Rosalind HamptonProfessor Rosalind Hampton of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education will deliver a lecture entitled “Plotting Black Studies in Canada” on Friday, Feb. 4.

Speaker to explore role for Black studies in Canada

The past decade has seen Canadian universities that have long celebrated their settler colonial origins declaring commitments to “decolonization,” says Rosalind Hampton.

An assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, she will examine the shifting landscape of academia in a lecture entitled “Plotting Black Studies in Canada” at 10 a.m. Friday, Feb. 4.

“To plot Black studies is to locate and engage Black radical thought and creativity across time and place, and to study and organize together toward a repurposing of the university as a site of anti-colonial convergence,” she says.

Dr. Hampton’s areas of teaching and graduate student supervision include Black radical thought; arts and creative practice; Black women’s life writing; Black learners in Canada; and critical ethnographic and arts-informed methods of inquiry. Her 2020 book Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University examines racialized social relations in Canadian higher education through a study grounded in Black people’s experiences at McGill University since the late 1950s.

Expanding on this work, her current research projects examine Black student activism and coalition building in the late 20th century, Black studies initiatives at Canadian universities since 2015, and critical-creative praxis in Black studies research and pedagogy.

In her Feb. 4 address, Hampton will make the case for a critical Black studies that demands consideration deeper than institutional surfaces and appearances, below and beyond matters of representation.

The event is the second in the Distinguished Speaker Series in Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Pedagogies, presented by the Office of the Vice-President for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. It will run on the Microsoft Teams platform and is free to attend; join the live event on MS Teams here.