A distinguished group of review panelists from the Comparative International Education Society (CIES) has recently recognized Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein as one of four 2020 CIES – African Diaspora Special Interest Group Emerging Scholars.
Across its expansive network, CIES contributes to interdisciplinary understanding of education and scholarship through promoting international research and disseminating cross-cultural studies. With more than 3,000 members from over 110 countries, the CIES circulates impactful work on educational issues from broad and interrelated social, political and economic contexts.
Caroline Shenaz Hossein
Hossein, an associate professor in the LA&PS Department of Business and Society, earned the special CIES accolade for her extraordinary research contributions across the African diaspora, which offers a valuable perspective that demonstrates innovative thinking in collective economics.
For several years, Hossein has studied the business lives of the African diaspora by investigating the relationships illustrated within the community through the organization of cooperatives, mutual aid groups, small businesses, and social enterprises in the Caribbean, Canada and the United States. Her work as founder of the Diverse Solidarity Economies (DiSE) Collective has furthered these research efforts, with the organization dedicating itself to diversifying political economy and examining the ways in which racialized people have utilized economic solidarity to overcome issues such as systemic exclusion.
Hossein has also written and edited numerous books exploring the connections between race and social economics, including The Black Social Economy: Exploring community-based diverse markets, and Politicized Microfinance: Money, power and violence in the Black Americas, the winner of the 2018 Du Bois Distinguished Book Award and the 2019 Suraj Mal and Shyama Devi Argawal Book Prize. In addition to her CIES Emerging Scholar Award, Hossein’s research on the African diaspora has garnered support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which is funding a three-year project titled “African Origins in the Social Economy.”
“I am humbled that my emerging body of work on solidarity economics has meaning for the African diaspora, who are often neglected in development issues,” Hossein said. “This award recognizes the value of cooperative and collective institutions led by Black people who live in the Americas. It also means that my work now has a new home at the CIES among supportive colleagues working on issues that better the lives of the Black diaspora everywhere.”