Chair
Daniel Vandervoort: external@utgsu.ca
Meetings
Drop Fees National Student Day of Action Feb 1
The Liberal Party promised Ontario students 30% off tuition fees. However, now that they have been elected back pedaling has commenced and many students will not see that promise come to fruition. The next GSU Day of Action (DOA) planning meeting will be included in the next SJC on Tues Jan 24 5:30-7pm at
the GSU building to prepare for the DOA. Please join other UofT grads in planning our priorities and how
we can plug in to this exciting Canada wide coordinated action. If you can’t make it to the planning meeting but would like to stay in touch for future meetings and actions email external@utgsu.ca.
This week there is a social justice committee meeting tuesday at 5:30 at the GSU where we will be talking about some of the issues and how we want to represent our concerns on the streets, on wednesday is our gsu council meeting at the multifaith centre at 6 where we will also be talking about DoA and other issues and later will be international student issues day of action trivia at the gsu pub from 9-11pm, there is a uoft wide marshal training on thursday at bahen 4-6, and then right after we will have an intro session for gsu volunteers back at the gsu from 6:30-7:30 to talk about what specific roles you may want to play (eg. banner/ alt media production, poster/flyer distribution, marshal, trivia night or day of logistics, etc)
The DOA will be taking place Feb 1, 2012! Drop Fees! Drop Debt!
Education is a Right.
The next SJC will be meeting Tuesday Jan 24 at 5:30 at the GSU.
This week there is a social justice committee meeting tuesday at 5:30 at the GSU where we will be talking about some of the issues and how we want to represent our concerns on the streets, on wednesday is our gsu council meeting at the multifaith centre at 6 where we will also be talking about DoA and other issues and later will be international student issues day of action trivia at the gsu pub from 9-11pm, there is a uoft wide marshal training on thursday at bahen 4-6, and then right after we will have an intro session for gsu volunteers back at the gsu from 6:30-7:30 to talk about what specific roles you may want to play (eg. banner/ alt media production, poster/flyer distribution, marshal, trivia night or day of logistics, etc)
Agenda
Mostly we will talk about day of action, but also included on agenda is joining the ontario clean air alliance. Let me know if other items.
Event listings
1) What does it mean to ‘Occupy already occupied lands?’. How does Occupy relate to 500 years of resistance on Turtle Island? Please join speakers Tom B.K. Goldtooth, Clayton Thomas-Muller and Leanne Simpson with MC Tannis Nielson to explore and discuss these dynamics of the Occupy movement.
Where: Beit Zatoun, 612 Markham Street
When: January, 23rd, 7 pm
Event is FREE, donations welcome.
2) The University of Toronto Women and Gender Studies Student Union presents:
THE POLITICS of PROTEST: Bridging the Local and Global in Emerging Social Movements
Locating Occupy, SlutWalk, and Other Organizing Efforts
A panel discussion on the increasingly global nature of emerging activist movements, such as Occupy and SlutWalk, and how they negotiate politics of power and privilege in their organizing.
William Doo Auditorium (40 Willcocks St.)
Thursday, January 26, 2012
5 PM
3) the Hart House Social Justice Committee has an upcoming panel (Tue. Jan 31)on “Global Austerity, Access to the City & Citizenship”. Everyone is invited and encouraged to attend. We want to make sure that there is a strong graduate student presence. The event is free and open to all; we only ask for an RSVP ahead of time.
Panelists:
*David Hulchanski (Professor & Associate Director for Research, Cities Centre, University
of Toronto).
*Roger Keil (Professor & Director, The City Institute, York University).
*Margaret Kohn (Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Toronto).
*Jayme Turney (Executive Director, Toronto Public Space Initiative).
Light refreshments will be served.
When: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 4:00- 6:00 p.m
Where: Hart House Debates Room, 2nd Floor of Hart House Building, 7 Hart House Circle.
Map: http://harthouse.ca/location/hart-house-debates-room
Please reserve a seat (RSVP) by sending a short e-mail message to
hhsocialjustice@gmail.com.
About the Committee
From the anti-Vietnam war mobilizations in the 1960s to the movement to oppose sweatshop-produced clothing on university campuses in the 1990s, students have a long history of being strong and articulate leaders of social justice movements.
The mandate of the Social Justice Committee is to defend the right to an accessible and equitable student experience. Activities include working to freeze and reduce tuition fees, informing students about free trade and how it affects public education, and helping eliminate oppressive or exploitative systems.
Students live and work in the broader society as citizens, have ideas about the world and often play a crucial role in bringing about social change. This sub-committee addresses political issues that are not directly related to post-secondary education, but are most definitely directly related to students and our day-to-day lives because our experiences as students and citizens are not isolated from one another.
As founding members of the Canadian Federation of Students—our national students’ union which represents over 500,000 students across Canada—Graduate Students’ Union members have the opportunity to engage in student activities that have a national scope and which draw upon the resources and energy of many thousands of students from coast to coast. The Social Justice Committee will focus on the activities and campaigns that we help to determine at the national and provincial meetings of our Federation. Some of these campaigns include a campaign strategy to entrench students’ rights in provincial legislation and a research campaign on the impact of rising international students’ tuition fees.
Graduate students have been active participants in the successful effort to extract a two-year tuition fee freeze from the provincial government. The campaign to freeze and reduce tuition fees continues to be a primary campaign of the GSU and graduate students all across Canada.
Through the National Graduate Caucus of the Federation, the Committee will work on campaigns focused on graduate student issues including the ‘Whistleblowers’ campaign that sounds the alarm of corporate influence on research and its impact on academic freedom.
Up until the early to mid-1990s, most graduate programmes in Canada maintained a policy of reduced tuition fees for graduate students who had completed the course requirements, or period of “residency” for their degree. The National Graduate Caucus recently adopted a ‘Post-Residency Fees’ campaign calling for a return to the policy of reduced tuition fees for those graduate students who have completed their course requirements and are in the independent research and thesis writing stage of their degree. The Committee will continue working to implement this campaign at U of T.