BIPOC Perspectives on Multiraciality in Canada: Fieldnotes from a CRiCS Research Assistant
My contract as the Research Assistant for the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies (CRiCS) was short and paramount to my studies as a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Cultural Studies Program. As a member of CRiCS, I had the opportunity to attend the Research Talks series and Professional Development series, which were held virtually throughout the year. I had the opportunity to develop my own research project with guidance from two supervisors, extending beyond the allotted time of a regular academic course. My time in this position flew by, and I firmly believe that CRiCS should be a quintessential part of the Master of Arts in Cultural Studies program.
My inaugural introduction to the kind of work CRiCS does was through the VegFest festivities held on the quad of The University of Winnipeg’s main campus in September 2023. Acting CRiCS Director Dr. Jason Hannan was an organizer of the event and hosted Isaias Hernandez as a guest speaker who also spoke in the Research Talk series in CRiCS. His approach to environmental justice as a queer brown vegan is important because it approaches the topic by centring predominantly BIPOC communities and how they’re impacted the most by environmental racism, a stance that is very different from popular white vegan perspectives which center animal welfare often above human life. Hernandez spread his message by utilizing social media as his medium for activism to connect to a contemporary tech-savvy demographic. This was just one of several Cultural Studies events I attended throughout the year.
The highlight of my time with CRiCS and my time in the Cultural Studies Texts and Cultures program was putting together the “Who am I? Navigating the World as a Multiracial Person” discussion panel in January 2023. At the beginning of the school year, I met with my research supervisors Drs. Jason Hannan and Sabrina Mark (Research Coordinator for CRiCS) to discuss how I could contribute to CRiCS as the new 2023 research assistant. I had the creative freedom to choose the type of project I wanted to work on, with my mentors guiding me along the way.
My background in English from my undergraduate degree trained me to critically analyze texts beyond surface readings to understand the cultural and institutional factors that influenced the writer’s creative decisions. I knew I wanted to critique a facet of social culture which affected me personally with my CRiCS project. The ability to do this and learn more about myself was one of the attractive features that drew me to Cultural Studies in the first place. My focus in the Master of Arts program was on the intersection of multiracial people in Canada, namely from the BIPOC perspective. In my research on multiraciality, I found an immense amount of scholarship from American perspectives which focused on multiracial people with white ancestry: Half + Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial + Bicultural edited by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience edited by Chandra Prasad, Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects edited SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Spiers. While this perspective opened the doors for multiracial people in the United States to engage with Critical Race Theory in the 1990s, there was a glaring gap of scholarship from multiracial people who are non-white multiracial. This was the space within Cultural Studies I was most interested in and wanted to probe into more with my CRiCS project. This is how the original idea behind the “Who am I?” panel came into fruition.
I met with Drs. Hannan and Mark bi-weekly in the months leading up to the virtual event. They guided me through the process of vetting potential panelists and determining what they could contribute to the conversation. They helped refine my questions for the panelists to ensure they were ethical and wouldn’t cause undo harm. They gave me instruction on how to apply for grants and contact potential sponsors to secure honoraria for the panelists. Throughout the process, they supported my vision for the project and presented me with different avenues of thought I would not have considered otherwise. They supported me emotionally while I grappled with the intensity of a master’s degree and my internalized pressure to win grad school –an unrealistic goal, but my goal nonetheless. And in a one-year program where I couldn’t meet with my cohort for an extended period of time to find commonality in our struggles, Drs. Hannan and Mark were a much-needed, steadfast presence.
One week before the panel, we met with the panelists to build a positive rapport before delving into personal topics on a public platform. We discussed the format of the panel and gave them a list of questions to review and consider before going live. Through this private meeting, the nature of “Who am I?” changed from a conversation solely on multiraciality, to a conversation that also considered how multiethnicity factors into self-identity and community. This new addition to the conversation had a drastic impact on my thinking beyond my work for CRiCS. I was already thinking about how people from different racial groups in the diaspora related to each other better than folks who remained in their homelands. But after that initial meeting, I began to think about how multiple ethnic identities or social factors affect one’s membership into a single ethnic community, and the implications of this for both the individual and the larger community. If not for the space I was allowed in CRiCS to consider these related areas, I might not have arrived at these questions on my own.
My time as the CRiCS RA has been invaluable for my experience as a Cultural Studies graduate student. Experiencing the work other scholars are doing within the field has been an eye opener to what possibilities are open to me if I continue with my CS journey. The University of Winnipeg, being the home of many creative and inquisitive intellectuals, was the best place I could have gone to build connections with the field and explore different avenues for my academic interests.
-- CRiCS RA, Taylor Boucher
