Dr. Philip S. S. Howard

Professor Philip Howard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education. His scholarship is in the areas of Black Studies, anticolonial studies, and Critical Race Studies in education.  Professor Howard’s scholarship seeks to respond to the questions: What are the pedagogical processes—both within and beyond schools—through which we learn and normalize racial violence, antiblackness, and injustice?  How do these take shape through the nation state and its institutions?  This work pays particular attention to antiblackness and Black life in postracialist contexts—that is, contexts whose claims to have overcome racism are based in the very mechanisms through which racism continues to constitute their normative conditions.  With a view toward abolishing dehumanizing systems, Professor Howard’s research further examines the modes of survivance and resistance in which Black and racialized communities engage, often beyond the state and its institutions. His most recent research projects investigate contemporary blackface in Canada as a postracialist phenomenon; school to university transitions for Black students in Canada; and Black people’s agency in educational contexts in Toronto, Halifax, and Montreal as they unfold through Black community supplementary education initiatives.  

Professor Howard is recognized as an engaged and innovative educator. His work is grounded in his years of teaching experience in elementary, secondary and tertiary education.  He is the 2021 recipient of McGill’s Carrie M. Derick Teaching Award for Graduate Supervision and Teaching, and the 2022 recipient of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools’ Graduate Faculty Teaching Award.