Kimberly A. Williams, Ph.D.
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Kimberly A. Williams, Ph.D.

Associate Professor and Coordinator
​
of Women's and Gender Studies
Mount Royal University
Treaty 7 Territory
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

AVAILABLE NOW!
Kim's new book on the Calgary Stampede.

Picture
More than a decade in the making, STAMPEDE: Misogyny, White Supremacy, and Settler Colonialism is the first-ever intersectional feminist look at the settler colonial roots of Canada's oldest and largest western heritage festival. Williams exposes the material realities and often negative consequences behind this much-beloved annual event, challenging readers to ask feminist questions about who benefits from it and who doesn’t. Using a variety of cultural material, from photography and print advertisements to poetry and social media, Williams explores how this popular event continues to influence life on the streets and in the bars and boardrooms of Canada’s fourth-largest city. 

Order your copy today from Fernwood Publishers in Canada and Columbia University Press in the US. Also available at Shelf Life Books in Calgary.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What the F*ck?
Chapter 2: Truck Nuts and Petro Cowboys
Chapter 3: Who’s Greatest Together?
Chapter 4: Colonial Redux
Chapter 5: Sexcapades and Stampede Queens
Conclusion: Now, What?

Early praise for STAMPEDE:
"An amazing example of how to analyze iconic Canadian culture and tradition in an accessible and engaging manner. This book reflect a vital call for Canadian scholars and students to continue to explore the role of settler colonialism and sexism that proliferate in the public and private spaces intended to foster Canadian nationalism. STAMPEDE is edgy, personal, and theoretical."
—Victoria Kannen, Co-editor of
​The Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture

Speaker

Kim is an engaging and dynamic speaker. Grounded in extensive teaching experience, her talks lead participants through interactive sessions that combine critical thinking with an intersectional feminist analysis.

She is adept at working with participants who embody a range of complex identities and who are at different levels of familiarity with social justice concepts. Kim is funny and compassionate while facilitating meaningful discussions to unlearn oppression and work toward equity and justice. 

Kim is able to speak to your group on the following topics:
  • Global feminist movements
  • Men and masculinities​
  • Gender and race at the Calgary Stampede
  • Sex work or sex trafficking?​
  • Global gender issues

Have other ideas? Get in touch!
PODCAST: Women's March Canada, January 2019.
WALKING TOUR: Booze, Broads & Brothels
TALK: PechaKucha Night Calgary #35: Overdue --> Gender Justice
TALK: "Evacuating Family Pets," Resilient Calgary, May 2017
Invite Kim to Speak

Tour Guide

As featured on the Women's March Canada Podcast, Kim has taken her research on Calgary's consensual adult sex industry to the streets in an historical walking tour.

Booze, Broads & Brothels encourages participants to envision new ways of making sense of the old stories commonly told about Calgary’s past.

Kim offers the tour by pay-what-you-can donation to Shift Calgary.
Book a Tour

Author

In her writing, Kim explores things that are missing, that have been disappeared and/or rendered invisible
in the stories we tell about ourselves. She challenges readers to ask how and why they think they know
what they know, and how they might unlearn it, or learn it differently.


Her book, Imagining Russia (2012), won the SUNY Press First Book Award in Women's Studies, and her research on the people, processes, and policies of evacuating family pets during the May 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire is currently featured on PreventionWeb, the website of the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Kim's most recent project on the hundred year-old Calgary Stampede explores the gendered, racialized, ​​and settler colonial dynamics of Canada's oldest and largest annual rodeo and western heritage festival. ​
Learn More

Teacher

Whether Kim is giving a paper at a conference, leading folks on her walking tour, or teaching classes at Mount Royal University, where she directs the Women's and Gender Studies Program, she brings energy and humour to her work. Having taught university courses for over twenty years, she has a wealth of experience working with diverse groups of people to engage in honest and brave conversations about social justice. Kim is a 2021 winner of Mount Royal University's Distinguished Faculty Award.
Learn More

About Kim

Dr. Kimberly A. Williams (she/her) teaches in subject areas that include men and masculinities; intersectional feminist, critical race, and queer/trans theories; the processes and politics of colonization/decolonization; transnational feminist movements; and global gender issues, including the global sex trade industry and health and health care policies and practices. Her research projects and publications interrogate the power dynamics of political projects that rely on settler colonial narratives for cohesion.

Community involvement and collective social justice efforts beyond the academy have always been an integral part of Kim’s intellectual life. She has served as public relations coordinator of RI-NOW, Planned Parenthood, and Dorcas International Institute (Rhode Island, USA), as a member of Fortissima (Washington, DC’s only feminist chorus), on the board of One Voice Chorus (Calgary’s only LGBTQ+ chorus), and as a career counsellor for the Calgary Immigrant Women Association (Calgary, Canada). She also offers a summer walking tour, Booze, Broads & Brothels, based on her research on Calgary’s historic sex industry.

Dr. Williams currently sits on the Advisory Council of Shift, Calgary's only provider of harm reduction and rights-based support services to adults currently and formerly working in the sex industry. She is also active in labour activism and is an Editorial Board member of the academic journal Women’s Studies Quarterly. 
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