Irshad Manji
"a new media-savvy voice for progressive politics from someone
you'd definitely like to party with."
The Globe and Mail
"a new media-savvy voice for progressive politics from someone
you'd definitely like to party with."
The Globe and Mail
A Toronto-based author, broadcaster and educator, Irshad was recently declared a "Feminist for the 21st Century" by America's Ms. Magazine and one of "100 Leaders of Tomorrow" by Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine. The category they put her in? "Dreamer." How prescient.
A journalist with the world-reknowned Citytv, Irshad is host and senior producer of The Q-Files, the first program on mainstream North American TV to explore gay, lesbian and other "queer" cultures. Topics range from gays and God to drag queens and their mothers to youth and their role models. Irshad's favourite feature is Straight Talk, during which heterosexuals are invited to ask their most candid questions about homosexuals. Professional teachers join her to field these "queeries." The result: myth-busting hilarity.
In 1997, Irshad's first book hit the stands - and quickly entered second printing. Risking Utopia: On the Edge of a New Democracy chronicles how North American youth are turning political alienation into hip forms of citizenship. It has inspired school courses and led Irshad to speak with thousands of students and teachers about what she calls an "ethos of education." She is writing her next book about Generation Q, the 90 million post-Xers who are so queer and non-linear in their thinking (that's why it makes no sense to call them Gen Y) that they'll revolutionize education - if only we let them be our teachers.
Irshad demonstrates that lesson in her community work. She helps lead the Youth, Politics and Media program at Toronto's Laidlaw Foundation. There, she engages kids from the margins to promote democracy through fashion, sports and music. "You've got to be noble on their terms," Irshad says. "Challenging yourself to be the student is key to putting the edge back into education."
Irshad knows a thing or two about education. The holder of an honours degree in history, she earned major scholarships in each of her university years and won the Governor-General's award for top graduate. More recently, in an address to the University of Toronto, she questioned North America's love affair with communications guru Marshall McLuhan. In so doing, Irshad established two firsts: becoming the first 20-something to deliver the prestigious lecture, and attracting hecklers for the first time in that lecture's history. Since then, Irshad has started a debate about "neo-feminism" - the kind that rejects labels not as a slap to the women's movement, but as a tribute to it. For her very public risks, Irshad has been deemed everything from a "shero" to a parasite.
A refugee form Idi Amin's Uganda, Irshad took inspiration from hardship to write among her most influential pieces. "Dear Mum: I'm Sorry" is described in one review as a "moving letter which recounts with brutal honesty how the smart, ambitious daughter, striving to fit in, rejected the old-world mother - to her own peril." Emphasizing empathy, accountability and ultimately personal agency, the letter has been re-printed in school textbooks throughout North America.
It has also fostered Irshad's motto: "For all of my so-called minority
labels, I grew up with the greatest privilege any adult can give a child:
self-esteem."
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