A promotional photo for Dr. Kat Sark’s intersectional anthology. Photo via Facebook
As you may already know, International Women’s Day falls on March 8. What you may not know, however, is that Dr. Katrina Sark, a three-year sessional teacher at UVic, is releasing an Anthology of Social Justice and Intersectional Feminisms on the same day.
This textbook is not your traditional textbook: it is written by undergrad students, and is available for free online. It is a collection of short essays, poems, graphic stories, art, photography, creative non-fiction, and personal essays surrounding the topic of intersectional feminism, and what that means to the contributors and to the author.
“It’s significant, it’s powerful. Their voice matters.”
Sark did her undergrad at UVic in English and History. With a background in cultural studies, cultural analysis, and cultural history, she started teaching at UVic’s Germanic and Slavic studies department, but is now increasingly offering media studies classes.
“There was a niche for gender related cultural studies,” Sark says. “Looking at different cultures from the point of view of gender, social justice, things like that. It was something I was really interested in, and it was always part of my work, but more in the background, so I took the opportunity to make that more foregrounded.”
Sark has organized many panel discussions at the Victoria Public Library on topics such as intersectional feminism and social justice issues, but became frustrated when she realized important conversations were happening without any recording or continuation of the topics discussed. That is where her idea for the anthology started.
“A lot of the most cutting edge work was being done [by the] students. And so [they] kind of fall through the cracks, even more than I do, because [their] work is not considered ‘scholarly’ yet, or the value of scholarship is distrusted a little bit.”
The idea behind the anthology is to build bridges between the academic community and the rest of the world. Sark values the idea of mixing the conversations between academic instructors, students, and the public, and finds the most impressive work to come from undergraduate students themselves. Sark wants to highlight the diversity of the voices within the textbook, and hopes that the public, and her peers, take the anthology seriously.
“It isn’t just a journal in that sense that [there’s just] critical essays” Sark said. “This is a bigger thing.”
On the night of the release, Sark is hosting another discussion panel at the Victoria Public Library central branch, this time with the contributors as the speakers. The contributors will introduce themselves and tell the audience what they contributed to the anthology and how they feel about it. Sark wants them to discuss what it means to be a young person who is a part of this conversation.
Sark plans on this being volume 1, and plans on in the future releasing a new volume each year on International Women’s Day, with future volumes having more specific topics and themes.
“It’s significant, it’s powerful. Their voice matters.”
The launch of the anthology is Thursday, March 8, 7–8:30pm at the Greater Victoria Public Library central branch on Broughton Street. Admission is free.
The anthology will be available after March 8 at https://www.humanitiesnetwork.wixsite.com/anthology.
