The SHIFT Journal of Social Transformation

Seeing systems change in action

Special Call for Submissions: Social Transformation as an Act of Love

What does it mean to love a place that’s imperfect, or even antagonistic? This can be a homeland, a motherland, or the land upon which you’ve settled. Where and how do we build better infrastructure (physical or emotional), or create pockets of joy and care, that help us love a place through hostility? What do we yearn for, wish for, or fight for, in lands that we’ve left or still inhabit? How do we love a home even when it doesn’t love us back?

In this edition of the SHIFT Journal, we're inviting submissions of love letters to home, place, and land.

Deadline: February 2nd at end of day

Find out more and submit

Featured works

Playful public art along a pedestrianized street in Montreal

"Bye Bye DEI": Death to Deification

by Maureen Adegbidi

In our third piece in the "Bye Bye DEI" series, Maureen explores the concept of and risks associated with "deification", or what happens when we elevate the experiences and opinions of a marginalized person above all else, due specifically to their marginalization. She argues that deification is ultimately harmful, and we should be promoting ongoing and considerate conversations in workplaces instead.

Images of shirtless men on the facade of the Stock Bar building with passersby walking along St. Catherine in the Gay Village.

Reclaiming the Narratives of Chinatown

by Elizabeth Dresdner

If we see the city as a continuous process of negotiation, then its transformations and resistances can be understood as overlapping narratives continually rewritten through lived practice. Montreal’s Chinatown is a microcosm of these urban contradictions—a neighbourhood chronicled by intertwined forces of exclusion, displacement, and resilience.

Critical mass of cyclists taking over a road. One of the bikes is pulling a car with seating, on which is a man playing an electric guitar.

Critical Mass Montreal: Riding Together for a More Cyclable City

by Olive Zeynep Kartal

You might have already seen them: perhaps you rode your bike with them on Friday afternoon and felt the freedom and sense of community of cyclists taking over the streets. Perhaps you were walking and saw a group of cyclists pass, waving and ringing their bells, and wondered what was going on. Critical Mass is a “manifestive” bike ride that happens every last Friday of the month, advocating for increased accessible transit.

Consuming Queerness: Homonormativity, Urban Design, and Queer Space in Montreal

by Nicholas Martino

How does Montreal's Gay Village serve as a unique site for exploring the intersection of identity and dominant social structures within queer communities and space, and and serve as a site to explore conversations about rebranding former neighbourhoods of resistance into consumer destinations?

Additional works

Playful Urbanism: Reimagining Community Planning in Montreal

by christian scott

Placemaking is never neutral. It can foster inclusion, creativity, and empowerment, but it can also erase and commodify. When “community engagement” becomes a checkbox exercise, participation risks becoming performance. In this piece, christian discusses the benefits of play in urban design; how it can unsettle norms, surface hidden assumptions, and create conditions for collective imagination.

Art from the Inside

from the Prisoner Correspondence Project

As part of the SHIFT Journal's poetry month October 2025, we're excited to be sharing a selection of art and poetry from members of the Prisoner Correspondence Project. Every week, PCP receives dozens of letters from people seeking connection, community, and someone to talk to.

Reading on the TTC

by Mahta Riazi

All I understand of the commander’s announcement is thank you for your patience.
The rest is an odd blur like a murmur of velvet seats in a passing car
Or speech within a dream,
Neither here, nor there.

...

In this Wound, We Gather

by Belen Blizzard

A swirl of the Swahili word for self-help, harambee,
ribonned with the where of here, Quebec, forms a harvest: Harambec.

Led to the garden, spacious in/for
Blackness, we gather like roots, tangled
in mourning, breath, writing, movement, a leap –—
tectonic plates of ancestral grief

...

being human

by christian favreau

i am going to die
before the sound departs
before the fear is opened
and its pathways lead to freedom

...

Centre Kapwa: the safe space I wish I had growing up

by Jon Marvin Reyes

For our special edition of the SHIFT Journal, "Confronting Pride", we're excited to feature this piece from Jon Marvin, former SHIFT Intern and staff member at the Office of Community Engagement. Jon Marvin writes about his experience as a queer Filipinx, and the importance of spaces like Kapwa Centre - a SHIFT funded partner - in creating safer spaces for queer youth.

Browse past works

General submission & publication guidelines

Interested in publishing in the SHIFT Journal? Check out our guidelines to learn more about what we're looking for and how to submit your work for publication.

Learn how to submit your work

About the SHIFT Journal

As a non-academic university unit, the SHIFT Journal provides an avenue for our partners to publish through an institution regardless of their involvement in academia, and outside of the challenges of rigid publication rules.

Shared power is SHIFT’s core operating principle. With the Journal, we hope to share not just the lessons we've learned over the last five years of SHIFT, but also the many exciting and alternative paths that our wider community is taking towards a more just future.

The SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation

The SHIFT Journal of Social Transformation

Special Call for Submissions: Social Transformation as an Act of Love