THE ARCHIVE

Dr. Beth Coleman is an Associate Professor of Data & Cities at the University of Toronto, where she directs the City as Platform lab. Working in the disciplines of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Race Studies, her research focuses on smart technology & machine learning, urban data, and civic engagement. She is the author of Hello Avatar and multiple articles. Her research affiliations have included the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; Microsoft Research; Data & Society Institute; and expert consultant for the European Commission Digital Futures. She was the 4S 2021 Toronto Conference Co-Chair. She is a founding member of the Trusted Data Sharing lab, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the Inaugural Director, University of Toronto Black Research Network Institute Strategic Initiative. Coleman is a 2021 Google Artists and Machines Intelligence awardee and 2022 Google Senior Visiting Researcher. Her previous academic positions include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Waterloo. She is the co-founder of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, an internationally acclaimed multimedia art and sound platform. She has a history of international exhibition including venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Musée d'Art moderne Paris.

Laurie R. Lambert is an interdisciplinary scholar, working at the intersection of literature and history in African Diaspora Studies. She is an associate professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Her first book, Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2020), examines the gendered implications of political trauma in literature on Grenada. The book analyzes how Caribbean women writers use authorship as a means of expressing cultural sovereignty and critiquing the inadequacy of hierarchical, patriarchal, and linear histories of a Black radical tradition as they narrate the Grenada Revolution. Her research and teaching interests include Black Feminism, Black Radicalism, Caribbean and African Diasporic Literature and History. She is the co-founder and co-convener of Fordham’s Freedom and Slavery Working Group. Prof. Lambert’s writing has appeared in Cultural Dynamics, The Global South, and Small Axe.  She is currently the Secretary of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Before joining the faculty at Fordham in 2017, Lambert was Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, and the 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.  Lambert received her BFA in Film Studies from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, as well as an MA in English from the University of Toronto. In 2013 she completed her PhD in English and American Literature at New York University.  

Lauren McLeod Cramer is an Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the aesthetics of blackness and popular culture. She is currently writing a book on hip-hop, architecture, and black spatial practice and has published writing on a wide variety of “art objects” including WorldStarHipHop.com, the videos from Jay-Z’s 4:44, Peter Eisenman’s architectural designs, and Meghan Markle’s wedding. Lauren is a founding member of liquid blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics, and is the co-Editor of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (Duke University Press). Her writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Black Scholar, Black Camera, Film Criticism, he Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Docalogue and the edited collection Writing for Screen Media (Routledge, 2019).

Berlin Reed is an independent curator, author, and chef based outside of Tiohtià:Ke//Montréal. A Brooklyn transplant raised near Seattle, Reed is inspired by his German and Southern U.S. roots and a passion for culinary and agrarian traditions. His work across disciplines explores expressions of Black and Queer* identities, celebrating the brilliant ingenuity held in both cultures as a form of decolonial resistance. Rooting into the language of gastronomy in 2009, Reed began to establish himself by curating multi-dimensional pop-ups in artistic ecosystems from San Francisco to Brooklyn to Montreal - culminating in the 2013 publication of his memoir “The Ethical Butcher: How Thoughtful Eating Can Change Your World”. This nomadic chef's life led him to Montreal in 2012, where Reed co-founded immersive dining and consulting collective, Atelier Etta. As a Curator/Chef, Berlin focuses on creative spaces and opportunities for interactions between various disciplines and artists. His collaborative exhibitions with transdisciplinary artists explore practices of consumption and take advantage of the ability to infiltrate the viewer’s world through sensorial works.

 Deshonay Dozier is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work investigates urban development, policing and abolitionist place-making.  Her current book project details a tradition of abolition where poor and unhoused people in Los Angeles challenge the penal organization of their lives brought on by urban redevelopment. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and it has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies. Dozier is a University of California Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Urban Planning and the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and holds a position as Assistant Professor of Human Geography at CSU Long Beach. 

Tendayi Sithole is Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa. He is the author of Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology in Azania (New York and London: Rowman and Littlefied International, 2022), The Black Register (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), and Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). 

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on race, gender, and citizenship in the French-speaking Caribbean, Africa, and France. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press), which was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and Honorable Mention for the Eugen Weber Award for best book in modern French history. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Slavery & Abolition, Eighteenth-Century Studies and The French Review, and her public writings have been featured in Al Jazeera, HuffPost, and the Washington Post. She is a recipient of the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics. She is also incoming senior editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and feature (essays and interviews) in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux. 

Shauna Sweeney is an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies and History at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include histories of gender, economy, slavery, and emancipation in the Caribbean. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the licit and illicit economies of enslaved and free people of African descent, especially free and enslaved market women, in Jamaica and the wider the Atlantic world. Shauna’s work has appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Social Text. She recently published an essay: “Gendering Racial Capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition,” in the edited volume Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2021).

Elleza Kelley is a Postdoctoral Associate in the departments of African American Studies and English at Yale University. In July, she will join both departments as an Assistant Professor. Kelley earned her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and her B.A. from Wesleyan University. She works on African American literature and visual art, with an emphasis on black geographies and radical spatial practice in the United States. Her current book project looks at practices of inscription and mark-making as modes of spatial production, representation, and reinvention. You can find her writing in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, The New Inquiry, Cabinet Magazine, Deem Journal, and elsewhere.

Karina Vernon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, Black aesthetics, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2020 and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. She is at work on a five-year SSHRC-funded project “Black Art and the Aesthetics of Spatial Justice,” which seeks to understand how mid-century urban renewal projects that destroyed inner-city Black neighbourhoods across North America gave rise to a new Black literary aesthetic. With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) she is working on a SSHRC-funded book project on the politics and aesthetics of relation of Black Canadian cultural achievement, including writing, music, film, and visual art.  

Janice J. Anderson is a PhD candidate in Humanities at York University in Toronto. Her doctoral research considers self-fashioning and world-making in Black womxn’s intellectual traditions and literatures in the Americas. Areas of research interest include the Black womxnisms/ feminisms, Black Radical Tradition, Black aesthetics and Black literatures. She seeks to engage 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). Anderson’s work has been included in Small Axe Salon and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

Halle-Mackenzie Ashby is a PhD student in History at the Johns Hopkins University. She also holds a Master of Arts in History from the University of Toronto. Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation, and her research concerns questions about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. Her current project explores the ways in which Black women’s everyday encounters with systems of surveillance, punishment and medical violence mapped post-emancipation Barbados’ carceral landscape. Additionally, Ashby is an assistant editor for Electric Marronage as well as a digital curator for an upcoming Marronage Database as part of LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure.

Pablo D. Herrera Veitia obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St. Andrews. He is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of Orisa worship, hip hop studies and multimodal ethnography. His research explores what it means to be Afro-Cuban in post-socialist Havana and follows divinatory figures in the Odù Ifá literary corpus as primary conceptual sources. As one of Cuba’s pioneering Afro-Cuban rap music producers, Herrera Veitia proposes that understanding Afro-Cubaneity today may require a focus on recent shifts in the audible character of Havana and how the city’s sonorous dimension presents itself as a site where citizens contest state ideology through loud and discrete amplification practices. Herrera Veitia is a 2018-2019 Nasir Jones Fellowship recipient at the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Revista Casa de las Americas, Metronome's documenta 12 Magazines issue, and OkayAfrica.com. He has also collaborated on several major academic research projects on rap and reggaeton music in Havana, including Sujatha Fernandez's Cuba Represent and Close to the Edge, Tanya Saunders's Cuban Underground Hiphop; Marc Perry's Negro Soy Yo; and Geoff Baker's Buena Vista in the Club.

Dr. Joana Joachim is Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art Education, Art History and Social Justice at Concordia University. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist art histories, Black diasporic art histories, critical museologies, Black Canadian studies, and Canadian slavery studies. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral work, There/Then, Here/Now: Black Women’s Hair and Dress in the French Empire, examines the visual culture of Black women’s hair and dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, investigating practices of self-preservation and self-care through the lens of creolization as well as historical and contemporary art practices. She earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University working under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. Dr. Joachim obtained her master’s degree in Museology from Université de Montréal and her BFA from University of Ottawa. In 2020 she was appointed as a McGill Provostial Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Institutional Histories, Slavery and Colonialism.  Dr. Joachim’s scholarship has appeared in books, journals and magazines including Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture, Canadian Journal of History, RACAR: What is Critical Curating?, Mixed Heritage: (Self) Portraits and Identity Negotiation (Americana: e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary) and C Magazine.

Adesoji Babalola is a first year doctoral student in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His scholarly interests are hip hop sociolinguistics and ethnography, and Black Studies. Adesoji studied and taught English and linguistics at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria before joining Queen’s. He has published scholarly works in notable academic journals. His hobbies include listening to music, watching soccer football, teaching, socializing and writing poems. Adesoji’s ongoing doctoral research tentatively aims at theorizing the concept of linguistic necropolitics and how translanguaging practices are confronting such colonial monoglossic language ideology in hip hop music from Nigeria and Canada. The research is also interested in interrogating and deconstructing how race and ethnicity are constructed through translanguaging and vice versa to negotiate identities in hip hop space with the framework of raciolinguistics.

Tola Mbulaheni is a 3rd-year PhD candidate in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences program at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Ms. Mbulaheni brings 10 years of research experience related to Black/African women and social/structural contexts of HIV risk and prevention spanning Canada and South Africa. Her doctoral research will focus on critically examining structural forms of racism shaping HIV services accessed by Black women in the Greater Toronto Area. This inquiry will further investigate how women experience these services and the subsequent impacts on their decision-making related to HIV prevention and treatment. Ms. Mbulaheni is also a burgeoning scholar of critical theories of race and racism including critical race theory. She is particularly interested in the ways genealogies of medical discourse concerning Black women are taken up in present-day public health responses.

Jessica Bundy holds a master’s degree in sociology from Acadia University and is pursing a doctoral degree at the Centre for Criminology and Sociologeal Studies at the University of Toronto. Originally from Nova Scotia, her research interests center around race, gender, narrative, police, and the broader criminal justice system. Her doctoral work explores the experiences of the urban African Nova Scotian community with the criminal justice system.

Bianca Beauchemin obtained her BA with a summa cum laude distinction from York University in Women’s Studies and attended Queen’s University Master’s program in Gender Studies. She is currently a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at UCLA, where she was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship. Her dissertation research re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. Indeed, beneath the surface of the Bois-Caïman ceremony, the burning of Le Cap, the implementation of French slavery abolition laws, and post-independence literature, reside opaque, yet ingenious, formulations of Black liberation and resistance that unsettle Western discourses of archives, modernity, “humanness,” and freedom.

Jessica Bundy holds a master’s degree in sociology from Acadia University and is pursing a doctoral degree at the Centre for Criminology and Sociologeal Studies at the University of Toronto. Originally from Nova Scotia, her research interests center around race, gender, narrative, police, and the broader criminal justice system. Her doctoral work explores the experiences of the urban African Nova Scotian community with the criminal justice system.

Milka Njoroge is a PhD student at Queen's University. Her research investigates humanitarian photography and the production, circulation, and consumption of images of suffering. 

Muna Dahir is a Ph.D. student in Gender Studies at Queen's University, where she also completed her M.A. Muna also holds a B.A. specializing in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus. Her research pertains to Black temporalities through theories of “relation,” so as to reconsider the coherence and stability of Western colonial regimes of truth and modes of organizing time. Grounded in Black studies, Anti-colonial studies, and Feminist studies, her research focuses on questions of colonial pasts; alienation; Black women's material and cultural production; Black textual and reading practices; relational methodologies; poetics; and liberatory

Interested in Black History and eradicating racism against the Black community from an early age, Channon’s keen interest and passion in these areas, helped her realize that she must do all she could to educate others and raise awareness of the rich history of Black people. An enthusiast of reading, travel and writing poetry, Channon has an indescribable passion and thirst to not only know more about history, in particular- slavery (historical and modern), but to educate people on these issues and to assist in stopping it from continuing!

An honours graduate, with a Bachelor’s degree in History and Caribbean Studies from the
University of Toronto, a Master’s Degree in Slavery Studies from the University of Hull in the
UK, a Certificate in Adult Education from George Brown College and currently undertaking her PhD at Queen’s University, Channon has expanded her knowledge and information about Black History and the issues that the Black community faces both locally, here in Canada and internationally. Apart from participating in conferences and workshops relating to the Black experience and history in Canada, Channon is currently the first Vice-President for the Ontario Black History Society, where she helps the organization preserve, celebrate and spread the rich Black History of Ontario and Canada.

Channon is the co-founder of Oyeniran Education Support (OyES), an educational organization created by herself and her husband and she continues to use these platforms to teach young people about Black History. Channon Oyeniran was born in Scarborough, Ontario and currently resides in Pickering, Ontario with her husband and their sons.

Nataleah is a writer, film curator, and Ph.D. candidate in Communication and Culture at York and X Universities. Her doctoral research explores the socio-cultural impacts of social media videos documenting anti-Black police brutality and their representations in contemporary art. At the Toronto International Film Festival, Nataleah is international associate programmer for Africa, the Middle East and Black Diaspora. She has also supported festival programming for the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa. To find her recent writing visit Canadian Art Magazine, Xtra Magazine, the Gardiner Museum, and issue #58 of PUBLIC: Arts | Culture | Ideas, which she also co-edited. Nataleah was born to two and raised by many in Toronto.

Katrina Sellinger (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She received her MA in English Language & Literatures from the University of British Columbia and her BA with a Combined Honours in English and Gender & Women's Studies from Dalhousie University. Katrina is interested in black cultural production throughout the diaspora and has guest-edited an issue of The Capilano Review on "the work of words" for black creators with Emmanuelle Andrews. Her current research project looks at racial passing in African American literature, film, and memoir from the 19th to 21st century. Unlike most scholarship on racial passing that centers light-skinned black or mixed-raced figures passing as white, her approach insists that we explicitly decenter whiteness in our engagement with passing in order to more fully explore what passing might do for black people. Katrina’s research is funded by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier award.

Emilie Jabouin is a PhD Candidate in the joint X*/York Communication & Culture program. Her doctoral dissertation explores Black women's intellectual histories, organizing and expressive cultures in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century English-Canada. As a multidisciplinary academic and dance artist, Emilie merges research and performance to share stories with the public that are under-explored and silenced. Digging through the archives, her work is a source of information for collective healing in service to her community and to society. Additional research interests of hers include early twentieth-century health and dance history. In 2020, Emilie began using her research to inform choreography and committed her time to learning, sharing and preserving Haitian folklore – drumming, song, and dance under the guidance of Master choreographer and drummer Peniel Guerrier. In manifesting her vision, Emilie founded Emirj Projects, a multi-faceted research and performance production company inspired by the dance process of curiosity, intuition and exploration, (www.emirj.ca).

*The university is in the process of being renamed, please view this open letter for context.

Marcus Singleton, M.Ed. is originally from the South Side of Chicago and he is a conscious Hip-Hop artist and educator who is an advocate for Black students and their voices. Marcus is a Ph.D. student at OISE/ University of Toronto in the Social Justice Department under the supervision of Dr. rosalind hampton. Marcus' research focuses on Black Studies through the lens of Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Critical Race reading practices. By using Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Critical Race reading practices Marcus’ goal is to create counter-spaces of resistance with a transnational community of Black students/youth who are willing to move collaboratively in solidarity to challenge and deconstruct institutions constructed on Eurocentric ideals. Marcus’ interest includes using the mixed methodologies of (Auto)ethnography, Black Emancipatory Action Research (BEAR), Critical Race Emancipatory English Education (CREEE), and Youth Action Participatory Research (YPAR) in collaboration as a way to create counter-spaces and creative platforms for Black students to use their voice to reclaim and reimagine African-indigenous knowledges to counter the ways in which Eurocentric institutions e.g. schools and prisons continue to uphold anti-Black and colonial methods of learning as a weapon aimed against Black students/ youth.

Keisha Jefferies is a Toronto-based African Nova Scotian woman, born and raised in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. She is a mother, registered nurse and recently completed her PhD in nursing through Dalhousie University. Her doctoral research, which was funded by programs such as the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Killam Trust, Research Nova Scotia, Johnson Scholarship Foundation, BRIC NS and Dalhousie, examined the leadership experiences of African Nova Scotian nurses in healthcare. Her scholarly and advocacy work focus on addressing anti-Black racism in nursing, equitable admissions in post-secondary institutions, as well as health and wellbeing for Black communities. Keisha has clinical and health policy experience in the areas of neonatal intensive care and breastfeeding. 

Multi-Disciplinary Artist

Sandra Brewster is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad. A recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize (2018) and the Gattuso Prize for Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (2017), Brewster has been recognized for her community-based practice that centres a Black presence located in Canada. The daughter of Guyanese-born parents, she is especially attuned to the experiences of people of Caribbean heritage and their ongoing relationships with back home. Her exhibition Blur is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  She received a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.  Brewster is represented by Georgia Scherman Projects.   

Dr. Mark V. Campbell is a DJ, scholar and curator. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations and notions of the human. Dr. Campbell is a former Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Fine Arts at the University of Regina and is currently the Principal Investigator in the SSHRC funded research project on Hip Hop Archives.  As co-founder of the Bigger than Hip Hop radio show in 1997 and founder at Northside Hip Hop Archive in 2010, Mark has spent two decades embedded within the Toronto hip hop scene operating from community engaged praxis as both a DJ and a Curator.  Mark’s forthcoming books include B-sides and ‘Othered’ Kinds of Humans, the co-edited collection of essays, Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production with Murray Forman as well as  Hip Hop in Canada: Diasporic and Indigenous Reverberations with Charity Marsh.  Dr. Campbell recently published …Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto hip hop Culture from Analogue to Digital as part of his recent Contact Festival exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. He has published widely, with essays appearing in the Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society and the Journal of World Popular Music.  His popular writing can be found in various public sources, such as the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star as well as hip hop magazines such as Urbanology. 

"Dr. Andrea A. Davis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Special Advisor on the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies' Anti-Black Racism Strategy. She teaches and supervises in literatures and cultures of the Black Americas and holds cross-appointments in the graduate programs in English; Interdisciplinary Studies; Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies; and Social and Political Thought. She is the author of Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women's Cultural Critiques of Nation, soon to be released by Northwestern University Press.  She is an accomplished teacher who has won teaching awards at the Faculty, university and national levels, including a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship Award. Her research focuses on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas. She is particularly interested in the intersections of the literatures of the Caribbean, the United States and Canada and her work encourages an intertextual cross-cultural dialogue about Black women's experiences in diaspora. She is former Chair of the Department of Humanities and former interim director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC). Her SSHRC-funded research on the effects of violence on Black youth in Canada and Jamaica, housed at CERLAC, was profiled in the Council of Ontario Universities' Research Matters campaign in 2012-2013. She is currently co-editing (with Leslie Sanders) The Handbook to Black Canadian Literature (Routledge).   "

"Dr. OmiSoore H. Dryden, a Black queer femme, is the James R Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Faculty of Medicine, and Associate Professor, Community Health & Epidemiology at Dalhousie University. Dr. Dryden engages in interdisciplinary scholarship and research that focuses on Black LGBTQI people and HIV vulnerability within Black diasporic communities in Canada; systemic/structural issues that affect health and well-being, including experiences with blood donation in Canada; medical education; and Black health curricular content development.   Dr. Dryden is the Principal Investigator of #GotBlood2Give / #DuSangÀDonner a research project that seeks to identify the barriers Black gay, bisexual, and trans men encounter with donating blood and also analyzes how anti-black racism, colonialism, and sexual exceptionalism shapes the blood system in Canada. Most recently, Dryden is the Principal Investigator on the project Don’t Count Us Out! – a community-informed, culturally sensitive approach to health promotion for African Nova Scotian communities with an initial focus on COVID-19 pandemic.   Dr. Dryden is a content expert and Associate Scientist with the Maritime Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) SUPPORT Unit (MSSU). In that capacity, Dr. Dryden provides guidance on Canadian Black Health metrics needed to inform the development of health policies and improve the health care system, this specifically focuses on survey data and demographic information, determinants of trust, sexual health and qualitative data collection and analysis.   OmiSoore has published in peer-reviewed journals and book collections and has an edited collection (with Dr. Suzanne Lenon): Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging(UBC Press, 2015). Dryden is currently working on a new edited collection (with Dr. Nicole Charles) titled, Black Technoscience “Here” which aims to center transnational and diasporic Black technoscientific praxes and methodologies in an effort to broaden perspectives on what technoscientific thought and method entails, while unearthing the politics of doing so as part of a transnational dialogue. Dryden co-authored (with Dr. Onye Nnorom) the Commentary, Time to dismantle systemic anti-Black racism in medicine in Canada” published January 11, 2021, in the CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).   Dr. Dryden is the past co-president (with Dr. rosalind Hampton, UofT) of the Black Canadian Studies Academic Association; a board member of the Health Association of African Canadians, Nova Scotia; and a member of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies International Collective based at Northeastern University.    "

Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at the OCAD University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by ‘other’ Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, ‘culture’ and ‘education’ can be employed by to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging, and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was the 2017/18 OCAD U-Massey Fellow. Fatona has published scholarly articles, catalogue essays, and book chapters in a range of publications.    

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and feature (essays and interviews) in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux. 

Multi-Disciplinary Artist, Writer, Curator and Entrepreneur 

"Charmaine Lurch is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work draws attention to human-environmental relationalities. Lurch’s paintings and sculptures are conversations on infrastructures and the spaces and places we inhabit. Working with a range of materials and reimagining our surroundings—from bees and taxi cabs to The Tempest and quiet moments of joy, Lurch subtly connects Black life and movement globally.    Lurch offers us materials that are seemingly simple and familiar. Figures marked in charcoal perform dynamic movements, allowing us to visualize active presence. Paint both pleases and jars vision to create new ways of seeing and knowing. Wire takes up space, is a drawing in space, wire moves through space. The formations cast shadows, trace landscapes, and act as a means to mark the inside/outside of things. These elements are her expressive and textural messengers. Bound together with research, they create signifying forms that seek to re-configure and rewire perception and ideas."

Katherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art). While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis on embodied, creative and intellectual spaces engendered in the diaspora.

An Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University. Current research interests include Sound Studies and Black feminist performance, particularly the circulation of African American performance and its influence on the formation of national identity. 

Artistic Director of KasheDance and Program Manager at Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO), Kevin A. Ormsby has performed with companies in Canada, USA and the Caribbean. Recipient  of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch – Staunton Award and TAC Cultural Leaders Fellow, he has been a Guest Artist at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts - University of the West Indies (Mona), University of Wisconsin – Madison and Northwestern University.  Kevin's research and creative practice through his company's technical approach to dance exists in a space of constant interrogation and navigation of Caribbean cultural nuances towards, a methodology of understanding space in creation, research, and presentation. He is on the Boards of Dance Collection Danse, Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts and has served on the Boards of Canadian Dance Assembly, Prologue to the Performing Arts and Nia Centre for the Arts.  .    

"Dr. Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke UP, 2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke UP, 2014).   Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Feenin: R&B’s Technologies of Humanity, offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970’s. The second, Black Life/Schwarz-Sein, situates Blackness as an ungendered ontology of unbelonging. His work has been published in many journals, and the anthologies Black Europe and the African Diaspora, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache, and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland.  "

Evelyn Amponsah is a community organizer, researcher, scholar, and co- founder of the Black Graduate Students’ Collective at York University. She has been an integral part of the struggle for Black Studies at York and also works on decolonizing the academy, both in Ghana and in Toronto and advocates for more representation of Black people in the academy. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate in York University’s Social and Political Thought program. Her work is largely on melancholia and race and critiques of the “post” racial, and is interested in Afro-pessimism, Black Optimism,  Black studies, diaspora studies, Social and Political critiques of whiteness, popular culture and cultural studies. Her work is motivated by Robin D.G Kelly's phrase "love, study, struggle.   

Janice J. Anderson is a PhD candidate in Humanities at York University in Toronto. Her doctoral research considers self-fashioning and world-making in Black womxn’s intellectual traditions and literatures in the Americas. Areas of research interest include the Black womxnisms/ feminisms, Black Radical Tradition, Black aesthetics and Black literatures. She seeks to engage 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). Anderson’s work has been included in Small Axe Salon and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

Halle-Mackenzie Ashby is a PhD student in History at the Johns Hopkins University. She also holds a Master of Arts in History from the University of Toronto. Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation, and her research concerns questions about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. Her current project explores the ways in which Black women’s everyday encounters with systems of surveillance, punishment and medical violence mapped post-emancipation Barbados’ carceral landscape. Additionally, Ashby is an assistant editor for Electric Marronage as well as a digital curator for an upcoming Marronage Database as part of LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure.

Adesoji Babalola is a first year doctoral student in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His scholarly interests are hip hop sociolinguistics and ethnography, and Black Studies. Adesoji studied and taught English and linguistics at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria before joining Queen’s. He has published scholarly works in notable academic journals. His hobbies include listening to music, watching soccer football, teaching, socializing and writing poems. Adesoji’s ongoing doctoral research tentatively aims at theorizing the concept of linguistic necropolitics and how translanguaging practices are confronting such colonial monoglossic language ideology in hip hop music from Nigeria and Canada. The research is also interested in interrogating and deconstructing how race and ethnicity are constructed through translanguaging and vice versa to negotiate identities in hip hop space with the framework of raciolinguistics.

Bianca Beauchemin obtained her BA with a summa cum laude distinction from York University in Women’s Studies and attended Queen’s University Master’s program in Gender Studies. She is currently a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at UCLA, where she was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship. Her dissertation research re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. Indeed, beneath the surface of the Bois-Caïman ceremony, the burning of Le Cap, the implementation of French slavery abolition laws, and post-independence literature, reside opaque, yet ingenious, formulations of Black liberation and resistance that unsettle Western discourses of archives, modernity, “humanness,” and freedom.

Jessica Bundy holds a master’s degree in sociology from Acadia University and is pursing a doctoral degree at the Centre for Criminology and Sociologeal Studies at the University of Toronto. Originally from Nova Scotia, her research interests center around race, gender, narrative, police, and the broader criminal justice system. Her doctoral work explores the experiences of the urban African Nova Scotian community with the criminal justice system.

Cherie has a BA in English and Legal Studies (Carleton), a Certificate in Labour Relations from Queen’s University Industrial Relations Centre, and a Certificate in HR Law from Osgoode Hall Law School. She was called to the Bar in 2005 and has practiced in the areas of Criminal law, Regulatory, Civil, and Tax defence. She has appeared at all levels of Court in Ontario (Ontario Court of Justice, Superior Court of Justice, and the Ontario Court of Appeal). 

Cherie is currently in the second year of her Ph.D. in Social Justice Education with a collaborative focus in Women and Gender studies. In 2019 she graduated from The University of Toronto (OISE) with a Master of Education in Adult Education and Community Development and a collaborative focus in Workplace Learning and Social change, as well as also graduating with a Master of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School. Lastly not only is she one of the founding members of the National Black Graduate Network (NBGN). The National Black Graduate Network (NBGN) is an initiative to promote communication and collaboration among Black graduate students and students of Black Studies in Canada. For the 2020-2021 school year, she is both the coordinator for the NBGN and student representative for the Black Canadian studies Association executive. Due to COVID-19 she was named but has not officially received her honour for being named in 2020 1 of 100 Accomplished Black Canadian women (the event will be held in September of 2021) In March of 2021, Ms. Daniel is the 1st recipient of the Inaugural Cultivating Community award from the University of Toronto (OISE). This award celebrates the achievements of staff, students or faculty members – individually or as a group – who have undertaken positive actions to influence and improve a sense of belonging, inclusivity and community within OISE or our external environment. The inaugural winners have shown these qualities at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and beyond.

Nataleah is a writer, film curator, and Ph.D. candidate in Communication and Culture at York and X Universities. Her doctoral research explores the socio-cultural impacts of social media videos documenting anti-Black police brutality and their representations in contemporary art. At the Toronto International Film Festival, Nataleah is international associate programmer for Africa, the Middle East and Black Diaspora. She has also supported festival programming for the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa. To find her recent writing visit Canadian Art Magazine, Xtra Magazine, the Gardiner Museum, and issue #58 of PUBLIC: Arts | Culture | Ideas, which she also co-edited. Nataleah was born to two and raised by many in Toronto.

Emilie Jabouin is a PhD Candidate in the joint X*/York Communication & Culture program. Her doctoral dissertation explores Black women's intellectual histories, organizing and expressive cultures in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century English-Canada. As a multidisciplinary academic and dance artist, Emilie merges research and performance to share stories with the public that are under-explored and silenced. Digging through the archives, her work is a source of information for collective healing in service to her community and to society. Additional research interests of hers include early twentieth-century health and dance history. In 2020, Emilie began using her research to inform choreography and committed her time to learning, sharing and preserving Haitian folklore – drumming, song, and dance under the guidance of Master choreographer and drummer Peniel Guerrier. In manifesting her vision, Emilie founded Emirj Projects, a multi-faceted research and performance production company inspired by the dance process of curiosity, intuition and exploration, (www.emirj.ca).

*The university is in the process of being renamed, please view this open letter for context.

Keisha Jefferies is a Toronto-based African Nova Scotian woman, born and raised in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. She is a mother, registered nurse and recently completed her PhD in nursing through Dalhousie University. Her doctoral research, which was funded by programs such as the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Killam Trust, Research Nova Scotia, Johnson Scholarship Foundation, BRIC NS and Dalhousie, examined the leadership experiences of African Nova Scotian nurses in healthcare. Her scholarly and advocacy work focus on addressing anti-Black racism in nursing, equitable admissions in post-secondary institutions, as well as health and wellbeing for Black communities. Keisha has clinical and health policy experience in the areas of neonatal intensive care and breastfeeding.  

Yaniya Lee is a Ph.D. student in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her interdisciplinary research questions critical-reading practices and reexamines Canadian art histories. In November 2019, Lee and curator Denise Ryner co-convened the Bodies, Borders, Fields Symposium in Toronto. The 3-day series of workshops, performances and talks revisited a 1967 roundtable conversation on the theme of “black.” In the fall of 2020, Lee and Ryner guest-edited Chroma, a special issue of Canadian Art magazine dedicated to black artists and black art histories. Lee has participated in residencies and fellowships at the AGO (2017, with Emilia-Amalia), Banff (2017), Blackwood Gallery (2018), Gallery 44 (2018), and Vtape (2019-2020), and she is currently the 2020- 2021 research fellow at Artexte, Montreal.  (full bio: https://yaniyalee.com/) 

Yaniya Lee is a Ph.D. student in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her interdisciplinary research questions critical-reading practices and reexamines Canadian art histories. In November 2019, Lee and curator Denise Ryner co-convened the Bodies, Borders, Fields Symposium in Toronto. The 3-day series of workshops, performances and talks revisited a 1967 roundtable conversation on the theme of “black.” In the fall of 2020, Lee and Ryner guest-edited Chroma, a special issue of Canadian Art magazine dedicated to black artists and black art histories. Lee has participated in residencies and fellowships at the AGO (2017, with Emilia-Amalia), Banff (2017), Blackwood Gallery (2018), Gallery 44 (2018), and Vtape (2019-2020), and she is currently the 2020- 2021 research fellow at Artexte, Montreal.  (full bio: https://yaniyalee.com/) 

Tola Mbulaheni is a 3rd-year PhD candidate in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences program at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Ms. Mbulaheni brings 10 years of research experience related to Black/African women and social/structural contexts of HIV risk and prevention spanning Canada and South Africa. Her doctoral research will focus on critically examining structural forms of racism shaping HIV services accessed by Black women in the Greater Toronto Area. This inquiry will further investigate how women experience these services and the subsequent impacts on their decision-making related to HIV prevention and treatment. Ms. Mbulaheni is also a burgeoning scholar of critical theories of race and racism including critical race theory. She is particularly interested in the ways genealogies of medical discourse concerning Black women are taken up in present-day public health responses.

Ola Mohammed is an Assistant professor of Black Popular Culture at York University, Toronto, Canada. She specializes in interdisciplinary research exploring Black cultural production, Black social life and Black being as sites of possibility. Her dissertation, The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s), examines the sonic dimension of anti-Blackness in Canada; her research interests include Black Popular Music, Black Studies, Sound Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performance Theory and Digital Culture. Ola Mohammed has an extensive background in student activism, is a founding member of the York Black Graduate Students’ Collective which advocated and worked to implement Black Studies/ Black Canadian Studies at York at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Milka Njoroge is a PhD student at Queen's University. Her research investigates humanitarian photography and the production, circulation, and consumption of images of suffering. 

"Interested in Black History and eradicating racism against the Black community from an early age, Channon’s keen interest and passion in these areas, helped her realize that she must do all she could to educate others and raise awareness of the rich history of Black people. An enthusiast of reading, travel and writing poetry, Channon has an indescribable passion and thirst to not only know more about history, in particular- slavery (historical and modern), but to educate people on these issues and to assist in stopping it from continuing!  An honours graduate, with a Bachelor’s degree in History and Caribbean Studies from the University of Toronto, a Master’s Degree in Slavery Studies from the University of Hull in the UK, a Certificate in Adult Education from George Brown College and currently undertaking her PhD at Queen’s University, Channon has expanded her knowledge and information about Black History and the issues that the Black community faces both locally, here in Canada and internationally. Apart from participating in conferences and workshops relating to the Black experience and history in Canada, Channon is currently the first Vice-President for the Ontario Black History Society, where she helps the organization preserve, celebrate and spread the rich Black History of Ontario and Canada.  Channon is the co-founder of Oyeniran Education Support (OyES), an educational organization created by herself and her husband and she continues to use these platforms to teach young people about Black History. Channon Oyeniran was born in Scarborough, Ontario and currently resides in Pickering, Ontario with her husband and their sons."

Katrina Sellinger (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She received her MA in English Language & Literatures from the University of British Columbia and her BA with a Combined Honours in English and Gender & Women's Studies from Dalhousie University. Katrina is interested in black cultural production throughout the diaspora and has guest-edited an issue of The Capilano Review on "the work of words" for black creators with Emmanuelle Andrews. Her current research project looks at racial passing in African American literature, film, and memoir from the 19th to 21st century. Unlike most scholarship on racial passing that centers light-skinned black or mixed-raced figures passing as white, her approach insists that we explicitly decenter whiteness in our engagement with passing in order to more fully explore what passing might do for black people. Katrina’s research is funded by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier award.

" Dr. Camisha Sibblis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor and is currently transitioning to her most recent appointment at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in Criminology, Law and Society with a focus on Black Canadian Studied. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and pursued her BSW, MSW, and PhD degrees at York University. Camisha has extensive experience working with marginalized children, youth and their families as a school social worker in the Peel District School Board, as a child welfare worker, and as a clinician who, in addition to treatment, authors various types of assessment reports - including “Morris Reports” aka Impact of Race and Culture Reports. She counseled Black wards of the Children’s Aid Society as a mental health practitioner in private practice; and she is a clinical agent for the Office of the Children’s Lawyer. Among her community work, she taught for the Tabono Liberation Learning Academy - fostering activism among Black young adults, she was a long-standing member of the Council for Adolescent Suicide Prevention in Peel, a suicide intervention trainer, and was a member of the Peel school board’s community advisory council for the board-wide strategy to support Black student academic success and well-being. She currently sits on the Board of Directors as a Research Consultant for the Black Community Action Network of Peel."

"Marcus Singleton, M.Ed. is originally from the South Side of Chicago and he is a conscious Hip-Hop artist and educator who is an advocate for Black students and their voices. Marcus is a Ph.D. student at OISE/ University of Toronto in the Social Justice Department under the supervision of Dr. rosalind hampton. Marcus' research focuses on Black Studies through the lens of Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Critical Race reading practices. By using Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Critical Race reading practices Marcus’ goal is to create counter-spaces of resistance with a transnational community of Black students/youth who are willing to move collaboratively in solidarity to challenge and deconstruct institutions constructed on Eurocentric ideals. Marcus’ interest includes using the mixed methodologies of (Auto)ethnography, Black Emancipatory Action Research (BEAR), Critical Race Emancipatory English Education (CREEE), and Youth Action Participatory Research (YPAR) in collaboration as a way to create counter-spaces and creative platforms for Black students to use their voice to reclaim and reimagine African-indigenous knowledges to counter the ways in which Eurocentric institutions e.g. schools and prisons continue to uphold anti-Black and colonial methods of learning as a weapon aimed against Black students/ youth. "