Our Students

Former queer/trans activist who organized the first GSA-type group in my hometown when I was in high school. Before beginning my PhD, I was working front line supporting queer and trans youth and making only $10,000 a year and doing trainings with social service/healthcare providers on how to not discriminate against their marginalzed clients for $50-100 a pop. I’m a little jaded with the identity of activist nowadays, but I try my best when I can.

My primary research is about the experiences of autistic trans folks and their experiences of family. I makel use of storytelling/life writing research methods and have a general interest in using arts in research methods, especially arts produced by BIPOC and disabled communities. I’m an intersectional researcher who wants to do community research. I belong to multiple intersections and also dabble in fan studies in my spare time.

At this point in my life, I’m involved with the fight for autistic self determination and human rights with a focus on intersectional experiences. This means dealing with institutions and groups who “advocate” for autistics but don’t think to talk to actually autistic people and only talk to non-autistic parents of autistic children. Then there’s the hot topic/controversy where a supermajority of autistic adults are against ABA/IBI, the therapy inflicted on small children who can’t fight back or give consent. My goal is to have autistic people across the entire life cycle have the support they need to be the best autistic they can be. I want there to be no more kids growing up with PTSD from “therapy”. I want neurotypicals to practice empathy that they say autistic people lack. I want to end the assumption that autistics are all white and that you can’t be trans and autistic. Is this too much to ask for?

As a 1.5 generation Hakka-Jamaican, Eleanor is especially interested in diasporic communities. In particular, her research interests are centred on the model minority myth; the intergenerational effects of diasporic collective history, memory, and trauma; and the barriers that diasporic communities face while trying to participate in social and political matters.

As a 1.5 generation Hakka-Jamaican, Eleanor is especially interested in diasporic communities. In particular, her research interests are centered on the model minority myth; the intergenerational effects of diasporic collective history, memory, and trauma; and the barriers that diasporic communities face while trying to participate in social and political matters.

Eleanor is currently engaged in activism in the Vancouver Chinatown community. She has been volunteering virtually throughout the pandemic and partnered with a low-income Chinese senior to provide support and coordinate weekly culturally-specific grocery deliveries. She also engages in biweekly meetings with other Vancouver Chinatown youth to plan and create a vision of Chinatown that is intersectional, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-oppressive for all.

Eleni Lentz-Marino’s research is focused on how the “Girl” identity forms through the intersection of cultural signifiers such as race, class, sexuality and disability etc. More specifically—how does the “Girl” identity form through online spaces? Her research includes in person interviews that look into girl’s daily use of various social media spaces like, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr etc.

As a member of the Board of Directors at the Weston King Neighborhood Centre and Chair of the fundraising committee I am dedicated to securing funding and grants that promote collaborative, grassroots community projects and programs. I am a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Consultant at Feminuity and the Kojo Institute. In this role I participate in full scale client assessments from an anti-racist and intersectional feminist lens.

Evan Vipond (they/them) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies. Evan’s SSHRC-funded dissertation, Trans Liberalism: Trans Rights and the U.S. Military, critically examines the advocacy efforts to lift the U.S. Military’s transgender ban. Their research interests include trans rights, critical trans politics, transnormativity, neoliberalism, and trans cultural studies. Evan’s work has been published in various peer-reviewed journals including a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2019), Canadian Review of Social Policy (2017), Gender and Education (2017), and Theory in Action (2015). Their work will also be featured in the Canadian Scholars and Women’s press textbook TransNarratives (Fall 2021). 

My research focuses on the social reproduction of anti-black racism through the policing of black bodies in unionized university campus spaces. In my project, I explore unions spaces reproduce anti-black racist ideologies and create toxic environments where it becomes difficult for black people to speak up and call out the institutions that play out before them. environments where it becomes difficult for black people to speak up and call out the institutions that play out before them.

Sat on the executive team in both CUPE and YUGSA

Freshta hones her interest in the informal sector of our economic markets, through an intersectional lens, recognizing the role of this labour in displacing people of colour, specifically low-income women of colour, shaping our political identities.  Including the economic wage of unpaid domestic labour, she plans to challenge the existing benchmarks that determine wages in Canadian society.  She also takes an interest in urban politics, how people interact and shape our cities, and how wage determines livability and quality of living.

Freshta Ahmadzai’s research interest include the informal sector of our economic markets, through an intersectional lens, recognizing the role of this labour in displacing people of colour, specifically low-income women of colour, shaping our political identities. Including the economic wage of unpaid domestic labour, She plans to challenge the existing benchmarks that determine wages in Canadian society. Aside from that, She also takes an interest in urban politics, how we interact and shape our cities, and how wages determine livability and quality of living.

Hana Hasegawa’s research interests broadly include the Japanese diaspora in Canada and the United States, multiracial identities, the racialization of those who identify as multiracial, the role of “whiteness” in the racialization process, and the gendered elements of this racialization in both the contemporary and historical context.

Ifeyinwa Okadigbo is a scholar activist with an interest in African self and collective discovery, social justice, equality, and choice, through a decolonial analytical framework. With over a decade’s worth of eclectic career, research and personal experience living in communities where women were not visible in public spaces. She is committed to being a part of the solution towards creating more equitable lives for women in society where women can occupy spaces and live freely to confront and dismantle patriarchy, sexist structures, and discriminatory cultures.

Jasleen Arora is a doctoral student in the Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies Department at York University. Jasleen’s work is focussed on examining the socio-political and religious worldview within which colonial Punjab’s multilingual vernacular presses (Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu) operated, and how they contributed to constructing/challenging gendered discourses on reform, identity, and politics. Her research interests include the intellectual and social history of colonial Punjab, Punjabi literature, multimodal discourse analysis, women’s press and print culture in South Asia. British colonial Punjab; periodical literature in Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu; Punjabi print culture; women’s magazines; social history; India; South Asian Studies.

Joshua Falek holds an M.A. in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto in Women and Gender Studies and an M.A. in Social and Political Thought from York University. Prior to attending York, they managed a bookstore. Their research thinks across trans studies, Black studies, and science and technology studies to historicize the recognition of non-binary embodiment by the Canadian state in relation to anti-Black affective infrastructures. In particular, they are interested in questions related to and the contradictions between/within theories of embodiment, plasticity, self-determination, abolition and materiality.

Kanishka Sikri’s research interets include forms of racialized, gendered, ecological, epistemic, and sexualized violence, processes through which black, brown, and Indigenous women are slowly assembled as sexually violable, media, culture, and language.

Kanishka Sikri (she/her) is a feminist writer and theorist unravelling the multiple faces and forms of racialized, gendered, ecological, epistemic, and sexualized violence. At the entanglement of transnational intersectionality and post-de-colonial thought, her doctoral research is focused on the insidiously sneaky and subtle processes through which black, brown, and Indigenous women are slowly assembled as sexually violable, marked to lifetimes of violent attack and rape. Kanishka unearths the ways discursive and symbolic scriptings—media, culture, and language—girdles racialized women into the caricature of being violable and dependent to a series of violations, and thus not registered as violation but instead normal on their bodies. Rape is obscured and mystified, it becomes an implausibility on women of colour as it is impossible to violate an already violable subject. To learn more about her work or to connect with Kanishka, please visit: kanishkasikri.com

Kathleen Cherrington’s research focuses on critical sex work and erotic labour studies within a transnational context. She’s particularly interested in imaginative research creation methods applied in ethnographic fieldwork, and feminist art-based research. She has been examining sex workers’ and scholar-activists’ social justice-based art-activism (‘artivism’) utilized as a mode of creative resistance against human and labour rights violations associated with whorephobia, criminalization, colonization, police brutality, systemic violence, moral stigma, and other forms of marginalization.

My activism contributions have included providing a wide range of direct advocacy and support for sex workers, people living with HIV/HCV+, chronically homeless populations, co-concurrent disorders, and violence survivors.

sex work, disability and embodiment, feminist theory, social histories

organizer for sex workers’ rights

Mackenzie Edwards work focuses on fatness in popular as well as social media. Her PhD research centers on the body positivity Instagram community in Toronto. She uses influences from feminist thought, critical disability studies, and queer theory, and she often critiques neoliberalism in her work.

Marilena Soberal’s research interests include decolonization methods in the field of sexual assault advocacy, social justice, and community resources to combat sexual assault. 

Mari (she/her/hers) is an international doctoral student in the Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies program. She has spent the last six years as a sexual assault/domestic violence advocate in MIchigan and Wyoming, where she has worked to create culturally relevant and holistic sexual assault services. Her research interests include decolonization methods in the field of sexual assault advocacy, social justice, and community resources to combat sexual assault. 

Max Furguson’s research interests focus on Queer/Transgender sexualities,  Mad/Crip/Queer approaches to Art (Cultural Production) and Art History, Disability/ Mad Studies, Crip culture and Queer/Crip intersections, anticolonial approaches to research and art practice.

Menghzu Fu’s research interests are in grassroots social movement praxis, Indigenous-Asian relationality, and Asian diasporic activism. Their PhD topic is tentatively on Indigenous and Asian diasporic solidarity in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Canada-occupied Turtle Island in grassroots communities and organising, seeking to bridge pedagogy and praxis.

I have been involved in grassroots activism and community organising for the past 16 years on anti-racism, environmental justice, gender-based violence, migrant feminist youth work, and Asian solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty primarily in Aotearoa (also known as New Zealand). More recently, I have been involved in climate justice activism in Tkaronto.

Morgan Bimm’s research focuses on integrating fan studies, popular music studies, and feminist theory, particularly as they relate to the consumption of ‘girly’ texts, music, and aesthetics. Broadly, her work is interested in the ways that technology and media work together to produce particular ideas about cultural relevance. These research interests have led to the development of a dissertation project that investigates the role of women, girls, and girl culture in the mainstreaming of independent, or ‘indie,’ rock music during the 2000s.

Natalia’s research interests are related to Queer, Mad, creative autoethnographies. They are planning to both write and draw elements of their autoethnography to connect my lived experience to Feminist and Critical Disability scholarship. They are centring accessibility to reach a wide audience of those with interests in mental health and valuing lived experience as a way of knowing and understanding mental wellbeing.

Natalia Bonczek’s research interests are related to Queer, Mad, creative autoethnographies. They are planning to both write and draw elements of their autoethnography to connect their lived experience to Feminist and Critical Disability scholarship. They are centering accessibility to reach a wide audience of those with interests in mental health and valuing lived experience as a way of knowing and understanding mental wellbeing.

Born and raised in India, Noshina is pursuing her second master’s degree in Gender, Feminist, and Women Studies department at York University. She already holds a master’s degree in Women Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Her research interests include feminist theory; queer theory; critical race theories; gender, sexuality, and religion studies; queer diaspora; transgender studies. Noshina’s previous dissertation titled Voices of Muslim Women in India: Identity and Appearance has contributed to the studies on representational intersectionality. It critiques the stereotypical image with which Muslim women are represented in Indian society.

Asya Medea is interested in LGBT+ diasporas, social movements and advocacy. She has had research on labor regimes concerning refugees.

LGBT+ activism in Lambdaistanbul, SPoD LGBTİ, Istanbul & I, Hassle Free Clinic and 519

Rajdeep Sidhu major research interests are analysing migrated South Asian communities and their gender relations in the Canadian context. He is interested in looking into masculinities, policymaking, class, caste, transnationalism, and decolonial theory. His MRP topic is “Indian Post Graduate Work Permit Holders and their Pathways to Permanent Immigration to Canada during COVID-19”.

Roxana Akhbari dissertation draws on genealogies of North Atlantic liberal nation-state formations and cultural studies of law methodologies to analyze the reproduction of white supremacy in Canada’s redress politics. She also work on a collaborative project on cultural studies and pragmatist philosophy, entitled “(Mis)Trust in Settler Colonies: Pragmatist Conversations” (https://www.mistrust.info/)

Ruchika’s research interests include transformative and restorative justice practices, anti-carceral feminism, and the impact the prison industrial complex has on both perpetrators and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Ruchika works to better understand the ways in which prisons create a punitive society reliant on retribution rather than restitution, and how these systems of punishment create gendered and racialized experiences wherein more violence emerges, rather than rehabilitation.

Ruchika’s Gothoskar’s research interests include transformative and restorative justice practices, anti-carceral feminism, and the impact the prison industrial complex has on both perpetrators and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Ruchika works to better understand the ways in which prisons create a punitive society reliant on retribution rather than restitution, and how these systems of punishment create gendered and racialized experiences wherein more violence emerges, rather than rehabilitation.

Ruchika Gothoskar (she/her) is an editor, writer, reader, and settler, currently living on the territory of the Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Ojibway/Chippewa peoples, in Ontario. Ruchika has an Honours BA in English, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies from McMaster University, and is currently pursuing a certificate in Restorative Justice Studies at Simon Fraser University. Ruchika’s research interests include transformative and restorative justice practices, anti-carceral feminism, and the impact the prison industrial complex has on both perpetrators and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Ruchika works to better understand the ways in which prisons create a punitive society reliant on retribution rather than restitution, and how these systems of punishment create gendered and racialized experiences wherein more violence emerges, rather than rehabilitation. Find her at @rgothoskar on Instagram, and Twitter.

Sarah Redikopp is interested in critical race theory, feminist phenomenology, and feminist political economy to explore practices of self-injury among marginalized populations in southern Ontario. Her research interests include gendered experiences of madness and Mad Studies, social reproduction, health, and the politics of care, and Mad political economies.

Sarah Redikopp (she/her) is a critical mental health researcher living on Treaty 13 territory in Toronto. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research draws on insights from critical race theory, feminist phenomenology, and feminist political economy to explore practices of self-injury among marginalized populations in southern Ontario. Sarah’s research interests include gendered experiences of madness and Mad Studies, social reproduction, health, and the politics of care, and Mad political economies. Her work has been published in Word and Text (2018), The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies (forthcoming 2021), and The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Health (forthcoming 2022). Sarah is a member of the Robarts Centre’s Critical Mental Health and Mad Studies Research Cluster, an associate of the Global Labour Research Centre at York University, and a crisis counsellor with the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre. Find her on instagram at @mad.academic.

Shams Seif’s research interests include affect theory, research creation, and orientalism within normative queerness.

Shraddha Chatterjee’s doctoral work maps the relationships between queer activisms in metropolitan Indian locations and conditions of globalization, neoliberalism, and emergent nationalisms in order to trace discursive productions and material affects of/on queer lives. Their academic training has been in psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and anthropology. Other research interests include: animal-human relations, Lacanian psychoanalysis, critical pedagogies, ‘South Asia’, and questions of the ‘political’. they are also the author of ‘Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects’ (Routledge, 2018).

I have been involved, in small ways, in activisms in India from a queer feminist perspective since 2011.

Sochitl Alfaro’s reasearch interests centre on sexuality education in schools in El Salvador, decolonial praxis

Sofia Ahmed’s research interests focuses on how commonly underemployed are Muslims in Canada, especially women with Hijab? Also, what are the effects of such oppression on their mental and physical health?

Online Peer Advisor, Reach UWindsor (University of Windsor, 2019-2020), Volunteer at Nisa shelter Homes for immigrant, refugee, and Muslim women (2019-2020), Executive of Women and Gender Studies Student Association (WGSSA, 2018-2019), Student Representative (SR) of School Council and BSW (2017-2018), SR Women’s and Gender Studies Advisory Committee (2016-2019), SR Women’s and Gender Studies RTP Committee (2016-2018), SR Women’s and Gender Studies Student Affairs and Events Committee (2017-2018), SR Women’s and Gender Studies Truth and Reconciliation Committee (2017-2018), Volunteer, Spring Open House (University of Windsor, 2016-2019), Community Developer/Crisis Intervention Worker – Bashir Memorial Pakistan (1998-2005)

Tatiane Sant’ Ana Coelho Reis is dedicated to designing a project that could investigate gender issues, community economies, and regional development in Southern Africa. She is mostly interested in gender inequalities,  agri-coops, and the informal economy in Southern Africa. Political economy, black intellectuals, and comparative history are essential in her writing.

Rede de Historiadorxs Negrxs – social media working group

Valerie Andrews(vandrews@yorku.ca) is a PhD student in GFWS. Her current research focuses on reproductive justice and critical adoption studies.

Valerie is an adoption activist who strongly advocates for transparency in adoption records, and the elimination of coercion and reproductive exploitation in modern adoption practice. Through her writing, organizing, and activism, Valerie was instrumental in obtaining a Senate Inquiry into illegal, unethical, and human rights abuses in postwar adoption practice in Canada.
https://sencanada.ca/en/info-page/parl-42-1/soci-adoption-mandate/. Valerie is the Executive Director of Origins Canada: Supporting those Separated by Adoption, a Federal Non-Profit organization providing support and resources to those separated by adoption.
www.originscanada.org

V Bragagnlo is passionate about deconstructing legislation that upholds popular narratives of violence. Currently, their research examines experiences of sexual violence on university campuses and works to identify possible paths for revisions in on-campus sexual violence policy and education programs. Their research interests include the theorizing of violence, social politics and queer theory.

Violet Ferreira Sutherland’s PhD thesis uses a Black feminist lens to analyse how the neoliberal turn to politicization and regulatory interventions of financial markets impact credit unions in worldwide processes of financialization, and how these interventions impact credit unions’ ability to serve marginalized groups within the social economy in Jamaica and Canada. Her thesis uses racial capitalism as an analytical framework to illuminate understandings of credit unions as “alternative” sites of financialization, stemming from its contested and contradictory relations with capitalism, not only from a historical perspective, but also over racially gendered ideologies of the present.

Youn Joung is a Ph.D. candidate whose work focuses on tracing genealogies of Korean feminist thoughts and praxis in connection to prostitution abolitionism and white feminist ideologies. It examines how subjectivities of sex workers in South Korea are constructed and represented in dominant feminist research and movements. It is particularly concerned with transnational feminisms, sex work studies, critical anti-trafficking discourses, and critical race theory.

Zahra Nader’s SSHRC-funded PhD research is focused on the political histories of Afghan women from the 1960s to the 1990s. She is also interested in media representation and identity formation.

Through writing, I advocate for gender equality in Afghanistan and beyond.