Human Rights and Equity Conference 2024 Highlights
Over 200 BCNU members gathered in Surrey - the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Katzie, Kwantlen, and Semiahmoo First Nations on Nov. 13 for the union’s 2024 human rights and equity conference. The event, entitled On Being Included: Reflecting on the Past, Imagining the Future, invited attendees to reflect on systems and histories of exclusion and explore pathways towards a truly inclusive future.
During her opening remarks, BCNU president Adriane Gear asked participants to reflect on what it means to be included. She acknowledged the historically oppressed members who challenged BCNU to ask itself this question 20 years earlier, and the work they undertook to establish the BCNU Multicultural Committee in 2005, which led to the founding of the four equity-seeking caucuses that exist today.
This foundational work was led and supported by the conference’s first presenters, former BCNU provincial treasurer Mabel Tung and BCNU past-president Debra McPherson, in their session Reflecting on the Past - Social Justice and Solidarity.
McPherson is BCNU’s longest-serving president, holding office from 1990 to 1994 and again from 2001 to 2014. Tung served as the union’s provincial treasurer for 13 years and was instrumental in helping to establish the equity caucuses and was the first chair of the union’s Human Rights and Equity Committee.
McPherson and Tung’s session was followed that morning by Making Equity Matter for Class Politics. Conference participants welcomed the day’s first keynote speaker Vivek Chibber, an author, editor and professor of sociology at New York University. Chibber spoke to the ways workers have historically organized to resist various forms of social domination.
Chibber invited attendees to ask each other what “solidarity” means to them, and to imagine a basis of unity that could bring more union members together. “The core of inclusion and the essence of a union is trust. If you do not trust each other, you won’t fight together,” he said.
The conference’s afternoon program began with a presentation by Jill Stauffer, an associate professor of peace, justice, and human rights at Haverford College and author of the 2018 book Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard.
Stauffer shared that a weakened solidarity and the breakdown of trust leads to individual loneliness and talked about why people fail to truly hear one another. She examined the complexities of this experience through the lens of “ethical loneliness,” which she defined as the double harm of being unjustly treated and then not properly heard when one testifies to another about their own experiences and shares intimate details of something significant that has happened in their life.
The afternoon’s next presentation was Workplace Discrimination Among Regulated Nurses in BC. University of Victoria School of Nursing associate professor Dzifa Dordunoo presented recent BC survey highlights from a Canadian Nurses Association cross-country research project on racism and racial discrimination in the workplace.
She reported that nurses aged 25 or younger, those born outside of Canada or those who held master’s degree were among respondents who more frequently reported experiencing workplace discrimination.
The 2024 HRE conference concluded with Reading and Writing with local author Jen Currin which saw conference attendees participate in writing exercises that intended to spark their imagination and foster a safe space for self-expression. The writing activity encouraged attendees to communicate in ways that allowed them to feel truly seen and understood.
Feature-length coverage of the conference will be published in the Spring 2025 issue of BCNU Update Magazine.