Language Arts & Disciplines

The deepening climate crisis is making all kinds of work harder, more dangerous and more unpredictable — or if it hasn’t yet, it will soon enough. And all kinds of workers have something to say about it. I’ll Get Right On It is a poetry anthology about making a living and carrying on despite smoky air, fires, climate grief, species loss and increased precarity. Contributors include Indigenous, migrant, racialized, low-income, queer, disabled and unpaid labourers who do all kinds of work, including climate-related work, extractive work, migrant work, gig work, care and service work and traditional work.

This anthology builds on the rich traditions of working-class literature, work poetry and social poetics. These poems are both a way to pay attention to the politics of everyday life and a workshop for building solidarity among working people already surviving and adapting to a climate emergency. They surface the commonplace, powerful feelings of cynicism, helplessness, empathy, responsibility, resilience and hope that are needed in the struggle for a liveable future. Connecting the dots between labour and environment, this anthology invites us to think and feel through the many ways climate change transforms our working lives.

Scott Neigh expands our understanding of "listening" as not an individual, passive act but as inherently fundamental to constructing a socially just world. He walks us through his learning as a frontline activist, journalist and host of Talking Radical Radio and shares what he's learned from decades of conversing with other activists and scholars.

What does it mean to find oneself centred in a world in turmoil, as news of genocide, climate change and police violence increases to quell social movements? Neigh reflects deeply on the role of listening from the moment of injustice to how we respond as individuals, through to the formation of collective social movements — what these movements are, how they work, what they do in the world, the knowledge generated in and by them and the importance of listening to and within them. By listening effectively, we explicitly centre sensory pathways to understanding and may derive greater strategies for our collective liberation as embodied and situated knowers.