Recent Posts
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Wait, was that racist?
This is probably my most personal podcast of this series. I’m chatting with my good friends, Dr. Jessica Soedirgo, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and Dr. Hae Yeon Choo, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, about our assorted encounters with anti-Asian racism.
From seemingly benign encounters that show how the academy doesn’t actually see us as belonging—like mixing up Asian colleagues, or mistaking us for students, or the constant compliments about our English—to actual harmful moments that we still need to heal from, one of the challenges of giving voice to anti-Asian racism is that it oftentimes feels like it barely registers. Yet, Asians in the academy experience racism everyday, while struggling with the acute rise of anti-Asian sentiments, which has been amplified since the start of the pandemic. My hometown of Vancouver was even named by Bloomberg as the ‘Asian hate crime capital’ of North America. And it has also only been two months since the Atlanta shootings, where a man with a self-proclaimed Asian fetish murdered eight people including six Asian women.
On this episode, we talk about dealing with anti-Asian racism when institutions barely acknowledge its reality and fighting against insidious, everyday forms of microaggression.
If you want to get involved in combatting anti-Asian racism, check out Anti-Asian Racism Undone, presented by Scholar’s Strike Canada on May 29 and 30, 2021. Visit www.scholarstrikecanada.ca for more information.
Read more to read the show notes and see all of the links mentioned in the episode. Continue reading
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Subversives in the Academy
For many women of colour, life in academia feels like a constant fight. As Dr. Rita Dhamoon writes, racism is a workload issue. So, when do we sit down and when do we fight back? And how do we keep fighting in the face of such intractible systemic hostility? In this episode of Academic Aunties, we talk to Dr. Debra Thompson (Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University) about the necessity of the fight, the value of stealing your time back, how creating subversives can drive change, and the importance of armour to survive the neoliberal academy. Continue reading for more show notes.
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A-holes in the Academy
Why are there so many in academia? Does the institution attract them or does the institution make them? What is institutional gaslighting? And how do we care for each other in this often toxic space? In this episode, we chat with academic aunties, Dr. Nisha Nath, an Assistant Professor of Equity Studies at Athabasca University, and Dr. Mariam Georgis, a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Manitoba about coping with exclusionary academic norms, the messages that the neoliberal academy sends that breeds toxic behaviour, and the value of checking in.
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