Book Launch and Discussion: Reading the Room

Concordia University Press invites you to celebrate and discuss the release of Reading the Room: Lessons on Pedagogy and Curriculum from the Gender and Sexuality Studies Classroom. Edited by Natalie Kouri-Towe, this new collection features twenty candid contributions on classroom experiences from instructors and students throughout Canada to provide guidance on often-fraught issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and decolonization. Working from a place of coalition building, this volume is a frank, insightful, and pragmatic invitation to share different pedagogical practices with educators in a range of academic disciplines.  

Please join Natalie Kouri-Towe and contributors Kimberley Manning (Concordia University), Nathalie Batraville (Concordia University), Alexis Poirier-Saumure (Concordia University), and Kelly Fritsch (Carleton University). Together they will discuss topics including trigger warnings, student expectations, asymmetrical power relations between students and teachers, how students and professors learn from each other, how to negotiate conflict in a classroom, and how to be self-reflective about methods of teaching and learning. This panel will ask question such as: How do professors navigate their relationship to course design and pedagogical methods with student anxieties, expectations, and desires for the classroom? What approaches do professors hope that students and colleagues from outside of gender and sexuality classrooms will engage with more in the coming years? And what lessons do gender and sexuality studies scholars think people outside their disciplines should be taking into their own classes?

With these topics as a starting point, the editor and contributors will engage in a roundtable discussion in a hybrid format. This will be followed by light refreshments, further conversations, and an opportunity to purchase the volume at a special book event discount!

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Natalie Kouri-Towe is a professor of feminism and sexuality at the at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University.