A graduate student at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta is receiving some high praise for a project that examines violence in queer and non/monogamous relationships.
Jaisie Walker, a graduate student in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, has earned the 2019 Parkland Institute Graduate Research Award for her project called “Unsettling Lateral Violence: Queer Genealogies of Non/Monogamy in Southern Alberta.”
“For many LGBTQA2S+ people, non/monogamous relationships are seen as progressive and transgressive solutions to heteronormative violence,” Walker said in a news release.
“Consequently, non/monogamous relationships have become a way of mobilizing political values in an attempt to be more responsible, caring and loving,” Walker said. “However, non/monogamies scholarship is beginning to outline significant constraints that factors such as race, gender and class have on negotiations of safety and desire in non/monogamous relationships.
“Furthermore, non/monogamous communities continue to express the need for community accountability and anti-violence models that move beyond punitive victim/perpetrator dichotomies.”
Walker’s project is proposing a study that would gather 15 participants to photographically document community assets and concerns around violence, safety and accountability. Those images would then be used to communicate desired changes through a participant-led public exhibit with policymakers, educators and program developers.
“Verbalizing relationships can be really difficult, and interviews can be really difficult,” Walker said.
“In PhotoVoice, participants are really leading what they produce. It’s exciting because this particular topic crosses over critical rural studies, feminist geographies, queer theory, anti-violence literature, gender studies, art—you can make this applicable in so many different kinds of fields.”
Walker, who was born in the United Kingdom, has worked on the front lines of anti-violence programming in southern Alberta with the U of L’s Campus Women’s Centre and the Safe Haven Women’s Shelter Society in Taber, Alta. She says she has witnessed firsthand how queer and non/monogamous communities are underserved by current framework around interpersonal violence.
“Parkland supports research that pushes the boundaries of so-called common-sense understandings of the world, opening up, instead, avenues for greater dialogue,” Parkland Institute director Trevor Harrison said in a news release.
“Despite some legal gains in recent years, the LGBTQA2S+ community still faces many challenges, as Jaisie’s project highlights. Their submission was clear, well-articulated, and frankly exciting. We look forward to the results of their research.”