Provost Presents

Provost Presents… is a speaker series organized by Dr. Diane Purvey, Provost & Vice President, Academic, at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Each event will provide opportunities for KPU students, staff and faculty to hear from experts in higher education about timely, compelling issues that are pertinent to work and study in the field of academia.


Killjoys at Work

killyjoy handbookSara Ahmed talks about her new book – “The Feminist Killjoy Handbook”

To be a feminist killjoy is to be a killjoy at work. We work on institutions as well as at them. In this lecture I explore what we come to know about institutions from our efforts to transform them. I will draw especially from two chapters “The Feminist Killjoy as Philosopher” and “The Feminist Killjoy as Activist” in my newly published The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. To be killjoys at work means being willing to confront institutional problems, to question how diversity is happily claimed by organisations, and to challenge how they use our efforts to change them as evidence they have changed. To be killjoys at work also requires being alert to how the figure of the feminist killjoy can be appropriated and neutralised. We have to find other institutional killjoys, because the more we come up against, the more we need more.

Date: Oct 26th, 2023
Time: 9:30 am - 11:00 am
Location: Online Webinar

Past Speakers

Robin Wall Kimmerer Discusses her Book, Braiding Sweetgrass - February 21, 2024

Sara Ahmed - Killjoys at Work - October 26,2023

Kumari Beck, PhD. & Sharon Stein, PhD. - Living With/in the Complexities of Internationalization - April 27, 2023

Jean Teillet - The North-West is Our Mother - January 19, 2023

Sunera Thobani, Benita Bunjun, Enakshi Dua - Coloniality and Racial (in)Justice in the University: Counting for Nothing? - March 10, 2022