Alumni Book Nook: Dr. Jebunnessa Chapola (GPSC’18, PhD’22)

University of Saskatchewan (USask) graduate Dr. Jebunnessa Chapola, who earned her PhD in women’s, gender and sexualities studies in 2022, found inspiration for her new book from her lived experiences and community engagements as a racialized newcomer academic mother. The book, titled A Decolonial and Anti-Racist Transformative Autoethnographic Journey toward Reconciliation: A Racialized Immigrant Woman’s Empowering Stories, was released in August 2024 by Lexington Books. Chapola said it explores topics such as how to build an anti-racist community; how to take responsibility for building relationships with the land and its original people as a settler of colour; decolonial feminism; building bridges between newcomers and Indigenous people; and the importance of Indigenous land-based education.

Chapola grew up in Bangladesh and earned her undergraduate degree in sociology from the University of Dhaka. She moved abroad at the age of 23 to study social work in Göteborg, Sweden, and earned a second master’s degree in gender and development at the University of Bergen in Norway before coming to Canada with her husband in 2010. Her three daughters were born in New York, New Jersey, and Saskatoon.

Chapola currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, and teaches at Mount Royal University. She is also a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Margot Hurlbert (PhD), a professor and Canada Research Chair in Climate Change, Energy and Sustainability Policy at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Regina (U of R). Recently, Chapola received a short SSHRC postdoctoral fellow appointment after finishing her two-year SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship with the U of R and she has been accepted into the university’s exchange program as a Queen Elizabeth II Advanced Scholar.

While living in Saskatoon, Chapola was active at USask and as a volunteer in the larger community. For nine years, she was a key organizer of a community garden at USask, which was primarily utilized by international and newcomer immigrant students living in university residences. Chapola also ran a community radio show on CFCR for eight years. Her community-building efforts have been acknowledged at the local, provincial, national, and international levels; last year, for example, she earned the Student Changemaker MOMA Award 2023 from the International Association of Maternal Action and Scholarship (IAMAS) in the United States.

The Green&White asked Chapola about her new book and what inspired her to write it.

While many non-Indigenous academic researchers have used the terms decolonization, anti-racism, and reconciliation in their work, they have not fully explored what it means for transnational immigrants and refugee communities to see reconciliation as a source of knowledge and understanding. How do you become an anti-racist, decolonial feminist? How do you form an anti-racist community? What does decolonization look like? How might embracing responsibility for reconciliation benefit immigrant and refugee women’s communities? Why should newcomer immigrant and refugee groups embrace decolonial and anti-racist methods of thinking and acting, in order to build meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities? What does it mean to understand decolonial and anti-racist learning and practice in terms of reciprocal social interactions, ethical practices, and a framework for reconciliation?

The book, A Decolonial and Anti-Racist Transformative Autoethnographic Journey to Reconciliation: A Racialized Immigrant Woman’s Empowering Stories, attempts to address these multidisciplinary issues. It seeks not only to challenge our preconceived notions about reconciliation, but also to demonstrate the importance of accepting responsibility for relearning decolonial and anti-racist concepts in our daily lives. These include developing respectful relationships with Indigenous Peoples, honouring Indigenous Treaties, decolonizing our ways of knowing and acting, understanding the effects of colonial education processes, preserving our land and environment, ensuring food security and nutritional adequacy, fostering intercultural spaces for social interactions, and promoting transnational empowerment.

I was motivated by Saskatoon community involvement, including the USask community garden, CFCR 90.5 community radio, and transnational cultural acts. I was also inspired by anti-racist and decolonial feminist education, as well as building relationships with Indigenous Peoples and newcomers. As an academic mother, I’d say my children also motivated me to work for a just society. I wanted to raise anti-racist, feminist children in an environment where they could thrive through artistic activities, preserve their mother tongues, traditional knowledge, and a sense of connection to the land, as our socially constructed hyphenated, religious identities are socially given and problematic. I provided my children a new identity through community action and PhD research, demonstrating that land is my identity and that appreciating it may benefit us since it is non-discriminatory—because land teaches us inclusiveness, and it teaches us to live in harmony with nature and people. My doctoral research findings emphasize the importance of anti-racist community building, and the significance of Indigenous traditional knowledge, as well as how Indigenous epistemology can help non-Indigenous people accept responsibility for protecting the land, water, fire, rocks, and non-humans in the fight against climate change and the establishment of an anti-racist, inclusive community.

As a racialized newcomer academic mother, I developed the book based on my lived experiences, everyday challenges as a newcomer, motherhood lessons, and informal community involvements. (My) USask education, (the) campus, Saskatoon community activists, USask Indigenous scholars and Knowledge Keepers, and community members as well as my husband—whose family experienced brutality (during) the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War as a religious minority—all inspired me to create this book. Finally, due to my interfaith marriage (Hindu-Muslim), I and my family members were stigmatized; as a stigma fighter, mother, (and) singer, publishing this book is therapeutic; (it) empowers me and future generations.

This book chronicles the experience of a newcomer brown academic mother who discovered empowerment through informal, unobtrusive, unappreciated, and unrecognized community-building initiatives and daily efforts. It encourages research into Indigenous values of land, emphasizing the need to respect the land, recognizing women’s underappreciated reproductive labour, and the efforts of ethnic artists to make the world a better place. It presents a transnational, decolonial feminist story about building an anti-racist community and how we can co-learn the meaning of decolonization and reconciliation as a community.