Episode 66: Philip S. S. Howard

Dr. Philip S. S. Howard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University’s Faculty of Education, where he explores the social formations, pedagogical processes, and epistemological frameworks that shape how we understand ourselves, form identities, and exercise agency in the context of antiblackness, colonialism, and racial injustice.  Dr. Howard’s recent projects include an examination of contemporary Canadian blackface as a post-racialist phenomenon; narratives of Black life, agency, and resistance in educational contexts across Toronto, Halifax, and Montreal; and broader questions of Black Studies and its presence in Canada. We discussed the following: ISATT Conference at Glasgow University, British Empire and transatlantic slave trade, historical injustices and public memory, cosmetic versus substantive transformational change, post-2020 anti-Black racisms, post-racialist rhetoric, blackface in Canadian universities, cyclical backlash, Black Life, freedom movements, settler colonialism and higher education, Sylvia Wynter’s rethinking of the human in response to settler colonial logics, possibilities and limitations of institutionalizing Black Studies, critique of “Black excellence” discourse, historical consciousness and the archive, epistemologies of ignorance, and so much more.