Volume 12, Number 1, 2024

EN:

Canada has a significant problem with Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism (AMR), holding the alarming distinction of having the highest rate of targeted killings of Muslims among G7 countries. Beyond personal fear and hatred of Muslims and Islam, Islamophobia and AMR are deeply ingrained in institutional and structural systems, perpetuating violence and discrimination. This paper challenges the conventional view of Islamophobia and AMR as simply an individual moral issue, arguing instead that it is a form of racial and colonial violence occurring across multiple levels of Canadian society. AMR intersects with other forms of oppression, including sexism, anti-Arab, anti-Black, and anti-Brown racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia. Despite social work’s stated commitment to social justice, the profession has failed to effectively address AMR due to its own ongoing legacy of racism, white supremacy, and coloniality. To truly uphold its stated commitments to equity and human rights, social work must confront AMR at all levels. Grounded in critical race and anti-colonial theory, this paper illustrates how AMR is a multifaceted issue. While advancing a framework for addressing AMR within social work, this paper emphasizes the need for a comprehensive approach that encompasses direct practice, policy and community work, research, and education. Recommendations include adopting an antiMuslim racism approach that includes strategies that can be used to confront AMR and identify key challenges and opportunities for transformative change within social work.

EN:

This article reflects on the development process of a new undergraduate program, Racialized Health and Disability Justice (RHDJ), at the Critical Disability Studies program, York University from the perspective of the core program development team. The RHDJ program aims to centre the contributions and scholarship of Black, Indigenous, racialized, disabled, and Mad peoples, in response to mounting evidence demonstrating the ongoing marginalization and neglect of these groups in terms of their health and well-being across the Canadian state, and their exclusion from participation, recognition, knowledge production, and leadership within the colonial structures of academia. We reflect on how graduate students and faculty were involved in working toward the program’s central aim of teaching and enacting racial and disability justice. We ask, what difference does it make in our program development process to begin from a disability justice ethos, in our negotiations within a structure that the program resists at the same time as it relies on it for its existence? Since the program aims toward the transformation of care for communities who have been marginalized, we also consider if theories of care ethics can inform our process in implementing disability justice principles as we navigate institutional barriers, organization of labour, and collaboration. By sharing our process and reflections, we hope other collectives with similar disability justice goals may consider and build upon our experiences, in the service of building different tools for a different, more livable future.

EN:

This study uses Dorothy E. Smith’s Institutional Ethnography to examine social work field education coordination in an urban locale in Southern Ontario, Canada. Beginning with the standpoint of racialized students who were searching for a placement—the mandatory, practice-based component of accredited social work programs—I examine how the ruling relations socially organize field education coordination. I draw from textual analyses as well as conversations with key informants: five racialized social work students as well as two field education coordinators. A key finding of the study was that field education represented configurations of race, gender, and class with labour in social work education. By examining how field education coordination amidst the “crisis” of placement shortages was locally and translocally organized, this study explores the ways in which racialized students in one Canadian locale were systematically disadvantaged by neoliberal and managerialist discourses.

EN:

Engaging in research with Indigenous and Black women as a white woman settler involves critical considerations related to white supremacy, settler colonialism, and misogynoir. This is particularly true when the participants have been imprisoned and the researcher has not. As such, this article describes my unique abolition feminist methodology rooted in a framework of relational accountability which centred experiences of Black and Indigenous women who have been strip searched in prison. It describes the specific steps I took to enact the ethics of relational accountability – reciprocity, respect, and responsibility – in each phase of the research. This includes an innovative method of meaning-making whereby I listened to the recorded conversations with women while I was on the land of a federal prison. This facilitated more wholistic and embodied meaning-making as I was able to hear and feel what the women were sharing while being in the presence of a federal prison. I also engage in abolition feminist praxis by critically reflecting on the ways in which power and practices of superiority showed up throughout the research process.