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"What’s your actual name and where are you actually from?": East Asian Students’ Experiences on Campus

Dr. Sara Houshmand

Wednesday, April 7, 4-5:30pm

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Zoom link:

Meeting ID: 820 6202 1316

With alarming rates of Anti-Asian sentiments since the start of the pandemic, this presentation will examine racial microaggressions targeted toward people of East Asian descent in Canada. Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities that communicate negative racial insults to BIPOC and have detrimental outcomes for health and academic performance. This presenter will describe empirical findings from a focus group and individual interviews designed to understand East Asian students’ experiences with racial microaggressions on campus as well as their responses to these incidents. Students' experiences included exclusion and avoidance, ascriptions of intelligence, and being perceived as a threat. In response, students employed a range of strategies such as seeking comfort in the surrounding multicultural milieu and at times, confronting perpetrators and challenging stereotypes. Implications will be discussed for the current context.

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