Full details of the event can also be found at CitizenShift.

Get alternative coverage of what went down at the 2010 olympics with VMC, and also on CitizenShift’s own dossier, Olympic Footprint.

Now known as “Olympic Jesus”, he has fan pages on twitter and facebook.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to go to the Olympics Footprint Dossier

This dossier is CITIZENShift’s portal for you to express your views on and stories about the Olympics: Does the goodwill it’s meant to foster outweigh local criticism? What kind of ‘footprints’ (environmental, economic, social, etc) are the Vancouver games leaving on that city and what kinds of ‘footprints’ have past Olympics left on other hosting cities?

Add your stories to the dossier during the Olympics games, start debates about the issues at hand,  or peruse the content and tell others what you think.

To sign up or upload your stories check our site: CITIZENSHIFT

Protest against the Olympics in Vancouver. Criticisms of the Olympic Games continue, but most Canadians still feel they are beneficial. Where do you stand? Credit: thedarkerside.to CC2.0

In our last newsletter we included a call for content for ‘Olympic Footprint’, a new dossier planned for end of January/beginning of February. We’re excited by all the great ideas that have come in so far, but we have room for more, so we’re extending the deadline to Friday, January 22nd.

We’re looking for your photos, videos, audio pieces and articles about the impact of the Olympics, both over the next month, but also over the medium and long term. We’re also able to offer small stipends to original, unpublished material.

Read on for more details about the dossier and how to submit pitches. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at
info@citizenshift.org

CALL FOR CONTENT

>> Olympic Footprint

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics will be one of the largest international events in Canadian history. It will be subject to some of the most intense media coverage imaginable: television stations plan on broadcasting the games 22 hours per day, and thousands of journalists from around the world will cover the event.

The Olympics have also become highly controversial and contested. Residents of Vancouver, Whistler and surrounding areas, Indigenous communities of Coast Salish Territories, and people from coast to coast have been criticizing the event’s impact on land rights, the environment, housing, social services and civil liberties. All this seems in contradiction to the Olympics’ mission of friendly
competition and promoting peace and good relations between countries.

Olympic Footprint is CITIZENShift’s call for media on how you see the Olympics: Does the goodwill it’s meant to foster outweigh local
criticism? What kind of ‘footprints’ (environmental, economic, social, etc) are the Vancouver games leaving on that city and what
kinds of ‘footprints’ have past Olympics left on other hosting cities?

We’re looking for stories that tell how the Olympics are impacting life in BC, across Canada and around the world, before, during and
after the games have gone.

Send your proposals for short videos, audio pieces, texts and photos by January 22, 2010 to info@citizenshift.org (details on how to submit below). We’ll be in touch shortly after if your piece is accepted. The dossier, which is being co-produced with the National Film Board, will go online in late January/early February 2010.

Please note that original, unpublished works will be considered for stipends. Already published work is also greatly appreciated, and will be accepted, but we will not be able to consider this work for honorariums.

Submission guidelines (please email to info@citizenshift.org):

Name:
Phone number:
Email:
Type of media:
Working title (can change later):
Brief description of proposed piece (300 words max):

Deadline: Ongoing during Olympics

This is also part of a series of guests posts marking the 20th anniversary of the Dec. 6th École Polytechnique shootings. Read previous posts here.

………

They may not be named, but they will not be forgotten.

As a survivor of physical and sexual violence, a woman of colour, an immigrant, and a low-income single mother, I have come to see myself as a responsible agent in understanding the roots and complex realities constituting “violence against women” - to understand as fully as possible the historical, social, economic, cultural and political processes through which I was victimized, and how other women who are positioned differently from me have come to be victimized. I am responsible, not in the sense of being culpable, but in the sense that I retain and reclaim my ability to respond, and to choose to respond in ways that enhance mine and others’ self-determination. My story and identity today are as much the product of a conscious struggle for liberation as it is of victimization.

There are many more women who because of their oppressive contexts are made much more vulnerable to sexual and physical violence. Disabled women are 150% more likely to experience sexual abuse than so-called able-bodied women. As a result of their dependency on family members and professionals, their agency to protect themselves or get away from their abusers is seriously compromised. Moreover, the construction of disabled women as “non-sexual” and “incompetent” makes it more likely that they will not access the necessary sex education to make self-determined choices and will not be believed even if they do report incidents of gendered violence. Abuse (and trauma from abuse) can also lead to disability, introducing a vicious cycle that deepens women’s vulnerability to victimization. Earlier this year, for instance, I worked with a woman who was so severely brutalized by her husband that she lost her ability to speak.

The convergence of sexism, homophobia, transphobia and racism also make transgendered women another extremely vulnerable group. As of November 14, 2009, the number of transgender-related deaths globally has reached 101, more than doubling the count for 2008 (47) and disproportionately affecting transgendered women of colour. Click here to see their names.

A gathering storm

The brutalization and murder of women should rightly inspire horror, outrage and grief. Yet as we remember the victims of the Polytechnique massacre, let us also search out the stories and lives buried deep below the radar of public consciousness; let us honour also the ones we were not supposed to see – much less, grieve.

We will not eradicate violence against women without dismantling the oppressive colonial and capitalist systems that necessitate it. We must widen and deepen our vision to include and re-centre the normalized conditions of violence under which indigenous women, women of colour, disabled women, queer and transgendered women, poor women, and women in the South are fighting to survive, for these conditions are also the building blocks of our entitlement to comfort, “security”, a consumerist way of life and state protection. One of the first things we can do is to participate in making visible the lives and realities we are compelled daily to forget, and the deaths we are not supposed to grieve.

Let us have the confidence to believe in and work towards a liberated future.

This is also part of a series of guests posts leading up to, and marking, the 20th anniversary of the Dec. 6th École Polytechnique shootings. Read previous posts here.

—-
It’s December 6th 2009, and many people have been asking me what I’m thinking today. What do I think about this day where 20 years ago, a man walked into a Montreal engineering college and shot 14 women, specifically because they were women. Interestingly enough, I had to fight to have a female Aboriginal Elder open and be present at the event I’m speaking at today because the organizers “didn’t want to detract from the meaning of the day” by me asking her to say some words. It’s the 20th anniversary of the École Polytechnique shooting, and people keep asking me, so what do I think about that?

I’m thinking a lot of things in fact. Yes, I’m from the next generation of women who were too young to remember when the murders actually took place, but I suppose I belong to the current generation of women who identify themselves with feminist politics and have heard from the foremothers of this movement in Canada about the significance of remembering the day, and to never forget it. They say, “Women Won’t Forget” on December 6th. But as a young, sex working, multiracial, bisexual, two-spirited, Aboriginal woman, I think that sometimes, especially at these December 6th type events, women DO forget a few things:

Sometimes women forget that as Aboriginal women, we are five times more likely to die of violence than any other race of women in Canada, and that women have been going missing and being murdered in our communities by the thousands, for hundreds of years.

Women forget that while we show up to vigils and talk up a nice speech about some “poor prostitute” who died on the streets, we simultaneously judge, shun, and degrade current sex workers and speak against decriminalization - something that might actually help protect us.

Sometimes, women forget that same-sex violence should be taken as seriously as man to woman violence and that we really don’t talk about violence in the queer community as often as we could.

Women forget that Elder violence is very real and is happening, but also that a lot of it is committed against young women, who deserve the opportunity to speak for ourselves as youth, not be spoken for by yet another generation of first or second wave feminists that don’t want to give up their power yet.

And if you are reading this and thinking to yourself “well, I don’t forget that on December 6th” please, don’t expend your energy to get mad at me. Direct that passion towards reminding another woman now that you’ve read this, or someone else for that matter who is forgetting, or who just doesn’t know.

For the record, I refuse to have another argument with someone about what this day is “only” supposed to commemorate.

What about you?