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About Us

As a response to the 2020 wave of Black Lives Matter protests occurring across the world, Niroshnee Ranjan (Niro), then Deputy Officer of the student representative group the BIPOC Department at the Australian National University (ANU), launched a campaign called 'Are You Racist ANU?'. Over the second semester, this campaign aimed to explore this question through panel discussions and workshops with academics and activists, and empower students to speak the truth of their experiences through articles and various creative mediums. At the conclusion of the campaign and semester, the answer was evident - yes, the ANU was a racist institution. Not willing to let the campaign end, Niro decided to lead its evolution from a campaign to a wider, collective mission. 

 

In that summer of 2020-21, the twelve founding members came together to create the club - the Collective on Anti-Racism - COAR, pronounced "core", for short. COAR in 2021 was a community of students at the ANU who shared an interest in anti-racism and decolonisation. We were concerned about the lack of action taken by the ANU against racism and white supremacy embedded in our university structures. It was a response to the structural racism within our personal academic disciplines and how the University centred whiteness and Western epistemologies to perpetuate the never-ending coloniality of empire. COAR worked together to imagine an anti-racist learning hub at the ANU. We also aimed to empower BIPOC students to speak their truth in order to dismantle white supremacy within the university. COAR at ANU was centred on the premise that collective education lies at the heart of anti-racist liberation. After a year of collectivising in which we curated our Anti-Racist Syllabus, ran a workshop, launched our zine, created the COAR podcast, all while enduring the 2021 COVID-19 lockdown in Canberra, COAR began to discus the future of our Collective, and whether that future included remaining a university club at ANU.

 

In the summer of 2021-22 we launched COAR beyond the university as a Canberran community group. We changed gears, shifting our focus from forever fighting against an institution, to carving out our own anti-racist spaces irrespective of external structures. We could create BIPOC-centred anti-racist spaces amongst ourselves, for ourselves. Through this we could also connect with BIPOC people and groups across Canberra. COAR is now an anti-racist educational and community space that seeks to reckon with the reality of being on stolen land and how we can move forward towards racial justice. 

The COARmittee

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