- Review Important 2024 Annual Meeting Information
- 2025 Annual Meeting Updates
- Calls for Submissions: Demonstrate the Value of Sociology
- Learn About Leadership Opportunities at ASA
- Submit Suggestions for Elected and Appointed Leadership Positions
- Spotlight on Annual Meeting Location: Indigenous Activisms and Alliances in the Fight against Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People in Canada
Review Important 2024 Annual Meeting Information
The 119th ASA Annual Meeting will be held August 9-13, 2024, in Montréal, Canada. ASA President Joya Misra has chosen the theme “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy.” Below is important information for your review.
- Review the Registration page for information on rates and deadlines.
- Department Leaders Preconference. The preconference theme this year is “Navigating Conflict as a Sociology Department Leader.” Registration is required and will open in March. New and current department leaders at all types of academic institutions are invited to attend. Suitable for chairs, directors of graduate studies, and directors of undergraduate studies, the conference explores the challenges facing sociology departments in the changing higher education landscape and offers practical support related to academic department leadership.
Read also Spotlight on Annual Meeting Location: Indigenous Activisms and Alliances in the Fight against Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People in Canada.
2025 Annual Meeting Updates
President-elect Adia M. Harvey Wingfield has chosen the theme “Reimagining the Future of Work.” Read the full theme statement.
The 2024 Program Committee has begun accepting proposals for the invited session component of the Annual Meeting program. The deadline to submit is April 4, 2024. More information will be available soon.
Calls for Submissions: Demonstrate the Value of Sociology
ASA recently launched the Value of Sociology Initiative to collect and curate stories that demonstrate the value of our discipline. This collection will provide the substance for advocacy efforts as we fight political interference in curricular and classroom decisions.
Please contribute a story and share these calls with your students and colleagues. We need your help to be successful. This is the moment for sociologists to come together and ensure that sociological content remains broadly available to students. We want teachers to have freedom to teach and do research based on their expertise and students to have freedom to learn with integrity, and we want sociology to continue to be a vital part of curricula across the country. To ensure those outcomes, we need thousands of us to collectively demonstrate the value of sociology for students and our communities.
Are you a scholar who has done work that has made an impact? Impacts might include influencing policy change at local or broader levels or doing research that has raised awareness about current social problems, such as disparities in access to healthcare or affordable housing. Impacts might also include applying research methods in new ways or giving a talk at your local library that provides members of the community with tools for better managing teen social media use. Share your impact story here.
Do you know high school or undergraduate students of sociology? Or are you a current graduate student of sociology who has learned something specific in a sociology class that has helped you better understand our social world of your own life and experience? Please share this information about ASA’s TikTok/Instagram contest with your students or consider participating if you are a student.
Do you know former undergraduate students who majored in or took a sociology class and are using their sociological knowledge in interesting and productive ways? Please send them this invitation to share their story with us.
Learn About Leadership Opportunities at ASA
We are an association of, by, and for our members, and we can’t do what we do without the hundreds of sociologists like you who support our activities in a variety of ways. Becoming a leader within ASA is a meaningful way to expand your professional networks while contributing to the health of your profession and professional organization. If you would like to learn more about leadership opportunities at ASA, please click here.
Submit Suggestions for Elected and Appointed Leadership Positions
ASA invites members to suggest names for consideration for elected offices and appointment to ASA committees.
- Elected positions include President-Elect, Vice President-Elect, Council Members-At-Large, Committee on Committees members, Nominating Committee members, and Publications Committee members. Suggestions for candidates for elected positions will be sent to the relevant body that determines the ballot for each position—either Nominating Committee or Council Members-At-Large. Selected nominees will ultimately appear on the 2024 election ballot for ASA member vote.
- Appointed positions include members of the Annual Meeting Travel Fund Award Selection Committee, Awards Committee, Committee on Professional Ethics, Sections Committee, and the various ASA award selection committees. Suggestions for members for appointed positions are reviewed by the Committee on Committees. Committee members are formally appointed by Council.
When submitting a suggestion for either an elected or appointed position, please take into consideration how well the person meets the standards of professional ethics as articulated in the ASA Code of Ethics (e.g., harassment, plagiarism, discrimination). Self-nominations are welcome. Submit suggestions by May 1 to [email protected].
Spotlight on Annual Meeting Location: Indigenous Activisms and Alliances in the Fight against Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People in Canada
By Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard, Director at the First Peoples House of Learning, Trent University; Lisa Trefzger-Clarke, PhD student, Trent University; and Paulina García-Del Moral, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Guelph
A deep concern for the well-being of women, girls, and Two-Spirit (2S) peoples inspired our examination of Indigenous women’s mobilization against colonial violence, and its extreme and everyday gendered and racist manifestations.
From the Wiikwemikoong Unceded First Nation on Manitoulin Island, D. Memee Lavell-Harvard is a scholar, mother, and grassroots advocate for Indigenous women’s rights on Turtle Island. Lisa Trefzger-Clarke is a queer, disabled mother with German/German-Jewish immigrant parents, a Trent University Ph.D. candidate, and long-term social justice advocate working in community services and education. Originally from Mexico, feminist sociologist Paulina García-Del Moral focuses on femicide, exploring the Canadian state’s complicity in violence against Indigenous women and girls.
From these positionalities, we examine the role of alliances between Indigenous women and feminist civil society in holding the Canadian state accountable for the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S) through transnational advocacy and legal activism. Indigenous women, families, and their allies compelled the Canadian state to launch a National Inquiry into MMIWG (NIMMIWG) in 2016, despite the state’s consistent denial of human rights violations. Their advocacy redefined and extended our understandings of human rights and state responsibility.
Violence against Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2S People
While Canada’s official statistics lack precise data on MMIWG2S, activists and family members have tracked this violence. From them we know that Indigenous women, girls, and 2S people are overrepresented as victims of violence. The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) identified at least 663 missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls between 1960 and 2013. Although constituting only 3 percent of the Canadian female population, the 153 Indigenous women and girls killed between 2000 and 2013 represented 10 percent of the total murders of women. In 2014, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) documented 1,017 police-recorded murders of Indigenous women between 1980 and 2012, and 164 disappearances. The RCMP stated that Indigenous women comprise 16 percent of all female homicide victims despite representing only 4.3 percent of the female population. According to Statistics Canada, 185 Indigenous women were killed between 2014 and 2018. Tragically, the NIMMIWG’s final report indicates Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or go missing than non-Indigenous women and 16 times more so than white women.
Nevertheless, as late as 2014, former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper denied this violence was a problem. Former NWAC President Lavell-Harvard recalls “Harper accused us of being hysterical and said that violence against Indigenous women and girls was ‘not high on his radar.’” Harper also argued against viewing MMIWG as a sociological phenomenon, claiming these were individual acts of crime and a problem for tribal police. Harper’s position reflected the federal government’s efforts to deny Canada’s colonial history and legacy of systemic racism and heterosexism as the root cause of the disproportionate violence affecting Indigenous women, girls, and 2S people. As Indigenous scholars have argued, violence began as European settlers arrived on our shores.
The dehumanization of Indigenous women and girls is reflected in the provincial and federal lack of response to this epidemic of violence. Police relied upon racist and sexist stereotypes dismissing attempts to report missing Indigenous women and girls, especially those perceived to lead “high-risk lifestyles.” Institutionalized sexism and racism allowed serial killers to prey on Indigenous women and girls struggling to survive in conditions of poverty and social marginality. The Highway of Tears also evidenced how police ignored the disappearances and murders of Indigenous women and girls until a white woman went missing. Other cases of MMIWG2S have likewise received little attention or remain unsolved. Unsolved cases are not the exception, collectively pointing to the Canadian state’s complicity in this violence. Complicity is further evident in the high rate of acquittals and lenient sentences given to perpetrators, which include state actors, like judges and police. The state’s message was clear: people commit violence against Indigenous women and girls with impunity.
Mobilizing against Violence: Indigenous Women’s Organizing and Alliances
To overcome Harper’s refusal to acknowledge and respond to the crisis of MMIWG, Indigenous women drew on their tradition of organizing against gender discrimination in Canada’s legislation at both grassroots and transnational levels, simultaneously forming alliances with Indigenous and non-Indigenous civil society, including feminist organizations.
In the 1960s, organizations were established by Indigenous women across Canada to speak out against discriminatory provisions of the Indian Act. The Indian Act (1876) regulates the relationship and responsibilities between First Nations and the Canadian government, partly by determining who has legal status as “Indian” and is deserving of treaty rights. The patriarchal foundations of the Indian Act can be seen in Section 12(1)(b), which defines an Indian as any male person of Indian blood, or the wife or child of such a man. A First Nations woman would lose her status if she married a non-Indian man; while First Nations men not only maintained their original status regardless of marriage, but their wives and children gained status. Consequently, First Nations women who married out, and their descendants, were removed from their homes and communities, struck from the Indian registry, and denied any treaty rights to which they had been entitled. As First Nations women began organizing around kitchen tables, through such groups as the Indian Homemakers, Indian Rights for Indian Women, and the Ontario Native Women’s Association, they quickly realized that they had neither equality with Indigenous men, nor with non-Indigenous women. This realization led to legal activism and advocacy over decades to fight for their rights in domestic courts and supranational human rights bodies like the United Nations (UN) and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
According to Lavell-Harvard (whose mother Jeanette Corbiere Lavell challenged the government in the Supreme Court of Canada in 1974), as Indigenous women began organizing, they recognized the prevalence of violence in their lives as the critical barrier preventing mino-bimaadiziwin (the good life). Despite, or perhaps because of, widespread violence in their lives, exposing this issue led to backlash within many Indigenous communities. Many leaders felt that talking about violence within communities would cast blame on Indigenous men. Yet shining a light on this issue was necessary if they wanted a better life, or in many cases, any kind of life at all. Although Jeanette Corbiere Lavell lost her case, other Indigenous women, such as Sandra Lovelace and Sharon McIvor, joined the fight filing cases with the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), as well as the IACHR.
Transnational advocacy and legal activism became necessary as Harper’s government denied that violence against Indigenous women and girls was a problem and tried to suppress Indigenous women’s efforts to document cases of MMIWG. Indigenous women knew they needed to build alliances if they were going to reveal the crisis of MMIWG as a Canadian issue affecting society as a whole. One such alliance was between the NWAC and the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA), which had Indigenous feminist activist Sharon McIvor as a founding member. Many organizational or structural alliances on issues related to Indigenous women’s rights began as personal alliances. Through their alliance with FAFIA, Indigenous activists framed MMIWG as a human rights issue. This strategy has been central for holding the Canadian state responsible for its complicity in violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2S people and compelling concrete actions, such as launching the NIMMIWG in 2016 under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party government.
From an Indigenous Problem to a Human Rights Violation
NWAC and FAFIA, working alongside families of MMIWG2S, used international human rights law strategically. Although it has become commonplace to refer to MMIWG2S as a human rights violation, we do not take this conceptualization for granted. In our work, we examine the transnational processes and strategies through which Indigenous and feminist activists mobilized international human rights law to shift how the Canadian state and society respond to the acts, causes, and consequences of this violence. We also pay attention to how Indigenous women claim, redefine, and extend dominant understandings of human rights, gender violence, and state responsibility through their interaction with supranational legal institutions.
Using a human rights framework became central to NWAC and FAFIA’s “Solidarity Campaign with Aboriginal Women.” For Lavell-Harvard, this framing was necessary to counter the widespread belief that MMIWG was “just” an Indigenous issue, or an Indigenous women’s issue. Because the majority of Canadians did not see the crisis of racialized gendered violence as their issue, they could ignore it. Furthermore, the Harper government was actively invested in discouraging any understanding of MMIWG as a human rights violation to avoid the potential domestic and international visibility. Lavell-Harvard recalls the Canadian government has had a long history of deliberately advising civil society organizations concerned with MMIWG to avoid getting involved, since this was an issue of First Nations sovereignty. Put differently, the Canadian government claimed that advocating for Indigenous women’s rights was a breach of Indigenous rights. The Canadian government withdrew funding from organizations that became involved and spoke out against this violence, such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Ultimately, framing MMIWG as a human rights issue brought about an understanding that violence has implications for everyone in Canada. Allowing any threat to human rights in Canada is a threat to the fundamental premise of the inviolability of basic human rights in Canada.
Framing MMIWG as a human rights violation was important for NWAC and FAFIA’s transnational advocacy and legal activism. Given Canada’s longstanding investment as a global human rights defender, activists’ claims, before supranational human rights bodies, that Canada violated its own citizens’ human rights threatened this international reputation. NWAC and FAFIA’s contention that the crisis of MMIWG constituted a human rights violation sought to compel the Canadian state to live up to their reputation. While the Harper administration denied the veracity of such accusations, it was forced to respond when, in 2014, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples identified the high prevalence of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada as a pressing human rights issue. The 2013 Universal Periodic Review of Canada’s human rights record contained similar findings, opening up Canada to international criticism. According to Lavell-Harvard, damage control became imperative, especially when countries with poor human rights records criticized Canada for endangering the basic human rights of Indigenous women and girls.
However, beyond this “naming and shaming” strategy, NWAC and FAFIA made the legal argument that Canada had breached its duty to act with due diligence to address violence against women and eradicate gender and racial discrimination under specific international human rights mechanisms. This principle obligates states to prevent, effectively investigate, punish, and remedy acts of violence against women, whether committed by state or non-state actors in the public or private spheres. This legal argument was important because traditional understandings of state responsibility excluded actions by non-state actors from the purview of international human rights law, thus depoliticizing violence against women and girls at the hands of private individuals. Moreover, NWAC and FAFIA underscored the relationship between the state’s failure to respond to MMIWG, gender and racial discrimination, and the disadvantaged socio-economic conditions of Indigenous women and girls. NWAC and FAFIA drew attention to the colonial legacies creating the conditions for the violation of Indigenous women and girls’ human rights. NWAC and FAFIA were at the forefront of legal innovation, appropriating, redefining, and extending traditional understandings of human rights and state accountability.
NWAC and FAFIA’s innovative legal arguments underpinned requests that the CEDAW Committee and the IACHR conduct inquiries into the Canadian state’s response to violence against Indigenous women and girls. The CEDAW Committee (2015) and the IACHR (2014) inquiries found the Canadian state, through action and inaction, had failed to protect Indigenous women and girls’ human rights. These findings gave NWAC and FAFIA, the families of MMIWG, and other Indigenous organizations, leverage for demanding the launch of a national inquiry. Transnational advocacy and legal activism were important strategies through which Indigenous women demanded accountability from the Canadian state for its complicity in the tragedy of MMIWG.
State Accountability and Human Rights from the Perspective of Indigenous Women
Analyzing how Indigenous women have transformed traditional understandings of human rights and state accountability matters for debates on the power and limits of using human rights as a tool of resistance in the context of ongoing colonial relations. Some argue that international human rights law is in itself a Eurocentric, colonial artifact that reproduces gendered and racial inequalities. Although we recognize this legacy, we also believe Indigenous women and other marginalized people have repurposed it as a tool of resistance in powerful ways. We feel it is important to recognize these contributions and how they have reshaped the meaning and practice of human rights, even if, or precisely because, states like Canada continue to resist or deny their obligation to create the conditions in which Indigenous women, girls, and 2S people can live a life free of violence.
As important as it was to compel the federal government to launch the NIMMIWG, the Canadian state has yet to effectively respond to MMIWG2S even though the inquiry found this violence constitutes “deliberate race, identity, and gender-based genocide.” This resistance is not surprising; Indigenous women’s activism has forced the Canadian state to confront its colonial history and legacies of violence. Thus, for Indigenous activists and their allies, holding the state accountable is an ongoing, contested process. Reproducing narratives that human rights are de facto inaccessible to marginalized peoples, or colonial tools that reproduce oppression, arguably runs the risk of erasing the impact of the decades-long struggles of Indigenous and other marginalized women on human rights as both law and practice.
