SCHOOL OF DISABILITY STUDIES AT TMU | ZOOM WEBINARS
A MONTHLY SPEAKER SERIES ON BLACKNESS, GENDER,
AND NEW SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES IN CANADA
Session 1.
Dr. Camisha Sibblis
Dr. Camisha Sibblis is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Windsor’s School of Social Work and she is the Co-I of a SSHRC Connections-funded project, “Sealing the Leaky Pipeline: Constructing Mentorship Best Practices for Racialized Graduate Students in the Academy.” She is the recipient of a Mitacs Acceleration Grant with the YMCA as the agency collaborator and is a collaborator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Schools, Safety and the Urban Neighbourhood.” Her research uses spaciotemporal and critical race theories to focus on anti-Black racism, carcerality in Black life, and the politics of intersectionality. She wrote the “Morris Report” (R. v. Morris 2018 ONSC 5186) – the first Impact of Race and Culture Assessment report applied in the criminal sentencing of a Black defender in Ontario. Professor Sibblis has also been a mental health practitioner as well as a clinical agent for the Office of the Children’s Lawyer.
Image Description: This image shows a close-up self-portrait of Camisha Sibblis, looking directly at the camera. Camisha is wearing a maroon, high neck sweater and their long dark hair is styled in drop curls pushed back from their forehead with a black headband. They have a soft, closed-mouth smile on their face which is tilted slightly to the left of the image frame.
Dr. El Jones
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and abolitionist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was the 5th Poet Laureate of Halifax and a 2015 resident of the International Writing Program at University of Iowa. El was the poet in residence at U of T Scarborough in 2021. She won 2 Atlantic Journalism Gold awards in 2018 and 2019. In 2016, El was a recipient of the Burnley “Rocky” Jones human rights award for her work with prisoners. She was the 15th Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. El received her PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University.
El was the lead author of the report, Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM. Her second book, Abolitionist Intimacies, a collection of poetry and prose examining abolition through Black feminist practices of care and resistance is being released from
Fernwood Press in November, 2022
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Dr. Beverly Bain
Professor Beverly Bain is a Black queer feminist, antiracism, anti-capitalist scholar. She teaches in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga Campus. She currently teaches and researches in the area of Caribbean and Black diasporic sexualities, Black and Caribbean queer feminist organizing, sexual assault and violence against women, gender, colonialism, transnationalism and anti-capitalism. Bain is the author of “Fire, Passion and Politics: The Creation of Blockorama as Black Queer Diasporic Space in the Toronto Pride Festivities” in We Still Demand: Defining Resistance in Sex ad Gender Struggles, edited by Patrizia Gentile, Gary Kinsman and L Pauline Rankin. Bain is currently working on a series of essays on Black radical feminist queer organizing in Toronto from the 80’s to the present.
Image Description: This image shows a portrait of Beverly Bain taken by Jamie Magnusson. Beverly is facing the camera with head and torso in view, and wears a white buttoned-up shirt under an off-white waistcoat with a brown and navy striped bowtie. Beverly sports an open smile, their hair is styled in a short, curly, reddish-brown afro, and she wears gray-framed eyeglasses and dark lipstick. The backdrop of the photo is a creased, black and gray mottled sheet.
Session 2.
Dr. Treisha Hylton
Treisha Hylton is an interdisciplinary instructor in the field of child and youth care, criminology and social work, with an emphasis on equity and social justice for African/Black Canadian girls and their broader community. This is complemented with 15 years of professional experience working with various organizations such as Native Child and Family Services, Toronto Catholic District School Board, The Massey Centre and the City of Toronto. Her research interests are focused on centering African Canadian epistemologies to advance social justice and equity in child and youth care.
Image Description: This image shows a self-portrait of Treisha Hylton, who is facing the camera with their head and shoulders in view. Treisha is wearing a leopard print, high neck sweater and large, thin hoop earrings. They smirk at the camera with dark lipstick on and their short dark hair styled in a perfectly round fluffy afro. Behind Treisha is a white wall with some shadows.
Dr. Jenelle Rouse
Dr. Rouse is a Black Deaf Canadian born and raised to her Caribbean, African-diaspora family. She is an educator, scholar, translator, consultant, and artist. She has over a decade of experience in teaching students from kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12), and teaching candidates in their different professions for two years. Dr. Rouse leads a dual career as an educator with a doctorate in Applied Linguistics and as a visual body-movement artist. Over ten years, she has performed various shows such as Talking Movement, Withered Tree, Perceptions II, Home: Body, Crossings, Hear, Feel, See, What! and Proud. Through her personal project, Multi-Lens Existence, she explores and experiments with different mediums to share stories through body movements without any reliance on words and sounds/music. Additionally, Jenelle has taken on different roles (e.g., facilitator, collaborator, co-researcher, writer, workshop provider, and consultant) while working with a variety of local (Ontario) arts-related projects.
Image Description: This image shows a self portrait of Jenelle Rouse who is facing the camera with head and torso in view. Jenelle is wearing a pick shirt underneath a medium blue denim jacket with sleeves pushed up the elbow. They wear brown tortoise shell eyeglasses and a pink headwrap with some of their dark hair visible as a short curly side bang. Jenelle smiles openly at the camera with the back of their left hand resting near their jaw. Behind Jenelle is a white wall.
Amelia Palmer
Amelia Palmer is a Black Deaf Canadian, born and raised in her Caribbean family. She is currently an undergraduate and paraprofessional student at the Gallaudet University’s Multicultural Student Development and Mentoring (MSDM), majoring in Deaf Studies and minoring in Linguistics. She has a keen interest in researching, observing and documenting Black Deaf History with hidden lineage stories of Black Deaf Canadian individuals. She wants to be part of the change, to transform the stigma against IBPOC Deaf/HOH individuals with many intersectional identities in Canada and the USA. Amelia has a strong belief in giving back to IBPOC Deaf/HOH through empowerment and mentorship. By doing so, she hopes to change the perspective of IBPOC deaf people to the hearing community.
Image Description: This image shows a portrait of Amelia Palmer who is facing the camera with head and torso in view. Amelia wears an iridescent cream sweater and small hoop earrings. their dark hair is neatly flat-twisted into a halo braid around their head. They smile openly with their left shoulder resting on a wooden beam pictured at the very edge of the frame. Behind Amelia is a blurry backdrop of green trees and a bit of blue sky.
Amy Parsons
Image Description: This image shows a self portrait of Amy Parson who is facing the camera with head and shoulders in view. Amy is wearing a dark blue denim jacket with a brown backpack, and is carrying a rainbow striped umbrella that radiates out behind their head. Amy smiles widely. The sides of their head are shaved while the top is short and curly.
Amy Parsons (they/them) is a Black Deaf Canadian, born and raised in K’jipuktuk, Turtle Island (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada). They have deep roots in the African Nova Scotian community with familial roots in the Black communities of Lucasville and Weymouth Falls, as well as Irish settler heritage. As a lifelong activist for language and educational equality for Black Deaf persons, they have over a decade of leadership experience, supporting employee engagement and advancing anti-oppression frameworks/dismantling hegemony within educational and community systems.
Session 3.
LLana James
LLana James is a public intellectual and scientist. Her career spans the private sector and public service. She examines how AI disrupts the practice of health care, and medicine, while it increasingly redefines the human, rehabilitation sciences, public health and health care systems. LLana develops, implements and evaluates interventions at the intersection of race-ethnicity, medicine, public health, health systems, data, AI and the law. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, in the Faculty of Medicine.
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Dr. Idil Abdillahi
Dr. Abdillahi is published widely on an array of topics, including mental health, poverty, HiV/AIDS, organizational development, and several other key policy areas at the intersection of BlackLife and state interruption. Most notably, her cutting-edge research and scholarship on Blackened and antiBlack sanisms has informed the current debates on fatal police shootings of Black mad-identified peoples. Her work is attentive to the tensions between data, research, communities, institutions, and monetization, and she strives to challenge the ways that research data about communities experiencing structural oppression—particularly Black communities—is increasingly used in capital-oriented institutions as it simultaneously is serving socio-political ‘care’ spaces such as non-profit organizations, prisons, hospitals and community-based health centers. Dr. Abdillahi’s work integrates an understanding of how these institutions and ‘care’ spaces continue to disproportionately impact Black women/people, leading to their disenfranchisement from ‘public’ services and supports in Toronto and beyond.
Image Description: A close-up photo of a Black woman with brown eyes. She is looking directly at the camera with impeccable makeup; sculpted brows, tight lined eyes, and glossy deep pink lips. Some of her face is out of frame. She is bald and has on a forest green top with two gold necklaces: one that reads, “Idil,” and the other is the African continent. The photograph is taken indoors and the out-of-focus background has plants and framed pictures against a dark red wall.
Dr. Ijeoma Opara
Dr. Ijeoma Nnodim Opara is an internationally recognized internal medicine and pediatric primary care physician at Wayne Health, assistant professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine (WSUSOM), and associate program director of the Wayne State University School of Medicine Internal Medicine residency, Detroit, Michigan. Born in Nigeria and baked in Detroit
she is also a global public health expert, international speaker and consultant, scholar, and activist. She equips leaders, communities, organizations, and institutions with systems-based problem-solving tools for achieving their mission and meeting their bottom line while creating equitable, just, antiracist, and decolonized training and working environments. She is an award winning medical and community educator, mentor, and leader in both academic and non-academic spheres and sits on multiple national and international boards and committees addressing antiracism, decolonization, health equity, and health justice. A ‘liberation medicine’ practitioner, she centers Black and Indigenous African solutions in her asset-based justice and equity work as a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded community based participatory translational researcher, organizer, and clinician. She has created and led various health justice initiatives and has transformed the culture of her institution’s medical education and faculty development programs through the initiatives she leads and co-leads respectively including Health Equity and Justice in Medicine (HEJIM) and Global Urban Health Equity (GLUE) programs. She is celebrated for her masterful communication, moderation, and facilitation skills especially when engaging in challenging conversations regarding racial justice and systems transformation as demonstrated in her roles as co-chair of the Canada-US Coalition to End Race Correction in Healthcare (CUCERCH), co-editor of racism and health of PLOS One Global Public Health Journal, creator of Antiracism in Medicine Action Roundtable (#AIMART), facilitator of the Governor of Michigan’s roundtable on Reproductive Justice, and member of the White House Office of Public Engagement Health Equity Leaders Roundtable. In appreciation for her dedication to health justice, Dr. Opara was recently recognized by the WSU Board of Governors for her tireless work during the COVID-19 pandemic to raise awareness about medical and scientific racism; create new systems of training for healthcare professionals; advocate for practice and policy changes as well as institutional accountability; create advocacy networks of Black professionals; and centering the voices and stories of Black patients.
Image Description: This image shows a portrait of Dr. Ijeoma Opara who is facing the camera with head and shoulders in view. Ijeoma wears a black round-neck shirt under a black, white, yellow and blue patterned jacket. They wear gold disk earrings, a gold chain necklace with a gold disk pendant and large cat-eye glasses with clear frames. Ijeoma is smiling brightly, head tilted slightly to the right, they have dark brown hair that is shaved at the side with short curls at the top. Behind Ijeoma is a beige-coloured wall.
Jackie Girgas
More information to be announced.
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Session 4.
Arij Elmi
Arij completed her Bachelor's and Master of Social Work at the University of Windsor and is completing a doctorate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). She also has certificates in Critical Muslim Studies (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues) and Social and Cultural Psychiatry (McGill University).
Her research is focused on the intersection of race/religion, gender, and violence. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she aims to bring Black Feminist Decolonial Thought and Critical Muslim Studies into conversation with one another in order to see what a Black analytic can offer to the understanding of Muslim women’s subjectivities. Broadly, she is interested in how people come to understand themselves and how these understandings bear on systems of ethics.
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amber williams-king
amber williams-king is a multi-disciplinary Antiguan artist and scholar, currently living and working in Tkaronto. She is a recent graduate of the Masters in Environmental Studies program at York University, where she explored what Caribbean poetics might illuminate about moving with, through and beyond crisis. Her creative writing on queerness, intimacy and childhood appears in several print and digital anthologies. Over the years she has received several grants from the Ontario Arts Council, and has been selected as a finalist for the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist award, as well as the Michael Baptista Essay Prize for her paper, “When Palm Trees Break: The Fractured Horizons of Black Caribbean World-Making in the Midst of Crisis.”
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Mubeenah Mughal
More Info to be announced.
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Session 5.
Dr. Ciann Wilson
Dr. Ciann Wilson has over a decade of experience working within racialized communities across the greater Toronto area, first as a youth programmer and now as a health researcher doing work across the country. Her body of work aims to utilize research as an avenue for sharing the stories and realities of Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities for the improvement of the health and wellbeing of our communities.
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Tanitiã Munroe
Tanitiã Munroe’s scholarship and research is focused on African, Afro-Caribbean and Black (ACB) youth and families schooling experience in Canada using an anti-colonial, critical race, and Queer Black feminist theorizing. Munroe has published and continues to present at various conferences both locally and internationally to disseminate on issues and themes related to: Canadian K-12 Education policies; racial trauma in education; and Post Secondary Education (PSE) access for ACB youth.
Image Description: This image shows a self-portrait of Tanitia Munroe, who is facing the camera with head and shoulders in view. Tanitia is wearing a red sweater and green-framed eyeglasses. They have a soft, closed-mouth smile on their face, which is resting in the palm of their left hand. Their dark hair is styled in a neat up-do and behind them are bookshelves of various heights, filled with books.
Yasmine Simone Gray
Yasmine is a writer, artist, researcher, educator, and public speaker based in Toronto, Ontario. Yasmine has worked at Toronto Metropolitan University as a teaching assistant in the School of Disability Studies and as a research assistant on several projects related to anti-Black racism, curriculum development, and inclusive pedagogy. A scholar and life-long learner of Black Disability Studies, Yasmine holds a Master’s degree in Critical Disability Studies from York University. She enjoys listening to audiobooks and podcasts related to disability, health and public policy. Yasmine’s writing has been published in the Toronto Star, The Grind, and Briarpatch Magazine.
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