Introduction
The editors are pleased to present our second electronic issue of Atlantis which features two clusters of original papers that focus on aspects of violence against women. The first cluster, introduced by Carmen Gill, Director of the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre for Family Violence Research in Fredericton, New Brunswick, presents some of the papers given at the first annual research day held in November 2005. Six papers are presented here on the theme of "Violence Against Women and Children: Partnering for Change." Articles by Deborah Doherty and Gilles Rondeau and Christine Drouin provide discussions of the rates of homicide and the types of high lethality risks encountered by professionals in the field. While the latter article also examines the most appropriate types of intervention, Colleen MacQuarrie and Kelly Robinson investigate particular programmes. The article by Rina Arseneault, Nancy Benoit and Anne Brown focuses on Francophone and Acadian women in the context of socioeconomic inequality while Gill's collaborative piece discusses the development of the "Canadian Observatory on the Justice System's Response to Intimate Partner Violence." All of these articles focus on the development of policy interventions and initiatives.
Our second themed cluster also foregrounds a feminist focus on violence and women's bodies. Karen Macfarlane, past president of the Atwood Society, introduces three literary critical essays, each of which interprets Margaret Atwood's representations of women's locations within power politics. Jennifer Hoofard's "'It Is Her Body, Silent/and Fingerless, Writing this Poem': Margaret Atwood's Notes on a Poem that Can Never be Written" considers the ethical questions that arise in representing the tortured body. For her part, Marie Lovrod presents a comparative study of the forms and conditions of disciplining women's bodies in "Teaching Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale with Sidhwa's Cracking India as Introduction to Transnational Feminisms." Finally, Lynne Dickson Bruckner's "Surfacing in the Ecofeminist Classroom" explores the conditions that create violence and the connections between forms of violence.
Linda Kealey and Rhoda Zuk

Atlantis 30.3, 2006

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