Joanne Crawford has been an advocate for health equity throughout her career in clinical nursing practice, education and research. Emerging from public health practice, she has been engaged in health services research exploring health disparities related to access to preventive health services among priority populations (Indigenous, newcomer immigrant, and low-income communities) across key jurisdictions in Ontario, and social exclusion of immigrant women in the Niagara Region. She has experience with conducting community-based studies including participatory action research, different review methodologies, focus groups, survey design, and mixed methods.

Curtis Fogel’s research examines crime, corruption, violence, doping, discrimination, and other social and legal issues in the context of sport. He completed graduate degrees in both Sociology (M.A. and Ph.D) and Law (LL.M). He is author of the books Game-Day-Gangsters: Crime and Deviance in Canadian Football (2013) and Controversies in Law and Sport (2017), editor of Critical Perspectives on Gender and Sport (Forthcoming), and co-editor of Imaginative Inquiry: Innovative Approaches to Interdisciplinary Research (2014) and Sexual Violence at Canadian Universities: Activism, Institutional Responses, and Strategies for Change (2017). Three research projects he is currently working on include: 1) On the Sidelines: Sexual Violence in Canadian Youth Sport, 2) Rink Rage: Spectator Violence and Harassment in Canadian Hockey (with Kevin Mongeon), and 3) Blood on the Pitch: Socio-Legal Aspects of Rugby Violence.

Curtis has supervised graduate students on topics including hazing rituals in Canadian hockey, victim blaming of sexual assault survivors, and criminal violence in sport. He is interested in supervising student research in the areas of human rights law, criminal law and justice, sport and social justice, and interpersonal violence that use qualitative interviewing, observations, and/or unobtrusive methods.

Janelle Joseph is an internationally recognized and award-winning storyteller and scholar committed to disseminating knowledge about racial justice, health, and sport.

Dr. Joseph is the Founder and Director of the IDEAS Research Lab, which focuses on Indigeneity, Diaspora, Equity, and Anti-racism in Sport. Dr. Joseph is devoted to seeing graduate students and early career researchers flourish in community-based research using an embodied decolonial praxis lens. Dr. Joseph’s nation-leading scholarship, including over $4 million in research grant funding, over 50 articles and book chapters, and three books related to social justice, helps to answer the question: “What new health, sport, and recreation policies and practices might emerge if we focused less on including particular ‘kinds of people’ and more on removing the structural, cultural, and administrative barriers that currently shape our movement cultures and ambitions?”

Dr. Joseph’s work is situated at the intersection of Black Studies, Health Sciences and Sport Management to enable storytelling about uninhibited joy, abiding colonialism, and steadfast resistance of racialized peoples.

Rob Millington is an Assistant Professor in sport and social change and sport for development and peace. His research focuses on how international NGOs such as the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee mobilize sport for development in policy and practice in both historical and contemporary contexts.

More recently, his work has focused on the environmental component and sustainable development, to consider what role, if any, sport can play in an environmental context and in meeting sustainable development objectives, including the Sustainable Development Goals.

Broadly defined, my research focuses on leisure and sport culture in the lives of individuals, families, and communities. I seek to understand diverse social contexts and issues of power and social inclusion, particularly related to constructs of family, children and youth, gender and sexual diversity, and rurality. My work has a social justice orientation and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Sport Canada’s Research Initiative. I was recently appointed to the scientific committee of the Canadian Gender Equity and Sport Research Hub and I am the Vice-President for the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies.

Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani is the Vice Provost, Teaching and Learning at Brock University. He holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Educational Studies and Psychology, directs the Inclusive Education Research Lab, and is affiliated with the Social Justice Research Institute. The architect of Canada’s first zero textbook cost degree programs, his scholarship currently focuses on open educational practices, equitable access to education, student-centered pedagogies, and ethical approaches to educational technology. His publications include peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, three open textbooks in Psychology, and two co-edited volumes, Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science  and Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education. Together with Dr. Robin DeRosa, he is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

Leanne Taylor teaches courses addressing the sociocultural contexts of education, including diversity and equity issues in schooling and the interrelationship between pedagogy, culture and identity. Her ongoing research explores the social construction of racialized identities; multiracial discourses and critiques of critical ‘mixed race’ theory; transnational and immigrant student aspirations; the experiences of marginalized and ‘at risk’ youth in secondary and postsecondary schools; and the effects of school policies and teacher conduct on student experiences. A key focus of her work addresses how education that strives to be equitable and socially just must continually engage with the complexities of race and ethnicity, including multiracial experiences. She is currently investigating the use of digital media as a way of fostering teacher candidates’ engagement with social justice and equity issues in education.

My research explores the entangled discourses of sovereign power and transnational migration. I examine national and international state-based texts and the responses and reverberations of these texts in public discourses. I am interested in the ways that “official” texts that would once have spoken to a select, “expert” audience have become widely and idiosyncratically available to various publics because of the increasing and at times unplanned digitalization of such documents. I am particularly interested in the ways that the publicity of such texts influences public discourses of immigration, labour, race, gender, ethnicity, and language, and how they might influence perceptions of home, away, us and them.

My current major research project, “(Il)legal, (Ir)regular, (Un)documented: Rhetorics of Sovereignty and Transnational Migration,” examines tensions that emerge in national and international discourses of transnational migration. I welcome supervisions around the intersections of rhetorical studies and social justice, including work linked to border studies, transnational migration, human rights, transnational feminism, the nation and its nationalisms, the critical study of global Englishes, and postcolonial studies.

Tamara El-Hoss has been teaching undergraduate courses on postcolonial Francophone literatures and cultures at Brock since July 2005 and has taught graduate courses on postcolonial theories and literatures in SCLA (Studies in Comparative Literature and the Arts) for the last decade.  Her research recognizes that the current global migrant crisis has inspired numerous comics artists/journalists and graphic novelists to draw and tell the stories of refugees and migrants to a Western audience. As a medium, comics, bandes dessinées and graphic novels cross linguistic barriers, give a voice to the voiceless, and facilitate communication across boundaries. Her current research project, entitled “Visual Vox Digital Archive: Displacement in Comics, Graphic Novels, Bandes Dessinées and Zines”, is to curate a multi-layered open source digital archive on ‘drawing displacement’ in Africa and the Middle East that will be accessible to students, scholars, artists and the general public.

The archive will include material in comics (traditional North American soft cover format), graphic novels (longer format resembling a traditional book, often with a single storyline), bandes dessinées (French language comics) and zines (self-published work combining  texts and images) for a bilingual collection, located on Brock’s server. The Visual Vox Digital Archive will be the first digital archive of its kind, especially in that it provides a space for under-represented perspectives, e.g. from African and Middle Eastern migrants and artists.  Tamara is the co-editor of a bilingual collection of essays entitled Im/migrant Passages: Crossing Visual, Spatial and Textual Boundaries (forthcoming in July 2020, Small Walker Press).

Tami Friedman teaches 20th-century U.S. history at Brock. Her courses cover U.S. history since 1865, U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War, the 1960s, women in North America and class and capitalism in the United States. She also teaches a graduate course on women and work in U.S. history. Her interests include labour history, women’s history, racial/ethnic history and the social history of economic change. Her research examines the causes and consequences of industry migration within the United States after World War II, with an emphasis on workers, communities and industrial policy at the local, state, regional and federal levels. Her publications explore the relationship between economic restructuring and such developments as the decline of organized labour, the rise of the modern Right and the limits of unionism in the U.S. South. Possible areas of supervision include: deindustrialization, capital flight, economic development policy, corporate globalization, corporate power, union growth and decline, sexual and racial/ethnic divisions of labour, women and work, working-class culture and class formation/identity.

Tim Kenyon’s research in social epistemology focuses on testimony and disagreement, as well as the epistemology of ignorance, issues of epistemic injustice, and non-ideal theory. These topics are naturally informed by feminist epistemology and epistemology that foregrounds race, gender, and class. One application may be seen in this short lecture at a teach-in: “Rape culture and ignorance”. Tim’s work in the philosophy of language includes the nature of coerced assertions, which has implications for understanding how coercive social, economic, and political influences can shape personal and public discourse, and perceptions of received views. He is currently writing also on political bullshit, and its recent uses by authoritarian and populist leaders.

Tim has published on debiasing techniques for cognitive and social biases, and especially on the problem of how to teach and learn the building blocks for effective debiasing strategies. His graduate mentorship has included students working on issues of autonomy and respect for atypical or marginalized groups, including a PhD dissertation on how to support robust decision-making for persons with forms of dementia, and a PhD dissertation on epistemic injustice, focusing on respect for persons with cognitive or developmental disabilities as knowers.

Tim developed and ran a Philosophical Café discussion group in the Grand Valley Institution (the federal correctional facility for women in Kitchener), through Community Justice Initiative’s Stride Night program, as well as a successor program that ran through the St. Catharines YWCA. These programs are motivated by a belief in the emancipatory virtues of philosophical reflection and powers of expression.

Joshua Manitowabi (BA McMaster University, MA McMaster University, PhD Brock University) is an assistant professor of Indigenous history. His research has centered on Indigenous histories and Indigenous education. Josh’s master’s thesis, It sometimes speaks to us: Decolonizing Education by Utilizing Our Elders’ Knowledge, explored the experiences and recommendations of elders in introducing Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into the curricula of Anishinaabe schools. His doctoral dissertation, Anishinaabek Knowledge and Power on Manitoulin Island, is an ethnohistoric study of Odawa agency and perspectives regarding 18th and 19th century treaties made with the British Crown.

Josh’s publications include Wii Niiganabying (Looking Ahead): Rearticulating Indigenous Control of Education in the Turtle Island Journal of Indigenous Health and a review of Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City in the Canadian Journal for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. His current research project in collaboration with other Indigenous scholars is on the protection of water in First Nations communities. Josh has served as history consultant with Nelson Education on new primary and secondary education social studies textbooks and as a historical researcher and designer for Kenjgewin Teg Educational Institute in conjunction with the Truth and Reconciliation Report request for a post-secondary course on treaties. Josh is a member of the Indigenous scholars’ Writers Circle with the First Nations with Schools Collective.

Josh’s scholarship interests are directed toward providing historical evidence for attaining equity in treaty interpretation and in economics, education, and healthcare. His interests also include using ethnohistory, critical cartography and Indigenous mapping in a re-examination of Pontiac’s War, the 1764 Treaty of Niagara, Indigenous participation in the War of 1812, and Indigenous peoples’ political movements that organized in opposition to European colonialism during the 18th century.

Josh is a Potawatomi, Bear clan, member of the Wikwemikong Unceded First Nation. He is the recipient of several awards. Among them are the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Award, Bluma Appel Award Scholarship, and the Harvey Longboat Major Scholarship. He is a past member of the Aboriginal Research Advisory Circle, and the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Rights, Equity, and Decolonization at Brock University.

Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas trained as a visual artist (B.F.A.), art historian (M.A. and Ph.D.), and historian (Ph.D.). Her teaching at the undergraduate level focuses on the social and cultural history of Latin America from the sixteenth century up to the present, in particular the Colonial and Republican periods; revolutions; and race, class and gender. At the fourth year and graduate level, her teaching focuses on Canada-Latin America and Caribbean relations; social change; narrative and the visual field; multi- and/or inter-disciplinary approaches; and comparative analysis. Her publications explore the cultural history of 1930s-1940s Colombia; art, politics, and gender; memory and history; art, art history and history as complementary disciplines; grounded approaches to development issues; solidarity, empathy in art and culture; and Latin America and the Caribbean made in Canada.

She has supervised graduate work of students at Brock and internationally in History, History and Art History as complementary disciplines, and on Film and Literature in comparative perspective. She also supervises international exchange students. She welcomes directed graduate reading courses and graduate supervision in her disciplines and subjects of interest. She is also interested in supporting graduate students develop collaborative/team research and community partnerships locally and internationally, and get involved in helping advance knowledge, develop talent, and forge connections from an early stage of their training as junior scholars.

Cristina Santos research interests focus on sexuality and gender studies from an intersectional feminist perspective in the construct of monstrous women from an interdisciplinary and multi-cultural approach as seen in literature, film, television, popular culture, and mythology. She also investigates the construct of political and social deviance and trauma in life narratives as the construction of a personal and communal sense of identity that challenges official history and patriarchy. Her teaching and research are informed by feminist theory, post-colonial discourse, theory of alterity and gender and sexuality studies and incorporates a transnational and multi-cultural approach that involves the questioning and deconstructing of fixed binaries and recognizing that the in-between space of these binaries is one occupied by various authentic iterations of “self” that may (and most often do) deviate from dominant discourses.

In Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires and Virgins (2016) she explores to the concept of female monstrosity as representative of a marginalized, denied, silenced, and censored feminine sexuality. Her most recent book in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Untaming Girlhoods: Storytelling Female Adolescence (2023), looks specifically at female adolescence and the processes of socialization and individuation in identity building for young girls in contemporary contexts that impede, classify, proscribe, and censor non-normative female identities.

Her current SSHRC funded project, (Re)appearing the Desaparecidos: Testimonial Mural Art and Intergenerational Trauma of the Argentinean Dictatorship (1976-1983) focuses on the authenticity of human experience of trauma, memory, and life vis-à-vis voices of past political prisoners and intergenerational testimonies of the disappeared.

Susan Spearey’s research interests focus on literary/cultural responses to contemporary histories of mass violence, on the one hand, and to projects of transitional justice and social reconstruction, on the other. She also works on pedagogy, witnessing and the ethics of reception. Courses taught include Literature of Trauma and Recovery, Postcolonial Literature, South African Literatures of Transition, Textualizing Post-conflict Histories, Social Justice and the Arts, literary theory and graduate seminars on research skills.

Dr. Robyn Bourgeois (Laughing Otter Caring Woman) is a mixed race nehiyaw iskwew whose Cree family comes from Treaty 8 (Lesser Slave Lake) territory. She is also connected through her three children to the Six Nations of the Grand River. Dr. Bourgeois holds a BA in Sociology from Okanagan University College (now UBC-Okanagan), an MA in Sociology from UBC-Vancouver, and a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto.

Dr. Bourgeois’ primary areas of scholarly interest include violence against indigenous women and girls; indigenous feminisms; and indigenous women’s political leadership; alongside issues of gender and violence generally (with a particular focus on serial murder, state-based violence, violence perpetrated by women, and violence in popular culture). As a survivor of sexual exploitation and other forms of violence, Robyn has committed her life to end all forms of violence and has been involved in indigenous and/or feminist political organizing from the grassroots to international levels for more than twenty years. In addition to being an academic and activist, Dr. Bourgeois is also an artist.

My areas of research and teaching expertise include the interaction of labour rights and the Charter, industrial relations, labour and employment law, as well as human rights in the workplace.

David Butz teaches sonic geographies, geographies of international development, political ecology of the Global South and qualitative research design. He has completed two SSHRC-funded research projects, one that examined colonial and contemporary labour relations in the mountains of northern Pakistan, and another dealing with the constitution of spatiality in Jamaican reggae music. He has also investigated the implications of corporate restructuring for General Motors auto workers in St. Catharines, Ontario. The three projects are linked by interest in the geographies of exploitation, resistance and self-representation.

The latter concern has led to publications relating to research ethics and the method of autoethnography. Professor Butz has also published on irrigated mountain agriculture and sustainable development and is involved with grassroots political and environmental activism in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. He is currently co-investigator with Nancy Cook on an SSHRC-funded study of the impacts of road construction on social organization in an agricultural village in northern Pakistan. He and Dr. Cook are also studying the implications of food relief for local agricultural production in northern Pakistan, and are in the midst of on an “autophotography” project, also in northern Pakistan and funded by the Brock Council for Research in the Social Sciences. He is on the Faculty Steering Committee of Brock’s Social Justice Research Institute, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Studies in Social Justice, and editorial board member of three journals.

Michelle Chen (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) research interest focuses on the impact of social media technologies on social movements, civic engagement and political participation in support of a social issue or cause. Michelle teaches courses related to social media, business communication, and new media literacy.

Liz Clarke (PhD Wilfrid Laurier University) teaches classes in popular narrative, serial storytelling, film history, film theory, film and TV genres, and gender film and TV. Her research examines women in film and television both on and off the screen. Her current book project is on women in war films from 1908 to 1918. She also researches women writers in film and television from the silent period to contemporary female showrunners.

I am happy to supervise projects in the following areas:

• the war film
• silent film
• screenwriting history (particularly women screenwriters) and women in film and television production
• seriality
• television and streaming services

Lauren Corman is an environmental sociologist who teaches in the areas of environmental thought, contemporary social theory, and critical animal studies. Her research centralizes anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer, and feminist understandings of social relations and the more-than-human world. Broadly, her scholarship investigates the agency, resistance, and subjectivities of oppressed groups. Dr. Corman is interested in coalition-building across social and environmental justice movements and links her work to larger anti-capitalist analyses and struggles. She hosted the radio show, Animal Voices (animalvoices.ca), for about a decade. She recently published, “He(a)rd: Animal Cultures and Anti-Colonial Politics,” in Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor’s collection, Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (Routledge, 2020). Dr. Corman is currently working on a text about the cultural histories of particularly vilified animals and their relationships to colonial legacies.

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies. I received my PhD degree in the Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education at the University of Alberta. Before joining the Brock University, I held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of British Columbia (2015-17). My research interests include immigrant and refugee youth, international students, the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, sociology of education, immigration, integration, and transnationalism, agency/resilience, social justice and equity in education, and qualitative research methodology.

My two ongoing SSHRC projects respectively focus on examining the integration of racialized minority immigrant youth in Canada and the United States, and the immigration and employment transition of international students. As a critical scholar and educator, the purpose of my research is to identify, explore and analyze the marginalization, discrimination and oppression that subordinated groups experience in the North American societies. The goal of my research is to get the silenced voice heard, address social problems (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, and etc.), and look for socially just solutions.

Dashwood’s research interests within international relations encompass international development, the role of non-state actors in global governance, and Canadian foreign policy. Her current research is concerned with corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the extractive sector. Dashwood’s book on corporate social responsibility and Canadian mining companies was recently published by Cambridge University Press 2012. This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), through a Standard Research Grant (SRG).

She is a collaborator with the Canadian Business Ethics Research Network (CBERN), the recipient of a $2.3 million SSHRC Strategic Clusters grant over seven years. With CBERN as a partner, Dashwood is a co-investigator in a collaborative, multi-perspective case study project on Canadian mining companies in developing countries. This research was funded by SSHRC’s International Opportunities Fund (IOF). In the first phase of this project, Dashwood conducted research on a Canadian mining company and its CSR activities in Ghana.

Stefan Dolgert is a political theorist. He writes and teaches on democratic theory, the ethics of violence, critical animal studies, posthumanism, environmental politics and ancient Greek political philosophy. His primary interest relating to social justice concerns the “question of the animal” – how humans have historically constituted themselves in opposition to something called “animals” – and how this human/animal dichotomy has legitimated oppression in the form of racism, imperialism, sexism, ableism and speciesism.

He is currently working on three major projects: a manuscript on the rich non-anthropocentric tradition in ancient Greek thought, focusing on Homer, Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle; another manuscript, that critiques the sacrificial model of politics derived from juridical thought; and finally an edited volume that highlights the productive relationship between critical animal studies and disability studies.

Andrea Doucet has published widely on themes of gender/work/care, fathering and mothering, masculinities, parental leave policies, embodiment, reflexivity, ‘responsible knowing’, and knowledge construction processes. Her book Do Men Mother? (2006, 2nd edition, 2018) was awarded the 2007 John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociology Association. She is also co-author of two editions of the book Gender Relations in Canada: Intersectionalities and Social Change (2008, 2017) and a forthcoming edited collection on feminist epistemologies entitled “Lorraine Code: Thinking Ecologically, Thinking Responsibly. 

Andrea approaches her teaching and research from an eclectic transdisciplinary perspective and background. She has degrees in political science (social and political thought) and creative writing (York), international development studies (Carleton), and a PhD in social and political sciences (Cambridge University, funded as a Commonwealth Scholar). Her research on theories, practices, and ontologies of care has been influenced by her co-parenting of three daughters; her work on methodologies, epistemologies and knowing processes began thirty years ago when she spent nearly six years as a participatory research facilitator, working mainly for the United Nations Development Program in water supply and sanitation projects in Central and South America.

Andrea is currently conducting collaborative research with local community organizations on young motherhood, Black motherhood, feminist and Indigenous approaches to care and eldercare, and class and gender issues in parental leave policies. Her current writing is on non-representational narrative analysis, visual methodologies, family photographs, ecological thinking, and our epistemic responsibilities as researchers and knowers.

Dr. Hannah Dyer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child & Youth Studies and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research employs interdisciplinary methods to investigate how sexuality, gender and nation-state become entangled in theories of child development. Drawing on queer theory and cultural studies, her work examines the affiliations between social belonging and the child’s psychological interiority.

She turns to children’s art and art about childhood to better understand how to repair justice and build hope in the aftermath of violence. Hannah’s forthcoming book, The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, explores how the aesthetic cultures of childhood can cause us to re-think what we know of gender, race and sexuality. While taking the child’s material vulnerabilities and pressing need for care into account, this work also draws from the humanities’ emphasis on aesthetics, fantasy and futurity. Hannah’s research interests include: Queer theory; child and youth studies; art/aesthetics; racism and racialization; gender and sexuality; cultural studies.

Dr. Ezeonu received his B.Sc. (Honours) from the Anambra State University of Technology (now, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria), M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, England, M.A. from the University of Leeds, England and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He has published on issues of social and economic justice in Sub-Saharan Africa (with special focus on the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO) and the international politics of environmental protection.

Ifeanyi’s research interests include globalization and international development, gang violence, racialized crime, social construction of crime, transnational crime, environmental crime in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and contemporary African Diaspora.

Margot Francis is an Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, cross appointed to the Department of Sociology. She is the author of Creative Subversions: Whiteness and Indigeneity in the National Imaginary (University of British Columbia Press, 2011) and has published in journals such as Native American and Indigenous Studies, Feral Feminisms, and Critical Sociology. Her research interests include: Indigenous and decolonializing perspectives on settler societies, community arts for Indigenous resurgence, alliances between Indigenous and anti-racist movements in sexual violence activism, queer artistic activism.

Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in Theory and Policy Studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (2002).

Jennifer Good’s research and teaching interests sit at the intersections between the mediated communication, materialism and our relationship with the natural environment. She has published articles exploring the communication and framing of climate change, the role of the Internet in environmental communication/awareness and the relationship between television viewing and the environment. Good’s book Television and the Earth: Not a Love Story was published in 2013. Her current research includes two CRISS-funded projects: an environmental content analysis of prime-time television; interviews with advertisers and environmental activists about their use of digital media. She is also working on a book that explores environmental justice in the lifecycle of electronics. Good has a B.A. in International Relations from U.B.C., a Master’s degree from York University in Environmental Studies and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Communication.

Dr. Allyson Ion has multidisciplinary training with a MSc in Health Research Methodology and a PhD in Social Work. Dr. Ion has worked in community-based HIV services, child welfare, and as part of community-based participatory action research projects related to living with HIV, perinatal care, parenting, criminalization of HIV non-disclosure, child welfare, and substance use. Dr. Ion teaches critical social science and critical social work at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Dr. Ion’s research and practice emphasizes principles of community engagement, equitable partnerships, and honouring the wisdom and experiences of children, youth and families who are on the receiving end of health and social services. Dr. Ion’s teaching, research, and practice are guided by critical and intersectional knowledge systems and are grounded in anti-colonial, anti-carceral, and anti-oppressive approaches to walking alongside children, youth and families. Dr. Ion is committed to teaching and learning that connects critical theoretical knowledge to applied and real-world contexts such as child welfare.

Dr. Chelsea Temple Jones (pronouns: she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies. A queer, white settler spoonie, Dr. Jones holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from Ryerson and York Universities and an MA in Critical Disability Studies from York University. She completed a Mitacs postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Regina’s Vocally Oriented Investigations of Create Expression (VOICE) Lab—a studio space for disabled folx who communicate in various ways, and not always through speech. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that continues her study of the ways in which ableist, colonial gestures of “giving voice” face resistance from young, disabled adults engaged in disability justice.

Dr. Jones’ qualitative research focuses on disabled children’s childhood studies and takes intellectual disability as a cultural phenomenon. Her work is deeply engaged in disabled, deaf, mad, and crip-informed arts-based research methods informed by her earlier position as a Research Associate at Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. An award-winning teacher and journalist, Dr. Jones is a former Instructor of research methods courses at Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies and is the co-founder of the transdisciplinary podcast, “Podagogies: A Learning and Teaching Podcast.” She brings storytelling into all of her courses and works with students to create intellectual partnerships that value collaboration through a broad, ever-changing understanding of how we might engage in accessible knowledge production.

Pascal Lupien is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brock University. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC, York University), an Associated Researcher with the Groupe de recherche en communication politique (GRCP, Université Laval) and co-coordinator of the Groupe de recherche Afriques-Amérique latine (GRAAL, University of Alberta). He holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Guelph, a Master’s in Information Studies (MIS) from the Université de Montréal, and a BA in Politics from McGill University.

Dr. Lupien’s research interests revolve around participatory democracy, social movements, political communication and technology, and the factors that enhance or diminish the capacity of marginalized communities to participate in politics. He currently leads a SSHRC-funded project entitled “Indigenous Women and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs): Supporting an Empowered and Resilient North-South Community”. This transnational multidisciplinary project draws on a community-based approach in order to ensure that the direction of the research is guided by Indigenous women. Working across four jurisdictions (Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Canada’s Yukon Territory), project participants seek to develop indigenized and gendered ICT solutions that will support Indigenous women’s efforts to engage in the public sphere, and to facilitate sharing of stories and strategies across settler-imposed borders. He is working with both academics and Indigenous community leaders in the four jurisdictions. Lupien’s previous SSHRC-funded project (2017-2019) examined the impact of ICTs such as social media on the capacity of Indigenous social movements to engage in politics in three Latin American countries.

Lupien’s book, Citizens’ Power in Latin America: Theory and Practice (SUNY Press, 2018), looks at how local communities use participatory democracy mechanisms to pursue collective social development goals. His research has also been published in journals such as Democratization; Citizenship Studies; Political Science Quarterly; Information, Communication and Society; Social Media + Society; Gender, Place and Culture; and Latin American Perspectives.  

Dr. Lupien’s teaching interests include the politics of Latin America, democracy and democratization, civil society and social movements, and comparative politics (particularly with respect to the Global South). He welcomes the opportunity to supervise graduate students in his areas of expertise.

Areas of specialization:

• Comparative politics
• Latin American politics
• Indigenous politics (Andean region)
• Participatory democracy
• Social movements
• Political communication
• ICTs and social media

Dr. Midzain-Gobin is a settler scholar whose research focuses on how settler colonialism has persisted into today, and how Indigenous peoples are revitalising their own governance practices to undermine it. He focuses on settler colonial states, including Canada, and his work centres questions of sovereignty. His book, Settler Colonial Sovereignty: Visions of Improvement and Indigenous Erasure (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) studies settler colonial worldmaking, and how the racialized, imperial, ‘logic of improvement’ has become a ‘settler common sense’ that is constitutive of international order. He argues the logic rests on cosmological assumptions about human dominion over the earth and its continued relevance is key in how settler sovereignty is continually remade.

Dr. Midzain-Gobin’s broader research interests are drawn from his background in critical international relations theory, and especially decolonial theory. Working as a settler, Dr. Midzain-Gobin seeks to employ community-engaged methods to support Indigenous self-determination in order to build a decolonized future. He also has active research projects on the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous housing in Niagara, and Indigenous energy utilities, and is interested in supervising students in any area of Indigenous politics, settler colonialism, decolonial theory, and international politics more broadly.

Shannon A. Moore is a Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. Dr. Moore holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies. She is a nationally registered clinical counsellor (since 2000) and a registered psychotherapist with the Ontario College of Psychotherapists (2017).She considers questions of health and wellbeing through the lens of community, society, and culture. Her recent research is focused on trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive pedagogy, service and practice. Dr. Moore is a qualitative researcher that engages social justice and transdisciplinarity.

Research Interests

Well-being and mental health of young people, families and community; trauma-informed and trauma sensitive policy, practice and pedagogy; university-community relationships; restorative Justice; Social Justice; transdisciplinarity; and qualitative methodologies.

Stigma, Substance Use, Housing and Homelessness, NIMBYism, Collective Identity, Social Representations, Community-Based Qualitative Research, Research Ethics

Broadly my research interests lie in how collective identities are represented and contested in the context of intergroup relations. I have explored this in the context of urban Indigenous community members’ negotiation of their diverse cultural identities and representations of colonial history in an Indigenous culture-focused school, in the narratives of exclusion that often typify community resistance to planned social housing or homeless encampments, and most recently in how people who use drugs are represented in anti-stigma campaigns across Canada and the United States.

Much of my research is community-based (i.e. community members are directly involved as collaborators in the research) and I primarily utilize qualitative research methods. A significant part of my work has also focused on research ethics from the perspective of heavily researched community members, for example in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood.

Trent Newmeyer teaches the sociology of leisure, research methods (primarily qualitative research design) and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. His research interests include the social history of tourism and leisure, crafting as politics and issues around HIV/AIDS from pregnancy planning to the use of crafting (body mapping) in mediating cultural stigma around HIV.

Dr. Christiana Okyere Folson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies and holds a Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Science from Queen’s University. Following her Ph.D., she was selected for the Hegarty postdoctoral fellowship which provides training for post-doctoral researchers that have interests in the areas of intellectual and neurodevelopmental disabilities in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education at Michigan State University. She also worked as a Research Associate at Can Child in the School of Rehabilitation Science at McMaster University on Partnering for Change (P4C) – a tiered needs-based model for the delivery of occupational therapy services to children in schools.

Broadly, her research seeks to promote the full inclusion of children and youth with disabilities and their families. Dr. Okyere Folson works to achieve this by engaging with children and youth with disabilities, their families and stakeholders across the education, employment and policy sectors. She explores perspectives and examines processes and outcomes of school and community-based services/interventions/programs. Ultimately, Dr. Okyere Folson’s goal is to decrease systemic barriers often experienced by children and youth with disabilities and their families and advance their inclusion, equity and well-being globally.  

Dr. Heather Ramey is an assistant faculty member and holds a PhD in Lifespan Development Psychology from Brock University. Her research is focused on youth engagement and youth adult partnerships, youth well being, activity participation, and child and youth care. She is the Research Director for the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement at the Students Commission. As a child and youth worker and former children’s therapist, she is very interested in how youth engage with youth services. Rather than seeing children and youth as only recipients of services, however, she is particularly interested how child and youth advocate for themselves and others and shape the world around them, and in how children and youth help others and make positive contributions to others, communities, and the broader world.

Dr. Smith’s research explores the tensions between openness, privacy, and participation in technologically mediated culture. Some of Dr. Smith’s research is conducted in collaboration with Mozilla, a global non-profit committed to the open web. From 2013-2015, Dr. Smith conducted collaborative research with Mozilla to build the Hive Toronto digital literacy network. In 2017, Dr. Smith was awarded a Mozilla Research Grant for a project titled Add-ons for Privacy: Open Source Advocacy Tactics for Internet Health. Dr. Smith is also currently a collaborator on The eQuality Project, a SSHRC funded research collaboration to examine digital economy issues such as privacy and cyberbullying that impact youth.

Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz’s research focuses on the relationship between embodied social relations, formations, and subjectivities within contemporary capitalism through anti-racist, feminist, queer, and marxist social theories. His research demonstrates that the aporias frequently encountered in contemporary critical theories lay in the antinomies of classical sociology. In so doing, he emphasizes the necessity for sociological analyses that are commensurate to the social and political problems of our time.

Gökbörü’s teaching interests are in the areas of political economy of gender, work, and social policy; sociology of genders, sexualities, and families; race and racialization; classical and contemporary social theories; history of sociological analysis; phenomenological sociology; global social movements; and urban sociology.

He has published on social movements; refugees and state formation; feminist urban theory; and public spaces and virtual spaces. He co-edited a special issue of Society and Space on planetary urbanization. His most recent co-edited book volume on social reproduction and feminist urban theory is currently under review.

Gökbörü is enthusiastic about working with graduate students who are interested in researching different aspects of contemporary social and political problems through a variety of theoretical perspectives (including, but not limited to, Marxism’s, feminisms, anti-racism, intersectionality, queer theories, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis) and methodological approaches (including, but not limited to, autoethnography, activist methodologies, institutional ethnography, and ethnomethodology).

Ebru Ustundag is an Associate Professor of Geography at Brock University. Ebru got her PhD from York U and she has her MSc in Urban Planning and Bsc in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University, Ankara Turkey. Her recent research project titled “Witnessing Social Citizenship: Microgeographies of street level sex workers in St. Catharines” where she collaborates with various local community organizations. Her areas of research are: citizenship studies, feminist geographies, health geographies, geographies of inequalities and exclusion, and theories of social justice.