Academic Well-Being of Racialized Students

edited by Benita Bunjun

Every Canadian post-secondary educator teaching or researching with BIPOC students must read and reflect on this critically edited book. The deep significance and outcomes from Dr. Bunjun’s work with racialized students over more than two decades are evident throughout its chapters. Once I began reading it, I could not put it down. This work speaks to my soul.

—dr. shelly johnson (mukwa musayett), Canada Research Chair in Indigenizing Higher Education

Educators have much to learn from BIPOC students about the ways in which the academy subjects them to the dictates of racial and colonial power. The survival strategies recounted here are deeply courageous and highly inspiring.

—dr. sunera thobani, author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada

Through the multiple genres of essay, art, poetry and photography, this book examines the experiences of racialized students in the Canadian academy, emphasizing the crucial kinship relations they forge.

Canadian universities have an ongoing history of colonialism and racism in this white-settler society. Racialized students (Indigenous, Black and students of colour), who would once have been forbidden from academic spaces and who still feel out of place, must navigate these repressive structures in their educational journeys. Through the genres of essay, art, poetry and photography, this book examines the experiences of and effects on racialized students in the Canadian academy, while exposing academia’s lack of capacity to promote students’ academic well-being. The book emphasizes the crucial connections that racialized students forge, which transform an otherwise hostile environment into a space of intellectual collaboration, community building and transnational kinship relations. Meticulously curated by Dr. Benita Bunjun, this book is a living example of mentorship, reciprocity and resilience.

A Note from Marginalized Students to Most Faculty • Centring the Academic Well-Being of Racialized Students • Pervasive Appropriation and Marginalized Students • Employment Equity Policy

Failures and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness • Decolonizing Intentions • My Long Search for Safe Spaces for Black Learners • Poetry as a Form of Resistance • Privileging Indigenous Knowledge • Envisioning an Intersectional Resilience Mentorship Program • Lessons in Surviving Academia from a Queer, Brown Femme • Settler-Migrant Relationships

• The Embodied Transformation of a Racialized International Student • The Making of Transnational Kinship Relations in Institutions of Higher Learning • Decolonizing the Settler awards: 2022

Father William A. Stewart, S.J. Medal for Excellence in Teaching

Dr. Geraldine Thomas Educational Leadership Award

All royalties from this book will be donated to the Racialized Students Academic Network benita bunjun is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s University in the Department of Social Justice and Community Studies, where she coordinates the Racialized Students Academic Network. Her research examines organizational and institutional power relations with a focus on colonial encounters within academic spaces. decolonization; equity; racialized; students; international students; university; academia