ANTI-RACISM LAB

Our Projects

Canada

In Canada, achieving social justice by creating equity has not emerged for IBPOC students and faculty. The research examines how equitable institutions could emerge in a post-TRC, post-BLM 2020 context of acknowledgment of the need for race and gender equity and institutional inertia.

Métis Nation 

The Métis are a post-contact, Indigenous people with kinship connections to storied places across the Métis homeland, which consists of the Prairies and Parkland areas of Western Canada and parts of the northern United States. Métis are defined as an Aboriginal people according to Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution with protected rights in Canada. The Métis continue to assert nation-to-nation relations with the British Crown and with Canada against a legacy settler colonial violence, dispossession, and erasure. Métis sovereignty and relationality are key to Métis self-determination with individuals and communities, and nationhood and peoplehood relations. 


United States of America

Whether in North America, or in South Asia, Dalit scholars are only ever at the threshold of neoliberal white/Hindu nationalist academia. Thinking about caste as a 2,500-year-old system of dehumanization and incarceration allows for an honest exchange of ideas and practices with Black and Indigenous peoples in the US who are working on abolitionism and decolonization. Our research facilitates urgent conversations between Dalit, Muslim, Indigenous, and Black students in the university.


Brazil

In Brazil, the myth of racial democracy, the tendency for affirmative action policy in state universities to focus on class, and the political turn to the right, have increased racial inequality and undermined existing intersectional race equality and Indigenous rights.  Research in Brazil explores the negative impacts of right-wing politics on the developments in intersectional racial equality and the possibility for change through decolonizing learning and teaching.

Finland

There have been no Finnish studies on (anti)racism or (de)colonialization in universities. Research in Finland examines how equity for BIPOC faculty and students is possible in a context that is not race cognizant

Sweden

 Our research in Sweden will explore whether drawing on BIPOC thought, activism, and experience can disengage the narrative of ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ underlying intersectional institutional racism. Specific research questions are: (1) How do university structures, policies, practices, knowledge systems and affective economies impact everyday marginalization of BIPOC faculty and students and produce exclusion of their concerns in education and research? (2) How can we draw on BIPOC faculty and student experiences and activism to transform curriculum, pedagogy, recruitment, retention, progression, and institutional culture? (3) How can we build decolonial anti-racist classrooms and research ecosystems within a context of professional autonomy, disciplinary inertia, and intersectional institutional racism?

South Africa

In South Africa, the ‘Fallist Movement’ has engaged activist students and faculty in decolonial social justice transformation of the Eurocentric university. Research will explore whether building decolonial anti-racist classrooms and institutional cultures can go beyond the simulation of transformation in a post-TRC reparations context and the place of Indigeneity within that.