Kimberley Manning is principal of Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute and associate professor of political science in the Faculty of Arts and Science.
Across Canada, universities are at a turning point.
The three major Canadian granting agencies recently stipulated that all universities must include a diversity plan when they submit proposals for Canada Research Chairs. The time has finally come for the academy to focus on inclusivity within its long-exclusive ranks.
Here at Concordia, we are poised to embrace that challenge, thanks in part to a long history of equity activism and to an exciting new chapter of social innovation in the shape of the Critical Feminist Activism and Research (C-FAR) project.
Funded by Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science as an integral part of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, C-FAR is a community-building, research and training initiative emerging from an intersectional feminist framework. At the project’s core are anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches to equity, inclusion and representation on campus and across communities.
Those of us working on C-FAR are trying to address the challenges of a higher education system in flux. Based upon a year of consultation and an extensive review of the literature, we are exploring different methodologies to realize new possibilities for disruptive change both inside and outside of the university.
‘Equity work must be rewarded, collective and sustainable’
Our growing team of faculty, staff, students and community partners are developing innovative projects to address, among other needs: anti-racist curriculum in elementary schools and communities, support for gender and sexuality alliances in high schools, and workshops geared toward teenagers that combine developing skills in a specific field — such as electroacoustics — with feminist, anti-oppressive learning.
C-FAR’s approach to institutional transformation recognizes that the challenges of racism and sexism neither begin nor end with the university. But we believe a feminist institution can serve as a fulcrum through which solutions to these challenges, and many other forms of exclusion, can be realized.
Of course, equity work such as this is not new. Scholars — and particularly women of colour — have been proposing systemic approaches to institutional transformation for nearly three decades. In order for the work to be effective, they argue, it must be rewarded, collective and sustainable.
Indeed, the goal is not just to increase diversity amongst the professoriate, but to ensure that everyone involved is able to add equity work into their pre-existing commitments.