Description
Over the last decade there has been an explosion in attention to questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and values and actions often linked to EDI, including belonging, decolonizing, and justice. However, most institutions tend to frame actions to addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion as a separate consideration from activities aimed at supporting mental and physicalwellbeing. These initiatives tend to focus on individual actions rather than communal approaches to care, running the risk of maintaining rather than challenging the intersectional structural issues that sustain inequities related to gender identity, sexuality, race, ability, and mental health.
The proposed Connection event, themed on How to Care: Mentorship, Wellness, and Community-Driven Initiatives for EDI, brings together international experts with the scholarly and practical knowledge required to bridge this gap and share and develop community-led strategies for EDI, working from the lens of communal and collective rather than individualized (self)care. Through the event, we will form the basis for a broad transnational network of critical
feminist scholars engaging with communal-focused approaches to addressing the challenges that EDI activities and related initiatives focus on, a key priority of the SSHRC action plan to Shift Dynamics of Privilege and Marginalisation.
Over the course of the three days of the symposium, we will focus on approaches to EDI, showcasing critical work on existing tactics as well as collective approaches that challenge individualized frameworks, showcasing keynote speakers from both scholarly and community spaces. We will also emphasize methods- feminist, participatory, and community-based as well as activist and research-creation- that support communal approaches to care and EDI,
foregrounding the practices of those on the ground in practitioner spaces. Our final day will be dedicated to mentorship and training workshops for graduate student work led by the PI and coapplicant with participation from York University’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit to support community-driven projects led by junior scholars. We will also provide mentorship to grad students with an eye to their inclusion in a proposed scholarly edited collection and to support
knowledge mobilization strategies beyond academic outputs for student work.
Turning from self-care to communal care as a framework for transformative change in practice, these events will also center on how care can inflect our scholarly methods, in particular those already attuned to community-driven research, including critical feminist approaches, feminist participatory action research, and research-creation activities. A key strength of the proposed
events is the inclusion of established and emerging scholars alongside local community and institutional organizers and activists. This means our audiences are multiple and are unified by commitments to supporting equity, diversity, and inclusion in working and professional contexts from a collective rather than an individualized approach, including graduate students, faculty members, and community and institutional stakeholders.
| Period | 6 Nov 2025 → 7 Nov 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Toronto, Canada, OntarioShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |