Four students win KPU’s second annual Intersectional Social Justice Essay Awards

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Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s English students and faculty came together to celebrate the winners of the second annual Intersectional Social Justice Essay Awards at the Surrey campus  library on Wednesday. 

Hannah Kite-Holmes, Hailey Glennon, Brook Lowery, and Jordan Redekop-Jones were the recipients of the award while Makayla Tamula, Usha Gunatilake, and Carolina Mesquita Rocha received an honourable mention. These students were chosen based on an essay they wrote in an English class within the past academic year that discussed a topic of intersectional social justice. 

Prizes are categorized by first, second, third, and fourth-year. Students are nominated by their instructors based on their topic and a strong argument in their essay. 

“I’m so delighted to see this is the second year that we are now going to be giving out these awards and it shows continuity of the work we’re doing,” English instructor Asma Sayed said during the event. 

Each winner received a cash prize, which comes from the Student Financial Office. English instructor Kirsten Alm says the KPU Foundation was the donor this year. 

“We have funding for the next two years from that source,” Alm says. “It’s an important award and represents some of the values of the university and things going on with equity, equality, social justice that people value, and I think it’s an opportunity for the university to put money into something we see [as valuable].” 

Alm says there was an increase in submissions this year as around 20 essays were nominated. Members on the awards committee read the essays and debated which ones they liked best. 

Sayed is an inspiration behind creating the award due to her work focusing on intersectional social justice as the Canadian Research Chair in the South Asian Literary, which Redekop-Jones will receive an internship from. 

Discussions of the award started in 2020 when Sayed and the awards committee wanted to showcase students’ interest in social justice issues. 

“These are good opportunities for students, it’s good training, for their [resume],” Sayed says. 

“Our students get to critically think about some of these issues because many of our students are also involved outside of KPU, with multiple organizations. They get to bridge their community work with their academic work. These kinds of initiatives allow us to do more of that.” 

Lowery, a fourth-year English student, was one of the winners based on her essay “Women Going Against the Grain: Depictions of Diasporic Laotian Women in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife.” 

“I was really excited, I didn’t think I was going to win because I didn’t know what the other essays were like,” Lowery says. “I always have a thing with my writing [where] I feel like it’s not as good as I want it to be. It was a cool feeling that my writing was acknowledged for something.” 

Lowery’s essay followed a chapter by chapter analysis of Thammavongsa’s book and challenged the expectations of Loatian migrant women in society versus how the characters were in the book. The essay also analyzed how women don’t have to conform to those ideas and beliefs in society and challenged the patriarchy, gender norms, and roles. 

“It’s not necessarily just about this one group of women I analyzed in the book, it’s not me saying this is the only way to view these struggles and these issues,” she says. “It’s one lens to look through to analyze how these issues affect women or femme presenting people in society.”

After winning the award, Lowery hopes to continue writing about these issues in the future for her classes. She also wishes more people knew about the meaning of intersectional social justice. 

“A lot of people have this idea of what it is from social media. For instance, there is that huge meme of the social justice warrior,” Lowery says. 

“To me at least, intersectional social justice is acknowledging your place in society and there are other groups of people, other ideas that need to be upheld, acknowledged, and supported.” 

To learn more about the awards, head to the KPU’s website.