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Historical documents are provided for research and educational purposes, as well as for private study, under the ‘fair dealings’ provisions of Canadian copyright law.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.

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:

• Connexions Calendar
  Canadian + selected international events. Event listings from past years are archived.


• Connexions Directory
  Associations and grassroots groups working for social justice: selective listing of Canadian and international groups and websites. A-Z Index – Subject Index.


• Connexipedia
  Social justice encyclopedia. Persons, events, movements, and concepts related to activism, radicalism, resistance, solidarity, and social justice. A-Z Index – Subject Index.


• Connexions Library
  Articles, books, documents, periodicals, films, and other resources on a wide range of issues. Subject, Title, Author, Date, Format, and other indexes and search features, including Gateways and Focus Pages.

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

• Connexions Search [ Learn More ]
  Searches names, titles, and topics related to your query.
[ Close ]
Connexions Search simultaneously performs two kinds of searches.

1) It searches the Connexions Library, Connexions Directory, Sources Directory, and Sources Library for records whose key elements – titles, subtitles, authors, organization names, descriptions, or assigned subject headings – contain your search term(s).

2) It searches the Connexions Subject Index to find subject headings which contain, or are related to, your search term. The intelligent search feature brings up topics related to your term even though they may not actually contain the term. For example, a search for "global warming" will also suggest topics such as "climate change", "climate & carbon dioxide", "greenhouse effect", "industrial emissions", "Kyoto Protocol", etc.
Results are presented in two columns.

The right-hand column contains topics related to your search terms. Click on a topic to see resources related to it.

The left-hand column presents titles or names of actual resources, e.g. articles, books, groups. Click on a title to view the bibliographic record for the resource, or organization profile for a group or website. If the actual resource is available online, clicking the link in the bibliographic record takes you there. However, many of the records in the Connexions Library are for books and other materials which are not available in electronic form: you'll need to find them in a bricks-and-mortar library.
Search results for the different parts of the library and directory are currently presented separately, below each other. Resources (books, articles, films, etc) are first; followed by groups; followed by experts and resources found in www.sources.com, the resource portal for journalists.
NOTE that the Connexions Search in NOT a full-text search. We use a system of pre-coordinated subject headings because this makes for more relevant results than a full-text Google-style search.
If you would like to do a full-text search on the Connexions site, we recommend using a search engine such as Ixquick and restricting your search to the domain www.connexions.org (Advanced Settings: “at this domain name”).




• Subject Indexes
  Controlled-vocabulary index of more than 12,000 cross-referenced topics to help you find resources in the Connexions Library, Connexions Directory, and Connexipedia.


• Title Indexes
  Titles + brief descriptions of resources in the Connexions Library and Connexipedia.


• Organization Name Index
  Names of organizations and websites in alphabetical order in the Connexions Directory.


• Author Index
  All Authors with titles & brief descriptions of their articles & books. Plus a Recommended Authors page.


• Chronological Index
  Publications grouped by decade they were published in.


• Format Indexes
  Resources listed by format: Books, Articles, Periodicals, Websites, Film & Videos, Audio, etc.


• Organizations
  Alphabetical by Name & by Issues.


• Dewey Index
  Books ordered by Dewey Decimal classification.


• Library of Congress
  Books ordered by Library of Congress classification.


• Languages Index
• French, Spanish and German Subject Indexes
  Some (but not all) of the Connexions Library subject index has been translated. (Translators always needed!)


• Sources
  Media profiles of organizations and spokespersons. A resource for the media and for groups that want to reach the media with their message.

• Alternative media list
  Getting the news – and getting behind the news


• Spotlight
  Top & recommended resources in Connexions Library


• Manifestos – Programs – Visions
  Selected political programs, vision statements and manifestos.


• Quotations
  A selection of quotations about social change, resistance, politics, and a wide range of other topics.


• Seeds of Fire
  Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.


• Organizing for Social Change
  Selected resources for organizers and activists.


• Getting Publicity & Media Coverage
  Resources to help your organization get more and better media coverage and raise awareness of your issues.


• Grassroots media relations
  Media relations strategies for activist groups

• Encyclopedia article about Connexions in Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Farsi, Filipino, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
• Interview with Connexions Co-ordinator Ulli Diemer in 2012,
  and in 1990 in English, French, German, Spanish and Arabic
• Five Decades of Connexions
• History of Connexions
• The Case for Grassroots Archives
• Collective Memory, Archives, and the Connexions project: An interview
• Is that an archive in your basement... or are you just hoarding?
• Activist Archiving in Toronto
• Other Voices December 17, 2017: Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia
• Secure a future for the past: In search of a new home for the Connexions Archive project
• Volunteer Opportunities
• Donate

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.

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.