About Quake

In 2023, Jessica Fields, Jen Gilbert, and a community of graduate students and postdocs at the University of Toronto and York University established QUAKE as a response to the often oppressive conditions that members of marginalized communities face navigating academic institutions. This interdisciplinary and intergenerational community of emerging scholars imagined a research community that promotes inclusion, collaboration, possibility, and friendship. Instead of trying to help racialized, queer, trans, and nonbinary graduate students better assimilate into inhospitable structures and professions, QUAKE’s transformative aim is to reimagine academic success and mentorship.

 Our mission is to foster interdisciplinary and intergenerational mentorship, collaboration, and friendship among racialized, queer, trans, and non-binary scholars, and those interested in gender, sexuality, and education. QUAKE is committed to professional development and to the development of a profession that advances intergenerational exchange and resists the oppressive conditions marginalized graduate students, postdocs, and faculty face in the academy. Through co-created workshops, writing sessions, and pre-conferences, we work to identify better practices in racialized, queer, trans, and gender studies mentorship and bring those practices to academic units across Toronto universities and across disciplines. 

We are inspired by models of collaboration, mentorship, and friendship that are rooted in principles of queer relationality. QUAKE incorporates decolonial, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and queer- and trans-liberatory practices: centering the experiences and knowledges of LGBTQ+ students and scholars, especially those who are racialized. We aim to resist traditional academic hierarchies of expertise through shared responsibility for planning and leading the team activities, a commitment to fostering participation across the group, and an investment in continuing to build QUAKE collaboratively.