sharon d. engbrecht

“How to address the urgency is the question that must burn for staying with the trouble.”

—Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Growing up on the Canadian prairies alongside Métis communities, in an otherwise homogenous rural oil and coal town, helped me understand from a young age the need to make space for marginalized voices and foster inclusive spaces not only in higher education but society generally. Although I had a sense of the racism and discrimination my close family friends experienced, I didn’t fully grasp the ways my privilege as a white, native English-speaking Canadian shielded me. My unconventional route to and through higher education has reemphasized the persistent need to create and ethically maintain inclusive spaces. This is especially evident in the academic setting where hidden agendas compound with a sometimes-entrenched lack of awareness around invisible disabilities and other barriers to learning such as socio-economic status, learning gaps, cultural backgrounds, and gender identities. In my experience, these forms of implicit bias coupled with limited resources lend to the insufficient address of individual need in generalized equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization policies.  

My experience as a first-generation, queer, disabled educator and researcher, and also a lone parent navigating the often deeply entrenched biases of the university, intersects with my privilege as a white settler. Because my experiences are fraught with struggle and a constant battle to be represented and find space in academia, I remain committed to the practice of activism in the context of social justice, decolonization, anti-racism, and anti-ableism as an educator and researcher and in my community work.

My willingness to experiment with and challenge traditional educational practices, influenced by my research and professional development work in decolonial pedagogy and universal design for learning, is demonstrated through all my teaching experiences and will continue as I implement successful strategies based on “staying with the trouble,” student feedback, and input from experienced, trusted mentors. In each course, I insist on including texts from Black, Indigenous, queer, and marginalized authors to represent diverse perspectives and facilitate student encounters with how to tackle issues of inequity, systemic oppression, and discrimination. In my editorial with Z. N. Dylan Jackson, “Producing Canadian Literature,” we both consider what it means to produce knowledge and how we might ethically and mindfully navigate the material conditions of knowledge production and potential institutions of power. Our editorial was meant to encourage scholarly reflection and contribute to ongoing changes in how certain kinds of knowledge and perspectives are naturalized at the cost of marginalizing and historically dis-remembering other ways of knowing, learning, and experiencing the world.

My goal as both a researcher and educator is to facilitate instances of transferable knowledge, to imagine future possibilities, by modelling and enacting what it means to be a responsible and ethical global citizen. Alongside my research, I will continue to lead by example and prioritize inclusivity, equity, diversity, and decolonial practices as I contribute to high standards of academic excellence by prioritizing students’ learning and intellectual growth.

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