Contributors

Temitope Adefarakan holds a PhD in sociology and equity studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, with a specialization in feminist studies offered by the university’s Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her interests lie in the areas of anti-Black racism, antiracist and anti-oppressive pedagogies, and African Indigenous studies. The author of The Souls of Yoruba Folk: Indigeneity, Race, and Critical Spiritual Literacy in the African Diaspora (2015), she is a sociology lecturer in the University of Toronto’s Transitional Year Program. She has taught for over fifteen years in a variety of settings, with a focus on equity, women’s rights, and anti-colonial thought in the African diaspora. She has also conducted workshops on equity, diversity, and social justice. A proud mother, Adefarakan especially enjoys exploring the world with her little one.

Sheila Batacharya completed her doctoral studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Roxana Ng. Her dissertation explored counterhegemonic understandings of violence and oppression, embodiment, and healing among young South Asian women. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, spanning gender studies, sociology, and education, while her work on embodiment and decolonization is also informed by her teaching and practice of yoga. She is the co-editor (with Mythili Rajiva) of Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian Murder (2010).

Candace Brunette-Debassige is a Mushkego woman from the Fort Albany First Nation, in northeastern Ontario (Treaty 9 territory). She has been working in Indigenous education for more than fifteen years. She is an educator and storyteller with a background in Indigenous theatre and embodied and story-based approaches to teaching and learning. Running like a thread throughout Brunette-Debassige’s work is a commitment to furthering the liberatory struggles of Indigenous peoples in the context of education. She is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Western University, where she is investigating the storied experiences of Indigenous women who are leading efforts to Indigenize universities in Canada.

Susan Ferguson is director of the Writing and Learning Centre at OCAD University, where she oversees a diverse portfolio that includes student academic support, English language learning programs, and a university-wide Writing Across the Curriculum initiative. Her research interests include the pedagogy of writing, feminist autobiography, embodiment, and pain studies, and her work is informed by interpretive social inquiry, disability studies, and transnational feminist theory. She holds a master's degree in sociology and equity studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, and has published in the areas of disability history, gender and equity in higher education, and writing in art and design education. Her commitment to decolonizing methodologies is grounded in her former work with Aboriginal youth living with intergenerational trauma, violence, and addictions in inner-city Vancouver.

Katie MacDonald recently joined Capital Region Housing in Edmonton as their Education Lead. Her research interests include transformative pedagogy, learning for social justice, and encounters with difference. She loves knitting, spending time with her dog Rita, and drinking coffee in the sunshine.

Jamie Magnusson is a faculty member in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto. She does harm reduction outreach through a program for street-involved sex workers and has been involved in participatory action research with youth who have been exploited in the domestic sex industry. Her work with LGBTQ+ communities includes the Fighting Out program described in her chapter. In her writing, she uses a Queer Marxist feminist lens to examine how urban poverty is organized through interconnected strategies such as real estate speculation, gentrification, and the racist police state. In her teaching, she explores community organizing from the standpoint of topics such as pedagogies of solidarity and social movement learning. She is also an instructor with Toronto’s Tai Chi and Meditation Centre.

Stephanie Moynagh is an active community member based in Toronto. She has over fifteen years’ experience working alongside low-income people in both nonprofit and community-based settings, with the goal of effecting transformative social change. Her interests include the roots and impacts of trauma, confronting and healing from interpersonal and systemic violence, and transformative justice practices. A firm believer in the power of relationship and in spiritual evolution, she continues to struggle toward a more complete understanding of her role in movement building as a person of white-settler ancestry and identity. She holds an MEd in adult education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto.

Devi Dee Mucina is an assistant professor at the University of Victoria in the Indigenous Governance program. Through his father’s lineage, he is Maseko Ngoni from Lizulu, which lies on the border between Malawi and Mozambique. Through his mother’s lineage, he is Shona from Zimbabwe. In his current research, which is international in scope, he employs an Indigenous intersectional framework, with an emphasis on dialogue and collaborative partnerships, to explore the decolonization of Indigenous masculinities, in part through the renewal of traditional holistic and relational understandings of wellness. In addition to decolonization and Indigenous governance, his interests include Ubuntu philosophy, Indigenous fathering, the impact of incarceration, and the politics of social memory.

Denise Nadeau is an educator of mixed European heritage. She currently is a visitor in the traditional homelands of the Lekwungen Nation on Vancouver Island. Born in Québec, she still spends time in Gespe’gewa’gi and in Montréal, where she is an affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University. She teaches and writes in the areas of Indigenous-settler relations, the decolonization of the body, and the deconstruction of whiteness and colonialism in Christianity. Her recent publications include “Decolonizing Religious Encounter? Teaching Indigenous Traditions and Colonialism,” in Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada, edited by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton (2016).

Randelle Nixon is a sessional instructor in the Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies departments at the University of Alberta. She received her PhD in sociology at the University of Alberta, where she explored the relationship between feelings of pride and various manifestations of pride politics. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, affect theory, body politics, and social justice strategies.

Wendy Peters is an associate professor in the Department of Gender Equality and Social Justice at Nipissing University, in the “near North” of Ontario. She received a PhD in sociology and equity studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include representations of privileged and marginalized groups in popular culture, with an emphasis on queer representation on television. She has published in Canadian Woman Studies / Les cahiers de la femme, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Flow, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Sexuality and Culture, and Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture.

Carla Rice specializes in embodiment and subjectivity studies and in arts-based and research creation methodologies. She is professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, where, in 2012, she founded Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, with a mandate to interrogate systemic injustices and use arts-informed methods to foster inclusive communities and promote equity. She has published three books, Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture (2014), Gender and Women’s Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain (2013), and Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain (2018), and has received numerous awards for advocacy, research, and mentorship. In 2016, she received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Partnership Grant for her project Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. Prior to entering academia, she worked to advance women’s health and well-being in Canada and was a founder and director of Canada’s National Eating Disorder Information Centre and the Body Image Project at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital.

Sheila Stewart is the author of two poetry collections, The Shape of a Throat (2012) and A Hat to Stop a Train (2003) and is the editor, with Suzanne Thomas and Ardra Cole, of The Art of Poetic Inquiry (2012). Her poetry has been widely published, in journals such as Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, the Literary Review of Canada, and the Malahat Review, and has been recognized by the gritLIT Contest, the Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Contest, and the Scarborough Arts Council Windows on Words Award. Her writing on poetic inquiry has appeared in Creative Approaches to Research and in LEARNing Landscapes, as well as in numerous edited collections. Formerly a community-based adult literacy worker, she teaches at the University of Toronto in the New College Writing Centre and in the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Yuk-Lin Renita Wong is a professor in the School of Social Work at York University. In her research and teaching, she seeks to deconstruct the power relations embedded in the knowledge production and discursive practices of social work, as well as to recentre marginalized ways of knowing and being. She brings contemplative pedagogy into critical social work education and, with respect to social justice work, explores mindfulness as a pedagogy of decolonization and a critical reflective practice that nurtures embodied awareness and engages with the integrated whole of body-mind-heart-spirit. Wong has practiced mindfulness meditation since 1998 and has led meditation and mindfulness training since 2007 in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Alannah Young Leon is a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation (Treaty 5) and a visitor to unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Coast Salish territories. She develops cross-cultural land-based pedagogies for sustainable ecologies. Her publications include “Weaving Indigenous Women's Leadership,” in Women, Adult Education, and Leadership in Canada (2016). She teaches courses on Indigenous research epistemologies and methodologies in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, where she also works with the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, Indigenous Research Partnerships and the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems. In collaboration with Denise Nadeau, she developed the staff and faculty Aboriginal cultural training curriculum for the University of Victoria’s LE,NONET Research Project.