Our videos

Getting started

Before diving into our videos, we invite you to follow the steps below.

Self-reflection

Fully engaging with anti-racist pedagogy starts with self-reflection and accountability.

It’s important to acknowledge that we all have a stake in this work because systemic racism and oppression affect the quality of all our lives to differing degrees. When it comes to systemic racism and oppression, some of us are more violently targeted than others or are implicit or even overt perpetrators. Every day that you are not questioning the ingrained prejudice within our social, economic, and political systems and our laws, education, and culture, you are maintaining them.

Be reflexive

What does anti-racist pedagogy or education mean to you?
What brings you to this work?
Why do you think this work will be helpful for you?
What is the relationship between your identity and anti-racist work? How would you describe your role in anti-racist work?
- Tip: you can answer these questions separately or together. While you reflect, think about your ethnic/racial or cultural background as well as your academic, personal, or professional training. Our identities impact everything that we do, how we approach, interpret, explore, and engage with the world)
What is the difference between engaging with this repository as a knowledge-exchange versus a knowledge extraction
- Tip: on this platform we guide you engage with our content as a knowledge-exchange, reflect on why this could be)

Be accountable

To what extent have you engaged with anti-racist or anti-oppressive education or philosophies within your life/work? Why or why not?
What would it look like if you were to silence or exclude another person or group in the environments that you frequent?
- Tip: write six or more examples and then organize the examples into two groups – instances where you have done this and instances where you have witnessed this happen.
Reflect on the ways that you have engaged with literature, presentations and other forms of knowledge led by Queer, Trans, Indigenous, Black, Asian, and other POC in your academic, personal, or professional lives.
What has been your role in disrupting and mobilizing against racism and oppression interpersonally or in the environments that you frequent?

“Anti-racism” is more than a buzzword

The focus on anti-racism and systemic racism has re-emerged in the public sphere following the 2020 global mainstreaming of COVID-19 and its disproportionately disastrous impact on racialized communities coupled with the mainstreaming of Black death, Black Lives Matter movements, anti-Asian hate, Indigenous oppression and suppression, anti-Semitism and more.

For many people, the mandatory isolation and precarity brought on by the pandemic laid bare the systemic inequalities within our classroom, streets and homes — inequalities that have and continue to be contested for over 500 years. For others, the increased interest in anti-racist education and systemic racism more broadly has felt long overdue.

Combatting racism is an ongoing battle for racialized peoples and their allies which has taken many forms throughout history. This includes the right to vote, live, have access to equitable employment, to teach and learn, to safety and protection, and to share public spaces, to name but a few.

While racism can be defined in many ways, we define it as the act of devaluing the humanity, knowledges, voices and positionalities of racialized individuals or groups often referred to as People of Colour (POC).

In order to disrupt and dismantle the perpetual subjugation of POC within academic institutions, the state and society at large, we must do more than choose to be anti-racist. We must foster anti-racist education by supporting and spearheading initiatives and ideologies that disrupt systemic racism and oppression at its core — from individual biases to collective cultural practices. Our video repository centers communities that can share the introductory steps to take part in anti-racist action and knowledge production.

Intersectionality and the Anti-Racist Pedagogy Project

Racism is often entangled with other forms of prejudice including ableism, hetero-sexism, religious discrimination, Anglocentrism and xenophobia, among others. Our video repository touches on different forms of discrimination to highlight the intersectional ways in which racialized peoples are targeted in society.

In Canada, the United States and Europe, it is commonplace to privilege racial whiteness, the English language, heterosexuality, maleness and at times Christian ideals, which work together to create multiple levels of oppression for gender diverse/trans and queer communities, disabled, racialized, religiously diverse, and non-English speaking communities. Globalization and a series of other political and economic factors resulted in many non-Western countries adopting these inequitable values. This inequitable system represses all people to differing degrees and instills power imbalances that segregate us from learning and growing together.

Glossary of themes

Here you’ll find a glossary of our most prominent and interwoven themes.

Disability Justice: This theme explores the ways that 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.
Queering the Academy: This theme explores the ways that 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.
Indigenous Space & Place: This theme explores the ways that learning environments can be reframed with Indigenous knowledge and practices. It also seeks to touch on the pedagogical significance of land and settlerhood, trauma-informed practices and Indigenous oppression, sovereignty and resistance.
Generational Knowledge: This theme explores the ways that 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 the production and dissemination of knowledge.
Mind & Body: This theme explores how oppression and resistance affects the mind, body and spirt. It includes presentations that incorporate information on embodied practices of anti-racist work that includes harm, anxiety and trauma reduction strategies to build wellness.
Xenophobia/Islamophobia: This theme explores the ways that immigrants and Muslims have and continue to experience systemic subjugation.
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 reciprocal commitments to self-growth, trust, love, embracing empathy and humility and seeking to educate oneself.
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.
Intersectionality: This theme explores the ways multiple forms of oppression intersect to impact the lives of racialized peoples. As coined by Black feminist Kimberlee Crenshaw, intersectionality is a concept used to investigate and illuminate the ways that oppression impacts individuals and groups differently based on their relation to intersecting systems of power. Intersectionality is investigated from different fields of study.
Anti-Asian Racism: This theme explores the ways hate crimes, subjugation and oppression target East and South Asian peoples.
Anti-Black Racism: This theme explores the ways hate crimes, subjugation and oppression target Black/African diasporic peoples.
International Student Experience: This theme explores the experiences of international students, particularly how systemic racism and oppression relegates international students to precarious positions where they lack access to institutional support and their transnational knowledges are devalued and unrecognized.
Institutional Change: This theme explores the ways communities are lobbying for institutional change within their organizations and academic affiliations.
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.