Equity Matters

Jan 18

Indigenous, immigrant, inclusive: Three perspectives on diversity

Malinda S. Smith, Vice-President, Equity Issues, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Will Ferrell’s comedy, ‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’ tells the story of a woman who is hired in to a newsroom dominated by an old boys club whose behavior ranged from tolerating her presence, to disdaining her professional interventions, to scheming to seduce or depose her. A kind of benign tolerance pertained as long as the ambitious female character stayed in “her place,” doing girly stories on food, clothing and cute pets. Despite being subjected to the kind of garden variety sexism that continues to underwrite the glass ceiling...

Read more »

Dec 22

Disorders of Sex Development: De-Queering the ‘I’ in LGBTQI2-S

Catherine Clune-Taylor, University of Alberta
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

In 1993 activist Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), kick-starting what would come to be known as the intersex rights movement. Since then, the word intersex has become more controversial, more contested and more divisive than ever before. First used in 1917 by biologist Richard Goldschmidt to refer to those conditions that gave...

Read more »

Dec 20

Desiring and Doing Equity: The Triangle Program for LGBTIQ2S Youth

Doreen Fumia, Ryerson University
Guest Contributor This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

I would like to add to the Equity Matters discussions about queer equity in public education with some thoughts that have surfaced from an ethnographic study I recently conducted. The study is based on the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) Triangle Program, Canada’s only publicly funded secondary school classroom for LGBTIQ2S youth...

Read more »

Dec 13

The Note-taker: Innovative assistive technology enables blind scholars to take notes

Michael J. Astrauskas, Arizona State University
Guest contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on diversity, creativity and innovation / diversité, innovation et créativité

To see a whiteboard at the front of the class, students with severe visual impairment typically use a monocular for far-sight viewing. This provides a greatly magnified but a very narrow field of view of the board. In addition to the monocular, they might need to use their glasses for note-taking (i.e. near-sight viewing). As these students take notes in class, they must repeatedly switch back and forth between the whiteboard and their notes,...

Read more »

Dec 8

Conversion Therapy Fantasies and Religious Opposition to LGBTQ-inclusive Education

Catherine Taylor, University of Winnipeg
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

As we look towards International Human Rights Day on 10 December, I share the frustration of many students, parents, and educators that as a nation we often stand timidly by while LGBTQ young people are being hurt in hostile school cultures, citing our reluctance to choose sides between religious rights to...

Read more »

Dec 6

Remembering December 6: Linking Structural and Interpersonal Violence in LGBTQ Lives

Janice Ristock, University of Manitoba
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

December 6th, today, marks the national day of remembrance and action on violence against women. It is the anniversary of the 1989 l’École Polytechnique de Montréal massacre where fourteen women were singled out and murdered by Marc Lepine, a man who blamed women and feminists for his...

Read more »

Dec 1

Trans Trouble: Structural and ‘Administrative En-gendering’ as the Academic-Corporate Complex

Bobby Noble, York University
Guest Contributor This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirit) peoples.

As I sit down to draft this blog entry, Dean Spade’s important book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Practice and the Limits of Law literally lands at my door. I’ve been thinking for a while now about the relationship between what Spade calls administrative violence and structures of binary genders...

Read more »

Nov 30

LGBT Lessons (Not) learned: Dominant gender ideology as a basis for transphobic and homophobic violence

Gerald Walton, Lakehead University
Guest Contributors

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

In September 2011, the Institute for Canadian Values ran an advertisement in the National Post asking that children not be “exposed” to discussions in school about LGBT issues. Children’s identities as boys and girls, the Institute reasoned, would be “corrupted.” The Institute...

Read more »

Nov 25

The L-Word: It’s Not Getting Better For Lonely Young Lesbians

Melissa Carroll, McMaster University
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirit) peoples.

On Friday, October 4, 2010 the lifeless bodies of 21 year-old Jeanine Blanchette and her 17 year-old girlfriend Chantal Dube were found in a wooded area behind a social services building in Orangeville, Ontario. Immediately deemed a double-suicide by police, the lesbian couple’s disappearance and their eventual deaths drew little attention...

Read more »

Nov 22

Status of Women: Three reasons women aren’t in leadership positions

Curt Rice, University of Tromsø
Guest contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s Equity Issues Portfolio series on the Status of Women in the Disciplines and in the Academy.

It’s true in higher education, it’s true in law firms, it’s true in hospitals (it’s even true in monarchies!): women can get far, but they can’t get all the way to the top.

In Europe, fewer than 10 percent of universities are run by women. In Fortune 500 companies, about 17 percent of lawyers are women. Even in a relatively egalitarian country like...

Read more »

Pages