 And I will give you a brief introduction, some technical information. So, hi everybody, welcome to the virtual conference, Reimagining Our Words From Below, organized by Society for the Study of Social Problems to its two committees that address transnational initiatives, the Transnational Initiatives Committee and the Adobe Virtual Transnational Initiatives Committee. This conference is hosted by the Orphalia Center for Global International Studies of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Thanks for being here today. Today we have session nine, Single Parents, Challenges and Distance, which I'm the organizer. Let me introduce myself briefly. I'm Lorena Tartare, currently I'm a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and the former Marisolo Dostacuri Fellow at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Moreover, I'm one of the members of the Transnational Initiatives Committee. Before starting with, I would like to remind you some general use and guidelines for this session. Please keep your microphones muted to avoid the echo. If you are experienced with issues, try to turn off your camera. This session will be recorded. If you do not agree with the recording, you should leave the virtual room now. And in the chat box, you will find two items posted by Patty Thomas. Both of these links are posted also on the front page of the conference. So the first link is to the committee guest book. So you can add your name to the TREPLSP Transnational Initiatives Committee guest book if you want to receive future announcement about the committee conferences activity and events. And then with the other link, you can provide feedback about the conference. So this live session will last one hour and half. Unfortunately, I will leave in 10, 15 minutes before the end due to family obligations. So we have one hour and 15 minutes for our conversation. In this session, we host three fantastic presenters and we have, I'm sorry for the pronunciation of your name, you can correct me if I make mistakes. So we have Eliana Egler, who is an independent researcher from Switzerland with the presentation, the video presentation, what's at the root of our children's mental health crisis. So a legal comparative of two case studies in the USA, Switzerland and Scottish law and the Scottish law too, on our family law can create social injustice for children and civil parents. Then we have Rashmi Karnatjani from the University of Toronto, Canada with the presentation from Mrs. to Mrs. to daughter, I'm sorry, mother in working and talking back. And then we solve for the termination again, Manxin Maw from the University of St Andrews, Scotland with the presentation, mapping out Australian single mother families housing in security experiences and copying strategies through a multi-dimensional framework. So I should remind you that this last session is not a traditional session with full presentation, but it aims to be a discussion among presenters and among participants. So I would ask presenters for giving a short presentation of their research in five, 10 minutes. And then we can start the discussion. And for questions, comment meanwhile, you can use the chat box or as your end or join the discussion after the presentation of the short presentation. Just a note about my style of conduction. I'm used to be quiet in the formal so I will call you with your name, your first name, but please feel free to do the same with me or to do otherwise, not a problem, absolutely. Thank you. Welcome everyone, Diana and Cynthia. Hey, good morning. Good morning. Yeah, thank you. Bye. Thank you. I've already started with a brief introduction and so I can leave the floor to Diana for a short presentation of my research in five, 10 minutes. And then, yeah, thank you. Yes, thank you for this opportunity to be here as an independent researcher. So I started getting into this topic as I was a single parent facing divorce myself, finding out that I had a partner who was suffering a parent actually. My partner became a parent and that is when I found out for the first time that we were facing a substance use disorder and that it was very, very endangering for the child. So that's how my focus really turned into that area. How does law, how does family law meet that topic? And especially when you have a lot of recommendations from social workers that are, as far as I now know, not adequate in order to really protect a child, short-hand as well as long-term. And it started with a mere gut feeling, I have to say that something was just not right with the system and that foremost that alcoholism and substance use disorders are not primarily and only, I would say, transmitted due to biosensitivity, meaning that people can inherit it because of genetics. So I then went into what are activated genes? Does it, what does it take for a child to become an addict because of one of the parents having been an addict? How is it activated? And to my astonishment, I found out that a lot of it happens through what takes place in a, like what takes place in family systems after a child was born. So it's really not just genetically a given and that on one hand is a great plus when we look at it as a society. And it also means that we have to understand the topic from a legal perspective. So that when you go to court and let your judge know what's happening in a marriage, what I found out from so many women was that most judges simply say, well, but that's the mother or that's their father. So they have to go see that child. And perhaps the most baffling example that I can give to you, there are actually two, is when you have a child that has been reportedly sexually abused by a parent. You don't really have evidence in most cases. A mother or a father doesn't go film a parent who is sexually abusing or molesting their child. So you go to court, you report that. And what happens in most cases is that the child has to see, has to continue to see that abusing parent. And then we go ask ourselves, why in the long run a, let's just say a girl who was sexually abused by her father happens to date the same predator again. And people have lots of therapy. And we must understand that therapy is altogether, it's great and it has its limitations. And I would also like to say that children have the right to experience prevention and not just like, okay, you have to go see your abusing parent and then take care of yourself in the future. You can do 20 years of therapy and let's see how well off you are. So that was one angle, one aspect that really caught my attention where I had the instinct, I got to do something about this. And the other one was when I found out that it was just a simple thought that occurred. How come you're not allowed to drive your car when under influence? But then again, I was told by social workers, well, of course he can take care of your son. You know, and I said, how so? And at the time my own attorney said, oh, he can drink from Monday through Friday. And when he sees the child every other weekend, he just won't be drinking. And I said, do you think that addiction works that way that it leaves people with choice when they get to drink and when not? So that's how I got into the, went into the research. And the most beautiful experience, the blessed experience I had was that I got to meet Suzanne Malvahill. And her life story really propelled me into research where I said, like these children have gone through so much and the court system did absolutely not protect them. Here's an opportunity to change something. And that is my main motive for the future. Every single parent who would like to have a different court sentence, who would like to have their child protected, can experience that. And it simply happens through educating. Education is a very important part of that. Education is the key. Judges are experts at law and they sometimes just need expertise in an area where a lot of silence is happening and the silence happens through shame, denial. I haven't heard anyone openly disclosing with a certain type of freedom that they have an alcoholic in their family. But I do experience when you open up this topic, this tender topic, simply through sharing yourself, people follow and they go, yeah, my uncle, oh, my cousin. As I say, in every family, you find someone dealing with substance use disorder or alcoholism. And it somehow still remains a taboo. And people have it that it is something that happens in poorer families while we can look at very wealthy families and the same thing happens. It's really not about money in education. Yeah, so I do, I stand for the ending of multi-generational trauma transfer because I've experienced it myself, how the court system protected my son and how this child is striving. And it also means that the addict itself is not, it's not about punishing that person or saying, you're not a parent anymore, but we need a support system of people who are social workers, who are educated. And I'm gonna end my speech, yeah, my share here. I hear a lot of people telling me, oh, you can't change the world and you can't, like, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna save the world? And I say no because it's happening, it has happened in Scotland and it's happening in Australia. So it can happen in each and every law system around the globe. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, thank you for your contribution. Thank you very much. So I prepared some questions and comments for you but I'll wait later after the other presentations. So Ali, I would leave the floor to Ashmi. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Thank you. It is lovely to be here with all of you, especially because it's at the margins that this work gets done because I too am now an academic, I mean, I am an independent researcher, you can say, though I haven't started that aspect of independent research yet, I defended my dissertation from the University of Toronto, which is why you see University of Toronto mentioned beside my name. I live and work in the Greater Toronto area in Ontario, Canada. And I am a kindergarten to grade 12 special education consultant within public education, publicly funded education in the school board here. So a quick snapshot of who I am, where I am and the problematic. So I am an institutional ethnographer. So as I follow the work and I do my work in the alternative sociology that was developed by Dorothy Smith. And I look at my research, I work with my research participants not looking at them as objects, but as standpoint informants who are experts in their experience. So in listening to the previous presentation, I was very excited from my institutional ethnography mindset to say, that's exactly it. When you foreground the experiences of people going through and how these texts written by experts in social work, talk to the legal justice system and talk to other people and create a narrative in which the child and the person who is a primary caregiver for the child are completely subsumed and invisibilized. So that was my takeaway from the previous session. My family of four came to Ontario in 2002 with nine bags, two children and no jobs, as was Canada's immigration promise that you come here and make it work. I have a degree in science and I began to volunteer in my children's school because my pharmaceutical background from previously was not going to help me here since I have no family here. And I didn't want to leave my children age three and seven at that time in the care of strangers. Their father was working within the pharmaceutical industry and I sought to get into education. Long story short, I got my B.Ed after jumping through hurdles of transcripts which internationally trained teachers need to get every single time, especially those who come from countries that are not, whose education systems are not valued in the Western world. So texts, talking to texts has always been a part of my experience, although I didn't know it at that time because it's asking a fish what is water because you're in it. You're not able to describe it until you get the language. So I finished my B.Ed, I started working in public education, teaching science first and then got my additional qualifications courses and started working as a special education teacher. And I taught students in grade seven and eight and in Ontario elementary education goes from kindergarten to grade eight and then students go to grade nine and 12, nine to 12 for high school. And since I taught students with special education needs, oftentimes their mothers would talk to me and they would ask what's going to happen of him or what's going to happen of her or what's going to happen to her? Some of them, if they were multilingually fluent would speak to me in their heritage languages because I speak six languages in addition to English that are traced back to South Asia. And when I would talk to them about high school course selection, often they would have questions that would perplex me a little, but I would do my best to explain and then they would get it and they would move on. It's not until my daughter was in the same age group of grades seven and eight and high school selection became my mothering work that I began to realize why I got it and they did. Because until then that disjuncture between my academic and work knowledge privilege and their lack of the same thing had not come into view for me. I just took it for granted and I would explain things to them from my institutional capture and I hadn't realized that I got things, I understood things better because I knew the work. And around that time I decided to apply for my graduate school as well. And when I went forward, University of Toronto rejected my application because they said I had a three-year degree from India and not a four-year undergrad degree. And I had also applied to York University and they accepted me. And for that exclusion from the University of Toronto I'm extremely grateful because had that not happened I would not have met Alison Griffith. Alison Griffith is my EMED supervisor and she is an expert in institutional ethnography especially having co-written the book Mothering for Schooling with Dorothy Smith. And I did my EMED with Alison Griffith and I worked with women who looked like me because I was placed in a school where the predominant population was what in the global market is known as South Asia. And they were South Asian women and that label itself invisibilizes the trajectories of people's lives because people from Indo-Caribbean indentureship are also labeled as South Asian. People from Mauritius through indentureship are also labeled South Asian. Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi women in spite of years of colonial rule and resultant conflict through partition left to us as a gift by empire are also labeled South Asian. And that was my standpoint because I was like, mothers who look like me experienced something that's different from what I experienced, what's going on here. And that's the research I began with in grade seven and eight what boundary work are they doing for transition to high school? But when I began with my dissemination I realized that there were more barriers than I had thought. My school board didn't want to hear about it because they said, oh, maybe because these mothers are South Asian and they were not educated here. So the common sense sexism and racism there is all women who look like me were not educated here. That is the understanding, right? Then the issue was, oh, you have a sample size of just seven mothers. So those voices don't count because I'm not a quantitative researcher. So that happened. And another thing was, oh, you're not teaching in this thing anymore it's going to add to the work of other people if you ask to do an action research project. So I shelved that institutionally but inside me it was still simmering. So I thought to myself, okay now if you want to take race off the table if you want to take South Asianness off the table let's go there. So for my doctoral dissertation I did something which was intentional yet very subversive. I decided to do an institutional ethnography of mothering work for students in the years of grade four to six. The reasons were from grade one to three class sizes in Ontario are capped at 23. You cannot have more than 23 children in a class. From grade four that cap is removed so you can have as many as 30 children in a class. So from grade to six there are large groups of children and the curriculum demand changes from learning to read and it becomes reading to learn. So in grade four to six children are expected to understand what they read because it is assumed that we have already taught them how to read now. And the question was at the end of grade six there is a standardized test that happens which is the EQ AO or the education quality accountability office by the government of Ontario that determines which schools are doing well and which schools are not doing well. And then immediately kids get funneled into grade seven and eight and whoosh they get sucked into high school. So I decided what's happening in this black box that we don't know about. No one's talking about grades four to six. Let's talk to teachers, let's talk to mothers. So I spoke to 10 of each and I did not go through school boards because they would have made me jump through hoops until I gave up. So I contacted socially. I put that in my research proposal and I sent out my posters through social media and people just came. I had to tell them I have my 10th person already I'm not interviewing more people. So the findings are in my presentation and it's interesting now because the conversation comes back to saying what's actually going on in schools? In the tensions between the work that is done by teachers and mothers is there one way of doing it? And when people talk about South Asian who exactly is South Asian? What does that even mean? So folks turn to me now and they say, wait a minute I thought you were just looking at mothers and teachers and you were not looking at South Asian mothers. And I said, okay, if that's what you thought that's great, but I look in the mirror every day and I know how you see me. You see, so when I'm talking back institutional ethnography allows me to talk back because I say, look what your texts are doing. Look how you're talking about me and people who look like me. Look what is going into your reports and look how those reports are making these trajectories happen, right? And another thing is returning the gaze because you know, you know right in the pit of your stomach what is that gaze that people are throwing at you? So as Foucault says, you do not need arms you do not need weapons, a gaze is enough. So when I get sidelined for a promotion I'm like, yeah, I get it. I can never be the face of your school board. I know what you see me as, right? And that is absolute freedom in being able to do this work at the margins. And I cannot thank Patty and Morena enough for letting us do this work at the margins and continue to stand strong and in solidarity with one another. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Rashmi for your presentation. Thank you. Then we had time for discussion later and now I leave the floor to Mengi Ma. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you, Morena. Thank you for organizing this panel discussion and good morning, good afternoon, good evening. And it's my pleasure to be here to share my research and also maybe some of my lived experience with you and listen to your research and your experience. So I guess I will just give a brief for backgrounds of my research first, including the practical background and the theoretical framework of this research. And then I guess I will share some stories or single mothers about their housing experiences. So this research, I personally, currently I'm a PhD student in human geography at the University of St. Andrews, but this research is based on my social work placement when I did my master of social work study. So the practical background and also the theoretical framework are all informed by my social work theory and the practice. And so this research is conducted in collaboration with an agency called Council of Single Mothers and Their Children. This agency is based in Victoria and Australia. So this agency has a service program named the Single Mother Housing Register which is a Facebook group to assist single mother families to find another single mother families to share housing in order to reduce the housing costs. And so in this Facebook group, we can say the experiences of single mothers in terms of their housing insecurity and their coping strategies. And at the time of this research was conducted, there was around 1,300 single mothers in that Facebook group. And in this research, housing insecurity is used as an umbrella term. So many forms of housing problems are included such as the unavoidability and overcrowding, lack of belonging, insecurity or tenure and so on. And in Australia, single mother families are one of the most vulnerable groups, social groups encountering housing insecurity issues. And we acknowledge that a single father families are there but we all know that one parent families is almost gendered. For instance, in Australia, 83% of one parent families and parent families is headed by single mothers. So based on my, we call it a strong-spaced approach. So in this research, we are not only looking at the risk factors of these insecurity issues, but also we look at the resilience, the protective factors that single mothers having to help them to encountering housing insecurity issues. And yeah, so the methodology used is that we analyzed around five years of the comments and posts in that Facebook group, which included 421 wall posts and more than 2,000 comments. We analyze these content and identify some things relevant to our research questions. So next I'm going to share some experience and some striking stories with you of our single mothers. For example, our single mother, they experienced many housing insecurity issues and the one is the unauthorable housing. So for our mothers, home ownership is almost unauthorable and also the housing in the private rental market is also very high and unauthorable. For example, one single mother family. So that mother, she was unable to live within her own hometown because the rental price in that place has increased so much she has to move away from her own hometown and she refers this as a shame. And the next insecurity problem is the struggles in the private rental market. Like some of our mothers, they are turned down for 25 times to get a rental house. And the next problem is high mobility, which means that the very freeing to move in rental houses. For example, one mother and her one year old and seven year old children had moved four times within seven months. So between different shared accommodations and another problem which is very common is homelessness. One example is very kind of heartbreaking is one mother and her 11 year old son, they have lived in a camper van without power and a bathroom for around one year and without any other support. And we use the multi-dimensional framework to locate different risk and protective factors because we think that every individual, they has their inner world and also outer world. Then the inner world include their biological, psychological and spiritual dimensions and outer world includes such as relational, social and structural and cultural dimensions. So in each dimension, it has some risk and protective factors. And I'm not going to go through by each factors, but I just want to highlight it to something. For example, we found some protective factors. The mainly two protective factor, one is the positive psychosocial characteristics of our single mothers. That means they felt grateful, they felt hopeful about their situations, whatever the situation is had for them. So this kind of positive personality keeps them going in front of these problems. And another protective factor is kind of the social support happened within these single mother communities. So we observed both fall dimensions of social support, such as instrumental information, emotional and personal support. But we can say that these two types of protective factors are kind of located in their inner world and also their social and relational dimensions. So from another side, then how about the structural dimension? So the almost all the factors that we identified in the structural dimension actually are risk factors for our single mother families. So especially the failure of social services because we think that the social services we provided to our vulnerable groups should be a protective factor for them, but the reality is opposite. So I'm going to give two examples about the structural dimension, the failure of social services. So one is public housing. So the first is the long waiting list, same hopeless for our single mother families. For instance, one mother who received disability pension tried to register for social housing, but the words told that 40,000 people were on the waiting list. And also all those mothers, they registered for public housing. They were not put in the highest need or viewed as an emergency case. Why? Because they were in the private rental housing. They were not physically being on the streets, but as a mother, so you think whatever your situation, you will not let your children to be on the streets. So this is a very ironic problem. And another thing is family law system. I guess there is some overlapping with another president's term in this panel. So the family law system, so our mothers use the words like the worst discriminated, no faith in the system and facilitate the abusers, silence or voices. So these are all the words and used by our single mothers to show their disappointment, desperation, anger and helpless towards the family law system. And some mothers, they had a long and exhausting court battle to keep themselves and their children safe from their former partners lasting like three years, 80 years or even 10 years. So what I wanted to highlight is that although we found some protective factors within our single mother families that also prove that some psychosocial intervention or group-based intervention are efficient to support our families. But the structural problems need to be solved. We need mountain-moving efforts which is to tackle these structural-level barriers for our single mother families. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, thank you, my name for your presentation and your contribution. So I will let the floor to the other participants for questions and comments in particular to Diana that I think she prepared some questions as a discussant. Then I have also my questions, but later. Okay, listen. Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Good day, good morning, good evening. Good afternoon, everyone from where you are in the Philippines, it's almost 12 midnight. So I just wanted to thank all the participants, all the presenters for their very insightful sharing and presentations. And I actually wanted to, excuse me, I just wanted to ask, and anyone can answer this. I wanted to ask how, if anyone would like to speak to this question, how doing research with marginalized groups has, like if anyone would like to discuss how they've encountered any challenges in their particular work in conducting research with marginalized groups, if anyone would like to speak to this, especially as you want to make the case for your respective underrepresented populations in your research. I know some of you touched on this in your presentation, but if anyone wants to elaborate on this, please, the floor is yours. When you say marginalized groups, anyone, not necessarily single parents? Yes, from the audience, you can open it up for the audience. And let's see how it interfaces also with the presenters for, yes, Dr. Ligaya. Yes, because I've been studying really marginalized groups, marginalized women. And the, I started with peasant women in the Philippines, so I stayed in the village and I wanted to see their problems. And I try, and that's where I evolved the organic feminist inquiry. And then I studied migrant women in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vancouver, Rome, and then Chicago. And I considered them marginalized women because they were in domestic service work and I discovered a lot of abuses. And, of course, the state policy, labor at-sort policy and the state policies within the receiving countries also interplay in marginalizing them. And my current research is on the indigenous communities in the Philippines. And I would say they're marginalized. Historically, they have been marginalized in Philippine society. And the entry of corporate mining, they are part of their marginalized system because of dispossession of their lands by transnational corporations. Also, there are violations of their human rights, especially the UN Declaration of Indigenous People's Rights that has universal application. And the right to life, the right to environment, the right to development, the right to ancestral lands, all of these are violated. So one of the things that might be unique and is hardly addressed is the militarization. How militarization actually impact more evidently and more seriously the lives of migrants or the lives of marginalized groups. And this is not addressed very well yet and maybe I'm thinking like someday to come up with a session where we can take a look at the state aggressive action, sometimes collaborating with other institutions. And it affects not only the people, the marginalized groups but also the non-governmental organizations who are providing service. And then also the families because when a father or a mother, especially father or son or daughter are extra judicially killed, then there's a lot of disruption in the family. So they become single parents. And the trauma, I haven't researched on that, the lingering trauma in the family because they are mostly poor, especially like Duterte's extrajudicial killing in his drug war, we need to do more research on what happened to these families, what's going on. And so the issue of state aggression and violence, I think needs to be addressed because it does tremendous impact including social movements of the poor. And we need to raise a public, global challenge to these oppressive states. Thank you, Dr. Ligaia. Is there anyone else who wants to jump in that's here from the presenters? Yes, please, Ms. Rashmi. Or was there someone else who wanted to speak? Oh, anyone can jump in. Okay. Yes, I think I was trained very well by the British to always raise my hand. So that's what I do. Anyway, on Monday, this is a long weekend in the land that's now known as Canada. And many people in the country will be celebrating Victoria Day, so that should tell me something. Anyway, in terms of researching at the margins, I was thinking about how even within a racial group that is perceived as homogenous, for example, South Asian, right? There are margins even within there based on the institutional privileges that some of us have as insiders within the educational system, which is my field of work and people who are outside that system. And it's interesting because there is such a difference in the community I'm experiencing here with all of you in being able to share, but in the place of employment where my research would have actually helped my school board and other school boards in Ontario to make a difference for the lives of students and families, it is completely erased. You see, it is completely erased and I call it the yes, but technique, right? So the pushback is so subtle. The pushback is so subtle to anything that one wants to do that the teams that you're invited to collaborate in suddenly decide to do something different than you realize you're not on the mailing list or things that you bring up at a meeting, folks will say to you, even superiors will say to you in a public forum, oh, I'm going to stop you right there. I know where you're going with this. And I have had to turn off my camera at that time because it felt like a stinging slap across my face, right? Because I'm not speaking for marginalized mothers and they may be black, indigenous, South Asian, Tamil, Pakistani, anyone, right? In the schools that I support, but the very fact that they are not insiders but I speak of them means that I am a thorn in the side, and it's become a fulfilling way of doing this now. I think the beauty of it is embracing it and saying, okay, this is where you're going to put me and I will stand here and I will fight, you know? I will stand right here where you have pushed me and from here I will fight. So that's okay, I guess, but that is the marginalization. Career paths are plateauing, you know? And that's okay. It's what the hill you choose to die on, right? And that's the price you pay and you're okay with that. Thank you, Dr. Rashmi, this beautifully said. Is there anyone else who would like to add? Yeah, Kai, just to share some of my experience based on my personal experience, it might be not as the insightful as Dr. Rashmi and Dr. Liga shared. So I guess taking the example of this single mother research, although this research is completely based on the content analysis, that means I didn't have a direct interaction with single mother families, but I did get some chances to have a short interview with some mothers with a migration background with the reference from the agency. So I would say being an insider definitely is an advantage to research with someone marginalized or disadvantaged group. And I forgot to share that the agency that I did my placement, actually they only recruit the staff or interns or placement students who are single mothers themselves or who are raised in single mother families. So I guess we either you are a practitioner or a researcher when we share some, that's a common identity with our clients or our participants that might be kind of easier to gain the trust from them. But I also acknowledge that you can't always be an insider because you will have different research participants. For instance, my PhD research actually will focus on older migrants. So definitely I'm not an older person, I'm a young person, I'm an outsider for my participants. But I think from in this kind of situation, personally I plan to kind of spend some time, for example, being a volunteer in some older care center or kind of a daycare center as a volunteer. So take some time to build trust with them. The next step continue my research with them because actually I indeed, I did some volunteer work in a daycare center which provide care with older adults with dementia and their clients are all kind of British and the local aged person. And I remember that it was the first day when I was there, we were, they kind of, they didn't accept me as an insider with them, but when I spend more time with them for three days or four days or long, one month, two months, and even though I'm an Asian woman, a young student, but they still accept me as an insider to work with them. So I guess the insider and outsider is kind of fluent up to the researcher. How do you identify yourself and identify yourself along with your participants that is just based on my personal experience? Thank you. Thank you, Meng Jing. Elian. Yeah. Dr. Elian. I would absolutely like to add what you just said. You have to make yourself an insider. When you research something, because I heard the word or the wording of fighting, I'm gonna continue my fighting. I just realized in my personal work, also coaching clients through this process, there's a high chance that you are going to face as a single mother, a male judge. And when you're going to court and you're gonna be fighting against these bad, bad men, you're gonna get fought back because no one, the question is, how do you get into people's hearing? You're not, in my experience, you're not gonna get into their hearing when you victimize yourself, when you make yourself part of a small group, a small group that doesn't get the privileges, kind of like complaining. People automatically shut off and they become defensive. They push back. So in my work, that's why I say children. It's a 50% chance, a boy or a girl, but they're children. And every judge, if he has children, he may have boys only or girls only, but he's a parent. So using words that make us, I would say connect. When you go into court and you ask for something, when you go into a meeting room and ask to be heard, how do I make myself with the topic that I have a part of everybody? And that's when you usually invite people to listening to you, yeah, which is really essential because I hear it all the time, like, oh, my husband, my husband, oh, these men, and oh, all these men that are drinking. And that's not gonna get us anywhere. It's really about making it about humanity. And it's happening with gender fights. The truth of the matter is when you look at these re-socialization programs for men in Scotland, they work, they're successful, and nothing happens with the woman. And it looks like that. The couple may separate, and then in the long run, if she doesn't do any personal work, she still has a concept of what men are and what they're not. Oh, they're useless. Oh, they're all dangerous. And there's such a high chance that she's gonna get herself into a next abusive relationship, although she's divorced, an abusive man or a drinker. She divorced that one, but she walks right into it again. And the other thing is, as I mentioned that, no, I actually, I didn't mention it in my presentation, but it's important to understand that even if the mother stays single, mostly boys step into the role of their father. They become the addict or the villain in the family system. So this is just one example of uniting us. It takes work on each angle as human beings. So when you step into a room and say, I'm the minority, how do you get everybody? Everybody's attention and build that, build empathy. Yeah. I think, oh yes, Dr. Ashmi, thank you, Dr. Adriene Eylian. Dr. Ashmi, you're releasing your hand again. Yes. Thank you so much for sharing that in terms of the collective and the knowledge piece of reaching out to people's humanity to understand the big issues. It's interesting, in the educational field also, Ellen Brandtlinger had written about dividing classes. When she talked about how middle-class women narrate their and other people's children, right? And in my field of work, what happened was I used my research and made it more accessible to teacher unions because that becomes a point where the intersecting work of mothers and teachers happens, right? Because when mothers raise a point about asking for more information, et cetera, if teachers say, oh, that's my professional judgment and that's a line that mothers don't cross. Not just mothers, even principals don't cross that line, right? Because if you invoked the word professional judgment, then everything comes to a stop because then the union and the union's professional judgment text and discourse comes into view because the teacher has claimed a situational positionality of being an expert, right? So I decided to make my work accessible through practice journals. And I wrote for the elementary teachers' Federation of Ontario's magazine, which is called The Voice. And teachers in my study had spoken about the power struggles that they have to endure from other teachers who are more powerful in their school when they advocate for marginalized students and families. So I wanted to reach out. And in that I used a sentence, which is my theorization of the blended standpoint. And I said, if this were my child, what would I want? What would I fight for? Okay, and it was well received, 82,000 members of the union read it. I still get emails. My school board converted it into a visual, okay? However, when push comes to shove, when we are sitting in meetings, when marginalized mothers are talking about their children, this big picture understanding of all children or our children flies out the window in my experience in this work. Because teachers will continue to recommend for their students, supports, safety plans, all kinds of exclusions from a mainstream classroom that they would never allow for their own child. You see? So there is a difference in what I notice in my professional standpoint. There is a difference between intellectually understanding that all children are our children. But when it comes to what Lipsky calls street level bureaucracy, right? Handing out opportunities based on in the material matrix who people think are deserving and not deserving. You see, of handing it over, like some parents will receive comments like, oh, I really liked how you spoke about your child with such an asset mindset. But other parents will be told, that's what you see, but this is what we see and this is what we'd like you to do, right? Unfortunately, what you are seeing in your experience with the legal system has not trickled down into education. And I think it also depends on the fact that the intersectionality of the parent or the mother, especially a single mother, if a black woman is very different from that of a non-black mother. You see? So those issues are on the table because race is always on the table. And education likes to pretend it's a race neutral field, but it is not. And I'm wondering what it is like in other things. And it happens to me in the legal field each day I walk into the courtroom. It is not something that I do once and then it's done. It's always a topic, but I do it nonetheless because it's conditioning. It's, I see it as a conditioning, a human conditioning that we, a lot of people are not even aware of. It's just dividing. Division happens every day, everywhere. Oh, they're not good enough because and there are 10 and more reasons why you could divide yourself from someone, whether it be gender, whether it be race, whether it be education, so many reasons, but it's worth going in there and making that difference each time. Of course. No matter what you hear back. Of course. You're doing it, that's what's essential. Yeah. And sometimes it's like a dog whistle, right? Only some of us hear it and some of us read it. For example, when we heard about the extremely excruciating incident of the shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo recently, where a young white man went in and shot people. And even before you know the identity and the race of the person who committed that atrocity, if you were to read the shooter is now in custody, you immediately know that it's not a black man in North America and everywhere in the world. If you are tuned into the textual conversation, when they say the person is in custody because if that were a black person out there, that person would not have lived through that, invariably. So when people say is in custody, the subtext for those of us who are connected to that conversation and I'm not a black woman, right? But I'm a teacher of black students. I'm a friend of black mothers, right? So immediately, even before they tell you who the shooter is, if they say the perpetrator is in custody or the perpetrator has been unfortunately, whatever, that's the bifurcation of the street level bureaucrats and whom they chose to take their life and whom they chose to take into custody. Unfortunate, but every day we show up and we do the work every single day. We show up and we do the work. Thank you for that. I just wanted to share like there is a thank you for your very rich insights like discussing the left or experiences with the reflexivity in your research, in your work and also the role of agency among your research communities in the face of so much overwhelming structural oppressions. Like you also touched that. My next question was actually on intersectionality but you pretty much touched on it. So yeah, I think like this is something that we can skip through. Yes, thank you. Thank you Diana. I think it's just a comment, a question for all presenters. And I was wondering if there are in your research, in your experience, if these women, women in different contexts, so housing, legal fields, education, if when they have problems like these problems with housing and so on, are they able to organize themselves in organizations, movements, make claims? Because I conducted research and research study on the transition of women through the legal system. And I see on my results that it's in Europe, so it's a different context but I have participants from different countries. And I see that a very big issues that that is these women have many, many problems in organize themselves in movement organizations and in asking out in an organized way. And they are single individuals but there are really, really many problems in joining other people and trusting them. So yes, I was wondering if in your research, these women are able to join and make claims together. And so yeah, just a thought about it. I can only speak to that from my perspective when I work with women who choose divorce when there's domestic violence and substance use disorder in the family. That's just my experience. Women who are married to a wealthy man who brings home, I'm gonna say a chunk of money, they usually are not the ones who are ready to file the, like they're not gonna file divorce unless the hell at home is burning so much that they really don't have another choice. What I hear in that perspective is more of, well, you see, I want my children to go to university. So how do I basically, how do I live through this? Staying married and having my children at home. How do I protect my children from what's happening while I stay in the marriage, while the children stay in the household? And then other women who are, I'm gonna say the middle class who make enough money so that they can support the child and themselves and then evidentially have to bring their child to daycare to continue working. They choose to leave the man. And these are the kinds of women, women who, number one, can afford to leave the man and number two, who are interested in knowledge, understanding the mechanisms. These women are women that bond. They bond through sharing their experience and hope. That's usually also where shame is pretty low. And then there's another segment of I'm gonna call them poorer families. Where education oftentimes is, I don't know if it doesn't reach them. It's very obscured. That's what I can see. Women bonding through saying, oh, that's how it's been forever. My father has been an alcoholic and my grandfather and we've all gone through this suffering. So I'm not gonna step out of that. Yeah, if that speaks to your question. Yeah, so it takes women who want knowledge and who are willing to walk the walk. And it's not an easy walk either way. Being a single parent, also when you make money, I'm talking from the Swiss perspective mainly. When you make money, when you can afford to be a single parent, it is a daily struggle. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. I have a question. Does anyone of you panelists ever thought of expanding the concept of domestic violence so that we do not always look at the source of violence originating from the fact but that the source of violence coming from external like pressure or violence from the state. And can you consider that as well as domestic violence when the impact is affecting the relations in the family affecting the, they become, they lose a member of the family. So the mother becomes a single mom or a child is taken away by state violence. Can you consider that domestic violence? Can we always, can we begin coming up with a paradigm of domestic violence that looks at the source of violence into the family coming from other sources like corporations, transnational corporations now have defense forces to contain resistance to some of their projects like extractive industries and these are tremendous impact on family life. I call that toxic patriarchy. It's not talked about much how men are negatively impacted by corporations, by other men, by their own fathers like male ruled structures, what it does to men when a man comes home to his family, a man who has a lot of pressure, a man who has to make an earning for the family also social expectations. Oh, you have a new car? Oh, so we need one too, honey, did you see that? Did you see that family over there? Our neighbors, they have a new car and they have a bigger pool. What does that do to a man? And that's something I'm seeing in Scotland that's working so well. They are bringing men together in group sessions talking about that. What does malehood, manhood do when it has a toxic form? So yeah, that's not talked about. We see the predator as the predator, the villain. The question is, how do you become a villain? Why did you become aggressive or violent? Yeah, I find that a great question that you just had. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And the aspect of toxic patriarchy is very important to consider because the whole thing of men have to be a particular way and how does that impact? So the question that was asked, I was also thinking of indigenous peoples in Canada or the land that is now known as Canada and the violence that is experienced is an issue that it comes into the family through the impact of intergenerational trauma that has begun with the residential schools that were started in order to kill the Indian and the child as the government mandate was. And last year around this time, bodies of children were beginning to be found on school grounds of residential schools. And those discoveries are still happening. And it's interesting because families themselves knew that their children were lost and they had not come home, but until indigenous families decided to go looking for their children, which is heartbreaking, the government did not do much in order to follow through on those claims that their children were buried on those grounds, right? So that is definitely Canada's shame and it is never being talked about outside. Nowadays, there is a raised awareness even within newcomer communities that this is in traditional indigenous territory, right? And a lot of it is unseeded land. So that is one aspect. Also in the 60s, there was something called the 60s scoop where indigenous children were removed from families and given up for adoption in non-indigenous families. So children were just lost, right? So if you were to look at writers like Richard Wagameez, he writes, he was someone who was taken from his family through the 60s scoop, right? And when you come back, your culture has been completely erased and you have been raised in shame and you have been raised with the burden of gratitude that you have been removed from the mess in which you were. Never mind that mess was started by somebody else, right? So that is something that's still happening. In more recent arrivals, the impact of Islamophobia, anti-black racism in social spaces and in work spaces does trickle back into the home. And as Mark said, for the working class man, his wife and children are his proletariat, right? So he comes home and that is the line of control. Somebody kicked me around outside. I'm going to come home and I'm going to kick you around because I have nowhere else to take it out, right? So Karl Marx talked about that, right? And he said that industrial model of someone at the top and someone at the bottom is replicated in the family because that man comes home and he takes it out on his wife and children, if you will, right? And those are things and you're right. We need to have men's groups. We have to have young men's groups, sons talking about, we need to have intergenerational conversations between working class families, right? To say it is always like that. And I was interested in your conversation about very rich families don't want to leave and very poor women don't want to leave because in the material matrix, that is the situation, right? And what happens to everybody else? So absolutely, that's an excellent question because what happens from society does trickle into the family because families are indeed a part of the social. What a brilliant group of people here. Thank you, thank you, Rashmi, really. Thank you for your comment. I have just, I know that I should close the meeting but we have just a final question about toxic patriarchy but it's just my point of view of the situation. I was wondering, it's a question about, in particular for Eliane because it's a field of work and research and there is some reflection about the law on children custody because I was wondering how the law on children custody and also the arrangement about children custody and character frames also the problem of your research. So what kind of impact this law has your specific problem, for example, about the use of drug and alcohol? But because in my experience, this law presents different problems in specific situations for example, domestic violence. Also, I guess if you have some reflections about the impact of this kind of law, just because I think it is in Switzerland you have a law similar to other European countries with the shared custody by default. So there used to be this general rule in countries such as Switzerland, many European countries and as far as I know, also the United States it was kept very traditional. The mother stays at home so she automatically gets to take care of the children and the father has to be the one who pays alimony and there has been as far as I know in Switzerland definitely a movement from father saying wait a minute, so I get divorced from my wife, I lose my children, I hardly see them and I pay for everything. And this resulted in much more flexible forms of parenting, shared parenting. So usually when a couple sort of gets along they can share parenting that children get to live in both households. And the problem with that is divorces are usually a battlefield, right? People usually don't come to court and say sure, let's agree upon everything unless they've done some coaching or conscious uncoupling. So nonetheless, there's jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is ruling in my country because it just simply says the father, that's the baseline the father at the very minimum gets to have the children every other weekend. Especially when it comes to substance use disorder it has nothing to do with gender. It's not about is it the mother, is it the father? Because I do have cases where fathers come see me and say she's smoking pot all day long. I come home and she's completely zoned out. My children don't do their homework, I'm at work all day, what do I do? I don't wanna so to say kill her like damage her but I am not okay as a father with what I'm seeing with what's happening. So there again, it's important to see it has nothing to do with gender and it has nothing to do with jurisdiction. We cannot apply a rule to these cases that has been established because we like to put things as human beings take that way. We like the white or black box, this or that because it's somehow easier to our brains. So we gotta think a little bigger. It's what is the issue? What caused the divorce? Is there substance use disorder? And then have a look at how can we help the children and the parents? Because you then have to look at who's making more money? Who's more capable, willing and able to take care of the child? And then lastly, we have to think of the social costs. This whole misery is costing us as a society, money-wise financially, healthcare being bearably affordable in Switzerland. It's a huge topic every year. Health care insurance is a tremendous issue for families and it's costing us because it's making children ill. That's what it does. I mean, there's a trend going on in Hollywood. Everyone's saying, oh, my therapist. In my understanding, this is not, this is not, it can't be a trend to say, oh yeah, I had my fifth relapse, I'm going to another beautiful institution. And it's okay. For me, it's not okay because it's very saddening what's happening. Thank you. Thank you, Eliane, for your experience. Thank you. I think that about to be slow, the problem is that it's not able to frame and to real specific situations because there is an application by default, a shared custody by default. So for many situations, it's fine, but for other several situations, it's not fine because we need to understand very well that specific situation of domestic violence and other problems because their families have different problems. And I think that it's a very, very big issues because I saw in my, because in the first part of my career, I worked as a court appointed expert for courts. So I come from a different field as a practitioner. So I saw many times that there is the general rule, the judge applies the general rule, the shared custody by default, but it doesn't work in many situations. So I think that it's not, as you told, it's not a problem about gender, but it's a problem about how the system works. So I think that it is important try to promote some reflection on about how the system doesn't work in many situations. So thank you. I think that we are approaching to the end of the session because we have five minutes, but I should leave. So I don't know if there are questions, but they are very, very welcome. So we can use this last five minutes. I put in the chat, the link to the page for this session. And I highly encourage you to go there and continue discussion there and to share this page with other people, other scholars, but also other activists or so forth who are involved in the projects and the topics that you're involved in. So that this becomes a good resource and we can begin to, that we can continue what we've begun here. So I just wanted to remind you that this is, this discussion will be up on that page and other people might see this discussion and have a chance to comment there, but also you can come and comment some ideas that you might have after leaving here. Because I know I always have like, oh, why didn't I say that or why didn't I say this? So I would encourage you to use that resource and to share that resource. I'm hoping Rashmi will share it on Twitter with her Twitter account and so forth. Anyway, so I just wanted to point that out that that's very much still available and will remain up long after the conference is completed which you guys are the end. So the conference is going to be completed when we leave here. So thank you very much for being a part of it. Thank you very much for coordinating this because it's extremely wonderful that, you know, we can all get together like this. And Patty, thank you very much for your help with all the uploading of the video and all that. Much appreciated. Thank you. Thank you. I would like to thank again all the speakers and participants for very, very interesting discussion. And I think that we can also, as Patty told, I think that we can try to establish new connections and networking among us and with our scholars. So it's very important that it's our aims. So thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. And I also wanted to say thank you for all the work that you do to make every day the voices of your research communities heard and to make the case for different marginalized groups all over the globe. So thank you. Thank you. So I wish you all a good continuation with your research and your activities and activism. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.