FEATURES
SFYou:
Dr. Jen Marchbank The professor who does it all invites you to Surrey Pride Festival 2022
Written by Yasmin Vejs Simsek
Editor’s note: The acronym LGBTQ will be used, as is used by the interviewee. This is not meant to diminish or neglect those identifying with IA2S+. Dr. Jen Marchbank is a professor and graduate chair in the department of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies (GSWS), but her commitments don’t stop there. As a deeply engaged activist for the LGBTQ community, she inspires people to create the change they want to see through innovative teaching practices. On May 26, she received the YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Education, Training and Development. The award ceremony recognized 75 remarkable women in 14 different categories. The Peak spoke to Marchbank to find out more about her accomplishments and the upcoming Surrey Pride Festival she’s putting a lot of effort into planning. Marchbank credited her award to her work with NEVR, the Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships. Marchbank attended the awards ceremony with her wife, Sylvie Traphan, and was thrilled to hear an anonymous donor matched the fundraising. “They had a target of raising $125,000 in that night [ . . . ] and then an anonymous donor matched it, so they got a quarter of a million for purpose-built housing for women and their children in Burnaby.” Speaking about the award, Marchbank said, “One of the things I was recognised for was my
08
innovative teaching practice and using things like podcasts, intergenerational oral history, and my research in LGBTQ and trans youth and elder abuse.” Marchbank received the award not just for her work at SFU but also the work she does outside of it. She explained that includes the advocacy she does with Youth For a Change, a Surrey-based organization she founded with Traphan in 2012 to educate and support queer youth, “training them to become social justice advocates themselves.” Of all the projects Marchbank has done, one of her favourites came through SFU. “I really liked the elder abuse project that I did with Dr. Gloria Gutman from gerontology, Claire Robson from GSWS, and our artistic director at that time, then PhD candidate Kelsey Blair. “What I liked so much about the LGBTQ elder one was the intergenerational aspect of it, the community level aspect,” Marchbank said. The project was created with both Youth For a Change and Quirk-e, a queer collective for elders that Marchbank and Traphan helped found. When they began this project, they didn’t realize that no Canadian material existed on the topic. In the end they created Canada’s first educational materials on elder abuse in the LGBTQ community through the creation of five posters in different languages with different cultures represented and three videos.
