Philip S. S. Howard
McGill University, Department of Integrated Studies in Education
York Centre for Education and Community, York University

My research examines the ways that racialized social structures and ideologies organize the ways that we, as social actors, come to know ourselves, create community, and exercise agency in contemporary neo-liberal contexts. This work explores the points of convergence and disjuncture between the ways that liberal democratic discourses and critical discourses imagine race and racial justice, and investigates how these contested knowledges play out in civil society. I am particularly interested in the contradictions that arise within social justice projects in liberal democracies, and in the ways that the marginalized resist and exercise agency in the face of these contradictions. My current research projects include:

1. a SSHRC-funded study of blackface incidents on Canadian university campuses. This study explores the meaning and impact of these contemporary blackface acts within the settler-colonial context of Canada, and how they are resisted within the climate of post-racialist discourse which claims the diminishing significance of race.
2. a study of the Africentric Alternative School of the Toronto District School Board. This study, funded by the TDSB and the York Centre for Education and Community, investigates the agency of this school community as it advocates for the equitable education of black youth.