Unsettling Activisms Anthology Launched at Trent University
Three generations of scholars edit new collection as part of Dr. May Chazan’s work as Canada Research Chair in Feminist and Gender Studies
Launched to a packed room of enthusiastic supporters on October 27 at Traill College, Unsettling Activisms: Critical Interventions on Aging, Gender, and Social Change offers a glimpse into a project that has entailed ongoing storytelling and relationship-building, poetry, life writing, orality, photography, performance, and research.
“We have worked hard to weave together academic, activist, and artistic contributions,” says Dr. May Chazan, a faculty member in the Gender & Women’s Studies department and the Canada research chair in Feminist and Gender Studies. “To push the boundaries of what is typically included in a text of this kind, and to practice a meaningful, radical, and accountable intergenerationality along the way.”
The book is, at its core, about unsettling and demystifying activisms. It challenges what has typically been included or considered activisms and who is typically considered an activist. Famous activists are often the focus of narratives of social change; this book spotlights the very different ways that ordinary people engage with change-making, resisting, and building movements. In an academic sense, it tries to decentre certain colonial, heteronormative, ableist, patriarchal, white-centric versions of what activism is and it emphasizes activisms in the plural.
Professor Chazan edited the book with Trent graduate Melissa Baldwin, who was a Master’s student at the time of publishing, and Dr. Pat Evans, a former faculty member in the Schools of Social Work at York and Carleton Universities, and past chair of the Grandmothers Advocacy Network (GRAN).
Contributors include Elder Shirley Ida Williams Pheasant, Professor Emeritus in Nishnaabemowin Language at Trent University; waaseyaa’sin christine sy, Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies at Trent University; Dr. Jenn Cole, emerging critical Indigenous feminist scholar and new Trent faculty member; Trent graduates Melissa Baldwin, Maddy MacNab , Jesse Whattam and Ziysah von Bieberstein; and current Trent student, Keara Lightning. Beyond Trent, the volume also includes contributions from scholars at the University of Toronto, Concordia University, McGill University, Simon Fraser University, and St. Francis Xavier University, and activists who range in age from 20 to 90-something.
Three of the contributors –Dr. Sally Chivers, Dr. Nadine Changfoot and Prof. Chazan – are members of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society.