Global Research

The life-taking/blood-sucking capacities of power systems are not only limited to macro-economics of development but also the micro coordination of public spaces in our everyday interactions that are frequently taken for granted as “normal”. As you have pointed in your powerful edited collection, ‘Academic Well Being of Racialized Students’, Canadian classrooms and universities continue to be troubling sites of racial exclusion, white entitlement and a glaring absence and underrepresentation of critical race scholarship and scholars (Bunjun, 2021, p.3).

Your original, scholarly contribution is an extension of Professor Sherene Razack’s (2002) three-dimensional framework on spatial theory and Sara Ahmed’s (2000; 2012) conceptual framework on spatial determinism. Professor Sherene Razack (2002:8) defines spaces as material, symbolic and representational. Material space refers to spaces that are constituted as a result of unequal economic relations produced by capitalism while symbolic spaces refer to lived experiences and differences in social meanings associated with spaces and representations of spaces refers to names, images and symbols associated with spaces (Razack, 2002, p.8).

From a materialist perspective, Canadian universities and classrooms are products of unequal economic relations in which neo-liberal capitalist economy prioritizes commodification of knowledge for profit generation and the utilization of diversity and inclusion as not only a containment zone for insurgency but also a way of maintaining marketability and academic imperialism.

From a symbolic perspective, many racialized, international students and post graduate workers express feelings and lived experiences of painful alienation and trauma in Canadian classrooms and universities both due to passive and active forms of violence. Additionally, Canadian classrooms and universities persist in the deliberate marginalization and omission of brutal histories predicated on the Atlantic Slave Trade, chattel slavery of Peoples of African descent, a system of indentureship and servitude among South Asian peoples, mass displacement, theft, genocide and land dispossession of indigenous peoples. The brutality of these histories that prevail in the contemporary construction of Canadian universities and classroom spaces are evident in the names of former slave traders and masters such as James McGill, McGill University and Lord Dalhousie, Dalhousie University.

The 2019 Dalhousie report which was written by Professor Afua Cooper and other well renowned academics have illustrated that Canadian classrooms are marked with racist and sexist graffiti on walls long before students enter these spaces. The Dalhousie report goes beyond the material aspects of coloniality which assess the economic imperative of white supremacist politics by looking at other important dimensions such as the ideological and semiotic modes of whiteness and coloniality. Consequently, this is where Sara Ahmed’s conceptual framework on spatial determinism becomes increasingly relevant to this discussion. Ahmed (2000; 2012) argues that spatial determinism refers to the fact spaces are not empty or unoccupied but are shaped by social relations and histories and these histories and social relations determine our interactions, encounters and lived experiences within these spaces prior to our entry in them. Ahmed (2012) also explains that one of the reasons racialized identities continue to be socially constructed as and treated as “bodies out of place” is because of conditional hospitality of the “multi-cultural”, settler-colonial nation who welcomes international students or migrants, generally on the condition that they give something back to the nation- loyalty to or proximity to the ideology of state formation and national identity.

Conditional hospitality also extends to border imperialist, immigration policies that operate under the shroud of humanitarianism and good will when in fact these immigration policies set the precedence for the precarious labour-citizenship nexus of racialized, international students and post-graduate workers whereby the fate of the future rests solely on their temporary legal status which makes them susceptible to dehumanising treatment by institutions.

We see a deeply troubling concern with respect to border imperialism and conditional hospitality in other parts of the world such as the United Kingdom under the Rishi Sunak’s conservative government administration. Last year, Rishi Sunak had proposed an illegal migration bill to ban refugees and is best known by the slogan “stop the boats” and this year, the Sunak-led government in the UK has passed a policy that will prevent international students from migrating with their families to the UK. The anti-black/Asian/indigenous/racialized racisms and long held xenophobic sentiments are not only compatible with conservative/right wing political ideologies but they also illustrate that borders are not only geographic or physical walls that are constructed to exclude, police, surveil and punish those who are considered as “Others” but borders are also existential, social walls to demarcate differences.

On the contrary, the centre right Prime Minister Andrew Holness-led government in Jamaica deported many of our Haitian brothers and sisters last year on the grounds of illegal entry and while there have been several outcries from reparations activists, social advocates, movements, unorthodox academic thinkers about the mass deportation of Haitians, the government of Jamaica remains unphased and unconcerned.