Constructing Social Justice

Program Day 1 - May 30 from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm: 

Join us in person at the SHIFT Centre at 9:30 for the breakfast or on zoom at 10 am.

Zoom registration: Day 1 Register on zoom to get the link (the first session will start at 10 am).

Program Day 2 - May 31 from 12:00 to 3:15 pm

Join us in person ay SHIFT or on zoom.

Zoom registration: Day 2 Register on zoom to get the link (the first session will start at 12:30).

About the speakers

Azize Aslan (Instituto Mora and Ph.D. in Sociology at Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla) is working on Zapatista and Kurdish Movements. She is an activist and fighter in the Kurdistan women's movement and, since 2016, she lives in Mexico and learns about the Zapatista struggle. She works on communal economies, cooperatives, revolutionary and autonomous practices. In 2021, she published the book entitled “Economía anticapitalista en Rojava Las contradicciones de la revolución en la lucha kurda” on the contradictions of the revolution in the Kurdish struggle.

Martin Danyluk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University. His work focuses on infrastructure, housing, and transportation, exploring how intersecting forms of inequality are produced and contested in cities. He studies the webs of violence and conflict that surround the movement of goods through the global capitalist economy. He recently published “Seizing the Means of Circulation: Choke Points and Logistical Resistance in Coco Solo, Panama.”

Mostafa Henaway (PhD student at Concordia University and former graduate student at the Social Justice Centre) is a long-time community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, where he has been organizing for justice for immigrant/migrant workers for over two decades. He is also a researcher and PhD candidate at Concordia University. He recently published the book "Essential Work, Disposable Workers" at Fernwood Publishing and "Infiltrating Amazon: What I learned going undercover at the corporate giant" (Breach Media, 2021)

Anna Kruzynski is a professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs and director of the Community Economy Development program at Concordia University. She has been involved in many different types of social movements: from the student movement, to health and feminist community organisations in Point-Saint-Charles, to anti-globalisation direct action, to busy work with neighbours and anarchist comrades to set-up local economic and political initiatives inspired by a post-capitalist politics. She was involved in Bâtiment 7 (Building 7) both as neighbourhood organizer and engaged scholar. She recently published « Quartier en lutte : Récits féministes et libertaires » (Remue-Ménage, 2023) a collection of essays on two decades of social struggles in Montréal.

Begüm Özden Fırat is a political activist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. Her field of research includes politics of visual culture, radical arts, and cultures of social movements. She has co-edited Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2011) and Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory & Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She recently published “A double movement of enclosure and commons: commoning Emek movie theatre in three acts” (Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 2022).

Eleni Schirmer, postdoc in the Social Justice Centre at Concordia University, is a writer, researcher, and organizer with the Debt Collective. She is a research associate with the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and she earned a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She researches and teaches about topics related to the political economy of education, labor, and the sociology and history of education in the United States. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Nation. Her work was featured in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about student debt relief. In 2023, Eleni co-edited a special issue of the radical social justice magazine, Rethinking Schools: "Resisting debt, funding justice: the struggle against debt-financed public education."