Lena shares her experience of coming to Canada from Kazakhstan and she is of mixed race - Russian and Korean. She notes how people would keep asking her “where are you from,” “what are you?” and how these questions can be offensive. She voices the importance of moving beyond performative action to real action in order to resist colonial ideologies.
Lena is a school teacher in Calgary and a PhD student in Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Born in Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union, Lena comes from a Russian and Korean family. Being of mixed race ancestry, she is interested in learning about lateral racism and how mixed race people are racialized in various contexts and through various race theorizations that often employ a monoracial lens. In her work, Lena is interested in examining schools as workplaces where everyday interactions between staff are acknowledged as being products of deep sociohistorical conditioning. Over the years, Lena co-led a number of counter-hegemonic projects with her students that involved art, drama, dance, and plants as forms of resistance against colonial ideologies.
