Reading the Room is an edited collection on classroom experiences from instructors and students throughout Canada. The book provides guidance to educators on often-fraught issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and decolonization. Contributors discuss an array of topics including asymmetrical power relations between students and teachers, how students and professors learn from each other, how to negotiate conflict in a classroom, and how to be self-reflective about methods of teaching and learning. They also consider debates around trigger warnings and students’ expectations, discuss methods for curriculum selection and pedagogical practices, reflect on what it is like to embody a subject one teaches, and show how university equity, diversity, and inclusion work is often offloaded to overburdened racialized students and precariously employed staff.

Public scholarship – sharing research with audiences outside of academic settings – has become increasingly necessary to counter the rise of misinformation, to fill gaps from cuts to traditional media, and to increase the reach of important scholarship by making it available to the public. Engaging in these efforts often comes with the risk of harassment and threats – especially for women, people of colour, queer communities, and precariously employed workers. Engage in Public Scholarship! provides constructive guidance on how to translate research into inclusive public outreach while ensuring that such efforts are accessible for a range of abilities as well as safer for those involved. Engage in Public Scholarship! offers both encouragement and toolkits for reaching audiences and sharing knowledge in practical and more equitable ways.

For decades, research centered on risk narratives as a strategy to compel safety interventions in schools. In this report, we query the left’s continued attachment to this discursive positioning of trans youth and ask: what are the implications of relying on an articulation of trans youths’ right to exist in relation to risk in order to advocate for resistance? Drawing on queer and trans theory, we argue that research about trans youth is trapped in an understanding of trans youth as victims in need of saving. We desire responses from the left that are not mired in conservative narratives, and we explore how we can resist transphobic attacks without reifying ideas of trans youth as at-risk.

Children are often given a name based in some part on the sex they were assigned at birth. For trans youth, their given name does not always reflect their gender and so an aspect of their transition often includes changing their name. Drawing on interviews with trans youth in Australia, Ireland and Canada, I explore how trans youths’ naming practices offer insight into the ways that they express their desire for intelligibility and safety, while simultaneously navigating gender norms and a new sense of identity

After a review of the circulation of consent as a keyword in WGS, this chapter examines liberal, affirmative, and critical consent frameworks that inform constructions of this term. We then turn to the ways that Indigenous feminism, disability studies, and feminist studies of digital culture have articulated norms of consent around decolonial and intersectional feminist frameworks about community autonomy and consensual allyship, and about the rights of BIPOC creators to their knowledge and creative labour. These different valences of consent reveal a range of knotty issues that bear on WGS as a field, including how one ethically negotiates the power dynamics that shape social relationships and who is seen as having and being capable of exercising agency and individual will within those relationships.

This chapter examines the feminist protocols the authors developed to collect, design and create a digital archive of student activism against sexual violence on their campus. It explains our processes for compiling and designing a digital archive in collaboration with student activists on our campus.  It also examines how student activists and those who us who are creating the archive build and maintain cultural memory of their work, through tactics such as manualizing student activist practices, digitizing their documentation, and telling stories about student activists, reporters, editors, advocates, and peer educators.

This chapter examines the conceptual and political underpinnings of the creation of an archive of student activism against sexual violence on campus. We examine the institutional conditions and commitments that account for some of the losses of this cultural memory, and the ways in which students and researchers document, and make transmissible, both the work of student activism and the processes of archive creation. The cultural memory of student activism is an active process; it is something we do, collectively and collaboratively, with student activists. The archive project developed a collaborative ethos that shapes our own accountability toward the work student activists do: we are accountable for accurately telling the stories of their advocacy, clearly representing their political visions for change, and making visible their contributions to the movement and the transformation of the university.

Debates on trigger warnings depict the classroom as a space charged with friction between student demands for warnings and teacher responses to these demands. Although there are many ways to practice giving warnings before showing or engaging in material that deals with violent content, this chapter interrogates how the relationship between students and teachers is negotiated through the debates around trigger warnings themselves. Drawing on scholarship in the areas of affect studies, gender studies, feminist pedagogy, and education and psychoanalysis, the chapter considers how teaching and learning are informed by the frictions, tensions, and difficult affective encounters that play out in the classroom and are contested through the politics of gender that aim to transform the power relations of the classroom. Beyond narratives of student trauma and faculty academic freedom or authority, the debate on trigger warnings opens space for thinking about the role of solidarity as a technique for mediating pedagogy and affect in the classroom.

Since 2012, the feminist term rape culture has been broadly used in Canada and the U.S. to explain the cultural and structural supports that reproduce sexual violence, yet in recent years it has come under attack by anti-feminists. This article examines opinion columns written by women published between 2012 and 2019 that target feminist frameworks on sexual violence, the terminology of rape culture, and campus feminism. Anti-feminist columnists occupy key media positions from which to spread anti-feminist ideologies, connecting the various players of alt-right networks and right-wing movements and mainstreaming anti-feminism in the pages of Canada’s English language legacy press.

In this article, we share findings and provide commentary on some of their drawings in order to contribute to knowledge about how children in LGBTQ families become aware of their social locations and enact everyday ways of being with and a part of kinship structures. Through the drawings and conversations with children, it was revealed that the children’s perspectives on family are not straightforwardly dictated by ideologies about queer and trans cultures, but involve a complex constellation of affect, power, sensation, curiosity, and social structures that have to do with the minutiae of kinship.

Feminist teaching often tries to implement prefigurative politics, i.e. spaces that embody here and now those forms of social relationships that are the goals of the (feminist) movement (Boggs, 1977, p.100). Similarly, feminist pedagogy often tasks itself with the mission to create “safe spaces” for learning, where students feel safe enough to share their thoughts and feelings (Holler and Steiner, 2005). Although it is important and legitimate to foster spaces where everyone participates, especially people who rarely speak up in public spaces (women, people of colour), I argue, following hooks (1994) and Barret (2010), that it is neither possible nor desirable to try to create a “safe space” in the classroom. Instead, I suggest we ought to invest in the concept of “learning spaces” and to construct feminist pedagogical practices that aim to better equip students to become transformation actors negotiating with imperfect contexts and people.

In this article, the authors offer a critical reflection on an experimental critical criminology seminar course that was designed to provide a framework for abolitionist learning. Trauma-informed pedagogy and peer-led learning are suggested as concrete ways to build and maintain spaces of trust and vulnerability while tackling difficult subjects such as violence and systems of oppression. When students are supported in forming new and different relationships with each other, alternative and more radical forms of collaboration and imagination become possible. Despite the challenges posed by the neoliberal university, trauma-informed pedagogy and radical forms of collaboration and imagination can hold space for abolitionist learning in the university classroom and beyond.

This article offers ideas and strategies for teaching introductory-level courses in Gender and Women’s Studies by providing the responses of eleven experienced educators who were asked two questions: What main theme or idea do you hope students will learn in the introductory class you teach? And what practical strategies do you use in the classroom to achieve that learning objective?

La capsule vidéo « Accueillir la diversité de genre en contextes pédagogique et professionnel » aborde les bonnes pratiques d’accueil (1:29), d’enseignement (6:18) et de recherche (10:42) qui favorisent le bien-être et la réussite des personnes trans, non binaires et queers à l’université.