When silence screams

This article was originally published in We Are Not Numbers on June 2, 2025. Samah reached out to Antler River Media Co-op to republish “When Silence Screams” in hopes of reaching new audiences in Canada. They’ve stopped. For now. No bombs for 10 minutes. Fifteen maybe? My ears are still ringing, my heart is still beating fast and my mind is dizzied with questions—Is it over, or is this just the pause before the next strike? Did it hit someone I know? Should I move now or wait? How many more nights like this can we survive? And on and on.…

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Edward Said: Between Worlds – “We were there. You can’t do more than that.” 

Edward Said was always a familiar name at my dinner table. Since I was a child, I walked past our oak bookshelf that carried the spine of his magnum opus Orientalism, intrigued by its cover image of a thick blue snake coiled around the torso of a young boy. My father would listen to Said’s lectures at his home office. Sometimes he would invite me, peering from the doorway, to listen; sometimes I would catch stray phrases. From this early osmosis, I came to a vague yet strong sense that Said spoke about “our part of the world” — whatever…

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PERSPECTIVES: Before we commit

On October 13, the City identified $186.8 million in the campus’s life-to-date capital budget and capital plan through 2033, but said a current breakdown of costs by component was unavailable. Preliminary capital estimates and an implementation plan were expected in 2027. With the election approaching, voters have an overall figure but no current component costs or clear account of which further spending decisions remain for Council.

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“My family could not abide by fascism”: Catalan researcher Mireya Folch-Serra on exile from Spain to France to Mexico to London Ontario 

“I was born in the middle of nowhere,” says Mireya Folch-Serra, an emerita professor of geography at Western University whose research focuses on diaspora and exile. She was born on November 14th, 1937, in the midst of the Civil War that led to Franco’s 39-year military dictatorship in Spain. Her mother, the daughter of philosophy professor and rector of the University of Barcelona Dr. Jaume Serra i Hunter, feared giving birth beneath the bombs in embattled Barcelona. She fled to her father-in-law’s cottage in Tarragona. “My grandfather – the father of my father – was a medical doctor. They had…

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Anti-Amnesia: Our memories are resistance

Capitalism and colonialism thrive on the erasure of our memories, that function as a type of amnesia of the working class. It is crucial to preserve our histories, victories, and struggles; by remembering, we combat dominant narratives that benefit those in power. By consciously recollecting, we practice hope – a discipline that works to disrupt capitalist and colonialist ideologies. The process allows us to invest in the belief of systemic alternatives. From this memory work, we learn and develop the revolutionary practices that it will take to get us there.  Amnesia is an imperfect metaphor for this phenomenon, as we…

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Prisoners’ Justice Film Festival brings stories of resistance, healing, and liberation to screens across London

The Prisoners’ Justice Film Festival (PJFF) has a historic legacy in London, running from 2012-2016. This year, our organizing collective finally brought it back, screening five films in the first week of August as a lead up to International Prisoners’ Justice Day on August 10.  On that date in 1974, Eddie Nalon died by suicide at the Millhaven Maximum Security Prison near Kingston, Ontario, after being repeatedly subjected to solitary confinement — a practice which has been called a form of torture by the UN. One year later, prisoners at Millhaven stopped all work and went on a hunger strike…

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