Drew Beaupre should have been walking across the stage at this spring’s convocation ceremonies — a proud graduand of the undergraduate English and Cultural Studies program, heading to do a master’s degree in the same department.

But things didn’t quite work out that way. Last winter, he learned that his mother was homeless and living on the street, and the difficulties that went along with that meant that he finished the term one credit short of being able to graduate with the rest of his class in the spring.

It was a challenge. And it’s not the first one Beaupre has faced.

“The most unique thing about my journey, and the thing that has underscored every part of it is that I come from a very, very poor family,” he explains.

“And despite being a really good student with really high grades who’s going to grad school in the fall, the barriers in my life are what’s stopping me from walking across the stage with my friends at convocation.”

That’s not to say he won’t be graduating. He will, and grad school and a different convocation ceremony await in the fall.

In fact, Beaupre is kind of an academic superstar.

His graduate supervisor, Catherine Grisé, praises his analytical skills, research potential, creativity and facility in synthesizing complex ideas, and says he will be a strong addition to his graduate program.

He’s made it through his undergrad degree with a raft of awards, including the Branscombe Family Foundation Scholarship, which paid most of his tuition. He’s published two pieces in McMaster’s Spectrum journal — one a piece of gender theory, the other a companion poem.

He’s the social and political advocacy expert with the MSU Women and Gender Equity Network (WGEN), a student-run network that provides peer support and resources to gender-diverse people and folks who are marginalized on the basis of their gender.

He and WGEN Director Rasheed Ahmad co-authored a published zine called Toolkit for Activist Accountability, which shows would-be activists — especially university students — how to leverage privilege, wealth and community to push for change.

But poverty, and the challenge of being the sole-support guardian of his 15-year-old brother, have been a part of every step Beaupre has taken.

He grew up in the Niagara region, in a family that experienced homelessness and economic instability. In high school, under financial pressures of the COVID pandemic, his mother and brothers moved to a rural area to seek more affordable housing, while Beaupre stayed behind so he could stay in school. Now homeless, he paid to live in the basement of friends and worked to get scholarships so he could attend McMaster.

In his first year at Mac, he gained custody of his brother, who was then 12. And though he persevered through the years, he always felt a little apart from his classmates and peers.

“It’s a very isolating experience to come to university and have homelessness spoken of as a faraway topic,” he says.

“There are so many things that you worry about as a poor person — food, not being able to get to school because you can’t afford bus fare, not having the internet working at home, or not being able to replace your phone or laptop when they break — but you’re in a room full of people who aren’t thinking about things like that, and who don’t expect that a student in their class will have that stress on their mind.”

Beaupre’s experiences now provide fuel for his work.

As both a poor person and a trans man, Beaupre is used to the expectation that he downplay his identities to appear acceptable to peers and teachers — even as, paradoxically, he’s had to write about his poverty over and over in order to get OSAP and scholarships.

“It was ingrained in me since I was a child to always hide my class, and at a university, that’s especially true, even if it doesn’t get said explicitly,” he says. “People expect you to know by now that you should be playing into respectability — and that’s absolutely not what I’m about.”

It’s this idea of “respectability” — and how to dismantle it — that will form the basis of his graduate research

“I’m super interested in the idea of ‘refusal politics’ — the idea of refusing to engage in respectability,” he explains.

“I’m all about the idea of creating theory that actually helps the people we talk about ‘in theory’ — and that means theory created by the people that we’re talking about.”

“I think we absolutely need to smash down the walls of respectability to allow those people in.”

For his graduate work, Beaupre has plans to create a public-facing project that focuses on what the experiences of poverty can offer to the practice of critical theory — and how those unique understandings can ultimately lead to better theories than those developed by external, often wealthy scholars.

“My goal next year is not to show poor people critical theory, but to produce better critical theory about the marginal social position of poverty, alongside people who know it best,” he says. “I don’t think poor people need the university — I think the university needs us.”

For now, Beaupre is finishing up his last credit and looking forward to graduate studies. He lives with “a beautiful found family” of roommates, a boyfriend, and his brother, and is looking forward to starting grad school in the fall.

He’s also found artistic expression as a costumer, working with local drag acts and theatre groups, including the McMaster Thespian Company for last term’s production of Twelfth Night.

“Costuming is one of the skills I picked up because as a poor, fashionable child, I had to find ways to work with what I had!” Beaupre says.

“But also, I worked tirelessly on Twelfth Night, and that work ethic proves the point I’m trying to make about what impoverished experience can add to academia and the university community.”

Making the university a more welcoming, inclusive place — especially for people living in poverty — continues to be at the core of Beaupre’s thinking.

“My ultimate goal is to get a bunch of impoverished people into the university,” he says.

“I think that being really honest about what that looks like and what it means to have poor people in the university, and how much harder it is to be poor in university, is really important work.”