an interdisciplinary virtual symposium
Researchers across Brock University were invited to present research findings, reflections, and explorations of (im)migration, movement and (im)mobility at individual, societal or systemic levels, and/or the transportation of people, things, or ideas across places, times, or contexts.
Presenters and Abstracts
Professor Phillip Gordon Mackintosh (Geography and Tourism Studies)
Until the 1920s, turn-of-the-twentieth century North American children were the “future of the race,” their social protection an indisputable public good. The emerging automobilization of the early twentieth century, however, aggressively challenged this formidable and decades-long bourgeois domestic feminist and liberal Evangelical Protestant child-protection discourse. Consequently, Interwar Toronto’s (1918-1939) reckless endangerment of the city’s children, on increasingly crowded and automobilizing streets, occurred with virtually no municipal policy to protect children, especially those aged four and younger. Absent that formal protection, the Toronto Globe responded to the crisis by advancing child self-protection. The paper’s 1928 “Just Kids Safety Club” began training children, ostensibly, “to look up and down” the street before crossing. In this, the Globe was in fact describing the fatal consequences of competing public goods in Toronto: the sacrosanctity of children versus the presumed economic insuperability and incontestable social utility of automobiles. The city’s children lost.
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VISIT PROFESSOR MACKINTOSH’S FACULTY PAGE
Professor Nancy Cook (Sociology) and Professor David Butz (Geography and Tourism Studies)
Feminist interest in gendered mobilities has largely developed in studies of transnational migration, which focus on reconstituted performances of feminine subjectivity among women who move. What is less well understood is how changes in local mobility systems produce new gendered movement patterns and shifts in gendered subjectivities and spaces in particular locales. We address this question through an analysis of the implications of local road infrastructure development and an altered mobility system for gendered mobilities, spaces and subjectivities in Shimshal, northern Pakistan. Shimshal is the most recent village in the Gojal region to gain road access to the Karakoram Highway. Vehicular mobility has replaced walking as the means to access the highway. We describe how the road has disrupted pedestrian-era gendered movement patterns and spaces, reorganised mobilities and regendered village spaces. We then analyse changes in gender performances that are commensurate to the new spaces in which they are enacted.
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VISIT PROFESSOR COOK’S FACULTY PAGE
Nancy teaches Contesting Everyday Im/mobilities (SOCI 4P71)
VISIT PROFESSOR BUTZ’S FACULTY PAGE
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
2016-2021: Road Construction, Mobility & Social Change in a Wakhi Village (Available open access in digital form from the Brock Digital Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/10464/14863)
Denese Brown-Bell (Faculty of Education)
The migratory nature of human beings has been a long-standing topic of many discussions and research. Increasingly, the stories change over time based on the individuals and the circumstances they had to overcome. Bugnet’s (1879) book entitled: “The Forest” copyrighted in 1976 illustrates one of the earliest experiences of immigrants and human movement in their most authentic form. Many immigrants are seeking the proverbial better life. The objective of this presentation is to illustrate the most recent story of my journey from my home country Jamaica to Canada and move to the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. My journey was afforded to me based on my educational pursuits. My story is narrated through the experiences gained that I have articulated in a larger research project for my Master of Education research paper entitled: Fulfilling Dreams through Education: An Immigrant Mother’s Sociocultural Narrative.
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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
FULFILLING DREAMS THROUGH EDUCATION: AN IMMIGRANT MOTHER’S SOCIOCULTURAL NARRATIVE (BROCKU.CA)
Associate Professor Gale Coskan-Johnson (English Language & Literature)
In September 2021, images appeared in mainstream US media depicting US Border Patrol (BP) agents on horseback pushing Haitian migrants across the Rio Grande in Texas. The images, taken by freelance journalist, Paul Ratje, capture the graceful power of the horses, the whiteness of the riders, the blackness of the migrants. The photos freeze a history of US racialized violence in multiple juxtapositions when they invoke a “wild west” of cattle roping and filmic cowboys. I am interested in how this set of photos brings into relief the US state’s participation in discourses of mobility through which “modernity” is “used to cloak the logics of coloniality” (Garcia & Baca), and citizenship is constructed as “whiteness by law” (Lopez). In this presentation, I report on my initial examination of these photos and my exploration of social media spaces in which they circulate and become evidence for wildly divergent arguments about immigration.
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VISIT DR. COSKAN-JOHNSON’S FACULTY PAGE
Assistant Professor Julie Ham (Sociology) with Christine Vicera and Jemima Joy Gbadago
This presentation discusses the linkages between knowledge production and cultural production through creative works produced by migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, a global city characterized by diverse and creative domestic worker communities. Through creative works produced by migrant domestic workers, such as video, photography, and writing, we discuss the knowledges that emerge about labour migration, and the work that stories and art do in local and global discourses. In doing so, we offer a theoretical toolkit, grounded in decolonial aesthetics, for stakeholders involved in arts-based initiatives about migrant worker rights. More specifically, we explore the role of decolonial aesthetics in contributing to social change for migrant workers. We argue that collaborating on creative endeavours with migrant domestic worker communities requires an astute understanding of the structural context in which creative labour emerges, and the interactions between narratives driven by migrant domestic workers and narratives tailored for diverse publics.
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Visit Julie Ham’s faculty page
Additional Resources:
Dr. Snežana Obradović-Ratković (Faculty of Education) and Professor Kari-Lynn Winters (Faculty of Education), Assistant Professor Catherine Longboat (Faculty of Education, Brock University), Spy Dénommé-Welch (Faculty of Education, Western University)
Stories of displacement due to war, persecution, natural disaster, or settler-Indigenous power differentials, reveal a sense of an interrupted existence or a tenuous relationship with an original identity. Through a doctoral dissertation, poetry, children’s literature, applied theatre practices, film-making, and lived experiences, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, international and domestic graduate students, and community members of the Niagara Region explored the notion of displacement in Canada. The study resulted in artistic practices, ethical spaces, academic publications, a play, and a film guided by authentic experience, collaborative inquiry, and the Two-Row Wampum Belt – a living treaty between the Haudenosaunee people and Dutch settlers, made by the Haudenosaunee people in 1613. In this presentation, we will highlight some social, cultural, and political issues affecting both Indigenous and immigrant experiences, share and celebrate their voices, and offer a platform for reconciliation through research, knowledge translation, and the arts.
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VIEW THE FEATURED VIDEO LINK
Visit Snežana Obradović-Ratković’s BIO PAGE
Visit Kari-Lynn Winters’ faculty page
VISIT CATHERINE LONGBOAT’S FACULTY PAGE
About the series
Hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences, this series aims to showcase the variety of work being conducted by faculty and student researchers across Brock University, to uncover an array of perspectives, and to foster potential synergies and collaborations.
Cross-disciplinary and cross-Faculty participation is encouraged.
Learn how to participate in this Symposium Series.