Don’t Call Me Resilient

By: The Conversation Vinita Srivastava Dannielle Piper Krish Dineshkumar Jennifer Moroz Rehmatullah Sheikh Kikachi Memeh Ateqah Khaki Scott White
  • Summary

  • Host Vinita Srivastava dives into conversations with experts and real people to make sense of the news, from an anti-racist perspective. From The Conversation Canada.
    2021 The Conversation
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Episodes
  • The world is in crisis – what role should our universities be playing?
    Mar 27 2025

    Across the globe, we're witnessing a rise in far-right movements. Just a few weeks ago, the far-right AfD party in Germany secured second place. This marks the first time a far-right party has gained this level of power in the country since the Second World War. Germany is not alone in this trend: Italy, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Croatia are now led by far-right governments.

    It may come as no surprise that many of these new leaders are increasingly hostile toward universities.

    In India, under Prime Minister Modi, universities have the lowest academic freedom since the 1940s. In Brazil, former president Jair Bolsonaro claimed that public universities transform students into leftists, gays, drug addicts and perverts.

    Meanwhile in the United States, Vice President JD Vance has called universities the enemy for allegedly teaching that America is "an evil, racist nation.” President Donald Trump even signed an executive order demanding higher education institutions dismantle their DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs. He’s also pulled federal funding from universities that allow "illegal protests”. The U.S. president has [also demanded that Columbia University's Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Departments be independently reviewed.

    But, despite this hostility, universities — and students — have historically been springboards for change. It was student protests 25 years ago that helped lead to the downfall of apartheid in South Africa. More recently, in Bangladesh, student protests helped topple the country’s authoritarian leader. This past year, students across the world have raised public awareness of genocide in Gaza.

    Meanwhile, here in Canada, universities are facing financial pressure because of reductions in international student permits. This drop in revenue has caused alarming budget constraints at universities, revealing a deep reliance on international students as a revenue source.

    This has led to existential questions about our universities. With today’s world in crisis, what should the role of the university be? And why are our public universities so underfunded? And how can they continue to serve their communities?

    To help tackle these questions, we sat down with two education professors at the University of British Columbia to discuss the function of the university in a democracy — especially in times of crisis.

    In this, our final episode of Don't Call Me Resilient, we speak with Annette Henry — a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education and cross-appointed to the Institute for Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice. Her work examines race, class, language, gender and culture in education for Black students and educators in Canada.

    We also speak with Michelle Stack, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies whose work looks at educational policy, university rankings and equity and education.

    At a time when critical conversations in higher education are under attack worldwide, can Canadian universities rise to the challenge and be a force for good?

    Thank you for spending your time with us.

    You can find links and more resources related to this episode here.

    This episode was coproduced by Ateqah Khaki (DCMR associate producer), Marsa Sittheeamorn (student journalist) and Jennifer Moroz (consulting producer). Our sound engineer was Alain Derbez. Josh Mattson provided onsite sound assistance. Thank you to the Journalism Innovation Lab and its crew and the Social Science Research Council of Canada for their generous support.

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    43 mins
  • AI-generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation?
    Feb 20 2025

    Virtual influencers are becoming more popular and prevalent everyday. A full-blown industry has sprung up around them – an industry with agencies and companies dedicated to creating and managing them, with some of the top personas earning into the millions annually.

    But our guest today has noticed a troubling pattern – many virtual influencers are crafted as young, women of color. But their creators? Often men with different racial identities, who work at marketing agencies.

    Jul Parke is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information specializing in social media platforms, digital racism, virtual influencers, and AI phenomena. She is currently a visiting scholar at NYU.

    Jul’s doctoral research explores what motivates companies and creators to produce these virtual, racialized women, which she says is a new form of commercializing gender and racial identity in digital spaces.

    As we enter the world of AI proliferation, it seems virtual influencers are here to stay. There are at least 200 of these digital personalities out there today, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are rolling out new tools that enable everyday users to craft their own virtual personas.

    Given the absence of a governing framework for non-humans, the rise of virtual influencers on social media raises a whole host of urgent ethical questions about authenticity online.

    Visit here for a full list of the virtual influencers and resources discussed in this episode.

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    35 mins
  • Food as a tool of oppression
    Jan 23 2025
    Editor's note: This podcast episode is the first in our Don't Call Me Resilient live event series. Our next event — "AI-generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation?" is coming up on Wednesday February 5th in Toronto — and we'd love for you to be there! Attendance is free. Click here to learn more and save your seat! Food is so much more than what we eat.It is, of course, nourishment — the food we put into our body to fuel ourselves. It can be joyful, like the the smell of pancakes wafting through the house on a Sunday morning, or when loved ones gather around a feast at the dinner table. It can also be deeply personal and defining, connecting us to ancestral history, and cultural and racial identities. And it is also political — especially in the United States — which is the key takeaway in a new book by law scholar Andrea Freeman. Last fall, we sat down with Andrea to discuss her book in the first conversation of our new live events series from Don't Call Me Resilient. In this new episode, we bring you an edited version of that conversation.The book — Ruin their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United State from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan Books/Raincoast) — is a history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control.Freeman is a professor at Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles. Much of her work explores food oppression and examines how food and law policy are influenced by corporate interests, which disproportionately impact and harm marginalized communities.In her book, Prof. Freeman argues that food law and policy have created and maintained racial and society inequality in the U.S., which she says amounts to "food oppression."Our conversation was wide-ranging. We covered some fascinating topics, including the love/hate relationship with frybread, how milk became a symbol of white supremacy and how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been using nutrition programs — including "government cheese" and the National School Lunch Program — as a dumping ground for unwanted agricultural surpluses since the Great Depression.Freeman's book also explains how this longstanding oppression has produced racial health disparities, resulting in higher rates of diabetes, disease and even premature death among Black, Indigenous and Latino communities.Although the picture is bleak, Freeman — a constitutional law scholar — provides some potential avenues for change, vis-a-vis reparations and the U.S. Constitution.In her concluding chapter, she writes:"Corporations do not feel compassion. Sickness and loss do not move them. Appealing to their humanity is not an effective political strategy. Looking to the White House and its agencies for solutions has yielded only temporary results at best. The Obama era saw improvements in school lunches that Donald Trump swept away during his brief tenure. Joe Biden reinstated stricter guidelines, and the corporations stood ready to beat them back down again. In the face of near-complete capture of the legislative and executive branches, it is time to turn to the courts."In addition to the podcast episode, you can read an excerpt from Freeman's book about frybread — a simple, versatile "comfort food" for many Indigenous communities that she says embodies the contradictions that have dictated Indigenous food and health in North America since colonization.If you'd like to stay up-to-date on the remaining events in our series, follow us on Instagram @dontcallmeresilientpodcast or sign up for our weekly newsletter.This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at Another Story Bookshop in Toronto on Nov. 14, 2024. The episode was hosted and produced by Executive Producer Vinita Srivastava and co-produced by Associate Producer Ateqah Khaki, with support from Consulting Producer Jennifer Moroz. Ryan Clarke was our on-site audio engineer and mixed the episode.
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    36 mins

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