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Concordia’s history and its founding institutions’ relations with Black communities

Responsibilities 2020–22

  1. researching and examining Concordia’s and its founding institutions’ (Sir George Williams University and Loyola College) historical relations with Black communities within and outside the institution, in order to provide recommendations on how to honour and highlight this history
  2. working with Concordia archivists and librarians towards identifying possibilities for mobilizing Concordia’s Black community archives and library
  3. researching and rebuilding previous relationships with Montreal’s Black community and forming new pathways and relationships with the community
  4. recommending sustainable models of engagement with the local and international Black communities

Subcommittee lead

Christiana Abraham, Scholar-in-residence, Critical Race Pedagogies, Department of Communication Studies, Faculty of Arts and Science

Christiana Abraham
Scholar-in-residence

Christiana Abraham is scholar-in-residence, Critical Race Pedagogies in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. Prior to this, she obtained an MA and a BA from Concordia University.

Her teaching and research specialities are in critical race studies, race, ethnicity and media, visual representations and culture; de/post-coloniality and gender; and transnational and global-South media practices.

Her research revolves around the radical re-thinking of archives, community, and orality as forms of grounded grass-roots activism that critically reclaims and re-narrates established aesthetics, canons, and cultural knowledges.  Her scholarship is also interested in the destabilization and re-visualization of visuality in anti-racist and de-colonial pedagogies. A former lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Dr. Abraham brings to academia a range of grounded international field experiences in media, journalism, development-communication, and rural community pedagogies.

She is the curator of “Protests and Pedagogy: Representations, Memories, and Meanings” an archival exhibition that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Sir George Williams students’ protest.  Prior to this, she curated “From the Archives to the Everyday: Caribbean Visualities and Meanings”, a collection of vintage family photographs of Caribbean life.

Subcommittee members 

Eunice Bélidor 
Former director, FOFA Gallery, Faculty of Fine Arts
Affiliate Professor, Department of Art History
Curator of Quebec and Canadian Art, MMFA

Océane Jasor
Assistant professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Fine Arts

Camina Harrison-Chéry
Undergraduate student, John Molson School of Business

Cynthia George
Cataloguing assistant, Concordia Library

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