Fall 2022 Colloquium

If I were his Mother: Kinship, Race and Redemption in Brazilian Men’s Prisons

Guest speaker: Dr. David C. Thompson

Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 1:00 - 2:30 pm

Join us for a free in-person public lecture

SFU, Burnaby Campus, Academic Quadrangle, Ellen Gee Room, 5067

Abstract
Why are men’s prisons saturated with anxieties about motherhood? This presentation follows invocations of the mother‐son relationship, as incarcerated cisgender men, their families, and prison workers each grapple with the meaning, weight, and redemptive potential of a mother’s love. I argue that within this problem‐space, mothers emerge as both the root cause of men’s failings and as the solution to their ungovernability. Social workers, evangelical missionaries and others who offer themselves up as maternal figures for a disproportionately Black prison population also bring into relief the racism that drives the question of who is a worthy mother. I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Rio’s prisons to chart the gestures and discourses of motherhood that give form to the care, violence and infantilisation running through these institutions. In doing so, I offer an engagement with the anti‐Black and un/gendering foundations of incarceration, and consider social science’s complicity with this project.

Bio
David C. Thompson is a cultural anthropologist and the current Wenner‐Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow within the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. His work engages with prisons and incarceration in Brazil, with an attention to the individual and collective futures that contemporary regimes of punishment anticipate, call forth, or foreclose. He is currently preparing a book‐length manuscript entitled ‘Resocialise to Conquer the Future’: Incarceration and Reform in Rio de Janeiro.

Light refreshments served

Transgressing White Academic Entitlement: Creating Transformational Learning and Relations

Guest speaker: Dr. Benita Bunjun

Sponsored by Simon Fraser University's Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Tuesday, October 11, 2022, 1:00 - 2:30 pm

Join us for a free in-person public lecture
SFU, Burnaby Campus, Academic Quadrangle, Ellen Gee Room, 5067

Abstract
By engaging with critical race/whiteness theories, academia in colonial Canada can be understood as a site of colonial encounters of differently positioned subjects within simultaneous contact zones (Senate, Board of Directors, student/campus services, departments, classrooms) in a white settler society. University spaces are powerful sites of colonial settlements re/producing white entitlement while managing the socio-geo-political local and global intermixing of a diversity of students, faculty, and staff across racialization, class, gender, trans/non-binary, citizenship, and ability.

Feminist critical race and anti-racist scholars have consistently demonstrated the pervasiveness of coloniality within the academy resulting not only in the erasure and marginality but also the management of critical race and Indigenous scholarship. This presentation interrogates the intersectional deployments and effects of "bodies out of place" within Western, Eurocentric, and white academia while also providing key interventions for the creation of transformational learning and relations.

Bio
Dr. Benita Bunjun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Justice and Community Studies, and Women and Gender Studies in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (colonial Halifax, Nova Scotia). She is currently a Visiting Faculty at Simon Fraser University in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology. Her research examines organizational and institutional power relations with a focus on colonial encounters and nation building within academic spaces and workplaces.  She is the past President of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) and contributed significantly to the Centre for Race, Autobiography, Gender and Age (RAGA) at UBC.

Dr. Bunjun has published book chapters, and in various journals including Journal of Management Education, Education as Change, and International Journal of Organizational Diversity. She is the editor of Academic Well-Being of Racialized Students (2021 – Fernwood Publishing) centering transnational kinship relations and well-being. Dr. Bunjun is deeply committed to the academic well-being of Indigenous, Black and students of colour - who are often seen as "bodies out of place" - and to her responsibilities and responsiveness regarding the complexity of Indigenous-settler (of colour) relations.

She is currently the Faculty Coordinator for The Racialized Students Academic Network (RSAN) and works with racialized students and international students at various universities to promote their scholarship, well-being, and self-advocacy in the areas of academia, tenancy, and mental health.