Letter from Directors

Our names are Sasha Cohen and Anika Ines Bousquet, and we are two fourth year students at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in Canada. We became friends, and coworkers when serving as co-speaker’s coordinators for a conference on campus; our mission was to build a speaker’s roster that went beyond the mainly white, formal, electoral sphere. We wanted to highlight that politics doesn’t always happen in electoral, legislative spheres, but it is done all around us, everyday.

After the conference was over, we sat over coffee discussing how our studies in political science lacked the critical, creative, and interdisciplinary nature of “politics’’ we sought to highlight with our speakers. These norms fail to reflect the many ways of knowing, ways of sharing, and lived experience that thrive in the world around us. We then began to think of ways we could create a platform for discourse on the “new,” more fluid academia the two of us longed for, but failed to find in the established academic space around us. Little did we know, the mission we set out on as speaker’s coordinators would turn into the incredible collection of work we present you with in our inaugural volume: Resistance. So, we came up with an idea: to create a publication, open to secondary, undergraduate and post-graduate students, with the specific focus of redefining perceptions of what constitutes “the academic” and “the political.” We talked about our own experiences feeling alienated and excluded from the world of elite academia, and thought about other students who may feel the same, particularly peers from historically marginalized backgrounds. From here, the Perspectives on Gender, Equity, and Politics Journal (PGEP) was born. A year ago, PGEP was a concept. It was an idea that was sprung from a burning desire to challenge the status quo, to push boundaries on the kinds of knowledge that are legitimized and given a platform. Since February 2021, our team has grown to fourteen executive members, five graduate-level reviewers, and over 21 contributors. PGEP seeks to elevate and connect diverse student voices from across what is now known as Canada, to highlight many sides of the topics we examine, and the questions we ask. We are committed to learning from, and applying decolonial and radical lenses to our work, and encourage all of our writers and contributors to do the same. By challenging the norms of academia, we hope for PGEP to serve as a tool to encourage and inspire meaningful social and political change by questioning current systems and structures, and thinking creatively and critically about ways we can learn from and transform them. The mission we have embarked on has been rooted in creativity, passion, and ambition; each of these qualities are embodied by our writers, our executive team, as well as our review board (a group of post-graduate individuals who assist us in our editorial process). We hope to continue to grow, learn, and share with you all in this issue and beyond.

Love, Sasha and Anika