On part 2 of Coming Home, we continue our conversation with Professors Mariam Georgia and Eisenstein Staats-Pangowish about what it means when our work is deeply tied to our homelands. This week, we talk about what home means, how we need to unlearn colonial ways of teaching, and the arrogance of western colonial academia. We also talk about why our commitments to this work drives us to teach differently and the ways we attempt to decolonize the classroom.

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

Last summer, I had an opportunity to return home to the Philippines. It was a bittersweet homecoming. I returned in part because my family and I needed to sort out my dad's estate, but it was also joyful homecoming because I reunited with family and community. Being able to be home where I heard my language spoken everywhere, where I understood cultural scripts was a relief.

But as I reflect on going home, I realize the tremendous privilege I have in being able to do so many of our friends live in exile, where going home is no longer possible. Many are witnessing imperial plunder take place in their lands, as in the case of colleagues in Venezuela, and find that going home is especially fraught, if not altogether impossible. And yet others see research on their homes as being tied to larger political projects, a commitment to escape scholarly erasure, and to recuperate lost histories.

Yet the way academia functions is that these complex emotions engendered by going home is not openly acknowledged. Something that many of us know is that the university can be profoundly inhospitable to how we take up these lineages, especially if we are insisting that our connections to home ground innate important knowledges.

And it is also the case that when it comes to academics, especially outsider academics, researching our homes can also be sources of colonial damage. Academics often treat our homes as their research playgrounds, where they suddenly become experts who know more than us.

So in this two part series, I chat about home with two of my favourite people, Dr. Mariam Georgis, and Professor Esentsei Staats-Pangowish.

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

We're just weeks into 2026, but it is already messed up. US imperial attacks on Venezuela, the ICE raids across the US and Renee Good’s murder, the kidnapping of activist Chantal Anicoche by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, continued Israeli attacks in Gaza...it's been a lot.

So why are we talking this week about Heated Rivalry, the unexpected hit TV show from Crave and HBO about two hockey superstars who embark on a decade-long secret relationship despite being the faces of an intense hockey rivalry?

How can we possibly be thinking about a TV show amidst the fascist hellfire all around us?

To be honest I was initially hesitant about releasing this conversation in this exact moment.

But on reflection, I realized that maybe the overwhelmingly positive response to Heated Rivalry these past few weeks-an excitement and energy that I definitely felt-says something about what we are yearning for right now. When talking to friends about Heated Rivalry, I realize that we are seeking tenderness. Community. Love. Connection. In a world where we have elected leaders who are the antithesis of these very values, and where many of us feel real deep despair, stories like Heated Rivalry allow us to be part of a world where our only concern - for that 30 to 40 minute episode - is to be immersed in a love story. And not just any love story. But one that dares to dream that love can thrive in the face of a world that is deeply homophobic and anti-queer. Maybe this show is resonating not in spite of this awful political moment we find ourselves in, but because of it.

So I’m happy to bring you the conversation I had recently with my good friend and previous guest on the pod, Dr. JP Catungal. We talk about JP’s creation of a Heated Rivalry syllabus, which addresses hockey culture, queer Asian representation, homonationalism, and much more. We also talk about the academic impulse to intellectualize things, fandom, and neurodivergence.

Related Links

1. JP's Heated Rivalry Syllabus

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

(Audio fixed)

In our last episode for 2025, we welcome back the OG auntie, Dr. Rita Dhamoon, and Academic Aunties producer, Dr. Nisha Nath for the latest instalment of our year-end conversation, Academic Aunties After Hours. It's been quite a year, but it's always wonderful to think about what inspired us, what vexed us, and what gave us joy.

Hope you enjoy this conversation, and we'll see you in January!

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

In academia you are constantly making compromises. In my time, there have been numerous instances when I've found myself having to make compromises, prioritizing academic expectations over family and community. Times where I have to hustle hard, forgoing time with my young kids just to try to get tenure. I even remember writing my PhD dissertation, seeking to ground it in community centered knowledges and being told that academic conventions necessitate legibility, which means citing, analyzing and writing in a way that faculty members could understand.

On this week's episode, we speak to Dr. Tari Ajadi, a longtime community activist researcher, and a good friend. He completed his PhD in Political Science at Dalhousie University, a journey which you'll learn more about in our conversation.

We talk about the seeing academia for what it is, and how sometimes leaving is what we need to do in order to live a more fully realized life.

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

There are many so-called truths in academia. One of them is the belief that academia is a calling, and that you have to relinquish everything for your career. Even if it means leaving everything behind, taking you away from family and support systems.

On this episode, we challenge this truth with our guest, Dr. Jessica Ticar, an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Algoma University. We talk about her journey and the hard decision she had to make to leave her academic job to support family, without knowing how it would turn out. And we also talk about listening to the cues that our bodies tell us, even before our minds are aware, that we might be in a toxic environment and have to leave.

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

Academia likes to put people into a box. The pressure to stay within disciplinary boundaries is strong. For those who reject these disciplinary regimes, this can be felt personally, with gatekeepers discouraging this kind of scholarship at every opportunity.

On this week's episode, we talk to Dr. Aadita Chaudhury, who  just finished a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from York University, about these dynamics. We talk about pursuing scholarship that colours outside the lines and the importance of community to carry the load.

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

For many of our listeners, and certainly in conversations among friends, we talk about how one of the most dangerous figures we've encountered within the university are nice white women, and I don't use the word dangerous lightly. A lot has been written about the exaltation of white womanhood and especially the collusion of white women in settler colonialism, imperialism, and more.

This happens in all sorts of institutions, and of course in academia. Tears, gaslighting, gatekeeping, civility, appropriation, extraction, exploitation. All of these done with a smile and under the banner of care. These are all things that come to my mind when thinking about the ways in which nice white women can be such an obstruction to the flourishing of so many of our listeners.

Our guest this week is well positioned to talk through these dynamics. Dr. Willow-Samara Allen is an Associate Professor at Royal Roads University. Her research examines reproductions and disruptions of settler colonial socialization in public sector work, antiracist and anticolonial pedagogies and methods for critical adult learning and collaborative leadership, as well as the subject-re/making and complicities of white settler women, and the micro socio-political spaces of multiracial families.

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

In academia, it's taboo to be unserious. Not here, though, at Academic Aunties. On today's episode, we show that we can be good academics and also like unserious things by diving deep into one of my guilty pleasures, The Summer I Turned Pretty, streaming on Amazon Prime.

The show, despite supposedly having a target audience of tweens and teens, became so popular among my demographic of 30+ and 40+ cynical academic women. What is it about the show that we love? What did we think about the contrived plot points? Why were so many of us wringing our hands at the main character, Belly?

We get into it with my friend, Dr. Nicole De Silva, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia University.

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].

Season 6 premiere!

We've just started the school year and I'm realizing that I am already stressed. How can this be? The year literally just started!

My goal this year was to slow down, to take it easy and to not lose sight of my health. But it's so hard to do when it seems like all the good things that we love about universities and colleges are being taken away. And it seems like the neoliberal academy loves nothing more than to take us away from teaching and researching, and instead imposing upon us increasing amountos of paperwork, heaps of ever escalating fear mongering about AI that require ridiculous regulations that are designed to reveal students, and mounting pressures to increase enrollment because didn't, you know, we have a budget crisis and so on and so on.

That's why I found this week's conversation so refreshing. This week we talk to Dr. Carrianne Leung, a fiction writer and assistant professor at the University of Guelph in Creative Writing. We talk about how her winding non-traditional path into academia gives her a refreshing perspective about the energy she chooses to bring into the classroom, how she views her relationship with her students, including teaching in the age of AI and why we should all slow down and not hustle so hard.

Related Links

• Carrianne Leung's Website

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on BlueSky, Instagram, or by e-mail at [email protected].