Black Feminist Thought | The Harriet Tubman Institute

Dee Marksman-Phillpotts

rebsl — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:35:41 +0000

Dee Markman-Phillpotts (they/them) is a Black, trans, non-binary educator, researcher, and community advocate whose work centers Black trans life, collective care, and liberatory futures. A PhD student with a background in social work and sexuality studies, their research examines how intersecting systems of anti-Black racism, gender-based violence, queer and transphobia, and poverty shape the lived realities of Black and marginalized communities.
Grounded in Black feminist methodologies and abolitionist praxis, Dee’s scholarship interrogates dominant discourses that render Black trans people hypervisible as sites of harm yet invisible in policy, care infrastructures, and knowledge production. They are particularly interested in how communities cultivate survival strategies, mutual aid networks, and embodied practices of care that challenge carceral logics and reimagine safety beyond the state.
Through teaching, community-engaged research, and public scholarship, Dee works to bridge academic and grassroots spaces, insisting that knowledge is most transformative when it is accountable to the communities from which it emerges.

Keywords: Black Trans Studies; Queer of Colour Critique: Black Feminist Thought; Intersectionality; Anti-Black Racism; Gender-Based Violence; Abolitionist Frameworks; Transformative Justice; Collective Care; Critical Pedagogy; Anti-Oppressive Education

Bianca Beauchemin

rebsl — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:23:32 +0000

Bianca Beauchemin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at 91��ɫ. She recently was the 2022-2023 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University. She was also awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Gender Studies.

She has published a book review of Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and is currently working on the final draft of her article entitled "Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities” for the Journal of Canadian Studies’ special issue on Black Studies in Canada. She is also working on her book manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, where she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.

Myrtle Sodhi

rebsl — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 19:43:13 +0000

Myrtle Henry Sodhi is a PhD student at 91��ɫ in the Faculty of Education. Her research focus relates to Black feminist thought, precolonial African thought, and ethics of care and their roles in re-envisioning systems. Through the process of reclaiming her inherited Afro-Caribbean Indigenous storytelling role she uses her work to uncover stories located in the body. The Black body is often a site of personal, political, and social enactments and can reveal the complexities in re-creation and reclamation efforts. Her work examines these complexities while also providing a way to increase the capacity for self and community integration. Her (research) creation attends to a process that is guided by trans-temporal collaborators who challenge ideas around the relationship to art and productivity, community integration, and authorship. Myrtle is the founder of The Beyond Strong Community--a personal and collective care community that provides multimodal arts based practices by local women artists for Black women that examines joy, ease, and liberation.