2025 – ACAM 330 (fmr. 320B) student submissions

August 9, 2025August 9, 2025

It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All

Everyone in Canada deserves to have the same access to healthcare.

Creator:
Samantha Wong 黃千殷 (She/her)

Mental health is a challenging concept to grasp at best, and downright seemingly intractable when considering the different layers of issues that can further complicate one’s experience with mental health. Too often, racialized individuals attempting to access mental health support are left with options and practitioners who do not share their cultural backgrounds, views, or practices. Without taking into consideration the numerous ways in which a client forms their identities (whether it’s gender identity or cultural identity), mental health supports simply cannot effectively address the unique needs of those clients. As Samantha details in her letter to her Member of Parliament, it is clear that the current state of mental health support is most effective at providing support for those who belong to the cultural mainstream, leaving racialized (and other marginalized) populations in a worse position to handle their mental health struggles. If it were up to you, what would and equitable mental health care system look like, and what challenges have you seen within the existing mental health care system?

August 9, 2025August 9, 2025

Make Health Care Accessible to All

Everyone in Canada deserves to have the same access to healthcare.

Creator:
Claire H.

Despite the ideals behind the Canadian healthcare system – that it is universal and accessibile to all, the reality reveals a slightly different scenario. This occurs for numerous reasons, including language barriers and geographical distribution of medical services. This is further complicated by the labyrinthine intersections of local, provincial, and federal approaches to health care provision, which means that any potential solutions will undoubtedly have to be difficult, multi-faceted, and subject to the partnership of all three levels of government despite potentially wildly different political perspectives and goals. In this letter to her Member of Parliament, Claire lays out her perspective of what lie at the heart of inequity in access to health care in Canada, and what may be done about it. Have you, or those around you, experienced difficulty in accessing health care, and how might that be related to people’s varying identities?

August 8, 2025August 9, 2025

On Asian Canadian Queer Activism

They compel me to fight a little harder for justice – for others like me, and even for myself.

Creator:
Anonymous

One of the most notable aspects about academia in a Western context is in its lack of diversity in terms of the “object” of academic inquiry, such as the lack of discourse around the experiences of various cultural/ethnic communities. This lack of diversity is pervades through various domains of academic study, including that of queerness in Canada. While plenty of work exists to articulate the experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals within the cultural mainstream, the same cannot be said of those among cultural/ethnic minorities. This dovetails with the activism scene as well, where queer activism has long been seen as representing and benefiting queer White folks, with racialized queer folks feeling increasingly left out of activism spaces. It is then left to racialized queer media to highlight the work of racialized queer activists to showcase the history of work that has been done, and the work that continues to happen. In this paper, the anonymous writer profiles Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians, a documentary by Richard Fung, and showcases the struggles, efforts, and resilience that the racialized queer community demonstrated (continues to demonstrate) in Canada. What do you think queer liberation should look like if it were to achieve true equality, and how would queer spaces look different if that were the case?