Issue 14.1 (Spring 2025)

Both sensuality and profanity dwell within love’s truthful self-expression. James Baldwin’s oeuvre reads race relations in the United States, revealing a skewed balance between sensuality and profanity rectified through authentic sensual connections across racial lines. This essay introduces Baldwin’s work as an exemplar of world reading, an ingredient of cultural literacy, to argue that sensuality prevents society from dismissing negative emotions as merely symptomatic of race or class resentment. Centering on profanity, the argument relies on how Baldwin deftly constructs sensuality as an inversive emotional balm for healing the US race problem through the feminine energeia found in his pervasive… Read more >

This article critically engages with the emerging “media forensic” turn at the intersection of visual culture, new media practice, and humanitarian and political activism. This field purports to subvert dominant forensic and surveillant regimes, weaponizing these mediated modalities to document acts of humanitarian and political violence. Such practices have been widely celebrated for enhancing forms of legal and political accountability and justice. However, there are concerns that these practices may inadvertently mirror the state-sanctioned regimes of control and power they wish to expose, reinforcing settler-colonial histories of the forensic and evidentiary, whilst also excluding counter-hegemonic and experimental modes of emergent… Read more >

This article examines the Ontario education system’s use of surface level practices intended to counter racism but that often fall short of creating authentic and sustainable change. Many schools across the province have focused their efforts on celebrating identity awareness days, weeks, and months, yet these initiatives largely reveal an apparent disconnect in understanding of the significant impact of white supremacy that is deeply embedded within the educational structural system. Stories from students, families, and community members reveal ongoing, often unintentional, acts of harm or violence against Indigenous, Black, racialized, and marginalized students, demonstrating a deep-seated failure to address systemic… Read more >

Launching from recent interest in disabled people’s livelihoods in the context of global Northern societies, this paper theorizes interview descriptions of livelihoods from 20 disabled, mad, and Deaf artists in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on a critical sustainable livelihoods framework, we observe that the lives of disabled artists play out in an ethos of neoliberal-ableism that has resulted in an accelerated impetus toward death for disabled people, specifically through the advancement of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Interviews reveal themes of disposability, dignity, and art-as-resistance that are deeply entrenched in disabled artists’ livelihood experiences and the complexities of their artistry and… Read more >

Grief is typically portrayed as an individual experience that is a response to loss and provides the basis for personal growth; grief is something to work through, and, ideally, to benefit from, and represents a state change. But might it be possible to conceptualize grief of the future, a subjunctive grief that is based in speculation about change that brings that change into the present? The subjunctive invokes the wished for, the imagined, and the possible, and subjunctive grief serves to work through the experience of the future in the present. Focusing on debates around medical aid in dying and… Read more >