Johannes R. Chan

Take Action: Lindo family facing Deportation Again - Migrant Workers Alliance for Change More on the family's story: Yes Everything - On Canada Day, a family fights a deportation orderCBC News - Toronto track star with Olympic dreams faces deortation. The Hill Times - One family’s fight t...

nwmd.social/s/copylink/4...

Association of Canadian Archivists - Rights & Records: Filipino Community Archives and Activism ORG description

An excellent blog post on the Association of Canadian Archivists blog by Isa Carlin on Filipino activist archives in Canada. Organizing with ICHRP and other related Filipino activist groups was extremely formative for me. They are among the most organized folks I've met: archivists.ca/Blog/13488329

...store it natively or locally on your own devices instead of within the infrastructures of a corporation like google? And also where your data (under your control) is easily transferable among your own selected devices (or others you consent to). I would be interested in using something like that.

...I was looking into these things. I also found activity stats useful, for understanding when in the day I do most of my work or am most active or productive. Anyway, are there any alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo that help you track your search history and activity but...

DuckDuckGo was mentioned in a 4S panel on practices of refusal this morning and I remember using it a lot once, but reverting back to google because I could always review my own search history to revisit lines of thoughts I was having or find things I couldn't remember the words for but knew when...

YouTube video by erwigfilms Mack the Knife - Oscar Peterson 1974.

Peterson played with musicians involved at one time with communist politics including Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach. This is a rather unusual rendition of Mack the Knife from Elisabeth Hauptmann's & Brecht's Three Penny Opera, performed by Peterson in communist Prague: youtu.be/ObJMYHzNOGI

Teddy Wilson is not only one of my favourite jazz pianists, but one of my favourite musicians period. It's easy to forget how many radicals were in the 20th century's jazz milieu. The revolutionary Nina Simone called Peterson the greatest pianist alive in 1968.

Peterson was not a radical. There's a somewhat reproachful mention of him in M. NourbeSe Philip's book Bl_ck. But I think it's pretty cool that his hero was Teddy Wilson, at times known as the "Marxist Mozart". I've always loved Peterson's music & registering that influence helps explain why I have.

There's been a lot of celebration of Oscar Peterson at 100. Almost every week I sit just steps away from where Peterson was laid to rest. I was surprised to learn recently that one of his favourite jazz pianists was Teddy Wilson. These are some mentions of Wilson in Peterson's autobiography...

Why did nobody tell me Thomas Sankara was in a jazz band called Tout-à-Coup: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tout-%C...

I'm curious if Newman's views more or less still stand, if he sees anything differently now, and I'm very curious what he thinks of the work of Hannah Landecker. I first encountered Newman in a reading group that read his critique of new materialism: marxismandsciences.org/marxism-and-...

Synthetic Biology: Life as App Store Published in Capitalism Nature Socialism (Vol. 23, No. 1, 2012)

I found this paper by Stuart Newman, a Marxist cell biologist, who critiques projects involving the development of synthetic protocells and synthetic biology more broadly (almost a decade and a half ago): doi.org/10.1080/1045...

Ecosystem Alteation of Boreal Forest Streams by Beaver (Castor Canadensis) Beaver (Castor canadensis) alter the structure and dynamics of aquatic ecosystems with a minimum of direct energy or nutrient transfer. Through dam building and feeding activities, beaver act as a ke...

by this I'm thinking of say how the impacts of beavers on river ecologies are studied through things like "stream metabolism" doi.org/10.2307/1938...

Self-reproduction as an autonomous process of growth and reorganization in fully abiotic, artificial and synthetic cells | PNAS We investigate mechanisms for the observed nonlinear growth in the number of polymer vesicles generated during a photo-Reversible Addition-Fragment...

This was the paper that sent me down this rabbit hole: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

...but it's interesting that non-living 'nonbiochemical' cells have metabolisms: doi.org/10.1016/j.xc...

i'm in sts, but i'm really so under-read when it comes to philosophy of biology and the demarcation between living and non-living matter. obviously at least since Roland Daniels and Marx, metabolism has been applied to society and ecologists have applied it to ecologies and rivers...

Integrated translation and metabolism in a partially self-synthesizing biochemical network One of the hallmarks of living organisms is their capacity for self-organization and regeneration, which requires a tight integration of metabolic and genetic networks. We sought to construct a linked...

pretty wild there are people out there making synthetic cells that can metabolize and reproduce: www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

The main thing I miss about Spotify was seeing what friends were listening to. I sometimes login just to peek. Trying last.fm for that social function, and looking for people to follow there now (pls share your profile if u have one): www.last.fm/user/johanne...

Recently quit spotify over the Helsing thing, but found out about the Naxos Music Library app that's free with a Toronto Public Library account. You can download music for offline listening. Lots of other great resources available for free via TPL: www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/books-video-...

I've read Prof. Leddy's book & had the chance to talk to her. I think what I only realized today though, with Ford's Bill 5 & Carney's Bill C-5 now in mind, is how geopolitical urgency persists as an excuse to bypass/dismiss Indigenous sovereignty & self-determination, today as during the Cold War.

I attended this really great talk today online. Prof. Leddy describes the affects of the sulphuric acid plant run by Noranda Mines on Serpent River FN and Indigenous resistance against it. I was just at the Noranda Earth Science Library ytd at UofT for dissertation research wondering abt its name.

Excited to be teaching this summer! The course is online, meeting Mondays and Wednesdays for 6 weeks starting July 14. It's a new course, looking at degrowth and liberation theology, the topic of the book I'm writing with @mattbernico.bsky.social.

Info and register: www.icscanada.edu/summer-courses

(1) last month of being stuck at my desk marking papers vs (2) the past year as a whole

I feel like whittling down writing to meet word counts is one of the most difficult and time-consuming things for me. Yet I also feel it often improves the quality of my excessively tangential style of writing, and also helps me rethink what is most essential about my argument.

Bright yellow graphic with red lettering that says: FLASH SALE. 50& OFF 3/25-3/26. Use Coupon Code FLASH50 to Save 50&. VALID FOR ALL BOOKS AND JOURNAL ISSUES. Duke University Press logo appears at the bottom of the graphic.

It's your lucky day! We're having a Flash Sale, today and tomorrow only. Save 50% on all books (including pre-orders) and journal issues. Use coupon FLASH50.
buff.ly/hpjC4Uw

thank you :)

will all Duke UP books also be 50% off on the @uoftpress.bsky.social website, or is it only select books? have a few titles i'm really looking forward to work through.

Unseen Scripts: A Conversation with Dionne Brand | Brick The following conversation took place at the Toronto Reference Library on September 11, 2024, to celebrate the release of Dionne Brand’s Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. David Chariandy: You describe...

Dionne Brand said in an interview at the Toronto Library that "the Napoleonic Wars... are really colonial wars about who owns Sri Lanka, who owns Barbados, who owns Tobago, et cetera." brickmag.com/unseen-scrip...

Could anyone suggest a good anticolonial or radical history of the Napoleonic Wars?

Joy for days! I was so happy and honored to give a lecture and workshop research in the @tru-uoft.bsky.social. Meeting and engaging with Dr. Murphy was as joyous as it was intellectually generative. Toronto owes me not a single thing. Thank you dearly for the invitation.

I’m thrilled and honored to be in Toronto to give this lecture. I hope to see you there.