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Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborative writing across our distinct caste positionalities. Writing as caste-oppressed Pakistani Muslim settler (Patel) and dominant caste Indian settler (Da Costa), we write primarily across caste power lines to focus on the failure in our own efforts at collaborative writing. This article, initially meant to focus on our complicities in white settler colonialism in its present form, reflects on the detours we undertook to arrive at this place of certainty that “we cannot write about our complicity together.” Specifically, we reconsider some assumptions underlining prominent methodological commitments of transnational collaborative writing across uneven locations in, for, and beyond the academy. Collaborative writing has been championed for its capacity to generate dialogue across disagreements, praxis grounded in social change, a challenge to the academy’s notions of individual knowledge-production and merit, and as a means of holding people across hierarchies accountable to structures of violence that remain at work within social movements and collective struggles. Considering the contours of what Sara Ahmed (2019) calls structural “usefulness” of collaborative writing to the colonial and neoliberal academy, we use historical and life-writing approaches to make caste violence legible in order to refuse the cover that collaborative writing provides to dominant caste South Asians engaged in research with Indigenous, Black, Muslim, caste-oppressed and multiply and differentially colonized communities. Our purpose is to foreground the historical and ordinary violence of caste as it shapes North American academic relationships, intimacies, and scholarship, in order to challenge the assumption that caste-privileged South Asian scholars of postcolonial and transnational studies in western academia are best poised to collaborate with Indigenous, Black, other racialized, and Dalit scholars and actors toward a decolonial, abolitionist, and anti-casteist feminist praxis. While focusing on writing across caste lines, our analysis can also be read as offering a space to engage ethically with complexities informing collaborative projects across differential horizontal and vertical power relations informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, north/south and other differences. In the process of writing this article, we have also paid particular attention to our citational practices.

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In February 2019, OUTSaskatoon, a 2SLGBTQ+ resource centre in Saskatoon, SK, received 1.1 M in federal funds to support a five-year project set to intervene in the instances and societal perpetuation of gender-based violence toward the 2SLGBTQ+ community. The project involved partnerships between OUTSaskatoon and the University of Saskatchewan, including a comprehensive research and evaluation stream to accompany the delivery of front-line services and educational activities. During the project’s application to the University’s Research Ethics Board (REB), members of the ethics review committee expressed heightened levels of fear and discomfort not only with the subject-matter, but with the role (and centrality) of the community organization within the research process. The documented experience explores pressing barriers to effective and ethical community-university research partnerships. To this end, the authors explore their communications with the REB alongside the themes of “vulnerability,” “risk-aversion,” and more broadly regarding the timelines of community work versus university processes. Together these themes maintain a culture of academic exceptionalism that causes significant barriers to the development of reciprocal partnerships between community partners and universities. In this case, the outcome was hopeful, as a formal complaint to the REB received a documented apology. In documenting this specific, though not unique, experience, we aim to highlight the possibilities for leaning in and building ethical space between and through community and academic environments to foreground both needed critique and collaborative pathways forward.

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This article analyzes how the conceptualization of gendered violence shapes responses and possibilities for redress in two very different community-engaged research contexts and projects. The first case study examines how Canadian universities enact sexual violence policies from the perspective of student activists and other stakeholders to understand the struggle over the power to define violence and shape institutional responses. The second case study is a participatory action research project that explores how transnational feminist and human rights regimes shape, inform, and often occlude or over-determine the struggles for redress by Indigenous women survivors of wartime sexual violence in Guatemala. In both contexts, we identify the persistent circulation of a particular ‘violence against women’ paradigm that functions as a universalizing exceptionalist imaginary which excludes more complex and situated understandings of violence while legitimizing certain responses over others. We consider the possibilities of critical community-engaged research as a means of challenging this presumed universalism. We explore the complexities of conducting such research as white scholars located within the neoliberal academy, given how its investment in community engagement serves to mask the implications of academic knowledge production in colonial and imperial projects and positions the university and the researcher as “saviours” of the “community.”

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Research on feminist pedagogy has analyzed activism-based teaching practices in introductory courses and special topics courses in Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS). Few studies have focused on courses that entirely center on feminist activism and have students implement weeks-long activism projects. In this article, I investigate how we can transfer an activist consciousness to our students, some of whom might not consider themselves feminists, might not have thought of themselves as activists, have not participated in any form of activism, or might be taking a WGS course only for general education or diversity credit. Using data collected in my “Women and Allies in Action” class via surveys, interviews, and analysis of students’ reflective writing, I assess which challenges hold students back and what motivates them to create and implement complex, creative, and sustainable feminist activism projects.

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How can social work courses prepare students to be scholars of social movements, and also to act in solidarity with movements for social justice? How can graduate programs reimagine the professional socialization of social work students from aspiring for expertise toward a stance of life-long learning? How can instructors more deeply leverage our teaching practice to advance justice in our communities? This paper traces one attempt to answer these questions through a three-quarter graduate social work course designed to deepen students’ skills and knowledge in practices for social transformation, while amplifying existing social justice movements. Drawing on reflections from the instructor and five students, course artifacts, and insights from other students and community partners, this case study offers a model of community-engaged teaching that centers solidarity, reciprocity, and justice.

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Feminist scholars and activists have a long history of integrating feminist praxis in the curriculum through community engagement initiatives. Using feminist critiques, they have investigated possibilities as well as limitations of these initiatives in neoliberal universities (Boyd & Sandell, 2012; Costa & Leong, 2012; Dean et al., 2019; Johnson & Luhmann, 2016; Kwon & Nguyen, 2016). Nevertheless, most of the existing studies focus on feminist community engagement within institutionalized Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) departments, programs, and courses. This article demonstrates how feminist community engagement can expand its scope outside the institutional boundaries of WGSS programs. It contributes to the existing feminist literature in several ways. First, it explores how feminist and decolonial praxis can manifest in a non-WGSS setting and the resulting challenges and possibilities that arise. Second, it argues that the transition from traditional service learning to feminist and decolonial community engagement is a complex, contentious, and iterative process rather than an end goal. Lastly, it elaborates on how faculty can not only avoid the tendency of “learning elsewhere” and framing the community as “unprivileged Other” but also build and organize with community through creative subversion of various structures of the neoliberal university.

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This article addresses the possibilities and pitfalls for fat activist engagement in academic institutions through the framework of the ‘fat person.’ Drawing from Emily Henderson’s (2019) ‘gender person’ in academia framework, we connect our own experiences as fat studies scholars, teachers, and activists with the experiences of other scholars in our field to construct a framework of understanding the role of the fat studies expert, or the ‘fat person,’ in the academy. The raw material for this article was written over the course of two extended online chat sessions between the authors, which took place during the summer of 2020. Our conversations were seeded by our prior histories as fat people and fat academics, and by our pre-existing collaborations: as supervisor and graduate student, co-researchers, and through teaching together in a fat studies course. Throughout this article we draw on scholars in our field who have explored their experiences as fat academics, fat researchers, fat students, and fat teachers. We argue that this framework is a useful step in furthering understanding of what it means to be positioned as the ‘fat person’ within an academic institution. We are embedded in the strength of our communal and embodied experiences, and at the same time, we are also aware of the potential ethical challenges of working from a place that is firmly grounded in community knowledge. Our hope is that other scholars, particularly fat studies scholars, will build from the framework we are suggesting here to further understandings of how the ‘fat person’ is constructed—and resisted—within the academy.

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Collaborative Movement focuses on an ongoing research collaboration centred on supporting trans/genderqueer/non-binary/queer community dance/movement programming and mentorship in Regina, Treaty 4 territory. Incorporating queer feminist community research methods, this article demonstrates that collaborations between community organizations and academia can be productive in their grounding of ideas (about gender and bodies) in everyday complexities and specificities of place in ways that hold potential for new forms of interaction, new ways of relating to each other, and new possibilities for action.

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In working toward a budgeting framework that responds to the often harmful impacts of neoliberal accounting practices on people and places, this research has been guided by deep-rooted principles that were gifted to the University of Saskatchewan, through a rigorous Indigenous-led community consultation process which interpreted institutional strategic principles, using Cree and Michif terms: nākatēyihtamowin | nakaatayihtaamoowin (sustainability), nihtāwihcikēwin | nihtaooshchikaywin (creativity), nanātohk pimātisowina | nanaatoohk pimatishoowin (diversity), and āniskōmohcikēwin | Naashkoopitamihk (connectivity). This consultation demonstrated the pressing need to redefine what a successful budgeting framework might mean by looking beyond the role of a financial plan and adopting a more broad-based approach using socially and environmentally responsible lenses that incorporate new directions based on Indigenous knowledges, world views, and values invested in creating a more inclusive and productive campus in targeted, incremental, and structural ways. This exploratory study builds on information gathered internally from the university’s student governance structures, broad conversations within an ad hoc advisory group, and relevant literature. An important role of budgeting is that it can guide performance measurement and management; our exploration included looking for ways to identify potentially “new-old” measurements of success as they pertain to the university’s stated objectives and aspirational goals. Current challenges of resource allocation faced by the university were reviewed to identify bottlenecks based on funding limitations that cause barriers to accessibility to academic and non-academic supports, and undesirable environmental effects. Our study raises more questions than answers, but provides insight into potential future processes, which we anticipate in this field report.