Anti-Racism Task Force
The Faculty of Health Sciences Anti-Racism Task Force (FHS-ARTF) is a student-facing initiative designed to dismantle whiteness and center anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism strategies as well as build intellectual empathy as a collective.
Building intellectual empathy as a collective and responding to racism in meaningful ways are additional aims. The principles inherent to intersectionality, critical race, and post-colonial theory inform our work.
This collective is committed to creating trauma-informed, action-oriented initiatives that cultivate safe, inclusive spaces for students and faculty to share their voices and co-create opportunities for socio-political change. Evaluation processes will be designed, with the aim of determining the impact of these social justice initiatives on curriculum, policies, and training as our taskforce activities unfold and as larger anti-racism strategy at Western unfolds.
We all have important roles to play in helping make Western a safer, proactive space to learn and grow.
This task force is designed to address and actively work to prevent racism and other forms of systematic oppression within the Faculty of Health Sciences. We acknowledge that the institutional racism and marginalization on our campus impacts the social and educational experiences of students, faculty, and staff. Historical settler colonialism provided the foundations for academic institutions that centered whiteness and white normativity. Foundational to these was enslavement and the violent genocide of Indigenous people that created systems of oppression which are still evident today in police brutality toward Black people and violent attacks on Treaty lands.
