Two students at York University have earned recognition for essay writing that analyzes and challenges race inequity and are recipients of the Gertrude Mianda Prize for Excellence in Essay Writing.
The essay prize is awarded to undergraduate or graduate students at York’s Glendon Campus whose essay is judged by the Glendon Race Equity Caucus (CERREC) to be of excellent quality. The award comes with a $500 honorarium and the prize will be administered by the Glendon Race Equity Caucus (CERREC) adjudication committee.
CERREC recently announced two winners for the Gertrude Mianda Prize – Vernetta Avril and Geneviève François-Kermode.
Vernetta Avril
Vernetta is a Sanctuary Scholar who is currently completing a BA in cognitive neuropsychology at York University’s Glendon Campus, as well as a BEd at the Keele Campus. She holds certificates in counselling, community mental health and crisis intervention and prevention. Vernetta is an experienced mentor in the York community as a peer mentor and the community at large. She is also a member the S4 collective-man organization which aims to increase equitable access to education to Sanctuary Scholars in Canada. She is passionate and enthusiastic about working with and helping individuals with precarious immigration status and effecting meaningful change in their lives.
Her essay “Migrants at the margin: On Sanctuary Students, Sanctuary Cities and Accessible pathways to Citizenship” examines how historically racist immigration policy in Canada has operated in ways that systematically and pervasively deny access to racialized migrants. Consequently, options for permanent residence have been shaped, and frequently reshaped, to offer permanent residence to certain migrants while resulting in barriers for others. Through racialized exclusion in the immigration system, Sanctuary Scholars – a unique and invisible subset of the population – experience unnecessary barriers accessing citizenship pathways even while living in the Sanctuary City of Toronto. The paper aims to interrogate dominant discourses of citizenship, to help shed some light on the issues that Sanctuary Scholars face, and to propose a citizenship pathway specifically tailored for Sanctuary Scholars that provides equitable access to citizenship.
“Thank you for the honour and privilege of being a recipient of the Gertrude Mianda Prize and for recognizing the importance of Sanctuary Scholars and the issues affecting them,” said Vernetta. “This is a win for all Sanctuary Scholars on York University’s campuses.”
Geneviève François-Kermode
François-Kermode is a fourth-year undergraduate student at York University in the Gender and Women’s Studies program, as well as the Humanities in the Power, Diaspora and Race stream. Academically, she has focused her writing on themes pertaining to gender and queerness, disability, anit-racism and intersectionality, centering her Haitian roots in much of her work.
Outside of academia, she has been involved in activism on multiple fronts, including working NGOs and participating in grassroots movements in Toronto. She is currently writing a book that focuses on radical love and communal care as practices of futurity, and plans to do a master of social work to apply these concepts to marginalized communities on the ground.
François-Kermode’s essay was written for the course Race, Gender, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Memory, and focuses on the ways in which personal positionality, history and memory intersect. It begins by examining the author’s relation to the politics of invisibility as a queer disabled Haitian woman. The author then discusses the Haitian revolution, its relevance to historical and current geopolitical situations, and her relation to this significant historical event as a Haitian Canadian queer disabled woman. Using the lens of decoloniality, the author argues that the Haitian revolution is one of the most important events in decolonial history, that continues to be silenced by the west. However, the politics of memory allow us to recover this history and its possibilities for continued resistance today.
The author explores dance as an alternate method of memory recovery that insists on the humanity and resistance of enslaved peoples on Haitian soil and their descendants. Finally, as a diasporic Haitian on Turtle Island, the author stresses the importance of recognizing decoloniality as an ongoing process by Indigenous peoples on this land, and the necessity for solidarity between peoples facing the continued effects of colonialism today.
“I am very honoured to have been awarded the Gertrude Mianda Prize for Excellence in Essay Writing as a recognition of the importance of writing about challenging race inequity,” said François-Kermode. “I am grateful that my essay on the Haitian revolution was selected, as it has allowed the continued struggles of Haitians to be highlighted. I am thankful for the continued work for race equity of the members of CERREC.”
For more information on the Gertrude Mianda Prize for Excellence in Essay Writing, email cerrec.glendon@gmail.com.
About Gertrude Mianda
Gertrude Mianda is a full professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at Glendon. She was previously the director of the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University from 2011-15. Mianda holds a PhD in sociology (gender and development) from the University of Laval at Québec. She is a sociologist, feminist and Africanist whose work is rigorously inter- and pluri-disciplinary. Researcher, francophone, African and a woman who has carried out research in and about African and the African diaspora for three decades, Mianda challenges gender and race inequities in her research, her teaching, in all of her collegial practices and in the community.
About Glendon’s Race Equity Caucus (CERREC)
Glendon’s Race Equity Caucus (CERREC) is led by racialized part and full-time faculty. The CERREC is a place of support for racialized faculty and students at Glendon. The CERREC coordinates actions to further race equity at the Glendon campus. CERREC cooperates closely with the Race Equity Caucus (REC) at the Keele campus while being responsive to the specificities of Glendon.