The Unwritten Rules of History

Tag: sex work

Historians’ Histories: Sarah York-Bertram

We’re back today with everyone’s favourite series, Historian’s Histories! If you’d like to see more posts from this series, you can do so here. This latest entry features the fierce Sarah York-Bertram – feminist, activist, and sex work historian.

Photo of Sarah York for Historians Histories

A scholar from Treaty Six Territory, Sarah York-Bertram is a PhD Candidate in York University’s Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies programme. She studies histories of sex work, the affective basis of social responses to the sex trade, and the erasure of sex workers’ histories from public memory specializing in the geographic area of the Canadian Prairies. She won a Joseph Armand-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for 2015-2018 in support of her dissertation project Stopping Traffic: Historicizing Trafficking of Women and Girls in Canada’s Prairie West, 1880-1940

Also a qualitative and community-based researcher, Sarah has worked on studies of feminist pedagogies in relation to intercultural learning, educational access and justice, harm reduction, parenthood in the context of HIV/AIDS, and digital queer communities and activisms. She has also coordinated the Neil Richards Exploring Cultures Group and various other queer and feminist-focused groups in Saskatoon and Toronto.

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Women Making History in Canada

Young woman reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. Shilly Shally Lodge, Gatineau Park.

Young woman reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. Shilly Shally Lodge, Gatineau Park. N.D. Rosemary Gilliat Eaton / Library and Archives Canada, No. R12438

Can  you believe that it is already Unwritten Histories’ second anniversary? I can’t. I remember the days when this was a wee little baby blog that only my friends read. 🙂 So of course,  Stephanie and I wanted to do something special for the occasion. But saying nice things about this blog is pretty boring. So instead, we are going to use this opportunity to highlight the work of women-identified, who are either graduate students or recent graduates, who are making history.  We are obviously fans of men-identified scholars and the work that they do. However, we recognize that women continue to be underrepresented in senior academic ranks and leadership positions, face widespread gender bias in student evaluations, and perform a disproportionate amount of service work and emotional labour. We also recognize that there is incontrovertible evidence of bias against female scholars and the fields of women/gender/feminist history in Canada. 

While Unwritten Histories can’t solve these problems, but what we can do is to highlight the amazing work being done by by these scholars. The scholars we have listed below have all made substantial contributions to the field of Canadian history.  The list is organized alphabetically. Each profile contains a short biography and a list of selected publications. The name of each scholar is also linked to their Twitter accounts, in the event that you would like to keep up with their work.

A couple of quick caveats. First, the term “woman-idenfied” basically refers to all scholars who identify as female. The use of this term is deliberate, so as to include both cis-gendered and trans women.  Second, we limited this list explicitly to graduate students or recent grads who are engaged in the field of history specifically. Finally, we would like to point out that this is a partial list at best. Since, we can only include so many people in one blog post, we had to limit our list to ten. But hopefully we can do a part two!

So without further ado, here are the profiles:

 

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