Into the Mainstream or Still at the Margins? 50 Years of Gender Research in the Canadian Political Science Association

Abstract

The annual conference of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) is a disciplinary bellwether that helps us trace the evolution of political science scholarship. This article analyzes research presented at the conference between 1965 and 2015. It shows growth in the gender and politics sub-field and in the presence of women in leadership positions in the CPSA. At the same time, gender-related research is often presented in gender-focused panels and not incorporated across the discipline's sub-fields. This means that gender scholars typically present their work to like-minded researchers, and scholars in other sub-fields have little exposure to gender perspectives. That such siloing occurs at the earliest stages of research dissemination is an important contextual factor in understanding gendered citation patterns, departmental hiring and rates of tenure and promotion. For Canadian political science to remain relevant, more needs to be done to incorporate gender perspectives across the discipline's sub-fields.

The Future of Canadian Political Science: Boundary Transgressions, Gender and Anti-Oppression Frameworks

“…Certainly, as a field, CPS is not static. It is heartening that John Borrows and Erin Tolley are the most recent recipients of the Donald Smiley Prize, with their books centring on Indigenous legal traditions (Borrows, 2016) and the racialized framework of political news coverage (Tolley, 2016). And, as noted at the outset of this article, Coulthard's 2016 win is further indication that CPS does have the capacity to recognize work that is profoundly disruptive to the discipline's canon.…”

Narrating Canadian Political Science: History Revisited

“…In her recent 2015 presidential address, Jill Vickers argued that despite growing numbers of women in the profession, and a body of feminist knowledge, little has changed in what she terms conventional political science (Vickers, 2015: 747-48). Erin Tolley (2017) echoes this in relation to CPSA conferences, where work on gender appears to operate in a silo. This is concerning because feminist scholarship has been distinctly attuned to multiple forms of difference and intersectional theorizing and therefore human complexity (see, for example, Hankivsky, 2014;Vickers and Issac, 2012).…”

“…Not least, Timlin was interested in different policies and her presidential address on immigration evinces more attention to discrimination based on race than the interventions of earlier decades (1960: 532) perhaps confirming a form of defying conventions in research focus (Tolley, 2017: 152). Although there is debate over whether Timlin considered herself a feminist, she was sympathetic to many tenets, and she was definitely not conventional, starting her career at the University of Saskatchewan as a secretary, getting formal university degrees while working or taking leaves, and finally becoming an assistant professor at the age of 50 (Ainley, 1999).…”

The Qualifying Field Exam: What Is It Good For?

“…In terms of external threats, scholars have expressed concerns about the Americanization of the discipline (Albaugh 2017;Cairns 1975;Héroux-Legault 2017) and a comparative turn (Turgeon et al 2014;White et al 2008). Others are concerned about internal threats, lamenting the fact that white, male, and English-Canadian voices have long dominated the scholarly community at the expense of French, Indigenous, and other racial and ethnic minority voices (Abu-Laban 2017;Ladner 2017;Nath, Tungohan, and Gaucher 2018;Rocher and Stockemer 2017;Tolley 2017). This introspection, coupled with the limited size of the community, is likely to increase consistency across departments; therefore, we expect the core set of readings identified in the reading lists to be more unified and comprehensive than in other subfields.…”