Fall 2025
HRSJ 5010 – Foundations of Human Rights and Social Justice
HRSJ 5020 – Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Resurgence of Land Based Pedagogies and Practices
HRSJ 5140 – Art, Media, and Dissent
Winter 2026
HRSJ 5030 – Problem Solving in the Field
HRSJ 5220 – Trauma, Rights, and Justice
HRSJ 5270 – Social Determinants and Medicare
Summer 2026
HRSJ 5040 – Human Rights and Social Justice Field Experience
Fall 2026
HRSJ 5710 – Critical Race and Racial Justice
HRSJ 5260 – Contemporary Capitalism
One of the most valuable assignments that I completed during the program was my paper titled “Missing, Murdered, and Marginalized: Racial Disparities in Media Coverage of Missing and Murdered Women”. This paper looks at Missing White Woman Syndrome and the missing and murdered women and girls epidemic that impacts Indigenous women in Canada. It delves into how the media differentially portrays missing and murdered women based on their race and socioeconomic status by looking at the number of articles written about different missing women and the vocabulary used in said articles. Through a content and critical discourse analysis, I compared the number of articles written about missing and murdered White women with the number articles written about missing and murdered Indigenous women in 2024 and 2025. This was compared with official Statistics Canada statistics on reported murders and disappearances for the same year. I also compared the vocabulary used in the articles about the white women versus the Indigenous women.
While I had anticipated that the coverage would vary based on the race of the victim, my findings indicated just how vast this gap in representation is. White women’s disappearances were viewed as national emergencies whereas Indigenous women going missing is normalized and ignored. This was impactful to my learning as it showed me how mainstream institutions continue to reproduce colonialism. By differentially depicting women who go missing, the news media creates implicit biases within the general population. This then allows for racism and colonialism to cyclically reproduce. Overall, the assignment showed me that in order to address colonialism and racism within Canadian society, we need to look at what discourse is normalized within our institutions.
I have linked the paper here should you want to read further into the findings.
One reading from the program that really stuck with me was the articles titled “Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis” by Willier et al., that we read in HRSJ 5220. This course was centred on trauma and gender-based violence and incorporating this article allowed for a fruitful discussion into some of the sociological and psychological factors that contribute to the enactment of gender-based and interpersonal violence. the article ultimately claims that “men react to masculine insecurity by enacting extreme demonstrations of their masculinity” (p.981). They do not just compensate when their masculinity is threatened but rather overcompensate. The authors claim that this is something that likely varies across cultures, with overcompensation being most common and most obvious in cultural contexts that conceptualize masculinity in a narrow way, and value masculinity at a relatively high level (p.1012). It is through this desire to recover masculine status in both one’s eyes and the eyes of others that the urge to overcompensate emerges.
This reading was particularly interesting to me as it helps to show how gender norms can actively shape political attitudes and societal conflicts. As well, both socially and in the context of this program, it helped me to understand the prevalence of certain acts in society that contribute to trauma. Things like hate crimes, Femicide, gun crimes, and far-right rhetoric can to some extent be understood through the lens of the overcompensation thesis. Here, we see one potential explanation for the adoption of overly masculine attitudes and behaviours. With the rise of “red pill” culture and a subset of the internet that preaches stereotypical masculinity and hatred for women, research like this is more important than ever.
As well, it was interesting to use this research as a lens for understanding why there is sometimes backlash to societal progress. We can see how sudden disruptions to the status quo can unfortunately have adverse effects on social movements. When certain movements threaten notions of hegemonic masculinity, we see displays of the overcompensation thesis. Disruptions of the status quo that interrupt stereotypical gender norms may result in expressions of overcompensation to maintain the system in which many men thrive. This can delay progress.
The research also highlights that masculinity is a structural issue rather than an individual problem. They found that societal contexts which emphasize the importance of hegemonic masculinity are often the ones that face the most male overcompensation. This illustrates how the socialization of men in certain cultures can create a specific type of masculinity that is often threatened and in need of overcompensation. Ultimately, the reading provided an interesting perspective on the perpetrators of male overcompensation and allowed for fruitful in-class discussion about the role male socialization plays in creating a larger culture that normalizes gender-based violence.
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