GBA+ Team

Maya Eichler, Mount Saint Vincent University

Maya Eichler is an Associate Professor in Political and Canadian Studies and Womens Studies at MSVU. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Innovation and Community Engagement and leads the Centre for Social Innovation and Community Engagement in Military Affairs at MSVU. Dr. Eichler is interested in social change and citizen engagement in the military and security sphere, with a particular emphasis on the role of gender. Dr. Eichler currently conducts research on ge

nder, sexual violence, and the armed forces, the transition from military to civilian life, and community stories of war and peace. She completed her Ph.D. at York University and held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Southern California, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the University of Toronto. She was a 2013-2014 Lillian Robinson Scholar at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University.Dr. Eichler has published the book Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War in Post-Soviet Russia with Stanford University Press (2012) and the edited volume Gender and Private Security in Global Politics with Oxford University Press (2015). Her articles have appeared in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Critical Military Studies, Armed Forces Society, Études International, Critical Security Studies, Citizenship Studies, Brown Journal of World Affairs, International Journal, Military Behavioral Health, Journal of Military, Veteran and Family Health, and the Journal of Family Theory and Review. She serves on the Editorial Boards of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture Social Justice.

Dr. Eichler teaches courses in the areas of International Relations and Gender Studies, such as Women, War, and Peace, Gender and International Relations, Canadian Foreign Policy, and a special topics course on Critical Military and Veterans Studies.

Link to Personal Website or CV:

https://www.msvu.ca/academics/bachelor-of-arts-ba/political-studies/faculty-profiles/dr-maya-eichler/

Vanessa Brown

Vanessa Brown holds a BA (Hons) and an MA in Political Science from York University. She is a PhD candidate conducting her doctoral work in sociology at Carleton University. She joined the College as a lecturer in 2015 teaching Institutional Policy Studies for the Joint Command and Staff Programme. Vanessa became an Assistant Professor of the Department of Defence Studies in 2020 working in the Dallaire Centre of Excellence for Peace and Security.

Vanessa researches the sociology of the military through a feminist and intersectional lens as well as pedagogy associated with Professional Military Education. Her work doctoral work is concerned with the process of integrating gender and cultural perspectives in Professional Military Education and its influence on organizational culture change. Her broad areas of research include: militarized masculinities and femininities; diversity, identity and inclusion; feminist interventions in international security; international normative frameworks on security and the integration of these in Canadian Foreign and Defence Policy. Her work has been published in a number of edited books including: Rethinking Military Professionalism, Teaching Culture at Military Academies; Culture and the Soldier: How Identity, Values, and Norms Intersect with Contemporary Military Engagements; and From Knowing to Doing: International Perspectives on Leading Effectively. Vanessa has publications forthcoming in Allons-y: Journal of Children, Peace and Security and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice. She has also authored professional reports addressing the topics of gender, culture and security.

Her current projects are on enhancing military operational effectiveness in the provision of support to the Women, Peace and Security agenda, Protection of Civilians and the prevention of the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

Yolande Bouka, Queens University

Yolande Bouka (Ph.D. American University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queens University. Her research and teaching focus on gender, African politics and security, political violence, and field research ethics in conflict-affected societies. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from American University. Her current research is a multi-sited historical and political analysis of female combatants in Southern Africa. Her previous research which is now a book manuscript In the Shadow of Prison: Power, Identity, and Transitional Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda focused on the social and political impacts of the power-laden nature of the Rwandan transitional justice program. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Scholar Program and the American Association of University Women. Prior to joining Queens University, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver.

In addition to her academic work, she has extensive experience with development and security research agencies. She has worked with and offered support to USAID, the UK Department for International Development, the United Nations, the African Union, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the United States Institute of Peace. Between 2014 and 2016 she was a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in the Conflict Prevention and Risk Analysis Division in Nairobi, Kenya, where she led research on peace and security Africas Great Lakes Region. She currently serves on the Research Advisory Council the RESOLVE Network, a global consortium of researchers, research organizations, policymakers and practitioners committed to empirically driven, locally-defined research on the drivers of violent extremism and sources of community resilience.

Tammy George, York University

Tammy George is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Science, School of Kinesiology in the area of Critical Socio-Cultural Policy Studies in Sport Physical Activity at York University. Her current research lies at the intersection of Canadian critical military studies, feminist theory and racial violence. Her current manuscript entitled, Be All You Can Be or Longing to Be: Racialized soldiers, the Canadian military experience and the im/possibility of belonging to the nation explores reconfiguration of racial and national subjectivities in an era of neoliberalism.

Leigh Spanner, Mount Saint Vincent University

Leigh Spanner is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Social Innovation and Community Engagement in Military Affairs at Mount Saint Vincent University. Here, she is undertaking research funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, which explores the gendered dynamics of the transition from military to civilian life in Canada. Her work examines gender norms and power relations in state militaries and Canadian defence and security policy, with a particular focus on how intimate lives and households are integrated into and informed by national security objectives. Leigh received her PhD in Political Science at the University of Alberta in 2019, where her research on military families was supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, a Presidents Doctoral Prize of Distinction from the University of Alberta and a Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship. Her research has been published in International Journal: Canadas Journal of Global Policy Analysis and in the journal of Critical Military Studies.

Andrea Lane, Canadian Forces College

Andreas research focusses on the intersection of national defence, politics, and society, examining the military as an institution, civil-military relations, personnel policy, and procurement. Her current project investigates the narratives of the Elsie Initiative and their effects of female combat soldiers. A frequent media commenter, Andreas work has been published in International Journal, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, the Canadian Naval Review, as chapters in several books, and in popular venues such as Policy Options. She is the co-editor, with Brian Bow, of Canadian Foreign Policy: Reflections on a Field in Transition, published by UBC Press (2020).

Nadège Compaoré, University of Toronto

Nadège Compaoré is an incoming Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of Toronto Mississauga (2021), where she is completing a Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received her PhD in Political Studies from Queens University, where her research on the global governance of oil revenues was informed by fieldwork in Gabon, Ghana, and South Africa, and was funded by SSHRC, CIGI, and CIDA. Her work lies at the intersection of IR theory, the global governance of extractive resources, as well as gender and race in global politics. She is co-editor of New Approaches to the Governance of Natural Resources: Insights from Africa (Palgrave), and her work has also been published in journals such as International Studies Review, Etudes Internationales and Contemporary Politics. Nadège is a board member of Women in International Security Canada and the Canadian Association of African Studies.

Personal Website: nadegecompaore.com

Victoria Tait, Carleton University

Victoria Tait is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at Carleton University (Ottawa), and holds a BA (Hons) and MA in Political Studies from Queens University. Her research focuses on feminist security studies, and her dissertation examines how Women, Peace and Security policy has been framed and implemented within the Canadian Armed Forces. She works directly with Canadian soldiers to identify challenges in the militarys gender culture(s) while creating space for female-identifying soldiers to shape the academic and political narrative of their experience. Victorias work has appeared in the Canadian Defence Academy Press, Springer Publishing, Sage Research Methods Case Studies, Queens-McGill Press, and the Royal Canadian Military Institute. She has experience working as a subject matter expert in the JCSP and NSP programs at the Canadian Forces College. She held doctoral grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC), Ontario Graduate Scholarships (OGS) and has been awarded the Women in International Defence Memorial Scholarship (2016) and the Franklin Pinch Award for Best Graduate Student Paper at IUSAFS Canada (2018). She recently presented her doctoral research as an invited scholar in the Canadian Defence and Security Network Capstone Conference (2020).