forward, toward goodness and justice, especially when put into conversation with non-European epistemological and ontological frames.
Sujith Xavier, Law
Sujith Xavier is an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. Sujith has significant experience working with local grassroots non-governmental organization in Palestine and Sri Lanka. While living in The Hague, he worked for Judge Agius in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Sujith’s scholarly interest is situated at the intersections of law, socio-legal theory, and global and local society. He is one of the co-editors of the Third World Approaches to International Law: On Praxis and the Intellectual (London: Routledge, THIRDWORLDS Series, 2017) and Decolonizing Law: Indigenous, Third World and Settler Perspectives (London: Routledge, Indigenous Peoples and the Law Series, 2021, Forthcoming). His peer- reviewed publications appear in various international and academic journals. Sujith is a founding member of the Editorial Collective of Third World Approaches to International Law Review. Sujith’s notable cases include Minister of Citizenship and Immigration v. Alexander Vavilov (2018, Supreme Court of Canada) and he was an Amici Curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States (2020) in Department of Homeland Security, et al. (Petitioner) v. Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam (Respondent) (19-161).
Sujith’s paper contributes to antiracism scholarship by interrogating how legal conceptualization of refugee convention is steeped in the settler colonial assumptions. He will employ auto ethnography, international law, refugee law and settler colonial studies to trouble the promises of refuge, as encapsulated within the various domestic and international protection regimes. Using his own lived experience as a survivor of a civil war and as a queer Tamil (/Thamil) refugee that fled to Canada hoping for safety, this paper will juxtapose the promises of the refugee system, the demands of white supremacy and the erasure of the original peoples of Turtle Island. The symbolic aspirations and promises embedded in the refugee convention and its domestic incorporation into the Canadian settler colonial legal framework traps refugees between guilt and gratitude. The promise of safety is contingent, and eventually promotes erasure. The necessary protection for the refugee is contingent on being grateful to the settler colonial state that simultaneously forces the erasure of the original and First Peoples of this land that is now known as Canada.
Panel 2: Racisms: Learning from Our Experience
This section is centred around exploring lived experience to generate productive analyses and definitions of the scope, meaning and theories in and around identity and specific forms of racism.
Andrew Allen , Education
Andrew Allen is an Associate Professor, Faculty of Education University of Windsor. He specializes in Race, Class and Gender and Issues of Social Difference and Marginalization in Education and Schooling, Urban Education, Critical Teacher Education and Negotiating a Critical Teaching Practice, Developing Teacher Identity and Factors Contributing to and Affecting the Process of Learning to Teach.
Andrew will work on experiences of racism in the academy paying attention to anti-Black racism and student activism.