I haven’t added one of these blocks in a while, because it seems ineffective to repeat what I’m doing each post. That’s because addressing anti-Black racism as a white person requires not a couple one-time changes but long-term shifts in practice and thinking. I’m still working hard on making my…
Whether we wanted to or not, we all learned a lot in the past 12 months — about ourselves, about how we react to unprecedented events, about the strengths and faults of the communities we live in, about epidemiology for laypersons — like, SO much. And that’s on top of…
We’re in the home stretch of 2020! As with my previous entries this year, I’ve tried to focus on things that are available to anyone, not people or circumstances I’m lucky to have in my life. Hope you’re all hanging in there too! This quarter, I’ve enjoyed: 1. routine At…
As a university instructor, I’ve struggled with a lot of professional challenges during the pandemic, but the biggest one has been setting boundaries. I know that many throughout the education sector — from preschool teachers to postgraduate supervisors — face a similar dilemma. We want to do our best for…
I’ve decided that finding out my idols have feet of clay is a good thing. In part, I’m deciding this out of necessity. With the direct contact between celebrities and fans facilitated by the Internet and 24-hour entertainment news, it’s easy to learn that J. K. Rowling is transphobic, that…
I was disappointed to get The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening as my very first video game. I’d never played anything but platformers and Tetris, and this weird top-down adventure was completely new. It had never occurred to me that a video game would let you explore a map, play…
The novel I’m working on has two protagonists. Each has qualities and sides to her identity that I share, and each has some for which I have to use my empathy and imagination. For example, one’s gender presentation is masculine-of-centre, and so is mine. One is Jewish, and so am…
In the prelude to my last blog entry, I raised some questions about diversity and taste: how do we evaluate the equity of our personal taste? Does that question even make sense? How much of what we call our taste is malleable, the result of environment and choice, and how…
Looking over this list, I see there are still a lot of places for me to reconsider my media intake. Few of the artists I’ve mentioned here are Black, and, although I’m allowed to like the artists I like, the fact that this list doesn’t reflect the diversity of the…
4:33 PM As the semester starts, I’m considering what I can do as an instructor to combat anti-Black racism in the classroom and the academy. Obviously, I can listen to the lived experience of folks and learn how to do my best to make my courses universally accessible–universal design helps…