Susan Spearey

Associate Professor

Affiliated Faculty, MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies
Affiliated Faculty, PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities

Chancellor’s Chair for Teaching Excellence 2005-2008
PhD Leeds

Office: GLA 143
905 688 5550  x3885
[email protected]

Teaching Areas: Anticolonial/ Decolonial Studies, Trauma Studies, Emancipatory Social and Climate Justice Movements, Critical Pedagogy, Environmental Humanities

My scholarship and pedagogy explore the intersections between trauma studies, anti-colonial studies, social justice and equity studies, and literary studies and the arts. In recent years—in the face of escalating climate crisis, and as a consequence of my participation in various research collaborations and graduate committees—I have also necessarily become increasingly engaged with Environmental Humanities,  Traditional Indigenous Knowledges, Abolition Feminism, and Healing Justice. I am deeply indebted to, and take direction from, Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck’s (2009) proposed shift in theorizations of social change from “damage-centred” to “desire-based” research paradigms; Michael Rothberg’s theorizations of multi-directional memory (2009) and his figure of “the implicated subject” (2019),  and theoretical and praxis-based interventions by social and climate justice movement leaders, organizers, and cultural workers, such as Staci K. Haines’ account of somatic shaping in The Politics of Trauma (2019); adrienne maree brown’s formulation of “emergent strategy” (2017) in her book (and published series) of the same title, as well as her praxis of “intentional adaptation;” and Cara Page and Erica Woodland’s (2023) mobilizations of “healing justice lineages,” abolitionist traditions that promote individual and collective flourishing outside the confines of the medical industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the other industrial complexes with which these are tightly bound up.   I am particularly interested in pedagogical experiments and alternative practices of knowlege generation and dissemination that draw on these emancipatory theories and modes of praxis.

Susan Spearey, Susie O’Brien, Helene Strauss, Tayah Clarke, and Jesse Arseneault, “Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding: The (in)Humanities, Artistic Practices, and Planetary Crisis: Guest Editors’ Introduction,” Studies in Social Justice. Volume 18, No. 4 (2024), pp. 658-680.

Jesse Arseneault, Tayah Clarke, Linzey Corridon, Feisal Kirumira, Susie O’Brien, Jane Sewali-Kirumira, Susan Spearey, Helene Strauss, Nandini Thiyagarajan, Andrea Vela-Alarcón, “Reckoning, Repairing, and Reworlding as Praxis: Editors’ Outro.” Studies in Social Justice. Volume 18, No. 4 (2024), pp. 1006-1022.

“Fostering Receptivity: Ethical Solicitation, Cultural Translation, and the Navigation of Distance in J T Rogers’s The Overwhelming,” Safundi, Vol 17 No 2 April 2016, pp. 231-248.

“Reconstituting Community, Identity and Belonging: Classroom Encounters with ‘Post’-conflict Texts,” Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schulties, eds, (2015) New York: MLA Press. Pp. 200-212. [print]

“Displacement, dispossession and concilation: the politics and poetics of homecoming in Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull ,” scrutiny2: issues in english studies in southern africa Vol 5 no 1 2000, 64-77.

“Dislocations Of Culture: Unhousing The Unhomely In Salman Rushdie’s Shame ” in Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Essays in Literature and Culture , ed. Roland Smith, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000.

“Substantiating Discourses of Emergence: Corporeality, Spectrality and Postmodern Historiography in Toni Morrison’s Beloved ” in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporealit y, ed. Avril Horner and Angela Keane. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000

‘Drifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Spatial Odysseys In Diaspora Writing’, in Drifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent , ed. Radhika Mohanram and Ralph Crane. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000