Course Guides

Glossary of Themes

Here, you’ll find our evolving glossary of interwoven themes that we value as pertinent for unpacking the nuances of systemic racism. We have themes that are covered in our current videos. We have other themes that we strive to deepen. We intend to add more themes over time as we learn from the community at large.

​

1. Allyship/Solidarity: This theme explores the implications of allyship and solidarity in anti-racist/anti-oppressive work. Beyond supporting others, allyship and solidarity are presented here as action-oriented, involving mutual commitments to self-growth, trust, love, embracing empathy and humility and seeking to educate oneself.

2. Anti-Asian Racism: This theme explores how hate crimes, subjugation and oppression target East and South Asian peoples. 

3. Anti-Black Racism: This theme explores how hate crimes, subjugation and oppression target Black/African diasporic peoples. 

4. Anti-Semitism: This theme explores how Jewish people are discriminated against and subject to violence, policing, and erasure in and outside the academy. This anti-racist pedagogy project strives to represent the critical and underrepresented experiences of Jewish students and faculty in the academy with racism. This project also acknowledges resistance efforts against human rights violations against Jewish communities, locally and transnationally.

5. Challenging Anglocentrism: This theme encapsulates talks that challenge the hegemony of English in the academy and explores the boundaries and complexities of social justice work in French.

6. Disability Justice: This theme explores how disabilities and the disabled body can be incorporated, acknowledged, and respected within the academy — physically, theoretically and methodologically. We approach disability justice from the perspective of Concordia’s Access-in-the-making (AIM) lab for disability and multimedia activism.

7. Environmental Justice: This theme explores the intersections between race, the environment, sound and sustainability. This project strives to unpack the importance of learning and unlearning the historical subjugation of racialized communities to waste, ghettoization, food insecurity, land appropriation, resource extraction and health vulnerabilities and how acoustic ecology shapes our experiences.

8. Generational Knowledge: This theme explores how knowledge is created and passed down through, across and between generations. Elders are privileged here as the sacred keepers of history to decenter the institution as the sole place for producing and disseminating knowledge.

9. Indigeneity: This theme explores how learning environments can be reframed with Indigenous knowledge and practices. It also touches on the pedagogical significance of land and settler hood, trauma-informed practices, Indigenous oppression, sovereignty, and resistance.

10. Institutional Change: This theme explores how communities lobby for institutional change within their organizations and academic affiliations.

11. International Student Experience: This theme explores the experiences of international students, particularly how systemic racism and oppression relegate international students to precarious positions where they lack access to institutional support and their transnational knowledge is devalued and unrecognized. 

12. Intersectionality: This theme explores how multiple forms of oppression intersect to impact the lives of racialized people. As coined by Black feminist Kimberlee Crenshaw, intersectionality is a concept used to investigate and illuminate how oppression affects individuals and groups differently based on their relation to intersecting power systems. Intersectionality is analyzed from different fields of study.

13. Islamophobia/Xenophobia: This theme explores the ways that immigrants and Muslims have and continue to experience systemic subjugation.

14. Mind & Body: This theme explores how oppression and resistance affect the mind, body and spirit. It includes presentations incorporating information on embodied practices of anti-racist work that provides for harm, anxiety and trauma reduction strategies to build wellness.

15. Queering the Academy: This theme explores how communities mobilize Queerness as a disposition, practice, methodology and theory for pedagogical change. The movement to “queer” the academy involves challenging the normalization of racism and sexism and the binary categories by which certain groups are oppressed and privileged in the academy.

16. Race, Media, Technology: This theme explores the ways race and racism are conveyed in the media through social media, film, and other audio and visual tools. The analysis of race in this section involves unpacking its implications on different multimedia platforms.