Megan Rivers-Moore and Manjeet Birk receive FASS Research Awards

Manjeet Birk (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers the lived experience of racialized and Indigenous girls and women in Canada. Her research focuses on women’s organizing, social justice and institutional racism using critical race, intersectional and decolonizing theories and methodologies. Her interests are grounded in her community activism working with women’s organizations locally, nationally and internationally.

Dr. Birk recently returned from a year in Aotearoa, New Zealand, completing a SSHRC postdoc focused on her project Pathways to Inclusion of Indigenous and Racialized Communities: A Comparative Analysis Between Canada and New Zealand. This project involved collaborating with a team in the Department of Public Health at the Auckland University of Technology, in Auckland NZ to think through systemic and institutional racism particularly as it relates to racialized and Indigenous communities in Auckland. This will form the basis of a comparative analysis between Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. With a lifetime of experience organizing, troubling and challenging systems, Dr. Birk is always looking for new ways to re-conceptualize a more beautiful world. To learn more about Dr. Birk’s work, you can also check out this FASS interview.

Megan Rivers-Moore is an Associate Professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. Her research focuses on how gender and sexuality operate transnationally, including projects on sex tourism in Costa Rica, sex worker organizing across Latin America, and clandestine abortion. Her book Gringo Gulch: Sex, Tourism, and Social Mobility was published in English by the University of Chicago Press and in Spanish by the University of Costa Rica Press.

Rivers-Moore’s research takes place at the intersections of sociology, gender studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. Engaged in both academic and activist life in Costa Rica, she  particularly interested in exploring how sexuality operates transnationally. Other research interests include gendered affective labour, travel and tourism, race and ethnicity, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, and qualitative methods.