Expertise:

China, Women and Gender Politics, Human Rights, NGOs, Civil Rights, State-Society Relationship, 2008 Olympics, non governmental organizations chretien canada reforms beijing tibet falung gong tiananmen square ngo chinese

Language(s) spoken:

English

Professional associations:

PhD

Overview

Dr. Manning is Principal of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. A Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies, Dr. Manning specializes in gender politics, with a particular focus on China's revolutionary past. Her work also focuses on the contemporary Canadian mobilization of transgender children and youth and their families, in addition to other forms of equity-seeking research projects. Dr. Manning analyzes political life through the lens of feminist theory, with particular attention to the affective enactment of family ties in social movements and state formation. In her work as a university leader and community organizer, Dr. Manning has co-founded a non-profit organization, advocated for the passage of human rights legislation in Quebec City and Ottawa, overseen a three-year student-directed program in institutional equity, and built two large grassroots campaigns to run for political office. She is a 2021 recipient of the Concordia Academic Leadership Award.

Chinese Politics

Dr. 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 authored her forthcoming monograph “The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of Chinese State Power,” to be published by Cornell University Press in summer 2023. “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 has reviewed submissions for a wide range of journals including Comparative Politics, Positions, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, The Canadian Journal of Political Science, International Political Science Review, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China, Twentieth Century 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 a co-investigator on a SSHRC-funded research project focused on the advocacy of parents of transgender children and youth. She is also the member of a partnership grant funded by the FRQSC to provide new forms of institutional support for transgender youth in Quebec

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 developed with a McGill colleague a study of the career choices of Quebec students impacted by Law 21, which prohibits public employees from wearing religious symbols. Dr Manning is also a Co-Investigator and EDI-lead on a SSHRC-funded Strengths-Based Nursing Partnership Grant (2020-2023)

 

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