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“There’s many applications: fire surveillance, harvest surveillance […] Police forces are using UAVs to help them with search and rescue operations.”

Inna Sharf, McGill professor of mechanical engineering, and researcher at the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory

UAVs, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, are colloquially known as drones, and have attracted attention in recent years for their role in wars waged on foreign turf, and for allowing those wars to be waged in a detached, methodical fashion. In the above quotation, Sharf defended her lab’s research, which has the goal of making landings and take-offs for UAVs more autonomous, by pointing to its potential use in civilian matters. Sharf’s lab receives funding from the Canadian military; this came to light this year through the release of documents obtained through the Access to Information Act.

Resistance to military-funded research has developed on campus in recent years. Demilitarize McGill, a campus group founded in 2009, seeks to end military research at McGill and raises awareness through walking tours of campus, workshops, and articles published in student press. Its members also engage in direct action. On March 14, in response to revelations that defence contracts fund Sharf’s lab’s UAV work, Demilitarize McGill blockaded the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory for close to four hours. Seen as an obstruction of university work, the demonstration was dispersed by invoking McGill’s protest protocol and the arrival of police on campus.

McGill has responded that research at the university is “[conduct[ed] with integrity and adhere[s] to the highest ethical standards.” While researchers point to potential applications outside of warfare, Kevin Paul, member of Demilitarize McGill, asserted that military-funded research at McGill is dependent on the possibility of warfare, “McGill benefits when war is being waged by virtue of the wide array of military research opportunities and labs that arguably would not exist without military funding.”

Demilitarize McGill continues its ongoing campaign to disrupt, and eventually end, drone research on campus. In the meantime, McGill has released a series of heavily redacted documents in response to Demilitarize McGill’s access to information requests regarding military research at the university.

—Drew Wolfson Bell and Anqi Zhang

“Among the opponents to the Charter, a number of people fall within a fundamentalist movement. […] They become the first victims of the large-scale manipulation orchestrated by Islamists under the pretext of an attack on individual freedoms.”

Martine Desjardins, former student leader and current Parti Québécois candidate, criticizing opposition to Bill 60, the ‘Quebec Charter of Values.’ (translated from French)

On September 10, 2013, Parti Québécois (PQ) Minister Bernard Drainville officially proposed a ‘Quebec Charter of Values.’ The Charter includes five proposals seeking to regulate interactions between state officials and the public, but only one proposal has garnered significant attention. This proposal would “limit the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols” for state employees. In practice, this means that state employees would be prevented from freely expressing their religion if the Charter passes, potentially at the expense of their jobs. Banned religious symbols would include hijabs, burqas, turbans, kippas, and ‘large’ Orthodox crosses.

Debate erupted after the Charter was proposed, leading to numerous anti- and pro-Charter rallies. Those opposing the Charter have claimed that it unfairly targets religious minorities, and as such, is racism barely disguised under a label of secularism. This claim has been reinforced by a reported increase in hate crimes against religious minorities, such as Muslim women, as part of the public fallout since the Charter was first proposed. A Léger survey released in January 2014 found that 60 per cent of Quebecers polled support this component of the Charter.

In early March, the PQ called an election for April 7, with the intention of emerging from the election as a majority government. If this occurs, the PQ will likely push the Charter into law. Other major parties have failed to explicitly condemn the Charter in its entirety, and have instead endorsed altered versions that still prevent certain religious minorities from freely practicing religion. As such, the fate of religious minorities’ place in the public workforce in Quebec remains unclear, regardless of the outcome of the upcoming election.

—Davide Mastracci

“That’s what food justice is: working with those most affected by an unjust food system, rather than creating spaces outside of it only accessible to the privileged.”

Aaron Vansintjan, “The potential of food banks”

This year, the column “A Bite of Food Justice” by Aaron Vansintjan turned a critical eye to contemporary narratives of food politics and sustainability. In tackling topics like land grabbing, gentrification, and dispossession, Vansintjan created a narrative that included broader themes of food security in the face of ongoing colonialism and capitalism. Alternating between a historical context and current events, and between a specific Montreal focus and case studies elsewhere, from rural Ontario to urban Hanoi, Vansintjan investigated and reported on a broad range of social politics in his seven columns.

—E.k. Chan

“Every story we tell of our dead is also a story of those of us who still live: a cautionary tale, a political fable, a remembrance of what happened, and what is still happening.”

Kai Cheng Thom, “For moonlight siblings on the Transgender Day of Remembrance”

In Kai Cheng Thom’s second year of writing as a columnist, they took a different stylistic turn by penning a series of open letters, in From Gaysia with Love. Addressing their letters to personal role models like Janet Mock and CeCe Macdonald, as well explicitly addressing broader audiences at times, Thom wrote with poetic flare on a broad range of subject matter in their nine columns. Covering intersections of transness, sexuality, race, class, and other factors, the intimate nature of epistolary writing drew personal connections and contrasts between Thom and their addressees, which in turn related to broader, societal issues, such as rape culture, transmisogyny, homophobia, and racism. Writing about their own experiences cast a tangible light on normally abstracted concepts, grounding these discussions in a daily, lived reality.

—E.k. Chan

“All of those expectations for me to be masculine, to act a certain way and to live up to an ideal, were thrown out the window.”

Eric White, on dressing in drag for the first time, in “Sore feet and smokey eyes”

White Noise, a column by Eric White, broached topics of queerness in Montreal, using personal experience as a jumping-off point. In his writing on heteronormativity, polyamory, drag, and the contemporary notions of what it means to be ‘queer,’ White broached critical discussions that remained accessible to the student body. In his columns, White refrained from invoking highly academic terms and instead focused on a relatable narrative, through which urban queerness could be explored and critiqued.

—E.k. Chan

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“The two main goals [of ECOLE] are to be a model for sustainable living, and […] to serve as a catalyst for a surviving, connected community for sustainability that integrates community outreach, sustainable living, and equity.”

Lily Schwarzbaum, ECOLE coordinator

Sustainability at McGill faced advances and setbacks this year. On the positive side, two important sustainability projects were approved by the University, Vision 2020, and the Education Community Living Environment (ECOLE) project. Vision 2020, which seeks to create a long-term sustainability plan for the McGill community, was approved on March 21.

The ECOLE project, also approved in the Winter semester, aims to create a sustainability hub in the Milton-Parc community and a model for sustainable living. The ECOLE project will operate in a house off-campus, and see 8 to 12 students live there while completing an independent study project. These student residents will receive subsidized rent and academic credit for their independent study. ECOLE will launch its pilot year in September 2014.

However, sustainability on campus also took a hit when SSMU abruptly lost the position of Sustainability Coordinator. The position which entailed working to align the activities of SSMU with a culture of sustainability, was ended in the Fall semester. Since then there has been little movement from SSMU to create a new position.

As per a motion passed at the SSMU Winter General Assembly (GA), the Ad-hoc Committee on Sustainability will make an “actionable recommendation” for sustainability at SSMU by the end of the Winter 2014 semester. After the recommendation is made, it will be the job of the President and executive to look into the feasibility of the proposal and steps for implementation, and an update will then be brought forward to the Fall 2014 GA. As such, much of the work to implement sustainability on campus remains to be seen in the next academic year.

—Jordan Venton-Rublee

“If this isn’t social injury, then McGill needs a new definition.”

Divest McGill banner

Divest McGill was created in 2012 to campaign for divestment from University holdings in the fossil fuel industry. In February 2013, the group submitted two petitions to McGill’s Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR). The petitions – one seeking McGill’s divestment from the tar sands and fossil fuel industry, and the other seeking divestment from companies associated with the Nord pour tous (formerly known as Plan Nord), a natural resource exploitation project started under former premier Jean Charest – gained momentum, with support from McGill student unions, as well as numerous climate justice advocacy groups across the city.

In May 2013, McGill’s Board of Governors rejected both petitions that Divest McGill submitted. The decision was based on recommendations from CAMSR that indicated that the petitions failed to prove “social injury” had occurred under CAMSR’s Terms of Reference – that is, their mandate and guidelines for reviewing the social responsibility of the University’s investments.

Divest McGill continues to be very active working with other climate justice advocacy groups and Indigenous communities who are also opposed to fossil fuel and tar sands extraction in Canada, and raising awareness on campus. This year, the group held workshops, organized a bike protest, and spoke out against the Petrocultures conference hosted by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Divest McGill acted, and will continue to act, as a key player in increasing the pressure on McGill to divest from fossil fuels and become a leader in ethical investments among universities worldwide.

—E.k. Chan and Hera Chan

“It is important to break [the invisibility of equity issues] down. We have to be intentional about it and actually make changes and work against it.”

Sarah Berry, course lecturer

Equity was a buzzword on McGill’s campus this year, at times due to missteps by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) executive and staff. During the first semester, the SSMU executive was met with criticism for its Costume Campaign, which intended to educate students on culturally appropriative costumes, but used posters featuring people wearing the sort of costumes SSMU sought to ban.

Despite both the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) Equity Committee and SSMU Equity Committee holding forums on the subject in the second semester, the issue of equity at McGill seemed to become larger than life following a complaint filed toward SSMU VP Internal Brian Farnan over a GIF of Barack Obama included in a SSMU listserv email. Part of the Equity Commission’s ruling in the complainant’s favour was that Farnan would issue a public apology – an apology that took a life of its own, attracting international media attention. Back on campus, SSMU eventually decided to retract the decision to make the apology public at a Council meeting, on “the basis that the apology trivializes the legitimacy of equity and racism on campus,” according to the motion moved.

Efforts by the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) to create a more equitable environment were positive, but flew under the radar for many students. Christopher Tegho, who was appointed Equity Commissioner for EUS in October, worked to educate engineering students on the meaning of equity, rape culture, and safer space through workshops held in the Winter semester. The workshops, held in a mandatory first year course for Engineering students, broke down such concepts for students, many of whom were hearing of them for the first time – a phenomenon that is all-too common at McGill.

—Jordan Venton-Rublee

“[The] industry went on a mission to developing countries to get them to use chrysotile asbestos.”

Kathleen Ruff, anti-asbestos advocate

McGill attempted to address accusations of research misconduct in October 2013, when it hosted a conference on asbestos that included panels and discussions about research ethics and asbestos. The University found itself involved in a long-running academic dispute surrounding the work of Professor John Corbett McDonald, who undertook research in the 1960s and 1970s on the health impacts of chrysotile asbestos. His work demonstrated that the use of this asbestos was safe in controlled circumstances; however, McDonald received direct funding from the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association, “an [asbestos] industry-funded body.”

Starting in 2002, numerous scientists began lodging complaints with McGill over the methodology of the research, with some claiming that data had been chosen selectively to give the result desired by industry, and to green-light the commercial exploitation of a cancerous substance.

In response to mounting criticism, the University hosted a day-long conference focused on both asbestos and academic research ethics. Yet while most people at the conference agreed that McGill needed greater ethical oversight in research, no solution was put on the table for discussion, and critics – notably Kathleen Ruff and David Egilman – argued that hosting a conference was not enough and that McGill needed to decide on an ethics policy and retract the study.

Rejection of McDonald’s findings are almost unanimous within the scientific community; however, McGill still refuses to completely retract the paper. To date, critics maintain that the asbestos industry uses McDonald’s findings as evidence for the harmlessness of the substance. This is particularly true in developing countries. The Brazilian government’s position, for example, is that chrysotile asbestos is harmless; this view is based on McDonald’s findings. All that needs to happen to stop the sale of harmful chrysotile asbestos around the world, according to critics, is for McGill to denounce McDonald’s research.

—Emmet Livingstone

“[We should protest] until it is taken seriously by the government [and] they actually put some effort [into] helping these Indigenous women.”

Cleve Higgins, an attendee at the October Sisters in Spirit vigil

Every year, Montrealers take to the streets calling for justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. This February, Missing Justice, an Indigenous solidarity collective, organized the annual march, which saw over 500 protesters participate in the march, higher than all previous marches.

Despite the fact that the march has occurred annually for years now, the response from the government continues to be lacking. Even after years of demands for a formal inquiry into the issue, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government have refused to heed the demands to hold a national inquiry.

Public attention was once again drawn to the issue after the murder of Loretta Saunders, an Inuk woman. In March, to coincide with International Women’s Day, Mohawks blocked CN rail lines in Tyendinaga in a plea for a national inquiry into the issue. Despite all of this initiative, the government is unwilling to take any action.

—Dana Wray

“You reach a point where you realize that there is a huge power differential between SSMU and McGill, and no matter what, we are going to be in this building and they are pretty much setting the terms of the negotiation.”

Joey Shea, SSMU VP University Affairs

It appears that the tipping point that Shea mentions in the above quote has come to pass. After several years of negotiations, SSMU has signed a ten-year lease with McGill for the use of the Shatner building. The newly-signed lease will take effect retroactively, beginning in the 2011-12 school year – the most recent SSMU lease expired in 2011 – and the lease will be in effect until 2020-21.

Lease negotiations have raised financial concerns for three cycles of SSMU executives. At the beginning of the 2012-13 school year, McGill announced that it would no longer pay the entirety of the utilities cost for the Shatner building, and the lease, signed earlier this month, is the first indication of what this means for SSMU. For the 2013-14 year, SSMU will pay an increased rent of $130,000, as well as $100,000 in energy costs. Both rent and utility costs will increase yearly; rent will increase by $5,000 a year for the next seven years, and utility costs will increase with inflation.

In an effort to mitigate the negative financial impacts of these steep rent increases (compare the total $230,000 to be paid out this year to the $110,000 paid in 2010-11 under the previous lease), the SSMU executive attempted to pass a referendum question regarding a Shatner building fee in the Winter referendum period. This question failed to pass, with many questioning the executives’ lack of advertisement of or emphasis on the fee’s importance. Some have also questioned the executives’ role in negotiating a lease that places such a high financial burden on the Society. The building fee may be proposed again in a referendum in the Fall 2014 semester.

—Anqi Zhang

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“We are pleased with the compromise with McGill.”

Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Assistants (AMURE)

Satisfaction with compromise is not something our writers are used to hearing from unions on their negotiations with the University. Nevertheless, in January of this year, Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE), expressed satisfaction with an agreement made between labour unions and McGill to avoid harsh salary decreases for low-paid employees, which would have otherwise occurred as a result of proposed changes to the payroll frequency. The payroll compromise has been a high point in a relatively slow, and at times frustrating, year for labour at McGill.

This year saw the beginning of a campaign by AGSEM: McGill’s Teaching Union to unionize note-takers, graders, tutors, and undergraduate course assistants, responding to concerns about their current pay and work conditions. In October of last year, AGSEM’s invigilator unit also unenthusiastically signed its first collective agreement – though it filed a grievance against McGill only a week later when the University violated the agreement – while AGSEM’s course lecturer unit split off to form an independent union.

The years-long back-and-forth between unions and the administration over pay equity escalated this year in a challenge of the University’s pay equity adjustment calculations for 2001-05 by the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA). This concluded in an agreement that will give McGill until February 2015 to account for employees who were not considered in the first round of calculations.

Beyond our own campus, at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), we watched for a full three weeks in January as professors and library staff went on strike mainly to advocate for fairer salaries for UNB professors. The Daily editorialized on the issue, urging students to resist an all-too-common rhetoric that pits students’ interests against those of workers.

This year, like any other, McGill unions have negotiated for their members’ best interests. These institutions provide a level of support and bargaining power for many workers at the university, and their value cannot be ignored by the student body that shares its space with these groups.

—Jill Bachelder and E.k. Chan

“The motion was clearly an abuse of power on McGill’s part […] They basically wanted to have the law rewritten to suit their needs.”

Mona Luxion, ATI respondent

This year saw a continued struggle to access information at McGill – but the fight is not yet over. In January, the University settled a case that had been before the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec since last year, agreeing to uphold long sought-after access to information (ATI) requests, and release documents related to military research, fossil fuel investments, and sexual assault complaints, among others.

The settlement came after the University refused to uphold such requests, instead accusing students, journalists, and other interested parties of filing requests in a “systematic” and “abusive” manner. In arguing its case to the Commission, the University requested the power to deny all future requests from a blanket group of students and their associates. This power, however, is legally unprecedented, as only the Commission can make that sort of delegation.

The Commission ruled against the University in October, though the University sought an appeal – which later turned into a settlement, something respondents alleged was a “decision to cut its losses.” According to the settlement, documents would be released starting at the end of February up until the summer.

The most recent documents released by the University have been heavily redacted, to the point of being unreadable, due to concerns about the release of information related to third parties. The next few months will tell if information continues to be limited, or if the long-standing requests will finally be fulfilled.

—Molly Korab

“Direct action costs them money, and the more expensive we make it for them, the closer we get to winning.”

Amanda Lickers, organizer at Swamp Line 9

Two years after the protest-heavy academic year of 2011-12, direct action continues to be a tactic of choice for student groups. However, direct action has also faced a increasingly hostile environment courtesy of the administration. In 2013, McGill adopted two documents, commonly called the protest protocol, that limit the scope and the types of direct action on campus. Outcry from campus and civil rights groups did not alter the protocol, and it still remains in effect today.

Some campus groups, such as Divest McGill – which seeks to pressure the University to divest from fossils fuels – and Demilitarize McGill – which aims to stop military research at the university – still protest on campus. In addition to workshops, petitions, and other forms of action, Divest McGill held a bike rally earlier this year. The group Support Our Staff at McGill (SOS-McGill) also handed out letters outside of a Senate meeting. February saw the blockade of the Petrocultures conference, where demonstrators unfurled a banner outside the Faculty Club to protest fossil fuel extraction.

The bike rally, the demonstration outside of Senate, and the Petrocultures blockade went off with little to no blowback from the administration, but not all demonstrations got off scot-free. A few weeks ago, on March 14, Demilitarize McGill blockaded the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory after revelations that some researchers in the Lab conducted military-funded research related to drones. The peaceful blockade lasted almost four hours, but the administration eventually called the police to campus to shut down the protest.

—Dana Wray

“The Charter of [rights and freedoms] protects the right to freedom of expression, but there is no right to protest.”

SPVM spokesperson Jean-Bruno Latour, in French to La Presse

Although the municipal bylaw P-6 has been in effect since 2001, the city only saw the grim results of its stipulations on March 15, 2013 when the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) used the bylaw to shut down the annual anti-police brutality march.

On that date, the police kettled – sectioned off and detained different parts of the crowd – and doled out fines of $637 to the demonstrators. According to the SPVM website, bylaw P-6 prohibits any participant at a demonstration – defined as an assembly, parade, or gathering – from covering their face; this includes scarves, hoods, and masks. Additionally, it is mandatory to disclose the location and itinerary of a demonstration to the police at least 24 hours beforehand. Failure to comply with these requirements results in the demonstration being declared illegal, and potentially a heavy fine for demonstrators.

The bylaw was most visibly enforced at the height of the Maple Spring – the Quebec student strikes of 2012 – and has since been cited by many as extraordinarily repressive. Last year, 78 community groups endorsed a public statement issued by the Anti-capitalist convergence in Montreal (CLAC) that called for solidarity against police repression in Montreal. Although the bylaw is largely associated with the Maple Spring, its enforcement continues to make waves, such as during this year’s anti-police brutality march, which was shut down within minutes of its initiation.

Currently, collective defences and class action lawsuits that plead not guilty are challenging the legality of the arrests and the conditions of detention in last year’s kettles. The lawsuits are just beginning to be heard in court, and many other individuals are challenging their tickets without a lawyer. CLAC, an advocate for individual challenges of tickets, continues to host workshops, sharing information on how to defend oneself, and what to do in case of arrest.

—Hera Chan

Year in review: News | Commentary | Culture | Features | Sci+Tech | Health&Ed | Sports

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The drone was low and deep, shuddering in my skin when the air around me was still enough for a moment. It hummed steadily in my ears, waiting, every moment of every day. I can’t remember when it started, nor could I describe the exact quality of the sound other than its constancy, its deepness. I don’t know where it came from. It seemed to reverberate in different spaces, seemed to emanate from every direction sometimes, and from within myself other times. I could never tell if its echoes were bouncing off the walls around me or between the walls of my skull.

The noise vibrated behind my eyes when the headaches came and went, and it gnawed on the rawness of my nerves as they frayed from stress. It was loud enough to wash out the quieter sounds in my life – I could not fully hear a lover’s murmur in my ear, or the particular resonance of a piano’s notes after hands were lifted from the keys. Whether the constant anxiety was caused, or just made worse by the hum, I suppose I’ll never know. The two had become inextricable, an endless loop of irritation and aggravation.

I couldn’t remember a time I’d heard real silence, outside of my sleep. And sleep did come with difficulty, as the hum became more noticeable when my eyes were closed and I tried to lay still. It ate away at me worst of all when I tried to relax myself, to find a way to calm the grating sensation of the constant noise. But eventually, every night, I slept, and occasionally I dreamt.

Every time I had the dream, the awakening was the same. I awoke in pitch blackness, the chill soaked deep into my skin where not even the scalding hot water of my shower could reach it and chase it out. It was not the dream itself that draped itself across my shoulders, a creeping cold dread that clung to my skin all day. It wasn’t the dream that settled itself into my flesh and left my teeth clattering together in my mouth.

In the dream I am restful, lying on my side on a bed of furs, my legs tucked against my chest. Long curved horns extend from the ground and arch above me, creating a domed cage in the air, keeping me in – and keeping everything else out. When I look up past the criss-crossed bones, the air is dark and speckled with the gold flakes of starlight.

I sense something standing outside the bony cage, near my head – a silhouette of pure light against the night sky. I know it’s looking down at me, and I know it’s smiling, though its lack of a face indicates neither. I roll onto my back to meet its gaze, my neck craned back. Its figure is a soft, ochre-tinted glow. Its arms part and suddenly a bright, white light pierces my eyes. I want to look away, but I can’t. My eyes strain with the blinding pain, and I watch as a single eye comes into focus, bright in the middle of the figure’s forehead, a spotlight that sears into my skull.

I feel a sting, a tickling pain in my scalp, and I am warm all over. I feel something tugging at my skin, pulling the folds in my forehead apart until they tear, and my third eyelid opens, in some kind of response to the figure standing above me. I grit my teeth. I want to reach up to wipe away the blood I feel trickling toward my temples, but I find my arms immobilized.

My third eye blinks away the pool of blood and tears collecting on its surface, and it sees – I see – with sudden clarity, the figure’s face. It is familiar and kind. Its single eye is a brilliant, shimmering gold, and in the absolute blackness it radiates warm light that reaches its fingers between the curled horns and gilds my whole body with its gentle, careful touch. The silence is deafening and pure, every particle in the air frozen exactly in place in that moment, with not so much as the rustling of a breath audible in my ears. I want desperately to respond, to call out, to stretch my arms up to the figure, but I am left to stare, with all three eyes wide and a desperate yearning building in my chest and throat.

When I wake up from the dream I am alone, and it is the emptiness of my dark bedroom that brings that unsettling cold under my skin. The nighttime air casts a blueness over everything and it is in that cold, empty air that I start to shudder.

The low hum always returned when I awoke, playing on in my ear. When I woke from the dream it always seemed closest, almost as though it came from under my own skin.

* * *

One day, I woke from the same dream, the same iciness sinking into my skin, sifting through my muscles and into my bones. The sadness had become a strange routine of mine. I rubbed at my aching limbs, stiff with the cold as I accustomed myself to the familiarity of the noise once more. And as I sat up in my bed as always, shivering with the cold and the quiet, it happened. The noise changed.
It was just a single pulse, a tiny blip of an interruption to the steady drone. It startled me, shook me right out of the familiar dread that I felt settling in my chest. I looked around, bewildered, as though my eyes would somehow right the wrong my ears found. Nothing.

I held my head still, listening intently to the deep hum, but it was the same as ever. I found myself gripping the quilt, my breath caught in my mouth. I sat there, immobile, breathing as quietly as possible, listening to the drone for the better part of an hour. I was afraid. Of what, I was not sure, other than the unsettled feeling that had so disturbed the routineness of despair. For the first time, I tried to seek comfort in the noise, to ground myself with its constancy, to find reassurance in that unchanging horizon of sound.

I was gripped by tense anticipation for days – for what, I wasn’t sure, but I waited. I listened. And sure enough, a week later, the noise changed again. Another single, short break in the drone, and I heard it clear as day as I ate lunch in a park near my office. I chewed on my sandwich slowly, methodically, trying to replay the sound in my head. Just a small break – a split second of true silence. Trying to imagine that absence of sound against the constant backdrop of the hum proved futile, and the harder I tried, the more frustrated I became. I tried to cling to the hope that it would return, and I became fixated on finding that relief again, growing more and more impatient.

I became unable to hold conversation for longer than a few minutes, as my mind would drift, ever searching. People became all but faceless shapes that melted into one another around me – I was alone with the sound and it swallowed me whole, wrapping itself up with my senses. When I put my fingertips against a wall or a desk I could feel the reverberant tremor. When I closed my eyes, it shuddered against my eyelids.

The next blip came faster – three days later. I was at home, alone, distractedly trying to read. My entire mind felt itchy with the want for silence. That consuming need had become as persistent as the humming itself, and when I heard it I gasped audibly. I tried to savour the moment but as soon as it registered as a thought in my mind, it was gone again. Something in me snapped then, and I was overcome with a loneliness unlike any other. I put my head in my hands and cried, grabbing fistfuls of my hair and wishing I could simply pin down the silent reprieve that found me in those dreams, that now taunted me in my waking hours too. I screamed into my palms until my throat went hoarse, trying to drown out the noise myself, if it would refuse to leave me.

That night, the dream changed, too. The figure appeared above me as before, and through the long horns it watched me. Some subconscious part of me knew my third eye would open again, but I was surprised when the skin of my forehead split – it seemed more painful, more forceful. A scream started to form in my throat, but it was lost in the still air, extinguished before it left the tip of my tongue.
My forehead stung and my ears rang, but everything fell away into an utter calm when I let the figure’s light wash over me again. There was a new blissfulness in that night’s dream, in the totality of the silence, the warmth, the light.

When I woke up, my eyes hurt – they itched terribly, like a dried scab, like thick-bodied insects crawling over my eyelids. In a half-awake panic I clawed at my own face, feeling only smooth skin. I ran to the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror, and saw nothing out of place, other than the fresh red scratches across my forehead, under my brow, and down my cheeks. I watched myself panting in the mirror for a moment, and so I saw it in my own eyes when the drone was interrupted with two short silences, a second apart – a beat. I recoiled visibly at the second silence, and stared at myself in the mirror for a moment as I collected myself. I leaned on my hands on either edge of the bathroom sink, and stared down into the cracked ceramic basin as I prayed for it to come again.
I heard more pauses over the next few days, more small beats in the constant drone. Some better judgement in me resisted the hopefulness that grew in my chest, but I could not help the feeling that maybe – maybe soon – the silence would outweigh the sound.

The arrhythmic, irregular stops made it so that I could not predict the timing, but they soon grew to a point where I could expect to hear one every few hours. One evening I walked a familiar path around my quiet neighbourhood, down to the riverside a few blocks away. I dragged my heels on the gravel path deliberately, savouring the crunch and crumble of the stones under my feet, audible above the drone. Then I heard a second of silence, and in that second the crispness of the wind rustling the leaves around me was perfect. I smiled to myself with a small satisfaction, and picked up the pace along the trail to make my way home.

I heard another silence as I walked. Then another. And another. Seconds apart, they still didn’t form a musical beat, but they were growing closer together. I looked around as my heart picked up its pace, trying to find a source, a cause for the change. I spotted somebody in the distance. I could distinguish nothing from their figure, and as we approached one another – I was inexplicably drawn – I found my eyes unable to focus on the figure, unable to find a place to rest my sight. At last, the silences were forming a regular, steady tap-tap-tap-tap and the figure was nearly in front of me. She looked up.

She was a small, slight girl, with dark eyes that pierced into my skull. “It’s you,” she said. The silences and the drone were now playing in equal measure, forming a buzzing, low beat that mirrored the pounding of my heart as I stared at her. “You hear it too.” Her eyes did not waver, but I could not hold her gaze. I looked around her – her hair, her cheek, her ear, her shoulder. I nodded shakily in response, my mouth dry with fear. She seemed to loom over me, though she was no taller than me. I watched the corner of her mouth as it softened into a wry smile. “I think we’ve been looking for each other.”

She stepped close to me. I gasped, and tried to step back, but couldn’t. The beat grew louder and quicker, becoming a frantic drumming closing in on my ears. My eyes flitted back and forth from one side of her face to the other. “Look at me,” she said softly. I clenched my jaw. My gaze slowly moved from her mouth, up to the tip of her nose, and agonizingly, I forced myself to look into her eyes.

The noise stopped. It truly stopped. My blood was pumping frantically, I heard it rushing in my ears, a gust of wind whistled by, and somewhere far away, a dog barked. I heard with incredible clarity the sound of breath filling my lungs. I stared into her deep, brown eyes, and I saw small flecks of gold, a small and distant sky reflected there.

I heard a strange, human noise suddenly, and realized it was my own laughter, choked through dry lips. I laughed again, still staring into her. “Will it stay gone?” She nodded. “I think so.” Her smile was now unhesitant, spreading into a true grin as she laughed too, before throwing her arms around my waist. She crushed herself against me, and I held her. We stood there on the gravel, soaking in the unobscured sounds that surrounded us.

We eventually parted our embrace, staring and unable to stop ourselves from laughing as we both revelled in the entirely mundane soundscape. “I hear an owl, far away,” she whispered reverently. Suddenly, she took my hands in hers. “Let’s… listen,” she said in a hush. And we did, walking along the path for what seemed like an age. The croak of frogs, the murmur of cars driving down streets beyond the trees that concealed the city in the distance. There was a true wonderment in the way she smiled every time the noises died down for a moment, to allow the empty silence to resonate.

Finally we wound our way back to my apartment, delighting in every tiny echo of our footsteps along the weathered cement. We embraced again in front of my door. “Thank you,” I said, and she shook her head. “I should be thanking you,” she laughed. A silence passed between us, our eyes locked, and then she averted her gaze to look down the empty road. A fear flashed across my mind then – fear that when she was no longer with me, the hum would return. When she turned to leave, a hundred questions that I wanted to ask suddenly surfaced in my mind, but all were paralyzed by that fear. I stood by my door and watched her figure grow smaller in the distance, and she looked over her shoulder to give me one last smile before she seemed to melt into the darkness down the road. The noise did not return. And I stood alone, hearing the quiet buzz of the lightbulb above my head, staring down that deserted road.

I unlocked the door and headed up the stairs, entering the wondrously still air of my quiet apartment. The floorboards creaked beneath me, and I could even hear the soft percussion of my palm against the wall, as I leaned on it to remove my shoes. I made my way to the bathroom, splashing water on my face and rubbing at my eyes. I towelled off, then looked at myself in the mirror. I could not help smiling at myself.

I made my way to my bedroom, flicked on my bedside table lamp, and propped myself up against the headboard. I reached over to the window and tapped the glass experimentally, listening to the tiny ringing noise my fingernail elicited. I pushed my hands around on the bedsheets, the rustling of fabric a sound for sore ears. I stopped for a moment and laughed at the strangeness of the act, feeling for all the world like a newborn exploring an alien, unfamiliar world.

I grabbed the book I had laying on the floor beside my bed, and leafed through the pages, finding my place in a chapter I had been struggling to concentrate on for the past few days. I sighed, leaning heavily into the pile of pillows behind me, and it was then that I felt it – something shifted suddenly, beneath the skin on my forehead. Something round. Something large. And it started to itch.

The post Decay and Sustain appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Technically speaking, machine-free tattooing has a long and diverse tradition worldwide. It can be performed by professionals and amateurs alike, with no need for specialized equipment: anything from flame-sterilized sewing needles to the professional-grade needles normally used in tattoo machines can be used; the method is what dictates its categorization. Yet, in the North American public eye at least, hand-poked tattoos are often seen as being poor quality, or “shady” (or both), depending on the circumstances – punk or prisoner.

I spoke with Isabella Mancini, a recent McGill graduate who has, by her estimate, given 30 to 35 stick-n-poke tattoos, normally as a pre-party favour when she plays host to a large group. Having seen her work on friends, the tattoos she gives are normally simple line drawings – a small skull, a symbol of Venus, a squiggly line – delivered by sewing needle and India ink. “I think it’s fun. I think it’s a cool, alternative, free way to get a tattoo, if it’s something simple enough,” she said.

In contrast, Rian Desourdie, an apprentice tattoo artist at Montreal’s Studio Artease, was quick to note that while she does not speak for all professional tattoo artists, “everyone in the shop had the same opinion without even talking … We frown upon it.” She explained, “Proper hygiene practices, the risk of getting an infection, people not really knowing what depth to go when they do a stick-n-poke. These are all things that we’ve learned and been trained and certified in.”

To Desourdie, aesthetics are only secondary to sanitation. Referring to blog posts she’s seen offering inadequate safety tips, she has little confidence in amateurs’ abilities to adhere to the industry’s high standards of care. After our interview, she brought up a Google image search of stick-n-pokes. Looking through the photos, she and the counter staff at Studio Artease acknowledged that some of the tattoos were clearly made by someone with decent artistic ability, “at least as good as some apprentices.” But she acknowledged grotesque images of infections or scarring as the best arguments for professional tattooing.

Mancini herself said that when she started, her methods were “very unsanitary, like ‘let’s all just use the same jar of ink,’” though now she makes sure to be “as clean as possible.” While Desourdie told me it’s possible for a stick-n-poke to be done and later cared for without issue, she doesn’t find the risk is worth it.

Desourdie also spoke of the way tattooing has become increasingly legitimized as an art form, a path she believes the industry has been painstakingly paving for decades. To her, DIY tattoos are “reverting back to these poorly-done stick-n-poke tattoos that are kind of an echo of prison tattoos. It’s not something I think you should really celebrate.” Speaking about the same type of pre-party get-together that Mancini has hosted, she finds that, “It’s very much that fad mentality … It’s a rebel thing to do.”

Having heard anecdotes from people with stick-n-pokes, the intimacy, low cost, and bonding between friends seem high on the list of reasons to opt for a stick-n-poke. Mancini said of her motivations, “There are certain things that, to me, make more sense to do DIY and to do it in your living room.” Pointing, as examples, to an anarcha-feminist symbol on her thigh, and matching S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) tattoos she’s given to several people, Mancini finds some tattoos better delivered by the hand of a good friend, but she also acknowledges the place of a professional piece. “I like studio tattoos because I like really big, beautiful, colourful tattoos, and I acknowledge that I’m not able to give those to myself, or to have a friend do it.” Here, the two artists may agree, as Desourdie told me about her first tattoo: “Because I’m an artist, I didn’t care about price. I just wanted awesome art. Tattoos are expensive, but they are a lifetime.”

While Desourdie refers to stick-n-pokes as “a fad that’s permanent,” Mancini recognizes that permanence in a different light. “I like that it’s DIY, I think it’s really cool and important…to have a tattoo that your friend gave you, and to have that on you for the rest of your life.”

The post Getting skin-deep with DIY tattoos appeared first on The McGill Daily.

At the beginning, I wasn’t sure that I’d do much more than go on a couple dates with the man who now shares half the rent of an apartment with me. I knew he was in a very long-term, long-distance relationship with someone else at the time, and I knew they were polyamourous, but I didn’t know how well I could handle being involved with someone who was in love with someone else. To be sure, in two years there have been a fair share of stumbles and awkward conversations as we felt our way around what worked, but it has, for the most part, worked.

When telling people that I’m in an open relationship, I’m often asked, “What does that mean, exactly?” From having met and talked with other polyamourists, I know the arrangements and configurations of relationships are nearly endless. Some couples have ‘tiers’ of relationships (primary partners, secondary, et cetera). Some are open to the idea of their partners sleeping with others, so long as they’re willing to share. While I know that monogamous relationships also have their own sets of rules, implicit or explicit, the strictness and specificity of those rules in polyamorous relationships range so widely that it would be absurd to say “‘x’ is how a polyamourous relationship should work.”

In my experience, the first mental images of polyamoury conjured up by people unfamiliar with the idea lean towards either religious polygamy, as ‘popularized’ by shows like Sister Wives and Big Love, or a free-spirited communal group-love. I admit that the latter was an idea that circulated in my mind for a while – did I have to date both of them? As it turned out, I was essentially a fourth addition to a linear arrangement of partners. My relationship with my boyfriend is entirely distinct from his relationship with his girlfriend, and that in turn is separate from her other serious relationship. What I initially feared might be some kind of sexual free-for-all turned into a deeply intimate commitment to one man, with an allowance that I might someday make deeply intimate commitments to other people and still be with him.

For the better part of a year, I barely considered dating or sleeping with other people, but the fact that the option existed was hard to ignore. When friends complained of being attracted to people outside their relationships, or of their fear of commitment to a single person, I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. Once I did eventually decide to try having casual sex with other people, I found myself empowered by the ease with which I could let those people walk in and out of my life, demanding nothing and sharing only the time and intimacy I decided to share – all within the security of knowing I was loved and cared for.

Of course, I was not without issue – another question I’m frequently asked about my relationship is some variation of ‘How come you don’t get jealous?’ or ‘Doesn’t it bother you to have to share?’

I’ve heard many times, from people in various types of relationships, that in monogamy, a bit of jealousy is healthy, and in polyamoury, it’s unhealthy. This dichotomy terrified me. Jealousy and insecurity plagued me like it does many in their late teens, but I felt particularly burdened with the idea that I was supposed to strive to get rid of those feelings to satisfy the terms of our relationship.

I couldn’t fathom a way to just be rid of my jealousy, to suddenly overcome and not mind at all that someone might occupy a more important part of my partner’s romantic life than me. The struggle in my relationship wasn’t about trying to get rid of jealousy, but rather confronting the things that made me jealous in the first place. Sometimes jealousy isn’t about covetousness or spite. Sometimes it’s about a genuine, though misguided, fear of losing someone important, and that fear was what I had to deal with, not the symptomatic jealousy that resulted.

I’ve grown in immeasurable ways in the last two years, and while not all those ways are explicitly connected to my relationship, there are things that would be entirely different if I hadn’t learned to be a polyamourist. I wouldn’t have explored half the number of kinks I now frequently enjoy, and I’m not sure I would have come out as queer, or as genderqueer. I believe the freedom to experiment coupled with the assurance that I was not unlovable made all the usual, tumultuous self-discovery of late teenagehood a much better experience than it would have been otherwise.

I also believe that it doesn’t work for everyone. I have met ex-polyamourists, who found that trying to juggle commitments with multiple partners, struggling with deal-breaking envy, working out the rules of their relationships, or any other number of factors made things too complex, or too painful, or otherwise unworkable. Some polyamourists, like the authors of The Ethical Slut (frequently hailed as the how-to guide of open relationships), suggest that many or most relationship problems could be solved with polyamoury, and encourage all to rethink the monogamous concept of love ingrained in all of us since childhood. As much as I have come to love the feeling of having my options open, if I had become involved with a less patient or compassionate person, or if I hadn’t had help getting over my feelings of inadequacy, or if I hadn’t awkwardly blurted out my feelings at inopportune moments and ended up having painful but necessary conversations, I might have decided a long time ago that polyamoury was not for me, and left it at that.

Some people emotionally require polyamoury, the same way some people are naturally monogamous. On the other hand, I followed a learning curve between the assumptions I had been taught to make, and the reality of admitting and being okay with the fact that I, and people I love, can be interested in multiple people. Learning to pursue those interests in a way that doesn’t hurt me or my partner has taken time, too, and naturally, the easier-said-than-done heart of all good relationships is communication.

It might turn out that at thirty years old, I’ll be in a serious relationship with one person, or two, or three, or none. Whatever the case, I’m certain the experiences I’ve had with polyamoury will have formed a good foundation for a willingness to explore and share those relationships if I have them, and to know how to take care of myself if I don’t.

The post My love is not a battlefield appeared first on The McGill Daily.

On some bored weekday night in my first semester, I attended a public talk in the Redpath Museum and, on my way out, spotted a poster calling for volunteers in a lab researching vertebrate evolution. At that point I hadn’t decided what exactly I was at school for, but ‘evolutionary biologist’ had a nice ring to it, and this opportunity seemed to fall somewhere in line with that.

After exchanging a couple of emails with my soon-to-be lab supervisor wherein I explained my lack of practical experience, I was nonetheless invited to “come by the museum and meet Hans.” Slowly, something clicked in my head: Hans… Larsson? The dinosaur-maker? After a few Google searches I was thrilled to find Larsson’s body of work not only included turning chickens into dinosaurs, but what seemed like a picture-perfect image of paleontology in the field – digging up dinosaurs, crocodiles, and other bits of prehistory in badlands and deserts across the world. I wondered if I would end up cleaning or categorizing some of those fossils the way my ten-year-old self had always imagined.

As it turned out, my position was in the wet lab and simply entailed the extraction of chick embryos from their eggs – a relatively easy (and, after the initial squeamishness, boring) task that involved picking bits of shell apart until a sizable window formed, followed by some careful tweezer-and-spoon handling. Eventually I was ‘promoted’ to an all-around gopher in the lab, trying out various protocols from running DNA gels, to making stock solutions, to showing new volunteer arrivals the limited and particularly uninteresting tricks of the trade as I walked them through the methods of handling the embryos.

During my first summer in Montreal, I piloted a method of installing Teflon ‘windows’ into chick eggs. This was done to facilitate observation without needing to disrupt or extract the embryo, with the ultimate goal of creating a few-seconds-long timelapse video of the embryo developing in ovo, which was never quite realized.

Considering my experiences, the Jurassic Park-esque mental image of people in lab coats examining chick DNA in a dimly lit fumehood, or using a fine-toothed brush to clean off fossilized Tyrannosaurus teeth both seemed a bit far off, but some parts of the research in the lab veered farther in that direction than others. Some of the students in the lab were trying to create a living model of the fin-to-limb transition; that is, ‘training’ live fish out of water to see if they could be induced to crawl more efficiently on land.

My project, on the other hand, ostensibly involved tracking patterns of tissue movement in the developing chick limb, with the use of fluorescent dyes – at least, that’s what I told other people. It actually largely involved hunting through literature for protocols, permanently staining my clothes with fluorescent dyes, accidentally breaking hair-thin needles (usually with my hand), and wrangling with a makeshift microscope stage fashioned – in all seriousness – out of an old spoon. In the end, I weaved some (statistically) insignificant results into some eye-catching but uninformative figures, and was rewarded with the first A grade I’d achieved during my time at McGill.

I felt a little cheated, having contributed, in theory, to the chickenosaurus project for two years and never having seen so much as a mosquito in amber. Of course, if science worked the way media described it, we probably would have slapped some lizard legs onto a plucked chicken and called it a day.

Unlike the way I had to reassess my expectations of working in the lab, I found the hand-dirtying, elbow-greasy paleontological side of things more or less what I expected. This summer, I spent two weeks on a field course led by Larsson, living out of a one-person tent alongside a dozen or so other students in southern Saskatchewan. We went on day-long hiking expeditions into arid valleys, learning to identify dirt qualities by taste, uncovering and collecting millennia-old teeth and bones by the sackful. The childlike thrill of spending an afternoon on a crumbly shore using awls and brushes to uncover a dinosaurian jawbone the size of my face was as much as I could have possibly hoped for.

After a week and a half of collecting, we also spent some time in the T. rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, Saskatchewan, cataloguing, cleaning, and gluing together the dusty shards we hauled out. Working on the job, we learned to identify crocodile ribs, gar scales, and raptor teeth, while museum visitors peered into the research lab through floor-to-ceiling windows.

Though the objects of study were rather different, working under the fluorescent lights in the T. rex Discovery Centre brought a certain reminiscence of hunching over a lab bench in the  Stewart Biology Building. While in hindsight, the monotony of collecting data for my project was not especially inspiring, watching it go from numbers in a spreadsheet to an informative contribution to a much bigger picture was reaffirming. As for working with fossils and fitting together more literal pieces of a puzzle, I found it incredibly satisfying. After I handed in my field book at the end of the summer, I was able to tell my mother during the car ride home that I had finally decided to be a paleontologist.

The post Dr. Chickenosaurus appeared first on The McGill Daily.

First, the seemingly innocuous progressive Darwinism, which parades itself as “neo-Darwinism plus,” compounds a well-established theory with the implications of the emerging field of epigenetics. Epigenetics, in essence, studies heritable changes in gene expression (turning genes “on and off”) that are not caused by the DNA sequence itself. However, the author David Benrimoh makes several straw men arguments and leaps of logic in his attempts to apply the concept, and forgets one important thing: epigenes are subject to natural selection.

Neo-Darwinism, the theory that phenotypic or, expressed, change is affected over time by the inheritance of genetic mutations, is already capable of accepting that changes in gene regulation can also be inherited. The effects both of and on the epigene are blown out of proportion by Benrimoh, who doesn’t understand that the adaptive “fine tuning” during a single animal’s lifetime is accounted for by phenotypic plasticity – an introductory level evolutionary concept suggesting that all organisms have some individual adaptability. Benrimoh also draws shaky connections between epigenes and the “problems” of altruism and consciousness, overlooking the fact that answers to these “problems” are already being sought by neo-Darwinists, and have nothing to do with epigenetics, regardless.

Similarly, Nirali Tanna, the author of the Integrationalism article seems to view those silly neo-Darwinists as arrogant know-it-alls and postulates “more nuanced schools of thought.” Tanna suggests that questions like “What is life? Why has life happened? Or, even, what is consciousness?” are beyond the scope of science, requiring some form of ineffable transcendence to comprehend. Philosophical pondering is completely valid outside empiricism, but it is not a basis for scientific discussion. Tanna writes that “evolution is becoming more conscious of itself,” apparently ignorant of the fact that evolution is not a viewpoint nor a series of products, but an observed mechanism. One might as well say: “Photosynthesis is becoming more conscious of itself.”

Much as I abhorred the faux-science, I am even more indignant at The Daily for presenting these two theories as though they represent a balanced view of evolutionary biology. I am infuriated to think that people may be led to believe that there is room for nonsense about the “subtle battle…between our own consciousness and the epigene” or “holistic consciousness” in discussing Darwinism. Perhaps, next time The Daily publishes an “exploration” of scientific theory, they may find it pertinent to consult scientists in the field, rather than letting it be bastardized and passed off as well-reasoned.

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