A Curriculum of Migrant Home:

In this article, I examine two ideas that have provoked me to reconsider my relationship to decolonising work as a settler. First, I consider the idea of home and the grounds, both material and symbolic, that make such “home-making” possible as a settler moving between states with similar aggressive investments in what Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) calls white possessive logics. Second, I take up a practice increasingly common in Australia – Welcomes to Country – that complicates how land is positioned as a space for people to gather. While I don’t suggest that Welcomes to Country are a panacea that resolve settler co-opting of acknowledgements as a tool of innocence (Asher, Curnow, & Davis, 2018), there is something inherently disruptive in Welcomes that might prove ethically instructive for those of us who find ourselves migrating within the settler-colonial sphere as we seek to make new homes.

Erasure Narrative 2

The second of two poems where the author has taken the Special Issue's Call for Submissions, erasing parts of it in order to juxtapose Living Migrancy with Living Hospitality.

Sumac Blues

Photographic image of Sumac in front of a body of water, entitled Sumac Blues by Nicholas Ng-A-Fook (Nov. 23, 2020)

Chasing After Life: Migrating Childhoods in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

This essay engages the border-crossing poetics of transnational migration through an engagement with Valeria Luiselli’s fictional depictions of migrant children in her novel Lost Children Archive. Engaging the migrating and intertextual forum of children’s witness and memory in the novel, I follow Luiselli’s moving depiction of child migrants as wholly undocumented and lost people outside the adult world of articulation. I argue that Luiselli’s novel documentation conjures up historical, contemporary, and autobiographical memories of migrant and displaced children comprising the colonial story of modernism. I consider children’s articulations, construction and witness of migration through my readings of the stories of migrating childhood delivered by Luiselli’s fictional depiction. I find, Luiselli’s moving rendition of children’s migration presents new challenges to educational and popular discourses of childhood, migration, and the responsibilities of the adult communities.

Dis/place/ment: The Life and In/animacy of Rocks and Stories

In this illustrated article, I begin with a question: Do rocks talk? The life, movement and migration of stories – and rocks, as the oldest living beings, have witnessed these histories and transformations (Donald, 2009; Tinker, 2004). This article explores the changing landscapes and stories of our lives, and the places where we live and dwell. It unravels discourses seeped in colonial histories, while recognizing our responsibilities as newcomers and settlers to these places and Indigenous peoples. This métissage of stories speaks to the meaning of places within our lives – and what we can learn from these places, when and if, we are willing to listen. And rocks, as the oldest living beings, always remember.

CPI Welcomes the Fall 2020 Special Issue: "Living Stories of Migrancy: Exile, Unconditional Hospitality and Transnational Citizenship" with N. Ng-A-Fook, C. Lee and H. Oguanobi, Invited Guest Editors

Editorial introducing the Fall 2020 Special Issue of Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry entitled "Living Stories of Migrancy: Exile, Unconditional Hospitality and Transnational Citizenship" by Dr. Cecille Depass and Dr. Ali Abdi.

Unsettling Claims of Belonging:

Starting from the premise that we have to know where we have been to know where we are going, this piece looks heavily to the past and considers the effects of differently experienced belonging in Canada across generations. This autobiographical reflection questions how we might read migrant-settler narratives of belonging alongside Indigenous struggles for sovereignty in such a way that desires for belonging do not displace or erase such struggles but rather support them. Reflecting on my experiences of belonging and shame as a Japanese Canadian of mixed Japanese and British ancestry, the article seeks to deconstruct and disrupt settler-migrant stories by examining citizenship and belonging from these different perspectives.

When Chen Meets Chan

A poem featuring an imaginary dialog between Chan, a well-known Chinese-Canadian athlete and Chen, a Chinese academic living in Canada. The piece speaks from these two different cultural perspectives.

Reflections on 'Performing' Canadian-ness as a way of 'Passing'

This reflective essay explores my family’s intergenerational experiences of belonging and exclusion in and through Canadian spaces. I share how my parents, first generation Canadians, navigated cultural and religious traditions in order to help their children “pass” as Canadians–meaning, performing “norms” of perceived “Canadian-ness” to fit in. For me, the implications of this resulted in tensions around my identity and self-worth. I unpack personal stories of residing within a “third space,” as a second generation Canadian who identifies as and is also visibly identified as, South Asian and Muslim. I close the essay by appealing to Derrida’s concept of “unconditional hospitality” as a pedagogical parenting and teaching tool to inform my own children’s multifaceted identities as Canadians.

The ‘Other’ Here and the ‘Other’ There:

Through examining key family narratives and selected personal experiences in this article, I reflect on how I began to rethink and (re)frame the representation of my racialized and (trans)national identities as a hyphenated, South African-Canadian citizen. The article summarizes my experiences of visiting Cape Town, South Africa (for the first time), when I engaged in a semester-long, secondary school teaching internship, conducting in-class action research while teaching Grades 9 and 10 History and English. I was sure that I was not just going to teach—I was going to discover myself. To borrow Derrida’s term, the “edges” of my identity continue to become blurred in relation to the shifting social and economic contexts.