Woven together: advocacy and research as complementary

Abstract

One of the many important contributions of second-wave feminist scholarship was the re-positioning of scholarly activity as being necessarily situated in relation to ‘I.’ This insistence on standpoint, or positionality, was coupled with a contribution from postmodernism, which challenged the notion that (universal) truths could circulate without specific attachments to people and places. Advocacy was a less used word, but the position taken in this paper is that every piece of research, in all science, carries with it the potential for advocacy. Drawing on the author's own experiences of advocacy as interwoven though her career as a lawyer and an academic, this paper examines various aspects of the intersection of advocacy and professional work.

Key Words:

• advocacy
• standpoint
• feminism
• equality
• justice

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Religion and Diversity Project in the preparation of this article as well as the on-going financial support of my research through my Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada. I would like to extend my thanks to Mary Jo Neitz for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper, as well as to Michael Stausberg and the anonymous reviewer for their extremely helpful comments that helped to sharpen the arguments of this paper. I am also grateful to Marianne Abou-Hamad for her editorial assistance.

Notes

¹See Defining Harm (Beaman 2008) for a more complete discussion and analysis of the Bethany Hughes case.

² Reference re: Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada [2011] BCSC 1588.

³When a woman on a New Delhi bus was gang-raped and later died of her injuries, women and men took to the streets to protest. See Roychoudhury and Banerji (2012).

⁴After an Italian priest said that women who wear tight clothing and fail to cook and clean were partly to blame for domestic violence against them, women's rights and anti-violence groups were vocal of their anger. See Mackenzie (2012).

⁵Frosh-week chants at Saint Mary's University that glorified the abuse of underage girls drove students to rally against sexual violence. See Auld (2013).

⁶See ‘The Will to Religion: Obligatory Religious Citizenship’ (Beaman 2013) for more on this.

⁷This project is entitled ‘Religion in the Everyday: Negotiating Islam in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.’ Principal Investigator is Jennifer Selby.

⁸This project is entitled ‘Religion among immigrant youth in Canada.’ Principal Investigator is Peter Beyer.

⁹This project is entitled ‘La sécularisation, la laïcité et les identités religieuses dans le contexte québécois.’ Principal Investigator is Solange Lefebvre.

¹⁰Boycotts ensued after the president of pasta-maker Barilla said that he would not show gay families in his pasta's advertisements. See McCoy (2013). Also, when the Quebec Soccer Federation set a ban on the wearing of turbans, a team of non-Sikh boys wore orange turbans to show their support of their fellow Sikh players’ rights to wear the religious garb. See Montgomery (2013).

Additional information

Lori G. Beaman, Ph.D., is the Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada, Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, and the Principal Investigator of a 37-member international research team whose focus is religion and diversity (see www.religionanddiversity.ca). Her publications include: Varieties of Religious Establishment (Ashgate, 2013); ‘Battles over Symbols: The “Religion” of the Minority Versus the “Culture” of the Majority’ (Journal of Law and Religion 28 (1) 2012/3: 101–138; and Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law (UBC Press, 2008).