About Connexions

Connexions exists to connect people working for social justice with information, resources, groups, and other people. Connexions.org features a library of thousands of articles, books, documents, and periodicals: current materials as well as historical documents. You will find information about the world as it is now – and the visions, struggles, and movements of people working to change it.

Connexions.org also offers an event calendar, a directory of social justice groups and websites, a radical history feature called Seeds of Fire, a collection of thought-provoking quotations, and Connexipedia, an alternative encyclopedia covering the history of struggles for justice. A quick sketch of Connexions’ mandate is at the bottom of this page. You can read a description of the Connexions project, and a brief history.

Your donations are extremely welcome and appreciated.

If you’d like to link to or promote Connexions, you can download banners here and here.

The Connexions Archive is a sister project dedicated to people’s history: keeping alive the rich history of grassroots movements for social justce. Its goal is to preserve and learn from the memories, experiences, strategies, and vision of those who have worked for justice over the years. The Connexions Archive is a working archive holding a large number of materials from grassroots groups spanning several decades of activism. A team of volunteers and interns works on scanning, abstracting, indexing, translating and digitizing these materials; more volunteers are always needed.

The Connexions Archive is located on the University of Toronto campus. Archive hours are limited; if you wish to visit, please contact us via the information on our contact form.

The content of the Connexions website is provided free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
Historical documents are provided for research and educational purposes, as well as for private study, under the ‘fair dealings’ provisions of Canadian copyright law.

Materials created by Connexions or its members are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 CA) license.

The following terms apply:

You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Note that the license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.


How to get the most out of this website

Connexions is many things: above all, it is an online library featuring information about social justice. It offers thousands of online documents, plus information about books you can find in public libraries (or buy), alternative periodicals and websites, and films and videos you can watch online, or borrow from the library, or rent. And there is more, much more,

You can find lots of stuff quickly on Connexions.org, but Connexions is especially designed for people who want to explore a subject in detail. We want to help you acquire knowledge and understanding, not just facts. We believe that really understanding a topic means research: reading multiple sources, current as well as historical, from a number of different perspectives. Connexions specializes in offering resources and points of view that are ‘alternative’ to, and to the left of, the mainstream, At the same time, we try to feature a diversity of left and alternative points of view, including views that members of the Connexions team may not personally agree with, rather than a single ‘correct’ interpretation. We believe that criticism and debate are essential. We support freedom of speech and critical analysis; we oppose suppression and censorship.

To fully benefit from the wealth of information on the site, you’ll need to use some of the research tools, including the Search feature, the browseable Subject Index, the Title, Author, Chronological and Format indexes.

Connexions aims to help you find what you are looking for – but also, and just as importantly, to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. (Serendipity: n. “The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident; happening upon things information, etc., by chance.”) We try to encourage fruitful creative research by providing a web of links within and between documents on the website, as well as by offering multiple paths to further exploration and discovery in the menus that appear across the top and down the left-hand side of almost every page on the website.

You’ll find more information about what is in Connexions and how to find things on the site below. We welcome your feedback about your experiences on the site and how we could improve it.


The Connexions.org website includes these main features:


Search and Find

Connexions features multiple tools to help you find what you’re looking for:


Gateways and Focus Pages

Popular Pages in the Subject Index Other Languages Social Media      History

Further reading
Mandate

Connexions exists to support individuals and groups working for freedom and social justice. We work to maintain and make available a record of the theory and practice of people struggling against oppression and for social change. We believe that the more we know about the struggles, victories, and defeats of the past, and about those who took part in them, the better we will be to bring a new world into being.

Connexions maintains a physical archive of books and documents (The Connexions Archive), and is engaged in an ongoing project to build and expand an indexed digital archive of documents. We try to feature a wide variety of resources reflecting a diversity of viewpoints and approaches to social change within our overall mandate of support for democracy, civil liberties, freedom of expression, universal human rights, secularism, equality, economic justice, environmental responsibility, and the creation and preservation of community.

We are internationalist in our orientation, but as a Canadian-based project we feature an especially extensive collection of Canadian documents and profiles of Canadian activist organizations.


Statement of Values

We believe .....

  1. In the value of preserving the history of grassroots movements for social justice and making it accessible to new generations.
  2. In the importance of keeping alive the memories, experiences, strategies, successes, failures, and visions of those who have worked for social justice over the years so future generations can learn from them and be inspired by them.
  3. In the tradition of ‘history from below’ –people's history – working to keep alive memories of resistance in the face of a political culture that insists there are no alternatives to the way things are, and that ‘resistance is futile’.
  4. In the importance of diversity and pluralism, of recording and making available a wide range of approaches to social change and social justice. We aim, as best we can, to feature resources reflecting a variety of viewpoints and alternative approaches to social justice.
  5. In the value of knowing our history, of knowing that people have been working at the grassroots for a better world for many decades and of learning about the problems they faced and how they tried to deal with them.
  6. In the value of passing on the experience and knowledge of elders, and of people who have passed on, to the activists of today and tomorrow. These are threads of wisdom and experience that can be woven into the tapestries of our movements for change.
  7. In the importance of sharing information as well as preserving it. Our goal is to make the contents of the archive available as widely as possible, in a variety of formats and languages.
  8. In connecting people in different places. For people to act locally and think globally, it helps to know what people in other places are facing and how they are trying to bring about change.
  9. In the values of democracy, civil liberties, freedom of speech, universal human rights, secularism, equality, economic justice, ecology, and the creation and preservation of community, which we seek to support through the Connexions Archive.

A note on the collection

The Connexions project has been collecting and sharing information and resources since 1975. The Connexions Archive, currently located on the University of Toronto campus, contains more than 100,000 periodicals, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, buttons and ephemera of various kinds. Much of the collection, but not all, has been catalogued and indexed; a smaller proportion has been digitized. The Connexions website holds more than 325,000 files, some of which are digital versions of physical documents in the Connexions Archive, but many of which are digital-only.

Connexions’ mandate is to inform and encourage individuals and groups working for freedom and social justice. We believe that this requires including a wide diversity of viewpoints, including views that members of the Connexions team do not personally agree with. We believe that in order to present alternative views effectively, we must understand and engage with ideas we are criticizing. We believe that criticism and debate are essential. We support freedom of speech and critical analysis; we oppose suppression and censorship.



Contact: Visit the Contact page.