Below the Radar

City of Vancouver Councillor Jean Swanson joins Am Johal to discuss her time in politics, both as an anti-poverty activist, and as a city councillor. In this episode, they discuss the housing affordability crisis in Vancouver, the need for safe supply, and the high cost of living. Jean also describes how she was introduced to political activism through Bruce Eriksen and Libby Davies, the experienc...

In this episode of Below the Radar, host Am Johal is joined by adrienne maree brown, organizer and author of nonfiction activism explorations Pleasure Activism, Emergent Strategy, and more. Together, they discuss brown's history as a community organizer and facilitator, the powers of solidarity and pleasure in activism, and some of her inspirations—from Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler to the beauty...

Content Warning: The stories in this series deal with difficult and sometimes traumatic topics. This episode in particular discusses substance use, family separation and residential schools. Please practice self care, stop listening, and seek help if you need to. Scroll down to find links to available supports. For the final installment of the Voices of the Street podcast series, host Angel Gates...

Content Warning: The stories in this series deal with difficult and sometimes traumatic topics. Please practice self care, stop listening, and seek help if you need to. Scroll down to find links to available supports. Storyteller, actor and activist Angel Gates invites Megaphone author Peter Thompson into conversation about his poem, “Empty Inside.” Peter’s piece, published in the 2021 Voices of t...

Content Warning: The stories in this series deal with difficult and sometimes traumatic topics. This episode in particular discusses substance use, family separation and residential schools. Please practice self care, stop listening, and seek help if you need to. Scroll down to find links to available supports. The fourth episode of the Voices of the Street podcast series features a conversation o...

Content Warning: The stories in this series deal with difficult and sometimes traumatic topics. Please practice self care, stop listening, and seek help if you need to. Scroll down to find links to available supports. For the third installment of the Voices of the Street podcast, we have a candid and heartful conversation between host Yvonne Mark and Megaphone writer Dennis Gates in response to hi...

Content Warning: The stories in this series deal with difficult and sometimes traumatic topics. Please practice self care, stop listening, and seek help if you need to. Scroll down to find links to available supports. Be transported into the soundscapes of two different poems. This installment of the Voices of the Street podcast is produced by Jules Chapman, a writer and peer support worker who is...

Content Warning: The stories in this series deal with difficult and sometimes traumatic topics. Please practice self care, stop listening, and seek help if you need to. Scroll down to find links to available supports. The Voices of the Street podcast makes its debut on Below the Radar! Over the next six weeks, follow along as Megaphone storytellers weave tales and read from the 2021 Voices of the...

Content Warning: The stories in this series deal with difficult and sometimes traumatic topics. Please practice self care, stop listening and seek support if you need to. Help is available (links below)! The 2021 Voices of the Street anthology, “INSIDE we are all the same,” jumps from the page in this special podcast series. For four Megaphone storytellers, poetry and prose from last year’s specia...

City of Vancouver Councillor Christine Boyle sits down with Am Johal to discuss her hopes for the City’s future, and what can be done on the municipal level to combat the climate crisis, the housing crisis, and issue of drug poisoning on Vancouver’s streets. An organizer, minister and activist, Christine also speaks to her work on the City’s United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous P...

Writer, researcher, and Chairperson of the Institute for Global Analytics, Rumena Filipova joins host Am Johal to discuss her latest book, Constructing the Limits of Europe: Identity and Foreign Policy in Poland, Bulgaria, and Russia since 1989. Rumena speaks to how dominant conceptions of national identity have shaped the foreign policy behaviour of the Balkan states, Hungary and Russia. She expl...

Sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor at SFU’s School for International Studies, Darren Byler joins Am Johal to speak about his latest book, “Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City.” Darren describes how China surveilles and dispossesses Uyghur populations through a mass digital surveillance system, connecting it to the war on terror. Darren and Am...

Continental philosopher and assistant professor of Philosophy and Women Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina, Elisabeth Paquette, joins Am Johal to speak about her latest book, Universal Emancipation: Race Beyond Badiou. Elisabeth speaks about some of her transformative moments as a continental philosopher, including an essential question posed to her by Paget Henry, and her experien...

In this episode, we spoke with Alessandra Pomarico about creating collaborative art for social change, both before and during the pandemic. The show begins by talking about friendship and different collectives in Italy and New York, before moving on to new ways of thinking which combine resistance and existence (re-existence). Centring re-existence in Latin American ideas and the Zapatista movemen...

On this week’s episode, we sat down with long-time Indigenous-rights advocate Scott Clark of the Coast Salish S'Klallam nation, and discussed creating systems of change from the ground up that produce positive and evidence based results. Diving into his work with ALIVE, or Aboriginal Life in Vancouver Enhancement Society, Scott talks about his hope regarding youth-led movements while critiquing ho...

Am Johal sits down with the team at InterGenNS, a North Shore community project working to inspire intergenerational connections. This intergenerational trio, Rachelle Patille, Sue Carabetta, and June Maynard, speak about bridging the gap of academia and community, the impacts that COVID had on project goals and funding, and the challenges of embarking upon community-engaged research. The team als...

The climatic events of 2021 (heat, fires, floods, storms) have brought home the reality of climate change like never before — and the urgency for media to address this crisis couldn’t feel greater. But how do we talk about the climate emergency in ways that move us away from despair and disaster coverage? How can podcasts shift the conversation in ways the mainstream media cannot or refuses to do?...

Writer and poet, Renée Sarojini Saklikar joins Am Johal on this episode of Below the Radar to talk about her latest work, Bramah and The Beggar Boy, first in a series, THOT J BAP (The Heart Of This Journey Bears All Patterns). In this episode, Renée reads passages from her new story and discusses the act of writing as a woman of colour, her creative process, and how writing can be a form of surviv...

Below the Radar explores the transformational capacity of dialogue with apiculturist, award-winning author, and SFU Professor of Biological Sciences Mark Winston. He is in conversation with host Am Johal about SFU’s Semester in Dialogue program and the importance of providing students with opportunities to be engaged with their communities. Mark shares how part of a university’s job is to help peo...

Performance scholar and Associate Professor in the Dramatic Arts department at the University of Alberta Selena Couture joins Am Johal to talk about her latest book, Against the Current and Into the Light. Selena speaks about how her book explores varying historical and contemporary performances involving Stanley Park through language, relationships to land, and the unlearning of settler knowledge...

Travis Salway, a social epidemiologist and Assistant Professor with SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, joins Am Johal in a conversation about syndemic theory, the state of conversion therapy in Canada, and LGBTQ2S+ affirming healthcare. Going in-depth about the structural health disadvantages of LGBTQ2S+ people and the multiple epidemics concurrently affecting them, Am and Travis discuss how Canada...

For this final episode of Women, Work, More, host Alyha Bardi speaks with Sheila Block, a senior economist from the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, and Jo-Ann Hannah, retired Director of the Pensions and Benefits at Unifor, and board member at the BC Financial Services Authority. Sheila and Jo-Ann speak in conversation about retirement incomes with a gender and racial equity lens, and exp...

The director of the SFU Labour Studies program, Kendra Strauss, joins Am Johal in a conversation about systemic challenges facing workers, and the ways in which workers shape economies and exercise power in the workplace. Honing in on issues of precarious work, low wages, technological change, contracting out, and the devaluing of feminized work like care work, Am and Kendra discuss trends in labo...

A transnational labour scholar, co-founder of Justicia for Migrant Workers, and assistant professor from SFU's Labour Studies Program, Evelyn Encalada Grez joins this episode of Women, Work, More to speak about migrant women and their experiences of transnational loving. Evelyn explores the pains that accompany migration, from separating families to the often temporary loves that migrant women fin...

Ken Lyotier tells stories from his early days in the Downtown Eastside and how he came to found United We Can, an initiative by binners, for binners. United We Can creates economic opportunities for those who rely on collecting and returning recyclables for their income. In this episode of Below the Radar, Ken is in conversation with host Am Johal about building community in the neighbourhood, adv...