This article contains mentions of police brutality.
Following the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement received more attention than ever before. Many promises to improve were made: by corporations, educational institutions and individuals — but how many of these claims actually saw further action?
Stories like Floyd’s and the actions — or lack thereof — that resulted from them have shaped many aspects of Kimberly Bain’s role as an assistant English professor at UBC.
“At the time, many institutions had been making promises to hire more Black faculty or to support Black studies initiatives as a result of George Floyd protests. But despite making these sort of statements, a lot of universities did not actually commit to these kinds of projects,” said Bain in an interview with The Ubyssey.
“They said the thing that they wanted to say, so they could get the kind of applause that they wanted, and then in the end didn't actually manifest those things materially within the university system.”
Formerly the John Holmes Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Tufts University, Bain now teaches and studies the histories, theories, philosophies and aesthetics of Black people in UBC’s English department.
Bain’s move to Canada was largely influenced by the downfalls of American academia. She was looking for an institution that was willing to expand — somewhere hiring scholars who actively engage with urgent social and political issues, a place that allows them to teach these topics without censorship.
Although she recognizes that UBC and other Canadian institutions are not free of criticism, from her perspective, these issues do not play out on the same scale.
“In the States, the way that academia is structured is that it is hyper-neoliberal, hyper-capitalist, it's also dependent on the contingent labour of lecturers … Similar things [are] happening, of course, in Canada. But the depth of that kind of extraction, or the depth of that kind of predation, is far more widespread in the States.”
Despite now being a professor, Bain didn’t originally intend to pursue further education after completing her undergrad — she assumed it wasn't financially feasible for someone living in the US. But when one of her professors encouraged her to apply and she started to look into the possibility of pursuing grad school, she realized this future could become her reality.
The start of her graduate studies coincided with the death of Eric Garner — which was ruled a homicide in 2014 — which influenced the direction she took when deciding where to focus her research.
“This was a key consideration for me,” she said. “This is a moment in which a Black man is being choked by the police. So how do we think about not just policing but also legacies of medical racism, environmental racism, that result in Black people suffocating in other ways and other forms?”
One of Bain's projects, On Black Breath dives into breathing and Blackness and how they have proven to be interconnected throughout time. Although the book is a work of scholarly theory, Bain experiments with poetic style and integrates the practice of collaging — she lays out her ideas in ways that appeal to different styles of thinking and understanding.
“I like to think of my work as an educator and as a thinker to be necessarily intertwined with the kinds of creative undertakings that we might take in our personal time, like collaging,” she said.
Bain carries this desire to investigate academic questions through creative projects into the English courses she teaches. Her students can expect to have quite a bit of freedom over the methods they use to share what they’ve learned — they may sculpt with clay, bake a cake or play around with audio and video.
While an essay is a logical way to discuss ideas, this might not actually be what we want to achieve as academics. How can you understand the complexity of a topic if you restrict your thinking and expression of ideas to a written argument?
“A much more consolatory form of thinking can really actually benefit us all when we're thinking about how things relate to each other in the world, and how such structures of power function,” Bain said. “Power doesn't just function as a top-down thing.”
Embracing creativity and the joy that comes out of it is especially important to Bain. To her, it’s a way of practicing balance. Her field of study can be heavy and traumatic — both to learn about and to teach — so knowing when to step away or delegate responsibilities is just as important as her work itself.
She maintains a solid circle of friends and colleagues and makes time for grounding activities; in her case, pottery, baking and hip-hop dance (which she admits she doesn’t consider herself being very good at, but loves nonetheless).
Although she recognizes that finding your support system is a self-guided process, Bain tries to help her students build a community of their own in her courses.
“You have to find your people. [That] means finding folks who are aligned and committed to the same kind of vision for a better world, or a vision for a different world, as yourself.”
The steps she takes to encourage collaboration are simple to implement in the classroom — having students learn each other’s names is more than is typically expected in a university-level course.
Bain doesn’t call on her students — they call on each other by name and are encouraged to refer back to and build off of their classmates’ ideas.
“I am here to help shape or help refine things, but if there's a person sitting next to you, or across from you, learn their name and really think critically about how they're helping you learn what you know about the world around you,” Bain said.
Learning to appreciate the perspective that the person sitting next to you brings to the table is not synonymous with agreement — in fact, for Bain, disagreeing with a take is as important as accepting one.
Ultimately, any conclusion from active dialogue can help shape your own views and help you understand them more than any traditional lecture — someone talking at you, rather than with you — can.
“We can do this the way that the university would like us to do it, which is how you come in, I deliver something and you walk out, and you're not changed,” Bain said.
“Or we do this the way that Black feminist scholars for many, many decades have been imagining this, which is that the community space can be a space of refusal, a space of dreaming, a space of transformation.”
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