Biography

Karissa is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. She earned her Bachelor Degree in History (Honours & With Distinction) and her Master of Arts in History from the University of Lethbridge. Karissa found her love for southern Albertan women’s history and oral history through her work on the museum exhibit display, “We Knew Nothing: Educating Women and Girls on Human Sexuality, Motherhood, and Wifehood in the 1950s and 1960s”, featured at the Galt Museum and Archives (Lethbridge, AB) in the Stories of Women and Girls: Insights by Undergraduate Scholars exhibit in 2012. She has since then been involved in several oral history initiatives such as the planning of the University of Lethbridge’s Centre for Oral History and Tradition. She has also worked with the University of Lethbridge Archives and the Galt Museum and Archives through Applied Studies from 2011-2013, and curated the Archives Exposed: She Cared Enough To Come exhibit honouring senator Joyce Fairbairn (March-May, 2013). Karissa’s own research on her undergraduate honours thesis on the history of the Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre in the 1970s required her to conduct original research on a topic unknown in the historical narrative. This research inspired her to broaden her focus to youth and students’ reproductive rights activism in Southern Alberta during the 1960s and 1970s. Karissa’s next research project will include rural and indigenous communities experiences with reproductive rights and reproductive oppression in Southern Alberta during the 1960s and 1970s.