Stories from Montreal

In this episode, our guest, Jessica Agathangelou talks with Marie about drug addiction and its legal history in Canada. She also unpacks our current system of criminalization, and presents its more humanistic alternative, a harm reduction approach. The foundation for this episode is on Jessica’s paper, “The Failure of Drug Criminalization: Criminalization and Harm Reduction as Viable Approaches to Addiction.”

In this episode, Olivia talks with Arielle Queraud on her work concerning intellectual disability and sexual and reproductive rights. She breaks down how laws designed to protect individuals, actually end up hurting them as they face discrimination, misunderstanding and infantilization concerning their bodily autonomy. This conversation centers around Arielle’s paper, “Intellectual Disability and Sexual Rights.”

In this episode, Olivia chats with Amanda Van Oort about her paper, “Catching the Spirit: Dynamics of Spiritual Capital in the Coupling of American Evangelicalism and Media Technology.” They dig into a conversation surrounding the interplay of celebrity, religion, profit, and politics to look at Evangelical Christianity in the United States while drawing from examples like televangelism, Kanye West, Justin Bieber and buying your way into heaven for just three easy instalments.

This week, Marie talks with illustrator and researcher, Julien Posture about his experiences as he conducted his field research in Myanmar for a linguistic anthropology master’s degree. They dive into conversations about positionality and authenticity in the field, especially pertaining to queerness, and his thoughts on the discipline more broadly.

This week, Marie and guest, Maliha Latif dive into a conversation about the intersections of race and gender in the context of chronic pain. The source is Maliha's essay, "The Gendered and Racialized Dimensions of Fibromyalgia: A Contested Chronic Pain Illness."

In this episode, Olivia talks with master's student, Philippe Boucher about his research, "Impacts of Government Policies on Indigenous Food Sovereignty: The Kahnawá:ke Case." They look at the history of this issue, how these policies permeate other aspects of culture, as well as how they continue to affect Indigenous communities to this day.

In this episode, Marie talks with Amanda Sidiras and Julia De Marco about their paper, “Sex Through the Eyes of God: Perceptions of Virginity of Montreal Protestants.” Their field research took place at a church in Montreal as they investigated how religion plays a role in the member’s conception of virginity, intimate relationships, and sexuality more broadly.

This week, Marie talks with Mor Argaman about her research paper, 'Mediating Identity Through An Instagram Filter: The Nuances of Instagram Use Among Montreal's Undergraduate Students.' Hear them discuss degrees of intimacy on the 'finsta', archived embodied experiences and how Instagram can serve as a positive tool in the negotiation of one's identity.

This week, Marie chats with our first guest, Félix Bonnevie, author of the paper 'Queering Virtual Worlds: Identity Performance in Virtual World Video Games.' They dive into the intersections of culture and media studies by looking at how massive multiplayer online games, like Second Life can be a means to self -realization for queer and transgender players.