Enakshi Dua, a professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) Equity and Social Justice Award. This award celebrates her outstanding contributions to advancing the position of professors, academic librarians and other academic staff from historically marginalized communities.

Reflecting on the honour, Dua said: “While all individual awards are collective, this award is especially meaningful as it was truly based on collaborations with members of the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies andĚýBIPOCĚýcolleagues at 91ŃÇÉ«. It illustratesĚýourĚýshared commitment to anti-racism and all forms of equity. I am proud to be part of a School andĚýhave colleaguesĚýthat are leaders in research and teaching. We are especially committed to teach the next generation of leaders. I hope this award inspires people to continue working toward positive change in our world.”

Dua's extensive body of work directly tackles systemic barriers and advocates for meaningful social change within higher education, centering on anti-racist feminism. Her scholarly publications and teaching portfolio reflect a career-long dedication to equity-deserving frameworks, moving from foundational theories to urgent contemporary critiques. Beyond the classroom, Dua has translated her recent publications into systemic institutional leadership and service aimed at shifting university structures.

Having previously served as director of the Centre for Feminist Research and in senior roles within the 91ŃÇÉ« Faculty Association, Dua has applied these insights to help create institutional spaces that uplift marginalized voices and support collaborative, decolonial approaches to academic governance.

Learn more about the award .

The School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies is proud to announce that Tera Gosse has been named the recipient of the 2026 Melissa J. Knauer Essay Prize. This prestigious honour is awarded for the best essay submitted in the social sciences on a topic relating to women. 

Gosse’s winning submission, titled On the Language of the Historical Colonial Contract: Language, Performative Acts, and White-Streaming Heteropatriarchy, offers a rigorous look at the mechanisms of institutional power. In Gosse’s words, the work â€śexamines how settler colonialism persists through language as well as through law and policy.  Drawing on feminist theories of performativity, Indigenous feminist scholarship, and historical case studies, it argues that colonial authority is continually reproduced through bureaucratic, legal and institutional language that transforms domination into consent. The essay concludes by examining testimony, artistic expression, and Tori Gosse's poem All My Relations Blame You as forms of refusal that challenge and disrupt the narratives sustaining colonial power.”  

For Gosse, a Gender & Women’s Studies major, the recognition represents both academic rigor and personal history.   

“Winning the Melissa J. Knauer Essay Prize is deeply meaningful because it recognizes work that brings together my academic interests in feminist theory, Indigenous studies and social justice with my lived experiences as a woman of Mi'kmaq ancestry,” says Gosse. “My family history and especially the influence of my late Mi'kmaq grandmother, has profoundly shaped how I understand the issues explored in my research. Receiving this award affirms the importance of critically examining the systems and narratives that continue to shape our society and encourages me to continue pursuing scholarship that amplifies Indigenous and feminist perspectives.”  

Faculty members have praised the essay for its sophisticated and interdisciplinary approach. Nominator Professor Tanya Taylor noted that “Tera Gosse's work is original in both approach and content. Its sophisticated interdisciplinary analysis brings feminist theory, Indigenous scholarship and historical research into productive dialogue.”  

Taylor further observed that the research provides a vital contribution to modern scholarship, saying â€śTera's investigation of how language itself reproduces colonial power demonstrates exceptional theoretical depth while remaining attentive to the lived realities and ongoing effects of settler colonialism. Ultimately, On the Language of the Historical Colonial Contract: Language, Performative Acts, and White-Streaming Heteropatriarchy accomplishes more than advancing a compelling ethical and political argument about resistance, testimony and Indigenous forms of refusal; it becomes a site of knowledge production that contributes meaningfully to ongoing conversations about Indigenous resurgence, historical accountability and reconciliation.”  

The Undergraduate Awards Committee corroborated this assessment, finding that “the paper was well-argued, clear and consistent unpacking of colonial governance and of how bureaucratic language works as a tool of control.” ĚýThe award marks a significant milestone in Gosse's academic studies, highlighting the vital intersection of Indigenous and feminist perspectives in the social sciences.  Ěý

The Black Studies podcast, hosted by John Drabinksi, engages with activists and scholars in the field of Black Studies. In the March 9 episode, Bianca Beauchemin, an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies, discusses Black Studies in a Canadian context, the role of gender and sexuality within the field, what drew her to work and more.

Beauchemin’s research explores how embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine concepts of freedom and Black liberation. She recently was the 2022-23 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University and previously held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD in gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 

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The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) has announced the recipients of the November 2025 SSHRC Connection Grants. Ten 91ŃÇÉ« research projects received funding.

Congratulations to the researchers from the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) whose innovative projects were selected. These projects span a wide range of disciplines and demonstrate the depth and diversity of research expertise within our Faculty.

The one-year Connection Grant funding will support key knowledge-mobilization activities including events, workshops and outreach initiatives that help strengthen the impact and reach of this important work.

Projects involving LA&PS researchers are listed below.

Converging and Conflicting Buddhist Legal Frames: Secular Governances and Buddhist Transgressions, led by Alicia Turner (associate professor, Department of Humanities, LA&PS) with co-applicant Benjamin Berger (professor, Osgoode Hall Law School), received $24,619.

The Relational Turn: Looking Back, Thinking Ahead, led by Ruth BuchananĚý(professor, Osgoode Hall Law School) and co-led byĚýAnnie BuntingĚý(professor, Department of Social Science, LA&PS) and the University of Toronto, received $20,096

Waste-work: race, caste, and labour in the new global politics of disposability, led by Shubhra Gururani (associate professor, Department of Anthropology, LA&PS), received $23,503.

Monstrous Intimacies at 15, led by Tiana Reid (assistant professor, Department of English, LA&PS), received $24,055.

Colère et Espoir autour de la Palestine : Perspectives d'artistes et de chercheur.es en sciences sociales, co-led by Nadia Hasan (assistant professor, School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies, LA&PS) with partners from UniversitĂ© Laval and UniversitĂ© du QuĂ©bec Ă  MontrĂ©al, received $24,997.

Respite, Care, and Ethics for Cultural Workers: A Traveling Symposium, led by OCAD University and co-led byĚýCasey MecijaĚý(associate professor, Department of Communication & Media Studies), received $49,996.

De l'Ă©conomie politique postcapitaliste Ă  l'utopie — Rencontre entre recherche en sciences sociales et pratiques artistiques, led by Saint Paul University and co-led byĚýAudrey Laurin-LamotheĚý(associate professor, Department of Social Science, LA&PS) and partners from Lund University, UniversitĂ© Laval, and UniversitĂ© du QuĂ©bec en Outaouais, received $23,646.

Lusophone Studies Association Meeting, “Voices and Visions: Lusophone Communities in the Global Landscape,” led by the University of British Columbia and co-led by Robert Kenedy (associate professor, Department of Sociology, LA&PS), received $24,375.

°ŐĂł: Tewatia'tarò:rok Taetewatia'takĂ©hnha', led by the University of Toronto and co-led by Jeremy Green (assistant professor, Department of Humanities, LA&PS), received $50,000.

Read the full story in YFile.

Suliana Beraki, who is completing a minor in Gender & Women’s Studies (GWST), recently published a blog post in The Trauma & Mental Health Report. Her piece examines the barriers faced by Black and Indigenous people of colour (BIPOC) within Canada’s health care system. The article also features insights from Assistant Professor Bianca Beauchemin.

Beraki discusses how BIPOC communities are often over-policed, made invisible and given less support from public services. Many individuals in these communities don’t trust the healthcare system due to a long history of unethical and unfair treatment. They also face systemic racism and longer wait times for care, which leads to chronic stress, trauma and poor health. 

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On Monday, Nov. 3, individuals and teams were recognized for their contributions to the 91ŃÇÉ« Community at the President’s Staff Recognition Awards. The annual awards celebrate meaningful contributions across the institution in several key areas, including community building, leadership and service excellence.

The following staff members from the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies were celebrated as winners and nominees:

Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (DEDI) Award

Nominated:

• Colleen Robinson, administrative coordinator, Department of Anthropology 

Gary Brewer Emerging Leader Award

Nominated:

• Bhanu Priya Sharma, student engagement coordinator, LA&PS Colleges
• Tanzina Tahereen, associate director, faculty curriculum, Office of the Associate Dean, Programs (LA&PS) 

Harriet Lewis Team Award for Service Excellence

Nominated:

• English Department Administrative Staff 
• LA&PS Faculty Research Office  

The President’s Leadership Award

Nominated:

• Amanda Rodrigues, director, strategic enrolment, LA&PSĚý

Ronald Kent Medal

Winner: 

• Magy Baket,Ěýstudent success and academic advisor, LA&PSĚý

Nominated:

• Celeta Irvin, undergraduate program administrator, School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies, LA&PS

President’s Voice of 91ŃÇÉ« Award

Nominated:

• Jacqueline Selman,Ěýundergraduate students coordinator, Department of Social Science, LA&PS

Congratulations to all the staff recognized in the awards.

Read the full story in YFile.

Hazal Halavut is a postdoctoral fellow for the 2025-26 year, working under the supervision of Alison Crosby, professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies.

Halavut’s work traces the afterlives of colonial violence and genocide across memory, history and culture, attending to how they are held, denied and reimagined within the psychic, political and aesthetic life of the collective. Her postdoctoral project at 91ŃÇÉ«, Georgetown Boys: An Archive of Genocide, Collective Memory, and Canada’s “Noble Experiment”, turns to an extraordinary archive of survival and imagination: Ararat (1926–30), a journal produced by Armenian orphans brought to Georgetown, Ontario under Canada’s assimilationist experiment after surviving the Armenian Genocide. One of the earliest diasporic Armenian archives in Canada and among the very few child-authored genocide archives worldwide, Ararat is a site where boyhood was staged as masculinity, performed by the boys in ways that both reflected and responded to Canada’s demand that they become workers, men and proof of a successful experiment in nation-building. The project investigates how survival, memory and gendered belonging were forged under this assimilationist regime and how fiction, bilingualism and adaptation worked as strategies of refusal and creative survival within the demands of Canadianization.

This research builds on her doctoral dissertation, Archives of Absence: Nation’s Sleep, Perpetrator’s Dream, and Afterlives of Genocide (University of Toronto), now being developed into a book, which argues that absence functions as a generative force in the perpetrator’s national imaginary, a “technology of wakefulness” that organizes law, historiography and aesthetics in Turkey. Moving from the archive of absence in Turkey to the archive of creative survival produced by the Georgetown Boys in Canada, Halavut’s work rethinks trauma in a psychic and political economy shaped by the complicities of states, the demands of labor and the disciplining of gender and unsettled through imagination.

Alison Crosby, associate professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies, and Heather Evans, doctoral scholar in the graduate program in Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies, have co-edited a new book entitled, Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Reflections. The book is a collection of feminist and queer reflections on the ways societies memorialize loss in the wake of different forms of violence, including imperial, military and state violence. The book’s contributors look at memorials, archives, art installations, performances and other ways that communities memorialize, and looks at how grief can serve as a catalyst for activism and societal change.

Crosby holds a PhD from 91ŃÇÉ«. She has focused much of her research on the memorialization of harm from political violence in Guatemala, where she has worked for over 30 years. Her other research interests include gender issues, Latin American and Caribbean studies, transitional justice, and feminist participatory action research.

Learn more about the book or order it onĚý.

Andrea O’Reilly, professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies, along with her daughter Casey O’Reilly-Conlin, who holds a master’s degree from 91ŃÇɫ’s , have collaborated on a new book published by Demeter Press.

Gone Feral: Unruly Women and the Undoing of Normative Femininity, features 16 international contributions from scholars, poets, activists and artists looking at the ways women have been vilified for stepping outside traditional gender norms. The project came out of the two women’s respective interest in, and research on, women’s experiences and roles within patriarchal systems. The project was also a response to ongoing misogynistic attitudes, for example, attacks on women’s reproductive rights.

Gone Feral can be purchased through theĚý.

Read the full story in YFile.

Photo: Professor Crosby conducting fieldwork (© : Transnational Feminist Dialogues)

Enroll in GWST 4555 Feminist Methodologies, taught by Professor Alison Crosby, Wednesdays, 11:30-2:30 p.m.

In this course you will: Design your own research project. Learn how to conduct interviews, engage in ethnographic observation, and use creative methods such as PhotoVoice, image theatre, body mapping, and storytelling. Engage with guest lecturers as they talk about how they do research. Use a decolonial, intersectional framework to think critically about the politics of knowledge production. Grapple with the ethical dilemmas of conducting research and your own positionality.