By Ajay Parasram
More than 60 people crowded into Southam Hall, at Carleton University’s Campus and Community Teach-In on Oct. 2 
to deepen their understanding of the ongoing migrant and refugee crisis and to take concrete steps towards mobilizing the university community to respond.
Following a rousing panel discussion highlighting the centrality of Islamophobia, systemic racism in law and mainstream media, and histories of how universities have organized to resist similar tendencies in the past, the teach-in broke into organic working groups to plan next steps.
“We can choose to be open universities, instead of closed ones,” said Nadia Abu-Zahra, professor of International Development at the University of Ottawa.
The political culture in Canada since the Harper Conservatives won government in 2006 has been increasingly hostile to political organizing. University campuses can learn from successful campus-based activism in the past. Jennifer Ridgley, professor of Geography at Carleton, spoke to the historical precedent of university activism forcing their governments to welcome refugees. “Instead of walking into the quad and seeing a giant banner of John Manley, I’d like to see a banner saying Carleton is a sanctuary campus,” Ridgley said.
Making Carleton a sanctuary campus is a concrete medium-term objective, though as it stands today, the campus is far from that goal.
As Efrem Berhe, chair of Carleton’s World University Services Canada committee, informed the teach-in, “Carleton does not offer residency and textbook waivers to refugee students. Taking concrete steps to free up financial costs can help bring refugee students to campus right now.”
“Administrators can be pushed, but they won’t go one step further than what they are being pushed to do,” added Justin Paulson, sociology professor at Carleton and University Senator, speaking from the audience.
The informal town-hall style enabled considerable interaction between panellists and the audience. According to Fiona Jeffries, one of the teach-in’s organizers and the event’s facilitator, “teach-ins are all about collective knowledge building.”
Participants discussed the systemic racism underlying the major legal overhauls introduced over the tenure of the Harper Conservatives. The politics of fear, fostered by representing refugees as “security threats” for fleeing war-torn homes masks the fact that the current conditions in Iraq/Syria are part of the legacy of Western geopolitics in the Middle East. Omnibus legislation that continues to lay claim to obscure “Canadian values” by vilifying migrants manifest in anti-democratic legislation designed to stifle political dissent at home.
“Bill C-51,” explained Abu-Zahra, “is not just against Muslims, it’s against anyone who says I’m Canadian and this is what I think.”
The categorization of this ongoing situation as a “crisis” brings to light that it is only considered a crisis because it involves people of colour arriving in Europe and North America. In terms of global refugee flows, as Decky Kipuka Kabongi from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs explained, there appears to be no mass organizing around the millions of refugees precariously situated in the African continent.
Responding to the longer-term issue of entrenched racism in Canadian public policy was identified as an important goal and one that the University is well positioned to tackle.
“We need to think about what kind of Canada we’re welcoming refugees to,” warned Safiya Rochelle, doctoral candidate in Law and Legal Studies at Carleton. “We have tiers of citizenship here.”
De-legitimizing racist assumptions about refugees proliferated in media and by political parties raises the importance of decolonizing university classrooms, which can have a longer-term, generational effect, Abu-Zahra said. “As students move from Ottawa’s classrooms and into government cubicles, we need to make sure these students who are entering the public [sphere] aren’t afraid to speak up. We need to make sure these people resist racism when they go to work.”
Participants identified letter writing campaigns, online petitions, larger teach-in demonstrations, and targeted political pressure as key areas in which to organize current and ongoing efforts. Working groups were established and plans are currently underway.
The next Teach-In will be held at the Bronson Centre in Centretown on Wed. Oct. 21 from 7-9 p.m.
This article first appeared in The Leveller Vol.8, No.2 (October 2015).
