FEATURE // SOCIAL JUSTICE
Students for justice
University of Alberta groups and clubs working to make an equitable campus
F
ebruary 20 was proclaimed World Day of Social Justice by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2007, and the annual event was first celebrated two years later. It's a day to recognize the efforts of organizations and people who are working to eradicate poverty and to promote gender equity, full-time work and access to social well-being and justice for all. It's a day to celebrate victories, while also acknowledging the work that still remains. Social justice means respecting every person's basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, regardless of their gender, race, religion, culture, age, disability, sexual preference or ethnic affiliation. At the University of Alberta, students are well aware of the remaining workload to ensure social justice. On campus alone, there are between 15 and 20 clubs and groups addressing different social justice issues. Make Poverty History, Engineers Without Borders, Amnesty International and the Ainembabazi Children's Project are just a few. In the last five years all of these groups have been brought together by one over-arching coalition called the Student Umbrella for Social Justice (SUSJ). The coalition was started by a group of students who saw a need for collaboration between social justice groups. "What we are hoping to do is build a stronger network," says Mike McGinn of SUSJ. "We had groups all over the place doing their own thing and a lot of them faced similar challenges, just regular student group challenges, like fundraising, administration, that type of thing, and also just advocacy. So with the SUSJ, we figured if we were able to form a coalition and have regular meetings, we would be able to exchange and support everyone in their initiatives." One of those initiatives is helping OUTreach—a group that provides
DECLINE OF THE WEST << CONTINUED FROM PAGE 05
else should the centre of gravity be? Asia is very far from monolithic, and there is no logical reason to suppose that its economic rise spells economic decline for the West. Thirdly, descriptions of the future that are simply extrapolations of the present, like the ones at the start of this article, are almost always wrong. If the widely believed forecasts of the '80s had been right, Japan would now
a queer-positive atmosphere and meeting place for students on campus—lobby for a larger safe space for the campus's LGBTQ community, McGinn says. "One thing that's nice about the SUSJ is we have a little bit more lobbying power because we're a larger organization, so we're lobbying the Students' Union to create a larger safe space on campus for the [LGBTQ] community." Another project SUSJ is working on is making the university a fairtrade campus, like the University of British Columbia, the first Canadian campus to do so in January 2011. To be recognized as a fairtrade campus, the university has to meet availability and visibility standards set out by Fair Trade Canada.
That means educating the public about fair-trade products—goods that farmers have been paid a fair price for—and making those products available on campus. Another campus-wide initiative the SUSJ is working on this year is creating a campus decolonization tour to take place during orientation week each year. For that, SUSJ has combined forces with the Alber-
ta Public Interest Research Group (APIRG), the Students' Union and numerous other groups. "APIRG has been doing this decolonization tour on campus every year for the last couple of years now, just showing different aspects of campus that reflect how it is a colonial institution and how it might make some of the indigenous populations feel uncomfortable and unrecognized," explains McGinn. "So we're looking at building that into orientation week so that we can at least bring light to the situation for students who are coming onto campus. With
the Idle No More movement going on right now it's a really good time to bring these types of issues up." Ideally, McGinn says those tours
will begin next September, but it's just a matter of figuring out the logistics and going through the appropriate processes with the university. The work being done by student groups and clubs to fight for social justice on campus can sometimes be thankless work, he adds. But being under one umbrella over the last number of years has made a significant difference. "When you have a community together, you have a much stronger support structure and you get to share in everyone's success, so when someone else has a small success, you get to share in that together." NICOLE VEERMAN
// wikimedia commons
bestride the world like an economic Colossus. The one certain thing about the future is surprises—but some surprises are a little less surprising than others. Take climate change, for example. The scientific evidence strongly suggests that the tropical and subtropical parts of the world, home to almost all of the emerging economic powers, will be much harder hit by global warming than the temperate parts of the globe, farther away from
// NICOLE@VUEWEEKLY.COM
the equator, where the older industrialized countries all live. There is already much anger about this in the new economic powers. Eighty percent of the greenhouse gases of human origin in the atmosphere were put there by the old-rich countries, who got rich by burning fossil fuels for the past two centuries, and yet they get off lightly while the (relatively) innocent suffer. But even if the newly rich wanted revenge, they are too
VUEWEEKLY FEB 21– FEB 27, 2013
disunited—and will be too busy coping with the warming—to do much about it. The centre of gravity of the world economy is undoubtedly leaving the old "Atlantic" world of Europe and North America and moving towards Asia, but how far and how fast this process goes remains to be seen. And there is no reason to believe that it will leave the countries of the West poor or helpless. True, economists in the West of-
ten ask the question: "What will we sell the emerging countries in the future that they cannot produce for themselves?" In the runaway global warming scenario, the answer would be "food", but the real answer is sure to be more complex than that. Never mind. They'll think of something, because they'll have to. V Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
UP FRONT 7