Welcome to the second episode of Governance Hack. Governance Hack is the podcast series for the Unsettling University Governance project. We’re an interdisciplinary team of minoritized faculty members with deep leadership experience, who work at Canadian public universities. The team brings bad attitudes and radical daydreams to the project of problematizing the university as we know it. The Unsettling University Governance project aims to trouble common sense understandings about university governance. The problem of how to democratize and decolonize university governance is a classic “wicked problem,” and this, the second in the Governance Hack podcast series, is focused on addressing Black leadership, Black representation and Black Studies in the Canadian University. In this episode I, Handel Kashope Wright, Senior Advisor to the President on Anti-racism and Inclusive Excellence, Director of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, Professor of Education at the University of British Columbia and member of Unsettling Governance, speak about Black representation in the Canadian academy with Malinda Smith, Vice Provost of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Associate Vice President, Research at the University of Calgary and Wisdom Tettey, Vice President of the University of Toronto and Principal of University of Toronto, Scarborough. Who are Black academics in all our sociocultural diversity and our decided underrepresentation in the academy? What should we make of long-term Black agency and activism, including initiating (often precarious) Black Studies, being endorsed recently by institutional attempts at Black flourishing at Canadian institutions (efforts undermined by “anti-Black racism fatigue,” an aspect of a general “anti-racism fatigue”)? How and why is the almost paradoxical role of “Black senior administrator” undertaken and how is it perceived?
Acast
Apple
Resources
Ibrahim, A. Kitossa, T., Smith, M. & Wright, H.K. (2022). Nuances of
Blackness in the Canadian academy: Teaching, learning, and
researching while Black. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
The Scarborough Charter on anti-Black racism and Black inclusion in Canadian
higher education: Principles, actions and accountabilities