CMCE
Centre for Media and Culture in Education (CMCE) Event
“Surveillance, Saviorism, and “Care”: Challenging Nationalist Educational Policies and Teacher Practices through Media-Based Resistance.”
Saturday, March 23rd from 9:00 – 10:30 am EST in OI 5150
Speakers:
- Dr. Niyousha Bastani, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and International Studies
- Abarna Selvarajah, PhD Student, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE
- Sarah Ázeline, EdD Candidate, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE
Chair: Dr. Hayley Brooks
Abstract: This highlighted panel session will explore how educational policies and teacher practices across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom shape specific nationalist discourses that produce and reproduce racial violence. To investigate this, each presenter will explore how critical engagement with media and culture has the potential to envision resistance to nationalist policies and practices that surveil, harm, and dispossess student populations. The first presentation focuses on how the Ontario Safe Schools Act regulates and suppresses student activism in Ontario highschools by examining a case-study of awareness-raising campaigns on Tamil Genocide Education. The paper is influenced and informed by scholarship on narratives of doubt, self-censorship, and resistance through social media storytelling. The second panelist examines the enactment of complexes of white saviorism in US classrooms and how these complexes have dominated the ways in which white-identifying, female-identifying educators in the United States envision their role in education. Considered through the lens of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), this panel will focus on the connections between film media, nationalism, and white savior roles in the US education system. The final presentation takes up a counter-extremism policy known as Prevent, which is a mandatory policy across the education sector in the United Kingdom. The policy has been widely criticized for policing students who are (perceived as) Muslim. By contrasting the policy’s vision of psychological care with an anti-surveillance articulation of healing in a zine by the Khidr Collective (a Muslim arts collective), this presentation reveals “prevention” as a racializing and racist ethic of care.
Panelist Biographies
Niyousha Bastani is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of Diaspora and Transnational Studies and The Evasion Lab. Her research interests focus on the overlapping histories and politics of psychology, race, anti-Muslim racism (particularly in the UK), and education. Especially through engagement with the political thought of Sylvia Wynter, her work questions how these histories and politics shape racial understandings of being human. She is currently working on her first monograph, based on ethnographic research on psychological and educational approaches to counter-extremism in the UK. Her next research project looks at global usages of psychology for articulating anti-imperial resistance, especially in Iran in the 1960s-80s. She received her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge, and was formerly Editor in Chief at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. She has published her work in Politics and Space and Cultural Critique.
Abarna Selvarajah is a student-researcher, facilitator and activist whose community-based research examines the intersections of gender, immigration, and displacement, with a particular focus on the resistance-building practices of mature Tamil women. She is a PhD student in the Social Justice Education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), housed in the University of Toronto. Abarna’s scholarly and policy-centered work focuses on and counters violence experienced by mature Tamil diaspora and migrant women through community-based policy interventions that nurture agency. Previously, she worked with ten mature Tamil-Canadian women to formulate policy and program changes to settlement education, rooted in the long-term aspirations of mature immigrant women. Her writing can be found in the Journal of Comparative and International Education and the Journal for Studies in the Education of Adults. This year, she is one of the co-chairs for the OISE Graduate Student Research Conference.
Sarah Ázeline (she/her) is a student and teacher-educator based in the United States. As a student-researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), she is currently investigating the efficacy of US-based Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainings. An EdD candidate in the Department of Social Justice Education (SJE) at the University of Toronto, Ms. Ázeline also holds a Master of Arts degree in developmental psychology from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Music Education degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current area of research exists at the intersection of race and gender, and is focused on analyzing the effects of racial diversity trainings on white-identifying educators in the United States. In 2024, she is proud to be one of the co-chairs of the OISE Graduate Student Research Conference.
About the Chair
Hayley H. Brooks is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, and an Editorial and Proposal Development Officer at the Office of the Vice-Principal, Research & Innovation, at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She earned her PhD in Social Justice Education, with a collaborative specialization in Women and Gender Studies, at OISE, University of Toronto. She specializes in the areas of critical international education, media and cultural literacy education, and gender-based violence prevention in public education. Her research is published in the Journal of Media Literacy Education (2019), Comparative and International Education (2022), and the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education (2023).