rabble radio

Homemade movies are something we tend to take for granted in this era of selfie culture. Flashback to the 1950s and super 8 film. And then, in the 80s and 90s, all of the home movies shot on videotape. It was a very different technology and a different way of documenting and archiving than we see nowadays. Those films have mostly been regarded as private, family moments. They weren't shared. Today we're talking to the organizers of a project that is addressing what they see as a gap in our national archives. The national archive project Homemade Visible wants to get that archival footage out of people's closets and into our national archives. They are focusing especially on home movies by Indigenous people and visible minorities. Homemade Visible is a project of the Regent Park Film Festival in Toronto, in partnership with Charles Street Video. rabble radio host Victoria Fenner talked to Ananya Ohri, Artistic Director of Homemade Visible. She is also the Executive Director of the Regent Park Film Festival. The Homemade Visible Project is hosting a symposium this Saturday, April 28 at the Toronto Media Arts Centre at 32 Lisgar Street. Re:collections brings Indigenous artists and artists of colour to share how their work engages, re-frames and re-defines the archive. They're exploring questions like — How do we take the idea of an archive, and its difficult, racist, exclusionary history, and turn it around? For more info you can check out Homemade Visible Symposium Facebook page. Image: Homemade Visible. Used with permission Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

Today in anticipation of Earth Day and Earth Week, we're celebrating and paying attention to the world we hear. Acoustic ecology is the study of human beings in their relationship to their environment through sound. Multidisciplinary artists Brady Marks, Mark Timmings have created The Wetland Project to celebrate Earth Week 2018, a program of events exploring the soundscape of a Saturna Island, British Columbia marsh. The goal of the project is to connect people to the circadian rhythm of the wetland. There are a few different components to this project — an audiovisual installation at the VIVO gallery in Vancouver, a musical performance comprised of sounds transcribed from field recordings of the marsh along with a work performed by chamber choir. And Slow Radio Day, where four radio stations and an internet stream will play the sounds of the wetlands all day on Earth Day, this Sunday, April 22. The Wetland Project commemorates the 50-year anniversary of the founding of the World Soundscape Project and the idea of "wilderness radio" proposed by WSP associate Bruce Davis in 1975. In Davis's words, it would be "a radio service which 'listens in' rather than broadcasts out." Four decades later the Wetland broadcast realizes his vision. Victoria Fenner, rabble.ca executive producer of podcasts, has been a soundscape artist and acoustic ecology practitioner for many years, primarily inspired in her early days at Vancouver Co-op Radio by Hildegard Westerkamp and the late Howard Broomfield, both World Soundscape Project researchers and artists. So she's especially happy to be doing this program today for rabble radio. She had a conversation with Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, starting their conversation by talking about who Murray Schafer is, and why the World Soundscape Project remains so important to listeners around the world. View the full schedule, including the radio broadcast here. Image: Nancy Angermeyer Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

The voice and words of Judy Rebick are well known to rabble readers and listeners. Judy was one of the co-founders of rabble in 2001 and she continues to be a good friend and mentor to rabble these 17 years later. In her new memoir Heroes in my Head, she recounts many of the political battles that she has waged over the years for women's rights, a just and progressive society, and her involvement in the struggle to change Canada's abortion laws. And her new book shows another dimension in Judy's life. It is truly a stunning example of the phrase "the personal is political." She reveals as aspect to her life that few people have known until now. She talks to Victoria Fenner, executive producer of rabble podcasts. Bio: Judy Rebick is a well-known social justice and feminist activist, writer, journalist, educator, and speaker. She is the author of Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political, Occupy This!, Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution, Imagine Democracy. She is the former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada's largest women's group, and was the first CAW Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University. During the 1990s, she was the host of two national TV show on CBC Newsworld and is a frequent commentator on CBC Radio and Television. In the 1980s, she was a well-known spokesperson for the pro-choice movement during the fight to legalize abortion. She lives in Toronto. Founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada's popular independent online news and discussion site You can read her rabble.ca blog here. Image: Judy Rebick, photo by Kim Elliott. Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

The 24th anniversary of Rwanda's hundred-day genocide is Friday, April 6. It began when a plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down. From April to July, 1994, almost a million ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu friends were slaughtered by marauding gangs of Hutu extremists. In alternative media, there is a long tradition of using radio for peacebuilding, so many community radio workers were horrified to hear that the airwaves in Rwanda were being used to stoke the furnace of ethnic hatred. Today we're repodcasting a story by David Kattenburg about how radio in Rwanda is working to promote healing after this sad legacy. It's called "Ghosts of Hate Radio," originally podcast on rabble in 2006, and repeated this week on The Green Planet Monitor. And the tradition of radio for peace in Rwanda continues. One of the featured radio stations, Radio Izuba, continues to train whole new generations of journalists who are working to make sure this never happens again. You'll also hear the voices of Willy Rukundo, who was the station manager of state-run Radio Rwanda, and Alan Thompson, who organized and coordinated the Rwanda Initiative, a collaborative project of the National University of Rwanda and Carleton University, in Ottawa. The project ran from 2006 until 2011. It sent more than 75 Carleton journalism students to Rwanda as interns, as well as about 100 professional journalists to teach journalism there. Thanks to The Green Planet Monitor for permission to repodcast. Image: Wikipedia – African FM Radio Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

The influx of money into our communities comes at a cost. All those shiny new buildings come with a high price tag as people with higher incomes move into our communities from elsewhere. They bring high real estate prices as the market grows. And new economic development also changes the kinds of services that are needed or desired to serve the growing and changing city. It's happening all over the country. Hamilton, Ontario is a classic case study of how gentrification changes a community. Hamilton has had a reputation as a low rent city, but that's all changed, especially in the last five years. It's not as unaffordable as Toronto, but many people with low incomes are becoming displaced by higher rents because their homes are being sold by their landlords. Or they're being evicted while landlords renovate so they can get higher prices. There's no affordable place to go, with rents going up all over the city. Gentrification is at the heart of a battle in Hamilton about public transit. Many people are supportive and others fear the development that will happen further on down the line when the line is built. For years, public transit in Hamilton has been substandard. The proposed solution, an LRT line going from east to west, is a good idea in many ways. But not everybody shares that opinion. Today's program asks the question — is this "A train to inclusion?" Lil Blume and Stephen Dale examine the coming of light rail transit in Hamilton, Ontario, with an eye on the question of how transit planning and the quest for social equality might — or might not — intersect. Produced with support of the Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Division. Image: Wikipedia – LRT Kenala Jaya Line Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

Last week, March 16, marked a tragic milestone – the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, the mass murder of unarmed people in two small villages in Vietnam. It has been called one of the most shocking events of the entire war. My Lai was one of the two villages. The exact number of deaths has never been definitively established, with estimates ranging from 170 to over 500. Many of the people killed were women and children who were also mutilated and raped by American soldiers. The massacre escalated global outrage and opposition to the war and back home in the United States. In the end, only one of the 26 soldiers criminally charged for their part in the massacre was convicted. That one lone soldier spent three and a half years under house arrest. He never went to jail. This grim anniversary is cause for reflection not just on that incident, but the entirety of the war and its aftermath. This next interview is excerpted from The Global Research News Hour, a podcast and radio program by the Centre for Research on Globalization and CKUW Radio in Winnipeg. You'll hear show host Michael Welch talking to Christian Appy, a leading American historian and expert on the Vietnam War. Appy is professor of history at University of Massachusetts and the author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015). This interview was excerpted from a longer program focusing on various aspects of the United States and the Vietnam War. You can listen to the whole show and past podcasts here. Image: Wikimedia: My Lai Memorial Site Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

Imagine coming home to your apartment building and seeing a sniffer-dog your lobby from a private canine detection company hired by your landlord. Or you go to a music festival and there is a group of security guards and sniffer dogs. That's what happened to Michelle Guo's friend from Australia. So Michelle decided to look into the legality of using sniffer dogs and what our rights are here in Canada. What she's discovered is a lot of grey areas. Michelle Guo is a Media Studies Student and rabble podcast contributor from Montreal. She speaks to rabble radio host Victoria Fenner. Image: Wikipedia – sniffer dogs in Sweden Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

February is one of the worst months to be homeless in Canada. Temperatures plunge and it seems like winter will never end. It's a harsh reality for thousands of people in Canada. That's why community radio stations across Canada have chosen February as the time for their Homeless Marathon. Today, fourteen campus and community radio stations across the country will be devoting their airwaves to the topic of homelessness. Luke Smith is with the National Campus and Community Radio Association. He talks to rabble podcast exec producer Victoria Fenner about how the idea came to be, what you'll hear and how to listen. If you live in one of the 14 communities across Canada taking part, you can listen onair. To find out, call your local station, or go to the NCRA website and click on the Homelessness Marathon link. You can also listen online by going to www.localfm.ca – Local FM is the campus community radio station in St. John, New Brunswick which is coordinating the national effort this year. Image: Luke Smith, National Campus and Community Radio Association Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

When he's not at work at the Urban Worker Project, Andrew Cash is a musician. On January 26th, he spoke to rabble podcast exec producer Victoria Fenner in Barrie, Ontario, between sound checks just before a tribute concert to the late Gordon Downey Jr. of the Tragically Hip. The concert was in support of the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund. Andrew Cash is also a former member of parliament and one of the co-founders of the Urban Worker Project. When he was a member of Parliament from 2011 to 2015, precarious work was one of Andrew's major issues of concern. His National Urban Worker Strategy Bill was ground breaking legislation in Canada's Parliament dealing with precarious work and led to the first protections under federal labour laws for unpaid internships. The Urban Worker Project is an extension of that work. Because Bill 148 only came into effect on January 1st of this year, Ontario is the focus of a lot of the discussion about labour changes, but changes are needed in other provinces too. And changes are coming. Does it go far enough? Should it be a model for other provinces? Image: provided by Urban Worker Project Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

This past weekend, January 20 and 21, 2018, was the anniversary of the first Women's March which was held last year to coincide with inauguration day in the United States. Marches were held all over North America, including many here in Canada, large and small. Sandy Cove, a tiny village on the Fundy Shore in Nova Scotia had 32 marchers. And though that sounds small, it's half the village population. Big places like Vancouver and Toronto didn't get that high a percentage of the population out. Toronto police estimated 6,000 people at the Women's March in that city. And police estimates are usually on the low side. Safe to say there were a few tens of thousands of people marching in Canada. For those of you who weren't able to make it to a Women's March in your community, we're bringing you a snapshot in sound from the March from London Ontario, collected by Meg Borthwick, a London resident, activist and also rabble's babble moderator. Image: Kevin Jones Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.