Race | The Harriet Tubman Institute

Adonika Wilkes

rebsl — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:10:37 +0000

Adonika Wilkes is a PhD candidate in the Socio-Legal Studies Program at 91��ɫ. Bridging together feminist theory and critical race theory, her research looks at Black Canadian history, chronicling its effect in contemporary times. Her past research looked at the racialization of space and how Blackness is expressed and regulated in different areas. Her upcoming research will further expand on this topic, specifically looking at the surveillance Black Canadian women are subject to.

Keywords: Critical Race Theory, Feminism, Social Justice, Race, Anti-Black Racism

Guita Banan

rebsl — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:07:41 +0000

Guita Banan is a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at 91��ɫ. She studies history of neuroscience, ethics of neurotechnology, and neurobiological conceptions of humanness through the lens of Feminist STS and Black Studies. The focus of her PhD research is early clinical neurology in the late 19th century in the US within the racial context of post-slavery. She aims to understand the entanglements between the emergence of a field concerned with studying bodyminds and the racial shifts and continuations that worked to preserve a privileged and overrepresented category of “human,” as well as implications for contemporary ethical discourses. Guita received her MA from Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto and holds a PhD in (neuro)physics from the University of Florida. She received her BSc in physics from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran.

Keywords: Feminist STS; Black Studies-STS; race; history of clinical neurology and modern neuroscience; ethics

Michelle J. Martineau

rebsl — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 18:55:24 +0000

Michelle is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Université de Montréal. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Law (Université des Antilles – Guadeloupe) and a Master’s in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations, Cooperation, and Development (Université du Québec à Montréal). Her Master’s research focused on departmentalization and independence in the Guadeloupean context, spanning from 1950 to 1990. Her doctoral project examines identity (both political and cultural) and its impact on Guadeloupe’s political future in a post-colonial setting. Specifically, she aims to deconstruct the notion of departmentalization, illustrating how epistemic violence has influenced the construction of political and cultural identity in the archipelago. She was the student representative for CRIDAQ (2021-2023) and received scholarships from CRIDAQ as well as the CÉRIUM writing grant (winter 2023). She is the founder of the blog identitescaraibes.org and a columnist for NéoQuébec.

Keywords: Colonization, decolonization, postcolonial and decolonial theories, race, ethnicity, identity, citizenship, assimilation, universalism, France, nationalism, Caribbean geopolitics, regional Caribbean governance, international relations, political violence, (De)colonial feminism, Black studies

Clifton Grant

rebsl — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 19:21:57 +0000

Clifton Grant is a Graduate Student in the Department of Social Legal Studies at 91��ɫ and an Executive Member of the Harriet Tubman Institute. His research interests explore the intersectionality of race, education and criminality primarily by exploring the "school to prison pipeline" that disproportionately impacts marginalized and racialized communities. The Canadian mosaic has a "discourse of denial" of discriminatory and racist policies manifested from the discourse of institutionalized racism. This has intentionally created an oppressive pipeline that is characterized by under resourced schools, overuse of suspensions and expulsions aided by the overuse of Police in schools. Clifton's objective is to engage in solution-based discourses that provide methodologies to decrease criminalization of youth, reduce barriers to education and break the generational cycle of incarceration. His research hopes to facilitate the creation a paradigm shift of reform that empowers systematic changes to the punitive system of retributive justice that will manifest into the significant use of the restorative social justice model that emphasizes healing, reconciliation and community involvement. His research also plans to explore the removal of the stigmatization of criminality that will many positive repercussions for Canadian society including the assimilation of individuals who have paid their debt to society facilitating their transformation to becoming productive members of society with the ultimate beneficiary goal of the elimination of criminal recidivism. Clifton's active community engagement and advocacy at 91��ɫ continues to embolden his academic and civil pursuits as an impactful changemaker.

Keywords: Race, racism, discrimination, oppression, criminality, policing discourse of denial. liberation, freedom, social justice, education, stigmatization, incarceration, recidivism, reconciliation, restorative justice.

Mina Mir

rebsl — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 18:58:38 +0000

Mina Mir is a doctoral student at the Department of Politics at 91��ɫ. Her research focuses on law enforcement agencies (policing and intelligence) and the surveillance of Black, brown, and Indigenous folks. In particular, her research focus is on surveillant biometric technologies, especially facial recognition technology. She inquires into how technologies of visual representation ‘see’ (or don’t see) race, and how biometric technologies of identification have been used historically to perpetuate modes of social classification, sequestering, and carceral warehousing. She is from the Balochistan region of Pakistan, where her people have been fighting against historic dispossession and exploitation.

Keywords: Race, anti-Blckness, biometric technology, surveillance, social movements, securitisation, policing

Lorne Foster

rebsl — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 22:38:07 +0000

Lorne Foster is Professor, School of Public Policy & Administration (SPPA). He holds the 91��ɫ Research Chair in Black Canadian Studies & Human Rights (Tier 1). As the Director of the Institute for Social Research (ISR), Dr. Foster oversees the leading university-based survey research centre in Canada. He is past Academic Director, of the 91��ɫ Statistics Canada Research Data Centre (RDC); and the inaugural Chair, Race Inclusion and Supportive Environments (RISE). In his university service, he currently serves as the Chair of the Community Safety Council (CSC); and is a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Rights (PACHR). Dr. Foster is also the Director of the Diversity & Human Rights Certificate (DHRC), which he established in partnership with the Human Resources Professional Association (HRPA). This initiative is the first academic-industry partnership sponsored by a regulatory organization.

Tka C. Pinnock

rebsl — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 01:43:03 +0000

Tka C. Pinnock is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at 91��ɫ. Her research interests lie at the intersection of feminist political economy, political ecology, globalization and critical development studies where she explores the everyday politics of life work. Her dissertation project explores the constructions of indigeneity among African-descended marginalized workers as a political-economic response to the conditions of economic development, using the tourism sector in Jamaica as a case study. Pinnock’s community work also gives rise to an interest in diaspora studies and community-based research.

Janice J. Anderson

rebsl — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 01:25:28 +0000

Janice J. Anderson is a PhD candidate whose doctoral research, “Being Otherwise: Black Women’s Literary Interventions into Radical Being, Knowledge and Power,” considers self-fashioning and world-making in Black women’s intellectual traditions and literatures in the Americas. Her areas of research interest include the Black Radical Tradition, Black feminism/womanism, Black aesthetics and Black literatures. “I am grateful to the Tubman Institute for the continued support to examine enslavement in the context of the Americas. Here I can further develop a scholarly practice that adheres to geographer Katherine McKittrick’s admonishments to shift “our analytic frame away from the lone site of the suffering [Black] body” and “toward co-relational texts, practices, and narratives that emphasize black life” (McKittrick 2014). My gratitude continues for acceptance and space in this collegial environment of innovative scholars.

Danielle Howard

rebsl — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 04:41:30 +0000

Dr Danielle A. D. Howard joins AMPD as an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre. She recently taught within the University of California-Los Angeles' School of Theater, Film and Television before coming to 91��ɫ. Dr. Howard holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from UCLA and writes at the intersections of race, gender, performance, visual and sonic culture. She is currently working on a manuscript titled Making Moves: Race, Basketball, and Embodied Resistance that spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The project foregrounds Black basketball players’ virtuosic and improvisational movements as oriented towards a kinetic knowledge of freedom and akin to contemporaneous jazz aesthetics. Other recent research includes the speculative lives of nineteenth and twentieth-century Black performers. Dr. Howard’s article, "The (Afro) Future of Henry Box Brown: His-story of Escape(s) through Time and Space" won TDR’s (The Drama Review) Graduate Student Essay Contest Award and appears in their September 2021 issue.

Originally from the United States with training in music, dance, and theatre, Howard's move to Toronto inspires her continued pursuit of her artistic and intellectual curiosity by engaging art-based research practices. She is invested in improving the health and resilience of her communities through their participation in the collective making of artistic expressions with different forms of embodied art. As a certified Social-Emotional Arts (SEA) Facilitator, she hopes to organize community programs that use dance, music, and theatre to facilitate healing, inner peace, and self-expression as well as inform the public on various topics.

Célia Romulus

rebsl — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 03:37:13 +0000

Célia Romulus joined Glendon's Department of International Studies as an assistant professor in July. She completed her PhD in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University, where her research focused on: the normalization of gendered state repression under the Duvalier dictatorship; how these systematized forms of violence shaped movements of population out of Haiti; and the notion of citizenship as experienced by multiple generations of migrants. Her research and teaching draws from anti-oppression and anti-racist education, Afro and decolonial feminisms, and explores questions related to the gender and the politics of memory, migrations, citizenship, political violence and interdisciplinary methods. Prior to completing her PhD, Romulus worked as a program director in the areas of gender-based violence in public spaces and in security sector reform for UN Women, the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. She continues to work as a consultant and trainer on questions related to anti-oppression, anti-racism, Black femininities/masculinities, gender mainstreaming in public policies and in development.