Advancing anti-racism communications at UWaterloo
By Sharon Aschaiek | April 6, 2022
At the University of Waterloo, Tracelyn Cornelius is on a mission to ensure communications is inclusive, respectful and accurate.
As anti-racism communications manager, Cornelius advises communication leaders across the institution on tackling systemic racism and following the principles of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA). She uses anti-oppression, anti-racism and decolonizing lenses to help formulate, articulate and implement IDEA and anti-racism values and best practices.
“There is a huge appetite for people wanting to do better and understand what unconscious bias and micro-aggressions are,” Cornelius says. “It’s about developing new frameworks and strategies to do better in challenging narratives of oppression.”
While this is a relatively new role for Cornelius at Waterloo — she has been a communicator there since 2019 and this current position is a one-year secondment — she says she has been applying an anti-racism lens to communications at various workplaces for more than 20 years. That work has involved flagging instances of White-centric content — visual, text or otherwise — and integrating the faces and voices of individuals who are BIPOC, ensuring they are fairly represented.
“Wherever I have seen underrepresented groups being portrayed in a negative manner, I have explained to organizations why it’s wrong and needs to be addressed,” she says.
For anti-racism work to be effective, she says, it’s important to start with acknowledging the presence of pervasive racism in Canadian society, including at post-secondary schools. That insight is partly based on research she completed for the Master of Environment and Business that she completed last year at Waterloo. For the program, she examined how to implement anti-racism practices within post-secondary institutions.
“Canadians tend to deny that racism exists, but it’s all over, including at university campuses…Racist practices are ingrained in the system, and the dominant culture may not understand the negative effect this can have on students,” she says.
Cornelius’ work at Waterloo involves supporting the work of the President’s Anti-racism Taskforce (PART), which was established in 2020, the year that the murder of George Floyd by police in the U.S. sparked widespread social justice protests. PART consists of a BIPOC-led team of advisors whose official mission is to “weave anti-racism into the fabric and culture of all campus operations, communities, pedagogy and lifestyle.” Its work focuses on areas such as hiring, curricula, cultural events and support for BIPOC students.
Cornelius’ work also includes contributing to Catalyst, a monthly newsletter that showcases Waterloo staff, students and faculty engaged in anti-racism work on campus. As well, she is helping to develop an inclusive style guide, which will offer campus communicators resources for avoiding offensive terms and narratives and fairly representing racialized groups.
By establishing my role, Waterloo is showing that it is serious about addressing racism,” Cornelius says. “It’s a step in the right direction and I hope other universities follow suit.”