In this blog piece, Tianna Edwards, Officer of Direct Response Appeals in the Office of Advancement at Queen’s, talks about the importance of having a diverse staff and student body as the starting point to achieve a genuinely inclusive campus

I was raised in Kingston and spent my elementary and high school years as the only person of colour in most of my classes. To clarify what this means, it means being the spokesperson for all people of colour (answering questions about my race), fighting stereotypes and generally losing any anonymity whatsoever. So when it came to applying to universities, I didn’t consider Queen’s. I felt that I wouldn’t fit into the established culture of sameness and didn’t want to continue the pattern of being the only person of colour in my classes. So I branched out. Like many young Kingstonians, Continue Reading »

In this piece, History professor Adnan Husain talks about using education to combat stereotypes, and he explains how universities provide us with the opportunity of learning from the past to build a better future

As a historian, my reflex is to look to the past to analyze contemporary conditions and understand recent experiences.  When I first began to study medieval European and Middle Eastern/Islamic History as a university student, I did not imagine that my preoccupations with how religious identities were formed through the interrelationships between Muslims, Christians and Jews in the pre-modern world would seem so relevant to so many others.  My interests at the time developed from a more personal perspective as a Muslim from a religiously observant family raised in North America.  I was seeking historical grounding for what seemed an eccentric problem—being what one scholar would later term a “Western Muslim.”   My exploration of inter-religious interaction was meant to satisfy an internal dialogue about identity and its diverse sources and to discover ways to integrate and reconcile disparate influences of my heritage and formation. Continue Reading »