Notice Board

What is a university? Whose interests does the institution serve, and which communities and lifeways does it exclude or harm? The 2022-2023 University of Lethbridge Women Scholars’ Speaker Series, The University and Its Worlds, will explore these pressing issues through a number of virtual events. In the midst of ongoing funding cuts, precarity, labour struggle, public health crises, settler colonialism, racist violence, and neoliberal extractivism, we offer an opportunity to think deeply together about what is – and what could be. Featuring invited speakers from Canada, Turkey, and the United States, this year’s WSSS will focus in particular on the politics of employing ‘Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’ as a frame for addressing historical inequities and exclusions, a panel honouring the intellectual and activist work of our late colleague Dr. Gülden Ozcan, the management of sexual violence on campus and the academic well-being of racialized students.   

The first presentation in the WSSS 2022-2023 features Dr. Silma Bilge (Dept. of Sociology, Université de Montréal) and her lecture titled EDIble Others: ‘We’ve joined the table but we’re still on the menu.'

This lecture weaves together strands of scholarly work on neoliberal university, diversity governmentality and affect under racial capitalism, to think through a specific process of interpellation. It seeks to understand how the newest playing field of neoliberal diversity complex, namely EDI/DEI portfolio, hails us as “persons of diversity” and succeeds to recruit some of us as its players. What does it mean to engage in EDI enterprise within a university at this historical moment? In what ways do EDI rhetorics, procedures, and protocols articulate to a neoliberal university’s ongoing ingestion of difference and neutralizing of dissent?

Sirma Bilge is full professor of sociology at Université de Montréal. She founded in 2005 Intersectionnalité Research Unit within the Centre for Ethnic Studies of Montreal Universities (CEETUM) at a time intersectionality was unheard of in the French-speaking academy. An internationally recognized scholar in the field of intersectionality studies, Bilge is the author of two books, three edited volumes and over 60 scholarly articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a monograph tackling the double problem faced by minority knowledges (e.g., CRT, intersectionality, ethnic studies, Black and Indigenous studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, feminist, gender and sexuality studies...): their repression from the far-right populist movements and governments and their depoliticizing incorporation within the neoliberal university. She is also preparing a new book (under contract) on intersectionality’s global counterparts, both past and present. Her coauthored book Intersectionality has been translated to several languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Romanian, French and Turkish). 

Please click here to join the webinar