The 20 Days for 20 Years campaign has created a series of ten brochures to be released in a limited print edition in September and October. They will be available for pick-up in the Jackman Humanities Building, Room 320, and in select U of T courses on specific dates announced on the PATH website.
Brochures, pamphlets, and zines have long been shared to spread information and encourage collective action. From Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and nineteenth-century abolitionist pamphlets to the leaflets of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the White Rose student resistance, short printed publications have allowed movements to bypass official channels, put evidence and arguments directly into people’s hands, and create durable records that can be read, discussed, shared, and passed along. As the Museum of Protest observes, pamphlets and brochures occupy a useful space between the fleeting message of a leaflet and the sustained argument of a book: they are portable and accessible while still allowing an issue to be developed with evidence, history, stories, and argument.
Our ten brochures deliberately draw on this tradition. Rather than compressing twenty years of BPMH’s history, and the many intellectual, educational, institutional, and governance questions surrounding its future, into a single statement (although we are also soon releasing a book on the BPMH history that covers these issues in detail), each brochure takes up one part of the case, inviting readers to encounter the campaign cumulatively.
The ten Task Force brochures form an argument and an archive that will be shared across classrooms, meetings, events, and digital networks, creating opportunities for conversation while documenting why this program matters and why decisions about its future deserve public attention. Today, in an age of disappearing posts, over-crowded inboxes, and institutional communications designed to be forgotten, the modest brochure retains a radical virtue, asking to be read, collected, and shared in person.