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Articles

Vol. 12 No. 3 (2021)

Dialogues of Disruption: Confronting Oppression in the Academy

  • Ciann L. Wilson ▸
  • Amandeep Kaur Singh
  • Ann Marie Beals
  • Rajni Sharma
  • Brianna Hunt
  • Ellis Furman
  • Natasha Afua Darko
  • Tiyondah Fante-Coleman
  • Vivila Liu
  • Natalie Kivell
Submitted
June 2, 2023
Published
2021-10-20

Abstract

Within academia in recent years, there has been a concerted effort to re-center the perspectives and rights to free speech of the status quo at the expense of the safety and wellbeing of queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous communities.  Historically, critical race scholars have identified the centering of freedom of speech as an exercise by the old-guard in white supremacist culture to repurpose and repackage language about political freedoms in an effort to retain white settler control of a society that has long outgrown stunted ideologies about binary gender norms, and the continued oppression of Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities. Through our hard-fought lessons learned from often painful lived experiences as queer, trans, and Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) scholars and activists, this paper aims to: 1) Archive and document the testimonies and experiences of multiply-marginalized students and emergent faculty in the field of community psychology in a mid-sized Canadian university; 2) Utilize critical and intersectional analyses in unpacking the layers of violence and harm expressed and experienced through case examples; 3) Use our experiences to share strategies on the successful navigation of white supremacy in the academic spaces in which we work and learn; and 4) Call academic disciplines, including community psychology, to action by identifying their ethical responsibility to cultivate non-violent spaces for BIPOC people.