This project hopes to examine the untold relationship between art, law and corporate governance using auto- ethnography. This method will analyse the subjectivity and life experiences as “an outsider” while navigating the decision-making networks in Black film-making. Through identifying stakeholders which are involved in the creative and corporate decision-making processes, these micro decisions will be examined from a corporate law lens using autoethnographic modalities.

Camisha Sibblis, Social Work

Camisha’s research is part of a broader effort across various disciplines (e.g. history, humanities, equity studies, philosophy, psychology, and education) to study identity, oppression and anti-oppressive alternatives. Her work engages with the studies of space, social exclusion, and the physics of Blackness which examines de-colonized constructions of time. It explores how excluded Black youth are constructed in the education system and how the intersection of the forms of social identity influence their experiences, outlook, trajectory, and mental health. Furthermore, her work traces the manner in which different spaces throughout history have constructed the Black body as abject and have functioned as regulating sites of violence - thereby contributing to anti-Black racism as a theoretical framework.

Her paper will centre a discussion of the Black body in space, in relation to one way in which the human is defined: the movement out of nature. The questions that are fundamentally engaged in considering how this relates to race are: who moves and who does not? And as Razack aptly asks: how are people kept in their place? And how does place become race? She explores these in relation to self-concept and mental health, primarily through the works of Frantz Fanon, Silvia Ferreira Da Silva and Radhika Mohanram. Through reflection, this chapter will explore how engagements with the movement, mobility and emplacement of the Black body has implications for social work practice, education, and mental health.

Vasanthi Venkatesh , Law

Dr. Vasanthi Venkatesh is Assistant Professor in Law, Land, and Local Economies at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Professor Vasanthi Venkatesh’s research focuses on immigration and citizenship law, law and social movements, comparative human rights law, and property and labour. Her expertise lies in the interdisciplinary study of law within its political, economic, global, and historical contexts. It is informed by critical class, race, and feminist theories as well as post-colonial scholarship and uses empirical, comparative, and historical methods.

Her paper shows that immigration and citizenship legal studies and pedagogical approaches continue to be rooted in Eurocentric and colonial formulations of borders and sovereignty. The dominant paradigm of state citizenship as the source of rights and political expression has reified racial oppression of Indigenous peoples and migrant workers. Social movements calling for anti-racism, decolonisation of borders, and peoples' sovereignty are producing new narratives and frameworks. How should legal scholarship and pedagogy respond?

Panel 3: Positioning Ourselves and Our Research

This panel will look at how our positionality and intersectionality shape the kind of research we produce in relation to racism.

Ashley Glassburn , Indigenous Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies