Articles tagged with: Catherine Nash

  • Welcoming Dr. Katie Young

    Monday, November 22, 2021 | By

    The Department of Geography and Tourism Studies is pleased to introduce the newest member of our Department, Dr. Katie Young. Dr. Young has joined Dr. Catherine Nash as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Beyond Opposition research project.

    Dr. Young is an arts-based ethnographer, exploring everyday experiences of space through the lens of music and media. Prior to joining the Beyond Opposition project, Dr. Young was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Limerick between 2020 and 2021. In Ireland, her research explored experiences of night space for Black-Irish and African diasporic musicians and creatives living in Cork and Galway.

    Katie’s doctoral research focussed on gendered experiences of Hindi films and film music in the home and in everyday life in Ghana. After receiving her PhD in Music and Geography in 2019, she was the 2019 African Studies Association UK Teaching Fellow at the University for Development Studies in Northern Ghana.

    Learn more about Dr. Young and her research here.

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  • New book explores transnational pushback against LGBTQ rights

    Monday, December 07, 2020 | By

    FROM THE BROCK NEWS | MONDAY, DECEMBER 07, 2020 | by

    A new book from recently retired Brock Professor Catherine Jean Nash focuses on resistances against LGBTQ rights and equalities in different regions, or ‘heteroactivism.’

    Resistances against LGBTQ rights and equalities in different regions, or ‘heteroactivism,’ is the focus of a new book from recently retired Brock Professor Catherine Jean Nash.

    Nash, from Brock’s Department of Geography and Tourism Studies, and co-author Kath Browne of the University College Dublin coined the term for the phenomenon featured in their book, Heteroactivism: Resisting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Rights and Equalities published by Zed Books earlier this fall.

    Nash and Browne define heteroactivism as “both an ideology and a set of practices” used by a broad range of groups and organizations who oppose sexual and gender rights by “asserting the supremacy of heterosexual marriage and normative gender roles as the foundations for the best society and the best place for raising children.”

    “In order to understand their arguments and why they are framed as they are, one has to understand the social, cultural and political contexts that heteroactivists find themselves in,” says Nash.

    Whereas “homophobia” is a term that implies hatred, heteroactivists often sidestep the label by arguing that they are not motivated by hatred or oppression, but rather by apparent attacks on their individual rights, such freedom of religion, freedom of speech or parental rights.

    Catherine Jean Nash of the Department of Geography and Tourism Studies is the author of a new book on heteroactivism.

    “With LGBTQ rights and equalities in place in Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, these groups have had to revise or reshape their strategies in order to find room to have their ideas and position heard,” says Nash.

    Nash and Browne also show in the book that heteroactivism is adapted based on geography. “Heteroactivist ideas ‘travel’ across national and international boundaries and are taken up, but often in specific, local ways,” Nash says.

    The book grew out of research first begun in 2012 and supported by two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants, following many years of progress in laws designed to enshrine the rights of members of the LGBTQ community.

    “When this research first started, we were curious about what arguments individuals and groups who opposed LGBTQ rights and equalities could make, given that these rights and equalities are the law of the land, so to speak,” says Nash. “We saw these groups as quite marginal given the law and policy changes and assumed this would be a small project.”

    However, as Nash began to take a closer look at groups objecting to LGBTQ legal rights, visibility in the media or gender-inclusive language, the research turned up an unexpected result.

    “We began to notice that for many reasons, including the advent of social media, these groups developed increasingly complex international connections,” says Nash, noting that individuals read and commented on each other’s blogs, published newsletters and attended conferences such as the World Congress of Families.

    “In many cases, these groups developed similar but specific arguments,” says Nash. “That is, they might have objections to, say, sex education curriculum in both Canada and the U.K. but have distinctive and specific concerns given the different history of these locations because, as we argue, geography matters.”

    Nash points to the strategy of the Conservative government of Ontario that debated repealing the 2015 sex education curriculum, arguing that “traditionally minded” minority groups objected to the LGBTQ content and that their views needed to be respected in a multicultural society. By contrast, when some Muslims parents in the U.K. protested the LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed curriculum as well as broader school programs aimed at diversity that included LGBT families, they had to show “that they understood that LGBT rights were U.K. values which they needed to embrace, so they framed their argument as one of ‘parental rights’ to determine what is ‘age appropriate,’” according to Nash.

    Even more significantly, Nash says that as a result of these adaptations, “LGBTQ opposition began to move from what had been the margins to the centre of political debates, particularly around trans rights, teaching sex ed, parental rights and freedom of speech.”

    This observation illuminated a need for careful study of the complex landscape of heteroactivism.

    “The purpose of the book is to set out in some detail the sorts of arguments heteroactivists make by looking at specific battles in Canada, the U.K. and Ireland,” says Nash. “We were primarily concerned when we started that academics in particular were not paying any attention to heteroactivist opposition or in developing counter arguments to heteroactivist claims, though academics in Europe and the U.S. are now increasingly focusing on the various types of resistances that are becoming more prominent.”

    Nash and Browne will now continue their research in this area, turning their attention to a multi-year project called “Beyond Opposition” funded by a more than $3-million European Research Council Grant awarded to Browne.

    “The project’s goal is to engage with individuals and groups who might be opposed to or are uncomfortable with social and political changes around LGB, Trans or abortion for example,” Nash explains. “These are people who, in their different geographies, might find themselves in difficulty — for example, workplaces may celebrate gay Pride while some individuals themselves don’t support it and yet to voice their opposition might cause them strife in the workplace.”

    Nash, who will act as co-researcher on the Canadian component of the project with a post-doctoral fellow, says that although this project is just starting out, “the ultimate goal is to try to work beyond the us/them binary” to better understand how we might accommodate differences.

    Anyone interested in the project can complete a questionnaire at beyondopposition.org.

    STORY FROM THE BROCK NEWS

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  • New book: The Geographies of Digital Sexuality

    Tuesday, July 30, 2019 | By

    In May, Drs. Catherine Jean Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray (editors) published a new book titled The Geographies of Digital Sexuality.

    Book cover The Geographies of Digital Sexuality

    About the Book
    This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from ‘real life.’ Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.

    Citation: Nash, C.J., and Gorman-Murray, A. (Eds.) 2019. The Geographies of Digital Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillian, Singapore. DOI 978-981-13-6876-9

    Read more.

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  • Congratulations to Andrew McCartan on the successful completion of his MA in Geography thesis

    Tuesday, December 05, 2017 | By

    The Department of Geography and Tourism Studies would like to extend our congratulations to Andrew McCartan and his committee for the successful defence of his MA in Geography thesis entitled “Glasgow’s Queer Battleground” on December 4, 2017.

    Andrew’s research was supervised by Dr. Catherine Nash, and committee members, Dr. Philip Mackintosh and Dr. Ebru Ustundag. Thanks to Dr. Linda Peake (York University, City Institute) for serving as the external examiner, and to Dr. David Butz for serving as the Acting GPD for Andrew’s defense.

    We wish Andrew all the best for his feature endeavours, including his doctoral studies in Ireland starting in January 2018!

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