Coussa is a fourth-year Honours International Development Studies student. They are the Events Coordinator for Queer McGill, and they have collaborated with QPIRG on several events, including “Culture Shock.” Radu is in her final semester at McGill and got involved in her second year when she joined one of QPIRG’s working groups. She now acts as the Campus Outreach Coordinator and has been in this position for almost a year. 

This year, the focus of “Culture Shock” was “joy, pleasure, and celebration as community building.” When asked how this theme came to be, Radu stated that it was proposed by the Popular Education Committee of QPIRG and inspired by other campus events from the last year which were “not just about fighting the good fight, but also being able to take time and appreciate how far we’ve come.”

Some events that took place were “Nightlife as Community Building,” which explored how party culture can act as a safe space for marginalized people; “Places of Rest: An Interactive Mapping Experience,” which brought members of the BIPOC community together to physically map out safe spaces in Montreal; and “Un(PAC)k: Caring for ourselves and each other,” an event that led a discussion about the “Social Change Ecosystem.”  Further events included “Filthy Wholesome Dirty Talk,” which taught participants how to use dirty talk for pleasure; “ALL MY RELATIONS: Indigenous Crafting, Culture, and Connection,” an event that brought in Indigenous artists to make soap carvings and dream-catchers; “Clowning Around,” a workshop that introduced participants to “drag, clowning, [and] gendered performance”; “QTBIPOC Comedy Night,” a comedy show featuring “They Go Low, We Go Laugh”;  and “The Fortuna Kiki Ball by Mami Cuarta Mulan,” a fundraiser to help sponsor a similar Kiki ball in Peru. 

Of these events, both Coussa and Radu claimed that they were especially excited about the QTBIPOC Comedy Show, which Radu was heavily involved in planning. Coussa stated that the comedy night served a unique and central purpose, as “not often do we get to highlight specifically the voices of queer, trans, BIPOC comedians.” This event was in collaboration with “They Go Low, We Go Laugh,” a comedy club for women of colour. Coussa scouted out this group when looking for different people and organizations to collaborate with on this year’s “Culture Shock” series, having previously attended one of their live shows to find out more about the group’s comedy style. 

A lot of the events came together in a similar fashion, through the connections that members of QPIRG and Queer McGill have to the Montreal community. For example, QPIRG supports many working groups, autonomous organizations, and collectives working on issues that reflect QPIRG’s mandate, and these groups provide more access to various networks. For instance, the Pan-Asian Collective (PAC) leads the aptly-named event “Un(PAC)k: Caring for ourselves and each other,” which covered the Social Change Ecosystem Map, a book by Deepa Iyer that provides direction for those looking to get started in the realm of social change, and Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown, which explores how to make social justice a positive experience. 

The Daily attended the “Nightlife as Community Building” event, moderated by Adrienne Pan and featuring panelists Cuartababy, Camellia Jahanshahi, and Marlyne Lust. The focus of this event was on exploring how queer nightlife can lead to queer joy. The panelists were all involved in the nightlife scene in Montreal, from the ballroom scene to organizing burlesque shows for queer BIPOC. Cuartababy commented on the shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs on November 19, stating that “[there is] still a need for queer spaces that are safe.” Among the panelists, there was a major focus on creating space for marginalized people to be safe, and beyond that, for them to experience joy. In recounting a party specifically for queer people that was shut down by police, Pan stated that “parties can be very political.” Thus, given that the focus is on nightlife as a way to experience joy, the whole theme of “Culture Shock” for this year remains political, even though it does not directly focus on, as Radu put it, “fighting the good fight.”   

In reflecting on how their involvement with QPIRG and Queer McGill has affected their lives, Coussa and Radu also talked a lot about space, specifically how they’ve learned when to step aside and give space for others and how to create safe spaces for marginalized people. Coussa went on to describe how being a part of these groups, and interacting with the extremely diverse people who work in and around QPIRG, has given them the opportunity to think in ways they might never have before, and Radu agreed. Coussa expressed that “being in that space, [an] anti-oppressive, sustainable space, it changes us as people.”

As a final note, Radu highlighted the library resources available through QPIRG and Queer McGill. She spoke about Queer McGill’s library, the largest anglophone queer library in Quebec, and QPIRG’s  Alternative Library, both of which provide vast resources for McGill students. Additionally, future events led by QPIRG will be announced in the coming months, and while nothing is concrete yet, Coussa stated that they would love to see events that focus on anti-capitalism, a goal embodied in the accessibility of the aforementioned library resource.

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Before getting into the details of her book’s production, Dr. Mattern explained why presenting her book in the “book biography” style made sense to her. She claimed that this insight into the making of a book extends its limits to become an “argument, story, object, [or] commodity.” Additionally, she wanted to approach the talk in a way that credits the outside forces that impacted the writing of A City is Not A Computer. She mentioned her classes, students, and work with the New York libraries, all of which she said “informed the book we are here to talk about.”

One of the reasons Dr. Mattern wrote her book was that she was “tired of big men with ideas publishing on tech-related and urban-oriented subjects without being burdened with the anxiety of influence.” She claimed that there are many men who have written books about the tech industry without actually considering the “thinkers” who came before them. Dr. Mattern spoke on her own desires to break this supposed norm as a woman writing about tech. She was driven by frustration toward these “big men”; she noticed a repeated fault in tech-related books when the authors were “not thinking about citation as an ethical relation,” so she wanted to write her own tech book that would pay attention to the theorists who came before her. Additionally, Mattern was upfront about times when she herself had neglected to include thorough citations. For example, when re-reading her 2018 piece “Maintenence and Care” to find out if she could include it in her book, she noticed that she had neglected some “issues from critical disability studies and the Black feminist area,” so she edited the piece in order to include these ideas. 

In concurrence with her own feminist ideologies and those of the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies faculty at McGill, which organized this event, Dr. Mattern was transparent in revealing her own tendency to people-please as another reason she wrote the book: “I will say this is something even 20 years into [it] and say yes to it because I feel obligated,” meaning that she often says “yes” to requests only because she feels worried about letting people down. She also wrote the book because she was invited to and because she was excited to be able to work with the publication group at Princeton University, as this provided her with access to what she believes to be a well-resourced group of editors. 

Another informing factor of Dr. Mattern’s book was her ironic dislike for book-writing. Departing from the norm, A City is Not a Computer is a collection of essays written by Mattern since 2014 and published primarily by the Places Journal (Places). Dr. Mattern described Places as “embodying certain feminist principles” and “a place that focuses on open free access.” The journal’s focus on the concept of “open access” is something that has been incredibly valuable to her. When collecting the work for her book from her previously written articles, she often grappled with the question of eliminating open access in the new book form. Since much of the work for her book had been published online and was readily available to any person with internet access, it seemed odd to privatize it by organizing it into a book. Thus, she was faced with the question, why write a book at all?

Dr. Mattern claimed that another one of her main motivations for writing her book was that the prestige associated with books greatly surpasses that of online articles. Mattern noted that her essays are called “think pieces” or “blog posts, because they are freely available online.” She went on to expose how rigorously fact-checked and edited her articles have been for Places, even sharing  screenshots of some of the edits she has received on her articles. Mattern provided these examples to demonstrate that her freely available journal articles are edited with diligence, and she claimed that her journal articles should not be considered less academic or prestigious than her books just because they are available to the public.

Dr. Mattern approached her discussion of A City is Not a Computer in a semi-unconventional style, and she was able to provide an extensive amount of context about how events in her life and her own ideologies shaped her book. To conclude her presentation, she spoke about the final chapter in the book, which explores how trees are often used as models for “organizing knowledge.” She stated that “thinking  through trees allows me to combine several of the humanistic, material environment, urbanistic, ecological, and computational models that I’m encouraging us to bring together in the book.” Just as her book does through its unconventional writing method, Mattern’s “book biography” talk brought together different pieces to tell one story.

All quotations were taken from the recorded Zoom call with Dr. Mattern.

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