Papers by Sid (Kim) Jackson
not normal: revolutionary notes on the undeserving poor, 2024
Much writing has been dedicated to: going over Marx’s usage of the term lumpen; contemporizing wh... more Much writing has been dedicated to: going over Marx’s usage of the term lumpen; contemporizing what we understand as lumpen identities and struggles; critiquing lumpen involvement in past revolutionary struggles; developing other terms to refer to the lumpen (informal, surplus, waste, etc.); and autobiographical accounts of lumpen life. However, rather than being understood within the greater class structure, the lumpen remain a marginal interest. Ultimately I aim to advance this discussion of the lumpen towards articulating a political identity for poor people in order to boost their struggles and claim their historical role in the fight for liberation.
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 2024
Interview with activist, Dreddz B.L. on the connections between homelessness and incarceration.
not normal: revolutionary notes on the undeserving poor, 2023
I have recently finished a long period of time spent in academia. Since I was a young adult, I ha... more I have recently finished a long period of time spent in academia. Since I was a young adult, I have been active in various dimensions of the anti-colonial-capitalist struggle. It was around 2008 when I became a part of a poor people's community in the west Toronto neighbourhood called The Junction where I was living and working. At that time, poor people were facing the onset of gentrification. Now, with gentrification in full flight and facing a condo building boom, the community has been dramatically reduced. But we are still here. 1 Through academia I was able to fund my arts and activist engagement with specific sites of poor people's inhabitation: a shelter, social housing, low barrier rentals, and a park that sits in the heart of the community. This work culminated in a PhD (2020) dissertation with the hilariously wordy title: Mending and Transforming the Torn Social Fabric: Lumpen Social Reproduction in Settler Urban Space as Relational Praxis Art 2 (ugh, I meant every word of it!). Out of critical discussions I was having in community where unhoused community members compared the shelter to prison, I decided to do a Post Doc (2022) that looked at those punitive neoliberal institutions of 'care' that frame, contain, and discipline poor peoples lives. My Post-Doc project was called: From Prison to Shelters: Resisting the Carceral Continuum 3 .
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 2022
In the judicial review, Guérin v. Canada (2018), the applicants argued that drastic pay cuts by ... more In the judicial review, Guérin v. Canada (2018), the applicants argued that drastic pay cuts by the Correctional Services Canada (CSC) and their special branch in charge of labour programs, CORCAN (established in 1992), put prisoners in what one applicant referred to as a relation of slavery (Guérin v. Canada, 2018, p. 79). Applicants say that pay cuts have caused “grossly disproportionate hardship, so excessive as to outrage standards of decency” (Guérin v. Canada, 2018, p. 33). While an analogy to slavery may not hold, fellow applicant and author Bariteau, further analyzes the relation as one of indentured servitude: often involuntary labour in which some sort of a loan is paid back by working for the lender without or with little wage for a period of time. Prisoners are seen to have a debt owed to society for the “crimes” they have supposedly committed, while dominant society takes no responsibility for the poverty and intergenerational trauma (specifically of Indigenous peoples and women) that cause the marginalization that leads to imprisonment (Chartrand, 2019; Manual and Derrickson, 2017). Rather, the CSC and CORCAN purport that the labour programs they run are ‘rehabilitation’ – the active encouragement and assistance to prisoners to become law-abiding citizens (CSC, 2012). Indeed, as imprisonment and labour have from the beginning been inextricable, so has the conflation of prison labour with rehabilitation.
The Journal of Law and Social Policy, 2017
Gentrification is often described metaphorically as a form of ‘colonization,’ however in this pap... more Gentrification is often described metaphorically as a form of ‘colonization,’ however in this paper I argue that gentrification comprises one strategy in the continued historical colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Canadian context, and more specifically in the settler city of Toronto. I propose that the colonial relationalities, both symbolic and material that give rise to the settler city, persist as a discipline on poor and Indigenous bodies, spaces and lands, through the capitalist way of life. Colonial relationalities are again heightened through gentrifications role in Toronto’s strivings for global city status in a neo-imperialist global economy. Gentrification is based on moral investments in the capitalist ideology of private property and monetary investments in shifting of property values. Investment in private property is fraught with the ethical contractions of land theft, exploitation, ongoing original accumulation, and displacement, which form the basis of homelessness and Indigenous marginalization in the city. However, gentrification theory and Marxist geography do not fully or consistently account for the implications of colonial history in the current understanding of gentrification. Neil Smith, for instance, relegates Indigenous history and epistemologies to an irrelevant past failing to unsettle or decolonize the notion of gentrification. Other Marxist theorists, who have attempted to connect issues of gentrification and colonization offer a way forward to a decolonized understanding, however, more engaged dialogue with Indigenous scholars and communities are necessary to continue this discussion in a more liberatory direction.
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies
Histories of disability are too often inextricably linked to histories of institutionalization. T... more Histories of disability are too often inextricably linked to histories of institutionalization. This is to say that part of the historical experience of people who have been labeled as disabled includes the damaging experience of social confinement and removal to institutional spaces. As an editorial team, we come to this special issue as members of a collective invested in the critical uptake of survivor knowledge as a force for political transformation. Since 2013, a group of artist-researchers and artist-survivors, including the editors of this special issue, have collaborated on Recounting Huronia, a project funded by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant. Using arts-based methods, we have explored histories of institutionalization at the Huronia Regional Centre (formerly the Ontario Hospital School, Orillia), which was the largest residential facility in Canada for persons diagnosed with intellectual disabilities. Huronia opened its doors in Orillia Ontario in 1876 and remained in operation until 2009. As survivors recount, it was a place of widespread and brutal physical and sexual violence, material and psychological deprivation. Huronia was an institution that survivors repeatedly refer to as haunted, and imagined being burnt to the ground, demolished, but not forgotten.
Talks by Sid (Kim) Jackson
presented at the unruly engagement conference, cleveland institute of art, cleveland oh. 2014
Conference Presentations by Sid (Kim) Jackson
Imagining Abolition: Beyond Prisons, Wars, and Borders April 14-17, 2021
Gentrification is often discussed deploying colonization as a metaphor, however, this paper looks... more Gentrification is often discussed deploying colonization as a metaphor, however, this paper looks at how gentrification, through its mobilization of capitalist relationalities (through private property and through economic and cultural life) is a form of ongoing colonization. As a a highly normativizing economic practice, gentrification forms a necro-political assault on different bodies. Crip social praxis art is discussed as a form of self-representation that has the possibility to recuperate lumpen bodies as creative and political agents, locally active in anti-gentrification struggles.
Books by Sid (Kim) Jackson
We have a message Women's Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness, 2012
This monograph was produced by the Women's Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness project ... more This monograph was produced by the Women's Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness project that was organized by the Red Wagon Collective. The text and artworks were created by women who live in a shelter and in precarious social housing in and around the Junction, a gentrifying neighbourhood in west Toronto. The layout was done by Liza Kim Jackson.
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Papers by Sid (Kim) Jackson
Talks by Sid (Kim) Jackson
Conference Presentations by Sid (Kim) Jackson
Books by Sid (Kim) Jackson