Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world. By 2030, SDG 5 seeks to achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls. EUC research integrates a gender-based analysis into many different research contexts, but women’s rights as articulated in urban spaces are a particular focus of our work. At the same time, the queering of urban spaces and rethinking of traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality are also key ways in which EUC researchers address questions of urban social justice.
Women and Urban Place-making
Through research, public education and policy engagement in strategically chosen cities in the Gobal South, Linda Peake’s partnership project GenUrb is advancing our understanding of how the relationship between poverty and inequality is being transformed in the early 21st century context of urbanization, reconstituting gender relations and gendered rights to the city.
Queering Canadian suburbs: LGBTQ2S place-making outside of central cities
Alison Bain’s research examines the relationships of cultural workers and LGBTQ2S populations to cities and suburbs, with particular attention to questions of identity formation, place-making, spatial politics, and neighborhood change. The research indicates that suburban LGBTQ2S activisms primarily center on enactments of local resourcefulness, community resilience and institutional reworking.
Subversive Performances of Quarantine
Jin Haritaworn’s latest books, Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto and Queering Urban Justice: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto are part of their Marvellous Grounds project. Each assembles ways in which QTBIPOC create communities, innovate methods of transformation and foster connections within Toronto and beyond. Their latest project on Subversive Performances of Quarantine: Organizing Across Differences at the Conjuncture of Protest and Pandemic examines the contributions that multiple marginalized communities are making to help their societies survive and recover from the pandemic.
Exploring gender, race, criminality, citizenship, and activism in Black refugee communities in Canada
Muna-Udbi Abdulkadir Ali’s current research builds on her SSHRC-funded qualitative doctoral study of public policy and media discourses of gender, race, class, criminality, surveillance, and citizenship related to Somali communities in Canada during the 1990s and the implications of such discourses on Somali life today. Realized through a Black feminist analytic, her work engaged Canadian print-media and government archives to examine the ways power manifests in discourses, formation of knowledge, and the marginalization of Somali subjects, particularly in the construction of the racial imaginary of Canada in the 1990s. These archives continue to manifest and shape the social and material life of Somali people in Canada today.
ReMaking places, making lives: Queer and trans youth strategies for more-than-survival in suburban Toronto claiming pathologized identities and spaces
How do LGBTQ2S+ youth survive and thrive in suburban Toronto? Queer and trans youth are more likely than their straight peers to experience isolation, depression, harassment, violence, and suicide; these structural inequities are amplified by intersecting racial, class, and gendered oppressions. Wiley Sharp's research interests include queer and trans place-making, sub/urban geographies, urban mobilities, digital geographies, and everyday life.
Reclaiming pathologized identities and spaces
Kafia Abdulkader’s graduate research studies how the fat Black female body is pathologized as something difficult to understand and lacking in complexity in contemporary society. The work integrates Black feminist methodology to critique pop culture tropes and social media as a neocolonial tool that perpetuates dangerous ideas around racism, heterosexism, fatphobia, and ableism.
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