If you’re reading The Strand for the first time, we’d like to welcome you to our community, and we hope that you’ll have an amazing start to your time at UofT. To our returning readers, thank you for returning, and welcome back to school.
It’s impossible to look forward to the fall semester without considering the difficulty of our summer. Whether you are entering first year or are a seasoned academic going into your fifth year, we know that this year will be different than anything we’ve faced in the past. In times like these, the only real salve for confusion, worry, and loss is the strength of our connections and communities. Since taking over as EICs, we have been focused on creating a safe and equitable community for readers, writers, and our masthead at The Strand. The words in our inaugural issue remind us that there is a lot to fight for and a lot to fight against.
We have witnessed the damaging effects of racism within our own classrooms and seen how students of colour lack the platforms, syllabi, and access to resources needed to protect them and encourage their voices to grow. As many writers, artists, and activists have pointed out, the education system often fails Black students. Organizations like March for Black Students have put together research on such incidents, and the details are disheartening, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it. In this issue’s op-ed “How to Prepare for a Semester of Unlearning,” Furqan Mohamed breaks down the process of becoming more socially conscious, something that is essential for moving forward in this academic, and thus often exclusionary, space.
Between growing political change and the worldwide spread of COVID-19, many of us may feel overwhelmed, helpless, or isolated. It’s an experience we’ve been having both collectively and individually. We feel grief as we mourn those lost both to the pandemic and in the struggle against police brutality. We feel hope when we see crowds of people taking a stance against racism, the police, prisons, and our corrupt capitalist system. While the media seems to have lost interest in covering the ongoing protests in the United States, this doesn’t mean that the people have lost their will to protest. As Mohamed writes, “[T]his particular moment in time feels different, with people critically reconsidering their relationship to systems that are seemingly permanent and unmovable.”
Inside this issue, you’ll find pandemic-specific resources, like Michael Mejia’s Feature on online learning, Candice Zhang’s guide in Arts and Culture on software skills for students, and Amy Zhang’s piece in News on the pandemic response at Vic. In Stranded, you can get to know our humour section by finding out about Vic’s new iDon. In Opinions, a statement from Vic’s international students on the University’s refusal to lower international tuition fees is an apt example of the ways in which we can be using this platform to voice our concerns with the administration and help create change.
As Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young argue in their book Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and possibilities, “[A]ll knowledge production—whose meaning, method, data, and for what and whose purposes—is always political.” As a student organization with a platform, we have a duty to use this platform to raise the voices of our students. Genuine, heartfelt, passionate, and radical writing is imperative to our collective well-being. We hope The Strand can introduce you to some of the voices of our community and encourage you to make your voice heard.
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