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  • At the Forks logo

    Here At the (Digital) Forks
    Vol. 1 No. 1 (2021)

    Questions of Indigenous and Human Rights are central questions of the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, or modern-day Winnipeg, as are questions of Indigenous people, places and communities, and their relationships to settler society and government, which are central to the Prairie provinces. In the past years, historians, political scientists, geographers, sociologists and literary scholars have directly and critically addressed the prairies’ particular histories of settler colonialism and the ways it has produced lived realities of violence, marginalization, poverty, and too often death for Indigenous people. At the same time, scholars have shown how Indigenous people have both formally and informally resisted settler colonialism and built and nurtured communities and resistance and dispossession.

  • At The Forks
    Vol. 2 No. 1 (2022)

    It has been an eventful couple of years where the two ancient rivers meet. The COVID 19 pandemic that began early in 2020 profoundly marked the two years that followed and continues to shape our lives and communities. At the University of Manitoba, we spent two years teaching remotely, and a third academic year with a full mask mandate. Halfway through 2023, we are beginning to do more things in person, but we are not who we were before.

    The contributions to this second volume of At the Forks chart the contours of some of these axes of difference, and document some of the ways that people and communities speak back to them.

  • Special Issue: Unmasking Transphobia, Building Transpositive Solidarities
    Vol. 3 No. 1 (2024)

    The historical catalyst for this collection of essays is a tragic and disturbing one, consisting both of a particular event and a general global pattern. In March of 2023, Joanne Boucher, a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Winnipeg, delivered a public talk with the dodgy title, “The Commodification of the Human Body: The Case of Transgender Identities.” According to the event description, Boucher’s talk was to explore the “economic interests involved in transgenderism” and to investigate the intersection of “government, corporate-funded lobby groups, the medical industry and the biotechnology sector.” Although framed in neutral-sounding academic jargon, both the event title and the event description contained blaring red flags, readily identifiable even to casual readers. Far from being a unique and isolated event, Boucher’s talk was part of a much larger and more general global explosion of transphobic discourse, which has been expressed in recent years in the form of utterly cruel and inhuman legislation. In response to this frightening national and global drift, the University of Winnipeg’s Centre for Research in Cultural Studies (CRiCS) organized a public event aimed at understanding our current political moment and offering guidance for solidarity and praxis. This collection features essay versions of the informal talks delivered at the March 2023 event.