Guest blog by Dr. Malinda S. Smith, a Professor of Political Science and a 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow at the University of Alberta, a former Executive member (Equity & Diversity) on the FHSS Board, coauthor of The Equity Myth (2017), and a coeditor of the forthcoming book, The Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy.

As Congress 2020 undertakes to “Bridge Divides” and confront the intersections of colonialism and anti-Black racism, it is critical to confront the histories and multiplicity of Black lives in Canada. As Desmond Cole’s new book reminds us, Black lives are neither reducible to “...

Guest blog by Tamari Kitossa, Associate Professor, Sociology, Brock University

This essay is a modified contribution to the forthcoming collection The Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy, edited by Awad Ibrahim, Tamari Kitossa, Malinda Smith and Handel K. Wright. I wish to express my appreciation to Anita Jack-Davies, Carl James, Delores Mullings and Awad Ibrahim for commentary on various stages of this paper. Errors and omissions are mine.

Introduction            

           Phenomenologically the lifeworld of an African Canadian professor is fraught with ambivalence,...

Guest blog by Handel Kashope Wright, Professor and Director of Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, The University of British Columbia

This blog is based on a paper presented on the panel #Black Professors Matter: Experiences in White Academe at the 2019 Canadian Sociological Association Conference. The paper is an abridged version of “The Awkward Presence of Blackness in the Canadian Academy,” a contribution to The Nuances of Blackness and the Canadian Academy, a forthcoming book co-edited by Awad Ibrahim, Tamari Kittosa, Malinda Smith and Handel Kashope Wright.

The Canadian academy at the present historical juncture, like much of the academy worldwide, has become the neo-liberal academy in a time of extended austerity. Academic work is now highly stressful...

Guest blog by Ann Travers, Associate Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University

My research with and on behalf of trans and gender nonconforming kids brings my personal experience together with my scholarship in a particularly powerful way. I was a gender nonconforming kid and experienced very harsh gender policing. I now identify as trans non-binary and wish there had been more options when I was growing up. My own experience really influenced my efforts as a parent to keep people from imposing gender categories and norms on my own children. This often felt like a losing battle, as people and institutions are relentless when it comes to dividing children into girl and boy categories and attempting to restrict the...