The Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) celebrated its 60th Anniversary with an alumni panel discussion, commemorative website launch, and grad community get-together as part of its first in-person Faculty Council meeting since March 2020.
“Knowledge creation for a better world has always been at the heart of what we do,” Dean MacLachlan said. “We have forged new paths in interdisciplinary methodologies and media, challenging accepted theoretical frameworks and entrenched social and practical problems.”
“As we unveil a 60th anniversary website today that honours our past, and celebrate the alumni who are currently, in this moment, making a difference on the world, please join me in advocating for and building an even better future in FGS,” Dean MacLachlan concluded.
FGS's 60th Anniversary official asset
From left to right the names are as follows: Alice MacLachlan, Vice-Provost & Dean; Alejandro Mayoral Baños; Richa Gupta; Kerry-Ann James; Tokunbo Ojo, Associate Dean, Students; Cheryl van Daalen-Smith, Associate Dean, Academic
The website takes visitors on a journey through the history of the faculty. Through the Years charts the growth of the FGS in terms of student population and program growth, expanding campuses and financial support for graduate education at York.
The Testimonials section features messages from the Dean and former Deans and from staff and former staff speaking about FGS and graduate education, the number of degrees awarded, program growth in the past 24 years, the annual amounts of scholarships and funding, and the Top 30 alumni under 30.
Under Awards and Recognition are the different prizes the faculty hands out—Postdoctoral Supervisor of the Year, the Faculty Teaching Award and, for students, the Thesis and Dissertation Prizes. This section also includes prestigious award recipients for Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships, Banting Postdoctoral Researchers, and the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for Black and Indigenous Scholars — as well as Grad Studies Highlights and Research Spotlights and a 60-year timeline.
The Highlights of the Last Decade section of the website captures the changes that have occurred at the faculty since it celebrated 50 years of graduate education, while the FGS Gallery takes visitors to the FGS Flickr account and the pictures from different events staff from FGS has been involved in, in recent years.
The Faculty of Graduate Studies was established in 1963 and opened its doors to York’s first graduate cohort of just 11 students the following year,. York was the first university in Canada to offer a PhD degree in women’s studies and the first to accept doctoral dissertations written in an Indigenous language.
Cheryl van Daalen-Smith, Associate Dean Academic, recapped a recent visioning exercise the Faculty hosted with stakeholders which utilized the skills of Drawing Change artist Sam Bradd. “We envision fostering 60 more years of knowledge creation,” she said while the results of the exercise were projected on the screen behind her. Drawing attention to the centre of the art piece, van Daalen-Smith said, “There is the need for grad studies to be valued and prioritized.”
Tokunbo Ojo, Associate Dean Students, introduced the three alumni panelists to the audience, Alejandro Mayoral Baños (MA ’16, PhD ’21), Executive Director of Access Now, a global organization, Richa Gupta (MBA ’10), a passionate entrepreneur and marketer who founded Canadian brand Good Food for Good, and Kerry-Ann James (MA ’24), a tv/film actress, film scholar, curator and former high-performance track athlete.
Drawing Change artist, Sam Bradd, capturing 60 years of knowledge creation in FGS
Speaking about his particular journey, Baños said one of the aspects he always likes to share with people is the interdisciplinary nature of his journey. “I was a nightmare for a lot of the admin staff here at York,” he said. As an international student, he went from Dean’s office to Dean’s office, trying to explore how he could tackle his research and also looking for funding. He did his Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies and his doctorate in Communication and Culture.
If there was any advice he could give someone currently where he was in grad school, Baños said, “You’re going to encounter a lot of issues that are not easy to resolve. I saw a lot of my peers complaining about finances, their supervisor, the program,” he said. “You need to find yourself and find a pathway forward.” He said he found a support group with some of his peers by creating writing groups. “We created these writing groups and we were accountable to each other,” he said. “It was a way to move forward just building that accountability system.”
It was while doing a Master’s degree in Business Administration at Schulich School of Business that Gupta discovered a social enterprise. “You can create a profitable business and do good in this world,” she said, adding, beginning in January 2025 she will also be teaching social entrepreneurship at Schulich. She built an award-winning, values-driven food brand, Good Food for Good, from the ground up, which is now available in stores across Canada and the United States. She also mentors new businesses in Canada and the US about how to scale sustainably. Gupta said she would tell current students, “I know it’s difficult, but there’s a lot we can learn in grad school to get us to the next phase of our life.”
James pointed out she had graduated with her Master’s degree in Cinema and Media Studies a couple of weeks previously. She praised her program administration for being “so accommodating of me doing multiple things at once, having the opportunity to explore different possibilities.” She added, “I discovered I didn’t have to be a professor to be a serious film person. I was able to create community and filmmaking and story-telling.” Her Master’s degree research was focused on aesthetics exploring the spatiality, temporality and spirituality in contemporary cinema. As guidance to current students, James said “be open to the possibilities around you, be open to not only giving help, but receiving it too.”
Looking forward to the next 60 years of graduate education at York, Dean MacLachlan said, we face multiple challenges and possibilities, from an unstable world order that must confront problems of climate change, forced migration, violence and dispossession, to scholarly questions such as the need to decolonize how we conceive of intellectual property, acknowledging the rights of Indigenous communities to data sovereignty, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in graduate research and pedagogy. “We are adapting to these,” the dean said, “even as we rise to meet the needs of a changing graduate student population whose devotion to research and professional development is matched by other commitments: to their families, their communities, the world we all share and the problems we all face.”