Newly named Canada Research Chair at UofT Mississauga
Professor Jennifer Adese has been named a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Métis Women, Politics, and Community, and with this designation will focus her efforts on the impacts of colonization, sexism, and racism on Métis Women.
“This CRC project will allow me to advance Indigenous research more broadly, but also to pursue a vital, yet relatively underexamined area within Métis Studies research,” says Adese.
“It's a very exciting opportunity to work to push the conversation in the area of Indigenous peoples’ political organizing even further and will generate new research in the scholarly understandings of Métis women’s responses to colonization via political mobilization, and Métis women’s experiences in the context of the wider landscape of Métis activism.”
In her tier two CRC project, Adese will examine early-to-mid twentieth century Métis political participation, as well as Métis women’s ongoing efforts to confront their marginalization through contemporary political mobilization. This work is a departure from previous studies of Metis political organizing and also scrutinizes the sexist and gendered dimensions of Métis politics.
“We are so fortunate to have a scholar of Professor Adese’s caliber at UTM,” says Professor Kent Moore, U of T Mississauga’s vice-principal, research.
“Her impressive research accomplishments and important work, along with this prestigious acknowledgement by the CRC program, is a great boost to Indigenous research in Canada and, more locally, on our campus where we are striving to develop a more robust Indigenous-research cluster.”
Adese, who joined the Department of Sociology at UTM in 2018 as an associate professor, has just wrapped up two co-edited books, A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Métis Studies with Chris Andersen (UBC Press), and Indigenous Celebrity: Entanglements with Fame with Robert Alexander Innes (University of Manitoba Press), which examines a wide-ranging landscape of Indigenous conceptualizations of, and experiences with, celebrity and related forms of popular recognition. Her sole-authored book is under review with University of Manitoba Press, titled Aboriginal™, which is an analysis of the term “Aboriginal” and its more frequent usage after the 1982 Canadian Constitution Act was passed. Her work has primarily concentrated on representation using various lenses, visually and through language, as well as in literature, culture, and politics, and her community-engaged work also examined the history of violence against Métis girls and women.
Her research was funded in 2019 by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to pursue her project, “‘No one else can speak for us:’ Métis Women’s Political Organizing, 1970s-Present,” which explores Métis women’s mobilization and activism over the last 50 years.
Adese’s interest and what she describes as “life-changing insight” in this particular area was sparked by attending the National Aboriginal Women’s Summit (NAWS) in 2012. Participating in these proceedings and witnessing firsthand the resilience of the Indigenous women strengthened her commitment to be an informed advocate to lobby for the rights of Métis and all Indigenous communities.
Additionally, Adese has a personal interest in this area: she is Métis and draws on her culture via a large family unit that is primarily based in Alberta, and she says that her relationships with other Métis people and communities provides her with a unique perspective for her work, writing and teaching.
“A lot of previous research has been undertaken and published by non-Métis, and the tendency through that work has been to analyze and discuss Métis people as simply a by-product of the intermarriage of two other populations, broadly First Nations and European,” says Adese.
“That is not how we understand ourselves and our existence as a distinct Indigenous people, and quite often how Indigenous people represent ourselves through art, through literature, through political engagement is very different. It is through this mobilizing of new knowledge that we will be able to reach a higher ground of understanding about the ongoing impacts of colonization, dispossession, and racism.”
To hear more from Professor Adese and learn more about her work, tune in to her interview on
VIEW to the U podcast.
The Canada Research Chair Program (CRCP) was established in 2000 to fund outstanding researchers in this country and annually provides funds to universities to help retain and attract top minds, spur innovation and foster training excellence in Canadian post-secondary institutions.
The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced that the Government of Canada is investing approximately $195 million to support 259 new and renewed Canada Research Chairs at 47 institutions across Canada. This investment is complemented by close to $14 million in new funding for research infrastructure to support 57 Chairs at 27 institutions through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Together with the chairs announced earlier this year, the total investment marks the program’s largest in a single calendar year. This important milestone underscores the program’s continued relevance and far-reaching impact as we celebrate the Canada Research Chairs’ 20th anniversary.
See the full list of all the new chairs on the CRCP website.