W3+ : Waterloo Womxn + Nonbinary Wednesdays

W3⁺ is everyone who comes out to our events or joins our mailing list or Facebook group! W3⁺ receives core funding from the Faculty Association and Staff Association and is coordinated by a planning committee of faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students.

Additional funding for 2019–20 provided by: the Office of Research, Department of English Language and Literature, the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, the Department of Recreation and Leisure, the Department of Communication Arts, the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of French Studies.

The committee

Contact Laura McDonald for more information.

We need new representatives to be the voice for post-docs at W3+. We especially encourage folks with Black and Indigenous backgrounds or who identify as LGBTQIA2S+ to join. 

The group plans and manages monthly events, including bringing in guest speakers. Each committee member takes the lead on one or more events each year, based on their schedule and interests. Here’s what committee members do:

• Attend committee meetings at least once every other month
• Chair or take notes at a couple of meetings each year
• Help identify and arrange guest speakers for monthly events
• Gather feedback about and gather suggestions for events
• Plan and organize events, including arranging space, catering etc.
• Attend and take part in most W3⁺ events

This is an opportunity to gain valuable experience chairing meetings and organizing events centered around important social issues in a supportive environment. 

If you are interested or want to know more, please contact Michelle Przedborski (mprzedborski@uwaterloo.ca). Please feel free to circulate to your colleagues and inform others who might be interested in this great opportunity!

August 24, 2020

W3 is now positively charged! The W3 planning committee has changed the name of the group to W3+: Waterloo Womxn and Nonbinary Wednesdays (pronounced “W three plus”). The change in spelling from women to womxn signals that feminist spaces have historically excluded racialized women and the plus reflects the gender and sexual fluidity of our membership as inspired by LGBTQIA2S+ and the countless ways in which people self-identify. Like an atom that has lost an electron, a positively charged W3+ strives to create space for its members against the negativity of all forms of oppression. We believe that this name better reflects our constituency, our vibe and attitude, and the community we are and hope to continue to build.

We invite women with an ‘e’ to see themselves as womxn and begin to explore what that difference means—what it would mean to racialize whiteness and settler colonialism, and to challenge the heteronormative binary of gender/sexuality. As our style guide for communications, we will use womxn and nonbinary when referencing our membership. This is not a prescriptive policy for members’ or presenters’ work or research or identity, and we will respect everyone’s choice of spelling.

Our listserv and Microsot Team are like community bulletin boards, enabling us to connect on issues and concerns related to our membership. As a diverse group of womxn and nonbinary folks with intersecting identities, there are a wide range of issues beyond gender that are relevant to our membership. Gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, and social justice are all topics that impact and hold relevance to our everyday lives and are welcome on the listserv and in Teams. We ask that when you post news or events, you introduce the content with one or more sentences that explain the event or other content’s relevance to our membership and/or social justice, to help make the connection clear to everyone.