Three NMU faculty members and one alumnus gave a panel presentation titled “Becoming Just: Feminist World-Making Around the Globe” at the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference. The event was held in November in Montreal, Quebec. NMU faculty participants Patricia Killelea, Rachel May and Jaspal Singh of English were joined by NMU graduate Kyle Bladow, a Native American studies professor at Northland College.

Killelea presented “My Blood Doesn’t Lie: Visualizing Corporeal Sovereignty in Anishinaabe Mixed Media Poetics.” She focused on contemporary writer and visual artist Tessa Sayer, whose work is “contextualized within the Canadian government’s failure to address ongoing epidemics of missing and murdered indigenous women.”

May presented “Re-seeing the Archive: Race, History and Erasure in a 19th century Quilt.” She shared the story of two enslaved women, Eliza and Minerva, cobbling together facts, documents and research on free and enslaved people in 1830s Charleston. May used the material to "examine her own implications in contemporary systems of oppression."

Singh presented her paper, “Social Justice and Earth Democracy: Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Phswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” In South Africa, where racial and land segregation led to divisions and exclusions, Mda’s and Mpe’s texts show resistant responses to colonialism’s “slow violence.” Singh compared their varied representations.

Bladow presented “Never Shut Up My Native: Expressing Indigenous Feminism in Sápmi.” He focused on Mimie and Maxida Märak, stars of Instagram and the Swedish television series, Sápmi Sisters. They use new media, along with music and poetry, to advocate for feminism, environmentalism and indigenous rights.