Community Involvement

In addition to my research and formal teaching activities, I am an active member of my academic and local community, understanding community engagement  to be an important part of  both my pedagogical commitments and feminist practice. As such, I am regularly involved in university activities, such as serving on the committee of the Emergence Queer Arts Festival in 2014, and acting as a panel chair for the annual Undergraduate Conference on Gender and Sexuality in 2017.

In 2014 I acted as a co-founder of the Women’s Studies and Feminist Research Graduate Student Collective. Along with two of my peers, I participated in the creation of the collective as a response to the growing desire among the department’s graduate students to foster a greater sense of community support and solidarity. The collective launched the ongoing peer mentor program, which matches incoming graduate students with upper year students who can act as their mentor as they undertake the many challenges associated with beginning a graduate program. As chair of the collective, from 2015-2016 I also oversaw the development and adoption of formal terms of reference for the collective, and helped to organized various orientation and community building activities. In 2017, I also co-organized a teaching workshop on responding to student disclosure of sexual assault which was open to teaching assistants and instructors, and which received an overwhelmingly positive response.

In addition to my service activities within the University community, I am committed to involvement in the broader, non-academic community. In an effort to foster greater engagement with local feminist community and activism, I began volunteering with Sexual Assault Centre London in June of 2014, helping to provide support and services for survivor of sexual assault within a feminist, anti-oppressive framework. In addition to engaging in public education activities such as recruitment and information dispersion, I was actively involved in the training of new volunteers and have co-facilitated presentations on anti-oppressive practice, disclosure of sexual assault, and bystander intervention. I have also acted as a facilitator for SACL’s Girls Creating Change summer camp, leading groups activities and discussion aimed at educating and empowering girls aged 12-18.