Widening the Circle: Racialized Immigrants in Toronto's Alternative Food Movement

Toronto is a growing site for the alternative food movement with plenty of innovative projects. While the alternative food movement may emphasize the participation of diverse members and communities some observers have noticed the underrepresentation of immigrants and visible minorities within the movement. As Toronto increasingly acts as an immigration hub, it becomes critical to create room for diverse and marginalized voices in food spaces. This major research paper will reflect findings from interviews with five food leaders in Toronto involved in food justice and food security initiatives while using critical whiteness theory and critical race theory to deconstruct the complexities which surround the needs and visions of immigrants and visible minorities. Findings reveal that when the voices of immigrants and visible minorities are recognized in the food movement, there is work to be done in improving accessibility, inclusivity and collaboration of the movement.

Widening the Circle: Racialized Immigrants in Toronto's Alternative Food Movement

Toronto is a growing site for the alternative food movement with plenty of innovative projects. While the alternative food movement may emphasize the participation of diverse members and communities some observers have noticed the underrepresentation of immigrants and visible minorities within the movement. As Toronto increasingly acts as an immigration hub, it becomes critical to create room for diverse and marginalized voices in food spaces. This major research paper will reflect findings from interviews with five food leaders in Toronto involved in food justice and food security initiatives while using critical whiteness theory and critical race theory to deconstruct the complexities which surround the needs and visions of immigrants and visible minorities. Findings reveal that when the voices of immigrants and visible minorities are recognized in the food movement, there is work to be done in improving accessibility, inclusivity and collaboration of the movement.

We Are the Champions? Performing whiteness in ASCENSION: DAWN OF CHAMPIONS

Background. Building on previous studies on racism and whiteness in video games, this article investigates how deck building games provide platforms for identity tourism, the symbolic appropriation of marginalised experiences, through their coupling of mechanics and racial stereotypes. Aims. The aim is to contribute to our understanding how dominant ideologies are expressed through simulation and gaming in a deck building context and how games similar to ASCENSION: DAWN OF CHAMPIONS (henceforth A: DOC) perpetuate racism and coloniality through gameplay design. This is part of an ongoing game studies effort to critique white supremacist and imperial structures in games. Method. In this article, I conduct a first-person close reading of A: DOC as an emblematic case study for contemporary deck building design. Using critical whiteness theory, I pay special attention to the gameplay design of the four Champion characters Nairi, Kor, Sadranis, and Dhartha in order to demonstrate the interplay of ludic, racial, and social performative elements in the construction of playful identities. Analysis. The deck building principles of A: DOC provides a racial pedagogical arena which creates affective links between gameplay and white supremacist values. In coupling digital deck building mechanics with stereotypical fantasy characters, the game invites players to take the roles of fantasy tourists and thereby become implicit in white supremacist play. Even though the characters Nairi, Kor, Sadranis and Dhartha are leaders of different genders and races, their “diversity” is established via popular racial cybertypes like the white female diversity advocate, the technologically advanced white male emperor, the aggressive Black male, and the Asian male exotic Oriental.

From Reflexivity to Collaboration

Recently scholars have begun to investigate who produces knowledge about Roma and with what agendas. I extend this inquiry to ask how reflexivity by a non-Romani ally and researcher contributes to analyzing the production and use of knowledge in Romani Studies. I examine various roles I have inhabited and forms of scholarship I have produced, both successful and unsuccessful, during my long involvement in Romani studies to reveal how and why I represented Roma, and what uses this scholarship served. Calling for a “reflexive turn” in Romani Studies, I note that while self-examination of knowledge production is useful for all researchers, for nonRoma it is mandatory because historically non-Roma have held more authority. Embracing “critical whiteness” theory, I examine my privileged roles and my attempts at collaborative advocacy. Tracing a historical trajectory of shifting subjectivities, I narrate several crises, such as balancing essentialism with advocacy, respectfully presenting Romani music, and combining diplomacy with activism to illustrate dilemmas of representation that I have faced and the responses I crafted. These issues all underline the responsibility that non-Romani allies have in accounting for their words and actions.

"Not looking at us level": Systemic barriers faced by Aboriginal teachers in remote communities in Central Australia

This essay is based on doctoral research that examined the reasons behind the low number of young Aboriginal teachers currently undertaking and completing teacher education in remote communities in Central Australia. By listening to the stories of a group of fully qualified and experienced Aboriginal teachers, this doctoral research explored the complex array of barriers, as well as supports, that Aboriginal people from remote communities encounter as educators. The seven teacher participants in this research have each spent between 20 and 35 years working in their respective schools in their home communities (see map below) and have undertaken and completed the requisite study to become fully qualified teachers. The purpose of this essay is to focus exclusively on the examples of systemic barriers experienced by these teachers through the theoretical lens of race, using settler colonial theory, whiteness theory and critical race theory (CRT).

Jean Devanny’s Fictional Critique of Whiteness and Race Relations in North Queensland

Devanny was a largely forgotten and disregarded figure in Australian political and literary history by the 1960s, but the newly revitalised feminist, race-conscious and postcolonial analyses of the 1970s allowed her work a new relevance. Devanny’s first novels were written in Wellington in the 1920s, and some feature Maori men in relationships with white women. Her Queensland novels begin when she visited the North engaged in political support for the Weil’s disease strike, out of which came Sugar Heaven (1936), and then Paradise Flow (1938)—both of which show white women choosing Migrant men (Italian and Jugoslav) over their white husbands—and after that, a planned cane industry trilogy, of which only the first volume, Cindie (1949), in which the white lady of the house has sex with a South Sea Islander indentured worker, would be published. The (also unpublished) “The Pearlers” offers a depiction of a white patriarch in simultaneous relationships with white and Indigenous women on Thursday Island, where she spent some time in 1948. Devanny moved to Townsville in 1950 to live; she published very little after that, although the already written Travels in North Queensland came out in 1951. The paper will consider how far Devanny can be viewed as working with an early style of 1990s “whiteness theory”, and also how, in this regard, one might think about her depiction (often scanty) of Indigenous characters in her north Queensland fictions.

New Riffs on the Old Mind-Body Blues: “Black Rhythm,” “White Logic,” and Music Theory in the Twenty-First Century

Contemporary music historians have shown how taxonomic divisions of humanity—constructed in earnest within European anthropologies and philosophies from the Enlightenment on—were reflected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of musical-cultural evolution, with complex and intellectualized art music forms always shown as transcending base and bodily rhythm, just as light skin supposedly transcended dark. The errors of old and now disreputable scholarly approaches have been given much attention. Yet scientifically oriented twenty-first-century studies of putatively Afro-diasporic and, especially, African American rhythmic practices seem often to stumble over similarly racialized fault lines, the relationship between “sensory” music, its “intelligent” comprehension, and its analysis still procedurally and politically fraught. Individual musical sympathies are undermined by methods and assumptions common to the field in which theorists operate. They operate, too, in North American and European university departments overwhelmingly populated by white scholars. And so this article draws upon and tests concepts from critical race and whiteness theory and asks whether, in taking “black rhythm” as its subject, some contemporary music studies reinscribe what the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have called “white logic”: a set of intellectual attitudes, prerogatives, and methods that, whatever the intentions of the musicologists concerned, might in some way restage those division practices now widely recognized as central to early musicology.