Study Towards Action is a series, hosted by Fathima Cader and Anupa Mistry, in which we collectively read speeches, essays, and other texts by transnational revolutionaries--from Detroit to Chiapas, from the prison floor to the picket line--to study how movements are built and how we can apply these roadmaps in Toronto. We will read together and out loud from writings, speeches, and other texts, invoking the rigor and vibration of mobilizations from across time, struggle, and borders.
Pre-reading is never required.
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Fathima Cader
Fathima Cader is a skilled lawyer, researcher, and educator on workplace issues, with strong media relations.
She currently serves as Academic Director of York University - Osgoode Hall Law School's clinical program at Parkdale Community Legal Services. She has previously served as Visiting Professor/McMurtry Fellow at Osgoode Hall, Visiting Professor at City Universty of New York, and a sessional instructor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor.
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Anupa Mistry
I’m a writer, producer, and story consultant. I was born in
Manchester, England to parents from the Gujarati labouringdiasporas of colonial East Africa. My home is in Toronto, on the present-day treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. This map shapes how I see the world.
For a decade I worked as a music critic, editor, and occasional talking head for major media platforms and publications. I continue to think and write about how music and art invite us to feel into the crevices of history and social relations. As a filmmaker I specialize in the creative development and production of stories at the intersection of culture and human
ingenuity.
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Zapatista Women’s Opening Address at the First International Gathering of Politics, Art, Sport, and Culture for Women in Struggle
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
Words from Zapatista women at the inauguration of the Second International Meeting of Women in Struggle
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
Poem & Interview: Claudia Jones
Wednesday, July 20, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
Revolutionary Charter for Establishing Peoples’ Power - Resistance Committees in Sudan
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
"Good morning, compañeras who are comandantas, bases of support, autonomous authorities, project coordinators, milicianas, and insurgentas."
Thus begins the Zapatista Women’s Opening Address at the First International Gathering of Politics, Art, Sport, and Culture for Women in Struggle. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, commonly known as the Zapatistas, are a mass movement that has long resisted the Mexican state. Based in Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico, much of the EZLN’s leadership and its rank-and-file members are Indigenous women.
In this speech (translator unknown), held a little over 24 years after the Zapatista uprising, the women of the Zapatistas collectively explain why they joined the movement: “I grew up in the resistance and saw how my compañeras built schools, clinics, collective work projects, and autonomous governments. … I saw that rebellion, resistance, and struggle are also a celebration, even though sometimes there’s no music or dancing, just the sweat and blood of the work, the preparation, and the resistance.”
This session delves into a close reading of this speech and its call for us all to “collectively build another path for life.”
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Words from Zapatista women at the inauguration of the Second International Meeting of Women in Struggle
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
“How did you get organized?” asks Zapatista Comandanta Amada, opening the Second International Gathering of Women Who Struggle in 2019. “What did you do? … At our first gathering, we all committed ourselves to get organized in our respective geographies, to organize against the murders, disappearances, humiliations, and disrespect. But we see that the situation is actually worse now.”
Those questions and those failures guide us.
Last month, we read the opening address from that first gathering of Zapatisa women. This month, we heed the reminder from the second gathering that we must “be organized to defend ourselves, to support ourselves, to protect ourselves, and we have to start now.” How do we organize ourselves in Toronto? And with what goals in mind?
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Poem & Interview: Claudia Jones
Wednesday, July 20, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
“It seems I knew you long before our common ties of conscious choice
Threw under single skies, those like us
Who, fused by our mold
Became their targets as of old”
Early in life, the Communist organizer, editor, and cultural worker Claudia Jones was aware of the contradictions. Born under British colonialism in Trinidad, Jones lived much of her life as an immigrant—without official status—in the United States, before being deported to England for her political activities. It was there that she founded the long-running, much-beloved Notting Hill Carnival.
Much of Jones' writing functions as an archive of American imperialism in the mid-20th century, cohering around a strong internationalist and anti-imperialist feminist perspective that ties together the fate of people from Ethiopia to the West Indies, from Korea to Jim Crow-era USA.
On the cusp of Emancipation Day on August 1, ahead of carnival celebrations in the imperial core—including Toronto—and in the midst of racist new anti-immigration laws in both Canada (such as Bill C-2) and the US, we ground ourselves in Jones’s political life, poetry, and adage: "A people's art is the genesis of their freedom.”
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Revolutionary Charter for Establishing Peoples’ Power - Resistance Committees in Sudan
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
6:30pm - 9:00pm EST
“Achieving social justice will necessitate dismantling the model of the modern national state,” declares the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power. “If this is not clearly set as an objective, social justice may be reduced to an individual rather than a societal issue.”
The resistance committees in Sudan, who had already brought down one dictatorship in 2019, issued the Charter in January 2023.
Weeks later, war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and its offshoot the Rapid Support Forces. Neither armed forms represent the people, but instead the capitalist strategies of a range of nation states, from the UAE to Egypt, and beyond.
Now entering its third year, the death toll from the war has been devastating.This is the world’s largest displacement crisis today, impacting over 14 million people. Despite its rich agricultural land, extraction by the SAF, RSF, and international actors has caused a famine more devastating than any seen in over a generation in Sudan.
Join us as we learn how resistance committees have set up neighbourhood-based emergency response rooms that direct war-relief efforts across Sudan. This work includes distributing food and medicine, coordinating burials, assisting evacuations, and more. Despite abandonment by the international aid community and the local state, the steadfastness and successes of resistance committees remind us that elite bodies like the state, the military, and international organizations are incapable of creating real change—and are in fact aligned against it. True power is instead manifested through organized mass movements of regular people.
So what can we do in Toronto to support or build similar mass movements?