Critical Conversation: Changing the System, Not the Subject: Black Lives Matter in 2022

Tajja Isen, Debra Thompson, Stephen Dorsey and Angelyn Francis

Critical Conversation: Changing the System, Not the Subject: Black Lives Matter in 2022

Tajja Isen, Debra Thompson, Stephen Dorsey and Angelyn Francis

7:30pm

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Each day of the Festival, authors and industry experts will come together for candid, live conversations to examine a new facet of the culture and politics that shape the world around us and the books we read.

The call for systemic change was loud in 2020, but after two years, what do we hear – and what are we doing? How has the conversation moved on and where have the statements of action and equity gone? Does the re-assessment of our past offer future change for Canada? Our panel combines lived experience and academic expertise to explore these issues. Tajja Isen’s Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service is a fearless, comic essay collection about race and justice, which explores the gaps between what we say and what we do. Debra Thompson is a leading scholar on the politics of race; in The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, Thompson journeys across the continent, offering insight on what it is to be Black in North America. As a bilingual, biracial man, straddling Black and white, English and French Canada, Stephen Dorsey offers readers intimate and unfiltered access to his lived experience of anti-Black racism in Black and White: An Intimate, Multicultural Perspective on White Advantage and the Paths to Change.

Moderated by Angelyn Francis.

Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 29 at 7:30pm ET
Where: Studio Theatre in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 75 minutes
Ticket prices: $17 – Regular; $12 – Youth; or Get a TIFA Pass

Each day of the Festival, authors and industry experts will come together for candid, live conversations to examine a new facet of the culture and politics that shape the world around us and the books we read.

The call for systemic change was loud in 2020, but after two years, what do we hear – and what are we doing? How has the conversation moved on and where have the statements of action and equity gone? Does the re-assessment of our past offer future change for Canada? Our panel combines lived experience and academic expertise to explore these issues. Tajja Isen’s Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service is a fearless, comic essay collection about race and justice, which explores the gaps between what we say and what we do. Debra Thompson is a leading scholar on the politics of race; in The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, Thompson journeys across the continent, offering insight on what it is to be Black in North America. As a bilingual, biracial man, straddling Black and white, English and French Canada, Stephen Dorsey offers readers intimate and unfiltered access to his lived experience of anti-Black racism in Black and White: An Intimate, Multicultural Perspective on White Advantage and the Paths to Change.

Moderated by Angelyn Francis.

Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 29 at 7:30pm ET
Where: Studio Theatre in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 75 minutes
Ticket prices: $17 – Regular; $12 – Youth; or Get a TIFA Pass

Featured Authors

Tajja Isen
Tajja Isen is a writer, editor and voice actor. Her essays and criticism have appeared in dozens of outlets across the US and Canada. She is the editor in chief of Catapult magazine, the former digital editor of The Walrus and has also edited for Electric Literature. She is the coeditor of the essay anthology The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. A voice actor for more than two decades, Isen can be heard on such animated shows as Atomic Betty, The Berenstain Bears, Super Why!, Go, Dog. Go!, Jane and the Dragon, and many others.

Read more about Tajja Isen

Debra Thompson
Debra Thompson is an associate professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is an internationally recognized, award-winning scholar of the politics of race and holds a Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and taught in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University before moving to the University of Oregon to help build its Black Studies program. She is the author of The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census, which received three major awards from the American Political Science Association. She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and is a regular commentator in print and on television on the state of race and racism in Canada and the United States. Connect with her on Twitter @DebThompsonPhD.

Read more about Debra Thompson

Stephen Dorsey
Stephen Dorsey is a senior-level business, brand, and marketing strategist, with nearly three decades of experience, and a creative writer, director, and producer of visual content. Today, he is the principal of The Fractional CMO, a strategic consultancy, and of Dorsey Studios, a content production development company. A civically engaged community leader, Stephen is a founding member and board member of Democracy House, a grassroots think tank and civic-minded movement dedicated to preserving and strengthening democratic systems and practices in Canada and around the world. He has written numerous articles, most notably a 2020 opinion piece on “White Advantage” in the Globe & Mail. A proud father of two lovely young children, Stephen lives in Roncesvalles, Toronto. Black & White is his first book.

Read more about Stephen Dorsey

Angelyn Francis
Angelyn Francis is an editor at the Toronto Star focused on social and video. Francis is a journalist with a focus on storytelling across a variety of media and amplifying marginalized voices. She previously covered equity issues at the Star and was a video producer at Maclean's Magazine. She was named one of Canada's 100 most powerful women in 2021 by WXN and hosted HuffPost Canada's award-winning podcast Born and Raised.

Read more about Angelyn Francis

7:30pm

Thursday, September 29

What to read

Black and White by , Some of My Best Friends by , The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging by ,
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