A variety of Carleton social sciences departments came together to host an academic symposium on the intersections of race, gender, and class.
The symposium was to honour the memory of Agnes Miranda Calliste, a sociology professor at St. Francis Xavier University.
Calliste, a sociology professor for 26 years, researched the connections between race, gender, and class—particularly in the context of Caribbean-Canadian and African-Canadian workers.
The event began with an introduction to Calliste’s work, followed by three panels with two scholars presenting as part of each.
The first panel featured Amina Mire, assistant professor in Carleton’s sociology department.
Mire examined racism and ageism in the advertisement of skin-whitening products and anti-aging biotechnology.
Her presentation focused on the idea of “wellness in whiteness,” and how marketing promotes biomedical technology “as a form of purification and restorative whiteness.”
The second panel was opened by Nahla Abdo, who discussed the shortcomings of contemporary anti-racist and anti-colonial scholarship. Her talk was followed by Amrita Hari, whose work centres on the history of Indian immigration to Canada and the challenges faced by Indo-Canadians today.
“[Canada’s] migration policies are drawn along racial, gendered, and classed boundaries,” she said. “Indian newcomers are still subject to new iterations of Canada’s past.”
The final panel began with a presentation by Xiaobei Chen on representations of race and culture in Canadian children’s books. The symposium concluded with a speech given by Jiyoung Lee-An, a doctoral candidate in migration and diaspora studies, who reflected on her experience as a racialized female contract instructor.
“I realized much later that coming to Canada and doing my PhD here was not a simple decision or a geographical shift, but a shift of my positionality as a member of a mainstream Korean nation to a non-white female international student,” she said.
Alejandro Hernandez, a senior doctoral student and an organizer for the symposium, said one of the event’s goals was to highlight racialized scholars, whose work is “usually not recognized in Canada.”
“Their labour is sometimes seen as less than white scholars, even if the work is more extensive or more critical or challenging,” he said.
Daiva Stasiulis, another symposium organizer, said Calliste’s work is “something that’s very timely to understand the present.”
“This is also an important moment where universities are talking about decolonizing their curricula,” she said. “We have to think about how that happens, and which types of scholarship have been subjugated, marginalized, and indeed forgotten.”
Hernandez said that the turnout “surpassed expectations” and that he was happy to see the participants from diverse backgrounds.
“It was really good to see the interest of the people,” he said. “Participants were really engaged in the conversation—they were asking questions, they were meeting other people.”
Hernandez added that the importance of having events that are open to students from different disciplines.
“There’s room for the university or how it’s structured to bring this topic to areas that are not seen as related,” he said.
Namrata Tilokani, a first-year master’s of social work student, said Lee-An’s discussion about the burdens of being a racialized educator deeply resonated with her.
“I was crying through it,” she said, adding she appreciated the diversity of the panelists and the event gave her a sense of validation.
“A lot of the discourse can be very Western and very white,” she said. “Topics of race [are] not always at the forefront of all our discussions.”
Third-year PhD legal studies student Ekpedeme Edem said the event broadened her perspective and gave her insight on how to approach her own research.
“I don’t think I’m going to ever recover from this symposium,” she said. “Within the body of research, there’s so many dimensions and ways you could look at things . . . that’s a takeaway, to be more open to new ideas.”
Photo by Spencer Colby
