As a longstanding��, May Day is a day to celebrate the collective power of all who labor – paid and unpaid, formal and informal, in care work and field work – all of the activities that sustain us and our community. It’s a day to recommit to forging solidarity across borders against exploitation and dispossession. Above all, May Day honours the power of ordinary people, working together, to shape the conditions of our lives.

Things are getting harder. People are struggling to get by, the rich are getting richer, the ecological crisis is intensifying, Palestine is enduring unspeakable horrors, authoritarianism is growing more ascendant globally, and ruling officials are offering us little more than flag-waving and immigrant-blaming. In these circumstances, it’s all the more crucial to remember that collective struggle from below is a source of joy and the way that we win.

So, this year, ��are resuscitating the tradition of the Ottawa May Day march and we invite you to join us!

March Details

• Date: Thursday, May 1st, 2025
• Start location: Confederation Park (Elgin St @ Laurier Ave)
• Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm

If you have questions or require more information, please contact us at punchup@riseup.net.

��A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys’s has crafted a novel of extraterrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth.��A Half-Built Garden��depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth cautiously entering into dialogue with. It’s not the easiest future to build, but it’s one that just might be in reach.

In this conversation, Emma D’Amico will engage Emrys’s work in��A Half-Built Garden��as a starting point to think through writing and reading climate fiction, asking how literature helps us imagine collective approaches to building non-dystopian futures.

Runnana Emrys is the author of��A Half-Built Garden,��Winter Tide, and��Deep Roots, as well as co-writer of Reactor’s Reading the Weird column with Anne M. Pillsworth. She writes radically hopeful short stories about religion and aliens and psycholinguistics. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. There she creates real versions of imaginary foods, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.

Emma D’Amico��is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University. Her current research focuses on climate emotions, climate-changed futures, and pre-figurative politics in literature. Her approach in research and pedagogy is informed by decolonial, climate affect, and climate justice theories that work to produce new insights into how to address climate-changed futures. Emma is ��also the co-coordinator of �Ӱ�ԭ�� Climate Commons, co-presenter of this event, which brings together scholars, students, and community members to discuss issues surrounding the climate crisis in relation to the humanities and social sciences, to share academic work, ideas, and resources.��

Join the EACH 4000 class in celebration with free food and exciting topics, including discussions on sustainability, visible mending, gardening for the future, fallen tree ecology, and zine giveaways!

April 10

6:30-8:00PM

Dunton Tower 1812

Bring an old pair of jeans (or any clothing item!) that needs mending and learn basic hand sewing, embroidery, and visible mending techniques inspired by traditional Japanese Sashiko and Boro stitching. All supplies, including beads, bows, thread, scrap fabric selection, and more will be provided for you to play and get creative with!

Light allergen-friendly snacks and refreshments will also be provided.

All levels welcome, no sewing experience required.

This creative and educational workshop is organized by Hailey, founder of��, and Francine, Founder of��. Both are Ottawa-based zero waste fashion designers passionate about up-cycling. We beleive in circular practices, in loving and repairing your clothes, reducing waste and overconsumption, and in rebuilding our relationship with fashion and the textile arts.

Grab a friend and join us to repair, repurpose, and remix an old pair of jeans!

Room number 4020 in the Nicol Building. Paid parking available on site.

Thank you to our event sponsor:��

The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Epochal Crises of Time

Humankind inhabits the epochal formations of fossil-based global capitalism and an Anthropocene earth system debilitated by carbon emissions, global warming and associated tipping points. Convergence of these epochs has generated crises of time at three interrelated levels.

Firstly, from an intra-global capitalist perspective, the realisation of capital over measurable chronological time is disrupted by the real time imperatives of financial profit making. Digital technologies enable traders and speculators to compress sequential economic time in ways that cannot recognise the historicity, futurity and totality of global warming-climate change. Secondly, global capitalism destabilises every aspect of the earth system; consequently, the deadweight of capitalism’s past carbon emissions and the associated ecological damage weighs increasingly upon the present. As this situation worsens for each incoming generation, the advancing repercussions of global warming deepen uncertainties about what the future might bring for disparate populations. A general crisis of temporal progressivity results whereby the past-present-future trajectory of economic growth becomes unviable and survivalist business models prevail. Palpable earth system deterioration threatens the assumption that that continued growth and technological advancement are guarantors of a better future. Global capitalism’s earth system deterioration also generates a crisis in the denial of coevalness; globally mediated now-ness and presentism cannot occlude the ever-growing multitudinous others of global warming displacement. Thirdly, earth system deterioration triggers a crisis of ecological and social temporalities. Across major ecosystems the cyclicities, rhythmicities and synchronicities of biotic, animal, bird and marine life are unravelling. And, amidst declining biodiversity, humankind faces a crisis of temporal autonomy; a sustainable future cannot be reliably secured.

Although the enveloping, polycentric nature of these time crises are not fully apparent their symptoms circulate unpredictably within communication flows and media spectacles. Fundamentally, the convergent epochs of the Anthropocene earth system and global capitalism have limited duration. What will then follow? In these fraught times, I set out the counter- constructions of time necessary to energise the climate justice movement and advance eco-socialist principles.

�Ӱ�ԭ�� the Speaker

Professor��Wayne Hope’s primary research focus concerns time, globality and capitalism. He has authored��Time, Communication and Global Capitalism��(Palgrave 2016) and��The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures: Times out of joint��(Palgrave 2024). Related research has appeared in��The International Journal of Communication, Time and Society��and��Triple C: Capitalism, Communication and Critique.��Professor Hope is joint editor of an online IAMCR journal entitled��Political Economy of Communication.��He is co-director of the Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD) research centre at the Auckland University of Technology and comments regularly on media-politics in blogs, podcasts and the news media.

December 11, 2024��at 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM

1524 Dunton Tower and Zoom

Dr. Sabrina Fernandes is a Canadian and Brazilian sociologist and political economist, ecosocialist activist, acclaimed author, and IPE alumna; currently Head of Research at the Alameda Institute, she is the author of Se Quiser Mudar o Mundo: Um guia politico para quem se important (2020) and Morbid Symptoms: the crossroads of the Brazilian Left (2019). Dr. Fernandes is also the editor of new Portuguese editions of The Communist Manifesto, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and a box set of the three volumes of Capital. She is co-editor of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies’ Global Authoritarianism: Perspectives and contestations from the South.

Climate Commons is organizing a social and community-building event that will feature speakers that bring together all five senses on the topic of climate change.

We’ll have more information coming soon, but in the meantime we’re looking for musicians, artists, writers, dancers, and other creatives who are working in relation to climate. If this sounds like you, and you’d be interested in getting involved in our event (as a speaker, or as a space to share or showcase your work) please let us know using the form below.

2023 Worldwide Climate Teach-In

When? Wednesday, March 29th (or anytime that week!)

Join the �Ӱ�ԭ�� Climate Commons, , and many other organizations in the upcoming on and around March 29, 2023. Last year this event engaged an estimated 50,000 students at more than 300 campuses in over 60 countries!

On and around March 29, 2023, we hope you’ll join us to! This means devoting your regular class time, in part or fully, to a discussion of how your field contributes to the understanding of climate change, climate solutions or climate justice. There are , in various languages (��and��!), to help you develop an inventive and engaging class that connects climate change with any course or discipline in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities. Any single one of the teach-ins and any style count!

You can participate even if your class is already focused on climate change–the goal is to have as many classes/groups/communities participating as we can.

If you are interested in participating, please, let us know by including your name and university on the form below. On March 23rd, we will be hosting a hybrid Noons for Now event (our weekly Teach-In series), to prepare for the wave of Teach-Ins. On March 30th, we will host another virtual teach-in to discuss and debrief about how the experience went.

Let’s make the climate crisis a fundamental part of post-secondary education! Let’s make climate change education a fundamental part of the necessary change!

Need some inspiration? Check out our resource lists on teaching and talking about climate change from past Noons for Now events:

• April 14, 2022: Climate Change and Experiential Learning with Stefania Maggi (�Ӱ�ԭ�� U) and Amin Sheickh-Ali (�Ӱ�ԭ�� U)
• May 19, 2022: Do I Know Enough to Teach �Ӱ�ԭ�� Climate Change? with Emilie Cameron (�Ӱ�ԭ�� U)
• June 9, 2022: Kitchen Table Climate Conversations with Colleen Lynch (ClimateFast)
• Dec. 8, 2022: ‘The role and responsibility of academia in the context of the planetary crisis – or what is to be done?’ with John Barry (Queen’s U Belfast)

Check out this upcoming webinar organized by the Centre on Hate Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech:

We warmly welcome you to join us for a The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change, a CHBE Webinar with Geoff Dembicki . Drawing from hundreds of confidential oil industry documents spanning decades, Dembicki’s explosive work of investigative reporting reveals for the first time the far-right conspiracy that’s stopped the world from preventing the climate crisis. Learn more about Geoff Dembicki’s book��

In The Petroleum Papers, investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki tells the story of how the American oil companies that founded the tar sands in Alberta, Canada—home to the third-biggest oil reserves on the planet—ignored warnings about climate devastation as early as 1959. Instead of alerting the world to act on this impending global disaster, Exxon, Koch Industries, Shell and others created ad campaigns saying climate change isn’t real and that alternatives to oil are an economic disaster. These companies built a global right-wing echo chamber to ensure tar sands could keep flowing into the U.S., which helped elect Donald Trump and now leaves the Joe Biden administration with a sprawling climate mess.

But Dembicki also tells the high-stakes stories of people fighting back: the Seattle lawyer who brought Big Tobacco to its knees and is now going after Big Oil, a young Filipino activist who saw her family drown in a climate disaster, and a former engineer at Exxon who was pushed out for asking too many hard questions. With experts now warning we have less than a decade to get global emissions under control, The Petroleum Papers provides a step-by-step account of how we got to this precipice and the politicians and companies who deserve our blame.

–

Geoff Dembicki is an investigative climate change reporter from Alberta, Canada, home of the largest tar sand deposits in the world. His book Are We Screwed? won the 2018 Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. He is a regular contributor to the Tyee and VICE. He lives in Brooklyn.

Organized by the����(CHBE). Co-sponsored by��,����and��Climate Commons.

Feb. 16: Noons for Now: Open Discussion

Our last teach-in of the month is dedicated to an open discussion. We will pick up threads from previous conversations to see where they take us, and we will develop new ideas for concrete actions to engage in individually and as a community. Everyone is welcome, whether you’ve attended a past teach-in or not!

When/Where:

Dunton Tower room 1816

12-1PM