Under the microscope
Sometimes research projects are serendipitous.
When Gada Mahrouse was hired at Concordia's Simone de Beauvoir Institute, in large part because of her research on race and postcolonial theory, she didn’t plan on publishing an overview of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in the international journal Race & Class.
“It really just fell into my lap,” says Mahrouse, who began visiting the institute when she moved back to Montreal in 2007 in preparation for the start of her contract there in January 2008. That fall marked the middle of the yearlong government consultation and Mahrouse became involved in formulating a response to the commission with students and faculty at the institute. She also helped plan presentations at the public hearings. Her article “‘Reasonable accommodation’ in Québec: the limits of participation and dialogue” takes a critical look at the Bouchard-Taylor proceedings.
Mahrouse’s analysis describes the climate in Quebec at that time when student hijabs and kirpans, workout gear and Hérouxville’s code of conduct were making headlines. She contextualizes Quebec’s model of interculturalism and the specificity of French Quebec’s majority status provincially, and its minority status federally.
She charges that Bouchard-Taylor may have erred by extending “the scope of the consultation beyond the realm of the legal — beyond rights to attitudes and opinions.” This context placed members of cultural minorities on the defensive and monopolized headlines with increasingly inflammatory comments. This decision ultimately “fed the crisis they were trying to mitigate.”
In particular, she challenges the report’s cover page slogan ‘Dialogue making a difference’ by suggesting that dialogue alone is limiting without corresponding structural change. This is borne out by the fact that the consultations were just one element of over a dozen parallel studies on systemic barriers to equality, yet they eclipsed the findings of the larger research project.
And while the Bouchard-Taylor Commission served as a good way to meet her new colleagues and students at the institute, Mahrouse is happy to be working on her own research projects again. She spent a good part of this summer writing “Virtuous Voyages” – a manuscript on the growing market for ethical and politically motivated travel; whether volunteering in the wake of natural disasters, touring slums in the global south or defusing conflict situations by physically acting as a human shield.
“We usually only hear about the benefits of this type of travel. We rarely hear about the contradictions and problems that can arise.”
By interviewing students and volunteers who have travelled abroad to ‘do good’ she points to some of the gaps between the positive public perception of such projects and the disconnect experienced by people who become even more aware of the conditions of inequality that allowed them to ‘help’ in the first place.