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Archive for May, 2010

Congress 2010 begins!

Friday, May 28th, 2010

The 79th Congress of the Humanities is underway at Concordia University in Montreal. Over the next 8 days, we look forward to welcoming over 9000 delegates from across Canada and around the world.

Be sure to visit our Experience Congress website to find out up-to-the-minute details about what’s happening downtown Montreal at this exciting event. Here you’ll find video and podcasts of recent lectures, in-depth blog posts, a calendar of all activities, and much more. Visit the site everyday for new and exciting content.

If you’re on Twitter, join the conversation with #congress10. If you’re in Montreal, stop by the Federation booth in the lobby of the EV Building – we’d be glad to say hello and chat about the week’s events!

Many thanks to the Concordia University community for your dedication and hard work around making this a memorable Congress.

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Being Fair: ‘We must be the change we want to see in the world’

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Valerie Mason-John, Independent Scholar
Guest Contributor

What is fair and just in the world that we live in today? The conflict that flourishes in this world, within each of us, in our families, at work and out there in the world is proof enough that people do not feel they live in a world that treats them impartially.

Who am I to talk on this subject when you could look at my life and count the privileges I have had on more than one hand? Winner of several awards, including an honorary doctorate for the research and writing that I have contributed to the African and Asian diasporas, a home owner, and someone who has lived and worked in three different continents and visited numerous places in the world.

My world became a kinder place when I stopped being a victim; when I moved from being a victim of my race, gender and sexuality, and became a survivor and then finally someone who could live comfortably in my skin and in the world that I had created for myself.

Research I conducted in India 2006 and now published as a nonfiction book in 2008, Broken Voices: ‘Untouchable’ Women speak out, changed my life forever. I came back from living seven months in India among the Dalit community, some of the poorest people in that country. Poor because a caste system has rendered them unfit to be included in the caste system; considered polluted, not fit enough to drink water from the same fountain as anyone else from a higher caste, and born to do literally the shit work. Still today this attitude prevails.

Being born a woman and a Dalit, perhaps is considered the worst curse, as the Manusmirti, one of the sacred Hindu texts states that women are born to serve their fathers, their, husbands and their sons.

After listening to story after story of women killed in dowry burnings, women beaten by drunk husbands, women forced into marriages with men 20 or more years their senior, women trafficked, women living on the streets as beggars, women living in slums I came back to the United Kingdom with less complaint. I realised that my life was pretty okay. Not to say I hadn’t suffered any oppression, but I knew if I had lived my life in my country of origin on the Africa continent, or in India, my life may have been very different.

How fair is that?

(more…)

Tags: Équité et LGBT, Equity and LGBT, Interculturalism and pluralism, L'interculturalisme et le pluralisme
Posted in Equity Matters, questions d'équité | No Comments »

Quebec and English-Canadian Feminists 40 Years after the Bird Commission

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Jill McCalla Vickers, Carleton University
Guest Contributor

This blog post is part of the Federation Equity Portfolio’s ‘Equality Then and Now’ series, marking 40 years since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. Look for more on this topic in upcoming posts and at Congress 2010.

I recently read in the Globe and Mail that Quebec’s MNAs had unanimously passed the following resolution, “that [Quebec’s] National Assembly reaffirms the right of women to free choice and to free and accessible abortion services, and asks the Prime Minister … to put an end to the current ambiguity on this issue.” Premier Charest explained, “the consensus [of]… the National Assembly reflects the consensus…in Quebec society” that “abortion is an inalienable right.”

Given the puzzled and sometimes irate e-mails about the reported event, I thought exploring why such support exists in Quebec would be useful to English-speaking Canadians as we contemplate this anniversary of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women – called the Bird Commission after its chair, journalist Florence Bird.

In recent decades, most English-Canadian feminists ignore women’s politics in Quebec, and have little sense of its historical importance in getting the Bird commission, and in getting abortion decriminalized, first in Quebec in the 1970s and a decade later across the rest of Canada.

Watch Bird discuss Quebec women’s demand for change.

Indeed a feminist colleague was rather irate about Premier Charest’s statement. My colleague insisted that “everyone knows Quebec women owe their abortion rights to the Supreme Court, and that the Quebec nationalists wanted them to go on having dozens of babies.” After exploding about this ignorance of the struggle for reproductive rights in Canada, I realized many women in English-Canada may share her false conceptions and that few know about the leading role Quebec feminists played in the decriminalization of abortion. Moreover, few feminists in English-Canada today understand how important it has been to our rights that Quebec governments have steadfastly defended women’s rights to bodily integrity as the basis of their citizenship.

So I decided the best contribution that I could make to this blog would be to explain the role federalism and Quebec feminists’ alliance with nationalism have played in the relative success of feminist activism in Canada generally. Without the strength of the movement in Quebec and the consensus of support for women’s rights, I believe English-Canadian women would be fighting to keep their rights from conservative erosion as has happened in the United States. (more…)

Tags: Commission royale d'enquête sur la situation de la femme au Canada, Interculturalism and pluralism, L'interculturalisme et le pluralisme, Royal Commission on the Status of Women
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Beyond Diversity Smokescreens: On the small screen and behind the scenes

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Rita Shelton Deverell, Mount St. Vincent University
Guest Contributor

In my 36 years in Canadian broadcasting, I’ve championed meaningful inclusion of the four designated groups. It goes with my professional territory as a black woman that a goal in life is engendering opportunities for women, persons with disabilities, Aboriginal Peoples, and visible minority creators.

Recently I have delivered numerous lectures on ‘Diversity in Media’ where I asked: Who will inherit the airwaves? The key points from these lectures are included below.

First, an ancient story about racial discrimination: Back in 1974, the position of host was available at the CBC newsmagazine ‘Take 30.’ I am told by an executive producer, “Some people at CBC think you’d do a really good job, but the Canadian people aren’t ready to have a black host of a network show.”

All that season I had been a substitute host while Adrienne Clarkson was on loan to ‘Primetime’ (renamed ‘The Fifth Estate’), and had been the researcher/interviewer on a 26 part ‘Take 30’ mini-series on the Rights of Children.

Later conversations with a retired feminist, Anglo-Saxon Dodi Robb, who had been CBC’s head of daytime information programming and had hired Adrienne Clarkson as ‘Take 30’ host, demonstrated that who you see in front of the camera depends on who is in the executive chair.

Fast-forward to the era of the mid-1980s to the end of the millennium, since both you and I would like to say that 1974 was the Dark Ages.

Let’s acknowledge how much better things got. (more…)

Pay Equity, Canadian Workers and the Feminist Movement

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Judy Fudge, University of Victoria
Guest Contributor

The establishment of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW), which issued its path-breaking report 40 years ago, marked the second wave of the women’s movement in Canada. It also provided an occasion for a public debate about the status and role of women in Canadian society in general and in the economy in particular. Law reform was embraced as the preferred strategy for achieving the goal of women’s equality.

However, three years of public hearings, scores of briefs by individuals and organizations, and dozens of studies by experts persuaded most of the Commissioners – the two male members remained obdurate – that women’s low pay was a problem that could not be remedied by the simple technique of formal equality. Since women were engaged in different kinds of work from men, the Commission complained that equal pay for equal work legislation in Canada, which applied only in a limited number of cases in which women’s work was the same or identical to men’s, was too restrictive. Thus, the Report recommended the principle of equal pay for work of equal value, which the International Labour Organization adopted in 1951 in Convention 100, as a key component in a suite of measures designed to rectify the problem of women’s low pay and economic insecurity.

The Commission issued its Report at a moment of profound transition for women; the expanding welfare state created a demand for paid women workers and shifted some of the burden for the caring of elderly, infirm, or disabled and ill family members onto public services. (more…)

Tags: Commission royale d'enquête sur la situation de la femme au Canada, Royal Commission on the Status of Women
Posted in Equity Matters, questions d'équité | 1 Comment »

Rethinking hate crimes: The hard work of creating social equity

Friday, May 14th, 2010

Lucas Crawford and Robert Nichols, University of Alberta
Guest Contributors

Monday, May 10th was Alberta’s inaugural ‘Hate Crimes Awareness Day,’ an event that raised more questions than answers. Offered as an opportunity to ‘celebrate’ the successes of the past few decades, many in those communities supposedly most protected by such legislation—racialized minorities, Indigenous peoples and the LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer] community, for instance— took this as an opportunity to challenge them as a vehicle for promoting safe, just communities.

A recent Statistics Canada report on hate crimes shows that white people reportedly suffer more instances of chargeable hate crime than Aboriginal people. In the United States, white people are apparently the second-most likely demographic to experience race-related hate crimes. In New York City five years ago, four lesbians of colour were charged and convicted with “gang assault” (and are variously serving time) after defending themselves from a homophobic and assaultive man who threatened them with rape and grabbed for their bodies. He would later characterize the incident as a hate crime committed against him – for his heterosexuality.

By isolating incidents of such violence from their social and political context, the hate crime framework simultaneously obscures the background field of systemic oppression while relying upon it. The ‘successful’ use of such legislation often depends upon the careful discrimination of instances of specific, intentional hatred and more general, nearly all-pervasive discrimination and derision.

Rather than working to eliminate such discrimination, hate crimes actually require it as a norm against which the particular case can be established as unique, exceptional and a function of the intent of the perpetrator. (more…)

Tags: Équité et LGBT, Equity and LGBT, Interculturalism and pluralism, L'interculturalisme et le pluralisme
Posted in Equity Matters, questions d'équité | 1 Comment »

Dalhousie Scholar wins Donner Prize

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Emily Andrew, editor at University of British Columbia Press, rang today to tell me that one of UBCP’s authors, Brian Bow of Dalhousie University, has won the Donner Prize for his book The Politics of Linkage: Power, Interdependence, and Ideas in Canada-US Relations. The Donner is given annually to the most outstanding and innovative book on Canadian public policy—and this year’s winner was proudly supported by the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program. The ASPP is run by the Federation, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The Donner is one substantial prize–$35,000 goes to Dr. Bow as the winner, and the short listers get $5,000 each. Speaking of the short listers, one of them, Michael Byers, recently spoke on the subject covered by his own book, Who Owns the Arctic?, at a Federation Big Thinking lecture. We, and the scholars who work with us, are everywhere . . . .

Congratulations to Dr. Bow and all those in the running for this prize!

Ms. Kel Morin-Parsons PhD
Manager, Aid to Scholarly Publications Program

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The Humanities: Relationships with others and with the world are essential to freedom

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Susan Babbitt, Queen’s University
Guest Contributor

“Humanities” refers to human beings and to the human condition. In the Humanities we raise questions about what it means to be human. But, at least in my discipline of Philosophy, we teach mostly the work of philosophers from North America and Northern Europe, most of them male and white. We look for wisdom in only some human experience. The Humanities, especially Philosophy, should look beyond Europe and North America.

The ethics we teach are mostly based in liberalism. Philosophical liberalism teaches, roughly, that we are free when we can choose for ourselves from a wide array of meaningful choices. We are free when we can live our lives according to deep-seated desires and preferences, without unnecessary interference from others.

Liberalism gives primacy to dreams and desires that come from me just because they come from me. Of course, it is more sophisticated than this, but ultimately it matters what my actual psychology is. And the view is attractive. Just consider the “follow your dreams” view of the good life. There is something powerfully appealing about the idea that people should follow their cherished dreams, even ones held since childhood. Of course, dreams matter, but why should they be important just because they are mine? (more…)

Tags: Interculturalism and pluralism, L'interculturalisme et le pluralisme
Posted in Equity Matters, questions d'équité | No Comments »

Lawyer, professor, Mi’kmaq woman: Equity matters in my experience

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Patricia Doyle-Bedwell, Dalhousie University
Guest Contributor

I am a Mi’kmaq woman who also holds an academic post and, to many, it appears that I have succeeded in the mainstream educational system. I have pondered the issue of equity. I have tried to wrap my head around the abstract notion of equity within my own experience and work. I also direct the Transition Year Program (TYP) at Dalhousie University, a preparation year for African Nova Scotians and Aboriginal – Mi’kmaq – students. I am a firm believer in what I call the Nike school of equity, “Just Do It.” But just doing it seems to be more difficult than ever.

As a law student, I asked a constitutional expert (naively I know now) why the Canadian Government does not ensure all laws meet the standard of equality as set out in the Charter. He stopped short and looked at me with surprise. He sputtered an answer about keeping lawyers employed. I never understood why a country such as Canada did not have equity/equality as foundational qualities of lawmaking and power sharing. I never received an adequate answer. Equity matters because equity means respecting our fellow humans, regardless of colour, creed, religion and race. To only talk about equity while refusing to implement equity measures due to the difficulty of unmasking one’s own limitations reduces equity to a simple vacuous concept.

In this blog, I hope to explore the meaning of equity in my life and work. As Director of TYP, I have implemented equitable principles in our program to ensure that accommodation of difference receives respect and acceptance. First, TYP’s vision has remained unchanged: to increase the number of Aboriginal and African Canadians in university. Prior to 1969, few African Nova Scotians and Aboriginal students gained entry into Dalhousie. Community leaders advocated for the inclusion of those students. When Dalhousie, in response, relied upon “we only accept the cream of the crop” argument, TYP became the program to ensure students met the academic standards of admission to Dalhousie. (more…)

Tags: Indigenous education, L’éducation autochtone
Posted in Equity Matters, questions d'équité | 3 Comments »

Towards Achieving Equity: New changes to CAUT’s governance structure

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Penni Stewart, Canadian Association of University Teachers
Guest Contributor

Thank you for the invitation to post the news about the changes to the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) governance structure to the Federations’ Equity Matters Blog.

We understand how these changes would be of interest to academic staff in the humanities and social sciences working towards achieving equity in the communities where they work.

A summary of the structural changes is available on the front page of our website for anyone interested in the details (www.caut.ca).

Excerpt from ‘Council delegates vote to amend changes’:

The creation of two member-at-large Executive Committee positions — one for Aboriginal Academic Staff and the other for Francophone Academic Staff. (No changes were made to either the Francophone Committee or the Aboriginal Academic Staff Working Group.)
The Contract Academic Staff Committee becomes a Standing Committee of Council. Like all Standing Committees of CAUT, the Chair will be elected by Council and will be a member of the CAUT Executive Committee.
Three new working groups will be created – the Racialized Academic Staff Working Group, the Academic Staff with Disabilities Working Group and the LGBTQ Working Group. Together with the Women’s Committee, which now becomes the Women’s Working Group, each group will take the lead in developing proposals for CAUT’s equity work in relation to its community and will share ideas and information in a new CAUT standing committee, called the Diversity Council, which replaces the former Equity Committee of the Executive. Each of the four working groups will choose two members to sit on the Diversity Council which will also have two Co-Chairs, one of which must be a woman. Both Chairs are to be elected by CAUT Council and will become members of the CAUT Executive Committee. Members serving on the Working Groups will be selected following the same process and criteria as all committees of CAUT which take into consideration not only field of expertise but size of institution, geography, linguistics, disciplinary lines and gender.
Two member-at-large positions remain on the Executive Committee (previously three) and are designated as “general” and elected by Council.

In recent years, CAUT has consistently heard the same message from members – that we needed to identify a way to organize ourselves to better represent our members of historically marginalized groups. As a national association, we needed to structurally reflect the systemic and demographic shifts that have occurred in our rapidly changing post-secondary education sector.

At their recent meeting in April, with a vote of 91% majority, Council delegates clearly indicated that now was the time for CAUT to move ahead on equity.

The changes to our governance structure will take affect April 2011 at the start of our next election cycle, which will include election for the Co-Chairs of the Diversity Council as well as Member-at-Large positions for both Aboriginal and Francophone members. The appointment of members to serve on the four new working groups of CAUT – the Women’s Working Group, the Racialized Academic Staff Working Group, the Academic Staff with Disabilities Working Group and the LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer] Working Group – will also be ratified in April 2011, with the process beginning early in the new year.

At CAUT we look forward to next year as we prepare for implementation and continue to advance our work on equity.

Penni Stewart is an associate professor of Sociology at York University and the President of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

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