The launch for Writing Justice (Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 2011) will take place on Thursday, April 14, from 5:30 to 7:30pm at the Columbus Centre, 901 Lawrence Ave. W., Toronto. Everyone is welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

The book was published in recognition of the United Nations General Assembly’s proclamation of 2011 as the .

“I want the book to serve as both an historical example of ethno-racial media in the tradition of Mary Ann Shadd and Henry Bibb, and as a critical analysis of some of the most important issues impacting the lives of people of colour in the last decade,” says Foster.

The aim of the International Year for People of African Descent is to strengthen national actions and regional and international cooperation for the benefit of people of African descent in relation to: their full enjoyment of economic, cultural, social, civil and political rights; their participation and integration in all political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society; and the promotion of a greater knowledge of, and respect for, their diverse heritage and culture.

Left: Lorne Foster

“Dr. Foster illustrates how, over the greater part of a decade, he has used his analytical skills and erudition as weapons for progressive social change. Despite covering a very wide range of topics – from leadership, human rights and race in the workplace through the language of culture and power, social problems in the city, health, urban poverty, and the immigration system – Dr. Foster keeps a steady eye on the roots, reasons and results of the issues he analyzes and provides a picture of the vitality of the communities, the hurdles they face and the efforts made to overcome these hurdles,” says Carl Thorpe, executive director of the .

Foster has written more than 200 articles for community and knowledge mobilization publications and was nominated for two media human rights awards, “for alerting, informing and sensitizing the public with regard to the nature and value of human rights in Canada” in 2001.

He is the author of and the co-editor of the forthcoming Balancing Competing Human Rights Claims in a Diverse Society, published by the .

His next book will deal with the foreign credentials gap in Canada.

For more information, call the at 416-979-2973. Attendees are asked to register in advance at mhso.mail@utoronto.ca.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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To do this, Mukherjee-Reed, director of South Asian studies at 91��ɫ, became a core member of the Tagore Anniversary Celebrations Committee Toronto (TACCT), which will organize a series of events throughout the year to celebrate Tagore. The first is a tribute to Tagore in conjunction with the ’s (ROM) 3rd annual South Asia Heritage Day tomorrow. Mukherjee-Reed will deliver an introduction to Tagore at the ROM theatre.

“Our primary objective is to bring Tagore's work and his worldview into the mainstream, particularly in North America,” says Mukherjee-Reed. “His brilliant work and his profound philosophical worldviews based on equality, humanism and justice have much to offer to us today.”

Right: A photo of Rabindranath Tagore taken during his visit to Canada. Photo by John Vanderpant, Library and Archives Canada.

In addition to poetry, Tagore wrote novels, short stories, essays and plays, and composed music and became a painter in his late sixties. He was also a leading social philosopher and fought for equality and justice for all, striving to build ties beyond borders of race, class, caste, ethnicity and culture. “He had a profound influence on the making of modern India,” says Mukherjee-Reed. His ideas of de-colonization, local self-reliance and autonomy, and a cooperative way of life deeply inspired India’s anti-colonial struggle. His views have influenced Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi.

Mukherjee-Reed says as she watches the events in Egypt and Libya, she is reminded of Tagore's words. “No matter how mighty a power is and how much artillery it has at its disposal, if there is a collective will to challenge its illegitimacy, it eventually cannot endure." These thoughts permeate the vast repertoire of poetry and music that became household chants during India’s struggle for independence. "Tagore saw colonialism as one major impediment to equality, but also feared that nationalist, elitist visions of progress would be equally problematic,” she says.

Tagore had great faith in the power of youth and those who would challenge established norms. “One of our aims is to engage the young with Tagore’s ideas,” says Mukherjee-Reed. “Unleashing the creativity inherent in people, particularly the young, was something Tagore strongly advocated.”

Left: Ananya Mukherjee-Reed

His strong belief in the power of education saw him establish two universities in India. “We have a lot to learn from Tagore’s ideas of education,” says Mukherjee-Reed. The first, he named Visva-Bharati, a Sanskrit name meaning "where the whole world forms its one single nest". It brought scholars, artists and students from every part of the world together to create a community, and even touched the lives of ordinary people.

“Tagore’s objective was to break with the traditional model of the university where the elite pursued knowledge for its own sake. It was no accident that Visva-Bharati was located in a village and not in a city, not amidst the urban, British-schooled affluent classes,” says Mukherjee-Reed.

“Very close to Visva-Bharati, Tagore established the Institute of Rural Reconstruction, yet another university designed specifically to serve the rural economy. The predicament of rural India was at the heart of Tagore’s work. His views on this remain very salient in today’s India where the benefits of ‘development’ still elude millions of its citizens.”

For more information or to hear Mukherjee-Reed’s discussion about Tagore on CBC Radio’s Fresh Air and CHRY Radio, visit the website.

For more information about the performances, live music, children’s activities and poetry readings during South Asia Heritage Day tomorrow at the ROM, visit the ’s website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Right: Sheila Cavanagh

In her new book , Cavanagh, a queer theorist, explores how the gendered nature of public washrooms has become a source of anxiety and political controversy in recent years.

“While talk about public facilities is often designated as out-of-bounds and not to mention crude and impolite in everyday conversation, these places condition ideas about gender and sexuality,” says Cavanagh. “Bathrooms have always been places where we segregate folks on the basis of gender, sexuality, class, disability and race.”

This segregation has a long history in North America and Cavanagh says that in the not too distant past; there were racially segregated bathrooms and water fountains in the American south. People with physical disabilities are today often desexualized by unisex facilities. “When you are physically disabled, your gender doesn’t seem to matter and you are desexualized in the built environment,” says Cavanagh.

She points out that separate bathrooms for the chamber maid or hired help were also built into many of the homes of the bourgeoisie classes. “In Toronto, bathrooms of today are often designated for ‘customers only,’” she says. “People who are homeless or street active or sex workers are frequently denied access to public facilities.”

The book is based on 100 interviews Cavanagh conducted with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer and/or intersex (LGBTQI) people living in North American cities. It delves into the ways that queer and trans communities are challenging the rigid gendering and heteronormative composition of public washrooms. Incorporating theories from queer studies, trans studies, psychoanalysis, and the work of French philosopher , Cavanagh argues in the pages of Queering Bathrooms that the cultural politics of excretion are intimately related to the regulation of gender and sexuality.

The book took four years to create – two years for Cavanagh to transcribe the interviews and another two to write and edit. “I came up with the title Queering Bathrooms in discussions with my research assistants. We felt that it was important to prompt the reader to think about how the rules governing gender in the bathroom are queer – meaning odd or unusual,” says Cavanagh. “I refer to the hygienic imagination in the subtitle because part of what it means to govern the gender of bathroom users is to clean up or excommunicate those imagined to be ‘out of place’."

What amazed her most as she compiled the book are the stories told by LGBTQI folks during the interviews. Many revealed they had witnessed or had been harassed for allegedly using the "wrong" washroom. It is no wonder, says Cavanagh, that activists must continue to campaign for more gender-neutral facilities.

"Access to bathrooms is a human rights issue and we must not police the gender of bathroom occupants," says Cavanagh. "While it is important to build gender neutral bathrooms, like the ones built at 91��ɫ by the SexGen committee, it is equally important to challenge what counts as a man and as a woman when in more rigidly gendered rooms."

The cover image of was chosen because the gender of the subject peering into the Victorian mirror is unclear, says Cavanagh. "The viewer wonders whether he/she is taking off a moustache or putting on lipstick. The slim hips and flat chest coupled with the wearing of a suit further complicates the image. I wanted a cover image that would prompt viewers to question our certainty about the gender identities of others in public spaces."

Her recommendation is not to do away with the gendered designs of bathrooms entirely but to be uncertain about what the gendered signs mean. "We must remember that there is always a gap between gender identity and the signs used to authorize our social status as gendered subjects. While gender neutral toilets are an absolute necessity, it is equally important to be creative with gender signage."

Cavanagh envisions that such creativity would allow the bathroom to become a pedagogical space where patrons would be gently challenged about their assumptions about what counts as a man or as a woman.

In addition to the book, Cavanagh says she gathered such a wealth of material that she is now working on a script for a new play, Queer Bathroom Monologues. The first iteration of the play was staged at the book launch at the Gladstone Hotel which took place in November. "It was such a hit," says Cavanagh, "that I knew I had to develop it for a larger audience."

For more information or to purchase a copy of the book, visit the web page on the University of Toronto Press website.

By Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Released in December, the volume of essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic explores issues of race and ethnicity, culture, media, gender and migration.

The collection is edited by , associate dean external of 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, and Halleh Ghorashi, a professor at VU University Amsterdam.

In previews, London-based scholars say the essays “illuminate a rich mix of issues that shape and define the everyday experiences of diasporic Muslims,” address “some of the egregious stereotypes used about the Muslim diaspora” and show how “homogenization of diverse communities may serve political expediency but has a negative effect on the quest for meaningful integration.”

Moghissi, who teaches women’s and equity studies at 91��ɫ, has written the introduction and contributed one essay – “Changing spousal relations in diaspora: Muslims in Canada”. Other essays look at Muslim youth culture in Europe, radicalization of Muslims in Sweden, discrimination against young Muslim French women, and home and belonging for Moroccan-Dutch Muslims.

The essays grew out of a four-year international research project, "Muslim diasporas: Heightened Islamic identity, gender, and cultural resistance". Started in 2006, the project involved scholars in Canada, France, Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands and was funded by the Ford Foundation.

Moghissi is the author of , released in 1999 and still considered timely and relevant. It was translated and reprinted in 2010 by a South Korean publisher. In 2009, she published a monograph, , co-authored by 91��ɫ political science professors and .

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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91��ɫ history Professor Marc Stein grew up in the suburbs of New 91��ɫ City in the 1960s and 1970s with a passionate faith in the US Constitution and US Supreme Court as strong protectors of freedom, equality and democracy in the post-war era.

That faith was shaken in the 1980s when the Supreme Court justices upheld state sodomy laws, which he initially attributed to the conservative backlash of the Reagan era. Then, in the early 1990s as a graduate student, Stein stumbled across a 1967 decision upholding the deportation of Canadian citizen Clive Boutilier, which challenged his assumptions about the earlier liberalism of the US Supreme Court.

Boutilier vs. the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was one of the Supreme Court's first major gay rights cases, says Stein, an award-winning author, editor and teacher in 91��ɫ's Department of History, School of Women's Studies ���Ի���Sexuality Studies Program, all in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

What the Supreme Court justices did in this case did not protect equality and freedom. Instead, they upheld a provision of the 1952 Immigration & Nationality Act that authorized the exclusion and deportation of aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, which the US Congress, the INS and the Supreme Court interpreted to apply to homosexuals.

Canada had introduced its own version of the US immigration law in the 1950s, but repealed it in the 1970s, a few years after homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The US didn't repeal its law until 1990.

Left: Marc Stein

Although liberals celebrate and conservatives condemn the US Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s for its rulings on issues such as abortion and birth control, Stein says, neither is correct in depicting the court of that era as sexually libertarian or egalitarian. He argues this point in his new book , which looks at six major Supreme Court cases – Griswold, Fanny Hill, Loving, Eisenstadt, Roe and Boutilier.

More than half the book is devoted to the Boutilier case. Stein is the first scholar to examine this episode in any depth and to tell Boutilier’s tragic story following the Supreme Court ruling. Boutilier had moved from Nova Scotia to the US with his family in the 1950s and several of his brothers served in the US military. When he applied for US citizenship in the early 1960s and revealed that he had once been arrested, though not convicted, on a sodomy charge in New 91��ɫ City, his legal troubles began.

In doing the research for the book, Stein studied liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage and obscenity, alongside the conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. What he found was that the sexual rights doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1973 was not liberal or egalitarian. In fact, it upheld heteronormative assumptions regarding "the supremacy of adult, heterosexual, marital, monogamous, private and procreative forms of sexual expression," he writes. Marital and reproductive rights were upheld; sexual rights were not. These decisions also reproduced and reinforced social hierarchies based on class, race, gender and citizenship. And liberal and leftist advocates who argued these cases before the Supreme Court "condoned sexual discrimination".

Right: Andrew Boutilier (left), Clive Boutlilier's brother; Joyce Boutilier, Andrew's wife; Clive Boutilier; and Eugene O'Rourke, Clive's partner

Their arguments in birth control and abortion cases, for example, distinguished between laws that interfered with marital and reproductive rights, which they challenged, and laws against adultery, fornication and sodomy, which they said were constitutional, says Stein.

In Boutilier’s case, the ruling concurred with the view that homosexuals suffered from psychopathic personality and so should be deported. After the decision, Boutilier’s case was all but forgotten. The decision against him didn’t conform to popular narratives about the liberalism of the US Supreme Court after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on racial desegregation, so it was ignored.

Stein adds that many US gay and lesbian activists challenged discriminatory policies and practices during the 1950s and 1960s, but that was also forgotten, giving rise to the popular myth that the gay and lesbian rights movement began in the 1970s. In fact, says Stein, it started much earlier and was quite vigorous, as can be seen by the extraordinary coalition that defended Boutilier, which included immigration advocates, civil libertarians and gay rights activists.

"My book is the first to show that the US gay and lesbian movement of the 1950s and 1960s had a well-developed strategy of turning to the courts to defend sexual rights," he says.

The sexually conservative aspects of the Supreme Court's "liberal" decisions on abortion, birth control, interracial marriage and obsenity in the late 1960s and early 1970s vanished from the public consciousness. Instead, the US public came to believe that the Supreme Court's decisions of that era were sexually libertarian and egalitarian. Decades later, the Supreme Court itself seemed to adopt the public's point of view, declaring in its 2003 decision striking down state sodomy laws that the ruling was consistent with the decisions of the 1960s and 1970s, says Stein.

This, he says, is consistent with new theories of "popular constitutionalism," which emphasize the importance of popular understandings of legal rights.

Stein hopes Sexual Injustice will shed light on the implications of some of the Supreme Court’s decisions, as well as the sexual revolution, and help educate the public regarding heteronormative rights and privileges in the past and the present.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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“I was surprised and truly honoured….I'm very lucky to have had such a supportive group of friends, supervisors, and colleagues at 91��ɫ who helped and encouraged me to write this particular paper,” says Mosby.

Right: Ian Mosby accepts the Nicholas C. Mullin Award in Tokyo from Society for Social Studies of Science council member Nina Wakeford of the University of London, UK

His paper, published last year in the journal examines the “discovery” of the Chinese restaurant syndrome in 1968 and subsequent reactions by the medical community, scientists, public health authorities and the general public to dangers posed by the common food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG) and by Chinese cooking more generally.

“I was originally attracted to this topic because I was curious as to why Chinese restaurants often had prominent 'No MSG' signs in their windows and on their menus even though MSG was a common ingredient in all kinds of processed foods ranging from potato chips to canned soup,” says Mosby.

“This curiosity quickly led me to a surprising number of scientific and medical studies from the 1960s and 1970s examining something called the Chinese restaurant syndrome. As it turned out, these studies ended up being a fascinating window into the interplay between ideas about race, food culture and industrial food technologies during the postwar period.”

In his paper, Mosby argues that "Chinese restaurant syndrome was, at its core, a product of a racialized discourse that framed much of the scientific, medical and popular discussion surrounding the condition. This particular debate brought to the surface a number of widely held assumptions about the strangely ‘exotic’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘excessive’ practices associated with Chinese cooking which, ultimately, meant that few of those studying the Chinese restaurant syndrome would question the ethnic origins of the condition.”

What happened is that Chinese restaurant syndrome became synonymous in medical and popular literature with Chinese cooking even though MSG was widely used by major American food manufacturers, he says.

And, as Mosby discovered, the debate over MSG ���Ի���its possible short- and long-term health effects, which have been claimed to range from mild discomfort up to brain damage, continues today.

The Nicholas C. Mullins Award is handed out annually by the for an outstanding piece of scholarship by a graduate student in the field of Science & Technology Studies. Mosby was presented with the award at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science at the University of Tokyo.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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“SSHRC’s investment in humanities and social sciences research allows our scholars to substantially contribute to Canada’s knowledge base, to culture and to quality of life,” said Stan Shapson (right), 91��ɫ’s vice-president research & innovation. “This basic research helps us to better understand the world while responding to the pressing social issues of our time.”

Forty-seven 91��ɫ faculty members received $4.4 million to fund their research projects through ’s Standard Research Grants program. 91��ɫ also received over $560,000 to support 17 projects funded through the:

• Research Development Initiatives competition
• Image, Text, Sound and Technology competition
• International Opportunities Fund
• Aid to Research Workshop competition

Graduate students and doctoral fellows also benefited from the announcements: 148 91��ɫ master’s and doctoral students have won over $5 million in scholarships and fellowships. More than 2,000 graduate and postdoctoral projects across Canada received funding.

Reflecting knowledge mobilization’s status as a core SSHRC priority, the competition also included special calls for Public Outreach Grants that support existing and ongoing projects that mobilize research results to a range of audiences beyond academia. Nine 91��ɫ projects were funded, securing over $1 million for the University.

In this category, 91��ɫ researchers enjoyed a 67 per cent success rate; in comparison, 2009 SSHRC applicants averaged a success rate of 33 per cent across all categories.

Through the Public Outreach Grants, 91��ɫ researchers will:

• Make literary research available to a broader community of researchers, students, teachers and educators, and policy makers in a sustainable way through the (ORION).
• Empower young mothers by exploring what they need to achieve economic, social, familial and personal wellness and prosperity.
• Share research conducted with marginalized youth with educators, community organizations and other stakeholders to help them understand the alienation and disengagement new migrants and ethno-racial minority youth experience as their families move from Toronto’s inner city and inner-suburban neighbourhoods to the outer suburbs, such as Peel, Brampton, Vaughan, Markham, Ajax and Pickering.
• Enhance microcredit program success for economic development through social performance ratings by making the information accessible and designing program evaluation instruments.
• Share new scholarship on the immigration of African American refugees from slavery to Canada with educators, community groups, libraries and government agencies, among others.
• Mobilize knowledge on the political economy of women’s rights—specifically, connections among macroeconomic policy, public policies that impact the paid and unpaid work of women, and women’s access to human rights—to local human rights organizations that focus on women.
• Provide experts in performance making, theatre design and green technology with a three-day opportunity to share practices, approaches and technological innovations.
• Mobilize the Aboriginal peoples of Canada’s disparate experiences with and knowledge of conservation by bringing together Aboriginal community representatives, academics, policy-makers, and conservation practitioners.
• Inform climate change policy and practice by making climate change research and evidence available to policy partners in four GTA municipalities (, , and ), and the .

“These awards also build upon 91��ɫ’s amazing success earlier this year in SSHRC’s large-scale collaborative competitions,” said Shapson. “91��ɫ received $6 million through SSHRC’s Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) and Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) programs. Professors Roger Keil, Pat Armstrong and Carla Lipsig-Mumme are already collaborating with their international research teams to study global suburbanisms, long-term residential healthcare, and work in a warming world.”

“Their work, coupled with the projects funded through this announcement, addresses key social issues facing Canadian society while demonstrating our leadership in creating and sharing new knowledge across the social sciences and humanities.”

“Our government continues to invest in world-class research to improve Canadians’ quality of life and increase the supply of highly qualified graduates that Canada needs to be successful,” said the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry. “The social sciences and humanities show us how to harness and interpret innovation from a human perspective, which translates into benefits for society.”

has posted a complete list of funded projects on their website.

By Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

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This year’s conference will take place on the University’s Keele campus. The 2010 conference theme is “Dialoguing Across Differences”. Keynote speakers and sessions will explore how to dialogue across relevant human rights areas in relation to this theme. Conference participants will engage in interactive sessions focused on communicating difficult topics.

Conference organizers are seeking proposals for sessions on race and racialization, gender expression and expectations, (dis)abilities or sexual orientation.

Presenters are invited to submit proposals on the conference theme for a 60-minute session in the format of a round-table discussion, individual or panel presentation, interactive workshop or dialogue process. Proposals should be provided to the Centre for Human Rights no later than Aug. 31.

For more information, e-mail conference organizers Kristina Osborne or Nythalah Baker or visit the Centre for Human Rights Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Much of what informs environmental thinking springs from a view that equates nature with sexually straight and queer with unnatural. The editors of a new book , turn those notions upside down.

Co-editors Bruce Erickson (PhD 09’) and 91��ɫ environmental studies Professor Catriona Sandilands, Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture, wanted to challenge the current thinking about what is considered sexually “normal” in nature and how nature is used to create normative sexualities. To do so, they gathered a group of mainly senior scholars who’d done work close to the intersection of sexuality studies and environmental studies in research areas such as queer geography, eco-feminism, environmental justice and gender and sexuality studies.

The result is a book that looks at three broad topics – “Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality”, “Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics” and “Desiring Nature? Queer Attachments” – with contributors from literary studies, landscape ecology, geography, science studies, history, philosophy, sociology and women’s studies, including leading researchers from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Erickson, who studied with Sandilands and is now a post-doctoral fellow in environmental history at Nipissing University, says part of the reason for Queer Ecologies was to explore the connection between environmentalism and discourses of homosexuality. “The birth of modern environmentalism and the birth of modern understandings of homosexuality and queerness came about at the same time through very similar actors and so we wanted to think about that a little bit more and see how those connections are actually a lot more deeply ingrained than simply being a kind of accidental event,” says Erickson.

Queer Ecologies asks contemporary environmental thinkers and activists to consider how their practices and assumptions about nature are located in homophobic and heterosexist perspectives, and to ask the queer communities to engage in more ecological discourse and action, says Mortimer-Sandilands. “It’s important to make nature and environmental issues part of a more robust queer platform. It’s not just about achieving equality in an ecologically disastrous world. It’s also about thinking about the interrelationship between sexual resistances and environmental justice, for example.”

Left: Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson

There are several historical connections between sexual and environmental politics, says Sandilands, author of .

“First, species, race and population were all hotly contested concepts in the late-19th and early-20th centuries; these debates influenced emerging understandings of both ecology and sexuality, which also influenced each other. Second, large-scale industrialization and urbanization both created new spaces in which new sexual cultures could thrive, and also contributed to larger social anxieties about hygiene, degeneracy and what was considered an 'effeminization' of white national virility. Out of these processes arose both modern understandings of sexuality and gender and modern institutions of nature conservation, most notably national parks.”

With these historical connections, it is important to understand that the modern environmental movement has sexual origins, and also that sexual politics have embedded understandings of nature and environment, she says. “In addition, political resistances to dominant sex/nature categories also have a history: from Radclyffe Hall’s literary defence of gender inversion to Oscar Wilde’s refusal of ‘natural authenticity’ to the Radical Faeries to the Lesbian National Parks & Services. It's a fascinating history.”

As a result, Queer Ecologies includes essays on both the “historical links between sex and nature and on more contemporary issues, such as the current popular fascination with the sexuality of animals, conflicts about public sex in designated nature areas, heterosexual panic in anti-toxics activism, population and development politics, and resistances by the queer communities to all of the above in art, literature and politics,” says Sandilands.

Erickson’s essay takes issue with the iconic nature of the canoe. “My starting point for the essay is Pierre Berton’s comment that a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe. I try to trace back this national feeling through these very normative ideas of heterosexuality and how the assumption by those that take up Berton’s statement as being such an interesting and witty way of understanding Canada reify a kind of heterosexist image of the nation.” He also looks at the politics of colonialism that have allowed the canoe to become a symbol of the nation.

Sandilands turns her gaze to two authors, Jan Zita Grover and Derek Jarman, ���Ի���how they responded politically and with dignity to the massive losses brought about by AIDS, and how they offer a model for thinking intelligently about the daily losses that are part of the environmental crisis. Too often environmental loss becomes tourism. Everyone runs out to see the natural wonder before it’s gone.

“But that approach is part of the problem, ethically and politically, we can't just ‘move on’ to other natures, and some of the approaches to loss and memory explored in the massive artistic and literary response to AIDS are very instructive to help us think about the consequences of what we are losing environmentally,” she says.

The book came about through a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada grant Sandilands received related to her work as Canada Research Chair, which included funds for a workshop which inaugurated the Queer Ecologies project.

Sandilands' next book, This Is For You: Walks with Jane Rule (UBC Press), is forthcoming.

Queer Ecologies was published last week; a launch will take place in the fall.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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“Over the last 25 years, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central and significant topic of scholarly inquiry across a wide range of academic disciplines. A cursory review of motherhood research reveals that hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on almost every motherhood theme imaginable,” says O’Reilly, who coined the term "motherhood studies" to acknowledge and demarcate motherhood scholarship as a legitimate and distinctive discipline.

"Indeed, similar to the development of women studies as an academic field in the 1970s, motherhood studies, while explicitly interdisciplinary, has emerged an autonomous and independent scholarly discipline in the last decade," she says. "This intellectual tradition of maternal scholarship both made possible and created the need for an encylopedia on motherhood."

Founder and director of the newly formed (developed from the former Association for Research on Mothering at 91��ɫ), O'Reilly approached contributors and compiled articles by some 300 women scholars throughout the United States, Canada and beyond for the book.

The , the first scholarly reference devoted to the subject, covers a vast array of topics, including how the study of motherhood is almost completely ignored in archeology, mothers in popular culture, hip mamas, influential maternal theorists, the economics of motherhood, psychoanalysis, fertility, guilt, ecofeminism, refugees and the future of mothering. The encyclopedia touches on mothers, and what it means to be a mother in almost every country. It also looks at mothers in film, books, art and poetry, as well as in the Bible.

“The publication is for me a significant moment in motherhood scholarships as it confirms that motherhood has indeed arrived as a legitimate and distinct academic discipline and scholarly field." says O'Reilly. "As well, the encyclopedia, in bringing together for the first time over 700 motherhood topics from A to Z, from aboriginal mothering to zines, and in providing a detailed summary and a bibliography for each topic, is an invaluable resource for anyone – students, journalists, writers, researchers, community agencies – in need of an overview of a particular motherhood topic and/or interested in doing further research on the subject matter.”

Left: Andrea O'Reilly

The book delves into the anthropology of mothering, a discussion on advice literature for mothers, a chronology of motherhood and mother activists. It explores the concept of bad mothering, absentee mothers, alcoholism, ethics, HIV/AIDS, race, slavery, lesbian and bisexual mothers, breastfeeding and more. In addition, it examines terms, concepts, themes, debates, theories and texts of motherhood within history, geography and academia.

To O’Reilly (BA Hons. '85, MA '87, PhD '96), the publication of the encyclopedia is like the coming of age of mothering research. The scholarship of motherhood has been legitimized and recognized, she says.

She introduces the Encyclopedia of Motherhood with a quote from author Adrienne Rich: “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.” And that is exactly what O’Reilly hopes the encyclopedia will change, that it will provide a glimpse into all things associated with and to mothering. The publication of the encyclopedia demarcates motherhood as an academic discipline and points to the future.

O’Reilly is the author of and . She is also the editor of 14 collections.

For more information, visit the Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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