Christina Hajjar
Dr. Angela Failler
PUBLIC MEMORY MATTERS
PROFESSOR – Dr. Angela Failler
Chancellor’s Research Chair and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Dr. Angela Failler is an award-winning teacher who is leading two major research projects. One involves public memory of the 1985 Air India bombings. The other explores public engagement with museums as sites for working through difficult knowledge.
“The museum is a site of public memory,” she explains. “It has the potential to shape the ways we make sense of the past and grapple with dilemmas of the present.”
An interdisciplinary approach allows Failler to examine complex issues from several vantage points. “Women’s and Gender Studies is not only about or for women. It is an inquiry into how all people’s lives are made to matter through relations of gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, age and embodiment, and how systems of power including colonization, racism and sexism bear upon our everyday social experiences.”
CONNECTING DIVERSE PASSIONS
STUDENT – Christina Hajjar (photo above)
Christina Hajjar studies Business and Administration and Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) at UWinnipeg. She is employed by the WGS department as a research assistant and as a coordinator of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies (IWGS).
“My feminism drives me to be an advocate and a community organizer, drawing important links between academia and grassroots activism,” says Hajjar. “I’ve recently co-organized an open mic night for queer and trans people of colour during Pride week in Winnipeg. I also took a travel study course this spring at Grassy Narrows First Nation on Treaty 3 to learn first-hand about environmental degradation, Anishinaabe ways of life, and Indigenous peoples’ resistance against injustice.”
WGS allows Hajjar to connect these diverse passions by collaborating with people within the University and the broader community.
Lauren Bosc
POLITICS OF SHAPE
ALUMNA- Lauren Bosc
Former President of the Universityof Winnipeg Students’ Association (2011-2013), Lauren Bosc graduated with a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies in 2012. Fuelled by a desire to think critically about the politics of bodies in contemporary culture and medicalized settings, Bosc went on to complete her MA in Cultural Studies at UWinnipeg.
“Taking a course in WGS was a turning point for my academic pursuits, shaping my university plans in an unexpected, yet very positive way,” says Bosc. “The program provided me with the theoretical foundations to continue my post-secondary education, and prepared me to work in a number of professional fields, allowing me to put theory into practice.”
While she plans for a PhD, Bosc currently works as a research and project coordinator for Dr. Pauline Greenhill and Dr. Angela Failler, respectively, at UWinnipeg.
