John Paul (JP) Catungal is Assistant Professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and Interim Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research, teaching, and community engagement work is broadly concerned with the cultural production and community organizing efforts of migrant, racialized and LGBTQ communities, particularly in the fields of sexual health, social services, and education.
Ethel Tungohan is an Assistant Professor of Politics and a Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts, and Activism at York University. Her research expertise lies in immigration policy and activism, with a specific focus on temporary labour migration and care work. She is a strong proponent of community-engaged research.
Article
Abstract
This piece, presented in the form of a dialogue, discusses the motivations, methods and contexts that inform our ongoing research collaboration on Asian international students’ experiences and understandings of the COVID-19 crisis in Canada. We focus particularly on the presence, persistence and circulation of narratives—about international students, about Canada, about universities, and about COVID-19—and how they shape Asian international students’ sense of place and experiences in the past year. We note that these narratives produce our research participants as racialized subjects, framing them simultaneously as desirable sources of revenue and evidence of diversity for Canada and the university and as threats to white entitlement to futurity and institutional space. We also situate these racializations in the longer history of anti-Asian racism in Canada. In attending to Asian international students’ articulations of their experiences of anti-Asian racism in COVID times, we also discuss how they mobilize counter-narratives as forms of embodied and felt knowledge. These counternarratives show our participants’ agentive capacities, testify to their lived experiences of racialization, and constitute critiques, not only of circulating narratives about international students but also of well-worn framings of Canada and its universities as sites of tolerance and multiculturalism.
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