The Scavenger's daughter

The Scavenger's Daughter is a five act play in the form of a medieval Miracle play. Though borrowing from medieval drama the play is mainly concerned with a modernist aesthetic in the vein of Artaud, Brecht, and Beckett. The play centres around a travelling merchant who builds and sells automatons which bear a close resemblance to the mythical Golem. He sells one of his automatons to a group of shepherds. When the "body" breaks a conflict begins between the shepherds and the merchant sparking a comedy of errors with the body. The play draws heavily on traditions of burlesque, travesty, satire, and farce

\u27We Are Radical\u27: The Right to the City Alliance and the Future of Community Organizing

This paper seeks to situate current efforts of The Right to the City Alliance and selected member groups in a longitudinal and cross-sectional qualitative study of the limits and potential of contemporary organizing. For three decades politicians, policy makers, advocates, academics, and even activists have promoted community-based efforts as the primary vehicle for contemporary social change. Local organizing has been seen as the best site and strategy for initiatives as diverse as community economic development, public school reform, social service delivery, and challenging the powers that be. In almost all cases these efforts have been constrained and moderated by a global political economy of neoliberalism, which promotes community initiatives at the same time as it foists additional burdens on local communities and community organizations. An overview of the Right to the City Alliance and selected member organizations reveals its relatively unique, alternative model of organizing. Study of the organization and its model enables us to look at some of the limits of this nascent effort, including how well the alliance model accomplishes the need for greater scale and power. It also enables us to compare it to other community organizing efforts and see how it fits with and informs contemporary mobilizations since 2010

Le développement local dans un contexte métropolitain : La démocratie en quête d’un nouveau modèle ?

Traditionnellement, le développement local en référence aux milieux urbains s’est avant tout défini à l’échelle des quartiers. Nous avançons ici l’hypothèse que, à la faveur de la mondialisation, les acteurs sociaux qui en ont fait la promotion dans le passé, en particulier les acteurs du milieu communautaire, devraient dorénavant se tourner vers l’espace métropolitain, car c’est à cette échelle que prennent place, de plus en plus, non seulement le développement économique, mais aussi la gestion des problèmes sociaux et environnementaux. Pour vérifier cette hypothèse, nous avons fait une étude empirique des pratiques des organismes communautaires de la région de Montréal en matière de développement local, en accordant une attention particulière à leur engagement sur le plan de la démocratie locale. Toutefois, les résultats de notre enquête n’ont pas permis de vérifier notre hypothèse. Cela peut sans doute être expliqué, du moins en partie, par le fait que l’espace métropolitain en tant que territoire politique demeure relativement récent à Montréal.Traditionally, local development in the urban context is defined at the level of neighbourhoods. We hypothesize that, with the influence of globalization, social actors, particularly those in local communities, should be turning towards urban spaces because it is the level not only for economic development, but also for managing social and environmental problems. In order to test our hypothesis, we examined empirically the practices of community organizations in the Montreal region, particularly as regards their approach and plans for local development and their commitment to local democracy. However, the results of this study did not allow us to confirm that hypothesis. That can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that the Montreal region has only recently become defined as a political space

Wave‐equation migration from topography

Conformal mapping is a technique used widely in applied physics and engineering fields to facilitate numerical solution of boundary value problems involving solution domains characterized by com-plex geometry. The predominant reason for applying a conformal mapping procedure is to transform an irregular solution domain to one of symmetric geometry. The conformal map transform has the property that the angle between neighboring arc segments is (locally) conserved under the mapping. Accordingly, in the con-text of wave-equation imaging under topography, conformal map-ping can transform an irregular, topographically-influenced solu-tion domain to a regular computational mesh. In this paper, we demonstrate that the use of the conformal mapping transform cou-pled with Riemannian wavefield extrapolation generates an orthog-onal coordinate system and the governing wavefield continuation equation required for wave-equation migration directly from a to-pographic surface. We illustrate the potential of this approach by migrating a 2-D prestack data set acquired on a geologic model of thrust belt

Getting Organised: Anti-Poverty Organising and Social Citizenship in the 1970s

Creating organizations through which the poor could have a voice was the primary goal of the anti-poverty movement in Montreal in the early 1970s. Through confrontation politics, it made claims on the state and mobilized those traditionally excluded from the wider political process. Its most significant impact was to transform those on welfare from a marginalized group into active citizens. In this article, we examine an English speaking anti-poverty movement in Montreal during the 1970s. We discuss its vision and strategies, as well as some of the conflicts within the organization, particularly as these shaped the possibility of the poor 'speaking for themselves'. Throughout, we show that the movement propelled a new form of citizenship for poor people

Radicalizing Community Practice and Education

We write this article on radicalizing community practice and education in the midst of an ongoing global economic crisis related to the neoconservative and neoliberal strategies that have dominated the world stage for more than thirty years. As the Scottish referendum recently demonstrated, participatory forms of grassroots social change have become a possibility again. The referendum revealed that making the case for democratic initiatives which recognize the failures of neoliberal policies has become easier in the contemporary context. We are not, however, naïve about the prospects of change. Crises can result, as with the origins of neoliberalism in the 1970s, in simply new forms of a reasserted class power. And crises can, and certainly do, bring about surges in reactionary and xenophobic (usually anti-immigrant) politics and social movements. The lessons we proposed five years ago in Contesting Community are timelier than ever. The opportunity exists for the development of new theories and practices in and about community efforts.

Initiatives communautaires de développement local et gouvernance métropolitaine : quel emboîtement ?

La mondialisation des échanges, la restructuration des économies urbaines et la reconfiguration de l’État-providence ont conduit à deux types de stratégies de développement au sein des métropoles nord-américaines : d’une part, celles qui relèvent d’initiatives communautaires de développement local et qui s’attaquent au chômage et à la pauvreté ; d’autre part, celles qui reposent sur diverses formes de gouvernance métropolitaine et qui visent le positionnement de ces métropoles sur l’échiquier international. Y a-t-il un arrimage entre ces deux types de stratégies et les organismes qui les portent ? C’est à cette question que tente de répondre le présent article en comparant quatre métropoles : Montréal, Toronto, Boston et Pittsburgh