Finding Feminism(s) in Canadian Political Science Scholarship: Diversity and Resistance in an Era of Global Uncertainty

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that we present this special issue showcasing contemporary feminist political research, theories and practices in Canada. In an era characterized by global movements and numerous transformations that range from the economic to the environmental, the political to the cultural, from macro- through to micro-scales, including complex debates about the fluidity of gender, and where “backlash” against the symbols and agents of past feminist activism is rife, this special issue queries where do we find feminism(s) today? The responses to this question, as well as to the interrogation of the place of gender in the discipline of political science more generally, are undoubtedly diverse and contested. The collective efforts contained in this special issue feature a mere taste of the rich range of thought-provoking recent scholarship on feminisms. And even with this necessarily condensed portrayal (the articles in this issue are shorter than is normally the case to allow for more work to be featured), the special issue is ground-breaking in that it marks the first time the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique has dedicated an entire issue to topics of gender and feminisms.

The Future of Canadian Political Science: Boundary Transgressions, Gender and Anti-Oppression Frameworks

“…This aversion to self-reflexive story-telling demonstrates that, “once policies and practices have been formalized, such policies dictate what practices are acceptable and, as such, are further legitimized and understood as the only appropriate way to approach a given issue” (Lugosi, 2011: 302). CJPS/CPSR's “Finding Feminisms” and “50 th Anniversary” special issues include articles that take a critical look at the state of CPS research in Indigenous politics (Ladner, 2017), gender (Tolley, 2017; Vickers, 2017) and feminist praxis (Dobrowolsky, et al, 2017; F. MacDonald, 2017) are, of course, important steps towards becoming self-reflexive about the narratives that are conventionally promoted in CPS. Finally, the discipline's use of “diversity” as an analytic category is overburdened.…”

“…We cannot explain the decline; however, this suggests the possibility that gender and diversity researchers are taking their articles to specialized gender and politics journals. In any case, the determination of the special issue's guest editors to redress the “systemic biases around gender” in CPS by featuring “affirmative, activist-inspired academic research” (Dobrowolsky, et al, 2017: 405), coupled with former CJPS/RCSP president Jill Vickers’ and then CJPS/RCSP editor-in-chief Graham White's active encouragement of the publication of this issue allowed it to come into fruition (406). This highlights, first, the importance of having a critical mass of scholars prompting attention to gender and diversity issues and, second, the intrinsic value in senior scholars fostering a supportive institutional environment for the dissemination of such research.…”

“…Tolley's findings are confirmed when looking at CJPS/RCSP and the Canadian Political Science Review ( CPSR ). Here, scholarship has moved from initially focusing on gender differences in voting and in political representation to using gender-based plus policy analysis, to understanding how social movements are political and to an explicitly feminist approach to political science (Dobrowolsky et al, 2017). Indeed, gender research in CPS has increasingly engaged with intersectionality.…”

Engaging with Identity Politics in Canadian Political Science

“…If scholarly research dealing in depth with issues of ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality frequently does not contain reference to identity politics, is there a chasm between this scholarship and mainstream social sciences research? Notably, there has been increasing attention to diversifying political science scholarship, as evidenced by the “Finding Feminisms” special issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science (Dobrowolsky et al, 2017) wherein contributors describe their work as engaging in intersectional analysis or anti-oppression, rather than embodying identity politics 13 . These self-selected theoretical framings connect political science scholarship with nuanced interdisciplinary analyses that work through questions of positionality, power and representation, while eschewing the tenuous demarcation of identity from politics.…”

“…While questions of identity have long preoccupied Canadian political and social scientists, little academic research has interrogated how the term identity politics is taken up by Canadian academics. Increasingly, scholars have challenged the treatment of race, ethnicity and gender in Canadian political science (for example, Dobrowolsky et al, 2017; Nath, 2011; Thompson, 2008; Vickers, 2002), and some have written critically about the use of the label identity politics (for example, Abu-Laban, 2017; Bannerji, 2000), yet there has been little systemic inquiry into how the discursive use of identity politics is implicated in the treatment of scholarship that foregrounds race, ethnicity and gender. In this article, we aim to interrogate whose politics are being labelled identity politics in Canadian academic discourse, and what work is done by this analytical distinction.…”