Historian-activists Kassandra Luciuk and Saku Pinta join us to discuss the "hall socialism" that flourished in communities of Finnish and Ukrainian migrant workers in the early 20th century. Though much of this incredibly vital social, political and cultural activity was successfully suppressed by anti-communist purges in the post-war period, the legacy and lessons of these networks lives on.

About our guests:

-- Kassandra Luciuk is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She is broadly interested in the history of Ukrainians in Canada. Her dissertation uses the community as a case study to investigate how anti-communism was entrenched in Canadian political consciousness throughout the twentieth century. Kassandra has also written several books and articles on the internment operations of the First World War. Most notably, she is the author of a graphic novel, Enemy Alien: A True Story of Life Behind Barbed Wire, which was published with Between the Lines. Kassandra’s most recent article, “More Dangerous Than Many a Pamphlet or Propaganda Book: The Ukrainian Canadian Left, Theatre, and Propaganda in the 1920s,” was awarded the Jean-Marie Fecteau Prize from the Canadian Historical Association.

-- Dr. Saku Pinta holds the Errol Black Chair in Labour Issues at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and occassionally works as a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba. As an independent scholar, his research is focused on two areas: the intersections between anarchisms and Marxisms and the history of the Finnish North American left and the membership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union in the twentieth century.

Pinta is a co-editor and contributor to Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red (PM Press, 2017) and his essays appear in the anthologies Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (PM Press, 2012) and Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (Pluto Press, 2017). He is a proud memeber of the Winnipeg General Membership Branch of the IWW, Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3909, Unifor Local 567, and the Association of Employees Supporting Education Services.

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