Women Scholars’ Speaker series opens today

By Lethbridge Herald on October 7, 2020.

LETHBRIDGE HERALD

The Women Scholars’ Speaker Series (WSSS) will open its 19th season in the virtual space this week, continuing to give a voice to outstanding women researchers and the groundbreaking work they are doing in the research community.

“We are very excited to present the Women Scholars’ Speaker Series: Virtual Edition. Through a series of online panels and presentations, we invite everyone to engage with the latest research around pressing and multifaceted topics including discrimination, equity, death and labour,” says Mia van Leeuwen, a professor in the University of Lethbridge’s Faculty of Fine Arts and a WSSS organizer, in a news release. “We may be at home, but we can still stay connected through our shared interest in engaging with ideas.”

The first session of the new season is titled, Gendered experiences of discrimination and microaggression in the recording studio, and will be presented today at 1 p.m. Amandine Pras and Athena Elafros, along with PhD student Grace Brooks (McGill University) and undergraduate student Monica Lockett (U of L), will discuss results from an international online survey of recording engineers, producers and studio assistants’ experiences of discrimination and microaggressions within the recording studio. They will explore their findings and how they highlight significant and systemic gender inequalities within the recording field.

The WSSS was launched in Fall 2002 by Shelly Wismath, dean of the School of Liberal Education. Its focus is to highlight local, national and international cutting-edge scholarship by researchers who identify as women and provide a venue for under-represented voices in academic research.

Julie Young, Tier II Canada Research Chair in Critical Border Studies and assistant professor in geography and environment, is also organizing this year’s WSSS sessions. She says the series continues to have a dedicated following and by moving online could attract an even broader audience.

“Over the course of the last 19 years, the WSSS has been a great platform for researchers to present their work and stimulate conversations about some very important issues,” she says. “Not only is the series valuable for faculty members by giving them an opportunity to speak about their work, it allows the community to engage with that work and gain an understanding of the activities ongoing here at the University and throughout post-secondary.”

The second session of the WSSS, ‘The Letters’: EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) and Tracing Work in the Academe, is scheduled for Nov. 5 at 7 p.m.

 To learn more, visit the Women Scholars’ Speaker Series webpage https://www.uleth.ca/liberal-education/women-scholars-speaker-series.

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