The Letters

“The Letters diagnoses and intervenes in the state of institutional life in the university, while also insisting on letters that teach us about labour, care, and collectivity. It is incisive and nourishing. Read it.”

-- Gulzar R. Charania, associate professor, Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa

“Opening with the call, “DIE EDI,” this work arrives amidst a bitter irony, having been written precisely in anticipation of the death of EDI. Yet, much more importantly, this intimate critique raises the problem of what “we” will have rebuilt in EDI’s wake, if not simply another turn back to the good ol’ days. In the latter sense, the collective’s offering in, through, and as “the letters” not only validates the daily struggles of Black, Indigenous, queer, and women of color scholars; in doing so, this work also honors the intellectual lineages and visions that guide our work and have always found expression: both exceeding their forms of appearance and resounding in and across different scales.”

-- Sharon Luk, Simon Fraser University and author of The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity.

“Breathtaking, brilliant, creative, enraging, heartfelt, joyful, powerful, and wise, The Letters is testament to the importance of ‘writing our lives’ and ‘right-ing our lives’ within and against the neoliberal, EDI’ university. The authors unflinchingly demonstrate the corrosive damages that universities inflict while also capturing the subversive power of collective witnessing, dissident friendships, and doing otherwise in these spaces. It is a work of profound theoretical heft that I also see as a love letter to its readers: not only does it give us a way to process, metabolize and understand painful encounters in our academic lives that have harmed us, it is also a reminder that amid the many instances of institutional cruelty that we might have witnessed and lived through, other worlds remain possible.”

-- Ethel Tungohan, host of Academic Aunties podcast and author of Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Communities of Care and Movement-Building.

“Raising critical questions about the university as a public institution, The Letters provides penetrating observations and brilliant analysis of the distortions, contradictions, hypocrisies and omissions of the EDI university. Articulating a powerful alternative to both liberal visions and far-right critiques of EDI, it is an original and very timely contribution to discussions on and strategies for equity and decolonization in the academe and beyond.”

-- Dr. Sedef Arat-Koc, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Toronto Metropolitan Univer