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As a mentor in the Enriched Support Program (ESP) at 杏吧原创, Taylor Reid is now giving back to the program that she credits for helping her get accepted at 杏吧原创 and flourish in her BA degree.

As a second-year combined Anthropology and History student with a minor in Archaeology, Taylor is excelling in her courses.

鈥淚 love learning,鈥� she admits with a smile. Yet, getting to this point was a challenge and ESP provided the pathway.

Ten years out of high school, Taylor applied to 杏吧原创 University but was initially not accepted. Her high school grades were low and being in the applied 鈥� rather than the academic 鈥� track hurt her application.

Shortly after she learned that her application was rejected, she received a letter in the mail from a program that she had never heard about. The ESP offered her a bridge to 杏吧原创 and Taylor gladly took it.

The ESP is a transition program for students who, like Taylor, face hurdles to being accepted into university. By enrolling in the full-time year-long program, ESP students are able to qualify for admission to 杏吧原创 while simultaneously earning university credits. Students take first-year courses while also attending weekly workshops that provide tips, knowledge, and practices to help them succeed in their studies.

Taylor recalls that when she began the ESP last year, 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 have a lot of faith in myself. I was nervous about university classes. I didn鈥檛 know how to do an essay with proper citation, carry out research, etc.鈥�

The ESP workshops and support helped her to 鈥渟ee that I am university material by just showing me the math equation that is university: keeping an agenda, having checklists, having relationships with a tutor or a coach, asking questions, signing up for extra lessons that can help me. All these small things help enormously.鈥�

The program gave her confidence and the skills she needed to do well in her courses.

After successfully completing the program, Taylor was honoured when she was asked to be an ESP mentor. As a mentor, Taylor offers support to ESP students as they learn to navigate the university themselves. She advises ten mentees, meeting with them one-on-one and assisting them when they have questions or need help.

Her aim is to help them utilize the full array of ESP supports, so each of them can individually benefit from their 杏吧原创 experience as much as she has.

Taylor鈥檚 accomplishments have not gone without recognition. She is the inaugural winner of the Chicken and Boots Bursary, a financial award given to assist those who have experienced homelessness or are homeless while pursuing a university education. She also won the Jean and Richard Van Loon Spirit Award for her work in the ESP program.

Today, Taylor is thoroughly enjoying her academic programs and is thinking of pursuing an MA in Anthropology.

She always was fascinated by History, the program she had applied for at the beginning, while Anthropology was entirely new to her.

鈥淚 had no idea what Anthropology was,鈥� she admits.

Her introductory Anthropology course showed her that the discipline offers students approaches that one can also find in Sociology, Psychology, and History, while also providing insights into cultural dynamics and everyday life for differently situated people.

鈥淚 am very street-wise and the ethnographies I read speak to me,鈥� Taylor reflects, explaining that they provide insights into the challenges, struggles, and successes of those in a range of circumstances.

Taylor has had her fair share of challenges, but thanks to the ESP she is thriving at 杏吧原创 and proud to be giving back as a mentor.

You can learn more about the Enriched Support Program at 杏吧原创 by visiting carleton.ca/esp.

Original story courtesy of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology: /socanth/2022/highlighting-taylor-reid-anthropology-and-history-undergrad-and-the-enriched-support-program-esp

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By Nick Ward

Philosopher and Professor of Sociology (Cross-appointed with the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women鈥檚 and Gender Studies and the Department of ), Alexis Shotwell, believes can be an exercise of illuminative justice that exposes the truth, unlocks meaning, and fosters connections.

Although our current pandemic moment has Shotwell asking existential questions about writing and its contemporary function, she remains steadfast that it holds the imaginative potential required to create a kinder, more equitable world.

The Covid-19 health crisis has also spurred Shotwell to reorient her ongoing interrogation of our unjust systems, and she has taken note of the commonalities between this pandemic and the AIDS epidemic which she researched in great depth for her (and her co-anchor鈥檚) heralded .

In a recent conversation with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, spoke to many of the issues laid bare by the health crisis, from policing to intensifying virtual dependency. She also discussed the virtues of writing as both a teacher and a learner. As you will see, this interview covers many seemingly disparate bases, but features several distinct throughlines. These include (among others) reflections and ideas on collective care, self-knowledge, and the boundless power of creative expression. 

Shotwell is currently writing a short book titled, Collecting Our People, as a highly anticipated follow up to her influential (University of Minnesota Press). 

Additionally, Shotwell is in the midst of preparing for her online writing group 鈥榃riting Anyhow鈥� to host their third Writing Camp on February 15, 16, & 17. Everyone and anyone is invited to attend Camp with the caveat that they are 鈥渃ommitted to not being a jerk.鈥� More info here.

On Writing

What, in your opinion is good writing?

Good writing connects 鈥� it brings things together, it allows us to understand things about our own lives and other people鈥檚 lives that we did not, it helps writers see what we think about things that matter to us or the world. One of the technical terms for that is that writing can be a practice of 鈥渉ermeneutic justice鈥� 鈥� building the collective capacities to express meaning and have it understood. I think of good writing as a kind of truth telling, but also always in the mode we see in science fiction 鈥� writing helps us understand the world, and once we have some interpretive traction, we have a better chance of imagining how to change the world. So, having more people writing in this connective and meaning-making way is of tremendous benefit today; we need it desperately, I think. 

That said, I spend a lot of time as a teacher of writing, to both undergraduates and graduate students, trying to help people lay down their orthodoxies about what good writing is 鈥� whether those tenets are that complex sentences or esoteric terms that are specific to a discipline are bad, or that simple sentences are bad, or any of a million other things. If I could wave a wand and get rid of the 鈥渋s my writing good or bad?鈥� question that a lot of people ask right away when they鈥檙e writing, I would 鈥� I think that question really shuts people down and produces a lot of twisted, tortured prose.

Does being a good writer come naturally or through practice? 

I think kids have a predisposition towards telling and sharing stories, and wanting to write books, and recount to us things that they have seen or thought about 鈥� so in that sense I think of writing as natural, as available to everyone. My friend Hector, who is four, just gave us a book, titled and bound, with illustrations and letters that he did himself. I love it! It鈥檚 really clear that pretty quickly, and I would say as soon as people start conventional schooling, they lose that sense of possibility and joy in writing and they stop giving their friends artisanally-crafted single edition books. And this seems to be as soon as an authority figure is evaluating their writing and giving it a grade. Obviously, there鈥檚 a lot of just structural stuff about this 鈥� which parents have time to read to their kids and supplies to let them make books, who is literate, and then whether grade schoolteachers have the resources they need to be present with kids. Writing is shaped by social relations of oppression as much as anything in this world, and that鈥檚 terrible, because the people who are told that they have nothing to say are being denied the basic human dignity of expressive possibility. So, by the time people come to university, we see some really deep patterns around writing which are much more difficult to shift than just teaching people parts of speech and how to express themselves, and that has everything to do with justice.

When teaching writing, what are your guiding principles?

When any of us are teaching, we鈥檙e always teaching writing. A lot of us professors don鈥檛 think this 鈥� we think we鈥檙e just teaching some specific material. But at every level we鈥檙e really also teaching expressive possibility and assessing whether people have understood the material at least in part through assessing their writing. So, we should always think about that in our approaches to teaching and learning: How, as we鈥檙e teaching other things, are we also teaching writing? What lessons are we giving, implicitly or explicitly?  I was trained in a 鈥渨riting without teachers鈥� approach, which shaped a particular lineage of writing teaching in the US 鈥� so I try to start from the point of view that every student is interesting, has something to say, and is uniquely worthy of attention. I know this seems pretty basic, but actually once you start taking this approach the entire structure of grading and assessment at universities starts to be a bit hard to work with. The kinds of surveillance that professors are encouraged to take up, and the ways that writing is reduced to grades, and the sort of aggressively defensive approach to grading papers, as though we need to head off any future complaint from students 鈥� all of these things make it hard to have a good pedagogical relation. And, of course, it鈥檚 not like I can just magically have this great space in which to teach writing – I teach big classes, I am very frustrated when I discover students have bought papers or plagiarized things, and it鈥檚 really hard to have nourishing work around writing when I only know people for one term at a stretch. So, I try to build in at least one assignment in every class where I can give student responsive rather than evaluative feedback and to talk about writing not as punishment but instead as a specific kind of pleasure and goodness that no one can take away from them. And as a general approach I try to teach the student to build their own capacities to write and to evaluate whether their writing is doing what they want it to do; this is the only way to have a relationship with writing after they鈥檙e through with university and being in a formal teacher-student relationship. 

Do you feel a responsibility to support other writers?

Well, I have had a strangely large number of extremely generous teachers, none of whom had really tortured relationships with their own work, and all of whom modeled for me a kind of gentle, relentless curiosity. I didn鈥檛 understand until I finished my PhD how rare they were, and once I really saw what a rough go of it others have had, I guess I did feel a kind of responsibility to try to share some of the bounty I had received through no particular virtue of my own. 

Obviously as a supervisor of graduate students I have a core responsibility to do my best to mentor and teach them as writers, and it鈥檚 been a great honor to also teach this new graduate thesis writing class 鈥� well, actually, it鈥檚 not new anymore, I鈥檝e been teaching it for four years now! That class draws students from all across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and it鈥檚 a really lovely thing to see how people can very quickly and effectively build writing community together as graduate students. They are so smart and generous with one another, and those relationships carry forward and have helped a lot of people finish their degrees and get interesting jobs where writing continues to be important. And we鈥檙e planning in the Sociology program to have a similar 鈥渃raft of writing鈥� class directed at first and second year undergraduate students. Last year, I had the pleasure of working with a wonderful undergraduate, Felicity Hauwert, as part of the Students as Partners Program on research to support that course. We ended up postponing running it because so much of what we found as best practices I wanted to try first in the in-person classroom, not through Zoom.

Given how often professors have really dysregulated and dysfunctional relationships with writing, it鈥檚 pretty amazing how much of our job really is about nourishing the craft of writing, in ourselves and our peers 鈥� whether that鈥檚 through doing manuscript reviews or reading grant applications. So that commitment to helping others write in a way that we can read and helping them connect with their thoughts and feelings, that goes all the way along wherever we are in our careers. 

Then I have for a long time hosted or coordinated various kinds of writing groups 鈥� at my last job, we started a Friday afternoon writing group that was still going last I checked, eight years later. When the pandemic started up, students in our department were looking for more writing community, and so I started an online space using a program called Discord; we鈥檝e had two 鈥渨riting camps鈥� there, one in the summer and one over fall break, and people meet up there to do silent collective writing. It鈥檚 a really nice way to have some accountability and community and to see that others are also working on this hard work.

What are your personal writing rituals and processes?  

Sadly, in the context of the pandemic, my happiest writing is with a group in a caf茅. My parents ran a used bookstore/caf茅, and so growing up I spent many of my waking hours doing homework there, and it鈥檚 always been an easy space for me to drop into writing mode. Without that kind of exoskeleton I have to be more deliberate about setting up an internet blocker, turning off my phone, and ideally finding at least one other person who鈥檒l work remotely with me. I need to close off habitual 鈥渙ff-ramps鈥� like interesting conversations, doomscrolling, or books I don鈥檛 actually need to read that suddenly seem incredibly interesting; if I can do that for three minutes then usually, I can write for a 45-minute chunk. The pandemic is helping me ask existential questions about what writing is for and why I鈥檇 do it, but honestly the most important thing I鈥檝e found is just having a practice, a process, for writing. Then various products emerge, and they can be tinkered with and shared. 

On Research

How is your knowledge and research on AIDS shaping the way you are thinking about the Covid-19 virus and its momentous implications on individuals and communities? Perhaps now is the time for a reorientation of what we each deserve as human beings?

It was such an amazing good fortune to co-anchor the AIDS Activist History Project; we鈥檝e just recently put up the last of the transcripts of interviews we did. We had five years of funding, but we could have gone on collecting interviews and ephemera much longer. This was the first sustained collection of interviews with people who were activists in response to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Canadian context 鈥� and there鈥檚 so much more work still to do since, of course, AIDS is not over, and neither is the political work that activists continue to do. But hearing from some of the people who were working on HIV and AIDS in the years before there was effective medication, so, before 1996, has definitely shaped everything I think about now. The Covid pandemic has manifested, tragically, that the people who have power to make decisions about health didn鈥檛 learn the lessons AIDS activists have always been trying to teach: That disease is political, that the conditions for people鈥檚 lives matter to whether they live or die, and only through listening to the people most directly affected can we build adequate medical policy and practice. So, in Covid times we see, as we saw then, that social supports are vastly inadequate to the needs of ordinary people, that prison is a death sentence, that it doesn鈥檛 make sense to talk about medical care if people are being evicted or can鈥檛 get enough food to eat. 

So, yes, I鈥檝e been arguing that strategies of containment and policing this virus are failing us now as they failed us in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. There鈥檚 been a lot of focus on individual behaviours without a corresponding attention to who is able to manifest those behaviours; it鈥檚 easy for me, as a continuing professor with no kids and good internet access, to work from home and self-isolate and so on. It鈥檚 impossible for many of my students, who are working in restaurants and grocery stores and single parents, or my neighbors who live in rooming houses, to do these things. So, taking a cue from AIDS activists, I think we should think about this pandemic as a social situation, and something that we could vastly transform through changing the social supports we give to people. We could start by releasing people from prison and immigration detention, stopping evictions, and providing access to the basic necessities of life.    

In Against Purity, you advocate that settlers claim their bad kin 鈥� could you explain this concept?

I started thinking about how settlers, and white settlers in particular, can take responsibility for our inheritances in Against Purity. I realized after the book was published how many holes there were in my own account of working with history as a piece of resisting ongoing colonialism. This happens to me a lot, that gaps in one piece of writing opens up the next work. So the short book I鈥檓 writing now, Collecting Our People, starts from this idea of claiming bad kin. Kim TallBear, Audra Simpson, Zoe Todd, and other Indigenous feminists have helped articulate the idea that it doesn鈥檛 matter what identity we claim 鈥� rather, what matters is who claims us as part of their relationships. Like a lot of white people, I have family stories about having Indigenous family, many of them narrated to me by my racist grandmother; many people like me turn to these stories when we begin to understand how awful racism is. Or, we white people harken back to the parts of our families who resisted slavery, or who experienced an earlier iteration of forced migration 鈥� such as some of my ancestors who left Ireland because of famines there. If we want to resist racism and colonialism, it can be pretty tempting to claim to not be white, or to only claim relationships with people who stood against oppression. But I鈥檓 interested in the ways that white supremacists and people who are invested in Canadian nationalism claim a relation with me, as a white person. They make all kinds of decisions about how this world should be organized and who should thrive in it based on protecting whiteness, normalizing land theft, and prioritizing the wellbeing of the wealthy. These are our bad kin, people who violate the basic possibility of caring relationality. In the book, I鈥檓 arguing that we can claim our bad relations in order to transform them 鈥� we can be the kinds of friends who make our friends their best selves, build comradely communities that advance political transformation, and actively resist white supremacists wherever they manifest. 

Your thoughts on purity politics in the age of the internet?  

As I use it, 鈥減urity politics鈥� is the idea that we can be individually innocent, that we should be perfect before we try to make the world better 鈥� two impulses that tend to make people defensive, obsessed with pointing out other people鈥檚 flaws or mistakes, and incapable of organizing collective changes. So, I鈥檓 tempted to say that the internet changes nothing about purity politics!

But of course, that鈥檚 not true. Among other things, as soon as we鈥檙e on the internet we鈥檙e participating in material relations of terrible harms 鈥� from using extractively mined rare earth minerals in our phones to the heat sinks of the computers holding the clouds we access to the future obsolescence of our devices. And then our behaviour doesn鈥檛 just intensify but rather may transform in response to online spaces; so, the purity politics impulse to not be contaminated, or complicit, can manifest online perhaps more than offline. But I鈥檓 interested too in the ways that being very online helps us perceive our collective situation and helps us get more real about being noninnocent, co-produced, and connected. I mean, the internet is a relation, like everything, and so we have a chance there to reflect on what kind of relation we can hold with others. For me, the internet is always what social theorist Stuart Hall used to characterize as 鈥渨ithout guarantees鈥� 鈥� the form itself doesn鈥檛 reliably or necessarily produce any specific social relation. In my own life, I love and rely on online spaces not only for inspiration but for taking strategic cues from others about the collective, distributed project many of us are working on, which is, more or less, trying to create a world in which everyone has what they need to live joyful, dignified lives. 

Additional Links

Prof. Shotwell’s interview in The Atlantic,

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鈥淲riting Anyhow鈥� is an online group (organized by Alexis Shotwell, Sociology) that has been writing together since mid-April 2020.

Writing Anyhow is hosting its third Writing Camp, February 15, 16, & 17.

This will be a supportive, kind space to do some intensive writing in a collective setting over a couple of days. You are invited!

Participating involves registering for the Discord server we use if you haven鈥檛 already, and then showing up for 鈥渦nits鈥� of writing during those days 鈥� units are just silent, collective periods of time when you turn off email and distractions and focus on your work. The scheduled times will be on the hour between 10-4. There is an option for audio-only chats, or people can always participate just via text. We may have optional writing and editing exercises! Suggestions for good writing snacks! Pictures of adorable animals! Advice about when to plant seedlings! Napping units! And more! It is fine to come for just part of the time.

Mostly people in the group are from 杏吧原创, but there are also writers from other places who may attend. Everyone is committed to not being jerks. 

Everything remains hard, and sometimes having collective space to tune in to our research and writing can be a form of self-kindness. It would be lovely to 鈥渟ee鈥� you and write with you for a unit or two!

You can register here: 

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The ongoing detention of Cihan Erdal, a 32-year-old PhD student at 杏吧原创 University, has sparked a growing international movement advocating for his release.

More than 2,200 people, including famed international scholars Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Silvia Federici, 脡tienne Balibar and Enzo Traverso, have signed a petition supporting him.

Erdal, who is a permanent resident of Canada, has been living here since 2017. He and his partner, Omer Ongun, intend to make Canada their home. Erdal and Ongun travelled to Turkey in August 2020 to visit family, and Erdal stayed a few extra weeks to conduct fieldwork with Turkish and European youth for his doctorate.

Unexpectedly, on the morning of Sept. 25, 2020, Erdal was detained and later imprisoned alongside 16 other academics, activists and politicians.

鈥淐ihan is an outstanding student,鈥欌�� says his PhD supervisor Jacqueline Kennelly.

“He won an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant last year, along with other internal departmental scholarships each year he has been here. He has been working with me as a research assistant on various projects, most recently as the co-ordinator of the Centre for Urban Youth Research. He is an extraordinarily hard worker, and an extremely smart and accomplished academic with several publications in both Turkish and English.鈥欌��

Erdal is a former central executive committee member of the left-wing opposition party, HDP (Peoples鈥� Democratic Party), a legal political party in Turkey and currently the country鈥檚 third largest party.

The arrests came following an investigation regarding 2014 protests in support of the Kurdish town of Kobane in northern Syria against Islamic State (ISIS) militants. The prosecutor鈥檚 accusation appears to be largely based on HDP鈥檚 Twitter posts calling for demonstrators to join the democratic protests.

Erdal strongly refutes all accusations and has stated that he was not in attendance at HDP meetings where the issue was discussed, nor was he aware of any tweets regarding the protests of Oct. 6, 2014.

Erdal has no previous arrest, detention or prison sentence and, to date, no proof has been presented to corroborate the accusations made regarding his involvement in the protests.

He is currently being held in solitary confinement pending trial.听He has minimal access to the outside world, clean clothes, sufficient food or school materials, including his books and notes.



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For more information, contact Jacqueline Kennelly

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