This free interactive workshop engaged participants in different places in their equity learning journeys to develop new insights and strategies towards learning inclusion and unlearning oppression as it pertains to Canada’s arts and cultural landscape.

The workshop examined historical contexts, personal narratives, power structures and systems that shape inequity in our world, and explored how these systems manifest inside our relationship with ourselves, our interpersonal connections, in our work spaces as well as systemic manifestations and barriers. The workshop also took a look at how we heal from traumas of exclusion and inequity and taught tactics for leveraging our privileges to imagine and actualize a meaningfully inclusive organization and on a larger scale, world.

Participants explored organizational models for meaningful inclusion, anti-oppression and intersectional anti-racism. Case studies and applications were examined to address inequity in funding, curation, adjudication and arts training. Participants reflected on process, policy and practice as means for addressing institutional oppressions. On a larger scale, participants were invited to explore the role of contemporary arts institutions, initiatives and funders in shaping Canada’s national identity and our understanding of justice beyond representation. Participants were provided access to a plethora of digital and print resources to continue their learning journey beyond the scope of the session.

Rania El Mugammar is a Sudanese Artist, Liberation Educator, Abolitionist, Anti-oppression Consultant , multidisciplinary performer, speaker and published writer. Her work explores reproductive justice, transformative justice & abolition, art as liberation and digital justice.

As a writer, Rania's work explores themes of identity, womanhood, Blackness, flight, exile, migration, belonging, gender, sexuality and beyond. Rania's primary mediums are poetry, spoken word and oral storytelling. She is a published poet, storyteller and playwright. Rania is deeply interested in poetic form and the auditory texture of words as well as the visual/aesthetic impact of language and form.

Rania is an experienced anti-oppression, abolition and liberation educator and consultant who is unflinchingly committed to decolonization and freedom as the ultimate goals of her work. She has worked extensively with contemporary arts institutions, STEM based enterprises, media organizations, educational institutions and community/grassroots spaces.