Academic Aunties

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].

Season finale!

The past year, we’ve talked a lot about just how much we’ve had to fight for the university. From authoritarian leaders who wish to suppress dissent and protests in universities, particularly protests in support of Palestine, to rudderless senior administrators who suspend programs, fire long-term staff, and hire expensive and useless consultancy firms, there’s a lot of reasons to feel disheartened because the odds seem stacked against us. 

And yet, the fight continues. And we are seeing lots of victories. To counter Donald Trump’s attacks against higher education, more and more chapters of the American Association of University Professors are being founded. Unions are being established. And continued organizing for Palestine has led to a number of wins. The University of Toronto’s Faculty Association, for example, successfully passed a motion divesting from companies that fuel genocide in Palestine and in other illegally occupied territories. 

On a more personal note, witnessing and reporting and mobilizing against senior administrators’ decisions has actually pushed me to get involved in the fight for our university. Overcoming my aversion to running for positions, I ended up running for a seat in our university senate, and won! So did all of my progressive, feminist friends who are sick of being told by senior administrators that we just had to trust that senior admin knows what they’re doing. We’re there to roll up our sleeves, dig up reports, and ask questions. 

So organizing matters. Being savvy, strategic, and smart matters. And building relationships matters the most. This is the core of our organizing work. 

In today’s episode of Academic Aunties, our season finale, my new friend, Dr. Elisha Lim, and I talk about organizing tactics, the importance of relationships, and the potentialities of artificial intelligence. That's right, AI can be be put to good use. Elisha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and does groundbreaking research on AI, social media, critical race theory, and much more.

Related Links

• Declarations of Interdependence: How Media Literacy Practices are Developed, Negotiated, Rejected, and Exploited Across Social Media Platforms, by Elisha Lim, Gina Marie Sipley, Ladan Siad Mohamed, Francesca Bolla Tripodi Tripodi, Vincente Perez
• Prof explores colonial roots of digital platforms

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

The need for care - for radical care, for decolonial care, for accountable and reciprocal and emancipatory care - has never been more obvious. In a world where it is clear that institutions don’t care for us and that many of our elected political leaders just want to amass power and wealth, it is clear that it is our “communities of care” that hold us up.

The importance of “communities of care” is something that my badass friend , Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, has stressed over the years, both in her academic work and in her activism. Val is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.

On this episode, we talk about her new book, Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building During Crisis. We talk about care as a practice, about the centrality of community-led and community-centered ethos to our work in the academy, and about the sustainability of the work that we’re doing.

The conversation was especially healing in the wake of the Lapu-Lapu Tragedy in Vancouver, where eleven people died - most of whom were women - and many more were injured after a car drove into the festival. It was devastating to see a day that was meant to be a joyful celebration for the Filipinx community in Canada end in grief. So Val and I talked about the care that the community showed too, immediately after what happened, with organizations mobilizing rapidly to provide support and to create space for grief.

Related Links

• Filipino BC Instagram
• Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building During Crisis
• Matatag Photovoice Project

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 are living in an age of fascism where you have political leaders who disregard democratic process and are going full steam ahead in shaping the world the way they want it to look like. And this world includes a depleted higher education sector that they see as enemy number one. All over, we are witnessing a move to defund higher education, pushing universities and colleges to adopt corporate, neoliberal norms and practices. Programs are cut while tuitions fees rise with little tangible improvements in education.

So where is the money going? Why do senior administrators keep bringing their hands saying that there is a budget crisis? And why is it that as members of the university community, we can't seem to get any answers from our university leaders who are resentful that they keep being held to account for poor management decisions?

To talk about this, we speak to Dr. Todd Horton, the chair of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations' Governance Working Group. We also talk to Dr. Sheila Embleton, a colleague at York University, and the former interim president of Laurentian 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].

Higher education is under attack. You've probably heard about the cases of Mahmoud Kahlil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Alireza Doroudi. Students, studying in American universities being arrested and disappeared for their political stances. And our academic institutions are all too willing to capitulate in the face of the fascist, anti-education turn of our leaders.

On this episode, we try to make sense of this all. Host, Dr. Ethel Tungohan speaks with Academic Aunties producer, Dr. Nisha Nath, and friend of the podcast, Dr. Shaista Patel, an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, about what it's like to be an academic in the United States, how colleagues and institutions–who until very recently called themselves allies–have been all to quick to betray us, and how what is happening in the US can and is happening around the world.

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

There is a backlash to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. All around us, we see the dismantlement of various DEI initiatives including in academia. Institutions and corporations that once rushed to put out statements in support of Black Lives Matter, Landback, and other social movements for justice, now seem all too ready to abandon their initiatives now that DEI is no longer trendy.

It seems that those who felt that they had to pay lip service to DEI and thus instituted hollow and toothless statements and programs in support of diversity, are now thrilled that they don’t have to pretend anymore - they can continue, unchallenged, with their desire to amass power and wealth.  

In this episode, we welcome Professor Angie Beeman, Professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs and Affiliate Faculty with Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College-CUNY, to address DEI head-on. We criticize DEI when it is used as a superficial tool used by institutions, namely neoliberal academic institutions, to performatively show that they care about diversity without actually making steps towards structural transformation. We address the question of why and how targeted racist harassment still takes place in universities and colleges that have DEI policies - weren’t DEI policies meant to protect us? And we also talk about the importance of having an understanding of diversity that isn’t superficial.

Related Links

• Liberal White Supremacy: How Progressives Silence Racial and Class Oppression
• Racist targeting and denial in academia: the ineffectiveness of current policies and practices to address evolving forms of racism
• University policies have not kept up with ‘everyday racism’
• Angie Beeman'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].

(This is a reissue of the episode with audio issues corrected)

Last week, at the end of the day on a Friday, York University announced the suspension of program admissions for 19 undergraduate programs, including Indigenous Studies, Gender Sexuality Women's studies programs. These cuts occurred against established procedures for collegial governance, and is part of a wider attack on higher education at academic institutions around the world.

On this episode, Dr. Ethel Tungohan speaks to Dr. Ena Dua, Dr. Sarah Rotz, and Academic Aunties producer Dr. Nisha Nath on what is going on, how this is part of a global backlash against DEI, the role of management consultants pushing an agenda for a neoliberal university, and why it is time for anyone who cares about the future of higher education to mobilize and do something.

Related Links

• Petition to Support York and Calling for Reversal of Suspensions
• Statement from Indigenous Studies at York on Program Cuts
• Statement from Women's, Gender and Social Justice Association
• Inside Doug Ford's Plan to Starve Ontario's Universities
• Undergraduate Employment Rates

Thanks for listening! Sign up for our forthcoming newsletter, 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, we assume that our value rests solely with our brains. The smarter we are, the more grants and publications we have, the more value we give to our institutions, to our fields, to our professions.

What this means is that anything that gets in the way of our ability to produce is seen as a distraction. Having a personal life is a distraction. Trying to build a family is a distraction. Pregnancy is a distraction. Seeking fertility treatments, going through miscarriages, giving birth, getting abortions. These are all distractions.

This of course, is deeply problematic. On this episode, we speak to Dr. Alana Cattapan, an expert when it comes to all things reproduction related, including serving as Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Reproduction at the University of Waterloo.

We talk about the need to shift the norms of silence around fertility, around pregnancy and miscarriage and abortion, and recognizing the complexities of our, as we talk about, our messy, leaky bodies.

Related Links

• Some States Are Turning Miscarriages and Stillbirths Into Criminal Cases Against Women
• The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement: The Rise of "Pro-Woman" Rhetoric in Canada and the United States, by Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon 
• Reproductive rights backsliding around the world
• Donations to Planned Parenthood
• Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights
• National Abortion Federation

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].