On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal speaks with Michael Clague, a community developer who has spent decades connecting underserved people to much-needed supports and programming. They begin by discussing Michael’s early service work as a UBC student, and move into conversation about the BC labour movement, community arts programming, and Michael’s new book, titled So, How Have I Been Doing At Being Who I Am?: At 82, A Life In Progress.

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/212-michael-clague.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/212-michael-clague.html

Resources:
Michael’s book, So, How Have I Been Doing at Being Who I Am?: https://bcbooklook.com/a-life-in-progress/ 
Carnegie Community Centre: https://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/carnegie-community-centre.aspx 
Britannia Community Centre: https://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/britannia-community-services-centre.aspx 
Social Planning and Research Council (SPARC): ​​https://www.sparc.bc.ca/ 
The Solidarity Movement in BC: https://www.communitystories.ca/v2/solidarity-bc-protest_solidarite-protestation-cb/ 
VANDU: https://vandureplace.wordpress.com/

Bio: 
Michael Clague is a former director of the Carnegie Community Centre and Britannia Community Centre, and a former board member of the Fraser Basin Council. He has participated in multiple community and social planning committees, including the Social Planning and Research Council (SPARC) and the Downtown Eastside Local Area Planning Process Committee. He was awarded the Order of Canada for community service in 2008, and he is the author of So, How Have I Been Doing At Being Who I Am?: At 82, A Life In Progress.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Reflecting on a Life in Community Development.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, May 2, 2023. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/212-michael-clague.html.

Reflecting on a Life in Community Development — with Michael Clague

Folks on this Podcast:
Chris Sims (he/him)
Elliot Helmer (they/them)
Travis Corwin (he/they)
Freeman Stevenson (he/him)
Kirsten Lopez-Picklesimer (she/her)

General notes:
Several years ago, the Go Dig a Hole podcast joined a large conversation across the discipline of archaeology to talk about what organized labor could look like for us. Check out episode 79 for what we didn’t know would be the prequel to this episode!

Freeman Stevenson and CRM’s renewed fight for better working conditions. 

Links 
Archaeologists are Organizing to Dig Out of Poverty Wages:
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/archaeologists-unionizing-utah-wages-teamsters 

Go Dig a Hole - Episode 79 - Unionizing in North American Archaeology 
https://soundcloud.com/godigahole/ep79 

Support Go Dig a Hole on Patreon: www.patreon.com/godigahole

Like Go Dig a Hole on Facebook: www.facebook.com/godigahole

GDAH Ep92 - Archaeologists Formed a Union!

In this episode, Jenn and Daren dive deep into the exploitation of Black labor, drawing from their personal experiences working for Disney. They shed light on the harsh realities faced by Disney workers, particularly Black employees, and discuss the broader implications of these labor practices within the context of American capitalism.

The episode begins with Jenn and Daren discussing the recent viral video of Disney characters unionizing and the importance of labor unions in protecting workers' rights. They then share anecdotes from the time they each spent at Disney, revealing the less-than-magical side of the company including the exploitation of part-time workers, overt racism and anti-Blackness.

In the second segment, Jenn and Daren broaden the conversation to include the systemic issues that Black workers face across various industries. They cite statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Brookings Institute to illustrate the disparities in employment and pay for Black workers, and discuss the additional challenges faced by Black women and men in the workplace.

The episode concludes with a reflection on the importance of mental health and work-life balance, particularly for Black workers navigating hostile work environments. Jenn shares her personal journey from STEM to academia and the pressures she faced, while Daren emphasizes the need for self-care and ethical work practices.

Reference Material:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/31/black-workers-views-and-experiences-in-the-us-labor-force-stand-out-in-key-ways/#:~:text=Black%20Americans%20make%20up%20large,time%20and%20are%20self%2Demployed
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/04/07/black-americans-views-of-education-and-professional-opportunities-in-science-technology-engineering-and-math/
https://www.epi.org/indicators/state-unemployment-race-ethnicity/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-are-employment-rates-so-low-among-black-men/
S1E5 - The Erasure of Black Women's Work - https://soundcloud.com/thatblackcouple/episode-5-the-erasure-of-black-womens-work
Rutgers doctoral student gives birth on same day she defends dissertation - https://abc7ny.com/post/rutgers-doctoral-student-goes-into-early-labor-gives-birth-on-same-day-she-defends-dissertation-from-hospital/14780220/
Why I will no longer use my unpaid labor to discuss race in America with white people - https://watercoolerconvos.com/2017/09/10/will-no-longer-use-unpaid-labor-discuss-race-america-white-people/
On Nnedi Okorafor and when Hollywood values our work but erases our names - https://watercoolerconvos.com/2017/09/14/nnedi-okorafor-erasure/


www.ThatBlackCouple.com
FB: www.facebook.com/ThatBlackCouple
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ThatBlkCouple
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Email: ThatBLKCouple@gmail.com

Podcast Summary:
This is an accidentally funny podcast about the realities of Blackness and adult life. We do “adult” differently. We are That Black Couple.
Our goal is to create a space for Black millennials to discuss and embody adult life on their own terms. We aren’t beholden to “traditional” gender or parenting roles, queerness is fluid and present in the ways we show up in our relationships and in the world, and we want to build community with other 30-something Black folx who are trying to figure this ish out.

S6E9 - Black Workers and Disney’s Exploitation of Labor

Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. She is inspired by the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance.

SWEAT is a series of conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual and sexualized body at work—where work is broadly defined as the labour of survival, the labour of care, creativity, and capital-a-Art. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform -- tasks, acts of care, and identities? Anchored in our always already racialized and sexualized bodies, our complex intersectionalities, these conversations are means of relating through work to each other.  I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

S4E1 S.W.E.A.T. with Olympia Bukkakis

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Dave Foster, a distinguished associate at the Energy Futures Initiative, about the story of how labor unions and environmental organizations have found ways to work together on issues that affect both contingents. As a former director of United Steelworkers District 11, Foster recalls the “Donora incident” as the main catalyst for the union’s interest in environmental affairs. Foster shares his firsthand recollection of the history behind the creation of the BlueGreen Alliance, including some of the various struggles, wins, and early initiatives that helped secure the partnership between labor and environmental organizations.

References and recommendations:

“Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie” by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712585/sea-of-grass-by-dave-hage-and-josephine-marcotty/

“Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition” by Sanya Carley and David Konisky; https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo254000286.html

Subscribe to stay up to date on news and research from Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/subscribe/

A History of Alliances Between Workers and Environmentalists, with Dave Foster

Amplifying ideas that fly below the radar. We talk environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community-building and urban issues with featured guests.

This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement as a part of our Knowledge Democracy Project @ 312 Main — encouraging the meaningful exchange of ideas and information across communities.

Hosted and currently produced by:
Am Johal
Joey Malbon
Julia Aoki
Kathy Feng
Samantha Walters

Visit our website for archived audio and video recordings of our public events: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/library.html

This is an accidentally funny podcast about the realities of Blackness and adult life. 

Our goal is to create a space for Black millennials to discuss and embody adult life on their own terms. We aren’t beholden to “traditional” gender or parenting roles, queerness is fluid and present in the ways we show up in our relationships and in the world, and we want to build community with other 30-something Black folx who are trying to figure this ish out.

We do “adult” differently. 


-About Daren and Jenn-

Jenn is a queer, Black feminist from Oakland. Daren is an introverted nerd and novelist from Anaheim.

They are boo’ed up and have been since 2002 when they bonded over a mutual love of Brian McKnight’s “Never Felt This Way”, their favorite Brandy lyrics, and nineties TV like Family Matters, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Living Single. It was a shared obsession with Black cultural icons, histories, and artistry that drew Jenn and Daren to one another even though they are actually completely different personality-wise.

Jenn and Daren have always said to themselves, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a show?” Well, no major networks have reached out yet. So, until that happens, you can find the them here, sharing their views on race and culture and everything in between.

They are young thirty-somethings who have been married since for over a decade. Jenn and Daren have three beautiful, brilliant, radical, snarky kids who play no games.

Go Dig a Hole is a podcast that explores all things related to archaeology, with a mission to make better archaeologists and build a more inclusive archaeology.

Resources Radio is a weekly podcast by Resources for the Future. Each week we talk to leading experts about climate change, electricity, ecosystems, and more, making the latest research accessible to everyone.

S.W.E.A.T. >>sex/uality. work. extraction. art. theatr/ics.<< is a series of conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual and sexualized body at work—where work is broadly defined as the labour of survival, the labour of care, creativity, and capital-A-Art. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? My hope is that these conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our always already sexualized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies.

photos by Onsoh Studios and Claudia Brijbag

please support S.W.E.A.T. on my patreon page 
https://www.patreon.com/madkate

S.W.E.A.T. hostex  Mad Kate is a Berlin-based electronic artist, vocalist, and producer who fuses sound, performance, and activism into a singular, immersive experience. Rooted in a background of writing and queer feminist, sex-positive performance art, Mad Kate weaves together interviews, field recordings, and vocal manipulations with raw, pulsating synthesizers to explore the porous borders between bodies, identities, and geographies.

With a sonic language shaped by storytelling and embodied experience, Mad Kate’s compositions interrogate the personal as a lens for understanding collective realities—how power structures inscribe themselves onto intimacy, how movement across borders reshapes identity, and how world-building through imagination disrupts existing narratives. Whether through hypnotic, shape-shifting club compositions or experimental soundscapes, their work pulses with a deep commitment to sonic activism, carving out space for new forms of relationality and resistance.

Mad Kate’s performances are immersive and confrontational, collapsing the boundary between artist and audience, body and machine. Their sonic explorations have been featured in venues and festivals across Europe, where they continue to push the boundaries of electronic music as a site of both political critique and radical pleasure.

New tracks tagged #unionizing