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Concordia University Concordia celebrates 50 years!
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Concordia University Concordia celebrates 50 years!

The SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation

The SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation

The SHIFT Journal of Social Transformation

Seeing systems change in action

General submission & publication guidelines

Interested in publishing in the SHIFT Journal? Check out our guidelines to learn more about what we're looking for and how to submit your work for publication. 

Learn how to submit your work

A letter from SHIFT

For the February edition of the SHIFT Journal, Social Transformation as an Act of Love, former Program Coordinator Stephanie introduces the edition and reflects on her time at SHIFT and the honour it is to witness dozens of kinds of love languages working towards various social transformation efforts every day.

Read the letter from SHIFT

Social Transformation as an Act of Love

Chapter 1: Letters to the "not yet here"

Featuring: Gabriela Gomez, Marlo Turner Ritchie, Barbara Saldana, Sevghi Haidar

In this chapter, Selection Committee member Prakash writes, the pieces "remind us that despite the darkness, we must keep choosing love, collective action, and integenerational solidarity."

Chapter 2: Letters to the "here and now"

Featuring: Maggie Smith, Nabiha Yahiaoui, Mikal Nazarani

As Pierina writes, love "is in all of our quotidian details," and acts as a "powerful weapon of resistance". The pieces in this chapter reflect on the experience of love as a weapon - and sometimes I healing act - in the present.

Chapter 3: Letters to the "once or never was here"

Featuring: Mona Calvet, Catherine Dufort, M. Kipling, Duha Elmardi, Sylvia Mondestin

As the letters in this chapter demonstrate, care is "our finest gift", as Selection Committee member Deann writes. Care as an heirloom that we need to hold as we show up with our community, ancestors, and future generations.

Additional works

No Security in Repression: an interview with May Chiu from the Chinatown Round table

By May Chiu and John

How are narratives of safety being used as justification to repress people disrupting the "social order" all over the city, including in neighbouring communties like Chinatown? In this interview, May explains the on-the-ground realities and tensions facing the neighbourhood she works in.

To the Community That Made Freedom School Possible: A Love Letter

by Adama Kaba and Jade Almeida

In this piece, Adama and Jade reflect on the first year or Harambec's Freedom School, a two-week summer program for Black youth across Montreal.

Building an effective community research collaboration

by Dagen Perrott

SHIFT hosted a talk on Indigenous community-based research collaborations, and the potential in creating partnerships across disciplines towards social transformation. Featuring a research project collaboration between SHIFT partner Tkà:nios, and the Gina Cody School of Engineering. 

Moving beyond "flat" : a case for dynamic governance

by Kristen Young

How does a dynamic governance model, inspired by "sociocracy," offer a different kind of shared power based in consent over consensus?

Reawakening, not revitalization

by Autumn Godwin

Through her organization "Buckskin Babes," Autumn leads moose-hide tanning camps for urban Indigenous youth and Elders alike. In this piece, originally from May 2023, she explains why the word "revitalization" doesn't fit the project.

What can academia learn from models like SHIFT?

by Andrea Clarke

In this first part of her short series, Andrea shares her reflections on what university institutions can learn about community collaboration and feedback from units like SHIFT. 
Browse past works

About the SHIFT Journal

As a non-academic university unit, the SHIFT Journal provides an avenue for our partners to publish through an institution regardless of their involvement in academia, and outside of the challenges of rigid publication rules. 

Shared power is SHIFT’s core operating principle. With the Journal, we hope to share not just the lessons we've learned over the last five years of SHIFT, but also the many exciting and alternative paths that our wider community is taking towards a more just future. 

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