When our editorial team at The Conversation Canada came together for the first time about six weeks ago, we gathered around a whiteboard to decide what coverage areas we wanted our new journalism project to focus on. We wrote down some obvious sectors: health/medicine; science/technology; energy/environment; business/economics; education; politics and arts. But we felt there was something missing.

We then wrote the words “Culture + Society” on the whiteboard. Everyone smiled.

My colleague Vinita Srivastava explains.

“For me, the issue of marginalized voices is key. I’m trying to unpack stories previously unexplored or cursorily looked at or misrepresented in media today. Here is an opportunity to unpack them from the perspective of the expert, someone who has been close to the issue for many years who can provide context and analysis. This is one of the ways I believe we need to go in journalism.”

Vinita oversees the Culture and Society file (as well as Arts). And in our first week, she has worked with some leading Canadian academics to produce provocative and thoughtful articles: the issue of racial identity; the way media portray young Indigenous and Muslim Canadians; the irony of media elites tweeting about “cultural appropriation.”

“The culture desk is not a news desk but instead a desk which looks at the news with a critical eye," says Vinita. "It seeks to make connections between the current issues of our day in order to examine and challenge our long-held beliefs.”

Today, we present another article you wouldn’t find in the mainstream media: Professor Rinaldo Walcott, director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, writes about the impact Black Lives Matter Toronto has had on queer communities in Canada and around the world.

En Français

The Conversation Canada is committed to providing our content in both of Canada’s official languages. Our initial launch is in English, but we are working diligently on a French-language site that will provide our audience with a wide range of articles that highlight the research of the country’s francophone researchers and academics. We will have robust websites in both French and English fully functional later this year.

In the meantime, The Conversation Canada will continue to commission articles from French-speaking scholars in Canada. Those articles will appear in French on the site of our global partner The Conversation France and will be translated into English here. An example of that is an article by Mimi Masson we published earlier this week in English and was then published in French by The Conversation France. For this article, there was no translation involved: Mimi wrote in both French and English.