Equity February 2015

Upcoming Talks

SNID Talks- Thursdays, 1-2:30pm in Macintosh Corry Hall,

D214

Thursday February 5th - International Community-based Rehabilitation: Building on Local Strengths to Improve the Quality of Life of People with Disabilities, their Families and their Communities by Heather Aldersey Thursday February 26th - The Business of Inuit Art in the 21st Century: the Devolution Dilemma by Norman Vorano Thursday March 5th - Contemporary Race Relations in Cuba by Esteban Morales Thursday March 12th - Solidarity Blues: From Surplus Labour to Surplus Labourers in the Plantation-Plant-to-Prison Pipeline by David Austin Thursday March 19th - The “Right to Remain” as Counter-gentrification Research by Jeff Masuda Thursday March 26th - Islands of Decolonial Love: Exploring Love on Occupied Land by Leanne Simpson

Welcome to the Sociology Equity Committee’s first Equity Talk newsletter. Equity Talk is a place for students and staff to share resources, cultivate inspiration and foster opportunities to contribute to equity and social justice at Queen’s University. We very much welcome contributions: send us announcements, write a profile of a student or researcher, or offer ideas for articles. Equity Talk offers students an excellent opportunity to write and publish on equity and social justice issues.

In addition to producing our first newsletter, the Queen’s Sociology Equity Committee has a new bulletin board dedicated to equity and social justice related news – visit us in the D wing of the fourth floor in Mackintosh-Corry. We have posted our newly-developed Resource Guide suggesting equity-related undergraduate and graduate courses across all disciplines at Queen’s University. We also have a new Equity Dropbox that allows Queen’s students and staff to share ideas and concerns about equity and social justice related matters that they would like discussed by the committee.

Newsletter of the Sociology Department Equity Committee—

Supporting Equity in Research, Curriculum, and Pedagogy

Talk

Photo by Priyanka Patel. Left: Mandi, Sarita, Marlee, and Melissa.

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Recent Talks Four Directions Aboriginal Student Centre,

the Kahswentha Indigenous Knowledge Initiative, Global Development Studies, and Kinesiology and Health Studies presented a conversation with James Daschuk on Friday, January 9th about his book Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. This conversation revolved around Daschuk’s work as a historian on colonial history in Canada, and how government policy led by the Prime Minister and Head of Indian Affairs, John A. MacDonald established the conditions of starvation on the plains in the 1870s and 1880s. Questions asked during the discussion pertained to issues of knowledge production in Canada, past and current health inequity within the state, and Canadian and Aboriginal identity.

Noteworthy Courses MPA859 – Indigenous Law & Public Policy

Taught by Dr. Caroline Hodes This graduate-level introductory course

follows an inquiry-based approach where students are required to analyze a court case using primary and secondary historical sources. This course will examine the relationship between colonization, public policy and the law. The focus of this course will be the impact that these relationships have had historically and in the present on Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike in different regions of Canada. Students survey cases, public policy, treaties and contemporary alternative practices of rights claiming. An important component of this course is to explore methodological issues as they pertain to ways in which information is recorded and gathered, who is excluded and included in these processes, the ways in which theory informs practice and the ways in which narrative intersects with knowledge production. The major themes surveyed in this course will include: gender, race, sexuality and the Indian Act; Reconciliation, Restitution and Resurgence; and sources of law and governance.

Equity

EDITOR Melissa A. Forcione

ASSISTANT EDITOR Sarita Srivastava

COMMITTEE CHAIRS Sarita Srivastava

Cynthia Levine-Rasky

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Megha Rao

Melissa A. Forcione Philip Howard

Sarita Srivastava

COMMITTEE MEMBERS Atm Shaifullah Mehedi

Ciara Bracken-Roche Cynthia Levine-Rasky

Mandi Veenstra Marlee Keenan

Megha Rao Melissa A. Forcione

Priyanka Patel Rachel Chan

CONTACT US sociologyequitycommittee@ gmail.com

Equity Talk February 2015—

Newsletter of the Sociology Department Equity

Committee

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Tze Yang Cheung Vivas—Undergraduate Student in Sociology

at Queen’s University

Madison Smith—Graduate Student in Criminology at Queen’s University

A first year Masters student in the Criminology and Sociology program at Queen’s, Madison specializes in poverty and youth crime. Her future career goals include completing a Ph.D. and becoming a criminology professor or going to law school and becoming a criminal lawyer. Madison tutors male prison inmates once a week at Collins Bay Institution is in Kingston, Ontario, which is a maximum, medium and minimum security facility. She helps her students in understanding a wide range of subjects whether it is to obtain elementary school level education or to complete a university degree. Madison enjoys the criminological perspective that comes with tutoring at Collins Bay Institution because it helps her see the relationship between illiteracy and crime. She believes this tutoring program is important for equity in education by making learning accessible to everyone, and consequently helping to alleviate these young men’s engagement in crime to some extent. If you are interested in taking part in making education more accessible to your Kingston community, visit the Frontier College/Queen’s University for Literacy website at http://queensstudentsforliteracy.blogspot.ca.

Student Profiles

Tze is a fourth year Sociology student who has been involved for the past two years with the Queen’s chapter of Love 146, an international human rights organization working to end child trafficking and exploitation through survivor care, prevention education, professional training and empowering movements. She says their ultimate goal is to aid in “abolishing child trafficking and exploitation while providing rehabilitation to those who have escaped the system.” Having been involved with child trafficking awareness groups and fundraising projects throughout high school, Tze leaped at the opportunity when her friends began the Love 146 Queen’s chapter as a project for their Gender Studies course, GNDS440 Community Based Research Practicum taught by Professor Srivastava. “We organize fundraisers in order to raise awareness of the conditions faced by thousands of children worldwide and use the proceeds to help train people in trauma care for a shelter in the Philippines.”Tze hopes to attend teachers’ college in Hong Kong, but plans to follow up and help with the new executive committee that takes over for 2015-2016. “ I will definitely follow up to see how Love 146 Queen’s Chapter is doing since it’ll be the first year we have volunteers, executive members, etc that are not just the base group of friends”. She hopes to see the club thrive and succeed in their initiative to end child trafficking over the next few years.

Equity Talk February 2015—

Newsletter of the Sociology Department Equity

Committee

Source: http://flickrhivemind.net/User/queensulife/Interesting

Photo by Megha Rao. Tze.

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Academics and Equity Dr. Philip Howard, York Centre for Education

and Community Can you describe your research project?

My research project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, is entitled, Racial Humour in the Post-racial: A Critical Race Africology of Canadian Blackface Incidents. Located at the intersection of the critical race scholarship around neo-liberalism, post-racialism, and humour, the project investigates incidents in which white persons don blackface in a form of racial cross-dressing that starkly resembles the minstrelsy of an earlier, more explicitly racist, era. These incidents appear to be on the rise in Canada, and/or are more widely reported. Most of these incidents are associated with educational institutions, and in the last 15 years, mainstream media have reported incidents of this nature at Hautes Etudes Commerciales, McGill University, Queen’s University, the University of Toronto, the University of Windsor, and Wilfrid Laurier University.

In this project, I am concerned with the following questions: What is the significance of these contemporary blackface incidents for understanding how racial knowledge is represented, articulated and transmitted in the climate of post-racialism; and how is it resisted? In more specific terms, the objectives of this research are to: 1) analyze the discursive formations within which these contemporary Canadian blackface incidents are articulated, justified, and apologized for; 2) explore how claims to humour function rhetorically to allow particular forms of racial knowing and not knowing; 3) explore the diverse ways in which these acts are experienced by black persons amid dominant claims to the diminishing significance of race; and 4) explore how black communities on university campuses understand these acts, and exercise agency in challenging them. Further, to the extent that these incidents are being performed by university students—ostensibly the most successful students from our Canadian K-12 education systems—I also analyze how Canadian education is implicated in re/producing or challenging racism. To date, my team has conducted interviews and focus groups with students, faculty, and staff at six university sites, and gathered media reports and online commentary related to these incidents.

What incidents related to blackface have you found at Queen’s? Most well-known is the case, reported in the Queen’s Journal in December 2005, in which a white

student donned blackface and attended a Halloween party as “Miss Ethiopia.” This is the incident that first prompted my interest in Queen’s as one of the research sites for this project. However, through the interviews that I conducted at Queen’s, I discovered that there have been at least three other blackface incidents involving members of the Queen’s community since then, which were not picked up by media in the way that the 2005 incident was.

What conclusions have you drawn from your research so far?

We are still in the early stages of data analysis. Nevertheless, it is already clear that there is a profound national amnesia around Canada’s deep historical involvement in blackface minstrelsy across both Francophone and Anglophone Canada. Consequently, contemporary blackface incidents are habitually excused through a Canadian “race to innocence” that seeks to place the history of this form of racist entertainment exclusively outside of Canada’s borders. This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Equity Talk February 2015—

Newsletter of the Sociology Department Equity

Committee

Source: https://ca.linkedin.com/pub/philip-s-s-how

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