Social Justice Fellows

Dr Niloofar Golkar 

PhD Political Science
York University

Niloofar Golkar is a Barry Pashak Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Justice Centre. She is lecturer at the Centre for Global Studies at Huron University College. She is an activist, researcher, and writer who received her PhD from the Department of Politics at York University.

Her postdoctoral research explores alternative economic pathways to social justice through an interdisciplinary lens grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, commons, cooperatives, and theories of anticapitalism.

Her doctoral thesis, titled Conflict and solidarity between anti-colonial environmentalism, indigenous anti-pipeline resistance and the labour in Canada, is the result of more than a decade of scholar activism and direct action in solidarity with Indigenous resistance to extractivism and environmental racism. Her environmental activism includes anti-pipeline organizing, as well as labour organizing in Canada. She has also contributed to the feminist movement in Iran as a member of We Change and the Feminists for Jina network.

Her Master's research project, Rethinking the Centre: Critique of the Theory of the Primitive Accumulation and the Situation of the Temporary Working Women In Ontario, focused on the political economy of women migrant workers, drawing upon feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, and Marxist analysis. Niloofar is a research coordinator with Research for the Front Lines and an editor of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action.

You can find some of her writings in Upping the Anti, No Niin magazine, and The Bullet by Socialist Project.

• Unist’ot’en camp: Resistance, Solidarity and the State!, Upping the Anti (2019)
• Workers’ Organizations and ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’: A Bottom-Up Solidarity in Making, The Bullet by Socialist Project (2023)
• We Change: On the Processes of Iran’s One Million Signature Campaign (2024)

Dr Bermal Küçük 

PhD Sociology 
Koç University

Bermal Küçük is a Barry Pashak Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Justice Centre. She received her PhD degree in Sociology from Koç University with her dissertation analyzing the transformation of feminist politics and subjectivities in Turkey in the post-2000 period, particularly under the economic and political crises alongside significant opportunities arising from the expansion of higher education, digitalization and urbanization. This dissertation was honoured with the Şirin Tekeli Research Award, organized by Sabancı University's Gender and Women's Studies Center of Excellence.

Her academic work and research interests are profoundly shaped by her longstanding engagement with feminist politics and activism in Turkey. She taught courses in the sociology of gender as an adjunct lecturer at various universities in Turkey.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Bermal's research interests were centred on the fields of agrarian and food sociology. In her master's thesis completed in the Sociology Department at Boğaziçi University, she studied the appropriation of women's unpaid domestic labour and their non-market knowledge as integral components of capital accumulation and value creation processes within the so-called "alternative" and “organic” food sector in Turkey. She contributed to numerous research projects, presented at academic conferences, and published articles in journals within the fields of agro-food sociology and rural sociology.

In her post-doctoral research, Bermal situates her doctoral dissertation within a global context by comparing the experience of the feminist movement in Turkey with those cases from the Global South and Global North. The research is rooted in the question of how and to what extent feminist movements in authoritarian contexts, shaped by multiple political and economic crises, differ from their counterparts in non-authoritarian settings on a global scale.

Her publications can be accessed here: Google Scholar page.  

Dr Frédéric Côté-Boudreau (2024-2025)

PhD Philosophy
Queen's University (2019)

Frédéric Côté-Boudreau defended his thesis on the right to autonomy for persons with cognitive disabilities and nonhuman animals.

His postdoctoral project is on the political turn to animal rights as well as on the links between speciesism and ableism.

His research is supported by the Chaire de recherche du Canada en éthique féministe under the supervision of Naïma Hamrouni (UQTR) in partnership with the Social Justice Centre, under the supervision of Pablo Gilabert (Concordia) and the CRÉ, under the co-supervision of Christian Nadeau (UdeM).

He is also affiliated with the Groupe de recherche en éthique environnementale et animale (GRÉEA) and the Animals in Politics, Philosophy, Laws & Ethics (APPLE) and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Montreal SPCA.

He also initiated and co-organized the Estivales de la question animale au Québec, an annual summer camp for animal activists and scholars across the province.

Recent publication:

• Côté-Boudreau, Frédéric (2024), « Ableism and Speciesism: Tensions and Convergence Between Animal Rights and Disability Rights », Athanassakis, Y., Larue, R., O’Donohue, W. (dir.), The Plant-based and Vegan Handbook, Springer, p. 213-227. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63083-5_13

For more information, visit https://coteboudreau.com

Dr Eleni Schirmer (2022-2025)

PhD Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019)

Eleni Schirmer is the Social Justice Centre's Barry Pashak postdoc researcher. She is also a freelance writer and an organizer with the Debt Collective. She conducts qualitative and historical research on the rise of debt-financed public education.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, she explores inequality as a set of power relationships that are materially-based, historically-formed, and malleable to change. How is inequality not only an economic and political force, but also a finely-textured, vividly-experienced human phenomenon? How do individuals not merely endure inequality but come together to resist and re-imagine it? To answer these questions, she searches for narratives that convey the complexity of the political economy and its influence on ordinary people’s daily lives. She is working on a book about debt and time.

In 2021, she was a researcher at the Future of Finance Initiative (UCLA, Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy).

She received the 2020 Frank L. Zeidler Labor History Award from the Wisconsin Labor History Society for her paper, “‘Power Is Only What You Chose To Do With It’: The Social Movements the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association Spurned, 1970-1974”

She recently published, with colleagues, “The other college debt crisis: institutional debt and higher education organizing” in The Journal of Academic Freedom, 2020, Vol. 12.

Her paper “Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Organizing Opportunities for Labor Activists during COVID-19” (co-written with R. Tarlau) is forthcoming in the Journal of Labor and Society.

Her work also appeared in many high-impact venues:

• How the Government Cancelled Betty Ann’s Debts, The New Yorker, February 23, 2023
  
• Life or Debt: What's next for the fight to abolish debt?, Lux Magazine, Issue 6.
• The Aging Student Debtors of America, The New Yorker, July 27, 2022
• We’re Burying Our Kids in Debt (Just Not The Way You Think), The New York Times, August 27, 2021
• The Fight for Fifteen at an Orlando McDonald’s, The New Yorker, February 15, 2021
• It’s Not Just Students Drowning in Debt. Colleges Are Too! The Nation, November 2020
• Jane McAlevey’s Vision for the Future of American Labor, The New Yorker, June 10, 2020

She organizes with the Debt Collective and was featured in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about student debt relief.

In 2023, Eleni co-edited a special issue of the radical social justice magazine, Rethinking Schools: "Resisting debt, funding justice: the struggle against debt-financed public education."

For more information, visit Eleni Schirmer's website. Follow her on twitter @elenischirmer.

 

Dr Erik Chevrier (2023-25)

Erik Chevrier is a researcher, professor and community activist with extensive knowledge about food sovereignty, food systems, ecological economics and social enterprises. He has expertise in growing transforming and composting food as well as developing community food economies. His postdoc is funded by Mitacs.

As a scholar, he practices critical-participatory-action research to help build food sovereign communities. He has co-created a variety of projects that map community food systems and has organized public discussions to encourage community food groups to collaborate on common goals.

As a teacher, Erik encourages his students to participate in community-campus engagement by working with organizations in and around Concordia. His students benefit from experiential-learning, while the organizations get community-based research and extra volunteers.

In 2022, Erik and his students formed a multistakeholder cooperative, CultivAction Solidarity Cooperative, at Concordia to educate students and community members about growing food in an urban setting and to localize campus food. Coop CultivAction provides food to the Hive Free Lunch and provide a weekly CSA program with fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices and mushrooms.

Erik has also helped co-create the Concordia Food Coalition, a group that brings together students, faculty and staff to promote and facilitate a transition to a more sustainable campus food system.

For more information, visit his website.

Stefan Christoff (2022-2025)

Research Assistant
Social Justice Archives Project

Stefan Spirodon Christoff is a media maker, community activist and artist living in Montréal.

Stefan hosts Free City Radio, broadcasting weekly on CKUT 90.3FM, CJLO 1690 AM, CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg, CFRC 101.9FM in Kingston, Ontario, CFUV 101.9FM in Victoria, BC and shared globally as a podcast (Spotify + Apple Podcasts).

Stefan makes music with many people globally, including Rêves sonores, Sam Shalabi, Lori Goldston, Adriana Camancho and Anarchist Mountains.

Stefan is on the board of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Côte-Des-Neiges and works with Cinema Politica Network. Stefan is also a history student at Concordia University.

Moe Clark 

âpihtawikosisâniskwêw (Michif/ mixed-settler) multidisciplinary artist Moe Clark is a 2Spirit singing thunderbird and master student at Concordia.

With roots from Treaty 7 and Red River Settlement, Moe is a proud member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. Currently residing as a guest in Tio'tiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal (QC) Moe works across disciplines of vocal improvisation, workshop facilitation, land-based oskapêwis/ Elder support, and performance creation.

They are a dedicated nêhiyawêwin (Plains Cree language) learner, working intimately with Elders and language keepers to advance language resurgence through song-based practices.

As a master’s candidate in the INDI program Moe’s research and creation, “tastawayihk dreaming / 2Spirit Drumming: Resurgent Practices of Reclamation and Cultural Continuity” aims to re-centre 2Spirit drum carriers roles and relations in community, through the lens of creative kinship, embodied knowledge, and Indigiqueer resurgence.

Project: "tastawayihk-iyiniwak wâhkôhtowin / 2Spirit Drumming: Resurgent Practices of Reclamation and Cultural Continuity"

Marcus-Xavier Granada

Marcus-Xavier is a second-year Master’s student in the Philosophy department at Concordia University supervised by David Morris.

He is a 2nd generation mestizo immigrant of Filipino-Colombian origin born in Tiohtià:ke, Mooniyang, and Longueuil, located on the south shore of Montreal.

His lived experience as an allophone in Quebec, union organizer at Concordia, and researcher and case worker at the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC-CTI), has formed his interest in philosophy to conceptualize and understand justice in the workplace, and oppression more generally.

At the psycho-social level, he is interested in developing a framework of liberation psychology and institutional psychotherapy popularized in the 1950s, by clinicians and philosophers such as Frantz Fanon and R.D. Laing. Using the methodologies of phenomenology and critical phenomenology, through the body schemas of Merleau-Ponty and Fanon, together with Lisa Guenther’s work on imprisonment and social death, he explores the relation between alienation, and its embodied affective counterpart, touch—whether imposed, chosen, or systemic— and how it shapes human experience.

As a result, his research project explores the issues of class and racialization through carnality, i.e.: how the former categories inscribe in and on the body. In response to these issues, he looks to a partial remedy in the practice of narrative medicine as a form of liberatory social theory and practice at the interpersonal level, and if/how one can mobilize, or translate these insights at the structural level, in the form of a liberatory political consciousness and coalition building.

Project: “Slackening the colonial grip and embracing the future: unfolding the habit of racialization” 

Elham Mohtashamzadeh

Elham is a PhD student in Social & Cultural Analysis at Concordia University, with master degrees in Film Studies and Gender Studies.

As an intersectional feminist and political activist, her research explores the convergence of media, social movements, surveillance, and gender justice, focusing on the lived experiences and resistance of Middle Eastern women. Committed to addressing systemic inequalities, she aims to foster transformative social change, particularly within the context of religious authoritarian regimes.  

Project: “The Girls of Enqelab Street: Fractured Voices, Shared Struggles - Iranian Women's social movements and the question of Collective Identity” 

Varda Nisar

Varda Nisar (she/her) is a mother, daughter, and sister. She is also a doctoral candidate in Concordia’s Department of Art History and a Public Scholar (2022-23). Currently she is the Scholar in Residence at the Centre of Oral History and Digital Storytelling.

Her work diverges in several direction, including art education and community outreach. She was the founder of Karachi Children’s Art Fest (2014-2016) and later headed the art educational program for the Karachi Biennale.

While in Montreal, she has consistently tried to foreground the work of artists from Pakistan and South Asia. In 2021, she organized and convened a speaker series titled (Art+Micro) History: Contemporary Artistic Voices from the South, which drew attention to the specific concerns and artistic modes of resistance in Pakistan.

In March 2022 –as part of her Public Scholar fellowship, she organized and moderated the discussion, The Logic of Postcolonial Museums: South Asia Edition, to foreground the diversity of thoughts and concerns of South Asian museums. She also developed a conceptual, critical space titled The Concise Museum, which critiqued the ways the nation-state of Pakistan maintains a colonial gaze toward its citizens. Her doctoral research focuses on the nexus between cultural production and military regimes in Pakistan and how museums have come to play a critical role in it. 

Project: "The Museum is Weaponized: Understanding Museums within the Military-Cultural Complex in Pakistan" 

Nabiha Yahiaoui

Nabiha Yahiaoui is a PhD student in the Social and Cultural Analysis program at the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Concordia University.

She recently worked as an instructor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute where she taught her first special topics course titled Sexuality in Racial Capitalism. 

Project: “Demystifying a world upside down: Islamophobia, sexual nationalism, and neoliberalism in Quebec” 

Dr. Nancy R. Tapias Torrado (2023-24)

PhD Sociology 
University of Oxford (2021)

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado is the Social Justice Centre’s 2023-24 Barry Pashak postdoctoral fellow. Nancy is a doctor in sociology from the University of Oxford, St Antony’s College (UK), and a human rights lawyer with an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex (UK) and an MPhil and an LLB/JD from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). She is also a Visiting Fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and a former Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculté de science politique et de droit at the UQAM.

Nancy’s community-based action-research programme is dedicated to the impact (or not) on corporate practice by Indigenous women-led mobilizations defending their ancestral territories from abuses committed in connection to mega-projects in Latin America and Canada. She develops an intersectional, decolonial and transnational research program that places Indigenous women at the centre. Thus, she acknowledges their victimization but goes beyond it to learn about their agency, leadership, legal mobilization, their processes of resistance and resurgence, and impact.

From Nancy’s investigation emerges the “braided action” theoretical framework, which she has shared widely with Indigenous women leaders, their organizations and supporters, and at academic conferences and university lectures for graduate and undergraduates of diverse disciplines. Part of her findings are now published in several peer-reviewed articles, magazines and book chapters, and she is currently focusing on publishing her doctoral and postdoctoral work in a book. In March 2023, Nancy received the Best Human Rights Dissertation Award from the International Studies Association (ISA) for her Ph.D. thesis: “Indigenous Women Leading the Defense of Human Rights from the Abuses by Mega-Projects in Latin America, in the Face of Extreme Violence” (2020).

Nancy’s research comes out of over a decade of experience working with and for neglected communities and human rights defenders at risk in Latin America and several previous years working in Colombia on gender, human rights and armed conflict. Among others, Nancy is a former regional researcher on the situation of human rights defenders in the Americas with the International Secretariat of Amnesty International (London, UK), a former law assistant professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia), and has consulted for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and several international non-governmental organizations, such as OXFAM, CEJIL and PBI.

Her publications can be accessed here (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nancy-Tapias-Torrado-2), and include the following:

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘The Violent Rollback of Indigenous and Environmental Rights: The Emblematic Case of Lenca Leader Berta Cáceres in Honduras’ in Simón Escoffier, Leigh Payne and Julia Zulver (eds.), The Right Against Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). https://bit.ly/3X20MxV.

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Postface’ in Nina Lakhani, Qui a tué Berta Cáceres ? (Les éditions de la rue Dorion, 2023). https://ruedorion.ca/qui-a-tue-berta-caceres/

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Overcoming silencing practices: Indigenous women defending human rights from the abuses committed in connection to mega-projects in the Americas – a case in Colombia’ (2022) Business and Human Rights Journal – Gender Special Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). https://bit.ly/3MeOe01.

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Acción trenzada. Indigenous women leading the defense of human rights from abuses related to mega-projects: impacting corporate behaviour - overcoming silencing practices’ (2022) Quebec Journal of International Law – ‘Opening to the Americas’ Special Issue (Montreal: Société Québécoise de Droit International - SQDI). https://bit.ly/3Ai3iG9.

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘De la victimización a la acción trenzada: la alarmante situación de quienes lideran la defensa de los derechos humanos en Colombia’ (2020) Revista Cien Días Edición Especial No. 100 (Bogotá: CINEP). https://bit.ly/3tKb8GI

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Mujeres indígenas liderando la defensa de los derechos humanos frente a los abusos cometidos en el contexto de megaproyectos en América Latina: Una aproximación desde la acción, que trasciende la victimización’  (2019) 50:4 LASA-Forum 6–11.  [1 Nov. 2019] https://bit.ly/3yR3BHT

Charlie Bond

Charlie is a PhD student in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Concordia University. He earned his BA in philosophy at University College London, and MA in contemporary literature, culture, and theory at King’s College London.

Drawing on Marxian political economy, urban geography, and queer history, Charlie’s research examines the fraught relationship between capital accumulation and the production of sexuality. His thesis follows this relationship to 1980s New York City, tracing how the City’s fiscal and HIV crises structurally reproduced one another. Charlie’s research questions include: What is the relationship between New York City’s economic restructuring and HIV transmission, treatment, mortality? How did the City’s historically affordable, queer neighbourhoods become some of the most expensive places to live in the world? And how did queer resistance mobilise in and against this political economy HIV?

Project: "The Political Economy of HIV: Capital, Sexuality and Mediation in New York City"

Mathilde LaRoche 

Mathilde LaRoche holds a Bachelor's degree in Geography from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2020) and is a candidate for the Master's degree in Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies from the Department of Geography, Planning & Environment at Concordia University.

Their Master's thesis adopts the perspectives of queer studies, critical geographies and queer phenomenology to explore the embodied experiences of queer students within university spaces in Tiohtià:ke, Montreal. Sensitive mapping is at the heart of Mathilde’s methodological practices, notably mobilized with the aim of queering the field of conventional cartography. With a particular focus on the power structures that shape our universities, her work is driven by a desire to reconsider and even reappropriate academic spaces and the research practices they entail.

Project: "Remapping Academic Embodiment: A Phenomenological Perspective to Center Queer Students' Experiences"

Thomas MacMillan  

Thomas MacMillan is a doctoral candidate in History at Concordia University studying labour and working-class history in the United States and Canada under Dr. Steven High.

He was born and raised in Portland, Maine. He is descended from French-Canadian and Scottish-Canadian emigrants on both sides of his family. As a teenager, he was a participant in Seeds of Peace, an international peace-building organization with a summer camp in his home state. He earned a B.A. from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts while studying International Development and Social Change. At Clark, he co-founded an organization which advocated for the human rights of Palestinians. While working in public education for a decade, he was an activist in his hometown and led campaigns for drug reform, public park preservation, and living wages. He also ran for office twice (Maine House of Representatives and Mayor). He then returned to academia, where he earned a M.A. in History from the University of Maine under Dr. Nathan Godfried. His thesis studied the history of urban reform, nativism, and class conflict in Portland, Maine with an emphasis on the Ku Klux Klan. 

Since enrolling at Concordia in 2019, Tom has been involved in the Teaching and Research Assistants at Concordia University (TRAC), where he was elected mobilization officer in three elections. His academic emphasis is on transnational labour organizing and his dissertation project examines independent labour organizing on the West Coast of North America with an emphasis on Vancouver and the San Francisco Bay Area during the New Left period and beyond. He hopes to incorporate oral history as well as archival research to capture the experiences of worker-organizers, their nascent organizations, and their impact on the period’s social, economic, and political changes. 

He has published multiple newspaper op-eds about racial justice and labour history. He also co-authored a chapter in “Where Are The Workers?” (University of Illinois Press, 2022) which examines the 2011 Maine Labor Mural crisis.

Project: “‘We can do it ourselves’: Worker-led organizing and the New Left on the West Coast”

Mieko Tarrius 

Grantee of major awards and fellowships, Mieko (she/elle) is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies from the Department of Geography, Planning & Environment at Concordia University.

She holds a Maîtrise in Political Science from Paris 8 University (in partnership with CUNY City College of New York) and an M.A. in Political Science from UQAM – Université du Québec à Montréal.

Mieko has served as a Public Scholar, Visiting Scholar, Lecturer, and Researcher in various institutions and organizations in Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal.

Building on the literature on whiteness, futurity, gentrification, and tech urbanism, her dissertation aims to expose the racial dynamics of tech-led gentrification in Montreal’s Park Extension and Philadelphia’s University City. Through critical content analysis and semi-directed interviews with tech workers and entrepreneurs, Mieko explores the ways narratives and discourses around cities’ fantasized, tech-friendly “future” have (re)configured gentrification in the present, ultimately cultivating the futurity of whiteness.

Project: “Imagining the tech city: Tech futurity, whiteness, and tech-led gentrification”

Sisheng Chris Zhang

PhD Student in Political Philosophy, UPF Barcelona

Chris is an FPI fellow and doctoral researcher in the Department of Law at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His main research interests are theories of social justice and ethics. His PhD project “Justice, Autonomy, and Self-Employment" explores the normative justification of self-employment.

At Concordia, he works with Prof. Pablo Gilabert to examine the relationship between dignity and autonomy of the self-employed workers.

For more information, visit his website.

Gideon Abagna Azunre 

Gideon is a Ph.D. student in Geography, Urban, and Environmental studies at Concordia University. He holds an MSc. in Urban Planning and Policy Design from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy; an MPhil in Planning from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana; and a BSc. in Development Planning also from KNUST. His research sits at the intersection of urban planning, urban informality, and sustainable city development. Geographically speaking, his research has mainly focused on the sub-Saharan African region, with keen attention to Ghana and its rapidly urbanizing cities.

Gideon’s Ph.D. research aims to examine the politics of multi-stakeholder participation and inclusion in marginalized informal contexts (i.e., slums and informal settlements).

He asks: To what extent are the needs and interests of diverse stakeholders and vulnerable groups (e.g., women, children, youth, elderly, and the disabled) considered in redevelopment projects? 2) What factors mediate their comprehensive participation (for example, socio-demographics such as education, age, gender, and ethnicity)? and 3) What roles do power and politics play in influencing decision-making? He focuses on Participatory Slum Upgrading Programs in Accra, Ghana’s capital and most populous city.

Project: "The politics of multi-stakeholder participation and inclusion in informal contexts: Lessons from a Participatory Slum Upgrading Program (PSUP) in Accra, Ghana"

His paper "Symbolic legitimization of evictions in post-colonial African cities: A review from Ghana's Old Fadama" written in collaboration with Festival Godwin Boateng was published in Habitat International, Volume 135, 2023, 102809.

Dean Joseph

Dean is a second-year MA student at Concordia University, Montréal. He earned his BA with honours in philosophy at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Currently, he is a Co-Editor-in-Chief  for Gnosis, the graduate journal based at Concordia’s department of philosophy. Dean is interested in normative ethics as it relates to our social world and has a forthcoming article on social action and problems related to its theory and practice. His research focuses on the stringency and flexibility of ethical principles in nonideal theory, an area he hopes to continue researching and eventually teach as a doctoral student.

Project: "Maximizing Feasibility: Dynamic Normativity, Neutral Agency, and Ideology" 

Stephanie Eccles

Stephanie Eccles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies at Concordia University. She holds a MSc from the same department and an BA in Anthropology from the University of Waterloo. Stephanie’s research engages with political economy/ecology focusing on the links between energy and food systems, Discard Studies, and multispecies relations. Her dissertation research looks at how industrial animal agricultural waste is produced, managed, and turned into frontiers for capital, in particular for renewable energy projects, at two temporalities: the ordinary day and during disasters. Exploring issues of environmental (in)justice, extreme weather events in North Carolina and British Columbia, and the emerging industry for waste-to-energy projects in North Carolina, she grapples with the enduring waste problems produced by industrial animal agriculture and the proposed socio-ecological fixes.

Stephanie has also written about contested companionship with pitbull-type dogs, and what it means to conduct multispecies fieldwork that grounds practices of care. Stephanie continues to work on collaborative projects and policy-oriented work that focuses on disaster management at the scale of industrial animal agricultural systems in North Carolina and British Columbia. Stephanie is motivated to both generate knowledge and relationships through action-oriented research that is committed to broader political projects rooted in transforming how we relate to each other and the nonhuman animal world in an effort to work towards a future that is abundantly just and kind.

PROJECT:  "Making Animal Waste Essential: ‘Renewing’ Animal Agriculture through the Fraught Politics of Renewable Natural Gas Development"

Ra'anaa Yaminah 

Ra’anaa Yaminah received her Bachelor of Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture at Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture. Her thesis titled The Architectural Segregation of Chicago: Black Identity in the South Side laid the foundations for her passion for the intersection of art and activism, coined artivism. She further explores this with ardour in her capacity as Chair of Black Lives Matter Sudbury and Installation Coordinator for Up Here: Urban Arts Festival.

Ra’anaa has participated in and curated numerous artivist initiatives and has contributed her talents to the development of many Afrocentric artistic installations. She has taken on many leadership roles, as an artist, activist, and academic creating space for people of colour and continually promoting anti-racist practices and social justice in all facets of her life. A cultural curator and visual activist, Ra’anaa is currently pursuing her Ph.D. research tentatively titled: "Futurities With(out) the Institution: The Emergence of Black Art and Activism in N’Swakamok", at Concordia University in Tio’tia:ke, on the unceded Kanien'kehá:ka traditional territory.

PROJECT: "Futurities With(out) the Institution: The Emergence of Black Art and Activism in N’Swakamok"

Dr Jesse Anne Tomalty (2021-2022)

Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Bergen, Norway

Jesse Anne Tomalty received her PhD in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews (UK) in 2011 and her M.A. in Philosophy at Concordia University (Canada) in 2007. 

Her research focuses on normative and conceptual issues related to global justice and human rights. 

She recently published “The Link between Poverty and Human Rights”, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice, edited by Thom Brooks (OUP, 2020), “Justifying International Legal Human Rights” in Ethics & International Affairs (2017) as well as “Remedial Responsibility for Global Poverty: Justice or Humanity?” in the Journal of Applied Philosophy (2017).

She also published “Is There A Human Right to Internet Access?” in Philosophy Now (2017).

For more information, visit Jesse Anne Tomalty’s website.

Nicholas Goberdhan 

Nicholas Goberdhan is an interdisciplinary PhD Student and multimedia creative. Born and raised in a classified, “Neighbourhood Improvement Area” within Toronto, he brings years of community research and activism to the Social Justice Centre.

Nicholas is based in the Communications program and supervised by Dr. Arseli Dokumaci. In aligning his research interests of disability, race and care relations, he serves as an Executive Board Member for the Access-in-The-Making (AIM) Lab at Concordia University.

Nicholas’ research project is focused on taking an intersectional approach to “young carers,” a cohort of individuals under the age of 25 who care for a disabled parent(s). Drawing from personal experience, an objective of this project is to ensure that no one who goes through the “young carer experience” must ever feel invisible, or that they are alone, again.

Balam Kenter  

After getting a BA in History of Art from Cornell University, Balam Kenter wrote their first MA thesis for UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department, Culture and Performance Program, which utilized the Foucaultian “care of the self” to reclaim so-called “eating disordered” and “obese” bodies as non-normative bodies and non-normative alimentary practices. After a non-academic period working as a theater manager and translator, Balam received a second MA from Bogazici University's Department of Philosophy where they wrote an award-winning thesis exploring the concepts of exploitation and oppression through the lenses of disability, Marx’s theory of surplus populations, and intersectional theory.

Balam is currently a PhD student at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Humanities PhD Program. Bridging Political Philosophy, Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies, Balam’s dissertation work focuses on the historical and material entanglements of ableism and anthropocentrism under late capitalism. The project features a novel combination of Foucaultian and Marxist analyses of power where capitalism emerges as a system that disables and animalizes certain bodies, human and non-human. The overall objective is to create a new paradigm of domination that envisions structural solutions without sacrificing singular flourishing needs.

When they are not studying in Montreal, Balam lives with two humans, three cats, and a dog in Istanbul.

Gustavo Henrique de Andrade

Gustavo Henrique de Andrade is a Master’s student in Political Science at Concordia University.

Gustavo also holds a B.A. in Public Administration from Fundação João Pinheiro and a B.A. in Physics from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

His work focuses on informal work with an emphasis on resistance in Latin America.

Léa Denieul

Léa joined the Ph.D. program at Concordia University’s Geography, Planning, and Environment Department in September 2019. After completing a masters in Cultural Geography at Wageningen Research Institute in the Netherlands, she became fascinated by the power of maps as storytelling devices. For her Ph.D. research she looks at maps as objects with agency that produce particular effects both on individuals and between people as they are shared and redistributed across different networks and scales.

Where does a map go once it is made? Who mobilizes it, in which context and for what purpose?

Koby Rogers Hall

Koby Rogers Hall is an artist, writer and social practice facilitator based in Montreal. Her recent projects are dedicated to dialogical arts practices, archiving as cultural activism, and public interventions for political engagement.

She conceives and facilitates social practice design with the performance collective Mischief Theatre, the multidisciplinary arts activist PreOccupations, the Politics & Care project, and the Artists’ Bloc of the Immigrant Workers’ Center in Montreal. She has taught classes at UQAM (Montreal), the Department of Arts Politics (NYU), and as part-time faculty with the Theatre Department and with the Community Economic Development (CED) Graduate Diploma Program through the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University. Her pedagogical practice has been invited by the Living Knowledge project of the Office of Community Engagement at Concordia, distinguishing itself as a community-based experiential learning project. 

Koby holds an MA in Arts Politics from Tisch School of the Arts (NYU) and a BFA in Theatre, specialised in Collective Creation (York University). She is pursuing her PhD in Humanities at Concordia's Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISCC) with a focus on migrant justice in social arts practices.

To learn more, visit her faculty profile.  

Agnes Tam (2020-21)

PhD in Philosophy
Queen's University

Agnes Tam received her PhD in Philosophy at Queen's University under the supervision of Will Kymlicka. Her doctoral thesis, Norms, Reasons, and Moral Progress, explored how partial and conformist group reasoning under appropriate conditions facilitates rather than obstructs moral progress. Her current research project, “Rethinking Democracy in the Populist Age,” explores the role of group belonging in populism.

Dr. Tam also holds a Bachelor's degree in Law from the University of Hong Kong and a Master's degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. She has recently published articles in the Journal of Political Philosophy and Analyse & Kritik.

https://www.agnestam.net

Heather M. Maranges (2020-22)

PhD in Social and Personality Psychology
Florida State University

Heather M. Maranges received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology at Florida State University. Her research seeks to understand what facilitates cooperation. In particular, she studies the nature and implications of self-control, moral cognition, and often their intersection. Heather not only employs traditional experimental and individual difference methods but also leverages diverse theories and methods, including those of evolutionary biology, relationship research, philosophy, neuroscience, and genetics to understand how people arrive at their social and moral judgments. 

As a Horizon Fellow in the Social Justice Centre and Psychology and Philosophy Departments, Dr. Maranges is working with Drs. Katharina Nieswandt, Kristen Dunfield, and Ulf Hlobil to on the SSHRC-funded research programme, Brilliant Thinkers, Empathic Therapists: What Explains the Gender Gap in Philosophy versus Psychology?

https://www.heathermaranges.com/

Isabella Trifan (2019-20)

PhD in Political Philosophy
Department of Law, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)

Dr. Isabella Trifan’s main research interests include distributive justice theories, global justice, family justice, and the ethics of procreation and childrearing.

Her current research centres on the ethics of policies which address population ageing, a problem faced by virtually every country in today’s world, starting from the observation that procreation and immigration, though seemingly unrelated practices, are both ways of adding members to a society. Examining procreation and immigration policies as potential demographic levers provides new insights for evaluating both practices, and for determining what states may permissibly do to tackle the effects of population ageing.

Before Concordia, she was a doctoral researcher at Pompeu Fabra University, working as part of a research project on Family Justice funded by the European Research Council and she has been a visiting student at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.

In coordination with the co-directors of the Centre, she will be in charge of organizing a public panel on immigration featuring scholars, policy-makers, and journalists in winter 2020.

Mostafa Henaway

PhD Student, Geography, Planning and Environment

Mostafa holds an M.A. from the Berlin School of Economics and Law where he specialized on labor policies and globalization, studying trade union strategies to challenge austerity in the U.K.

A long-time community organizer defending the rights of immigrant workers, Mostafa will be working under the supervision of Prof. Norma Rantisi (Geography, Planning and Environment Department). His doctoral work is part of the larger book project City Politics: Towards a Just and Sustainable Montreal in the 21st Century in collaboration with urban planner Jason Prince (School of Community and Public Affairs) and Prof. em. Eric Shragge, former chair of Concordia’s School of Community and Public Affairs.

Maxine Iannuccilli

PhD Student, Psychology

Maxine holds a B.A. in Psychology and was awarded a Certificate of Academic Excellence by the Canadian Psychological Association in 2018. Her undergraduate thesis studied the effects of bilingualism on children’s development of conventional understanding.

Under the supervision of Prof. Kristen Dunfield (Psychology) at the Social-Cognitive Development Lab, Maxine will be working on The Career Project: Investigating Factors Influencing the Gender Gap in Philosophy and Psychology. Her work is supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Arman Motaghi

PhD Student, Business Administration

Arman obtained his Master’s degree from Concordia University. After several years of professional work and a long history of volunteering and donating to NGOs (such as Plan Canada), he decided to pursue a doctorate in Business Administration.

His research project is titled A case study on Political use of levers of control and its effects on employees' health and benefits and is supervised by Prof. Michel Magnan and Dr. Matthäus Tekathen.

Elisabeth Roy Trudel

PhD Student, Interdisciplinary Humanities Program

Elisabeth holds a Master (LL.M.) in international law, a graduate diploma in journalism with a focus on human rights issues, as well as a B.A. in political science, human rights and the environment. She has been a visiting researcher at the Law School of the University of Western Australia in fall 2018 and taught a 300-level course on Contemporary Issues in Human Rights at Concordia in winter 2019. She previously worked as a consultant researching human rights violations at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.

Her article “The unfulfilled promise of the universality of human rights in a world dominated by vision” is forthcoming in International Law and Universality (Oxford University Press). Her research project Discourses of dignity? An interdisciplinary analysis of the paradoxical tendency in human rights to create exclusions is conducted under the supervisor of Prof. Amy Swiffen (Sociology and Anthropology) and co-supervised by Profs. David Howes (Sociology and Anthropology) and Rosemary Collard (Geography, Planning and Environment).