Set against the backdrop of current transnational “post-truth” climates—marked by heightened political polarisation, growing hostility toward critical scholarship, and increasing pressures on universities and educators to remain 'neutral'—this lecture maps (anti-Asian) racism across universities in settler colonial contexts, with a primary focus on Australia while drawing parallels with comparable systems. It engages the Australian Human Rights Commission’s recent landmark Racism@Uni study, which evidenced racism as systemic, pervasive, and embedded in everyday institutional practices, governance structures, and campus cultures. Using Asian international students as a key illustrative example—frequently racialised through stereotypes of academic instrumentality, linguistic deficiency, and economic value—the lecture situates these experiences within broader racial formations that shape multiple negatively racialised groups.

Dr Aaron Teo is a Singaporean Chinese migrant settler living on unceded Jagera and Turrbal lands and working as a Critical Sociologist of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, and Editor for the journal, Critical Studies in Education. Aaron Teo was part of the Australian Human Rights Commission's (AHRC) Racism@Uni Advisory Committee, and is currently on the AHRC Anti-Racism Education Reference Group and the Australian Association for Research in Education's (AARE) Research Development Advisory Committee.

Speaker: Dr. Aaron Teo, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Organizer: This lecture is part of a series of events (https://shortlink.uk/1sVnS ) organized by "Collective Responsibility. Critique of Racism at Universities" in cooperation with the Equity Unit of the University of Hamburg, the Equal Opportunities Office of the Faculty of Humanities, the Centre for Anti-Discrimination, and the Excellence Clusters CLICCS and UWA. This lecture is funded by the Faculty of Education.

Date and Time: Monday, July 6th 2026, 10.00 a.m.-12.00 p.m

Place: Von-Melle-Park 6 ("Philosophenturm"), Lecture hall F

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"Collective Responsibility"'s Code of Conduct (English):

We understand colonialism as a system of exploitation, violence and inequality that is permeated by racism, which produces and reinforces it. Colonial history and its reappraisal is, in a critical-reflexive sense, the reappraisal of a "shared history", a divided history that must be analysed and understood in its global interconnectedness and continuities.

Therefore, we cannot tolerate any open or subliminal xenophobic, racist, anti-semitic, sexist, discriminatory and/or colonial-revisionist statements, neither in analogue nor in digital events and discussions.