My year-long term as President of CUPE 4600, the joint Contract Faculty and RA/TA union, is quickly come to a close in April. Over this past winter I shepherded the union through one of the most efficient and successful rounds of bargaining in memory. I had the pleasure of acting as lead negotiator for the Contract Faculty, securing a solid deal for my fellow sessionals with the help of a great bargaining team. I am proud of the work done during bargaining by both bargaining teams and that we secured two solid deals through the collective bargaining process at record speed. This efficient and efficacious approach has saved the union tens of thousands of dollars in bargaining costs and staff time (not to mention avoiding the heavy financial costs of going on strike), and got pay raises and retro-pay to union members quickly.
While I am proud to have served my union in this capacity, I look forward to passing the torch and returning my attention to research and writing, much of which has taken a backseat due to bargaining. Shortly, my attention will turn back to my research with the Sex Worker Self-Authoring project in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive where we are close to finalizing a database of all the sex worker-authored materials at the CWMA. With my RA’s we will begin creating the public-facing outputs utilizing the database as well as begin writing a number of co-authored articles about our discoveries and process. I will also have eyes focused on reprising the Queer / Sex / Work video program I curated for ChromaQueer at the next iteration of the TQFF, as well as presenting on the Sex Worker Self-Authoring project at the Canadian Committee on Women’s and Gender History conference at Queen’s, both taking place in the Fall of 2026.
This spring I will also turn my attention back to a collaborative writing project on the militarization of queer history vis-a-visa new LGBTQ monuments in Canada and the UK for a forthcoming international anthology on queer monuments. I have also recently signed an author contract for the long awaited anthology entitled In Granite and Bronze: An Unofficial Guide to the Monuments in Canada’s National Capital (edited by Tonya Davidson and David Dean) that features my writing on the Canadian AIDS Society’s Millennium Time Capsule. The book will be out on McGill-Queen’s University Press in the near future.