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On the anniversary of the Nakba, Asians in Canada must reaffirm solidarity with Palestinian brethren

This article delves into the recent efforts of Asian migrant massage and sex workers in the Town of Newmarket, Ontario, and their struggle against a recently amended Personal Wellness Establishments (PWE) By-law. It starts with a historical overview of municipal licensing schemes and legislated migration controls in Canada, used to justify increased surveillance, control movement, and deny Asian women entry into Canada, before illustrating the enduring impacts on Asian migrant workers today. It concludes by emphasizing that migrant sex workers, often depicted as voiceless and nonconsenting victims, take leadership and have agency in defining their own struggles and authoring possibilities to resist.

The Supreme Court has chosen to exclude from intervention the voices of those directly impacted. This exclusion rehearses Canada’s longer history of excluding sex workers.

In a global era marked by surging racial nationalism and penal populism , anti-racist and decolonial research, education, and training has been under increasing threat in academia across the world. Popular use of the universalizing language of liberal internationalism as the dominant frame in discussing these developments leaves gaps in our understanding as to what areas of academic freedom are under the greatest threat, why they are under threat, what levers of sanction and discipline are used to suppress certain areas, and for what ends. Such a frame risks contributing to overly abstracted conceptualizations of academic freedom (and unfreedom) that are unmoored from the realities of how power operates in educational institutions and attendant maldistributions of who can in fact claim and be protected by academic freedom and who cannot.In this article, I put into conversation three very different jurisdictional contexts where nationalist backlash to, and suppression of, anti-racist and decolonial education and scholarship is occurring. Specifically, it examines American anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) campaigns, Chinese suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing colonial suppression of non-Han native peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and Israeli suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories through the case study of the ‘Spiro scandal’ at the University of Toronto (UofT) Faculty of Law. No good politics of academic freedom can emerge without centering an analysis of broader societal power and subordination. This is particularly true in the areas of national security and anti-racism, which form both distinct grounds for legal and political intervention in academic freedom. A national security threat engages certain types of legal grounds, particularly domestically (e.g. carceral responses to perceived counterterrorism, separatism, and extremism threats) while anti-racism justifies other types of intervention (e.g. civil rights complaints, removing of curriculum, firings, cutting funding) and can operate powerfully on a transnational level as well. I highlight three common elements in a transnational blueprint that can be observed in the creation, justification, and operation of selective nationalist attacks on academic freedom in anti-racist and decolonial education. My highlighting of these common elements are not meant to suggest any sort of equivalence between their operation, historical context, and/or relative severity, but rather to advance our collective understanding of the distributive nature of academic freedom politics and its relationship to power, race, and colonialism. Unpacking these campaigns transnationally complicates and unsettles the dichotomy between authoritarian and liberal populist censorship, giving us a more nuanced foundation by which to protect academic freedom and knowledge production in the service of racial justice and collective liberation.

The recent deaths of migrants trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border through Indigenous territory highlight the history of colonial dispossession that the border represents.

In a global era marked by surging racial nationalism and penal populism , anti-racist and decolonial research, education, and training has been under increasing threat in academia across the world. Popular use of the universalizing language of liberal internationalism as the dominant frame in discussing these developments leaves gaps in our understanding as to what areas of academic freedom are under the greatest threat, why they are under threat, what levers of sanction and discipline are used to suppress certain areas, and for what ends. Such a frame risks contributing to overly abstracted conceptualizations of academic freedom (and unfreedom) that are unmoored from the realities of how power operates in educational institutions and attendant maldistributions of who can in fact claim and be protected by academic freedom and who cannot.In this article, I put into conversation three very different jurisdictional contexts where nationalist backlash to, and suppression of, anti-racist and decolonial education and scholarship is occurring. Specifically, it examines American anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) campaigns, Chinese suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing colonial suppression of non-Han native peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and Israeli suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories through the case study of the ‘Spiro scandal’ at the University of Toronto (UofT) Faculty of Law. No good politics of academic freedom can emerge without centering an analysis of broader societal power and subordination. This is particularly true in the areas of national security and anti-racism, which form both distinct grounds for legal and political intervention in academic freedom. A national security threat engages certain types of legal grounds, particularly domestically (e.g. carceral responses to perceived counterterrorism, separatism, and extremism threats) while anti-racism justifies other types of intervention (e.g. civil rights complaints, removing of curriculum, firings, cutting funding) and can operate powerfully on a transnational level as well. I highlight three common elements in a transnational blueprint that can be observed in the creation, justification, and operation of selective nationalist attacks on academic freedom in anti-racist and decolonial education. My highlighting of these common elements are not meant to suggest any sort of equivalence between their operation, historical context, and/or relative severity, but rather to advance our collective understanding of the distributive nature of academic freedom politics and its relationship to power, race, and colonialism. Unpacking these campaigns transnationally complicates and unsettles the dichotomy between authoritarian and liberal populist censorship, giving us a more nuanced foundation by which to protect academic freedom and knowledge production in the service of racial justice and collective liberation.

Newmarket’s draconian use of bylaws and licensing to target and displace Asian massage workers risks taking us back to a racist past in Canadian history, where Asians were seen as moral threats.

As a direct response to the extensive and ongoing police violence experienced throughout these past two years of struggle in Hong Kong, there has been an increasingly widespread understanding of the police force as structurally undemocratic, unaccountable, and subservient to the interests of elites. This has also led to the articulation by the protest movement of a “sixth demand”— to disband the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) altogether. The remarkable uptake of this demand sparked debate around exactly what dissolution of the HKPF would entail. Would it be reconstitution and reform? Or a more radical type of abolitionist politics? In grappling with this question, we encourage Hongkongers to engage with diverse decolonial and abolitionist struggles across the globe, along with existing and ongoing proto-abolitionist practices at home.

Critical race theory (CRT) is a helpful theoretical lens to understand the origins and practices of five ethno-racial legal clinics in the province of Ontario. Both the development of a distinctly Canadian CRT scholarship and the day-to-day work of ethno-racial legal clinics would be mutually enriched by a much closer and robust union between scholarship and praxis. In particular, the praxis of Ontarian ethno-racial legal clinics is put into conversation with Amna A. Akbar’s vision in “Toward a Radical Imagination of the Law,” which outlines a profoundly transformative standard of CRT that broadens the analysis of racial power to look at how the law, capitalism, and the state may operate in tandem to produce intersectional inequality. Based on the theoretical tenets of CRT, this article traces the development of ethno-racial legal clinics and their unique praxis and, using the insight of “looking to the bottom” as an epistemological approach to law, demonstrates that ethno-racial community legal clinics provide a useful vehicle to understand structural racism. CRT can therefore offer a robust theoretical framework to support the cause of advancing racial justice through legal practice. Ethno-racial legal clinics embrace a democratic approach to the law that has the potential to transform traditional forms of legal representation by engaging in systemic advocacy and community outreach and aligning advocacy efforts with social movements to help build community power and facilitate broader social change. However, they also face institutional pressures that pull their practice of the law back towards traditional models—pressures that they must delicately navigate in their day-to-day work.