Last week I wrapped up a marathon bargaining session over two long back-to-back days. At its conclusion, the bargaining team for Contract Faculty at Carleton University that I lead secured a new tentative agreement that will be presented to the membership early in the new year. I am very proud of the work the bargaining team did and I have high hopes that the TAs/RAs will be able to secure a fair deal early in the new year as well. Collective bargaining is an exhausting and at times infuriating process, but it is always worth it in the end. I am looking forward to a slower pace this winter semester with one of the bargaining teams finished and the other quite close to a deal.
Interviews will continue throughout this winter term with veteran sex workers as part of my SSHRC-funded research looking at the sex worker-authored materials in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive (CWMA). As mentioned previously, these interviews will contribute towards the creation of a guide for archives and memory institutions as to how to best steward sex-worker authored materials. Most archivists want to do right by these materials, but often do not know where to start. Interviews will take place in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto before I head to Vancouver a bit later in the spring.
This fall I will also teach two upper-level sexuality studies seminars at Carleton titled New Queer Cinema and Politics of Kink. Both of these brand new courses (to me!) will also include a graduate-level enrolment offering. If you want to follow along with my NQC course you can check out the course’s public Letterboxd page.