Some Can't Miss Talks at Toronto's Spur Festival This Week

Just a quick blog post about some of the speakers who are appearing at the upcoming Spur Festival in Toronto later this week. 

Guy Standing, a Professor of Development Studies at the University of London, is speaking this Friday at the festival. He's one of the top minds globally on the issues of precarious work and a basic income guarantee. Prior to becoming an academic he was an executive with the International Labour Organization, which roots his work in a real world perspective often absent from much academic research.  His work help shape a lot of my initial research into unpaid internships in Canada and he has a lot of sensible policy solutions to address the economic problems Canada is facing. I strongly recommend that anyone remotely interested in labour issues attend his talk; also, I interviewed him awhile back when his seminal book, The Precariat, was first published.

Henry Giroux, the Global Television Network Chair in Communications Studies at McMaster University, is being interviewed by Paul Kennedy on Saturday. Dr. Giroux is one of the top minds in critical pedagogy and a brilliant theorist. He's going to be discussing the politics of disposability, neoliberalism, and the war on young people. I interviewed him two years ago when his book, Youth in Revolt, was published. I highly recommend this talk.

There are some excellent panels happening as well. Deena Ladd, an organizer with Toronto's Workers' Action Centre, along with Colette Murphy, the Executive Director of the Atkinson Foundation, will be discussing precarious work, poverty, and income inequality on Sunday morning. The panel I'm most excited about is the one entitled, "The Future of Work", which features Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the publisher of Jacobin magazine (which you should subscribe to). They will be talking about how the nature of work is being fundamentally changed. I highly recommend this panel as it's the one where all the cool kids will be at.

Hope to see some out at these talks! In closing, here's a video of Guy Standing lecturing at Calgary's Parkland Institute last fall about his most recent book, The Precariat Charter.