Conference Keynotes

The conference keynotes are free and open to the public. The talks will be livestreamed. Registration for both in-person and virtual attendance is required for both talks.

Ethel Tungohan, “Protesting, Podcasting, and Everyday Acts of Subversion: Care Activism and Dissident Friendships in Times of Crises”

Date: Friday, October 2, 5:30pm – 8pm (reception at 5:30, talk at 6:30pm)

Location: BioSciences Complex, Atrium (reception) and 1102 (talk), Queen’s University, Kingston

Register here for the Ethel Tungohan keynote.

Beginning with an analysis of the intersections between tech-fascism, AI, and the rise of the far-right, which have led to draconian anti-migrant legislation, to funding cutbacks across different sectors (including within universities), and to the suppression of protests, I consider the possibilities for feminist subversion when the threats we face appear so encompassing. Is resistance still possible? How might we rethink the coalitions and solidarities we form? And how can we – and how should we – ensure that, as we keep fighting for structural and institutional changes, we practice the tenets of collective and community care? Ultimately, I make the case for a revitalized understanding of care activism, taking inspiration from Elora Chowdhury and Elizabeth Philipose’s notion of ‘dissident friendships,’ Sarah Munawar’s writings on care and disability, and MK Thekkumkattil’s work dreaming about abolitionist futures without institutions (specifically without hospitals). Care activism can be seen in histories of migrant organizing, in ‘micro’ moments of subversion and in community spaces, including through communities generated in podcasts like Academic Aunties, and remains a vital source of strength as we live through multiple crises.

Ethel Tungohan is a Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism and an Associate Professor of Politics at York University. Her book, Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Communities of Care, and Movement Building, won the National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize. She is the host and producer of Academic Aunties, a podcast primarily for BIPOC, first-gen, and under-represented academics that tries to encourage its listeners to be – as former guest Sarah Ahmed encourages – feminist killjoys in the academy and in real life. In her spare time, she boxes, does art with her kids, and voraciously reads fiction.

Susan Stryker, “Changing Gender”

Drawing from her new book Changing Gender, historian Susan Stryker traces a new genealogy of the gender concept itself–one that restablishes its connection with grammar, situates its earlies uptake not in mid-20th-century social science but rather in mid-19th-century phrenology, and highlights its connections to cybernetics and psychedelics research in the Cold War. She suggests that “changing gender,” not in the sense of transitioning from one gender to another but in transforming the socio-cultural framework through which we understand personhood, is a necessary undertaking in our troubled contemporary world.

Susan Stryker, historian, theorist, filmmaker, and activist whose work has shaped the conversation on trans issues since the 1990s. The author and editor of field-defining texts that include Transgender History, Transgender Studies Reader, Queer Pulp, and Gay by the Bay, Professor Stryker currently holds a distinguished visiting appointment at Stanford University’s Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research.