Featured Faculty and Student Publications

At the Intersection of Equity and Innovation: Trans Inclusion in the City of Vancouver

Author:

Tiffany Muller Myrdahl

Journal:

Urban Planning, Vol 8, No 2 (2023): Queer(ing) Urban Planning and Municipal Governance

Description:

In 2016, the Vancouver City Council passed the Supporting Trans* Equality and an Inclusive Vancouver policy, a motion that prompted the development of a strategy aimed at ensuring the safety and accessibility of municipal programs, services, and physical spaces for Two-Spirit, trans, and gender-diverse (TGD2S) users, including residents, City staff, and visitors. Binary gender is a taken-for-granted assumption of most urban forms and functions: It is encoded in all municipal data collection forms, building codes, signage, and communication strategies. At its root, then, addressing trans inclusion requires the municipal government to attend to and redesign the gendered models of service, programs, and space upon which the city is built. This article tells the story of the Supporting Trans* Equality and an Inclusive Vancouver policy and is driven by two goals. First, I document this policy as a contribution to the urban policy and planning literature, where attention to gender diversity is due. Second, using the trans inclusion strategy, I show how a municipal equity policy aimed at addressing the safety and inclusion of TGD2S people can have significant impacts beyond its immediate scope. To develop this idea, I consider how equity-driven innovation can substantially reshape institutional practices.

Citation:

Muller Myrdahl, T. (2023). At the Intersection of Equity and Innovation: Trans Inclusion in the City of Vancouver. Urban Planning, 8(2), 223-234. doi:https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i2.6461

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

Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community: The Impact of Homophobia and Transphobia

Editors:

Claire Robson, Jen Marchbank, Gloria Gutman, Makaela Prentice (eds)

Publisher:

Springer, New York, 2023

Description:

This book describes and analyzes the lived experience of elder abuse from the queer community. It discusses the experiences by transwomen, gay men and lesbians of financial abuse, physical and sexual abuse, homophobic abuse, and neglect within partner relationships, residential care, in home care, and religious organizations. Queer and trans elders have been described as ‘The Silent Generation’, since they have lived through times when their sexual and gender identities were criminalized and pathologized. The book shows that they are far more at risk to suffer abuse and neglect by those they should be able to trust, since they are more likely to have encountered all key risk factors, such as isolation, previous abuse and trauma, and mistrust of the health care system. Their vulnerability has been overlooked and this book addresses that gap. As such, this book provides a great resource to anyone working with elders, including medical professionals, care providers, police, counsellors, and policy makers.

Citation:

Claire Robson, Jen Marchbank, Gloria Gutman, Makaela Prentice (eds), 2023, Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community: The Impact of Homophobia and Transphobia, Springer, New York, ISBN 978-3-031-33316-3

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)

Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty In Rural India

Author:

Vaibhav Saria

Publisher: 

Fordham University Press, New York, 2021

Description:

Winner, 2023 Bernard S. Cohn Prize, Association for Asian Studies
Winner, 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences
Winner, 2021 Ruth Benedict Prize, Association for Queer Anthropology

Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination―in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic.

Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche.

Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance, irresponsibility, or illiteracy but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning beyond the secular horizons of public health or queer theory.

Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday―laughter, flirting, teasing―to impossible longings, kinship, and economies of property and substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.

Citation:

2021, Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India. New York: Fordham University Press.

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.

Love, Sex, and Marriage (Chapter)

Authors:

Reema Faris

Workbook: 

Gender in Canada: A Companion Workbook, Rebecca Yoshizawa (Ed.)

Publisher: 

Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 2023

Description:

This workbook is designed for first or second-year sociology of gender or gender studies courses, focusing on the Canadian context. It is divided into five topics - Theory and Concepts, Institutions, Work, Family and Intimate Relationships, and Bodies and Health. This workbook does not replace a textbook, instructor teachings through lectures, class discussion, class assignments, or other standard undergraduate course materials. Instead, this is an activity book: a course companion, working alongside and with those course materials. It is designed to build competency, capacity, and confidence with course materials, concepts, and arguments. It does this by embracing the concepts of embodied learning, iterative scaffolding, and reflexive insight. "Embodied" means doing things with your body and not just your mind; "scaffolding" means breaking things down into constituent parts that can be gathered together to build something bigger; and "reflexive" means thinking about oneself in relation to broad concepts and contexts around us. The workbook presents four types of content. (1) Each chapter has one or two pages of written content deemed "Insights to Think About," which are summative guides to help students grab onto big ideas. (2) The chapters also have "Words to Try," encouraging a usable lexicon. (3) Chapters have thoughtfully designed "Activities." The activities help students to get ideas down, give those ideas meaning and order, and prepare students to do more engaged work in course conversations and higher-stakes assignments. (4) Finally, each section ends with "My Insights On," where students can record their "big picture" ideas and things they want to explore more in their course discussions and other assignments.

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

Strategic, Conflicted, and Interpellated: Hong Kong and Chinese Queer Women’s Use of Identity Labels on Lesbian Dating Apps

Authors:

Carman K. M. Fung

Journal: 

International Journal of Communication, Volume 17 (Special Section on Queer Cultures in Digital Asia), 2023

Description:

Dating apps have become an indispensable part of lesbian lives in China and Hong Kong. These platforms give queer women the choice to use identity labels to describe their gender presentations and dating preferences. For example, T andTB signify masculine presentation; P and TBG signify femininity and attraction to T and TB; H describes in-between-ness; pure refers to feminine women who are exclusively attracted to other feminine women; and no label indicates a rejection of all labels. Drawing from seven in-depth interviews and participant observations, this article illustrates how these women creatively interact with the apps’ affordance to strategically self-present. It demonstrates that these women feel ambivalent about using labels, which they see as both effective and restrictive, and argues that their app experiences can directly shape their own self-identity. Finally, this case study provides important insights into the challenges identity categories pose for dating app users of nonnormative sexuality and gender, which might be relevant to other cultural contexts.

Citation:

2023. “Strategic, Conflicted, and Interpellated: Hong Kong and Chinese Queer Women’s Use of Identity Labels on Lesbian Dating Apps,” International Journal of Communication, 17 (Special Section on Queer Cultures in Digital Asia), 2455-2462. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19798

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.