ABSTRACT
Despite the considerable influence of the “Asian Century” on Australian Government policy and the purported centrality of Asia to Australian national identity, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously highlighted and intensified the deleterious impacts of anti-Asian racism. Specifically, Orientalist discourses and a “fear of invasion” that underpin the differential racialized treatment of the Asian diaspora in Australia have manifested in both old and new racisms that have had significant impacts on the mental and physical wellbeing of Asian Australians. As microcosms of society, schools are germane for the analysis, confrontation, and transformation of such racialized injustices and so, as a means of intervening in these everyday inequities, this paper weaves an AsianCrit-informed autoethnography with composite narratives drawn from semi-structured interviews in a broader project with other migrant “Asian” Australian teachers to chronicle personal and professional race-making practices in the face of racism before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, while also rethinking and re-stor(y)ing a–way toward more hopeful, inclusive futures in schools.
BIOGRAPHY
Aaron Teo is a Singaporean Chinese first generation migrant settler living on unceded Jagera and Turrbal lands. He is a Sociologist of Education working as a Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Southern Queensland's School of Education. Aaron is Convenor for the Australian Association for Research in Education Social Justice Special Interest Group, Queensland convenor for the Asian Australian Alliance, 2023 winner of the Carolyn Baker Memorial Prize, and the State Library of Queensland's 2024 John Oxley Honorary Fellow. His research focusses on the raced and gendered subjectivities of migrant teachers from “Asian” backgrounds in the Australian context, as well as critical pedagogies in white Australian (university and school) classroom spaces. Aaron is interested in qualitative research methods, particularly the use of critical autoethnography as a-way of interrogating experiences at the nexus of migration, racism, sexism, and multiculturalism in the Australian education context.
