Simon Vickers

Simon Vickers, Jobs, Homes, and the Right to Exist: Neighbourhood Activism in Deindustrializing Toronto and Montreal, 1963-1989. University of Toronto.

In this dissertation, Simon Vickers expertly surveys neighbourhood activism in Montreal and Toronto from the sixties to the eighties. Vickers highlights the experiences of local, on-the-ground actors who organized within their own communities for access to “jobs, homes, and the right to exist.” In doing so, Vickers helps undermine dominant narratives of neighbourhood activism that overemphasize the perspectives of “white, middle-class, and cis-gendered male activists who benefitted from the world the sixties made.” This specific attention to the uneven material conditions of activists’ lives is a poignant reminder about how power and access shape the production of historical narratives.