Concordia Journal Home > Archives > May 8, 2008 issue >

Studying gender in the academy 

By Karen Herland

As the Simone de Beauvoir Institute marks three decades of women’s studies at Concordia, researchers from across the university spent two days together sharing their work and contemplating the future of feminist research here.

The interdisciplinary initiative brought professors and graduate students together from the humanities, social sciences and fine arts. Although religion and communication studies were well represented, education, English, sociology and history also enjoyed multiple interventions. In all, about 50 men and women presented their research and pedagogical interests as they relate to gender.

The second afternoon ended with a panel discussion on the state of feminist research at Concordia. Leslie Regan Shade began the discussion by recounting how her announcement five years ago that she would be moving to Concordia from her then home institution was greeted with an enthusiastic “Oh, that’s feminist heaven.”

And while she acknowledged that Concordia “attracts so many grad students interested in diversity, race, gender and sexuality that we can’t accommodate them all,” most of the panelists were more tempered in their enthusiasm.

Many spoke of feminist appointments within their programs as token. Candis Steenbergen spoke of her frustration as a Humanities PhD student trying to find a supervisor whose research interests matched her own, and who would have the time and energy to provide support to her and the numerous other students seeking the same attention.

For Kim Sawchuk, who like Shade is in Communication Studies, being a feminist means being expected to handle an unbelievable workload as a “labour of love,” with traditional notions of women’s unpaid labour grafted on to their academic careers. Only instead of raising families, researchers in her position are expected to extend extraordinary support to grad students, represent a feminist or gender perspective on numerous committees, and continue to maintain significant academic research achievements of their own.

She and several other panelists made the link between female academics and illness. Recent studies have suggested that women in academia experience much more stress than their male colleagues.
Kristina Huneault portrayed a rosier picture from inside the Art History Department. As one of the founders of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiatives, and one of four Concordia research chair-holders in her faculty, she acknowledged a significant amount of “support, grants and goodwill” extended to her by her department.

Chantal Maillé presented the history of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute as a series of crises in identifying the scope, importance and value of the field of women’s studies within the academy.

The panelists and those in the audience took up the question, wondering whether women’s studies and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute support feminist studies, or ghettoize it.

In the end, most agreed that the Institute’s presence acts as “a beacon and a fulcrum showing that kind of research is on the agenda.”

At an informal reception at the end of the day, Acting Institute President Viviane Namaste presented the first prototype of a research guide enumerating feminist scholars at the university with their areas of expertise and contact information. The booklets are available at the Institute, 2170 Bishop St. Or email Linda.Bowes@concordia.ca