UNews - Athena Elafros

Women scholars in the spotlight as popular speaker series goes virtual

trevor.kenney — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 15:38:33 +0000

The Women Scholars’ Speaker Series (WSSS) will open its 19th season in the virtual space this week, continuing to give a voice to outstanding women researchers and the ground-breaking work they are doing in the research community.

Drs. Amandine Pras and Athena Elafros, along with PhD student Grace Brooks (McGill ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ) and undergraduate student Monica Lockett (U of L) are examining gendered experiences of discrimination and microaggression in the recording studio.

“We are very excited to present the Women Scholars’ Speaker Series: Virtual Edition. Through a series of online panels and presentations, we invite everyone to engage with the latest research around pressing and multifaceted topics including discrimination, equity, death and labour,” says Mia van Leeuwen, a professor in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Faculty of Fine Arts and a WSSS organizer. “We may be at home, but we can still stay connected through our shared interest in engaging with ideas.”

The first session of the new season is titled, Gendered experiences of discrimination and microaggression in the recording studio, and will be presented Wednesday, October 7 at 1 p.m. Drs. Amandine Pras and Athena Elafros, along with PhD student Grace Brooks (McGill ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ) and undergraduate student Monica Lockett (U of L), will discuss results from an international online survey of recording engineers, producers, and studio assistants' experiences of discrimination and microaggressions within the recording studio. They will explore their findings and how they highlight significant and systemic gender inequalities within the recording field.

The WSSS was launched in Fall 2002 by Dr. Shelly Wismath, dean of the School of Liberal
Education. Its focus is to highlight local, national and international cutting-edge scholarship by researchers who identify as women, and provide a venue for under-represented voices in academic research.

Dr. Julie Young, Tier II Canada Research Chair in Critical Border Studies and assistant professor in geography and environment is also organizing this year’s WSSS sessions. She says the series continues to have a dedicated following and by moving online could attract an even broader audience.

“Over the course of the last 19 years, the WSSS has been a great platform for researchers to present their work and stimulate conversations about some very important issues,” she says. “Not only is the series valuable for faculty members by giving them an opportunity to speak about their work, it allows the community to engage with that work and gain an understanding of the activities ongoing here at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and throughout post-secondary.”

The second session of the WSSS, ‘The Letters’: EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) and Tracing Work in the Academe, is scheduled for November 5, 2020 at 7 p.m.

This seminar is organized by the Support Network for Academics of Colour Plus (SNAC+), funded and co-sponsored by the WSSS and the Alberta Human Rights Commission's Human Rights Education and Multiculturalism Fund.

To learn more, visit the Women Scholars’ Speaker Series web page.

U of L symposium to focus on digital audio arts and music sociology

caroline.zentner — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 17:10:59 +0000

Audio engineers and researchers from around the world will gather at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge on Friday, Feb. 14 for a one-day symposium titled Social Distinction in the 21st Recording Studio.

Organized by Drs. Amandine Pras, a professor of digital audio arts, and Athena Elafros, a professor of sociology, the symposium features hip-hop and electronic music experts, sound engineers, sociologists and ethnomusicologists from Alberta, Bamako (Mali), Paris, New York, Montréal and Toronto talking about upcoming generations of studio arrangers and recording producers.

“We organized this symposium to bring different people we’ve been working with together to exchange ideas,” says Pras.

One of the roundtables during the symposium centres on the two professors’ collaborative research, which examines social discrimination in the recording studio.

“Initial results show that for women and individuals who identify as transgender or nonbinary, the experience of discrimination and microaggressions are very high,” says Elafros.

Another session will centre on research Pras is involved in as part of an international team of 18 researchers. Looking at culture mediation and youth in West Africa, the project focuses on music production and how young generations manage traditions with globalization.

“West African societies are managed by elders,” says Pras. “Digital technology is a way for youth to cut through the hierarchy of their society. It’s really challenging the structure of the society.”

U of L students have been involved in both research projects and have helped analyze the data.

Study chronicling history of Alberta Gay Straight Alliances wins Parkland Institute Faculty Research Award

trevor.kenney — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 14:30:19 +0000

A new ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge research project that proposes to chronicle the history of Gay Straight Alliances (GSAs) in the province of Alberta has been selected as the winner of the 2019 Parkland Institute Faculty Research Award.

Tif Semach, left, and Dr. Athena Elafros will work with undergraduate student Wednesday Culley on the collaborative research project.

The project, GSAs in Alberta: Past, Present, and Future, is a collaborative study led by Dr. Athena Elafros (assistant professor of sociology), sessional instructor Tif Semach (BA ’12, MA ’14) and fourth-year undergraduate student Wednesday Culley. The group aims to create a record of Alberta GSAs by capturing the oral histories of those involved from the early 2000s to the present. In addition to preserving these experiences for current and future policy analysis, the project will create a public repository and collaborate with stakeholders to ensure the preservation of data in Canadian LGBTQ2S+ archives.

“I’m just really interested in capturing something that is so ephemeral. There really isn’t any record of this and it’s a really important thing for the queer community of which I identify as part of,” says Semach, who is also the community education coordinator for OUTreach Southern Alberta. “It’s also a chance to really track the evolution of LGBTQ rights in Alberta.”

Elafros researched GSAs as part of her doctoral program at McMaster ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and co-published two papers with, among others, Dr. Tina Fetner, current president of the Canadian Sociological Association. With an inherent interest in the topic, she began speaking with Semach and the idea for the project took shape.

Undergraduate student Wednesday Culley will play a key role in the research project.

“We really started talking about the fact that there is no record of this very important history in the province,” she says. “Working together, we came up with the idea to do the oral history component. Given my two colleagues’ connections in the community, we thought it’d be a good way to access participants and give them a chance to talk about their experiences and share them with other people who might be experiencing similar issues.”

Semach played a key role in starting the city’s first GSA, and only the second in the province, when she was a student at Lethbridge Collegiate Institute (LCI) in 2003. A decade later, Culley was involved with the GSA at LCI, while Culley’s father worked as a board trustee for Lethbridge School District No. 51 and touted the implementation of safe and inclusive policies in the district.

“I’ve sort of lived and breathed these topics for a long time,” says Culley. “We’re primarily looking for people who have participated in GSAs, and it doesn’t matter the experience, just people who were involved with them in any capacity. Being able to access different people who have experienced things maybe two years ago versus 10 years ago allows us to see a wide array of experiences and how things have changed over time.”

The project will involve a lot of ground work and take place over the next year.

“We’re going to start here in Lethbridge and then kind of branch out to Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton and hopefully some of the rural areas as well,” says Semach. “It’ll mainly just be a case of reaching out and letting people know we are doing this largely from a queer perspective, so we are working from within the community and are a safe voice looking to capture their stories.”

Elafros says the Parkland award is welcome recognition for the legitimacy of the study, especially in the current political climate. And while much of the current literature on GSAs is focused on the present, this study offers a historical perspective and will highlight broader outcomes.

“A lot of conventional historical accounts focus on people or groups with power, those without power or prominence often being left out,” says Dr. Trevor Harrison, U of L sociologist and director of the Parkland Institute. “The research being conducted by Dr. Elafros and her colleagues is important in addressing this absence. Additionally, because the present is always informed by the past, such research also points to contemporary issues of how the LGBTQ2S+ community still experiences prejudice and exclusion in Lethbridge.”

For Semach, the data they acquire will be integral for future programming and policy decisions.

“From the perspective of a community advocacy organization, a lot of what we are doing right now at OUTreach is looking at what our community needs,” she says. “Having access to data like we will be acquiring — the real, lived experience of people in Alberta — will allow us to then go out to organizations and advise perhaps on how policies should be focused. It’ll really allow for us to make decisions based on data.”

UNews - Athena Elafros

Women scholars in the spotlight as popular speaker series goes virtual

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U of L symposium to focus on digital audio arts and music sociology

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Study chronicling history of Alberta Gay Straight Alliances wins Parkland Institute Faculty Research Award

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