The Letters

Institutional Lives and EDI

by Nisha Nath, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, Anita Girvan and Davina Bhandar

A powerful witnessing, gathering, and tracing of the circulation of letters to inquire into the writing of life in the often destabilizing and troubled waters of the EDI university.

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About the book

The Letters asks what do equity, diversity, and inclusion–related letters do for the university as an institution and for those who are supposed to benefit from EDI initiatives? What do these letters tell us about institutionalized relationships, control, and creative resistance?

Intimate and moving, this erudite collaboration among four publicly engaged scholars traces power as it weaves through institutional correspondence. In grappling with official claims of inclusion, the authors examine how EDI-related letters are used by the university to claim a mythical identity — of being equitable, inclusive, diverse, and decolonizing —while simultaneously warding off criticism. Focused on recuperating the labour and forms of life-writing that members of subordinated groups undertake in institutions, The Letters amplifies structurally marginalized voices to diagnose why and how EDI adversely impacts certain people and poignantly identifies creative ways to intervene against the neoliberal university.

Activism & Social Movements Cultural Studies Education Public Policy

What people are saying

Gulzar R. Charania, associate professor, Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa
“The Letters diagnoses and intervenes in the state of institutional life in the university, while also insisting on letters that teach us about labour, care, and collectivity. It is incisive and nourishing. Read it.”

Sharon Luk, Simon Fraser University and author of The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity.
“Opening with the call, “DIE EDI,” this work arrives amidst a bitter irony, having been written precisely in anticipation of the death of EDI. Yet, much more importantly, this intimate critique raises the problem of what “we” will have rebuilt in EDI’s wake, if not simply another turn back to the good ol’ days. In the latter sense, the collective’s offering in, through, and as “the letters” not only validates the daily struggles of Black, Indigenous, queer, and women of color scholars; in doing so, this work also honors the intellectual lineages and visions that guide our work and have always found expression: both exceeding their forms of appearance and resounding in and across different scales.”

Ethel Tungohan, host of Academic Aunties podcast and author of Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Communities of Care and Movement-Building.
“Breathtaking, brilliant, creative, enraging, heartfelt, joyful, powerful, and wise, The Letters is testament to the importance of ‘writing our lives’ and ‘right-ing our lives’ within and against the neoliberal, EDI’ university. The authors unflinchingly demonstrate the corrosive damages that universities inflict while also capturing the subversive power of collective witnessing, dissident friendships, and doing otherwise in these spaces. It is a work of profound theoretical heft that I also see as a love letter to its readers: not only does it give us a way to process, metabolize and understand painful encounters in our academic lives that have harmed us, it is also a reminder that amid the many instances of institutional cruelty that we might have witnessed and lived through, other worlds remain possible.”

Dr. Sedef Arat-Koc, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Toronto Metropolitan University
“Raising critical questions about the university as a public institution, The Letters provides penetrating observations and brilliant analysis of the distortions, contradictions, hypocrisies and omissions of the EDI university. Articulating a powerful alternative to both liberal visions and far-right critiques of EDI, it is an original and very timely contribution to discussions on and strategies for equity and decolonization in the academe and beyond.”

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Authors

Nisha Nath

Nisha Nath is an associate professor of Equity Studies, Athabasca University, and is based in Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). She locates herself as a settler woman of colour whose family comes from divergent social locations in India. Her work critically engages citizenship, focusing on the intersections of race, security, and white settler colonialism. She collaborates on the Insurgent and Resurgent Knowledges Lab (IRKlab.ca) alongside The Letters co-authors. She is also engaged in a SSHRC-funded research project with Dr. Willow-Samara Allen on the role of discretionary power and white settler colonial socialization in public sector work.

Rita Kaur Dhamoon

Rita Kaur Dhamoon is an auntie, sister, daughter, anti-racist feminist, activist, scholar, educator, learner, aspiring artist, and drummer. Her scholarship focuses on anti-racist feminism, colonialism, and anti-colonialism, critical race politics, critiques of liberal multiculturalism and the nation-state, identity/power, gender and feminist politics, intersectionality, settler colonialism, Sikh diasporas, conceptual and empirical mapping of relations between race and Indigeneity, political theory, and Canadian politics. She has numerous academic publications on these topics. She strives to be meaningfully in sangat (collective/community) with others to share and learn knowledge that can be used in the service of disrupting relations of dominance and fostering liberatory relations. Dhamoon loves to play with paint, pastels, and charcoal, and hopes to engage with the creative arts to serve movements of political change.

Anita Girvan

Anita Girvan is an associate professor of environmental justice in the Department of Gender Studies in lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands at the University of Victoria. Following familial routes and roots and marginalized lineages of socioecological governance, she traces Black feminist/Afro-Caribbean socio-cultural knowledges and Indigenous knowledges as they intervene in the aftereffects of colonization. As a scholar-activist of the cultural politics of climate change, Girvan has written extensively on metaphors as mediators of socioecological worlds, specifically in the book Carbon Footprints as Cultural-Ecological Metaphors (Routledge, 2018). She is informed and inspired by coalitional and collaborative approaches to world-building, including through music, poetry and other cultural productions. Girvan is also a mother, auntie, and learner with plant relations through gardening and through walking among trees and extended more-than-human kin. With Nisha Nath, Davina Bhandar, and Rita Dhamoon, she is also a member of the Insurgent/Resurgent lab (IRKlab.ca) collaborative network.

Davina Bhandar

Davina Bhandar’s research interests are in the intersecting fields of critical race theory, anti-colonialism, abolition, feminist studies, contemporary theories of democracy, freedom, citizenship, sovereignty, and securitized borders. Her ongoing research focus is on the migration and relocation of diaspora communities from Punjab, India, in the territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen), Songhees and Coast Salish Peoples with the structures of the settler colonial state of Canada. She has been invested in understanding the formations and structures of citizenship through histories of migration, relocation, practices of emplacement, and belonging. She is tracing the practices of material domestic cultural textile production and women’s labour. Most recently she has been involved in a collaborative research project that is grounded in intersectional feminist practice and poetics. The Insurgent/ Resurgent Knowledges Lab (IRKlab.ca) is a generative, virtual intergenerational research community where activists, artists, dreamers, scholars, students come together to centre trajectories of insurgent and resurgent knowledge. The four founders of IRK collaborate on various topics, but most closely examine institutional power, racial capitalism, understanding care, ethics, and community practice.

Chapter 1: ‘The Letters’: Writing Lives Through and Against the EDI University
Chapter 2: The Invitation: ‘The Letters’: EDI and Tracing Work in the Academy
Chapter 3: Swallowing EDI and Complaint Procedures: Writing Lives of Magnificent, Subversive, and Rebellious Communities
Chapter 4: Riffing with Aunt Jemima: Rhythms of Call-and-Response within Nested Letters
Chapter 5: Up for Grabs: Public University, Where Are We Now?
Chapter 6: The Letters’: Collective Tracing