Giving Thanks: Gratitude and Feminist Work

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to co-facilitate a workshop on how to address and combat misogyny in the academy. The conference, Consent Culture: A National Forum to End Sexual Violence on Campus, was organized by the Nova Scotia chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students. I was excited by the invitation, and I was also nervous. And so I did what I tend to do: I said yes and then sought out collaborators.

My co-facilitators–Fazeela Jiwa and Kaarina Mikalson–are brilliant, generous, and incredibly expansive in their thinking. When we sat down to plan the workshop I started by saying “Fazeela, meet Kaarina. Kaarina, meet Fazeela.”

You see, these two people were willing (immediately, I might add) to work with each other despite the fact they had never met. Work together! On a workshop! About combatting misogyny! Phenomenal, right?

As we sat at a tiny table in the busy cafe close to the university, figuring out how to talk with one another about practical things (how much time do we have? How many people are expected at this workshop? How will we make it feel like a safe enough space to talk about practical tactics for combating misogyny) we were also navigating new relationships. Questions such as “How long have you lived here?” and “What do you like to do in your spare time–wait, what do you do?” interspersed our mapping, planning, and defining of terms such as micro aggression and intersectionality. We each had a different approach to how to think through the material. Each person listened carefully when the others spoke, and then chimed in adding ideas or information, or questioning a suggestion generatively.

To organize our allotted hour and fifteen minute workshop (and to address my anxious need to have a fairly specific roadmap for any class, even if that map gets thrown out in the first five minutes) we drew on our own experiences of facilitation. We also had a veritable archive of material I had gathered when I reached out to half a dozen other women and women-identified people who work, or have worked, or are working in academic settings. When I asked this group of people for suggestions of material, approaches, or best practices, they took time out of their incredibly busy, diverse, demand-filled lives and responded with suggestions. The suggestions included making sure to do our pronouns and let the participants do theirs, if they choose, to not simply make acknowledgement of the Indigenous traditional territory where we were guests, but also to think through how to activate those acknowledgements (Chelsea Vowel has an amazing piece on this), to not just cite terms but to historicize them (for example, remind participants that ‘intersectionality” is a methodology that comes from Black feminist thought), to make the space trans inclusive immediately, and to try spatial mapping as a way of doing a lot of conceptual work in a short period of time.

I mean, really. Pretty wonderful and thoughtful, right?

Between the invitation to combat misogyny in a practical way, the willingness of two amazing people to co-facilitate, the wealth of generosity and information from a group of people who also don’t all know one another… well, it all felt pretty amazing. And the experience of organizing, asking for help, and then facilitating the workshop (which went well, by the way), got me thinking bout how grateful I am to know all these smart, caring people. It got me thinking about how grateful I am for the thinking that can, and sometimes does, happen in academic places.

We know that the University–as an institution, as a business, and, at its best, as a site of resistance and knowledge-generation–is built on heteronormativity, White supremacy, and class exclusion. We know that in Canada universities sit on Indigenous lands, and that there is so much work to be done in the projects of both reconciliation and resurgence. We know that misogyny takes the form of micro aggressions and violent assaults every day. And we know that racism is harnessed as so-called “humour” and that spaces of higher learning are violent towards people of colour. We know that precarity is damaging to the education mission as well as to individual lives lived in a constant state of crisis. We know this.

Yet, on this day that we take to pause and be grateful for the people and things in our lives, I find myself being grateful for academe. Not as some totemic bastion of knowing, but because all the people I encountered in this one workshop–the conference organizers (all students!), my co-facilitators, the friends and acquaintances and colleagues who shared their own hard-earned knowledge, the participants, the keynote speakers (who were Indigenous women and women of colour) who preceded us and spoke of the complex and viscerally raw project of decolonization–I encountered them all through academe, in one way or another.

And so I am grateful for the possibility, the fortitude, the resilience, the resolve, and the hope of people working in academe, or against it, in the service of a more equitable world. I am grateful for books, for the expansiveness that I see in my students’ faces when they read certain writers. I am grateful for my new colleagues. I am grateful for my old colleagues. I am grateful for people calling out and calling to question all the hard questions. And I am grateful for Hook & Eye, for the voice this space has given me, and for you, readers, who bear witness and work, too, from your own subjectivities and situations. In another week of horrifically violent, sexist, homophobic and transphobic, and racist news, I am grateful for you, readers.

Let’s take pause, and then, let’s get back to work.