Érudit's RSS Feed

Editor's Note

Trish Salah

Critical Conversations Among Critical Race Theory and Narrative Inquiry Educational Researchers

Carmen Gillies, Stavros Georgios Stavrou, Chelsea Davis, M. Shaun Murphy and Stefinee Pinnegar
Using intimate scholarship (IS), we had conversations about the intersections of narrative inquiry (NI) and critical race theory (CRT) to better understand their value in our racial justice research. Building on Stavrou and Murphy’s (2021) five design elements, which they applied to CRT and anti-racist education, in this article we begin by identifying differences between NI and CRT and positing the use of counterstories to uncover potential intersections. Our article provides a critical review of recent studies based on NI and CRT. We articulate how this self-study of practice exemplifies IS and discuss counterstories from the basis of NI and CRT. Recognizing the limitations of the original 2021 NI and CRT design elements, we present revised elements and apply these to an analysis of a counterstory told by Shaun. We end by arguing that intertwining NI and CRT, when grounded in foundational theories, can uncover deeper understandings of experience and underexplored pathways to racial justice.

Québec’s Bill 96: A Case Study of Indigenous Cultural and Political Dispossession

Katya Kredl
This article examines Bill 96 (now Law 14; 2022), a language law enforcing French as the official language of Québec, in relation to language hierarchization and Indigenous dispossession. While this bill impacts all non-French speaking individuals in Québec, it carries especially important implications for the Indigenous Peoples residing on this territory whose languages are already endangered. In this article, I explore Bill 96 as an extension of settler colonialism that legitimizes white settlers as founders and that assimilates through language. Using previous Canadian language laws as a guide, I demonstrate the dangers of exclusionary language policies. From insular decision-making strategies to strict legal enforcement, these types of policies are grounded in dominant, colonial logic and have the potential to eradicate vulnerable cultures. Using political discourse analysis (PDA), I argue that this bill ultimately threatens the survival of Indigenous cultural and political structures in Québec. Finally, I reflect on Indigenous languages as a tool of refusal to settler colonialism.

Your World Not Mine: Racialized Women Navigating the Racialized Workplace

Monetta Bailey
This paper uses critical race theory as the theoretical basis for considering the voices of racialized women in professional settings in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. Using the concept of the racialized social system, I investigate the experiences of racialized women in the workplace, looking at the impact of the intersection of their racial and gender identities. The 24 respondents in this study represented diverse racialized women who spoke about their responses to racial and gendered stereotypes in the workplace. Respondents reported self-monitoring, behaviour-policing, and self-exclusion, resulting in negative impacts on their mental health. The results of the study are presented as composite counter-narratives. I argue that given that the workplace is a significant place where racialization and racism take place, the current movement to remove initiatives to address racism in the workplace, which has happened without the input of racialized women, is causing them harm.

Decolonizing Existentialism and Phenomenology: The Liberation of Philosophies of Freedom and Identity, by Jina Fast

Ikeoluwapo B. Baruwa

“The Word Black Has Geographic Power”: Itinerant Practices of Black Study in Five Movements

Muna Dahir
This essay was written on the occasion of the 20th anniversary reprint of Demonic Grounds (2026), and the publication of Heartbreak and Other Geographies (2026), a collection of McKittrick’s writing edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne. It pursues some of the lessons that thread through McKittrick’s oeuvre, tracing the knotty threads of Black study that cross and intersect across sites of creative production, knowledge, methods, rebellion, spatial poetics, and scientific stories. On these grounds, I argue that McKittrick, who has long drawn out the deep interconnections between histories of trans-Atlantic slavery, colonialism, land dispossession, colonial modernity, and hierarchized forms of knowledge production, makes visible how reading with and through Black studies reshapes the way we organize and understand knowledge, the world, and ourselves in relation to one another. Through this linked turn to my own encounters and deviating connections across her work and in conversation with others, I highlight how I have learned to read for itinerant forms of Black study through McKittrick’s theories, praxis, and methods. In this way, this essay is an experiment in working with her lessons to demonstrate how Black study is articulated through its plurality, interdisciplinarity, collectivities, and orientation towards imagining more livable futures.