This study investigates creating antiracist spaces and determining what an antiracist sociohistorical geography looks like. I argue that an antiracist sociohistorical geography is always necessarily unfinished and in a state of becoming. I introduce as my study site a section of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that was once a neighbourhood known as The Ward. At different times in the past, the land of this area was home to the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, a Black community, a Jewish community, and a Chinese community.
Through investigations of these historic racialized communities and through field site examination, I first document how current cultural representations within this space create racist exclusions. Next, through discussion of my experience with the Ontario Black History Society’s (OBHS) walking tour in and around this space, and through analysis of one-on-one interviews with OBHS representatives, I show the tour as creating starting points for developing antiracist geographies. Finally, by imagining the space devoid of racist exclusions, I illustrate what an antiracist sociohistorical geography might look like but also that the portrayal is a spatial and temporal moment and therefore unfinished. I combine an anti-essentialist antiracist historical methodology with critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography.
My main finding is that inclusions of excluded racialized groups into dominant discourse can contribute to naming and perhaps troubling particular racisms, but do not automatically disrupt systems and structures that (re)create exclusions. To deconstruct these powers, antiracism must incorporate ongoing disruptions of dominance over space. My study shows the potential for shifting discursive meanings around racialized bodies in relation to each other and sociohistorical geographies they occupy. These shifts have implications for how sociohistorical spaces become forums of social studies and history education in everyday spaces and in schools, as people (re)learn to read bodies within sociohistorical spaces in antiracist ways.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/43172 |
| Date | 19 January 2022 |
| Creators | Currie, Mark |
| Contributors | Stanley, Timothy |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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