2025-10-28
Luc S. Cousineau, Ryan Hopkins, Amy Mack
As critical scholars of the Far-Right in Canada our work exposes us to acts of violence (both direct and indirect) every day. We are all deeply affected. From different fields (Leisure Studies, Sociology, Anthropology) and different institutions, we have had remarkably similar experiences. As students, we received little or no support to offset the personal impacts of our research programs and had to seek out (or create) our own support networks. As untenured, precarious, and student members of academic research communities, we question whether institutions will stand behind us when we are (inevitably) threatened, or whether we too will need to become victims of violence on campus before we see supportive change. This paper ’ s narratives highlight voids of support, and it proposes possibilities for change to sustain critical social justice research.
2025-10-28
Katherine Occhiuto
This study explores how low-income lone mothers in Ottawa, Ontario, navigate Canada’s complex, multi-sector networks of social supports in their work to meet their families’ needs. Drawing on reflective thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and text message-based data with 25 mothers, the study illuminates how systems organized to meet basic needs are often experienced as stressful and deflating, stigmatizing, and even risky. Mothers described the labour of accessing supports as extensive, with physical, bureaucratic, relational, and emotional dimensions, and as compounding feelings of shame, undermining trust in the state, and constraining their socio-economic mobility. The findings show how certain aspects of social service design and delivery fail to meet needs and can entrench poverty and erode social bonds. Participants also identified elements that can foster a sense of support and connection, such as services that are reliable, flexible, co-located, coordinated, and relational. These findings underscore the need to reimagine social support delivery to value provisioning labour, reduce systemic harms, and address the structural conditions that sustain poverty.
2025-10-28
Houman Mehrabian
Despite the increasing diversity of our online and offline communities, hate speech continues to divide us deeply. We urgently need to examine its ghastly omnipresence and our growing numbness to its harms. This article aims to identify mechanisms that exploit the right to free speech as a cover for the proliferation of hate speech in contemporary society. Chief among these is the manipulative tactic of equating resistance to today’s culture of uninhibited expression – which includes hate speech – with censorship. To begin with, I demonstrate that the idealistic “marketplace of ideas” endorsed by free speech absolutists becomes as repressive as the tyrannical censorship it fears when participants are constantly pressured into conformity. Next, I show that in this unregulated market, the idea of open dialogue gains more traction when participants are divided by hate. Finally, I examine how digital technology fosters seemingly benign habits that enable the online and offline amplification of harmful speech.
2025-10-28
Daphne Winland
Having conducted research and taught courses in political anthropology for several decades, particularly on nationalism, populism, and ethnonational conflict, I have initiated, facilitated and been caught up in many difficult conversations on issues including identity (politics), rights, conflict and justice with my students and colleagues. My research on the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the Kitchener-Waterloo Mennonite Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program has taught me valuable lessons on how practices of repair have been embedded or emerged in response to tensions, conflict and trauma-induced experiences, histories and lived realities. These lessons have become especially relevant in the context of recent challenges to academic freedom that have emerged in response to the ongoing war in Palestine/Israel. Suspensions, censure and surveillance are some of the troubling consequences, which combined have had an enormous impact on pedagogy and scholarship, affecting faculty and students alike. In this context, I argue that practices reflecting the centrality of (and urgent need for attention to) academic freedom are enhanced through pedagogical instruction and illustrate several strategies I use in classroom settings. I also discuss how despite the fractious environment created, and in some cases inflamed by the ongoing conflict, faculty and student groups are endeavouring to create and test out safe and respectful spaces for critical thinking, vigorous debate, as well as sharing and listening. These and other locally inspired initiatives are important to building networks based on thoughtful discussion and analysis, allyship, activism and more. I conclude by reflecting on anthropological research on the ethics of repair and its potential to inform pedagogical strategies aimed at navigating increasingly fraught and vulnerable academic spaces.
2025-10-28
Shana MacDonald, Kate Bradley
In the face of academic antagonism, this article argues that feminists must build caring and careful communities of practice to sustain ourselves. In it we explore the importance of creating intentional, feminist-oriented spaces of actionable solidarity to protect activists and academics from institutional antagonisms. Through our encounters as researchers working within feminist archives, and as academics who are part of feminist research collectives, we have developed a process for creating provisional solidarities that protect both our persons and our activisms. This process is based on our lived experiences, archival explorations, and social media research that informs our sometimes messy and often nuanced praxes of community-building as a counterpoint to increasing neo-liberal co-option of discourses of solidarity. In this paper we provide some guideposts for how we do our work as a way of inviting further conversation around how to manage the antagonisms we face as feminist scholars.