Yesterday I attended a celebration of life for Dr. Margaret Walton-Roberts. Dr. Walton-Roberts was Margaret to me, Marg to many, and Nodge to her loved ones.

Margaret was one of my first mentors. I started my career as her research assistant, on a co-operative education placement in my last year of high school. I was reluctant at first. I wasn’t particularly interested in international migration or geography, I thought I wanted to be a diplomat or an international lawyer and work with the UN. Migration and social policy didn’t seem as glamorous, to be honest. I didn’t see the connection.

Working with and knowing Margaret changed me. Margaret’s presence was warm and steady. One of the things I remember most about her, about working with her, was how she listened – attentively, critically, and carefully. I knew she wanted to hear and understand, deeply, to build on whatever we shared among us. She was committed, dedicated, and devoted.

Margaret made me think through and feel the relationships between people and places in radical new ways. She encouraged me to pay attention to journeys, destinations, and pit-stops, to all of the life, the connections happening before, after, and in-between. I began noticing flows – of people, of capital, of culture, of time. I began to understand intimately how stories move people, physically and otherwise.

Last night, I sat down and revisited some of Margaret’s scholarship. I came across an article that she co-wrote with members of the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective in 2015.

It’s called “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University” (ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies).

As I read the article, memories began seeping in from the corners of my mind. Holding and watching a colleagues’ baby while they presented at a conference downstairs. Sitting side by side looking at tables of data together in the research centre’s office. Receiving a warm, squishy hug at a barbecue in our colleague’s backyard.

The article was published just before we started working together, and over the three years that followed, I got to know Margaret as a mentor and collaborator. I enjoyed copy editing her writing, visualizing her data, asking questions, and, eventually, researching and writing together.

Most of all, I loved learning and practicing this kind of slow scholarship. In looking back, I see all of the care interwoven with collaboration. She embodied all of it so well.

Many of Margaret’s loved ones who spoke at the celebration spoke about her practicality, her encouragement, her decisiveness, and insistence on not just whinging but doing something about it.

They spoke about her love of water, and attunement to the ebbs and flows of the tide wherever she took life and life took her.

While her early loss doesn’t make sense to me, it makes sense to me that she was able to move in this way, with slowness and quickness. She was like water.

Thank you for teaching me, Margaret. Thank you for being like water.

The Margaret Walton-Roberts Migration Research in Practice Fund (aka: Marg’s Fund) is intended to support graduate students researching migration. The fund is inspired by Margaret’s spirit of collaboration, her inclusive and engaged approach, and of course, her ever practical endeavours to ensure that research and scholarship have real world impacts. Make a donation here.