Benita Bunjun - Academic Well-Being of Racialized Students

ACADEMIC WELL-BEING OF RACIALIZED STUDENTS

Praise for Academic Well-Being of Racialized Students :

Every Canadian post-secondary instructor and professor teaching or researching with bipoc students must read and reflect on this critically edited book. The deep significance and outcomes related to the safe spaces created by Dr. Bunjun's work with racialized students over more than two decades are evident throughout its chapters. The contributions of fifteen authors offer searing stories and critiques of current racialized student pain and trauma within colonial academic institutions and multiculturalism steeped in colonialism and liberalism. It also provides many paths for readers to understand better and support student survival strategies linked to their wellbeing and resistance. Once I began reading it, I could not put it down. This work speaks to my soul.

Shelly Johnson Mukwa Musayett, Canada Research Chair in Indigenizing Higher Education, Thompson Rivers University

This timely collection highlights how bipoc students rise to the challenge of building Indigenous worlds and anti-racist communities within the oppressive whiteness of the Canadian university. Educators have much to learn from bipoc students about the ways in which the academy subjects them to the dictates of racial and colonial power. The survival strategies recounted here are deeply courageous and highly inspiring.

Sunera Thobani, author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada

This edited collection documents and makes visible what racialized students are experiencing in Canadian universities, including dealing with in-class micro-aggressions, yearning to be taught by full-time faculty members representing their own diverse backgrounds, witnessing the appropriation of ideas of non-white scholars by white scholars in academia, and unpacking how white-settler mentality is shaping their lives within Canadian post-secondary institutions. Initiatives, spaces and programs through which racialized students organize, support and mentor each other are also well highlighted, both as a way to show how empowerment and resiliency exist in the white-settler institution that is Western academia, and, implicitly, as best practices that Canadian institutions can adopt toward decolonization and equity, if they realize and adapt.

Jean Michel Montsion, Associate Professor, Canadian Studies Program, Department of Multidisciplinary Studies, Glendon College, York University

I am honoured that Professor Bunjun has invited me to reflect on the teaching and mentoring relationships that we both experienced together. Our relationship has lasted nearly twenty-five years. I applaud this very important anthology of scholarly and narrative manuscripts of her students and peers. These writings have found a unique space for self-representation and knowledge production in pursuit of repressed and subjugated truths that combine our embodied memories of our origins in the racialized class, caste, sexual, gendered and ethnic stratifications that we carry with us from locations of former colonies or dominions within overseas and territorial empires.

Yvonne Brown, Adjunct Professor, Department of Social Justice and Community Studies, Saint Marys University and author of Dead Woman Pickney: A Memoir of Childhood in Jamaica

ACADEMIC WELL-BEING OF RACIALIZED STUDENTS

EDITED BY
BENITA BUNJUN

Fernwood Publishing
Halifax & Winnipeg

Copyright 2021 authors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing: Amber Riaz

Cover image: Bria Cherise Millar
Cover design: John van der Woude
eBook: tikaebooks.com
Printed and bound in Canada

Published by Fernwood Publishing
32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0
and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Academic well-being of racialized students / edited by Benita Bunjun.

Names: Bunjun, Benita, editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210152184 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210152257 | ISBN 9781773634371 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773634388 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773634395 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781773634401 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Minority college studentsCanada. | LCSH: Minority studentsCanada. | LCSH: MinoritiesEducationCanada. | LCSH: Academic achievementCanada. | LCSH: Culturally relevant pedagogyCanada.

Classification: LCC LC3734 .A23 2021 | DDC 378.1/982900971dc23

Contents

A Note from Marginalized Students to Most Faculty
Beverlee MacLellan

1 Centring the AcademicWell-Being of Racialized Students
Benita Bunjun

2 Its in the Past, Get over It! Is It in the Past?
Vanessa Mitchell

4 Where Are the Black Female Faculty? Employment Equity Policy Failures and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness
Isalean Phillip

5 My Long Search for Safe Spaces for Black Learners
Wayne Desmond

6 Spoken Word Saved My Life: Poetry as a Form of Resistance
Zain Meghji

7 Taking a Stand: Privileging Indigenous Knowledge
Dorothy Christian

8 Envisioning an Intersectional Resilience Mentorship Program for Indigenous and International Students
Tammy Williams (Apukjii Epit)

10 SettlerMigrant Relationships: A Brown Womans Journey
Nathalie Lozano-Neira

11 The Embodied Transformation of a Racialized International Student on Coast Salish and Mikmaq Territories
Ahrthyh Arumugam

12 A Way of Being: The Making of Transnational Kinship Relations in Institutions of Higher Learning
Benita Bunjun and Yvonne Brown

This book is dedicated to the many students and mentors within academia who every day labour intellectually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually to create a different world and to promote our well-being. A special acknowledgement to the teachings, learnings, and guidance on the territories of the Coast Salish, Okanagan, and Mikmaq. May we find courage, compassion, and love as we journey through academic sites of learning.

Acronyms

ai Appreciative Inquiry

aptn Aboriginal Peoples Television Network

awrs Academic Well-Being of Racialized Students Project

blac Black Learners Advisory Committee

buf Black United Front

cac Community Advisory Committee

caut Canadian Association of University Teachers

cs-risc The Connor Davidson Resilience Scale

cgsm Centre for Gender, Social Inequities, and Mental Health

cirfs The Critical Indigenous, Race, and Feminist Studies Student Conference

edi Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

fnsp First Nations Studies Program

grsj Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice

ibpoc Indigenous, Black, and Other People of Colour

ibwoc Indigenous, Black, Women of Colour