AP/HREQ 3580 6.00
Ethnicity, Identity, and Equity in Canada
This course uses a critical human rights approach to explore the role of identity and ethnicity in struggles for inclusion. Hierarchies of oppression and exclusion are examined, as well as the ways in which ethnic identity can promote and constrain opportunities for people on the basis of age, ability, class, gender, and race.
We take an historical perspective to investigate these questions and continue to explore their meanings and relationship. We will treat ‘ethnicity’ as a basic category/concept put to use by colonialism, slavery and indentured labour which has worked to produce the meanings of ethnic groups through the fiction of multiculturalism to the complexities of a post 9/11 world. This course will critically examine the very notion of ‘ethnicity’, and ‘identity’ asking “what kind of category was and is ‘race’?’ when it is linked to ethnic groups. How different ethnic groups are treated depending on race, and how inequity exist in Canada depending on the race of the ethnic minority groups. The complexity in this course is how to produce knowledge that works to understand and analyze the cumulative work of ethnicity and identity in producing Hyphenated Canadians.
Course credit exclusion: AP/MIST 3580 6.00 (prior to Winter 2019)
Prerequisite: 24 credits