In Feminist Praxis Revisited, Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) practitioners reflect on how the field has sought to integrate its commitment to activism and social change with community-based learning in post-secondary institutions.
Teaching about and for social change has been a core value of the field since its inception, and co-op, practica, and internships have long been part of the curriculum in the professional schools. However, liberal arts faculties are increasingly under pressure to integrate community engagement practices and respond to labour market demands for greater student “employability.” That demand creates challenges and possibilities as WGS programs and instructors adapt to changing post-secondary agendas.
This book examines how WGS programs can continue to prioritize the foundational critiques of inequality, power, privilege, and identity in the face of a post-secondary push toward praxis as resumé building, skills acquisition, and the bridging of town-and-gown differences. It pushes students to reflect critically on their own experiences with feminist praxis through critical reflections offered by the contributors along with examples of practical approaches to community-based/experiential learning.

Amber Dean is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her first book, Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance (2015), offers a critical analysis of the public representations, memorials, and activist strategies that brought the story of Vancouver’s disappeared women to a wider public. In addition to publishing work on the topic of Air India, she has also published several journal articles and book chapters on artistic and (counter)memorial responses to murdered or missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and on gentrification in Edmonton, Hamilton, and Vancouver. With Vancouver writer Anne Stone, she has guest edited a special issue of West Coast Line on representations of murdered or missing women, and she has contributed chapters to several edited books, including Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress.

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Jennifer L. Johnson is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Thorneloe University at Laurentian. Her research and teaching interests include feminist geographical approaches to the study of social reproduction and global economies; gender, race and racism; and feminist pedagogies.

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Susanne Luhmann is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research and publication areas include trauma and cultural memory, queer and feminist pedagogy, and women’s and gender Studies. She is the co-author of Troubling Women’s Studies: Pasts, Presents, Possibilities (2004).

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