Who We Are
CWSE Staff
Roxana Ng, Head
Roxana Ng, Ph.D., is an OISE professor in the Adult Education & Community Development Program. Her wide-ranging research interests include holistic health and healing; globalization, migration and labour relations; immigrant women and Canadian institutions; feminist, anti-racist, decolonizing and transformative pedagogy. She is a founding member of the Vancouver Women’s Research Centre (1975-1978), and has helped establish immigrant women’s organizations in several provinces across the country. She is a board member of Inter Pares (an international development social justice organization), and has published and presented extensively in her areas of specialization.
Jamie-Lynn Magnusson, Acting CWSE Head
Dr. Magnusson's work explores the intersections of adult and higher education, neoliberal economic policy, and globalization. Working from a feminist marxist perspective, her recent research documents how the financialized economy has been affecting women in their pursuit of higher education and their ability to negotiate economic, social, and cultural security. Working from her expertise in feminist and higher education studies, professor Magnusson's research contributes to discussions on adult education policy and community interventions in the area of women’s securitization.
Jamie Ryckman, Coordinator, cwse@utoronto.ca
Jamie Ryckman, MMST, has worked at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education in various capacities since September 2008. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and a Master’s degree in Museum Studies, specializing in issues related to women. She has curated feminist exhibits, edited the anthology Becoming Feminists, and spoken about women’s issues at conferences, including Women’s Worlds 2011. She is also the Coordinator for the Women’s Human Rights Education Institute (WHRI).
Angela Lytle, WHRI Executive Director info@learnwhr.org
Angela Lytle, MEd, is the Executive Director of the annual Women’s Human Rights Education Institutes (WHRI) offered by the CWSE in collaboration with the Programa Justicia y Genero of Costa Rica. She received her MEd from OISE/UT in Adult Ed/Comparative, International and Development Education, and focused her research and practicum on human rights education and women’s human rights. She is an educator and feminist activist who has worked extensively with survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery in South Korea.
Resources for Feminist Research (RFR) Staff
Jamie-Lynn Magnusson, Associate Professor & Principal Investigator, RFR/DRF, OISE, University of Toronto
Lorena M. Gajardo, Editor, RFR/DRF, OISE, University of Toronto
Philinda Masters, Consulting Editor, RFR/DRF, OISE, University of Toronto
Associate Scholars
Paula Bourne, CWSE Senior Associate Scholar
Paula's research and published work has focused on Canadian women’s history, contemporary issues facing Canadian women, gender and education. She has lectured and provided educational training on a variety of topics related to women’s issues and gender equity in education. She recently completed chairing an expert panel of Ontario educators brought together to develop resources for elementary teachers to help them identify, and provide support for students who are or maybe witnessing woman abuse at home. These materials are now being implemented with teachers, administrators and counselors across the province.
Her most recent publication is the co-edited collection, Women Teaching Women Learning (Inanna Press, 2006). Currrently she is co-authoring the 3rd edition of Canadian Women: A History to be published by Nelson in 2010.
Frieda Forman, CWSE Senior Associate Scholar
Frieda Forman helped establish the Women's Educational Resources Centre at OISE and has worked with the CWSE for nearly twenty-five years.
Frieda's central research and writing interests have focused on the various manifestations of feminism and the women’s movement. Her publications include: Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality; with Mary O’brien,Feminism and Education: A Canadian Perspective; Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers; and Jewish Refugees in Switzerland: A Memoir of Childhood and History. She continue to research and translate the works of important but forgotten Yiddish women writers.
Nora Gold, PhD, CWSE Associate Scholar (website)
Nora Gold received her PhD in social work in 1990, was on faculty at McMaster University for ten years, and since January 2000 has been an Associate Scholar here at the Centre. Dr. Gold’s commitment to feminism has been expressed through her scholarly work, her activism, and her fiction writing.
In terms of her scholarship, Dr. Gold has authored numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and received funding for seven research projects, two of them international collaborations. Her two most recent studies (both feminist in approach, and both funded by SSHRC, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) were (1) a nation-wide study of Canadian Jewish women and their experiences of sexism and antisemitism, and (2) a longitudinal study of Toronto Jewish girls, focussing on the development of their identities as Jewish and female. The latter resulted in a short documentary film entitled Jewish Girl Power, which can be viewed on Gold’s website (www.noragold.com).
Regarding Gold’s literary work, her first book, Marrow and Other Stories, won the 1998 Louis Lockshin Prize for Short Fiction, and was short-listed for a national award, the Danuta Gleed. The title story, "Marrow," was also included in Vital Signs, an anthology of promising new Canadian women writers. Gold has completed two novels and in May 2010 founded the celebrated literary journal, Jewish Fiction .net (www.jewishfiction.net) which she edits. She is currently working on a collection of short stories about women at different stages of their lives.
Pam Patterson, PhD, CWSE Associate Scholar & Director of WIAprojects (website)
Pam Patterson has, for 25 years, been active in both the art and movement communities. Her research has focused on embodiment in art practice, the "body" in art, disability politics and feminist art education with publications in multiple journals and presentations in conferences including the Feminism and Art Conference (Toronto). She has taught in movement and the arts for various institutions including the University of Toronto and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her current research explores performance and the body - media, movement and interpretation. As a performance and visual artist she has exhibited and performed across Canada, in the USA and Europe.
Peggy Bristow, CWSE Associate Scholar
Peggy Bristow is the co-author of We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History. She is currently researching the history of black women self-organizing in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s.
Yara Doleh, CWSE Associate Scholar
Yara Doleh joined the CWSE in November 2010. Her research area is on the effects of menstruation on women: how menstruation has been perceived and understood throughout time and how women have managed our cycles at different stages of our lives.
Doleh holds a BA in Archaeology from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, and an MA in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. She works as a research assistant at the Royal Ontario Museum and in the University of Toronto Archaeology Labs.
Susan Marie Turner, PhD
Susan Marie Turner, PhD is a researcher and educator in Institutional Ethnography. Her doctoral thesis, Municipal Planning, Land Development and Environmental Intervention: an Institutional Ethnography, received the 2004 OISE/UT Outstanding Thesis of the Year Award. She received the 2010 Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems Institutional Ethnography Division. The award recognized her contributions to IE in both her innovative strategy for visually mapping complex organizational work and institutional functions, and her collaborative scholar-activist work.
Dr. Turner was Coordinator of the SSHRC-funded Community University Research Alliance (CURA) Rural Women Making Change (2004-2009). Working with rural women’s organizations, the program addressed a range of policy, communications and government relations’ issues in Canada.
She was Sessional Instructor in International Development and Sociology at the University of Guelph (1994-2008) and Special Graduate Faculty (2005-2008). Throughout 1999-2004 she also managed a large academic advising office.
Her most recent publication is
2011 Turner, Susan M. Texts and the Institutions of Municipal Government: The Power of Texts in the Public Process of Land Development, in Lindsay Prior (Ed.) Using Documents and Records in Social Science Research, SAGE Publications Ltd. New Delhi. Vol.4.
Dr. Turner gives annual IE Mapping workshops at the CWSE as well as joint weeklong intensives and a workshop on incorporating texts into institutional ethnographies with Dorothy Smith. Click here for information on upcoming IE workshops at the CWSE.
Work Study Students, Graduate Assistants, & Volunteers, 2012-13
CWSE Office & Events Assistant Eve Dufour recently graduated from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) with majors in Sociology and Women and Gender Studies. During her undergraduate studies she was part of the Women and Gender Studies Action Group, an on-campus student group that promoted a feminist presence at UTM, and published the essay “Lesbian Desires in the Vampire Subgenre: True Blood as a Platform for a Lesbian Discourse” in Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies at U of T Mississauga. She is currently pursuing a Master's of Education in Adult Education and Community Development at OISE
CWSE GA Andrea Weerdenburg is a second year M.Ed. student in Adult Education and Community Development at OISE. She also holds a B.A. in International Development from the University of Guelph. She first became interested in feminism when she was working on a Gender and Development specialization during her B.A. She's learned a great deal about women and gender issues around the world through her travels to India, Nepal, Haiti, Uganda, and the Netherlands.
Work Study Students, Graduate Assistants, & Volunteers, 2011-12
WHRI Assistant Julie Nowak is pursuing her M.Ed. at OISE/UT in Adult Education and Community Development, with a collaborative program in Comparative, International and Development Education. She has a BA in Sociology and French Studies from York University and completed a postgraduate certificate in International Development and Project Management at Humber College. She has worked for environmental and international NGOs in Canada, Belize and Haiti and would like to focus her current research on global citizenship education and women's non-formal education.
Volunteer Daisy Yidan Zhu is a PhD student in the Department of Adult Education and Councelling Psycholgy at OISE. She received her MEd from Simon Fraser University and her BA in Film and Theatre Studies from the Communication University of China in Beijing. Her research focus is in new Chinese immigrants' identity construction and language learning. She is working on a project investigating the history and process of women organizing in higher education in North America.
DNB Assistant Su Donovaro is pursuing her M.Ed at OISE in Adult Education and Community Development with a collaborative program in Community Development. She has a background as a classroom and community support worker and an environmental educator. Her research interests include popular education and radical approaches to mental health.
WIAprojects Assistant Pailagi Pandya is pursuing her undergraduate degree in Art History at University of Toronto Scarborough, and is an active member of Scarborough’s arts and culture scene. She is currently acting as the coordinator for WIAprojects and as assistant curator for Border Crossings: An Erotic Affair: Mesma Belsare and Sylvat Aziz in Conversation. She has also been a South Asia intern at the Royal Ontario Museum and a curatorial intern at the Meharangrah Museum Trust, India.
Her areas of interest include the history of Scarborough in photography, visual cultures of modern India and its Diasporas, photography in colonial India, museum studies in a global frame, and modern and contemporary Indian art. She is most inspired by the contemporary Indian artist Pushpamala N., who uses elements of popular culture in her art to explore place, gender and history through the element of ‘reciting’ parallel histories of women in the Indian sub-continent. When she has some free time you might just find Pailagi watching Bollywood films, or planning her next big educational trip to some exciting destination in the world.
CWSE Office & Events Assistant Safia Desai
RFR Assistant Aileen Foley
WHRI Assistant Samantha Cook
Visiting Scholars, 2011-12
Jasjit Sangha recently completed her PhD from the Department of Adult Education and Counseling Psychology at OISE, University of Toronto. She stives to make linkages between academic theory and lived experience by infusing arts-informed research methods and auto-ethnography into her work. Her current research is centred on adult learning and spirituality, transformative learning, and mothering/step-mothering. She is currently working on a book exploring the complexity of South Asian Mothering.
Csilla Kalocsai
After completing her PhD in Anthropology at Yale University, Csilla Kalocsai joined the CWSE as a Visiting Scholar to continue her research on gender and work in the formerly socialist states of East-Central Europe. She examines transnational corporations are able to shape the knowledge and experiences of young professionals in the neoliberal system, and how gender is stratified in these businesses.
Work Study Students, Graduate Assistants, & Volunteers, 2010-11
Rebecca Boyce
Office and Events Assistant Rebecca Boyce is pursuing her Master's of Education at OISE in Adult Education and Community Development with a collaborative program in Comparative and International Development Education. She is a big fan of Catrinas.
Ashleigh Russell
Programs Assistant Ashleigh Russell is an MA graduate in Child Study and Education at OISE. Her undergraduate work was in Journalism and Women and Gender Studies.
Sarah Power
WHRI Graduate Assitant Sarah Power is a second year M.Ed. student in Adult Education and Community Development at OISE with a B.A. in Human Rights and Law from Carleton University. Her research interests include non-formal human rights education, focusing on gender-specific approaches. She has volunteered in Cameroon with CUSO-VSO in educational community development, and partnered with local human rights organizations to train human rights animators.
Office and Events Assistant Jeevini Sivarajah
CWSE Graduate Assistant Susan Aaron
WHRI Fundraising Assistant Hala Zabaneh
WHRI Fundraising Assistant Jaclyn Isen
Visiting Scholars, 2010-11
Jessica Fields
Jessica Fields visited the CWSE during her sabattacial as a professor at San Francisco State University, to work on her second book, For That Time: Intimate Possibilities in HIV Education and Research for Incarcerated Women of Color. She is a member of the Research Faculty at the Centre for Research and Gender and Sexuality at SF State, and works with HIV educators in the San Francisco Department of Public Health.