Featured Faculty and Student Publications

Basically Queer: An intergenerational introduction to LGBTQA2S+ lives

Editors:

Claire Robson, Kelsey Blair, Jen Marchbank (eds)

Publisher:

Peter Lang Publishers, New York, 2017

Description:

Around 2014 Claire and Jen decided to get their two LGBTQ2SIA+ activist groups together. Claire was with QUIRKe – queer imaging and riting collective for elders and Jen co-facilitates Youth 4 A Change with her wife Sylvie Traphan (GSWS MA alumni). What began as a writing workshop became Call and Response where the two groups sent each other writing prompts. This led to the youth travelling to Vancouver to workshop these writings with the QUIRKes. That developed into a spoken word performance called ‘Call and Response’ which played in Surrey, Vancouver and opened New Westminster Pride week in 2016. Then the plotting began – Claire (GSWS adjunct), Kelsey (then English PhD candidate) and Jen brought together writings of lived experience; no nonsense explanations; and engaging stories to answer the question, what is it like to be queer? And answering it in a much needed intergenerational conversation.

Citation:

Claire Robson, Kelsey Blair, Jen Marchbank (eds), 2017, Basically Queer: An intergenerational introduction to LGBTQA2S+ lives, Peter Lang Publishers, New York, ISBN 978-1-43331-3345-9

Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave

Editors:

Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney

Publisher: 

UBC Press, Vancouver, 2022

Description:

From beauty pageant protests to firebombings of pornographic video stores, emotions are a powerful but often unexamined force underlying feminist activism. Feeling Feminism examines the ways in which anger, rage, you, and hopefulness shaped and nourished second-wave feminist theorizing and action across Canada. Drawing on affect theory to convey the passion, sense of possibility, and collective political commitment that has characterized feminism, contributors reveal its full impact on contemporary Canada and the highlight the contested, sometimes exclusionary nature of the movement itself. The insights in this collection of 12 original research articles show the power of emotions, desires, and actions to transform the world.

Citation:

Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022)

Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing

Author:

A.J. Withers

Publisher:

Fernwood Publishing, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2021

Description:

AJ Withers draws on their own experiences as an organizer, extensive interviews with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) activists and Toronto bureaucrats, and freedom of information requests to provide a detailed account of the work of OCAP. This book shows that poor people’s organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment.

Fight to Win tells the stories of four key OCAP homelessness campaigns: stopping the criminalization of homeless people in a public park; the fight for poor people’s access to the Housing Shelter Fund; a campaign to improve the emergency shelter system and the City’s overarching, but inadequate, Housing First policy; and the attempt by the City of Toronto to drive homeless people from encampments during the COVID pandemic.

This book shows how power works at the municipal level, including the use of a multitude of demobilization tactics, devaluing poor people as sources of knowledge about their own lives, and gaslighting poor people and anti-poverty activists. AJ Withers also details OCAP’s dual activist strategy — direct-action casework coupled with mass mobilization — for both immediate need and long-term change. These campaigns demonstrate the validity of OCAP’s longstanding critiques of dominant homelessness policies and practices. Each campaign was fully or partially successful: these victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use of, and the threat of, direct disruptive action tactics.

Citation

Withers, A.J. (2021). Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing. Fernwood Publishing

A Great Revolutionary Wave: Women and the Vote in British Columbia

Author:

Lara Campbell

Publisher: 

UBC Press, Vancouver, 2020

Description:

Suffrage in British Columbia – and elsewhere in Canada – is best understood as a continuum rather than a clearly defined right “won” at one specific time. Although white settler women achieved the vote in 1917, after forty long years of activism, it would take another thirty years before the provincial government would remove race-based restrictions on voting rights.

British Columbia is often overlooked in the national story of women’s struggle for political equality. A Great Revolutionary Wave challenges that omission and the historical portrayal of suffragists as conservative, traditional, and polite. Lara Campbell follows the propaganda campaigns undertaken by suffrage organizations and traces the role of working-class women in the fight for political equality. She demonstrates the intimate connections between provincial and British suffragists and examines how racial exclusion and Indigenous dispossession shaped arguments and tactics for enfranchisement.

A Great Revolutionary Wave rethinks the complex legacy of suffrage by considering both the successes and limitations of women’s historical fight for political equality. That historical legacy remains relevant today as Canadians continue to grapple with the meaning of justice, inclusion, and equality.

Citation:

Lara Campbell, A Great Revolutionary Wave: Women and the Vote in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020)

Knowledge Synthesis – Survivors of IPV and Likelihood of Being Re-Victimised

Authors:

Ambreen Dandiwall (Surrey Women’s Centre); Oreofeoluwa Adeyonu; Megan Bobetsis; Ranjani Jagannath; Spencer Lee; and Yasmin Vejs Simsek (all SFU MA students in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies).

Publisher: 

Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships (NEVR), Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, BC, 2021

Description:

In September 2021 NEVR, on behalf of the Surrey Women’s Centre, commissioned 5 masters students in Professor Jen Marchbank’s class GSWS 824 Gender, Violence and Resistance at Simon Fraser University.

Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution

Authors:

Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye; illustrated by Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer

Publisher: 

University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, 2017

Description:

As young girls in Cairo, Anna and Layla strike up an unlikely friendship that crosses class, cultural, and religious divides. Years later, Anna learns that she may carry the hereditary cancer gene responsible for her mother's death. Meanwhile, Layla's family is faced with a difficult decision about kidney transplantation. Their friendship is put to the test when these medical crises reveal stark differences in their perspectives...until revolutionary unrest in Egypt changes their lives forever.

The first book in a new series, Lissa brings anthropological research to life in comic form, combining scholarly insights and accessible, visually-rich storytelling to foster greater understanding of global politics, inequalities, and solidarity.

Making Sense of a Global Pandemic: Relationship Violence & Working Together Towards a Violence Free Society

Authors:

B. Gurm, G. Salgado, J. Marchbank, & S. D. Early

Publisher: 

Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, BC, 2020

Description:

In this 25-chapter free e-book Jen wrote the chapter on LGBTQ+ interpersonal violence and contributed to eight others on topics from elder abuse to men as victims amongst others. The book grew from the work and observations from the authors' involvement in the Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships (NEVR). It is a living book that not only provides details of the latest research but also campaigns and resources to challenge interpersonal violence.  Its target is academics, policy makers and front line practitioners.

Citation:

Gurm, B., Salgado, G., Marchbank, J., & Early, S. D. (2020). Making Sense of a Global Pandemic: Relationship Violence & Working Together Towards a Violence Free Society. Kwantlen Polytechnic University: Surrey, BC. Ebook ISBN 978-1-989864-14-2 or Print ISBN 978-1-989864-13-5. https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/nevr/

Our city of colours: queer/Asian publics in transpacific Vancouver

Author:

Helen Hok-Sze Leung

Journal: 

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 18:4, 2017

Description:

In 2014, the Vancouver School Board hosted a series of public consultations on proposed revisions to its policy on “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identities,” a move that paved the way for future initiatives around SOGI in subsequent years. The highly visible presence of parents from Chinese-speaking communities during these consultations presented a conundrum for LGBTQ activists and advocates. The parents spoke vehemently against the policy updates and demanded recognition as an ethnic minority defending their cultural right. How to address homophobia and transphobia in migrant communities without inviting racist stereotyping?  How to defend one minority’s assertion of rights against that of another? In this piece, I offer a new approach for engaging these questions.  I first analyse the rights-seeking discourse used by both the parents and LGBTQ activists. I then trace the influence of Christian theology on Asian migrant communities in Vancouver and uncover rich veins of Queer Asian cultural activism in the city’s LGBTQ history. I conclude by exploring a surprisingly commensurable language of love from these seemingly irreconcilable communities that may provide a starting point for mutual engagement.  In our current climate of heightened polarisation, I hope the article will facilitate reconciliation rather than remonstrance and inspire conversation rather than conflict.

Article Citation:

Helen Hok-Sze Leung (2017) Our city of colours: queer/Asian publics in transpacific Vancouver, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 18:4, 482-497, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2017.1387091

Running

Authors:

Lindsey A. Freeman

Publisher:

Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2023

Description:

In Running, former NCAA Division I track athlete Lindsey A. Freeman presents the feminist and queer handbook of running that she always wanted but could never find. For Freeman, running is full of joy, desire, and indulgence in the pleasure and weirdness of having a body. It allows for a space of freedom—to move and be moved. Through tender storytelling of a lifetime wearing running shoes, Freeman considers injury and recovery, what it means to run as a visibly queer person, and how the release found in running comes from a desire to touch something that cannot be accessed when still. Running invites us to run through life, legging it out the best we can with heart and style.

Simulated patients and their reality: An inquiry into theory and method

Authors:

Veena Das, Benjamin Daniels, Ada Kwan, Vaibhav Saria, Ranendra Das, Madhukar Pai, Jishnu Das

Journal: 

Social Science & Medicine, Volume 300, 2022

Description:

This article explains and thinks through the methodology that our research team innovated to address the issue of missed diagnosis. The larger question the article asks what the relationship, communication, or conversation is between the doctor and the patient in the clinic. What can we change to improve the quality of healthcare services. These questions becomes sharper and more pertinent when we look at the ongoing TB epidemic in India that is killing thousands even though expertise, medications, and diagnostics are available. What is the information and knowledge that is being exchanged in the clinic that prevents patients from being diagnosed and cured. 

Citation:

Social Science & Medicine, Volume 300, 2022, 114571, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114571

A Violent History of Benevolence

Authors:

Chris Chapman, A.J. Withers

Publisher: 

University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, 2019

Description:

A Violent History of Benevolence traces how normative histories of liberalism, progress, and social work enact and obscure systemic violences. Chris Chapman and A.J. Withers explore how normative social work history is structured in such a way that contemporary social workers can know many details about social work’s violences, without ever imagining that they may also be complicit in these violences. Framings of social work history actively create present-day political and ethical irresponsibility, even among those who imagine themselves to be anti-oppressive, liberal, or radical.

The authors document many histories usually left out of social work discourse, including communities of Black social workers (who, among other things, never removed children from their homes involuntarily), the role of early social workers in advancing eugenics and mass confinement, and the resonant emergence of colonial education, psychiatry, and the penitentiary in the same decade. Ultimately, A Violent History of Benevolence aims to invite contemporary social workers and others to reflect on the complex nature of contemporary social work, and specifically on the present-day structural violences that social work enacts in the name of benevolence.

Citation:

Chapman, C. & A.J. Withers. (2019). A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working. University of Toronto Press.