Aarzoo Singh
Ph.D. (2021)
How has your journey / experiences / learnings at WGSI, inside and/or outside the classroom, guided or influenced your career path / decisions.
Having worked and studied in a Women and Gender Studies department over the past twelve years has had a huge impact on my work as my pedagogy, research, and ethics as an academic are fully centered around social justice, local and transnational activism, ethical and equitable forms of pedagogy, decolonial frameworks, awareness of labour precarity, and critically investigating institutional practices. Now working as an Assistant Professor in a Women’s and Gender Studies department, having these investments shape how I teach, do research, and write. For example, I know the importance of teaching in a way that considers the multiplicity of students’ experiences with the world and invites it into the classroom—for creating learning opportunities for marginalized, first-generation, and mature students. I learnt this from my pedagogical mentors from WGSI.
Is there a distinct class, lesson, professor or experience at WGSI that has inspired the work you do / your practice / works that you’ve produced?
I can almost pinpoint the moment during my PhD that changed my way of thinking, not just about academia, but of how I take in the world at large. This came through in my first year in Dr. Dina Georgis’ class on Aesthetic Imagination, Creativity and Radical Hope. This class was centered around generative and creative theories that focused on the importance of reparative feminist readings, making space for the in-articulatable, and ruminating on the in-between with hopes of making possible new political futures. It was from this type of learning that my work became open to the power of story as methodology in its capacity to convey inexpressible trauma, affect, and memory. This massively shaped my dissertation and subsequently my continuing research in academia.
After you attained your degree at WGSI, what did you do next?
After obtaining my doctorate from WGSI, I went to work as contract faculty at the University of Toronto Scarborough at the department of Historical and Cultural Studies for two years before attaining a tenure track position in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg.
Does having a Women & Gender Studies lens positively impact your work and practice?
One of the most salient and positive take-aways from my time in WGSI was learning not just to critically read and analysis existing power structures and systems of colonial oppression, but how to think about reparation and recovery from their legacies of violence and rupture. That is, hope-oriented readings have become central to the way I do research and in turning towards the truth of lived experience illuminates so much possibility for capacious understandings of the world and how to move forward, better. An important feminist lesson I took from my training in the field of Women and Gender studies is that our research can be grounded in our own experiences and that we can dictate our own epistemological explorations to think about thinking itself more capaciously.
How has the skillset and knowledge acquired at WGSI directly or indirectly helped you in your career?
WGSI’s investment in critical race, postcolonial, and transnational feminist frameworks was central to my training in this field. For example, now as an Assistant Professor, my own pedagogical agenda is invested in critical and open dialogues about difficult content and approach the classroom with the philosophy of mutual aid. I emphasize a politics of reparation throughout my courses with the hopes that students can locate their own investments in community building and activism in the material they encounter. This kind of teaching comes from the types of feminist teachings I was exposed during my time in WGSI.