Activism is an integral part of our social fabric; it is one of the options available to us in the face of injustice. There are many stories of resistance that have been told and many more that have gone untold.

In this episode of Vital Signs, Rudi Wallace hosts author and media maker Scott Neigh to explore themes of resistance and activism in Hamilton and across Canada. Scott has documented stories from the front lines of social movements on a number of issues including gender, Indigenous rights, labour and more.

Key quotes:

“Most of what we know about the world happens in the context of institutions…school, the media…most of them are organized in a way that prioritizes the status quo, shaping which voices get amplified and which ones get marginalized and excluded.”

“Struggles that we sometimes think of as separate or siloed, like gender movements, are often interconnected with other movements…like the experiences that Indigenous women have had of colonialism and the ways they have resisted that in the context of educational systems like residential schools.”

“Listening is something that happens between us in a reciprocal kind of way…and is a feature of how all our lives are organized. Social movements are about how we arrange our relationships amongst ourselves and the changes we want to make in the broader world, the social relations that organize our lives.”

“It’s easy to see [repressive power] as being more absolute than it actually is. The sheer amount of effort that it takes for institutions to prevent or repress or co-opt movements is a sign of the power that ordinary people have when they work collectively to make change. If you look, there are signs of collective struggle winning things all the time.”

“It’s important [for social movements] not to be exclusively attendant to catering to popular opinion…often after the course of struggles for liberation, in retrospect, people will look back more favourably on the past. For example, the civil rights movement was profoundly unpopular but in retrospect, people have come say that was the right thing to be doing.”

“We live in a society that separates us. We aren’t in collective spaces as much as we were a generation or two ago…the key thing to being effective and building the popular power that we need…is to recognize the importance of doing things with other people…rather than accepting that separation and isolation.”