Graduate Social Justice Fellows Workshop

Join us for the second session of our 2025-26 Social Justice Graduate Fellow Seminars. 

The goal of these seminars is to give constructive feedback to our fellows on their work-in-progress.

Each talk will last 30-35 minutes, followed by an invited commentary of 5-10 minutes, and a discussion of 15-20 minutes.

Vegan snacks and refreshments will be served. Everyone is welcome. 

Note: Please arrive early to get coffee and snacks, so we can start at 1 pm on the zoom. 

Join us

In person: The conference room of the SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation (LB-145 in the J. W. Mc Connell Building) or remotely on zoom. 

Please register here and indicate on the zoom registration if you will join us in person or online.

Session 1: Raphaël Bessette (1:05 - 2:25 pm) 

Raphaël Bessette is a PhD student in Humanities.

Project: Animating the intimate: The material and affective capacities of trans prosthetics

Raphaël's dissertation is situated at the intersections of trans studies, critical disability studies, science and technology studies and research-creation and focuses on the parallel and connected practices of trans design and experimental filmmaking. They explore the relations between materials and bodies in their engagements with gender affirming gear (binders, breast forms, tucking underwear, packing, stand-to-pee devices, sex-toys, etc.) and in materialist analog filmmaking techniques of frame-by-frame animation and process cinema.

Respondent: TBD

Session 2: Richenda Grazette (2:40 - 3:50 pm)

Richenda Grazette is a Master student in Individualized Studies.

Project: “Haunted utopias: interpersonal culture, conflict, and cohesion in the activist-workplace”

Abstract: Leftist, grassroots nonprofits are constantly negotiating an almost half-world existence between a philosophical and political opposition to institutions and the state, while also needing to comply with and uphold the standards the state dictates, with respect to governance and human resources. In navigating these tensions, these organizations attempt to build internal utopias that reflect their political and social aspirations: building internally the futures they attempt to realize in their communities. This project explores what "shows up" for individual workers within these spaces before and during the utopian attempts, and the impacts that their personal or ancestral pasts have on their workplace cohesion. Anchored in hauntology (the term coin by Jacques Derrida’s 1993 Spectres of Marx), this project invited a group of research participants to craft “ghost stories” about the spectres that inform their visions of the ideal, how they've attempted to achieve it, and how those ghosts haunt their experience of relationships with one another and the work they have to do. As the people who make up these nonprofits collide and compare politics with one another as they navigate their organizations’ inherent tensions, they provide the perfect case study that explores a pragmatic approach to social justice: how do we work better together even if the world around us doesn’t change? What lessons can be learned from their quests to create a utopian workplace under an often-dystopian reality? Respondent: TBD. 

Respondent: Karen Herland, Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality program advisor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute