. He taught “Critical Perspectives on Business” at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University for many years.
Richard Swift is an internationally regarded journalist and a former editor of New Internationalist magazine. He has done stories from many parts of the world on issues as varied as famine and the plight of farmers, slums, the prison system and struggles for national liberation. Swift is author of S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism, now in its second edition; The No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy and Trigger Issues: Mosquito, and editor of Ties That Bind: Canada and the Third World. He is on the editorial board of Canadian Dimension magazine. He has also worked as a radio journalist.
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and community healer in Toronto. She is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir Metonymy Press), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2018), and the children's picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li. Her latest book is the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes at the End of the World (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2020). Kai Cheng won the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers in 2017.
Alberto Toscano is reader in critical theory and co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea and Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle). He edits The Italian List for Seagull Books and sits on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism.
Editorial Reviews
“The essays capture a truly visceral pain – all too often hidden in the daily bustle of pre-pandemic life – that’s further magnified in a lockdown world. Even for many in progressive politics, it is rare to hear such voices: prisoners, Black Nova Scotians, and Indigenous people long used to the failure of governments in providing accessible health care. Also represented are those living with the still stigmatizing diagnosis of AIDS, women fleeing male violence, and cleaners and grocery clerks who, despite their new-found hero status, continue to survive on poverty-level wages.”
Quill & Quire
