Across the globe, we're witnessing a rise in far-right movements. Just a few weeks ago, the far-right AfD party in Germany secured second place. This marks the first time a far-right party has gained this level of power in the country since the Second World War. Germany is not alone in this trend: Italy, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Croatia are now led by far-right governments. It may come as no surprise that many of these new leaders are increasingly hostile toward universitie...
Mar 27, 2025•43 min•Season 8Ep. 3
Virtual influencers are becoming more popular and prevalent everyday. A full-blown industry has sprung up around them – an industry with agencies and companies dedicated to creating and managing them, with some of the top personas earning into the millions annually. But our guest today has noticed a troubling pattern – many virtual influencers are crafted as young, women of color. But their creators? Often men with different racial identities, who work at marketing agencies. Jul Parke is a PhD c...
Feb 20, 2025•35 min•Season 8Ep. 2
Editor's note: This podcast episode is the first in our Don't Call Me Resilient live event series. Our next event — "AI-generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation?" is coming up on Wednesday February 5th in Toronto — and we'd love for you to be there! Attendance is free. Click here to learn more and save your seat! Food is so much more than what we eat. It is, of course, nourishment — the food we put into our body to fuel ourselves. It can be joyful, like the the smell of pancake...
Jan 23, 2025•36 min•Season 8Ep. 1
Don't Call Me Resilient is coming back to your podcast feed this month with a whole new series! We’ve been hosting some live events and we’re starting to roll them out as episodes in our feed. You can expect the same thoughtful conversations with scholars, shining a light on how systemic racism permeates our society. And we're diving into some fascinating topics... Like how the US government has used food to suppress and control marginalized communities. We’ll also be looking at the rise of AI-g...
Jan 16, 2025•1 min
After seven seasons and 65 episodes, we really want to meet our listeners. So we’re going to be taking the podcast on the road, and recording some live episodes across Canada with a live audience. You can expect the same thoughtful conversations with scholars, shining a light on how systemic racism permeates our society. And we’ll be bringing those episodes to our feed in the New Year. Follow us on Instagram @dontcallmeresilientpodcast to learn more about these events, and how to attend - includ...
Nov 07, 2024•1 min
Official reports have been declaring systemic racism in North America’s education system for more than 30 years. What will it take to change? Even before COVID-19, education experts were sounding the alarm about the future of racialized children in our schools. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only underscored — even deepened — the divide. On this episode of Don’t Call me Resilient , we speak with Kulsoom Anwer, a high school teacher who joined us from her classroom in one of Toronto’s most margina...
Sep 12, 2024•29 min•Season 7Ep. 20
In this reflective and personal episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient , Prof. Cheryl Thompson of Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Beauty in a Box untangles the wending history of hair relaxers for Black women — and the health risks now linked to them. For decades, Black women have been using hair relaxers to help them “fit into” global mainstream workplaces and the European standards of beauty that continue to dominate them . More recently, research has linked these relaxers to cancer ...
Aug 29, 2024•30 min•Season 7Ep. 19
If you don’t pay close attention to news about COVID, you might think the pandemic is nearly over . But for the millions of people worldwide suffering from long COVID, that couldn’t be further from the truth. And the number of those experiencing long-term symptoms keeps growing: At least one in five of us infected with the virus go on to develop long COVID. The effects of long COVID are staggering. Researchers say it can lead to: blood clots, heart disease, damage to the blood vessels, neurologi...
Aug 15, 2024•27 min•Season 7Ep. 18
In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient , we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbook.” We speak with two scholars to explore two historic examples: the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America, which historian David Stannard has called the American Holocaust and in India, the 1943 famine in Bengal . According to a recent B...
Aug 01, 2024•31 min
Land has so much meaning. It’s more than territory; it represents home, your ancestral connection and culture — but also the means to feed yourself and your country. One of the things that colonizers are famous for is the idea of terra nullius – that the land is empty of people before they come to occupy it. In the case of Palestine, the Jewish settlers in 1948, and the British before that, viewed the desert as empty — something they needed to “make bloom.” But the land was already blooming. The...
Jul 18, 2024•41 min
Every year thousands of migrants come to work in Canada. From harvesting the food in our stores to caring for the elderly, these workers form a vital part of the economy. Yet despite being critical, they often face harsh conditions, isolation, abuse, injury and even death as a result of immigration policies designed to leave them powerless. Documentary filmmaker and OCAD University professor Min Sook Lee has been documenting the voices of migrant farm workers in Canada for two decades. What she ...
Jul 04, 2024•36 min
In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient , we take a look at the ongoing struggle for land rights and some of the women on the front lines of that battle. These women are the land defenders fighting to protect land against invasive development. Both our guests have stood up to armed forces to protect land. Their work is about protecting the environment. But it is much more than that: it is fundamentally about survival and about the right to live openly on what is stolen land. Ellen Gabriel has...
Jun 20, 2024•38 min
This week on the podcast, meet some of our amazing producers who work to put out Don't Call Me Resilient . We chat about what motivates us to cover race and current affairs. We also revisit some of our favourite episodes from the past. And then every two weeks this summer (starting next week), we’ll be sharing some of their picks as full episodes in our "Flashback" Don’t Call Me Resilient feed. To make this summer “Flashback” series, we listened back on our catalogue. In doing so, we realized ea...
Jun 13, 2024•38 min
Can you believe we’ve now produced 65 episodes over 7 seasons? Every two weeks over the summer, we will be re-running some of our favourite episodes from past seasons on our podcast feed. Join us next week for a special bonus episode. You’ll get to meet some of our amazing producers who work hard behind the scenes to produce this podcast. We’ll chat about what motivates us to cover race and current affairs every week. We’ll be revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the past. There's a lot...
Jun 06, 2024•1 min
In this episode of 'Don't Call Me Resilient', Nisrin Elamin, Assistant Professor of Anthropolgy and African Studies at the University of Toronto, paints a grim picture of life in Sudan today. She says the current war, which exploded on April 15, 2023, is devastating both rural and urban communities. Elamin also identifies small pockets of hope. In the absence of a properly functioning government and looming famine, grassroots groups are stepping in to help people survive. Since last April, Sudan...
May 30, 2024•39 min•Season 7Ep. 13
We’re bringing you an extra episode this week. This episode comes from The Conversation Weekly, our sister podcast from The Conversation UK. The episode, which we're running in full, centres around medically assisted dying. In Canada, medical assistance in dying (Maid) became legal in 2016. And the government intends to extend eligibility to people whose sole reason for ending their life is mental illness. But that planned expansion, now twice delayed, is deeply controversial. In this episode of...
May 28, 2024•26 min•Season 7Ep. 12
Currently the largest electorate in history is heading to the polls in India, where - of course - politicians and political parties are trying their best to influence voters. Film and popular culture have always provided a reflection of the country's political culture, but in this election, they are being used more than ever to *sway* voters - especially by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP. Vinita sits down with two scholars who l...
May 23, 2024•34 min•Season 7Ep. 11
Collectively, the global student protests demanding university divestments from Israel are one of the largest mass protests in recent history. Student protesters are risking their futures as they demand their institutions financially divest from Israel and companies connected to supplying weapons and technology to Israel’s government. Last week, in Calgary, police descended on the University of Calgary campus with riot gear, using shields, batons and rubber bullets, to forcibly remove a group of...
May 16, 2024•31 min•Season 7Ep. 10
As we approach the start of gardening season, we figured it’s a good time to bring you one of our most talked-about episodes about the complicated, colonial roots of gardening - which have affected what we plant and who gets to garden. How we garden is deeply tied to colonialism — from the spread of seeds and species around the world to the use of forced labour and slavery that went hand in hand to the collection and commodification of plants. But there is a growing shift away from the status sy...
May 09, 2024•32 min•Season 7Ep. 9
Research shows social media apps are designed to entrap children who are even more susceptible than adults to its harms. Plus, technologies are not neutral: They’re embedded with and actively reinforce structures of racism. A recent survey of Canadian children in grades 7 to 11 found nearly half of participants reported seeing racist or sexist content online, and youth from marginalized groups were more likely than others to encounter this type of content. So, what’s to be done? Five school boar...
May 02, 2024•37 min•Season 7Ep. 8
Over the last 30 years, there has been an exponential growth of Indigenous media and Indigenous media makers, especially here in Canada which has one of the largest repositories of Indigenous media. However, the road to get here hasn’t been easy. Indigenous filmmakers, producers, and artists have had to navigate the complex and often unfriendly terrain of Canadian media institutions and media production companies. Their negotiations -- and struggles -- have helped make space for a generation of ...
Apr 25, 2024•42 min•Season 7Ep. 7
Many news organizations have reported on the Israel-Gaza war. However, many journalists have criticized those same media organizations for how they have covered the conflict, and have spoken out against what they say is a stifling of Palestinian voices and perspectives. In today's episode, Vinita talks to Sonya Fatah and Asmaa Malik, associate professors of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University whose research focuses on newsroom culture, global reporting practices and equity in journalis...
Apr 18, 2024•40 min•Season 7Ep. 6
Around the world, people are being forced to leave their homes in droves. We are seeing it happen in Gaza, as Israeli forces continue to wage war. And in Sudan, which has also been wracked by war. Then there are the people fleeing political or economic strife - like those living in Haiti, or Venezuela. Canada has various refugee programs designed to take in those seeking asylum from what's happening in their home countries. But the problem is, they weren't all created equal. In today's episode, ...
Apr 11, 2024•39 min•Season 7Ep. 5
The release of Beyoncé’s new album, Cowboy Carter, was a much awaited event for a lot of us. There was much anticipation about this being a country album — and a lot of talk about the resistance some radio stations had and still have to that idea. That’s because country music is considered "white music," even though its Black historical roots are well documented. But Cowboy Carter is about so much more than country music. It honours other Black musical legends — and challenges the segregation we...
Apr 04, 2024•41 min•Season 7Ep. 4
In today's episode, we're continuing the conversation we started last week about using forced famine as a tool to control land, resources and people. For centuries, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, to acquire land and the wealth that comes with that. Today, we’re looking at the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains of North America –. and the 1943 famine that took three million lives in Bengal, India, which was then under British rule. ...
Mar 28, 2024•31 min•Season 7Ep. 3
On Monday, the European Union's foreign policy chief accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war and provoking famine in Gaza. They were some of the strongest words against Israel we have heard from a western power about the situation in Gaza since October. They come on the heels of a UN-backed report that warns that more than one million people — half of Gaza’s population — face catastrophic starvation conditions. The report goes on to say that without an immediate ceasefire and a maj...
Mar 21, 2024•33 min•Season 7Ep. 2
On Sunday, nine years after #OscarsSoWhite, millions of us tuned in to the 96th annual Academy Awards — some to simply take in the spectacle. And some to see how much had changed. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite started after many people noticed that, for a second year in a row, all nominees for four of five major categories were white. The movement called on Hollywood to do better: to better reflect America’s demographic realities and also to expand its depiction of our histories. The reason: repres...
Mar 14, 2024•31 min•Season 7Ep. 1
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Mar 07, 2024•1 min
Monk is the lead character of the new movie "American Fiction," which is based on the 2001 novel "Erasure" by Percival Everett. Monk is a Black man but never feels 'Black' enough: he graduated from Harvard, his siblings are doctors, he doesn't play basketball and he writes literary novels. In fact, his last novel got rejected for not being "Black enough." As a Black man who thinks about race but also rages against having to talk about it, Monk gets so frustrated that he decides to poke fun of th...
Dec 14, 2023•31 min•Season 6Ep. 12
In this episode which we're running in full, host Gemma Ware speaks with Doseline Kiguru, a research associate in cultural and literary production in Africa at the University of Bristol in the UK, who has co-published research on the history of choral music and the role it plays in Kenyan national political culture. The episode originally aired on Dec. 11. Kenya is marking 60 years since its independence from British colonial rule on December 12, 1963. Each year, the country celebrates the occas...
Dec 13, 2023•23 min
