The projects on this page represent a diversity of experience of the carceral continuum from shelters, training schools and the medical system to policing of Indigenous and drug user bodies in public space. Each of these projects center people with lived expertise of the carceral continuum - as I come across or am recommended projects that contribute to the research - they will be posted here
We Want You To Listen: Shelter Video Project
Shelter Video Collective (video 70 mins)
With the attacks on unhoused folks in encampments, the city of Toronto is trying to say that being in the shelter system is ‘safer’ than being on the streets. On September 14, 2021 the Toronto Homeless Memorial added the names of 16 unhoused people who died in the month of August. Over half of these deaths occurred in the shelter system.
Shelter Video Collective members worked for five years on this urgent, timely project in which they bravely speak out, despite risk of reprisal, about the dehumanizing shelter conditions that they endured in the context of a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood. In the video, collective members share their lived expertise of being unhoused, poverty, disability, racism, classism, stigmatization, gentrification, the decimation of nature, institutional violence and the carceral continuum.
email: sheltervideoproject@gmail.com to view film
Image description: Invisible Institutions. A design of three boxes: the first has a sprout struggling to grow and the second has shows the plant folding in on itself, constrained by the box’s lid. The third box shows a sunflower blooming out of its open lid.
Invisible Institutions is a new documentary podcast exploring the past and present of institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Canada.
Creator and host Megan Linton, a disability researcher and writer, investigates the unreported and invisibilized harms of the institutional system. Join her on her journey to the grounds of current and former institutions, including interviews with survivors, community activists, and experts, as they work together to expose the exploitation, isolation, resistance and survival facing people labeled with disabilities.
Find Invisible Institutions on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Amazon Music, and Podbean.
http://invisibleinstitutions.com/
Crackdown podcast
The ongoing overdose crisis is an unprecedented public health emergency. Thousands are dying while activists and researchers call for urgent change. Government isn’t doing enough to address the crisis, and the media is letting them get away with it. So, we’re making our own media.
CRACKDOWN is a new, monthly podcast about drugs, drug policy and the drug war led by drug user activists and supported by research. Each episode will tell the story of a community fighting for their lives. It’s also about solutions, justice for those we have lost, and saving lives.
The host and executive producer of CRACKDOWN is Garth Mullins, an award-winning documentarian and longtime community organizer. Garth has been an opioid user for years, injecting heroin daily all the way through the last overdose crisis, and is now on methadone. The podcast is led by an editorial board made up of some of Vancouver’s most experienced drug user activists. CRACKDOWN is produced by Cited Media Productions on the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-waututh) Nations.
Unmanageable
Unmanageable (2019) is a feature-length documentary by Lokchi Lam and Cara Fabre that tells the untold story of Canada's little-known training schools and the generations of vulnerable children who survived terrible abuses within their walls.
Cara, a prison educator, learns that her mom Jo spent 2 years in a training school as a youth - a secret hid in shame for 4 decades. Cara follows the impact of this experience on Jo into her own life, and into the lives and families of other survivors.
What World Do You Live In?
What World Productions (2014, video 90 mins)
What World Do You Live In began as a collaborative video and activism project between long-time community filmmaker Rebecca Garrett and Sanctuary, a church community drop-in. It evolved into an unflinching documentary immersion into a world of resistance to police and security guard violence against people who are poor, homeless, and racialized in Toronto. “We have to stop calling the police,” says activist Anna Willats. The message resonates in dozens of stories collected by street pastor Doug Johnson Hatlem. Stunning testimony, images, and commentary are woven together with unique video of police assaults and previously unreleased footage from multiple important events in Toronto. Conflict erupts over nonviolent responses to overwhelming police impunity. Meanwhile, the increasing militarization of public spaces forces us all to ask: What World Do You Live In?
INQUIRIES: whatworldproductions@gmail.com
The gristle in the stew: revisiting the horrors of Huronia
What happened at Huronia Regional Centre was the stuff of nightmares. Huronia was a government-run institution for children with developmental disabilities, located in Orillia, Ontario. It was shut down in 2009, after more than a century of operation.
Parents were told their children would be well taken care of, their special needs attended to. They were told that leaving their children in the institution's care was the right thing to do. But instead, children were neglected and abused.
Marie and Pat lived at Huronia from childhood into their young adult lives. In 2011, CBC's David Gutnick produced a documentary about the atrocities that took place at Huronia and reported on a class action lawsuit that Marie and Pat were filing against the province of Ontario.
(image by nancy viva davis halifax)
I am the foundation of corporate capitalism, I fell between the cracks and now exist there
(video 7.5 min, 2010)
by Lynda Solowynsky and Kim Jackson
An experimental short video in which Solowynsky speaks to discrimination that she faced in the medical system as it pertains to poor people who are stigmatized for mental health non-normativity. She also addresses the trauma impact of the training school that she was in and the importance of lived experience vs. professionalism.
Video presented: November 18-20, 2010 for the McMaster University conference: Health, Embodiment and Visual Culture; Engaging Publics and Pedagogies.
We Have a Message: Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness
Monograph publication, Anagraphia Press, Toronto, ON.
Women’s Stories is an art and social justice project that took place in Toronto. We are a group of women from the Junction area who gathered together to do a photo based social arts project: Women’s Stories: Aging, Disability and Homelessness. The intent of this project is to generate knowledge about the realities of poverty through photography and narratives. We intend to understand how the health of the aging woman’s body is impacted by precarious housing and poverty. Ultimately we have identified a need to work with each other towards change.
We want to speak about our experience with the intention that these issues do not get ignored.
Building on a community collaboration, Women’s Stories has worked to develop democratized ways of generating knowledge within community settings. It draws upon affective, arts-informed, and performative strategies while contributing to possibilities that engage our capacity to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently.