My name is Sid (Kim) Jackson and I am a white/scottish settler with deep familial roots in the (so-called) Canadian colonial landscape. I am currently living and working on the ancestral Lands of the Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Anishnabe peoples. I recognize that I am an uninvited guest on these Lands and treaty person, and thus I have responsibilities to actively and materially work under the direction of Indigenous peoples in struggle for a decolonized future.

I come from a cross-class background. While my parents both come from wasp backgrounds, they were downwardly mobile. I grew up with a single mother who raised my sister and I while on and off welfare. I live with invisible disability, am queer and use they/she pronouns, I have a history of substance use, insecure housing, and lumpen lifeways, as well as a hard labour work. I have joined academia as a mature student bringing me privileges I haven’t previously experienced.

I have worked for over 30 years in grassroots struggles with low-income, unhoused, criminalized and marginalized communities.

While I have not experienced much inntitutionalization, my experience with poverty, social assistance, lumpen life ways, working class labour, and insecure housing give me a partial identification with the poor people’s community with whom I work. I also understand myself as working across differences of privilege defined by each of our diverse intersectional identities within a colonial/capitalist society that hierarchizes bodies according to the cis-white-ablist heteropatriarchal norm.

In 2020, I received my PhD in Environmental Studies (York), focusing on community building with poor folx in resistance to gentrification. My work is grounded in decolonial responsibility, and in Indigenous, anti-racist, Marxist, feminist, disability, carceral geography and arts praxis. I seek to centre the ‘lived expertise’ of those with whom I work in community and co-publish where possible.

My last academic adventure was doing a Post-Doc called From Prisons to Shelters: Resisting the Carceral Continuum with supervision by Shoshana Pollack.

I understand myself as accountable to the low-income community that I work in.

CV