Interview by Sabrina Sam, Jessica Malandrino & Kimberly Duong
Sabrina Sam: How did your own experiences spark your interest in critical sociology and social justice? Were there any pivotal moments in your early academic career, such as a particular course or extracurricular project, that inspired you to take this path?
Jessica Braimoh: In my early sociological training, I always felt like I was learning to use someone else’s glasses to see the world. The theories, concepts, and assignments were never about my experience(s) or my world(s). I wore these ‘abstract’ glasses and performed these ceremonial tasks (‘assignments’) but they never quite fit me. These early post-secondary experiences were changed forever when I entered the late Dr. Leslie Harman’s course at King’s University College: "The Sociology of Everyday Life.”
This course was pivotal in opening a space for me to think about other ways of knowing, seeing, and doing. It was this class that really got me to think about doing critical sociology. The first part of the course was focused on conventional research methods. It was here that I was introduced to feminist theory and methodologies. The second part of the course was an individual project where students pursued their own research interests. At that time, I was really interested in racialized experiences, particularly how young biracial people understood themselves as racialized bodies in the world. I conducted my first set of semi-structured interviews with people who identified as biracial and asked them questions about how they came to understand and experience their racialized identities. As an early undergraduate student, I thought that everyone’s experience would be like mine, so it was very surprising to see that people had very different experiences; gender, social class, and geographical location were central to the differences young biracial people spoke about. This project was like a properly fitted pair of glasses. I could see how critical feminist approaches could be used to ask different sets of questions and gain insights into experiences that I lived in my body but that might be different for other people. This project sparked more questions about how people’s experiences of the everyday world are organized to happen in the ways that it does. This overarching question has been central to my work ever since.
Jessica Maladrino: What are the mechanisms by which institutions participate in the exclusion and invisibilization of people experiencing marginality and interlocking forms of oppression, such as racism, heterosexism, classism, and ableism?
JB: Following my doctoral studies, I worked as a Research Coordinator with Dr. Greta Bauer and her team in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Western University. Broadly, the mixed method project drew on intersectionality to evaluate six survey items often used to document gender, sex, sexual orientation, and race and ethnicity in health research. Using an internet survey and follow-up of 311 participants across Canada, and cognitive interviews from a diverse sub-sample of 79 people, we began to uncover the varied ways that people understand these measures. The assumptions embedded within some of these measures is one mechanism by which exclusion and invisibilization continue to occur. For example, some measures of sex and gender produce misclassification and erasure of transgender populations1. We also compared classifications of the standard measure of racialization with two direct questions. Our analysis found that a single direct question on perception on treatment as a person of colour was better able to identify racialized persons that the commonly used measure of ‘visible minority.’ Visible minority captured experiences of racialization but also other experiences of marginalization including gender and sexual diversity and experiences of poverty2. Taking a critical lens has allowed me to see how seemingly neutral institutional and policy categories exacerbate and rationalize historically-entrenched relations of exclusion and oppression.
Maybe it's in the discomfort of silence that we can get more comfortable having these necessary conversations — and hopefully doing something about it.
Jessica Braimoh
JM: How do socio-legal processes govern the lives of people experiencing marginality at the intersection of race, gender, and class?
JB: Short answer: in plain sight. You just need to listen carefully and follow people’s accounts of their experiences into the interlocking relations of power that come to dominate, exclude, discipline, silence, and criminalize their lives. My postdoctoral research, which I have continued3, is a perfect example of this.
Alongside Dr. Erin Dej and Dr. Carrie Sanders at Wilfrid Laurier University, my post-doctoral research explored perceptions of homelessness, crime, and safety in a mid-size city in British Columbia, Canada. Central to this project was the engagement of three different stakeholder groups: people experiencing homelessness, police, and community (service providers and other community members). Through interviews with these groups, I found it difficult to make sense of the competing narratives I was hearing. On the one hand, police and broader community told me there was little to no Indigenous Peoples experiencing homelessness in the city or large encampment that had recently been removed and returned to a park. On the other hand, Indigenous and other people with lived experiences of homelessness told me that Indigenous women had started the encampment and that Indigenous Peoples, more generally, were very much part of the unhoused community in this city. I couldn’t let this go. So, with my colleagues we followed this narrative up into the multiple socio-legal processes that were used to justify the landlessness and displacement of Indigenous Peoples in this community. Importantly our research identifies how exclusion and erasure are produced through intersecting power relations including settler colonialism and class inequity4.
Kimberly Duong: As a society, we are too uncomfortable with the conversations necessary for change to occur and too comfortable with, for example, devaluing and dehumanizing racialized and marginalized people and communities — especially in academia, where people are existing in the closest proximity to power and whiteness. How do we, as scholars, students, and academics, challenge the status quo in academia? How do we bring in more voices from the margins?
JB: This is a great question. I don’t know if I have an answer that differs from what others (e.g., bell hooks, Paolo Freire, etc.) have said but I’ll try to answer from what I have come to know through my teaching.
To challenge the status quo in my teaching, I try to be very intentional about what kinds of knowledge I ask students to engage with. It is important to me that I carefully consider the voices students interact with – I think about authors' social locations, where they have published, their theoretical and methodological approaches, and even where they are located geographically (re: Spivak’s, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”5). I also think about including a diversity of forms of knowledge (e.g., lived experts accounts of topics, poetry, art, media accounts, grey literature, and traditional academic articles). I try to incorporate the physical body in teaching. In my classroom we talk about how it feels to read difficult course content or unpack difficult theoretical tools. Instead of avoiding it, I actively encourage tough dialogue in the classroom; sometimes these conversations get uncomfortable. I’ve learned it’s OK for a classroom to have silence (I’d like to think that means we are thinking!). Maybe it is here in the silence and discomfort where we can get more comfortable having these necessary conversations and hopefully doing something about it.
KD: What do you hope to see in the future regarding our understandings of race, gender, (dis)ability, and class? How do we talk about, for instance, the processes of criminalization or racialization without traumatizing students who may have lived experience with these processes?
JB: Another two important last questions! I am still very much learning how systems of power work onto and through people’s lives, including my own. I keep finding more and more instances of the ways that power (e.g., criminalization, surveillance, and governance more generally) occur. It’s a kind of puzzle I’m not quite finished. Yet, the future for my scholarship is starting to shift away from documenting how these processes work and instead towards the ways that people resist and actively disrupt them. For example, in my homelessness scholarship there seems to be opportunities manifesting for coalition in some communities across different groups of people experiencing marginalization and exclusion (i.e., low-income people, precariously housed people, and people experiencing homelessness). What do these efforts do to power, especially if these groups are diverse across other categories of difference?
In my research there have been things I just can’t unsee. Stories I will never forget. And people who I continue to think about. It is hard sometimes to do this kind of research, especially when you start to see patterns across research projects that demonstrate how deeply entrenched interlocking systems of power are. I can imagine the heaviness I sometimes feel in my research might be shared among students, especially those with lived experiences of the topics we consider in my courses. Perhaps taking our time through these topics and subsequent work (e.g., offering extensions, extra office hours, multiple weeks on topics) and offering opportunities for students to provide anonymous feedback and reflection on these classes would create safer spaces to engage in these conversations. Having said that, I do strongly believe we need to continue to talk about the processes you have identified. Criminalization and racialization extend into multiple public systems and impact many different aspects of our/people’s lives. We need these conversations to occur so we can better understand what is happening today. Doing so may encourage us all to imagine transformation6 and support the work of others in moving toward a different tomorrow.
Sabrina Sam is an undergraduate student at York University studying Criminology. Sabrina is interested in exploring how intersectional identities experience and are impacted by the criminal legal system and its adjacent structures.
Jessica Malandrino is a PhD Candidate at York University in Socio-legal Studies. Jessica did her BA in Criminology and Gender and Women’s studies at York University and she did her MA in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Jessica’s research is concerned with women who use art to survive imprisonment. Specifically, Jessica’s research looks at how women imagine their futures post-incarceration through art-making.
Kimberly Duong graduated from York University and she is pursuing her MA in Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. Kimberly is interested in how language (discourse) is used as a tool of social control and punishment, and, in turn, how it shapes policies regarding punishment (prisons), criminality, and race.
End Notes
- Bauer GR., Braimoh J., Scheim AI, & Dharma C. 2017. Transgender-Inclusive Measures of Sex/Gender for Population Surveys: Mixed-Method Evaluation and Recommendations. PLoS ONE, 12(5): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178043 ↩︎
- Bauer, GR, Mahendra, M., Braimoh, J., Alam, S., & Churchill, S. 2020. Identifying visible minorities or racialized persons on surveys: can we just ask? Canadian Journal of Public Health, 1-12. DOI: 10.17269/s41997-020-00325-2 ↩︎
- See the "From NIMBY to Neighbour" projected housed at the Centre for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. https://researchcentres.wlu.ca/centre-for-research-on-security-practices/resources-and-publications/from-nimby-to-neighbour.html ↩︎
- Braimoh, J., Dej, E., & Sanders, C. (2023). ’Somebody’s street’: Eviction of homeless encampments as a reflection of interlocking colonial and class relations. Journal of Law and Social Policy, 36(2), 12-22. ↩︎
- Spivak, G.C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of Imperialism (pp. 271-313). University of Illinois Press. ↩︎
- For example., Zero Gun violence Movement; ‘A rare diamond’: Prominent anti-gun advocate Louis March dies after sudden illness (Toronto Star); Tighe Fong, J. (2022). We conceive justice. Journal of prisoners on prisons, 30(2), 96-97.; Purdum, C. (2021). No justice, no resilience: Prison abolition as disaster mitigation in an era of climate change.” Environmental Justice, 14(6), 418–425.; Maynard, R. (2020). Building the world we want: A roadmap to police-free futures in Canada”. Community Resources Guide. ↩︎