Elaine J Laberge

Graphic design for impact

You’ve done the research. You don’t want it to collect dust on the shelf. You want it to make a difference. But you’re used to the academic status quo knowledge mobilization. This is where graphic design makes a difference. I am a researcher and graphic designer. I use the power of design to make research…

String it Together learning series

The Shoestring Initiative hosts monthly free String it Together: Finding togetherness in community on the education digi-scape webinars focused on social class on how classism shapes experiences in and understandings of higher education in Canada and around the world. The Shoestring Initiative is a grassroots solidarity movement to create communities of mentorship, belonging, support and…

Returning to the Barnyard

ELAINE J. LABERGE Returning to the Barnyard VICTORIA, BC | FEBRUARY 2018 Published in https://humanitiesnetwork.wixsite.com/anthology/downloads How different my story could have been told if I had not entered the world into poverty; I was raised in a community that storied me by my family’s poverty; I was storied by my mother’s supposed failings and weaknesses…

Outliers imagining otherwise in and for universities

Elaine Laberge, PhD Candidate, University of Victoria Written for my PhD Candidacy February 17, 2020 Many emotions drove me to write Miseducation – sorrow, guilt, pride, anger, righteous indignation, regret, anxiety, and fear. But above all a sense of urgency and desperation that, as a woman approaching 70, time was running out. Reay, 2018, p….

COVID-19 and poverty-class higher education students

March 13, 2020 Re: COVID-19 and poverty-class students Dear Canadian University Leaders: I write to you with fingertips quivering over the keyboard. I do not want to further expose myself to ridicule and shame. Yet, I must publicly come out of the social underclass closet because this situation is far more important than my shamed…

Neoliberalism’s Defeat of Democracy

http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/neoliberalisms_defeat_of_democracy/ Neoliberalism’s Defeat of Democracy Wendy Brown. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York, Zone Books, 2015. 296pp. $29.95, hardcover. Reviewed by Jodi Dean In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the end of history. The great ideological struggles characteristic not only of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but of history as such had…

Shoestring Initiative

https://shoestringinitiative.com/ The Shoestring Initiative is a grassroots initiative to build community and support among first-generation students, staff, and faculty who identify as coming from poverty, working class backgrounds, first generation, and from/in foster care. As members of the UVic community from poverty or working class origins ourselves, we recognize that our backgrounds come with shared…

Dear White Administrators in Academia – sign the petition

This letter originally appears in a text about decolonizing academia published in Dec 2018 by Clelia O. Rodriquez’s “Decolonizing academia: Poverty, pain, and oppression” (p. 119). Published by Fernwood Publishing. Dear white administrators in academia: You, as the sole protectors of intellectual property, are claiming politics of diversity in a built-in, impenetrable, and dismissive apparatus…

University can change homeless people’s lives, but they need support to get there – by Becky Edwards (UK)

Becky Edwards Thu 18 Apr 2019 The Guardian (open access) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/18/university-can-change-homeless-peoples-lives-but-they-need-support-to-get-there?fbclid=IwAR0aed4f7zHSeMcCzAnsymcv3q3B-SKVnApodfuu34hP2gw5Rw8MPlbMFVE When Lucy Davis left school at 12, falling into addiction and ultimately homelessness, the last thing she thought she’d be doing at 30 was going to university. But now she’s planning to start a fine art degree in September. Davis is one of five…

Echoes of poverty: Access and equity in Canadian higher education