Summer Updates
Just last week I recorded a podcast episode with Jamila and Zeb from the Resistant Communiqués Collective to talk social movement history, radical queer politics, and the (de-)evolution of Pride. The episode is available here and includes a helpful multi-media syllabus. I was honoured to participate in their well organized and well researched program and look forward to listening to future episodes that this collective creates!
This past May I began a one-year mandate as the President of the part-time contract faculty and teaching/research assistant union at Carleton University. Since then I’ve been busy learning my new role and helping both units prepare for bargaining that is set to commence upon the expiration of the current collective agreements at the end of August. I also attended the CUPE Ontario Convention, helping pass a resolution with my fellow colleagues to support university sector unions in seeking greater transparency from universities regarding their budgets and budgetary decisions.
This summer I’m finalizing an essay that will appear in the anthology that provides an overview of the case studies for the Archive/Counter-Archive project. I’ll be outlining the specifics of the case study that I helped lead on twentieth century Toronto HIV/AIDS activist tapes in Vtape’s sprawling and impressive video distribution collection. The chapter reflects on the team’s research questions, theoretical frames, archival methods, project outcomes, and musings for future directions/research. The book is edited by by members of the A/CA network and will be published by Concordia University Press next year.
Research with the Sex Worker Self-Authoring in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive project continues into its second year. The research team is working through the ethics process so that we can shift from wrapping up our archival research in the CWMA to begin doing interviews with a handful of veteran Canadian sex worker activists about how they would like to see their materials (and their colleagues’) stewarded. Much of these materials, including the material at the CWMA, have ended up in formal archives and memory institutions without their knowledge or consent. We’ll begin working on creating an alternative finding aid for the sex worker-authored materials in the CWMA while we finish the ethics process and begin doing interviews. We are also preparing a video program of shorts featuring queer and trans Canadian sex workers talking about themselves, their activism, and their work for a new queer film festival launching in Ottawa this Fall called ChormaQueer. More details to come in September!
