The 1991 census inaugurated the quantification of interracial coupling in Canada. Since then, with the release of statistical data demonstrating the absolute increase in the number of interracial unions, media reports and a growing body of scholarly research treat interracial unions as both spectacle and historical anomaly. Media reports and sociological research are typically celebratory in tone and scholarly research is overwhelmingly statistical in nature. Both governmental analysis and quantitative scholarship draw their explanatory accounts from speculative theory. The general assumption is that interracial coupling is attributable to multiculturalism and is a litmus test for social integration and tolerance. A ‘discursive formation’ of Canada as a progressivist and post-racial society is thereby achieved. This session seeks scholarly work that complicates and challenges the dominant narrative in the analysis of interracial coupling in Canada. We invite papers rooted in critical social history, socio-legal studies, women and gender studies and sociology from a range of methodologies and/or theoretical approaches that explore the contradictions, multidimensionality and paradox of interracial coupling in Canada.
Session Organizer and Chair: Kathy Deliovsky, PhD, Brock University, kdeliovsky@brocku.ca
Session Co-organizer and Discussant: Tamari Kitossa, Brock University, tkitossa@brocku.ca
Session Code: REth1
Schedule, location, and presentations
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