Rêver le Nouveau Monde, dirs. Sébastien Côté, Pierre Frantz et Sophie Marchand

Comment Lahontan et son personnage d’Adario s’inscrivent dans la fiction théâtrale dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, lorsqu’elle rêve le Nouveau Monde de la Nouvelle-France d’Amérique.Comment Lahontan et son personnage d’Adario s’inscrivent dans la fiction théâtrale dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, lorsqu’elle rêve le Nouveau Monde de la Nouvelle-France d’Amérique

The Politics of Prevention and Government Responses to Homelessness

Recently, the logic of public health prevention has found a foothold in research and advocacy about homelessness. From a commonsense perspective, the prevention of a social problem like homelessness is an objectively positive aim. However, in the realm of social and health policy, the concept of prevention is not simply a common-sense word. It is part of a wider set of rationalities and technologies of governance which operate in and through the institution of public health. Research demonstrates that state-driven interventions designed to advance the health of a population often pose problems for particular groups. Prevention efforts, and their differential effects, thus have the potential to illuminate how state-interventions pursued with the objective of safe-guarding the public in general may simultaneously exacerbate specific structural and systemic forms of inequality. In this article, we probe the ethical, empirical, and political dimensions of state-driven responses to the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) public health crisis, surfacing some of the ways these interventions posed problems for people who are homeless and experience intersecting health and socio-political disparities. From this vantage point, we then look critically at moves to frame homelessness as a public health crisis, as well as government efforts to prevent homelessness by drawing on public health rationalities. Although our focus is homelessness prevention, as constructed and pursued by governments, our analysis is inspired by critical public health scholarship that challenges the apparent impartiality of prevention as a central logic and set of practices in public health contexts

Flotsam and Jetsam.: A Beachwalk.

The time-based piece “Flotsam and Jetsam” is a stop-motion video that refers to a beach walk and shows hundreds of collected Plastic pieces at different paces floating, appearing and disappearing on the screen. The title refers to 17th-century sailing terminology for materials or goods floating on the water after wreckage or released to lighten a sinking ship. These terms reflect on the found plastic objects and their appearance as floating and stranded goods, the aftermath of the streams of consumer goods discharged into our oceans, disappearing into an unknown future calling out SOS into the world of petrocaptialism. The viewer is invited to discover plastic garbage metamorphosing during the process of stop-motion animation into mysterious forms but also familiar objects passing by. Through different paces, the found objects appear as uncanny, artificial creatures, haunting us and our entanglement with plastic. https://vimeo.com/82698103

To Affirm Difference or To Deny Distinction? The Competing Canons of Equality Law

What are the global canons of constitutional equality analysis? Many scholars would say that there are none. National courts cannot seem to agree on whether the guarantee is formal or substantive, intersectional or discrete, open-ended or strictly textual. This Article takes a different tact. There are two budding strands of equality law reasoning: the categorical canons and the difference canons. The former prohibit pernicious distinctions in the law, while the latter affirm individual difference. The difference canons are the more cogent of the two. Categorical equality reasoning leads to underinclusive protection that is discordant with the actual experience of discrimination. Meanwhile, difference equality reasoning quashes budding social inequities before they fester into pernicious “isms.” Categorical courts thus ought to take a page from the difference canons

Measuring Lessons Learned from Durham Region’s Community Hub Model During COVID-19: A Support Solution for Individuals Experiencing Homelessness and Other At-Risk Populations

The 2019 Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic severely limited the availability of community resources within the Regional Municipality of Durham, Ontario, Canada. It disrupted the lives of persons experiencing homelessness and other vulnerable populations. To address the gaps in resources, community stakeholders developed two pilot community hubs to respond to the unmet health, housing, and support needs of those impacted. This research utilized a mixed-methods research design to determine the effectiveness of the community hubs in responding to the unmet needs of patrons utilizing the services and the scalability of the community hub model as a viable regional service approach. Surveys were administered in person with seventy-five community hub patrons. Fifteen direct service staff completed self-administered online surveys. Interviews were conducted with five community hub managerial staff and two subject-matter experts who collaborated with one of the community hubs. Results from the study showed that the needs of patrons were deep and entrenched and required a progressive, co-located, integrated health and social service response model. Staff described the services as critical and lifesaving for the patrons. The descriptive statistical analysis revealed that 93% of patrons indicated that services offered by the community hubs met their needs. The main challenge for the community hubs was the lack of core funding. Implications of this study include establishing a regional, evidence-informed, integrated system of care that addresses the healthcare, social service, and housing needs of populations experiencing homelessness

'No Long Shadows'

‘No Long Shadows’ is a parafiction project developed between 2018 and 2020, made up of 4 photographic installations and an essay film. The project was built from an extensive body of research exploring historical connections between chemical science, military technology, and artistic production, with specific focus on the sordid history of the DuPont chemical company

Performing Plasticity: On Recycling, Prosthetic Memories, and the Precarious Working-Class Renaissance: — The Case of Disco Alaskan Wolves

This paper examines the representation of post-industrial malaise in post-socialist China through a case study of the plastic characters of the 2019 hit song Disco Alaskan Wolves (野狼disco). Gem Dong, the singer/composer from Northeastern China, inflects Cantonese with accented Mandarin, utilizing a "disco" motif to express his generation's traumatic transition to the market economy in a laid-off worker's family. Taking a threefold connotation of “plasticity” as references to the materiality of media affordance, the kitschy aesthetic form, and a mode reflective of neoliberalist flexible corporeal politics, I claim that lyrics, singing, and derivative amateur dancing videos of the song all demonstrate “plasticity” as a performing tactic that undermines the glorification of post-socialist economic reform through a paradoxical self-exploitation of underclass bodies. I argue that the song’s parody of Cantonese and stunt performances manifests prosthetic memories formed with spectatorial experiences of "plastic media waste" — cut-out disco CDs and pirate Hong Kong films. They simultaneously unsettle the neoliberalist aesthetic of flexibility through plastic clumsiness. Controversies around the copyright of choreography, however, reveal an uneven distribution of cultural capital in the global capitalist structure that may continuously mutate and ironize the social undertone. Plasticity thus embodies and delivers sensory knowledge of desire, trauma, and precariousness for the post-socialist working class and asks for an ecological understanding of the working-class cultural renaissance