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On International Women's Day, join us for a conversation about COVID, motherhood, and paid and unpaid work.

Amanda D. Watson is the author of The Juggling Mother: Coming Undone in the Age of Anxiety (2020, UBC Press). The book explores how the popular representation of the contemporary mother — frantically juggling paid labour and unpaid care work — perpetuates established inequities of race, gender, class and ability. Mothers with the most power are complicit in the exclusion of less privileged ones, but also in their own undoing.

At this event, Watson will read selected passages from The Juggling Mother, followed by a conversation with Michelle Eliot, award-winning journalist and host of “BC Today” on CBC Radio One. Watson and Eliot will discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and intensified the challenges of this idealized version of motherhood.

Speakers

Amanda D. Watson is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Her work has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Studies in Social Justice, and Politique de l’image.

Michelle Eliot is the host of CBC Radio One's midday open-line show BC Today. Michelle is an award-winning journalist with CBC Radio One, and has become a familiar voice as a regular guest host on regional and national programs, interviewing community members and prominent politicians, as well authors and musicians such as Douglas Coupland and Bif Naked. But her true passion is for the open line, where her skill at engaging callers probes further into their viewpoints and digs deeper into their personal stories.

MC Travers is a Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University. Their recent book, The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution, situates trans kids in Canada and the US, white settler nations characterized by significant social inequality. In addition to a central research focus on transgender children and youth, Travers has published extensively on the relationship between sport and social justice, with particular emphasis on the inclusion and exclusion of women, queer and trans people of all ages. Travers is Deputy Editor of the journal Gender & Society.

Land Acknowledgement

Jessie Williams, of the Squamish Nation, is the director of Indigenous relations in SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). This role involves developing community partnerships, preparing a strategic plan for FASS to better serve its students, and initiating consultations to develop Indigenous student supports.

Williams holds a Master of Educational Administration and Leadership in Indigenous Education from the University of British Columbia. She has eight years of experience in educational services, policy development and assessment, and in language revitalization. She has a direct role in launching more than six academic graduate and undergraduate programs, certificates and diplomas in a partnership between First Nations communities and the post-secondary sector. Before joining FASS she was manager of recreation and community facilities at the Squamish Nation in North Vancouver.