The Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies is a 21st-century research engine for the study of Canada and Canada in the world. We support York faculty, post-docs, graduate students, along with adjunct faculty and visiting fellows in critical, diverse and collaborative research leading to engaged research partnerships and projects, publications and intellectual exchange. The Robarts Centre provides leadership, funding, presentation and publication opportunities for graduate students through our Research Clusters and the Northern Studies Training Program.
As Research Associates, York graduate students have access to a list of opportunities to attend events, join interdisciplinary networks, and have additional academic experiences besides what is available in their programs. Launching in autumn 2021, Research Associates can take part in our new Robarts Connects Series, which aims at connecting York graduate students with each other, connecting your studies with your future, and connecting your research with unavoidable research themes in the contemporary Canadian landscape.
Scholars who have completed a PhD may apply (with sponsorship from a Faculty Associate at the Robarts Centre) to become a Research Associate for a two-year term. Research Associates are expected to present their work during their period of affiliation and are particularly encouraged to do so at the annual graduate student conference.
To join, please visit: https://www.yorku.ca/research/robarts/become-a-member/
Biographies and Research Profiles
Caleigh Aalders
M.A. Student, Public and International Affairs, Research Associate
An incorrigible transdisciplinarian, Caleigh holds degrees in classical singing, vocal and piano pedagogy, and a B.A. from the University of Victoria in Environmental Studies and English Literature. Caleigh’s past policy experience has focused on Canadian freshwater management and Indigenous rights. As a student in the Glendon Master of Public and International Affairs, her research areas are diversifying to include foreign relations and human rights protection under international law.
Email: caleigh.aalders@gmail.com
Ali Abbas
Ph.D. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
(A)(li)ttle bit of this and that, Ali’s interests are in the applications of technology within research and education. Since moving to Toronto in 2006, Ali has worked within a variety of companies dedicated to scaling some application of education technology. Ali is also pursuing his PhD studies in communications and culture. As a side, Ali also enjoys cultural studies and his work with such literature began during his formative years in Dubai when he sought to understand his family’s diasporic identity – he engaged with texts from the Middle East, East Africa and the Indo-Pak and crystallized his understandings through a Masters in Sociology. When asked to describe himself, Ali said, “I fear water far more than I fear thirst : my thirst is my own but the water is not. I am in control of what I sip but not of what happens beyond the sip. Once I take a sip, I tacitly consent to be a slave of the water’s desire and at any moment it may choose to do with me whatsoever it may please. I live with and in this fear, a fear that reminds me to respect all that is around me.”
Email: aliabbas0910@gmail.com
Mishall Ahmed
Ph. D. Candidate, Politics, Research Associate
Mishall Ahmed is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Politics at York University. Her research focuses on the use and applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in Canadian public sectors. Her research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS). She is interested in the challenges posed by the proliferation of AI in everyday life, the gendered and racialized effects of automation, and the political economy of techno-scientific innovations.
Email: mishall@yorku.ca
Roxana Akhbari
Ph.D. Candidate, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Research Associate
Roxana is a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York. In her dissertation, she examines the perpetuation of white supremacist heteropatriarchal liberal ideology in Canada’s redress politics for both Indigenous peoples and other racialized citizens. In doing so, she takes a law and literature approach to conceptualize grassroots works of literature (including a selection of novels and play) produced by people impacted by Canadian state crimes as dissenting storytelling voices that powerfully contest euphemistic representation of state crimes in Canada’s state apologies in particular and the perpetuation of liberal ideology in Canada’s redress politics in general
Email: rakhbari@yorku.ca
Michael Akladios
Ph.D., Heography, Research Associate
Michael Akladios is a Ph.D candidate in history at York University, working under the supervision of Dr. Roberto Perin. Michael’s dissertation examines the transnational, pluricultural, and ecumenical history of Coptic Orthodox Christian immigrants, first in Egypt and then later in the first and largest immigrant communities in Toronto, Montreal, and New York. He charts this groups’ immigration, settlement, integration, and associational activities since 1945. In addition to his doctoral research, Michael is the founder and project manager of the Coptic Canadian History Project (CCHP), a non-profit public history and community outreach organization affiliated with the Department of History and the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University Libraries.
Research Interests: Canadian History; Immigration and Ethnicity in North America; Middle East Studies; Coptic Studies; Transnationalism and Diaspora; Race and Racism.
Email: michaelakladios@gmail.com
Seyedmohsen Alavi
Ph.D. Candidate, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Seyedmohsen Alavi is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
Email: alavim@yorku.ca
Melissa Alexander
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History and Visual Culture, Research Associate
Melissa is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Visual Culture. Her research focuses on the experience of women artists in early twentieth-century Canada.
Email: malexa@yorku.ca
Najwa Alsilwadi
Ph.D. Candidate, Social Work, Research Associate
Najwa Alsilwadi is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Work at York University. She has rich experiences in practice experience, teaching and academic service. In 1999, she was the founding Director of the Community Action Center (CAC), an advocacy center affiliated with Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. She served as director until starting her doctoral studies in 2013. Her Ph.D. research examines Palestinian women’s first-hand knowledge of the need for an anti-colonial, feminist understanding of community organizing in Jerusalem. Her research enhances Social Work and other professions’ understanding of how women locally and globally organize and resist oppressive contexts, in particular under settler colonialism conditions.
Email: najwas@yorku.ca
Janice J. Anderson
Ph.D. Candidate, Humanities, Research Associate
Janice J. Anderson is a PhD candidate in Humanities at York University in Toronto. Her doctoral research, “Being Otherwise: Black Women’s Literary Interventions into Radical Being, Knowledge and Power,” considers self-fashioning and world-making in Black women’s intellectual traditions and literatures in the Americas. This research is supported by a Joseph Bombardier Scholarship. Her areas of research interest include the Black Radical Tradition, Black feminism/womanism, Black aesthetics and Black literatures. “I am grateful to the Robarts Centre for the support and space to examine Blackness in a Canadian context. Here I can further develop a scholarly practice that adheres to Canadian geographer Katherine Mc Kittrick’s admonishments to shift “our analytic frame away from the lone site of the suffering [Black] body” and “toward co-relational texts, practices, and narratives that emphasize black life” (McKittrick 2014). When the weather permits Anderson is an avid skier and member of the National Brotherhood of Skiers the oldest and largest Black ski club in world
Email: jandersonppc@gmail.com
Jessica Archibald
M.A. Candidate, Political Science, Research Associate
Jessica Archibald is a M.A. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at York University. She holds an H.B.A. from the University of Toronto in the fields of Political Science and Law, along with certificates in Global Sustainability and Global Perspectives, among others. Being fortunate enough to work as a research assistant at the undergraduate level, she plans to continue her work by examining sustainable urban policies in Canada.
Email: jessarch@yorku.ca
Hamza Arsbi
Ph.D. Student, Education, Research Associate
Hamza Arsbi is a Ph.D. researcher at the Faculty of Education focusing on Rural Education Policy. Formerly the founder of the Mind Lab, a non-profit working to increase quality education for children of refugees and underserved communities across Jordan. Hamza received a master’s degree in international development from the University of Manchester with a Chevening-Said Foundation Scholarship. He is an Obama Foundation Scholar, a fellow with the American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS), a Dalai Lama Fellow with the University of Virginia, and a Laureate Global Fellow with the International Youth Foundation.
Email: arsbi@yorku.ca
Desmond Asiedu
M.A. Student, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Desmond Asiedu has almost nine years of experience in the sustainability space, and his current research interests lie in the area of helping organizations/corporations become more sustainable and profit in an ecologically friendly way. He is interested in learning more about Canada’s environmental and sustainability landscape, leveraging its rich history and better understanding the steps it has taken to get to where it is today.
Email: dasiedu@yorku.ca
Ginelle Aziz
M.A.Sc. Student, Environmental Engineering, Research Associate
Ginelle Aziz (she/her), is a M.A.Sc. Civil Engineering student specializing in Environmental Engineering at York U. She completed her Civil B.Eng. at York as well. Her thesis revolves around the impacts temperature has on geothermal heating on groundwater, BTEX mobility, and biodegradation.
Email: ginelle2@my.yorku.ca
Megan Bailey
Health Policy & Equity, Research Associate
Megan completed a M.A. in Health, with a Specialization in Policy and Equity, at York University. She recently completed an Honours BSocSc in Criminology and the Social Science of Health from the University of Ottawa. Megan’s research focuses on the health inequities incarcerated individuals in Canada experience and the systemic health inequities of the criminal justice system fostered by present policies. Megan sees her research as an opportunity to promote human rights and more equitable criminal justice policies.
Research Interests: health equity, criminal justice reform, health policy, health and well-being of incarcerated individuals, human rights.
Amy Barlow
Ph.D. Candidate, Politics, Research Associate
Amy Barlow is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics. She holds an M.A. in Political Science and an H.B.A. in Political Science and History from the University of Toronto. Amy’s doctoral research comparatively examines the Canadian and American governmental emphasis on Islamic fundamentalist terrorism rather than white nationalist terrorism. Amy argues that governmental, mainstream media, and social media discourses produce and reproduce a narrative based on racial bias that causes a myopic view of threats that has fomented the unintended consequence of the rise of white nationalist terrorism.
Drew Danielle Belsky
Ph.D. Candidate, Science and Technology Studies, Research Associate
Building on my training in fine arts (Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin, Strasbourg) and interdisciplinary Masters in Fine Arts, Critical Disability Studies, and STS (York), my research interests revolve around bodies and visual production. Previous and ongoing projects address mobilizations of disabled bodies in contemporary art and aspects of consent in research and in art production. My doctoral work explores the construction of normal and abnormal embodiments through the social and material processes that shape the creation of biomedical visualizations. As a female-dominated field, the invisibility of medical illustrators as agents of knowledge creation contributes to the perception of medical images as unfiltered representations of the scientific truth of bodies. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Canadian and US graduate programs in medical illustration, my dissertation, entitled Making Bodies, Making Kin: Story-telling and the Professionalization of Medical Illustrators in North America, examines the role of disciplinary histories, narratives, and kinship metaphors in the training and professionalization of medical illustrators from the 20th century to the present.
Email: dbelsky@yorku.ca
Faidrex Leon Zahiti Bi
M.A. Student, Public and International Affairs, Research Associate
Faidrex Leon Zahiti Bi is a first-year student in the Masters in Public and International Affairs program. His research project is on climate and the environment in international relations. He volunteers for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL Canada) and recently was policy officer for environment, climate, and natural resources for a junior think tank.
Email: faidrex1@my.yorku.ca
Sophie Bisson
Ph.D. Candidate, Musicology, Research Associate, Former Member Robarts Executive Committee
Sophie Bisson is an opera singer and a doctoral candidate at York University where she is a graduate research associate of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies (RCCS) and co-editor of RCCS’s Canada Watch (Spring 2022 edition). She is also the creator and editor of the online Encyclopedia of Canadian Opera (spring 2022).
A recipient of the Sunnuz Sarah Taheri Graduate Award in Fine Arts and a Helen Carswell Research Grant, she has written numerous reviews and articles featuring Canadian musical content. She has presented on topics that include how institutional policies influence the creation of opera in Canada, re-righting the wrongs of Louis Riel’s Kuyas, the evolution and themes of the Canadian aria, and articles on the revival of Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus. She also presents on and guides others through the challenges and possible solutions for disseminating large-scale digital humanities projects in music and in the arts in general.
Sophie’s dissertation examines the representation of women in nine twenty-first century Canadian operas and her Helen Carswell research project revisits Canadian operatic history with an inclusive lens to highlight Black opera companies, works, and artists.
Research Interests: Digital Humanities, Italian and Canadian opera (representation, gender, race), decolonising curriculum, music reception, and music in Canadian internment camps.
Email: sbisson@yorku.ca
Julia Black
M.A. Student, Development Studies, Research Associate
Julia Black is a Master’s student in Development Studies. She is currently researching how Maternal Health Care Professionals in Northern Ontario position themselves and the care that they provide within the process of decolonizing healthcare. She is passionate about health equity, and sustainable and inclusive development.
Email: blacjuli@yorku.ca
Sarah Blacker
Post Doctoral Fellow Anthropology, Research Associate
Dr. Sarah Blacker is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, and a Research Associate at the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies. Her book manuscript in progress, Warding off Disease: Racialization and Health in Settler Colonial Canada, examines how public health and genomics initiatives tailored to racialized communities can exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, health inequities. She is currently teaching SOSC 3121 “Race and Health” in the Health & Society Program at York.
Email: sblacker@yorku.ca
C. Jennifer Bolton
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Research Associate
Email: boltoncj@yorku.ca
Anneka Bosse
Ph.D. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Anneka is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in Communication and Culture at York and Toronto Metropolitan Universities. Her research interests include labour migration in Canadian agriculture and food systems; nationalism and postcolonialism; social movements, activism, and community-engaged research. Anneka is also a member of the Niagara Migrant Workers Interest Group which provides support services for migrant agricultural workers living and working in the Niagara Region.
Email: abosse@yorku.ca
Miranda Brown
M.A. Student, Development Studies, Research Associate
Miranda is currently completing an MA in Development Studies at York University. Miranda had the opportunity to “grow up” in three different Western Canadian provinces (Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia), all of which inspired her interest in the interplay between resource development and regulatory policy.
Miranda’s research interests include regulatory policy, treaty rights, extraction development, resource governance, and impact assessments
Email: mirango@yorku.ca
Umbrin Bukan
Ph.D. Student, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Umbrin Bukan is a Ph.D. student in Social and Political Thought. Her research areas are in comparative politics and international relations, focusing on nationalism and museums, and nation building. Her dissertation explores nationalism in Canadian and Egyptian museums.
Email: umbrin@yorku.ca
Griffin Cahill
Ph.D. Student, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Research Associate
Griffin Cahill is a Ph.D. student in Linguistics & Applied Linguistics at York University. His research centres on languages undergoing revitalization, minority languages, indigenous languages, and the speech of “new speakers” of these languages in Canada and elsewhere. Some of his previous research projects have included: an investigation of ongoing phonological changes in Modern Irish, a phonetic description of the glottal stop in Teochew, and a comparison of the language policies of Haiti and the Seychelles as they relate to their local French-lexified creole languages.
Email: gvcahill@york.ca
Melinda Ann Callahan
Ph.D. Candidate, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Melinda Ann Callahan is a Ph.D. candidate in Social and Political Thought. Her area of research focuses on using the concepts of biopolitics, necropolitics, and Bare Life (Agamben) to study the Anthropocene, and more specifically, she intends to use these concepts as tools to highlight internal climate-driven migration in Canada. She has always viewed how the Canadian state defines, manages, and tackles biopolitics within its own borders as being problematic (especially in regards to the Indigenous peoples), but as climate change and unpredictable weather phenomenon have begun to turn to the extreme these last few years (the NWT-Alberta-BC fires in 2023; massive floods in Eastern Canadian cities in 2024), Melinda believes it is important to study how Canada intends to tackle internal climate-migration within its own borders. Whether that is through its emergency response operations at a provincial/territorial level, comprehensive climate change action plans done at the federal level, and even how Canada intends to define who is, and who is not, a “climate-migrant” within its own borders – these discussions are important to have before climate change-driven extreme-weather-phenomenon begins to escalate in severity and frequency.
Email: mcallah@yorku.ca
Cameron Cannon
M.A. Student, Political Science, Research Associate
Cameron Cannon is a political science M.A. student particularly interested in understanding the process of Canadian settler colonialism through the lens of uneven and combined development. Their work has appeared in Canadian Dimension, Passage, The Manitoban, The Media Co-op, and The Sioux Lookout Bulletin.
Cameron is a non-status Anishinaabe and non-binary person that values research as a means of social transformation. Their research experiences have included working with First Nations communities in Treaty 3 and 9 territory on residential school survivor led initiatives, supporting and deepening collaborative repatriation efforts at the University of Manitoba, and re-framing RCAP from an Indigenous Marxist standpoint.
They are the recipient of a 2022-23 SSHRC grant and the Packer Award in Social Justice.
Their research interests include: the political economy of Canadian settler colonialism; social movements; subalternity; Marxism and Indigenous peoples; the national question in Canada; subject formation as it relates to urban and rural development.
Email: cannonc@yorku.ca
Jean Phillipe Carlos
Postdoctoral Fellow, History, Research Associate
Jean-Philippe Carlos is Ph.D. in History (University of Sherbrooke, 2020). He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at York University in Toronto, where he works under the supervision of Professor Marcel Martel. Specializing in the intellectual and political history of Quebec and Canada in the 20th century, he is particularly interested in the history of ideas in French-speaking communities, socio-political movements, the history of economic thought and historiographical debates.
As part of his postdoctoral project, he studies the integration of economic experts within the high political spheres of the Quebec state during the Quiet Revolution, including their networks, ideas and strategies of influence. From a comparative perspective, he wants to compare the Quebec model to the Ontario model, in order to find out whether the two provinces share similarities in the development of scientific expertise and the deployment of economic technocracy in the second half of the 20th century.
Lauren Castelino
M.E.S. Candidate, Research Associate
Lauren Castelino is an M.E.S. Candidate at York University with a specialization in business sustainability and social change. She is the founder of a non-profit organization called the Green Career Centre that prepares underrepresented youth for green careers. Her master’s research, taking the form of a quilted cellphilm, investigates the funding struggles and inequities faced by racialized climate justice activists. Lauren is the recipient of 40+ scholarships, awards, and bursaries for her academic, entrepreneurial and sustainability excellence. In her free time, she likes to get crafty, climb at her local bouldering centre, and try her hand at new recipes in the kitchen.
Email: laulen@yorku.ca
Johannes Chan
Ph.D. Student, Science and Technology Studies, Research Associate
Johannes Chan is a Ph.D. student in the department of Science & Technology Studies researching the environmental and social history of watermills in Ontario and their relationship to British colonialism and empire.
Email: johannes.r.chan@gmail.com
Yuly Chan
Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Research Associate
Yuly Chan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology. Her research interests are in urban politics, social movements, political economy, and urban theory. Her dissertation research focuses on the political economy of social housing, and specifically, the processes of commodification and decommodification of housing through a comparative historical approach of social housing in Toronto, Berlin, and Vienna.
Email: yuly@yorku.ca
Seemil Chaudhry
Ph.D. Candidate, Social Anthropology, Research Associate
Seemil Chaudhry is a Toronto/Tkaronto-based visual artist and Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at York. Her research project explores intergenerational memories, histories, heritage, and cultural production in South Asian transnational diasporic contexts through a feminist and decolonial lens. Seemil’s primary research interests are arts and culture, diaspora studies, memory studies, gender and feminism, and history.
Email: seemil28@yorku.ca
Emily Collins
Ph.D. Student, Cinema and Media Studies, Research Associate
Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and Ph.D. student in Cinema and Media Arts at York University whose SSHRC-funded project draws on contemporary perspectives in sound studies and critical theory to examine sonic ecologies of resistance and communities of care within film/media artworks and creative practices. She has professional experience across research networks, arts organizations, and public institutions, including Archive/Counter-Archive, PUBLIC Journal, OCAD University, VUCAVU, TIFF, and the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Emily is a Graduate Research Associate at Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and a Graduate Associate at the Centre for Feminist Research.
Email: emecoll@yorku.ca
Zachary Consitt
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Research Associate
Zachary Consitt is a History Ph.D. candidate at York University specializing in Canadian cultural and sport history in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Specifically, his dissertation focusses on how Canada used the occasion of the Olympics to unify the country and display its perceptions of modernity to the world by hosting, participating, and excelling in the international sporting spectacle. Canadian federal interest also extended to promoting nationwide fitness campaigns by funding the popular arm’s length agency, ParticipACTION. He is a recipient of the 2021-22 Avie Bennett Historica Canada Dissertation Scholarship in Canadian History.
Email: zconsitt10@gmail.com
Justine Conte
Ph.D. Candidate, Theatre and Performance Studies, Research Associate
Justine Conte is a Ph.D. candidate in York’s Theatre and Performance Studies department. Her current work places focus how subjectivities come to be imagined through everyday experiences of coffee consumption.
Email: conte@yorku.ca
Christine Rose Cooling
M.A. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Christine Rose Cooling is an M.A. student in the Joint Communication & Culture Program with York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research areas include Canadian broadcasting history and the relationship between contemporary Canadian broadcasting policy and governing Canadian culture. She is currently completing a SSHRC-funded thesis with the working title, “Requiem for a Century? Reflections on Revising Canada’s 1991 Broadcasting Act in the Digital Age.” She recently published work in the Journal of Radio & Audio Media as a co-author with Dr. Anne F. MacLennan, “The Impact of the British Broadcasting Corporation on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.” She was also awarded the Governor General Silver Medal for academic excellence in 2023 and the Odessa Prize for the Study of Canada in 2023 for her undergraduate thesis entitled, “Reimagining Broadcasting Policy in a Networked Canada: Debating Digital Sovereignty and Democratic Freedom” at York University, BA Hons. Communication & Media Studies.
Email: ccools@yorku.ca
Bonita Das Bhatla
Ph.D. Candidate, Human Resource Management, Research Associate
Bonita is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Resource Management at York University. Her research interests include skilled migrants’ integration in Canada, including job search strategies and, identity resilience in the face of experienced incivility. She holds a B.A. (Hons.) Psychology from the University of Delhi, India and two Master’s degrees in Industrial Relations and in Occupational Psychology from the University of London, U.K. She is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society.
Bonita teaches courses in Human Resources and Equity Studies at York University.
Research keywords: skilled migrants, diaspora, globalization, identity, diversity
Email: bonitadb@yorku.ca
Julia De Kwant
M.A. Student, Art History and Visual Culture, Research Associate
Julia is currently completing an M.A. in Art History and Visual Culture at York University in conjunction with a Curatorial Practice diploma. She completed her B.A. in History and Visual Culture at the University of Waterloo. Currently her research examines the intersection of gender and public viewing practices of art in early-twentieth century Toronto.
Email: jdekwant@yorku.ca
Méline Delestre
M.A. Student Public and International Affairs, York and Sciences, Po Strasbourg, Research Associate
After a two years bachelor’s in political sciences at Sciences Po Strasbourg, Méline went on an exchange program in Japan at the University of Tokyo. Her main domains of interest are social sciences, environmental and energy issues, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. She is currently a research assistant for Professors Francis Garon and Rémi Vivès for a research project about Chinese interference in Canadian politics. Méline looks forward to discovering the research domain and exploring new topics on Canada’s environmental and social issues with the Robarts Centre.
Email: melined@yorku.ca
Arshad (Ash) Desai
M.A. History, Research Associate
Arshad Desai holds a B.A. in History and the Black Canadian Studies Certificate from York University. As an undergraduate student at York, Ash co-founded the Harriet Tubman Junior Fellows initiative and organized the inaugural “Blackness in the Academy” Symposium.
With an emphasis on oral history, he seeks to uncover the role of Black Canadian activism in Southern African liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century. The role of Canadian Black organizations in the transnational struggle against anti-apartheid is important for its influence on Black activism’s eventual pivot towards combating systemic racism in Canada.
Born in South Africa to a Black anti-apartheid Freedom Fighter, Ash knows the importance of oral history and its necessity in retelling the narratives of Freedom Fighters. He seeks to emphasize the importance of Canadian Black activism both within Canada and in African liberation movements.
Email: arshadsdesai@gmail.com
Patrick L. Desjardins
Ph.D. , Political Science, Research Associate
Patrick Desjardins is a Ph.D. in Political Science at York University. Employing a comparative perspective, his dissertation asks, “Why do some federal countries exhibit greater intergovernmental accountability than others”? Focusing on the nexus of representation of federated units in national legislatures and regionalism as a political force, he compares the politics of intergovernmental accountability in Canada, Australia, Austria and Switzerland by relating each country’s intergovernmental accountability regimes to the representation of federated units in national legislatures.
Dissertation aside, Patrick is also interested in Canadian language policy and politics, varieties of federalism(s), federalism and social policy, and the influence of federalism on civil society.
Sophia De Toma-Pleitez
M.A. Politics, Research Associate
Sophia De Toma-Pleitez is an M.A. student in the department of politics. She came to York because of its research in Canadian politics. Her major research project surrounds Indigenous child welfare in Yukon. In the future, Sophia hopes to continue doing research on marginalized communities in the north.
Email: detomas@yorku.ca
Navjot Dhaliwal
Ph.D. Student, Geography, Research Associate
Navjot Dhaliwal is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Geography at York University. He is currently researching insights into collective resource management between the First Nations communities of Lake Nipigon Basin and the Government of Ontario, to re-imagine a governance framework that incorporates Indigenous knowledge. It specifically highlights the value of Indigenous knowledge, the process through which we can braid this knowledge with Western science, and how these efforts can promote Canadian reconciliation with Indigenous communities. Furthermore, this scholarship will look to address the societal barriers that marginalize Indigenous communities, and how we can work towards reconciliation in a collective manner.
Email: navdha@yorku.ca
Jeff Donison
Ph.D. Candidate, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Jeff is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communication and Culture program at York University. His current research focuses on participatory cultures and digital technology, specifically dealing with identity and representation in Canadian podcasting and the use of sound as a primary epistemological tool for decolonizing historical narratives.
Email: jdonison@yorku.ca
Alireza Gorgani Dorcheh
Ph.D. Candidate, Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, Research Associate
Alireza Gorgani Dorcheh (they/them) is a migrant worker and polydisciplinamory artist who lives in Tkaronto, Treaty Thirteen. Holding a Master’s degree in Theatre Direction, they have a background in community-based theatre, film, and multimedia art practices that often deal with sociopolitical issues. They are currently doing a Ph.D. in Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at York University where they span performance and anthropology to investigate the issues of migrant workers’ precarious status through a queer lens.
Email: agorgani@yorku.ca
Frances Dorenbaum
Ph.D. Student, Art History and Visual Culture, Research Associate and member Robarts Executive Committee
Frances is a first year Ph.D. student in Art History and Visual Culture at York University and an independent curator of photography. Her research revolves around the relationship between images and texts and currently focuses on transnational photojournalistic representations of Canada.
Email: fdorenb@yorku.ca
Alana Duggan
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History and Visual Culture, Research Associate
Alana is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History & Visual Culture at York University. Her dissertation examines the mid-19th century art world that emerged from William Notman’s photography studio in Montreal as a foundational narrative for deconstructing socio-political relationships, power structures, and the enduring impact of colonial legacies in the present. While roles within the art world, canonical works, and cultural institutions were still being established by the ruling class, this network remained flexible, sustained by the labour of diverse participants. By refocusing on these marginalized voices, she reinterprets this complex art world through narrative methodology and a theoretical framework rooted in settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and global capitalism.
Email: alana70@yorku.ca
Caroline Duncan
Ph.D. Candidate, Civil Engineering, Research Associate
Caroline Duncan is a Ph.D. Candidate at York University studying decentralised water treatment with a focus in on Arctic drinking water treatment in Canada. Previous to her studies here at York, Caroline has a background in marine biology and climate change. She has spent her career so far holding different hats, from environmental scientist, science communications and business development.
Outside of studies, Caroline volunteers her time to the GOES Foundation, and has volunteered her time in the past to the Rotary Club (Scotland) and Rural Water Watch (Nova Scotia).
In her spare time, Caroline enjoys most of her time in the outdoors partaking in various activities – from hiking, biking, sailing, skiing etc (season depending).
Email: cd1224@yorku.ca
NseAbasi Etim
Ph.D. , Biology, Research Associate
Dr. NseAbasi NsikakAbasi Etim is a PhD candidate in Department of Biology of York University. With previous degrees in Animal Physiology, she has undertaken to study the impacts of environmental pollutants, particularly zinc on aquatic environment, using zebrafish as a model. She believes that findings from her research will help address some environmental issues within and outside Canada and also help in creating a safe environment for animals and humans.
Joshua Falek
Ph.D. Candidate, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Research Associate
Joshua Falek is a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies. They have been published in journals including the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Their research explores the contingencies of the recent recognition of non-binary embodiment by the Canadian state and the relations between this recognition and anti-Black colonial affective infrastructures.
Email: jbfalek@yorku.ca
Dominik Formanowicz
Ph.D. Student, Human Geography, Former Member Robarts Executive Committee, Research Associate
Dominik is a 2nd year PhD student in Human Geography at York University, particularly interested in transnational ties formed between the Global South and North and by rural-urban migrations within and outside of the Global South. After acquiring two master’s degrees (Law degree in Poland and Human Geography in the Netherlands) and years of diverse work experiences, he seeks interdisciplinary projects. Privately, he is the author of a published novel and a blog.
Email: dominik.formanowicz@gmail.com
Chris Francois
M.A. Student, Development Studies, Research Associate
Chris Francois is a master’s student in the Development Studies program at York. She holds a Master of Management Science in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University and a Bachelor of Science in Peace Studies from Manchester University. Her proposed research project focuses on the impact of diaspora attitudes towards queerness on the sense of belonging of LGBTQI+ Latin American newcomers to Canada. Her research interests also include Canadian immigration policy and diaspora politics in Canada
Email: cf98@yorku.ca
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Irene Kaye Galido
M.A. Political Science, Research Associate
Irene Kaye Galido has completed a Specialized Honours B.A. in Political Science with certifications in Public Policy Analysis (CPPA) and Public Administration and Law (CPAL) at York University. While completing her M.A. in Political Science, her research project examined the gendered impacts of COVID-19 policy responses on racialized women in Canada. Her research interests include social policy, political economy, gender equality, intersectionality, and migration.
Email: irenekg@my.yorku.ca
Shreyashi Ganguly
Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Research Associate
Shreyashi Ganguly is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at York University. Shreyashi’s research explores the idea of desi humour in stand-up comedy in Toronto as a distinct form of diasporic South Asian cultural-humorous expression. Shreyashi seeks to find out how participation in this form of humour leads to the consolidation as well as problematization of a collective South Asian identity among the diaspora in Canada and the significance this comic genre has on the broader politics of representation of a South Asian identity in the contemporary Canadian public sphere.
Email: shreyag4@yorku.ca
Karl Gardner
Ph.D. Political Science, Research Associate
Karl Gardner is an organizer, educator, and student committed to migrant justice and Indigenous solidarity. He is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at York University, where he engages in research on social movements, citizenship and immigration, and municipal politics in Canada. Specifically, his work focuses on the relationship between migrant justice movements and sanctuary city policies in Canada, and the potential to envision a new local politics of citizenship and solidarity within and against state-defined categories of migrant ‘il/legality’. His side projects touch on theories and practices Indigenous-settler solidarity; settler colonialism and the Canadian identity; and neoliberalism, gentrification, and ‘social mixing’ policies in Toronto.
Research Interests: citizenship and immigration; social movements; sanctuary cities; Canadian politics; municipal politics; settler colonialism; decolonization
Sarah Ghrawi
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Research Associate
Sarah Ghrawi is a Ph.D. Candidate in the history program at York. Her research explores key issues regarding surveillance in department stories between the 1890s and 1960s, focusing on Toronto and Montreal. She also serves as an instructor at the York Writing Centre.
Email: sarah.ghrawi17@gmail.com
Wilbur Greer
B.A. Student, History, Research Associate
Wilbur Greer is a 4th year undergraduate History student pursuing a M.A. in History. He is currently working as a research associate with the records of the late Dr. Bonnie Burstow, a professor, feminist therapist and anti-psychiatry activist. He does this under the supervision of Professor Megan Davies and Dr. Efrat Gold as part of York University’s Public History certification. He holds a broad interest in anti-psychiatry and disabled activism, as well as a specific interest in the historical portrayal of disabled people within the science fiction genre.
Email: greer11@my.yorku.ca
Tariq Habibyar
Post Doctoral Fellow, LA&PS, Research Associate
Dr. Tariq Habibyar’s involvement in the ‘Singing Our Stories’ project, led by Dr. Emberly, commenced in July 2023. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Liberal Arts and Professional Studies (LA&PS) at York University, Tariq collaborates with Afghan refugee youth and children to explore the role of music and storytelling in shaping their evolving identities in Canada. Tariq served as a senior advisor with the Ministry for Children in New Zealand. Over the years, he has gained extensive experience in various social, educational, advocacy, and international humanitarian projects, mainly inside Afghanistan. Tariq actively supported small and medium enterprises within local communities.
Email: tariq.habibyar@gmail.com
Shafagh Hadavi
M.A. Student, Interdisciplinary Studies, Research Associate
Shafagh Hadavi is a composer, visual artist, and researcher based in Toronto. Her music has been featured in festivals, blogs, and radio stations across Europe, the US, and Canada, and also performed by Canadian artists. She has performed and collaborated with a number of musicians across different genres. Since 2014, she has worked with multicultural visual artists in Ontario on a project experimenting with the impact of music on visual arts. Her innovative interdisciplinary project VISUALEARS aims to explore music perception and cognition, as well as the experience of mood immersion through the visualization of music, a sonic, gestural phenomenon, by contemporary visual artists, and a consequent immersive experience of simultaneous music-listening and art-watching by a global, virtual audience. She was the recipient of 2021 SSHRC grant.
Email: shafaghh@yorku.ca
Stephanie L. Hastick
M.A. Student, Political Science, Research Associate
Stephanie L. Hastick was born and raised in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. In the 2024-2025 academic year, Stephanie will be completing a Master of Arts degree in Political Science at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with a focus on reforms to democratize the Canadian Senate. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, from York University. In her free time, she actively participates and volunteers in her community at all levels of the Canadian government. Her research interests include Canadian politics, electoral reform, voter participation, and democratic governance.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1515-5974
Email: slhastick@gmail.com
David Hazzan
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Research Associate
David is a PhD candidate (ABD) at York U History, specializing in Canadian, Western Cultural, and Social History. His primary focus is on the cultural and subcultural history of drug use in Canada and around the world.
Email: dhazzan@yorku.ca
Racelar Ho
Ph.D. Student, Digital Media, Research Associate
Racelar Ho is a PhD student in Digital Media at York University under supervision by Professor Graham Wakefield. She completed her master’s degree of Experimental Art and bachelor degree of Architecture and Landscape Design from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts(GAFA) with prominent achievements on both research and creation and also studied in Sculpture Creation at Sungshin Women University as an exchange student.
As a researcher, she primarily focuses on ‘the viability of digital games as an independent genre of fine arts’, ‘the history, development, and discourses features of computer-generated arts’, ‘the influence of dialogues methodologies between creators and audiences under infinite virtual environments’ and seeks a way to smooth the gaps within science and humanities.
As an artist, to construct a hybrid-infinite world to express her poetic thoughts about Zen dialogues in different dimensions and to explore the idealistic world of transcendent beings are vital aims of her creation. This is the world which separates into four sections – objective realm, subjective realm, transcendental subjective realm, and transcendent objective realm – to reflect and observe the world of life existence.
Email: racelar@yorku.ca
Kacie G. Hopkins
Ph.D. Candidate, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Kacie G. Hopkins (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate with expertise in community economies, feminist social enterprises, and geographies of rural women’s handmade crafts and creativity. She studies in the Communication and Culture program at York University. Her field research for her dissertation takes her to rural Nova Scotia and rural Kentucky to study women organized craft fairs and rural arts cooperatives.
Email: kacieghopkins@gmail.com
Alexander Hughes
Ph.D. History, Research Associate
Alexander is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History, specializing in Canadian, American, and Cultural history. His research focuses on the commodification of pizza in Toronto, Ontario and Buffalo, New York between 1950 and 1990. He charts Italian immigration, business formation, consumption patterns, and the creation of pizza as a uniquely Canadian food.
Gillian Hutchison
Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Research Associate
Gillian Hutchison is a political science Ph.D. candidate at York University researching the regulatory environment of mineral mining interprovincially as corelates internationally. She is particularly interested in the Robarts Centre for its key principle “connecting Canada to the world.” My focus is on Canadian mining corporations and their involvement in the national and international mineral extractive industry. Characteristics of Canada’s unique style of federalism are significant to extractivism and contribute to Canada’s perception abroad. Her interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR), which began during her Masters’ studies at the University of Windsor now includes environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges.
Email: ghutch@yorku.ca
Aqeel Ihsan
Ph. D. Candidate, History, Research Associate
Aqeel Ihsan is a Ph.D. History Candidate at York University, specializing in Migration and Food History. His research interests focus on the South Asian diaspora currently residing in Canada. His doctoral dissertation seeks to conduct a food history of Toronto by placing ‘smelly cuisines’ at the center and chronologically tracing the history of the most prominent site where South Asian immigrants, beginning in the early 1970s, could purchase and consume South Asian foodstuffs, the Gerrard India Bazaar.
Email: aqeel8@my.yorku.ca
B Anne Jackson
Ph.D. Critical Disability Studies and Research Associate
Anne Jackson is a 4th year PhD candidate in CDS with a research thesis in unconscious biases in film and television towards people with disabilities as portrayed in modern film and television. She completed her masters in Inclusive Design at OCADU, 2015 creating a practice based research project; scuba diving with a disability, a documentary film about Tom scuba diving with quadriplegia. She has created more short documentaries on the subject of reducing the divide between able/disable
By profession, Anne Jackson is an IT Accessibility Consultant working in all electronic media to help make the world a more inclusive place.
Azeezah Jafry
M.A. Health Policy and Equity, Research Associate
Azeezah completed a BSc (Hons) at the University of Toronto in Health Studies. She is pursuing a Masters in Health with a specialization in Health Policy and Equity. Azeezah’s current research focuses on special education policies and their relation to the school to prison pipeline in Ontario. Throughout her academic career and through her work in the non-profit sector, Azeezah also developed an interest in disability rights, transforming public education, and sustainable, community-based programming. Azeezah uses an intersectional lens to inform her research and aims to do the same in policy and practice, to the best of her ability.
Elizabeth (Liz) Jansen
Ph.D. Student, History, Research Associate
Liz Jansen is a Ph.D. Student in Canadian and Environmental History at York University. Her Mennonite ancestors immigrated to Canada in the 1920s from the Soviet Union, now Ukraine, settling in Alberta and Saskatchewan before moving to Ontario. She studies how their values, beliefs, and way of life influenced how they adapted interculturally with Indigenous peoples and non-Mennonite settlers, and ecologically—and what they still teach us. She holds an Honours B.A. from the University of Waterloo and a master’s in interdisciplinary studies from York.
Email: ejansen@yorku.ca
Cassandra Jesik
M.A. Candidate, Art History, Research Associate
Cassandra Jesik (she/her) is currently a student in the M.A. Art History program at York University. Her current work centres on Canadian artist Joyce Wieland’s depictions of the Arctic during the 1970s and early 1980s. As a researcher, Cassandra is passionate about bringing attention to handicrafts and textile arts, which have been historically neglected from the canon of art history. Interested in exploring ideas of sovereignty, land and politics, Cassandra aspires to work as a curator, envisioning exhibitions as a way to challenge current discourses and amplify underrepresented voices.
Cindy Jiang
Ph.D. Student, Critical Disability Studies, School of Health Policy Management, Research Associate
Whether in the field of health, human rights, or disability rights, Cindy Jiang’s passion is working with people to create community. Cindy conducted research for the Strength in Unity (Vancouver site) project, a national men’s mental health research study looking at how to reduce the stigma of mental illness among Asian men in Canada. While working in the non-profit sector, she co-developed and implemented a social enterprise and skills training program, Threadworks, for people with disabilities in Vancouver. This program empowered participants used their newly learned skills to earn income in addition to their social benefits.
She has worked organizations such as the Centre for Excellence for Women’s Health, Simon Fraser University, Craftworks Society, the Fraser Health Authority, the Provincial Health Services Authority, and York University. Her research interests include social inequities in health, particularly mental health and disability health promotion.
Currently, she is in the first year of her PhD program in Critical Disability Studies at York.
Email: cindyj@yorku.ca
Benjamin Johnson
Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Research Associate
Benjamin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University with a focus in security studies. He is currently supervised by Gabrielle Slowey (Robarts Director) and is researching the use and development of surveillance technologies in the Canadian Arctic within a critical security framework. Specifically, Benjamin is examining how these technologies are expected to contribute to the defence of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty and whether they represent a continuation or new defence strategy by the Canadian state.
Research Interests: International Relations; Security Studies; Political Economy; Canadian politics; Labour Studies.
Abraham Joseph
Ph.D. Student, Health Policy and Equity, Research Associate
Abraham Joseph completed his Master of Arts (MA) in health policy and equity at York University in June 2020 and is now a doctoral student in the same program. His research explores intersections of power and mental health policy. He is interested in the ways in which power dynamics influence our ability to live safe, healthy (physically, mentally, socially), fulfilling, and meaningful lives.
Email: aj78@yorku.ca
Shruti Kalyanaraman
Ph.D. Candidate, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Research Associate
Shruti is attached to York University’s Ph.D. program in the Gender, Feminist and Women’s studies department. Her training includes an interdisciplinary background in business management and women’s studies. She has over ten years of experience in gender research that includes evaluation projects on social policy and non-profit governance. Shruti’s specific interests include Informal, care work performed by immigrant women and their interactions with multiple stakeholders like family, state, local government and social economy. At York, she teaches in the fields of gender, work and social economy basics, including governance issues of co-operatives, non-profits, and civil society organizations.
Email: shruti86@yorku.ca
Alia Karim
Ph.D. Candidate, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Alia Karim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She has a Master of Environmental Studies from Dalhousie University and Honours Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Mount Allison University.
Her research interests include Indigenous labour, Canadian labour movements, labour-community coalitions, labour geography, anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist political economy, and eco-socialism. She is currently exploring the relations between humans, nature, and economic ‘growth’ in the fields of Indigenous studies, Marxist ecology, eco-feminism, and ecological economics.
In her doctoral research, she will further investigate the ‘hidden’ histories of Indigenous labourers in Canada and their importance in the national economy, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers, and consider how non-Indigenous people can learn from Indigenous worldviews about the relations between land, production, and all living beings (including non-human beings). She has recently written about the Just Transition movement for an energy transition that protects workers and centers social equity, and how immigrant and racialized women are organizing against precarious work.
In addition to her academic research, she is the coordinator of the Fight for $15 and Fairness campaign at York University, and she is VP Campaigns in the York University Graduate Students’ Association.
sativa kawakami
M.A. Student, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
tiva (she/her) is a master’s student in Environmental Studies. Her research centers plant-human relations to unpack settler colonialism and contemporary Settles identities in Turtle Island /Canada. She also explores multispecies art and land-based learning as way for humans to imagine thickening their relations with more-than-human beings. tiva feels deeply inspired by her grandparents to incorporate her positionality as a Settler-Michif women into her work.
Email: tivak@yorku.ca
Deanne Kearney
Ph.D. Candidate, Dance Studies, Research Associate
Deanne Kearney is a Ph.D. Candidate in Dance Studies at York University, specializing in the analysis of Canadian arts funding models and their implications for the dance sector. In addition to her academic pursuits, she is a dance writer, researcher, and critic. Her scholarly and critical writings are available in her portfolio at DeanneKearney.com. For a deeper dive into dance reviews, she runs DanceDebrief.ca. Kearney is committed to rigorous research and insightful criticism, aiming to contribute significantly to the field of dance studies
Email: dkearney@yorku.ca
Ryan Kelpin
Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Research Associate
Ryan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at York University with a focus on urban governance and politics. He is currently supervised by Karen Murray and is researching the intergovernmental relationship between the province of Ontario and the City of Toronto during the last 25 years of state neoliberalization. Specifically, Ryan is examining how this intergovernmental relationship is used to further depoliticize and de-democratize governance and decision-making processes in the City of Toronto. Most recently, he has explored creative city discourse and critical urban theory in Toronto, resulting in the (forthcoming) article “Morality on Tap: The Production and Consumption of Morality by “’Vegandale’” in the Canadian Journal of Urban Research.
Research Interests: urban governance; political economy; Canadian politics; actually-existing neoliberalism; neoliberalism; democracy; critical urban theory.
Email: kelpinry@yorku.ca
Michael Kenny
Ph.D. Student, Education, Research Associate
Michael is a Ph.D. student is the Faculty of Education. Michael has presented at international and national conferences on issues relating to education, sustainability, politics and housing. He has over a decade of experience in positions of leadership and management, serving as an Executive Director, President, Board Member and Office Manager for various organizations. Michael has been the recipient of over 20 awards and scholarships for his professional and academic work. He is currently completing his dissertation research on environmental education and post-secondary students.
Email: ecomike@yorku.ca
Aaliya Khan
Ph.D. Student, Social and Political Thought
Aaliya is a Ph.D. Student in the department of Social and Political Thought who is interested in the relationships Muslim women have with Canadian space and the relationships that Canadian space has with Muslim women. She has a background in Urban and Regional Planning from Toronto Metropolitan University, where she explored barriers Muslim communities experienced in their attempts to build mosques in the Greater Toronto Area, whether they be legal, discretionary or prompted by community mobilizing. She also has worked on various projects related to gender-based violence, gendered Islamophobia, Islamophobia and anti-racism in academic and non-profit environments. In her free time, Aaliya likes to dabble in Arabic calligraphy, lift heavy weights and tweet @aaliyamkhan.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to Aaliya at kaaliya@my.yorku.ca
Zainab Khan
M.A. Health Policy and Equity, Research Associate
Zainab Khan is a M.A. student in the Department of Health, specializing in Health Policy and Equity. She has obtained an Honours B.Sc in Health Studies, with a Pre-Clinical Specialization at the University of Waterloo (2020). Her current research focuses on the impact of Islamophobia on the mental-wellbeing of post-secondary students. She aims to understand the perspectives of students at York University to determine the effect that targeted discrimination has on Muslim minorities.
HaEun Kim
Ph.D. Student, Applied Linguistics
HaEun Kim is a Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics at York University. Her research interests include language and literacy education, language politics, language learning in displacement, emancipatory literacy, and understanding barriers that prevent access to learning in urban contexts such as Toronto as well as settings considered to be ‘education in emergencies’. She has over six years of practical experience in project management, teaching, and community outreach working with refugee teachers in Dadaab, Kenya as well as an outreach worker for youth and families living in high-priority communities in Toronto, Canada.
Email: haeunk@yorku.ca
Stefanie Kiriazis
M.A. Candidate, Human Geography, Research Associate
Stefanie Kiriazis is an M.A. candidate in human geography researching public toilet access in the Greater Toronto Area
Email: stefkiri@yorku.ca
Hailey Kobrin
Graduate Student, Art History and Visual Culture, Research Associate
Hailey Kobrin is a writer and researcher currently investigating affect in food and performance studies in connection to Jewish identity.
Email: hkobrin@yorku.ca
Julianna Kowlessar
Ph.D. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Julianna Kowlessar is a first-year Ph.D. student in the joint Communication & Culture program at York and Toronto Metropolitan Universities. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Science in Psychology, an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies, summa cum laude, and an M.A. in Communication & Culture from York University. Her research centers on the benefits of teaching critical media literacy education in K-12 Toronto classrooms and using games as forms of pedagogy. The research Julianna conducted for her master’s thesis explored how pre-service teachers understand and approach the subject of critical media literacy to discover practical and unique methods of teaching it to their future students.
Email: jkwlsr@yorku.ca
Evangeline Kroon
Ph.D. Candidate, Politics, Research Associate, Former Member Robarts Executive Committee
Evangeline Kroon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at York University where her interests include elections and the environment, women and violence within popular culture, as well as gender and its role in Canadian politics. Her current research looks at Green party success in Guelph, Ontario and the political, environmental, and gendered aspects that contributed to this success. More broadly, her research traces the history of Green party success in Canada, Western Europe, and Oceania. Prior to coming to York, Evangeline examined narratives of violence against women in post-apocalyptic pop-culture to earn her MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice Policy at the University of Guelph.
Research Interests: Politics and Government; Elections; Canadian Politics; Environment; Climate Change; Feminist Theory; Gender Issues; European Politics; Violence and Society, Popular Culture
Email: ekroon@yorku.ca
Danielle Landry
Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Research Associate
Danielle Landry is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at York University. Landry’s SSHRC-funded doctoral research focuses on the activist knowledge-practices of psychiatric consumer/survivor businesses in Ontario in the 1990s. Most recently, her work has been published in: Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability & Society, and Studies in the Education of Adults. She teaches courses in Mad Studies and Disability Studies at Ryerson University. She was the 2020 recipient of the Wilhelm Cohnstaedt Social Justice Award.
Research Interests: Mad studies; disability studies; sociology of health and illness; work and labour; social movements.
Email: dlandry@yorku.ca
Marianne Laplante
Ph.D. Candidate, Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Research Associates
Marianne Laplante is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics & Applied Linguistics at York University. Her research focuses on language and law, more specifically courtroom discourse, ideologies, power relations, textuality, as well as interactional, social, and syntactic agency. Some of her work includes an analysis of blame attribution through syntactic agency in Québec courtrooms and media discourse of Québécois newspapers on #MeToo cases.
Email: lapmar@yorku.ca
Maryam Lashkari
Ph.D., Human Geography, Research Associate
Maryam Lashkari has completed her Ph.D. in Human Geography at York University in 2024. Her areas of research include feminist geopolitics, transnational migration, and urban geography. In her research project she explored how Iranian feminist activist migrants resist, negotiate and counter geopolitical structures of patriarchal violence and displacement. Using semi-structured interviews with activists across Europe and Canada, media analysis and (visual) ethnography, she engages with feminist and urban geopolitical scholarship to examine counter-geopolitical knowledges, practices, and spaces in Iranian diasporas.
Email: maryamlk@yorku.ca
Stephanie Latella
Ph.D. Candidate, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Stephanie Latella is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University. Situated in the fields of white settler colonial studies, queer of colour critique, and cultural studies, her work concerns nationalism in Quebec from the 1960s to the present. Her dissertation project examines how narratives of the October Crisis construct race, gender, and sexuality in different political and historical moments from 1970 to the present.
Email: stephanie.m.latella@gmail.com
Mandy Lau
Ph.D. Candidate, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Research Associate
Mandy Lau is a PhD candidate in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at York University. She is interested in language policy and language ideology, particularly in the contexts of digital culture, minoritized language communities, and public education. Her current research explores content moderation policies with regards to hate speech on social media as well as the relationship between voice technologies and language ideologies
Email: laumandy@yorku.ca
Michael Laurentius
Ph.D. Science and Technology Studies, Research Associate
Michael Laurentius is a Doctoral Student within the Department of Science and Technology Studies. Prior to this, they received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Master of Arts in Science and Technology Studies. Their Master’s work focused on how Canadian Cold War technological projects redefined and reconstructed the classical modernist narrative though the exploitation of the inherent tensions within said narrative. For their Doctoral work, they are in the preliminary stages of examining shifts and tensions within Canada’s atomic cultural history, narratives, and imaginaries during the period that roughly corresponds with America’s Early and High Atomic Culture (1942 – 1963).
Research Interests: Atomic cultural history; science, technology, and identity; concepts of modernity; Cold War narratives; technological imaginaries.
David Dyer Lawson
Ph.D. Student, Critical Disability Studies, Research Associate
Through diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), design thinking (DT) and critical disability studies (CDS) lenses — my PhD research focuses on the microeconomic business case for accessibility. Microeconomic data being more down-to-earth, and therefore more convincing to the business-minded than macroeconomic data, my proposed PhD research will produce powerful new ammunition to advance the accessibility cause in Canada and internationally. While qualitative data is very important, especially for interpreting and contextualizing quantitative data, it is quantitative oriented research that provide the critical constituent elements of the business case for accessibility. Therefore, my PhD dissertation will focus on the history of the business case for accessibility.
Email: david.dyer.lawson@gmail.com
Rebecca Lazarenko
Ph.D. Student, History, Member Robarts Executive Committee, Research Associate
Rebecca Lazarenko (she/elle/iskwêw) is Franco-Métis and a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta. One important lesson Rebecca has learned is about reciprocity and how important it is to maintain a balance of give and take. As such, she is committed to making academic (and also non-academic) spaces safer and more open to Indigenous peoples and cultures.
Her doctoral research is looking at Prairie Francophone and Indigenous colonial relationships, with a concentration on Métis peoples, through a comprehensive examination of the francophone newspapers of the time. The purpose of her research is to illustrate the colonial project of the francophone communities of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba – which was to colonize the lands and peoples to ensure the implantation and supremacy of the French people, the French language, and the Roman Catholic religion to the detriment of the “sauvages” – Indigenous Peoples.
Email: rlazaren@yorku.ca
Esmond Lee
Ph.D. Student, Critical Human Geography, Research Associate
Esmond Lee is an artist, architect, and first year Ph.D. student in Critical Human Geography. He holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto and was a practicing architect with experience in diverse building types before joining York University. His research concerns include migration, class and capitalism, settler colonialism, and informal spatial (re)production in Toronto’s urban periphery. His artistic outputs examining these issues include public installations for Nuit Blanche Toronto and CONTACT Photography Festival. Recently, his installation “Gods Among Us” at Malvern Town Centre examining places of worship in Scarborough was nominated for a 2022 Heritage Toronto Award for Public History.
Email: esmond@yorku.ca
Ernest Leung
M.A. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Ernest Leung is currently a first-year M.A. student in the York & Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture program. His research interests include comedy studies, humour studies, and Asian studies. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he moved to Canada in 2015 to pursue his undergraduate studies. Since then, he became interested in examining issues concerning Asian diasporic communities in Canada. His current research examines the use of humour in stand-up comedy to combat anti-Asian racism in Canada. He hopes that this research will not only help Asian-Canadians but also advance current scholarship around Canadian comedy and humour.
Luna Xiaolu Li
Ph.D. Student Law, Osgoode, Research Associate
Luna Li is a lawyer in Ontario and a PhD student at Osgoode Hall Law School. Her research interests include technology (AI, blockchain, “DAO”) and employment and labour law, algorithmic management, human rights, etc. Prior to her academic career, she worked two years at a leading employment law firm in Toronto, two years at legal clinics including a government agency, and three years in human resources roles with CHRP designation. Luna holds a Juris Doctor’s degree from Osgoode, a Master of Industrial Relations and Human Resources from the University of Toronto and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wuhan University (China).
Email: xiaoluli@osgoode.yorku.ca
Xiaoming Li
M.A. Student, Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Research Associate
Xiaoming Li is active in ESL/EFL language pedagogy and research. Xiaoming is doing a second M.A. in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. As an applied linguistic, an immigrant and a minority, her research areas include language teaching methodology, language professional’s pedagogical beliefs and practices, learner autonomy, assessment, and effects of language on integration of immigrants to Canada.
Email: xmli2022@yorku.ca
Anna Lippman
Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Research Associate
Anna is a PhD candidate in sociology at York University. She studies how hip-hop inspires young people to use their sociological imagination. Anna is studies how identity is shaped both through hip-hop culture and social institutions. She looks at how race, space, place, class, and gender shape how young people understand themselves and their place in the world. Anna is a 3rd generation Ashkenzi Jewish migrant on Turtle Island and first-generation settler in Canada. Anna is a grassroots organizer in Toronto where she tries to understand her role and stake in equity for all and practice praxis.
Email: alippman@yorku.ca
Amanda Little
Ph.D. Candidate, Geography, Research Associate
Building on her previous degrees in ecotoxicology and paleolimnology, Amanda is currently completing her PhD in the Graduate Geography Program on the influence of time, seasonality, and climate change on mining-related arsenic toxicity. While her current research is focused on lakes impacted by legacy mining contamination from the infamous Giant Mine near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, her broader research interests include both natural sciences and intersectional environmentalism, particularly through the lens of environmental (in)justice as it relates to Canada’s northern communities and resource extractive industries.
Email: ajlittle@yorku.ca
Chunlei Liu
Ph.D. Student, Education, Research Associate
Chunlei Liu is a devoted educator and researcher currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Education at York University. She holds a Master of Education from the University of Windsor and a Bachelor of Arts in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. Chunlei’s academic journey is marked by prestigious awards and significant roles as a Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant. Her expertise in instructional design and international education consulting enriches learning experiences, and she actively contributes to the field through presentations, research publications, and volunteering at educational events.
Email: chunleil@yorku.ca
Rachel Lobo
Ph.D. Candidate, Environmental and Urban Change, Research Associate
Rachel is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University.
Veronica Lockyer
Ph.D. Student, Humanities, Research Associate
Veronica is currently a second year Ph.D. in Humanities. As a white settler, she is interested in Indigenous history including the extenuation of the Residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, Indian Hospitals into the current Foster Care System, that was hidden in plain sight in Canada. She is examining what an inclusive Canadian history would look like, and if this could be a step towards supporting real changes in legislations, not a continuation of failed promises.
Email: vlockyer@yorku.ca
Bill Lu
M.A. Student, Public and International Affairs, Research Associate
Bill Lu is a Master’s Student in the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs at York University. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from McGill University. He completed an international exchange semester abroad in Tel Aviv University, Israel, where he studied Middle-Eastern history with a focus on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Bill speaks English, French and Mandarin Chinese. His research interests include the social determinants of health, critical policy studies, and racism and discrimination in the Canadian context. Currently, he is working on a project examining the impact of anti-Asian racism in Canada in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: Public policy; Canada; Asian Canadian Diaspora; social determinants of health; Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
Email: bill.lu353@gmail.com
Annie Luong
Graduate Student, Humanities, Research Associate
Annie Luong is a graduate student in Humanities. Her central research topic explores utopian and dystopian literature.
Email: annieluong2016@gmail.com
Signy Lynch
Ph.D. Theatre and Performance Studies, Research Associate
Signy Lynch is working on her Ph.D in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at York. Her research investigates how direct audience address in contemporary performance can help audience members and performers to negotiate the complexities of inhabiting a twenty-first century globalized Canada. Signy is a member of the Centre for Spectatorship at the University of Toronto and a board member at Cahoots Theatre which has just finished celebrating 30 years of staging diversity in Toronto.
Research Interests: contemporary Canadian theatre and performance, intercultural performance, digital performance, performer-audience relations, popular culture, and politics and performance
Email: signy.lynch@gmail.com
William MacGregor
Ph.D. Student, Health Policy and Equity, Research Associate
William MacGregor is a Ph.D. Student in the Health Policy and Equity Graduate Program at York University. His SSHRC-funded research focuses on disability policy and poverty in Canada, utilizing a political economy approach. Additionally, he is interested in issues of health policy, the politics of health, and broader equity concerns around federal and provincial policies in the areas of disability, health, and health care. Going forward, in addition to his current research, Will is intending to build on his M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from York to explore and develop arts-based research projects that both examine and stage the experiences of Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) with poverty, policy, and marginalization.
Email: wjmacgregor@outlook.com
Dani Magsumbol
Ph.D. Candidate, Politics, Research Associate
Dani is a doctoral candidate in Politics at York University. Her research interests lie in the intersections of citizenships/nationalism and carework, with a particular focus on the political economy of the Filipinx labour diaspora in Canada.
Email: ndm@yorku.ca
Samantha Mailhot Prévost
Ph.D. Student, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Samantha is passionate about spreading environmental awareness, exploring ideas about degrowth, and contributing to policy formulation and implementation aimed at critical shifts to sustainable lifestyles. Her research focuses on public opinions on degrowth-related policies in the Canadian context.
Kad Mariano
M.A. Student, Politics, Research Associate
Kad is a M.A. student in the Department of Politics at York University. He recently completed an Honours B.A. in Law & Society and Political Science at York University. Kad’s research interests include memory studies, settler-colonial studies, and urban politics, with a focus on Toronto. His M.A. thesis investigates how the settler-colonial state, in the form of the City of Toronto, visualizes and memorializes Indigeneity in public spaces, particularly Nathan Phillips Square and Yonge-Dundas Square, and how these commemorations shape the city’s understanding of its past, present, and future relationship with its urban Indigenous population.
Email: km99@my.yorku.ca
Alexandra Markwell
Graduate Student, Clinical Developmental Psychology, Research Associate
Alex is a graduate student in the Clinical Developmental Psychology program. Her research is broadly focused on understanding how diverse family and caregiver relationships can be supported in order to promote family functioning and children’s development. In the future, she hopes to contribute to the development and improvement of equitable systems, policies, and practices in Canada relating to children and families.
Email: alexmark@my.yorku.ca
Antoine Marleau
Ph.D. Student, Political Science, Research Associate
After completing a master’s thesis on the political economy of socio-ecological transition, Antoine Marleau’s research interests have turned to the Canadian growth model and its political determinants, seeking to explain the underperformance of the Canadian economy compared to other OECD countries. His research is situated within the fields of Comparative Political Economy, Comparative Capitalism Research, and Canadian Political Economy.
Email: antmarl@yorku.ca
Sophia Martensen
Ph.D. Student, Sociolegal Studies, Research Associate
Sophia is a second year Ph.D. student with the sociolegal studies department. Her research examines the circulation of public health narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic alongside other crisis narratives (i.e., Black Lives Matter movement) in Canada. Her goal is to reveal hypocrisies and contradictions within dominant frameworks and examine the implications of our response to the global health crisis for racial violence and the value of human life.
Email: smarten@yorku.ca
Parastoo Mazaheri
Ph.D. Fellow, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Parastoo Mazaheri is a second-year Ph.D. fellow in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at York. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree (from York University) in Management and Marketing. She has over 20 years of professional experience in different industries, such as Finance and Information Technology. Her research interests include behaviour research, Artificial intelligence’s policy and impact on public centers, the intersection of affordability and digital literacy, cultural studies, and the impact of new technologies on organizational change cultures.
Email: paris73@yorku.ca
Christopher McAteer
Ph.D. Student, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Christopher McAteer is a Ph.D. student in Social and Political Thought at York University with research interests in the aesthetics of wilderness and the politics of the Canadian Arctic. He holds a B.Mus. from the Royal Academy of Music, London, and an M.A. in International Relations from Queen’s University, Belfast.
Christopher’s interdisciplinary research draws on his academic and artistic backgrounds to radically critique how we imagine the Canadian Arctic. He is interested in the political meaning and uses of the idea of wilderness and how indigenous Northern artists are decolonizing prevalent Arctic imaginaries.
As a composer his work has been performed across the UK and Ireland, receiving awards including the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize (2013) and West Cork Festival Composition Bursary (2014). During 2015, he wrote the libretto and score for a new opera based on the life of Roger Casement, with funding from Arts Council Ireland. He was a Moving on Music Emerging Artist during 2017/18. His music has been performed by ensembles including the Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestra of Opera North, Kirkos Ensemble, and Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra.
Research Interests: Arctic studies; international relations theory; post-colonialism; post-humanism; human geography; politics of wilderness; cinema studies; music studies..
Website: http://www.christophermcateer.com/
Sara McCleary
Ph.D. Student, Humanities, Research Associate
Sara McCleary is a Ph.D. student in the Humanities program at York University. She has studied at Algoma University (B.A., History) and Queen’s University (M.A., History). Her research focuses primarily on Indigenous-settler relations in Canada, largely focusing on allyship, being a settler herself. Sara’s broader research interests include women’s lifewriting and early colonial North America.
Email: saram87@yorku.ca
Ellouise MGeachie
Ph.D. Candidate, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Ellouise is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Communications and Culture program between York and X-University. Her research focuses on genetic surveillance, race, identity, security, and privacy policy. Ellouise completed her B.A. in Communications Studies, and French Language and Literature at York; a master’s in Public and International Affairs at Glendon College; and possesses a Certificate of Management and Leadership from the Schulich School of Business. Ellouise has 10 years professional experience in the private sector spanning communications, management, and administration.
Email: ellouise@yorku.ca
Vanessa Moonilal
Ph.D. Student, Humanities, Research Associate
Vanessa is a first year Ph.D. student in the Humanities intending to study Caribbean studies within the Canadian context.
Email: vmoon@yorku.ca
Alexandra Mourgou
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Member Robarts Executive Committee, Research Associate
Alexandra Mourgou is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Cultural Historical Geography at York University, holding the Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, working on her project ‘Musical Geographies and the Greek Canadian Experience in Toronto. Places, Cultures, & Diasporic Identities’. Her research interests and publications focus mainly on urban, cultural, and historical geography, specifically on the interconnections between space and music. She received a joint Ph.D. degree in cultural historical geography at the National Technical University of Athens and University Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne (joint degree) in February 2022. She holds a master’s in architecture at the N.T.U.A. and a post-master’s degree in Urbanism at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’ Architecture de Paris La Villette. In the past, she has participated in European and national research projects, in Greece and Turkey. Beyond the walls of academia, she has studied classical and traditional music and has participated in performances in Athens and Paris. Her involvement with musical performance has been decisive in her perspective on academic, theoretical, and methodological explorations.
Email: alexandramourgou@gmail.com
Chris Murree
M.A. Student, Political Science, Research Associate
Chris Murree is a M.A. Student in Political Science. Chris’ research interests include Canadian politics, radical political economy, and democratic administration.
Email: chrismurree@gmail.com
Santina Musto
M.A. Health Policy & Equity, Research Associate
Santina completed a B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology at Acadia University and is currently pursuing a M.A. in Health Policy and Equity within the School of Health Policy and Management at York University. Under the supervision of Dr. Claudia Chaufan, Santina’s research is focused on Canada’s policy response to public health emergencies and its impact on the mental health of frontline health care workers, with particular interest in the 2003 SARS epidemic and the present COVID-19 pandemic. Santina is an active member of the York University community, mental health advocate, and avid learner who is dedicated to the pursuit of health equity through policy reform.
Research Interests: health policy and equity, mental health, mental health and social inequity, health care working conditions, mental health reform, emergency policy response.
J. Gary Myers
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Research Associate
J. Gary Myers is a Ph.D. Candidate in the history program at York University. He is the recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Scholarship award (2021-2024) and of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Toronto Graduate Scholarship 2021-22. He has a background in knowledge mobilization (KMb) as a community-based knowledge broker and writer. His current research is focused on gay nostalgia, oral history, post-gay theory, and the history of 2SLGBTQ+ communities in Toronto using KMb strategies. Gary has a deep motivation in advancing an understanding and implementation of KMb and research use by other historians.
Email: jgary.myers@gmail.com
Peyman Naeemi
Ph.D Student, Research Associate
Peyman Naeemi is a Multimedia Specialist and video production Professional with over 10 years of experience in the broadcast media industry. With a background as an Editor in Chief, Video Editor, and Video Journalist, he has successfully spearheaded and produced many multimedia projects for prominent news agencies and television outlets.
In addition to his proficiency in multimedia project management, Peyman Naeemi is a passionate environmental activist and filmmaker. As a PhD student, his research focuses on environmental humanities and education through digital media, with a specific emphasis on environmental and emergency management. To that effect, Peyman developed a serious game called “PRSG” (Pandemic Resilience Serious Game) that focuses on managing societal norms during a pandemic with a close look at COVID19 experience.
Moreover, Peyman created a documentary film “A Faithful Commitment to Sustainability” that examines the innovative sustainability program that the Jaffari Community Center (JCC) in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada carries out during the holy month of Ramadan to host and feed an average of more than 2,000 people every night. The film has been competitively accepted for screening at COP28 as part of Canada Pavilion.
Peyman’s professional journey in the media world has taken him to diverse settings, from collaborating with renowned filmmakers to serving as an editor for news agencies. His expansive experiences have honed his storytelling skills and amplified his dedication to making a positive impact through digital media. As a driven video editor, environmental activist, and emerging scholar, Peyman Naeemi’s career path is a testament to his commitment to combining the power of media and environmental advocacy to effect change and inspire action.
Email: peyman91@yorku.ca
Mara Nagy
Ph.D. Student, Humanities, Research Associate, Former Member Robarts Executive Committee
Mara Nagy hold a BSocSc, Hons, from the University of Ottawa, in Conflict Studies and Human Rights. She also holds a BEd and an MEd, both from York University. She is currently embarking on a PhD at York, and her doctoral research is set to take her into areas of migration, memory, education, urban (and suburban) culture, and socioanthropology, as she looks into the demographic shifts in South Scarborough over the last century, exploring the push and pull factors, as well as the social and political impacts these changes have had on the area. She will additionally be looking into R. H. King Academy in Scarborough (the oldest high school in the city) as a case study on how schools adapt to meet the needs of these changes, and especially how the first-generation student’s relationship with their family and this cultural intersection is impacted by their schooling. She has previously worked in politics and in education, and hopes to use these experiences to inform her research as well.
Email: mnagy005@gmail.com
Jeffrey Newberry
M.Ed. Candidate, Education, Research Associate
Jeff Newberry is a M.Ed. Candidate at York University and Prof. Gabrielle Moser’s research assistant on her Photography and Biopolitics project. After ten years teaching secondary school music and drama, Jeff’s research interests revolve around the meaningful integration of youth culture in teaching and learning spaces, building classroom culture, and new approaches to teacher education.
At the Toronto District School Board, Jeff recently served as the Music Curriculum Leader for the Virtual Secondary School, home to some 18,000 students from across the city. At Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts, he taught vocal music and drama and, with his students, launched an in-house record label to showcase student song-writing.
As a composer, Jeff’s writing is informed by his background in classical, pop, and theatre. As music director, Jeff has worked on productions in Toronto, Stratford, and Edinburgh and looks forward to A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline at Capitol Theatre, Port Hope. Jeff leads workshops and professional development sessions for the teacher education programs at OISE, Queen’s, and York University, and at provincial conferences for music and drama educators.
Ionut Nicolescu
Ph.D. Candidate, Politics, Research Associate
Ionut Nicolescu is a PhD candidate in the department of Politics. His dissertation focuses broadly on the concept of time – it interrogates, from the perspective of political philosophy, how time functions as an essential principle for the creation and organization of any given political world.
Email: bip@my.yorku.ca
Adaora Nwajiaku
Ph.D. Student Osgoode Hall Law School, Research Associate
Adaora Nwajiaku is a lawyer and a doctoral student at Osgoode Hall Law School. Her research interests include international law, human and women’s rights. Adora’s doctoral research focuses on the ways that Canada engages in sub-Saharan Africa’s human rights affairs, particularly its involvement in Nigeria and the impact of such engagement on Nigerian women’s rights.
Email: adaoranw@yorku.ca
Océane Nyela
M.A. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Océane is a master’s student from Montreal. She is interested in how Afro-Canadians create and sustain their [dual] identity online.
Email: oceaneingrid@icloud.com
Jeremy S. Ofwono
M.A Student, Public and International Affairs, Research Associate
Jeremy S. Ofwono is an international student from Uganda, currently undergoing his master’s in Public and International Affairs after completing his B.A. (with Specialized Honors) in Global Political Studies at York University. His main interests revolve around international and security studies, as well as foreign policy
Email: jere23@my.yorku.ca
Ify Okadigbo
Ph.D. Candidate, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Research Associate
Ify Okadigbo is a decolonial afro feminist scholar with interest in social justice, equality, and choice. I believe it is the responsibility of everyone especially women, to create a world where gender equality becomes the norm.
With over a decade’s worth of eclectic career, research and personal experience living in communities that are historically hostile to women, I am committed to being a part of the solution towards creating more equitable lives for women to occupy spaces, live freely, and dismantle patriarchy.
Email: ifyokad7@yorku.ca
Jake Okechukwu
Ph.D. Candidate, Osgoode Hall Law School, Research Associate
Jake Okechukwu Effoduh is a PhD candidate at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. His doctorate research is on the Legitimization of Artificial Intelligence for Human Rights in Anglophone Africa. He holds master’s degrees in law from the University of Oxford in the UK, and from York University in Canada.
Effoduh has been a human rights lawyer for over a decade, with a demonstrated history of advocacy across domestic, regional, and international human rights systems including the ECOWAS Court, the African Human Rights Commission, and the United Nations Human Rights Council. He has gained programmatic, research and academic experiences from working across 21 African countries. He has also delivered lectures at the University of Abuja in Nigeria, Ontario Tech University in Canada, University of Cape Town in South Africa, University of Oxford in the UK, and York University where he also serves as Teaching Assistant in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.
Email: effoduh@gmail.com
Caitlin O’Keeffe
Ph.D. Student, Art History and Visual Culture, Research Associate
Caitlin O’Keeffe’s research focusses on feminist art, Canadian art, ideologies of home and the politics of place and space within contemporary art. Her current research investigates the ways in which women artists employ domestic architecture to explore the rhetoric of home. Caitlin holds an MA in Art History and Visual Culture from York University, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Simon Fraser University.
Email: cokeeffe@yorku.ca
Shyam Patel
Ph.D. Student, Education, Research Associate
Shyam is currently a doctoral student in the Faculty of Education. He received both his MA in Education and BEd at the University of Ottawa, and he completed his BCom at McGill University. He was also a former fellow with Teach for India, working as an elementary school teacher at Rakhial English School No. 1. He has been drawn to the works of bell hooks, Loretta Ross, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others who have taught him how to exist in a world that is often complex and ineffable. In that manner, he is interested in the pedagogical possibilities that exist in healing, hope, and love. Along with his teaching and writing, he loves watching anime, Bollywood, K-drama, and anything that has to do with pop culture and reality TV.
Email: patels12@yorku.ca
Joanna Pearce
Ph.D Candidate, History, Research Associate
Joanna L. Pearce is a Ph.D. candidate in history at York University, working with Dr. Carolyn Podruchny. Her dissertation, “Which naught but the light of knowledge can dispel”: Experiencing Blindness in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, examines the experiences of blind people who did not attend residential schools. Her previous research, on the establishment of free education for blind children in Nova Scotia, was published in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association in 2012. She is a recipient of the 2015-2016 Avie Bennett Historica Chair scholarship for research in Canadian History. She received her Master’s degree in history from Dalhousie University. Her MA thesis, titled “Fighting in the Dark: Charles Frederick Fraser and the Halifax Asylum for the Blind, 1850-1915,” has been cited twice on wikipedia. Sadly, both articles are stubs.
Email: jlp@yorku.ca
Karl Petschke
Ph.D. Candidate, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Karl Petschke is a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Studies at York University, where he writes on themes of mobility, media, infrastructure, and landscape. His work on “wayside ecologies” explores environmental history and political ecology at the margins of modern transportation corridors. Blending archival and fieldwork methods, his dissertation project examines changing trackside environments along the GTA’s historic lakeshore rail line.
Email: kfwp@yorku.ca
Pamela Phan
M.A. Political Science, Research Associate
Pamela is a graduate student working towards her MA in political science and a certificate in democratic administration. She completed a Bachelor of Arts (honours) at Queen’s University, graduating with distinction while majoring in political studies and a minor in classical studies. For her honour’s thesis she examined the landscape of Big Data and surveillance, comparatively investigating the dynamics underpinning dataification of societies in the US and China. Her current research includes areas such as critical data studies, political economy, political sociology, (new) media, and the ways in which feminist and decolonial thought can inform the production of knowledge and its application in policy and society.
Evania Pietrangelo-Porco
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Research Associate
Evania Pietrangelo-Porco is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at York University. Her research interests include twentieth century Canadian history, nineteenth and twentieth century Gender/Feminist history, and North American Indigenous history. She is the recipient of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Toronto Graduate Scholarship (2021), the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS-Master’s Scholarship (2019-2020), the CSN-RÉC Best Undergraduate Essay Prize (2019), and the Odessa Prize for the Study of Canada (2018-2019).
Email: evaniap@my.yorku.ca
Elizaveta Poliakova
Ph.D. Candidate, Communications and Culture, Research Associate
Liz Poliakova is a Ph.D. candidate in Communications and Culture at York University. She holds an M.A. from the same program and a B.A. (Hons.) with a major in Book and Media Studies from the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research focuses on women’s work in self-publishing, exploring the different types of capital (as conceived by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) that this method of book production can offer female authors. Her research interests include the history of Canadian publishing and values in design.
Email: lizpoliakova@gmail.com
Julia Polyck-O’Neill
SSHRC Post Doctoral Fellow, Visual Art and Art History/ Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, , Former Member Robarts Executive Committee, Research Associate
Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, poet, and writer. A former lecturer at the Obama Institute at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz (2017-18), international fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization, and fellow of the Editing Modernism in Canada project, she is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Visual Art and Art History and the Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University where she studies digital, feminist approaches to interdisciplinary artists’ archives for her project, Potential Archives: Envisioning the Future of the Interdisciplinary Artist Archive in Canada. She is currently developing a monograph based on her SSHRC-supported dissertation, Rematerializing the Immaterial: A Comparative Study of Vancouver’s Conceptual Visual Arts and Writing, which she completed at Brock University. Her writing has been published in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (The Journal for Aesthetics and General Art History), English Studies in Canada, DeGruyter Open Cultural Studies, BC Studies, Canadian Literature, Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019), and other places.
Email: jpolycko@yorku.ca
Lucas Porter
M.A. Student, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Before coming back to complete his master’s in environmental studies, Lucas spent several years in the environmental non-profit sector, working in the agricultural and e-waste related roles. Previous to that, Lucas earned an honours B.A. in Environmental Governance from the University of Guelph. His research interests center around renewable energy transitions and electrification, especially as it relates to vehicles and urban mobility.
Sheetal Prasad
Ph.D. Candidate, Education, Research Associate
Sheetal Prasad is a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her current research examines representation within Canadian secondary history classrooms and how history textbooks and curricula can be interrogated through multimodal learning and engagement. With her background in fine art, she combines archival and art research methods to create augmented reality works that inform viewers of multiple perspectives in Canadian history.
Email: sp96@yorku.ca
Venilla Rajaguru
Ph.D. Candidate, Science and Technology Studies, Research Associate
Venilla Rajaguru is a Board Director of Science for Peace (Canada), and the Chair of a pan-university research-working group on Ocean Frontiers under Science for Peace. She also serves as an honorary council member of the International Peace Bureau (Geneva); and has previously served as the honorary Chair of ASEAN Secretariat Women’s Wing (ASEAN) 2009-2011. While she is on the last phase of completing her Ph. D dissertation at York University (Canada), she has been contracted as a Course Director at York for undergraduate courses on ‘Science and Technology Issues in Global Development’ (Dept. of Science & Technology Studies) and ‘Natural Resource Management’ (Environmental Studies).
Her educational background is in Science & Technology Studies, International Law and International Development. Her former degrees are from the University of Oxford and Cornell. She is the winner of the 2016 Vivienne-Poy Award for doctoral research on Asia; recipient of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for doctoral research in 2014; and Rhodes Scholar 1992. Her previous work experience spans public communications, radio news broadcasting, community outreach, and corporate social responsibility consulting. After getting back to academia, her research focus is on the S & T of transboundary infrastructure development, particularly those concerning maritime regions, peace regimes, regional and international security. Her publications include a book of poems, research based articles on the socio-politics of Southeast Asia, and on the S & T of artificial island constructions.
Research Interests: Transboundary infrastructure development and transnational/International Relations; Regional, International and Collective Security; Peace Regimes, pacification and global governance; S & T policies entangled with global development and foreign policies; Natural resources governance, sustainable development goals (United Nations SDGs) and multilateral joint development; International Development, and International Law
Sharifa Riley
M.A. Student, Art History, Research Associate
Sharifa Riley is an Arts and Heritage specialist who has been immersed in the Arts and Culture field for the last decade. Initially developing educational programming for youth, children and families, Sharifa Riley has expanded her experience by taking on Curatorial and Collections Management initiatives. She currently has two exhibitions, exhibited at the Erland Lee (Museum) Home, and is co-curating the ‘FRACTURE’ exhibition for the EUC department at York.
Sharifa is a graduate from the University of Ottawa (B.A.), Fleming College (Post Graduate) and is currently working on her M.A. in Art History at York University.
Steven Rita-Procter
Ph.D. English (York), Research Associate
Steven Rita-Procter received his PhD from the English Department at York University with a specialization in transitional justice and memory studies. His dissertation, “Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice: the Function of Narrative in Redressing the Legacy of Mass Atrocities” considered the history-writing aspect of transitional justice reports and the complex ways in which truth commissions and human rights tribunals shape the political, cultural, and ideological contexts according to which national traumas are absorbed into the cultural storytelling process. He has published on a wide and interdisciplinary range of topics, including: impunity laws and the politics of exposing human rights perpetrators, the ethics of extrajudicial human rights activism, the architecture of genocide memorials, the protest art of Kent Monkman and León Ferrari, the poetry of Juan Gelman, and post-atrocity archival practises. Steven has attended several human rights tribunals as both an honourary witness and as a trial monitor and has worked as a testimonial archivist for Residential School survivors.
Email: sritapro@yorku.ca
Aron Roman
M.A. Student, Political Science, Research Associate
Aron Roman is a first-year Master’s student in the Department of Politics at York University. His research interests are in labour and migration policy on circular migration systems and the impact of climate events on these systems and policies.
Email: aroman54@yorku.ca
Humairah Saleem
M.A. Student, Development Studies, Research Associate
Humairah Saleem is a first generation Canadian, born to Sri Lankan Muslim immigrants whose experiences have contributed to her drive in further understanding marginalized communities through sincerity and compassion. She has successfully completed a B.A. in Human Rights and Equity Studies at York University and is currently completing her M.A. in Development Studies. Her research interest includes studying the relationship between immigrant and refugee legislations and diasporic experiences in the post-colonized West. She is passionate and dedicated both personally and professionally to being involved within her community and to broadening her horizons.
Email: hsaleem@yorku.ca
Siobhan Saravanamuttu
Ph.D. Candidate, Politics, Research Associate
Siobhan Saravanamuttu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics at York University. Her doctoral research examines employment policy and social assistance for intellectually disabled workers in Ontario. More broadly she is interested in the historic and present-day practices of institutionalization and eugenics in Canada and their linkages to contemporary state-funded disability services and programs.
Email: siobhan1@yorku.ca
Lisa Seiler
Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Research Associate
Lisa Seiler is an environmental sociologist who returned to school after spending twenty years in the environmental non-profit sector. Her dissertation focuses on nature-related non-profits in Ontario and whether and how they communicate with their constituents about climate change and biodiversity loss. That research includes a Twitter analysis, interviews, and a survey. She has also published quantitative research with Dr. Glenn Stalker on climate change attitudes and support for and opposition to Canadian energy policies.
Email: lseiler@yorku.ca
Rory Sharp
Ph.D. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Rory Sharp is a Ph.D. student at York University’s Joint Program in Communication and Culture. Rory’s research focuses on the mediation of mis- and disinformation about 5G wireless technology in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. His other research interests include networked life, digital cultures, technological aesthetics, and internet sovereignty. Rory received his M.A. in English from the University of Toronto in 2019 and his B.A. in English/Gender Studies from New College of Florida in 2018. He has presented his research at the Florida Conference of Historians and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology’s annual conference.
Email: rzrsharp@yorku.ca
Wiley Sharp
M.A. Student, Geography, Research Associate
Wiley Sharp is a MA student in Geography. Their research concerns queer youth in suburban Toronto and their everyday practices of place-making.
Email: bwsharp@yorku.ca
Sahar Siavashi
Ph.D. Student, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Sahar Siavashi is a new PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York. Her area of study is Iranian studies. Her research is about the identity formation of Iranian-Canadian women and how Canadian society affects them and is affected by them. In a broader sense, she is going to pursue the relations between policing, media and identity formation in the context of Iranian-Canadian women, or in general, immigrant women from Muslim countries in Canada.
Email: saharsia@yorku.ca
Claudia Sicondolfo
Ph.D. Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies, Research Associate
Claudia Sicondolfo lives and works as a guest in Tkaronto. She is a Vanier Scholar and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. Her research projects address topics ranging from film festivals, screen publics, youth and digital media cultures, decolonizing research methodologies and affect in the creative industries. Her doctoral research project examines curatorial modes in pedagogy, community outreach, and audience engagement within contemporary digital screen initiatives and film festivals in Canada. Her writing has been published in Public and Senses of Cinema, in addition to various book anthologies. She is a researcher on the Archive/Counter-Archive SSHRC Partnership Project.
Email: csicondo@yorku.ca
Kanishka Sikri
Ph.D. Candidate, Research Associate
Kanishka Sikri is a writer and theorist thinking about violability: the practice that marks certain lives, bodies, and lands to the possibility of violence. They are currently a Ph.D. candidate at York University speculating on the ways violence becomes synonymous with and inhabits the flesh. Kanishka asks how we may speak about violence, lay it bare, grieve and mourn its many insidious faces without replicating the notion that certain lives are violable and capable of being violated.
Visit: www.kanishkasikri.com
Email: sikri@yorku.ca
Raj Singh
Ph.D. Music, Research Associate
Raj Singh is a guitarist, percussionist, and doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music. Raj received her B.A. Hons. in English, B.F.A. in Music, M.A. in Music at York University.
Her Master’s research focused on the cajón and its place in Afro-Peruvian music and cultural heritage. Her major research paper explored how the cajón’s cultural impact remains bound to notions of Afro-Peruvian heritage, representation and identity. She also examined the integration and role of the cajón in Spanish Flamenco, and the repercussions it had on Afro-Peruvian musicians as it became the most adaptable and sought after percussion instrument in Flamenco performance.
Her doctoral thesis focuses on Inuit Modernity and how Inuit musicians in Canada innovate and re-contextualize traditional music by incorporating contemporary musical forms to include new realms of lived experiences. Her doctoral work also interrogates notions of tradition in both western and Indigenous thought, gender, identity, language, and issues of race as they relate to communal notions of belonging. Raj conducts collaborative research through the Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage (MICH) SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Kira Smith
Ph.D. Student, Critical Disability Studies, Research Associate
Under the supervision of Geoffrey Reaume, Kira’s current research explores the experiences of children in Canadian provincial asylums from the period of 1870-1940. Her dissertation, Institutionalizing Mad Children in Canada 1870-1940, will blend both traditional historical narrative styles and fictional writing. Kira received her master’s degree at Carleton University in Public History, where she wrote a novella on patient experiences at the Brockville Asylum and an accompanying reflection. This research has been presented globally at the University of Tampere (Finland), the National Council for Public History (Las Vegas, NV), and the University of New Brunswick.
Kira also works as a historian for both the public and private sectors, focusing on Métis and Inuit histories, and is one of the founding members of the Psychiatric Survivor Oral History Archive, where she works with a collective of individuals seeking to preserve the community’s histories.
Email:kismith@yorku.ca
Lisa Smith
Ph. D. Student, Humanities
Having completed an M.Ed. at York, Lisa Smith has now joined the York Ph.D. Humanities program. Her interests broadly center around archival research and different forms of language revitalization (including children’s folklore and endangered and minority languages). Lisa currently works on the SHRCC funded project ‘Old Poles and New Stories: archival knowledges and oral histories of C’idimsggin’is and Kurt Seligmann’
Email: smithl68@yorku.ca
Maverick Smith
M.A. Critical Disability Studies, Research Associate
Maverick Smith is currently completing a M.A. in Critical Disability Studies at York University. They previously completed an M.Ed. in Adult Education and Community Development from the Ontario Institute in Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.
Lorena Snyder
Ph.D. Student, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Lorena Snyder is a Ph.D. student in the school of socio-political thought with research on decolonization of mental health for indigenous Canadians.
Michelle Sraha-Yeboah
Ph.D. Candidate, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Michelle Sraha-Yeboah is a doctoral candidate at York University in Social and Political Thought. Her research examines medical histories of racial and colonial violence, mental health care service use disparities and holistic wellbeing. Her work is particularly concerned with the intersections of socio-historical and political factors impacting Black Canadians’ mental healthcare service use patterns and treatment preferences. She attends to Black feminist theorizations of care to achieve anti-racist and decolonial mental healthcare service delivery for Africans in the Diaspora.
Email: yeboah@yorku.ca
Geetha Sukumaran
Ph.D. Student, Humanities, Research Associate
Geetha Sukumaran a doctoral student in the Humanities program at York University and is the founder of Conflict and Food Studies. Her research focuses on narratives of conflict and food in Tamil writing from Sri Lanka and the connected diaspora. Her broader research interests include war, and trauma, food studies, culture and poetry. She is a Tamil poet and a bilingual translator in Tamil and English. Her first collection of poems Otrai pakadaiyil enchum nampikkai, was published in 2014. Her English translation of Ahilan’s poetry Then There Were No Witnesses was published by Mawenzi House, Toronto (2018). Her recent book Tea: A Concoction of Dissonance, published by Dhauli Books (2021), is a collaboration with the poet Ahilan and artist Vaidheki. She is the recipient of the SPARROW R Thyagarajan award for her poetry.
Email: gsukumaran6@gmail.com
Rosalind Sweeney-McCabe
M.A. Student, Art History and Visual Culture
Rosalind Sweeney-McCabe is a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Visual Culture. Her research is focused on industrial design in Canada in the post-war period.
Email: rswemcc@yorku.ca
Laura Tanguay
Ph.D. Student, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Laura Tanguay is a second year Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. In her doctoral research, she investigates environmental histories and repercussions of the DEW Line, which sprawls across the Arctic. Engaging with concepts of environmental justice, militarization, and institutionalized ‘othering,’ she connects facets of neoliberalism with public complacency in the disruption of natural landscapes for state-driven capitalistic interests.
Email: tanguay.laura@gmail.com
Christiane Tarantino
Ph.D. Candidate, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Christiane Tarantino is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Toronto Metropolitan and York University Communication and Culture program and a doctoral associate at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre. Supervised by Dr. Irene Gammel, Christiane researches suburban literature with a focus on immigrant and newcomer narratives. She has a passion for literature and community outreach. Christiane completed her M.A. in the Literatures of Modernity program at Toronto Metropolitan University (2020) and her B.A. in English at the University of Toronto (2019). You can follow her on X: @cstarantino.
Email: christ15@yorku.ca
Patrick Teed
Ph.D. Student, Social and Political Thought, Research Associate
Patrick is a Ph.D. student at York’s Social and Political Thought Programme. Broadly speaking, his research projects cohere around the structural relation between anti-Blackness and settler-colonialism; the politics of knowledge within settler-colonial epistemological formations (which he analyzes through his concept of necro-epistemology); and the ontology of race. His doctoral research attempts to theorize the biosocial formation of race by situating current research in epigenetics alongside Black and Indigenous theories of temporality and embodiment. Mobilizing epigenetics as way to think through and complicate temporalities of biosocial racialization, his research demonstrates how sites of so-called ‘historical’ trauma epigenetically manifest into and beyond the present, theorizing the body as a bio-temporal accretion enmeshed within (rather than extricated from) the longue durée of settler-colonialism, conquest, and slavery.
Research Interests: settler-colonial studies; Black studies – particularly Afropessimism; biopolitics; science and technology studies; posthumanism; abolitionist university studies; and the history of ideas.
Email: patrickmichaelteed@gmail.com
Ransford Tei
M.A. Student, History, Research Associate
Ransford Tei is an international M.A. History student with a research interest is in women and gender history. Ransford is open to learning and researching more on contemporary Canadian history and its relations with African social, economic and political developments. Ransford’s hobbies include watching documentaries
Email: nene95@yorku.ca
Alaina Thomas
M.A. Student, Clinical Developmental Psychology, Research Associate
Alaina Thomas (she/her) is a first-year master’s student in the Clinical Developmental Psychology program at York University. Her research interests lie in the area of Inuit youth resilience; e-mental wellness technologies; and the relationship between youth mental wellness and social, structural, and environmental systems. For the past two years, Alaina has been working with youth and communities in Nunavut on the I-SPARX project to develop an Inuit-specific, CBT video game. She is committed to using community-driven research as a means to highlight the voices and perspectives of youth to inform mental health policy change, promote health equity, and social justice. Alaina is a 3rd generation settler, born and raised in Tkaranto. Her research is graciously funded by CIHR.
Email: athomas7@yorku.ca
Kenya Thompson
Ph.D. Student, Political Science, Research Associate
Kenya Thompson is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Politics at York University. Her M.A. research essay, “Prefigurative Care: Everydayness and Activism in Nova Scotia’s Childcare Deserts,” completed at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy, explored the juncture of caregiving, social policy, and activism in light of Canada’s forthcoming national childcare plan. Investigating care as a political act, Kenya examined how mothers/caregivers in Nova Scotia navigate care when formal childcare options are unavailable. Kenya has been engaged in community and student activism, worked with organizations such as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Nova Scotia and the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, and participated in several research projects. She currently works on the Reimagining Care/Work Policies project, funded by a SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Email: kenyat98@yorku.ca
Isaac Thornley
Ph.D. Student, Environmental Studies, Research Associate
Isaac Thornley is a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies student and a communications professional interested in building a more socially and environmentally just future in Canada (and beyond). His professional experience has centered around writing, research, web development, and communications for organizations that advocate for affordable housing, provide services for homeless and street-involved people and support families affected by mental illness. Broadly interested in how different Canadians subjectively relate to their environmental-material conditions (particularly those of land, labour, and infrastructure), he applies a psychoanalytic Marxist framework to the study of Canadian pipeline conflicts (specifically, the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion).
Email: isaact@yorku.ca
Brent Toye
Ph.D. Politics, Research Associate
Brent Toye is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics studying the political economy of education and training in Canada. His work focuses on how powerful private interests interact with state institutions and shape public policy. His dissertation research looks at the role of large firms and dominant economic sectors in different subnational jurisdictions and how they influence regional training and labour market regimes. His side projects include a comparative study of fiscal federalism and its relationship to ‘financialization’ and the modern debt state.
Research Interests: Comparative political economy; skill formation; Canadian political economy; comparative federalism; labour market policy; financialization; fiscal federalism; fiscal policy .
Davis Vallesi
Ph.D. Candidate, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Davis Vallesi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communication & Culture program at York, currently completing his dissertation entitled, “Trudeau Squared: A Comparative Media Analysis of Canadian Federal Elections.” His research strives to explore key issues regarding the Canadian media landscape, political process, and modern conceptions of democratic citizenship. He also serves as an instructor at the York Writing Centre and as a Teaching Commons Tutor at the York Teaching Commons.
Email: dvallesi@yorku.ca
Evan Vipond
Ph.D. Candidate, Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies, Research Associate
Evan Vipond is a Ph.D. Candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University. Evan’s work is interdisciplinary and engages with trans theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, political theory, and cultural theory. Their doctoral project, Trans Liberalism: Trans Rights and the U.S. Military, critical examines advocacy efforts to lift the U.S. military’s trans ban. Evan has conducted both academy- and community-based research with trans and nonbinary people throughout Ontario. Their work has been published in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2018), Canadian Review of Social Policy (2017), Gender and Education (2017), Queer Cats Journal of LGBT Studies (2016), Western Journal of Legal Studies (2015), and Theory in Action (2015). Research interests includes neoliberalism, trans rights and politics, and trans representation in mainstream media.
Website: https://yorku.academia.edu/EvanVipond
Email: evipond@yorku.ca
Sachin Wanniarachchi
M.A. Student, Applied Linguistics, Research Associate
Sachin Wanniarachchi is a self-reflective ESL (English as a Second Language) practitioner with seven years of working experience in two state Universities in Sri Lanka. His research focuses on ethnocentrism, language myths, second language acquisition, dominant ideologies and the marginalized.
Aviva Weizman
Ph.D. Student, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Aviva Weizman is a PhD student in the Communication and Culture Program. Her doctoral research explores intersection of memory and media studies through a tripartite study of three bridges in Western Canada, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ireland.
Email: aweiz@yorku.ca
Brianna Wiens
Ph.D. Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Brianna Wiens (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Culture and co-director of the qcollaborative (http://www.qcollaborative.com/), a feminist design lab. Her SSHRC-supported dissertation research draws on her mixed-race queer activist-scholar experience to analyze the movement of stories from #MeToo as they circulate among various spheres of power, developing praxes for analyzing and contributing to networked social movements. Wiens’s collaborative work has recently appeared in NECSUS, Feminist Media Studies, and Digital Studies/Le Champ Numériqe, and she is a co-editor of the forthcoming collection Networked Feminist Activisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices (Lexington Books 2021).
Eva Wissting
M.A. Student, Translation Studies, Research Associate
Eva Wissting is a graduate student in Translation Studies at York University, Glendon campus. Her main areas of interest include literary translation, Indigenous literatures and oratures, multilingual literature, and literature as language vitalization for endangered languages and as colonial resistance.
Email: evawiss@yorku.ca
Susan Morrissey Wyse
Ph.D. Candidate, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Email: wysesusan@gmail.com
Collin Xia
Collin Xia is a first-year Ph.D. student in York’s Political Science Department. His research is centred on settler colonialism and sovereignty, specifically the ways in which settler states co-opt Indigenous presence and culture in upholding settler occupation.
Email: cxia99@yorku.ca
Harshita Yalamarty
Ph.D. Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Research Associate
Harshita Yalamarty is a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto (Tkaronto) Canada. She is an international student from India. Her doctoral work examines the experiences of marriage migrant women from India to Canada, in relation to migration policies, expectations of household and care labour, as well as caste communities in the diaspora. She is also involved in community conversations around migrant workers’ rights, Indigenous rights and settler colonialism and Hindu right-wing mobilization in India and Canada. She is a teaching assistant at York University and has also taught at University of Delhi.
Ani Yedigaryan
Ph.D. Student, Humanities, Research Associate
Ani Yedigaryan has obtained a Specialized Honours BA and MA in Political Science, from York University. Her Masters research project focused on how the Armenian lobby groups in Canada and the United States have come to shape the collective memory of the Armenian genocide. Currently, Ani is a Doctoral student in the Department of Humanities. Her Doctoral research project focuses on the Armenian genocide, in particular, how the memory of the genocide affects political identity formation amongst Armenian diasporan groups in Canada and the United States. Her general research interests are in the field of memory studies, genocide, historical memory, politics of trauma, identity formation, identity politics, transnationalism, grassroots activism, social justice, pedagogy, ethics, forgetting, politics of commemoration, politics of denial, accountability, critical theory, ethnographic and qualitative research. She is particularly interested in the works of Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Halbwachs, Jenny Edkins, Milton Esman, Jan Assman, Roger Simon to name a few. Her theoretical interests are grounded in the Frankfurt School of thought, particularly, Hokhimer, Honneth, Gramsci, Arendt, and Adorno
Email: aniyan@yorku.ca
Sebastian Yuxi Zhao
Ph.D. Candidate, Communication and Culture, Research Associate
Sebastian Yuxi Zhao is a doctoral student at York University with an M.A. in Communication from the University of Ottawa and a B.A. in the same field from Simon Fraser University.
Sebastian’s doctoral dissertation will study the digital media consumption pattern of recent Chinese international students in Canada and its impacts on their identity negotiation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some other topics that he specializes in include new media, popular culture, the Chinese diaspora.
Email: sebzhao@yorku.ca