Our Work

BIPOCAC is a growing organization, and our work is just beginning.

Rather than presenting work as completed before it has begun, we want this space to document the projects, research, and initiatives we are building as BIPOCAC develops. Our Work will grow alongside the Coalition, providing a place where we can share our research, findings, resources, and other initiatives as they move forward.

Our work is grounded in a commitment to understanding and challenging systemic racism in higher education, while creating spaces where BIPOC academics and other members of the higher education community can share knowledge, experiences, and strategies for change.

Our Research Priorities

As we develop our research program, we are working toward projects that will:

1. Develop resources for people experiencing systemic racism
Create an “early-stage” checklist and other practical resources to help individuals recognize, document, and respond to experiences of systemic racism.

2. Examine racialized academic mobbing
Investigate how racial differences and stereotypes can be mobilized in academic mobbing situations and how these dynamics can be used to discredit, isolate, or attack BIPOC academics.

3. Chronicle the experiences of BIPOC academics
Document experiences of systemic racism in higher education and create opportunities for BIPOC academics to share their experiences, build collective knowledge, and challenge the isolation that can accompany these experiences.

4. Examine institutional responses to complaints of racism
Investigate the ways faculty and university administrations respond to individuals who raise concerns about systemic racism, including the ways stress, conflict, and institutional processes may be used to characterize complainants as problematic or deserving of disciplinary action.

5. Examine university accountability and transparency
Develop ways of assessing and comparing Canadian universities based on their accountability, transparency, and approaches to addressing systemic racism.

6. Document how complainants can become framed as aggressors
Develop research and educational resources examining how the progression of institutional events can result in individuals who raise concerns about racism being reframed as the source of the problem. This work will explore how these processes can suppress or obscure complaints about systemic racism.

Follow Our Work

These projects currently represent where we are going. As BIPOCAC grows, this page will be updated to share the work itself: research projects, publications, findings, resources, community initiatives, and other developments.

We invite you to return and follow this work as it unfolds.

This is only the beginning!