A blog by Daniel MacKinnon. Moving to Nova Scotia to attend university forced me to present a personal narrative. I was an outsider. But I had an answer ready: I was no “upper Canadian” tourist. I had family in Nova Scotia. We had been visiting almost every summer of my childhood. Nova Scotia was internalized…

A blog By Patrick Phillips. In 2019 Dr. Erica Dodds, chief operating officer at the Foundation for Climate Restoration, ran a “climate reality” workshop for a Washington, D.C. high school. She asked students, “What would life look like in 30 years?” The answers were not idyllic vistas of a prosperous world. In fact, “the answers…

A reader’s response to Dr. Hongyu Wang’s nonviolent relationality by Patrick Phillips. I, like others in our immediate (EDU6102) writing community, approached Dr. Hongyu Wang’s alignment with Jungian psychoanalytic theory with some skepticism; psychoanalysis often connotes certain kinds of historical and epistemological baggage. However, I realised that I appreciate the practicality of Wang’s application of…

A blog by Sarah Schmidt. Facts and figures allow us to compartmentalize our understanding and relation to acts of evil. By summarizing horrific and complicated events into an accessible narrative of evil, we provide a connotation of absolutism (Romig, 2012). It removes the need or ability to truly understand, let alone acknowledge or relate to,…

A blog by Sarah Schmidt. As a person of white privilege, working in a female and white-dominated profession of librarianship, listening and reading Vidya Shah while reflecting on the local and global events of the last few weeks’ left me with the need to sit, listen, and contemplate deeply on how to move forward, especially…

A blog by Bahareh Samsamiardekani. Canada’s first nursing school opened in 1874 in Ontario. The first baccalaureate nursing programs began in 1919 at the university of British Columbia. Black students were not permitted to attend nursing programs until 1984 (Jefferies, 2020). In the contemporary era, although racism is neglected in nursing curricula, black nursing students…

A blog by Sara Anne Petrucci. On March 27th, 2020 Ottawa-Carleton School Board Trustee, Donna Blackburn harassed a black student athlete playing basketball alone in a public park. She snapped a photo of the under-aged student and posted it onto her social media account stating, Apparently I have another title Park Patrol. This kid has…

A blog by Dan MacKinnon. In a brief moment away from the computer screen, I read an essay by Jill Lepore in this week’s New Yorker that strongly resonated with the readings…