Brandon University affirms an unwavering and unambiguous commitment to diversity, inclusion and universal human rights. We are stronger and richer together, and we celebrate the unique contributions brought to our community through everyone’s individual circumstances, perspectives and life experiences.
Around the globe, and occasionally here at home, we must sometimes face xenophobia and racism. This often masquerades as nationalism, pride, or concerns about cultural purity. Bigots may deliberately use vague language or misappropriate the struggles of marginalized groups to advance their offensive cause. Their language is couched in pretend innocence that is designed to convince the naïve and to provoke divisive reactions. We are not fooled. We condemn hate speech of all kinds.
The paradox of tolerance reminds us that no accommodations can be made for intolerance. Hate speech is not free speech. Prejudice is not pride. Bigotry is not up for debate.
These distasteful opinions are to be found everywhere, and the Brandon University campus is no exception. However, there are ways for the BU community to come together in response:
Brandon University staff, faculty and students come from many backgrounds, from around the world. That diversity strengthens our community, and provides us all with enormous benefits. We are committed to providing an environment that welcomes all, where everyone can feel safe, supported and respected for who they are as individuals with dignity and as full members of humanity.
The hurtful or hateful actions of a small number of individuals can have an outsize effect on marginalized groups and we know that disturbing expressions can have emotional impacts that require care and attention. We remind our entire BU community that we have services here to support you.
On September 21st, 2023, Professor Melissa Adler gave a talk at Brandon University. The title of the talk, "My Queer Manitoba, in Books" was given in defense of queer and trans content in schools and public libraries. Professor Adler talked from the perspective of a queer single mom, scholar, and former librarian on the necessity of 2SLGBTQIA+.
Professor Adler authored the book, Cruising the library: perversities in the organization of knowledge which is available in the John E. Robbins Library in both print and online format!
Her book offers a highly innovative analysis of the history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the library’s inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects. Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black as another example of how the Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby “buries,” difference. She examines the physical space of the library as one that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities. Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the 1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific study of sexual difference. Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly readable, her book provides us with a critical understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research and information—as well as categories of difference—in American culture.
On October 26th, 2023, in John E. Robbins Library, Dr. Robert Mizzi gave a speech, “Queer Flourishing: Why 2SLGBTQ+ Inclusion in School Libraries Matters.”
Dr. Mizzi is the Canada Research Chair in Queer, Community and Diversity Education, and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba.
His speech emphasized the importance of queer content in school libraries through topics such as Problematizing “fear”: Permitted books, the history of 2SLGBTQ+ book bans in (school) libraries, libraries providing safety, the impact of book bans in (school) libraries, how queer identity-development occurs through school libraries, 6 steps towards queer flourishing through libraries and more.
Among many other works, Dr. Mizzi has co-edited or authored:
Rodriguez, N., Mizzi, R.C., Allen, L., & Cover, R. (Eds.). (2023). Queer studies and education: An international reader. Oxford University Press.
Mizzi, R.C. (2021). Out of the closet and into the classroom: Exploring sexual and gender diversity in Canadian adult education. In S. Brigham, R. McGray, & K. Jubas (Eds.), Adult education and lifelong learning in Canada: Advancing a critical literacy (pp. 37-47). Thompson Educational Publishing.