The Radical Labour of Care

As part of George Brown College’s Labour Fair, the Office of Social Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University presents a special Transformation Cafe titled The Radical Labour of Care.

How can we reimagine the systems that continue to fail the city’s most vulnerable people through radical approaches to care? In an increasingly hostile and unaffordable city where housing, healthcare, and other basic needs are increasingly inaccessible, this Transformation Café explores the everyday/night labour of care work through decolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives.

Featuring Claire Dion Fletcher, an Indigenous midwife, leader, and educator, Lorraine Lam, a crisis outreach worker, case manager, and advocate in Toronto’s Downtown East, and Grissel Orellana, the Program Director of the Latinx Womyn’s Program at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape, this conversation will examine how panelists intervene in state cruelty by identifying the gaps and harms within systems that claim to provide care while also building practices of mutual aid, community safety, and collective survival.

By focusing on labour practices that centre people who are directly affected by crisis, this Café invites participants to imagine what an affordable and equitable city could look like when it invests in sensible drug policy, harm reduction, and housing justice; when it supports survivor-led sexual violence services without forcing them into chronic precarity; and when it advances Indigenous sovereignty in healthcare. We will share what is already working, what solidarities we need to sustain communities, and how care - as labour and as worldbuilding - can be a pathway to building a livable city.

Location + Time

When: Tuesday, March 24th, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Where: 200 King St. E., St James Campus, Room SJA 455E

The Office of Social Innovation launched our new event series titled Transformation Cafes in 2024. These panel events explore our strategic theme: social justice approaches to accessing education and campus space. Transformation cafes are discussions that are open to the TMU community and the public that invite people from different disciplines and communities to engage in dialogue around a common issue.

Previous events in this series critiqued inclusion into a normative system and offered different perspectives on safety and security on campus space. Stay tuned for our next Transformation Cafe in May that will center the intersection of disability, death, and access to housing.

https://www.torontomu.ca/social-innovation/initiatives/programs/transformationcafes/

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Host or Publisher Office of Social Innovation at Ryerson University