Counterclaims: Examining and contesting white entitlement to the space of the university through the labour of anti-racist student organizers

This paper examines competing spatial claims to one urban Canadian university through a case study conducted with 11 anti-racist student organizers. Situated in literatures which critically examine whiteness in the university, this study illustrates how active producers of whiteness claim space in the university and how in turn, student organizers counter these claims through their anti-racist labour. This case study explores the psychic geographies of the university by focusing on the affects which justify and motivate these spatial claims. First, I consider how distorted fears of racial justice both reproduce and justify whiteness and are then articulated through stereotyping, surveillance, and stalling. I then illustrate how anti-racist student organizers stake counterclaims to the space of the university through their labour, motivated by hope and routed through the "underground" or "undercommons" of the university. Ultimately, this case study seeks to demystify and challenge the distorted and racist fears and subsequent actions of white actors specifically, in order to undo the affects through which whiteness is spatially reproduced in the university.