Citizenship and Personal Safety

Our University of the Streets Café public conversations are much like any you’d have with friends or family around a dinner table, except with more people, more points of view, and slightly more structure. Conversations are hosted by a volunteer moderator who is there to welcome everyone and keep things on track. To get things started, there’s a guest, or sometimes two, who get the ball rolling by sharing their ideas, experiences and questions. After that, it's all up to the participants.

People all over the world live in precarity as a result of arbitrary restrictions from their citizenship status. This public conversation will consider the extent to which citizenship status is/should be a requirement to living secure lives. To what extent should one’s state affiliation define their access to health and social services? Who has the right to live fully and how can we as individuals, advocates and communities support individuals whose citizenship status precludes them from accessing basic human rights?

Guests:
Tareq Hardan has been involved with Al-Quds University (East Jerusalem University) since 2009 in its efforts to foster links with its local community. He is the founder of the East Jerusalem–based Kufer Aqeb Community Advocacy Center which works on a wide array of issues such as education in poor neighborhoods, residency rights and welfare benefits. He is a PhD student at the McGill School of Social Work and considers the ways in which higher education, community organizing, marginalization, refugee status and social policy intersect with people's social and economic rights.

Pénélope Boudreault is a nurse responsible for pan-national operations of Médecins du Monde Canada which she joined in 2006 as a street nurse. In collaboration with various Montreal community groups, she has walked the streets of our city, offering front line services such as STI detection, vaccination and offering health care treatments to marginalized individuals who are disconnected from the public healthcare system.

Moderator:
Myriam Zaidi has been involved in social justice work in Montreal for over 10 years. She considers herself to be an organizer more than anything else-from social movements to the workplace, she is always looking for ways to make spaces (big or small) more liberating. She is also a researcher in the field of social movement learning, intersectional feminist pedagogies, and popular education. She currently works as a human rights educator.

Accessibility info: The Little Burgundy Coalition is located on the ground floor of a building complex. There is a slanted access to the complex at the north-east corner of Des Seigneurs and St Jacques street. The washroom are not wheelchair accessible.