Expertise:

Gender and politics, Maoist China

Language(s) spoken:

English

Professional associations:

PhD

Overview

Former Principal of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies, Kimberley Manning specializes in gender politics in the People's Republic of China. Her work also focuses on equity-seeking research projects in Canada, including efforts to support transgender young people and their families. In her work as a university leader and community organizer, Dr. Manning has co-founded a non-profit organization, supported student-directed projects in institutional equity, and presented before three different committees in the Canadian Senate. She is a 2021 recipient of the Concordia Academic Leadership Award.

Chinese Politics

Kimberley Manning received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington in 2003, focusing her work on the informal and institutional dimensions of gender politics in revolutionary China. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies,Dr. Manning co-edited Eating Bitterness, an exploration of the contested nature of state-society relations during the Great Leap Forward and famine, and is author of “The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of Chinese State Power” (Cornell University Press, 2023). Jointly awarded best book in Comparative Politics by the Canadian Political Science Association (2024), “The Party Family” is based on interviews with over 160 Chinese farmers and officials as well as extensive consultation of local archives, explaining the astounding successes and devastating losses of social policy reform at the elite and grassroots of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1940s and 1950s. Nearly twenty years in development, parts of the manuscript have appeared in The China Quarterly, Modern China, and the China Review. Dr. Manning currently sits on the Editorial Board of Pacific Affairs and is co-editing a new collection focused on Gender and Politics in China

Parent Advocacy and Transgender Youth and Children

In 2011, Dr. Manning began to develop new lines of research about, and services and supports for, transgender children and their families. Under Dr. Manning’s primary direction, two intersecting SSHRC-funded teams hosted the first national conference on transgender children and their families in 2012, bringing together over 70 Canadian academics, parent advocates, health practitioners, and community organizers. The team subsequently published an edited volume based on the conference proceedings, created the high-traffic website GenderCreativeKids.ca, co-founded a non-profit to serve parents of gender non-conforming children, published over half a dozen refereed journal articles, and participated in dozens of media stories and conference presentations. This work led to Dr. Manning presenting before the Canadian Senate as part of the effort to pass Bill C-16, legislation protecting gender identity and gender expression in the Canadian Human Rights Act (now law). Dr. Manning is currently co-authoring a book focused on the advocacy of Canadian parents of transgender children and youth and is serving as co-lead of the Transphobia Subcomittee of the STRIVE Taskforce, developed in response to institutional inequities at Concordia

Institutional Equity 

Building on her advocacy work with families of transgender children and youth, Dr. Manning launched the Critical Feminist Action and Research (CFAR) project in 2017. CFAR, which was supported financially by the Faculty of Arts and Science, was a three-year pilot project to create more inclusive processes and practices within Concordia. More recently, Dr.Manning has served as a Faculty Equity Advisor within the Faculty of Arts and Science; acted as faculty lead on the 2019 student- and community-led visioning process called “Filipino-Canadian Futures;" and served as a Co-Investigator and EDI-lead on a SSHRC-funded Strengths-Based Nursing Partnership Grant (2020-2024), on which she developed and co-facilitated a new training module in EDI 

 

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