Flip the Switch

This has been a year of changes at OSI, quite apart from the widespread impact of the pandemic on our staff and communities. Our team doubled in size, allowing us to expand our programming, extend our reach beyond the university, deepen our scholarly approach and re-imagine our online presence.

2020 brought us moments of darkness and light, and we wanted to find a way to capture and share some of what has been a genuinely exceptional year. 

A formal annual report did not seem like the right medium to encapsulate this year. And so, we chose to create a collaborative Zine. We invited internal staff and community members whom we’ve been lucky enough to work with to submit reflections on their work with the Office. Their contributions shed important new light on how this exceptional year brought us new partnerships, new projects, and, as importantly, new ways of working!

The theme and title of this Zine is Flip the Switch. We wanted to shine a light on and capture some of the moments when situations of uncertainty at OSI led to times of resilience—allowing us to flip the switch on previous ways of doing things and create space for new conversations.

In keeping with this unconventional year, we consciously chose not to create a formal report. This Zine has no table of contents or page numbers. Like this year, we know that things don’t often happen in an orderly fashion. We invite you to interact with the content in any order you like. The document is also interactive, providing hyperlinks to find additional information about the initiatives linked to each submission.