Recent Posts
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The Chair
Season 2 premiere! We take a deep dive into The Chair, the new Netflix series starring Sandra Oh about the first woman of colour chair of the English department at the fictional Pembrooke University. Everyone (or at least all academics!) are talking about this new show, created by Amanda Peat and Annie Julia Wyman, and we have lots of thoughts, from the moments that resonated with us to why many are finding the show a bit triggering.
Joining us on are Jamie Chai Yun Liew (@thechaiyun), an Associate Professor and Director of the University of Ottawa Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, and Kimberly McKee (@mckeekee), past Director of the Kutsche Office of Local History and an Associate Professor in the Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department at Grand Valley State University.
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Searching for Joy
The season finale. This was supposed to be a light episode. It’s hot, and it’s been a long year of COVID and we all need a break. But it seems as though we’re never given a chance to just be. From the fatal Islamaphobic attacks against a family in London, Ontario to the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children at Canada’s residential schools to the anti-Asian shootings in Atlanta to police brutality against the Black community – white supremacy never lets up, does it? How can we keep working as though all is normal when we keep feeling like we’re constantly under attack? In this episode, we talk with Dr. Shaista Patel, Assistant Professor of Critical Muslim Studies at UC San Diego, and Krittika Ghosh, Executive Director of the Asian/Pacific Islander (A/PI) Domestic Violence Resource Project about searching for joy amidst trauma, the importance of celebrating friendship and communites of care, and the generative possiblities of #TrashyProfSummer.
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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
