SESE Students

SESE is a vibrant place for students. Currently, there are over 300 students registered in the Doctor of Education (E.D.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Master of Arts (M.A.) and Master of Education (M.Ed.) program.

Francis | Catherine

Click here for listing of students.

Francis Akena Adyanga, Ph.D. student

Francis Akena Adyanga worked as Program Coordinator for Gulu Development Agency (GDA) a Non Profit Community Based Organization (CBO) in Uganda specializing in the provision of Education to children affected by the brunt of the over two decades conflict in northern Uganda. And also as Teaching Assistant at Gulu State University, Uganda. With a Masters Degree in Education (OISE/UT 2008), Adyanga is now a PhD student at OISE/UT with a dream of becoming a University Professor. His interests are in indigenous knowledge and education in emergencies/civil war areas.

Catherine (Katie) Aubrecht, Ph. D. candidate

Hi, I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. My doctoral research uses a critical disability studies perspective to question the ordinary and commonplace ways embodied responses to the violence of prevailing discourses of power are assimilated under colonial knowledge regimes. More specifically, I examine the institutional organization of people and places around notions of mental health and illness, questioning how mental health and illness designations are used to silence and subsume complaints against contemporary forms of oppression. I recently published a chapter with my supervisor Tanya Titchkosky, titled, “The Power of Anguish: Re-mapping Mental Diversity with an Anti-Colonial Compass” in the book, Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada, edited by Arlo Kempf. caubrecht@oise.utoronto.ca

Onencan Apuke Cankech, Ph.D. student

Mr. Cankech is an Intellectual Philanthropist, a human Rights Activist and a Global Campaigner against Human Induced Poverty and Misery in Africa. He is also a teacher and pursuing the Doctor of Philosophy degree program in the Department of Sociology of Education and Comparative International Development Education at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Perryne Constance, Ph. D. student

Perryne Constance is PhD student at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She has both her B.Ed. and M.Ed. from OISE/SESE, her BA in communication and sociology (of developing world) from Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and two years of graduate political science in African politics and American foreign policy toward Africa from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Perryne presently teaches sociology, African history, politics and philosophy to grades 11 and 12 at a public alternative secondary school in Toronto, Canada. Previously she has worked as a journalist in Canada, the USA and South Africa, as a Parliamentary researcher in education and gender issues in South Africa, and as a communications manager for the Department of Economic Development, Provincial Government of the Western Cape, South Africa.
Perryne's academic interests (subject to change) are a mixed bag. However, her particular interest right now is how to encourage disengaged students -- with specificity to minority students and, in particular, black students -- to take advantage of the independent learning model offered by alternative schools to re-engage academically to achieve post-secondary success whether immediately in the workplace, trades, college or university.

Stanley Doyle-Wood

Stan Doyle-Wood has recently received his doctorate from the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. His research and pedagogy is first and foremost grounded in the centering of the embodied knowledges, voices, experiences and epistemologies of marginalized and racialized peoples as the central means through which to critically analyze, confront and resist oppressive and violating sociopolitical relations of power. With a specific focus on the formations of race and racialization, Stan’s research is concerned with pedagogical approaches that make historical, transnational, intersectional connections between the individual self, community and institutionalized structures of authority and power for the purpose of transforming socio-political configurations of inequity as they relate to practice, material effect and thought.

His thesis examines the implicatedness of the self as an embodied space of marginality, knowledge, and resistance to the discursive and material effects of systemic oppression. It explores the implications and possibilities as they relate to social collectives [in nation-state contexts] in resisting and contesting the constraining forces of dominant/ dominating institutionalized power and authority in the context of speaking and/or enunciating from a space of abjectification, racialization, and outcastness that has been constructed historically by the nation-state of Britain as a body codified as included-as-excluded-as-removed from the dominant sociopolitical collective’s sense of self and identity. His study argues that enunciation (as counter-hegemonic voice) carries with it a politics of ontological transformation that has profound implications for the social collective that is Britain as a whole and, specifically, in the context of social justice affirmation and the reclamation [and assertion] of a collective sense of self that is grounded in an angry refusal and contestation of the multi-layered hegemonic conceptual frameworks that continue to naturalize, {re}produce and sustain systemic oppression as a state of permanency. It explores the permanency of oppression, however, in relation to the discursive and material negation and amputation of social difference [i.e. class, gender, disability, and sexuality] while centering race [and its prostheticization] as a salient organizing tool in the (re)production of a hegemonic social order.

For the last five years Stan has worked as a sessional lecturer at New College, University of Toronto, teaching the Introduction to Equity course (spring and summer) and as an instructor in the Transition Year Program at the University of Toronto. In 2006 he was one of ten teaching assistant Excellence in Teaching award candidates out of 300 nominees to reach the final. In 2008, he was a recipient of the UTSUS/APUS University of Toronto instructor award for teaching Introduction to Equity Studies. He is also a recipient of a Toronto Metropolitan Children’s Services’ Award of Excellence for his anti-racism work at the early childhood level.

In recent years Stan has authored and co-authored several publications, including the anti-racist picture book, Chisani. He was also the co-editor and co-founder of The Julie Mango, International Online Journal of Creative Expressions. As Stan’s work represents a merging of theory and the practical, he has consistently worked in the areas of community collaboration and activism in the context of social justice work represented most recently in his collaborative work with the Justice for Alwy Campaign Against Police Brutality.

Dyer, Hannah

Hannah Dyer is a PhD student in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. She is also a student in the collaborative program with the Institute of Women and Gender Studies, and received an award for best incoming applicant to the collaborative program. Under the mentorship of Dr. Dina Georgis and Dr. Rinaldo Walcott, her SSHRC funded research explores how children create, resist, and come into knowledge of racial identifications. She is interested in how education can facilitate a child’s potential to imagine social worlds not determined or constrained by white supremacy. She has begun to publish her research and received the 2010 Janka Seydegart Scholarship for feminist research from the University of Toronto. As co-chair of the 2010 SESE Graduate Student Conference, teaching assistant in Women’s Studies, and active member of queer community organizations, Hannah is committed to making links between her scholarship and the communities it seeks to address. She deems SESE an ideal environment in which to inflect her theoretical study with social practice, and is continuously excited and inspired by her teachers and peers in the department.

Safia Gahayr, M.A. student

I am in my second year of an MA in Sociology and Equity Studies here at OISE. During my undergrad years at the University of Toronto i majored in Equity Studies, Aboriginal Studies and did a minor in Women and Gender Studies. These years equiped me with the understanding of the multiple intersections of oppression and the need to emphasize differences in our interogation of of oppression and marginalization in society. It is a combination of my lived experience and choice of undergraduate majors more than any other that has aroused my deep curiosity in equity issues. As a result of my exposure at universtiy to competing visions, often conflicting explanations of the most excellent way to ensure equity in society, my curiosity in equity was provoked even furhter. That is the reason why i am now persuing graduate work in Sociology and Equity Studies at OISE/University of Toronto.

Sharon Ghebressellassie, Ph.D. candidate

Saron Ghebressellassie is currently a PhD candidate at York University's department of Social and Political Thought (SPT). A graduate of OISE UT's department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, Saron's research focussed on the ways students organize for universally accessible and publicly-funded post-secondary education. At U of T, Saron was a founding member of Students in Support of CUPE 3902; the Reparations Committee at the University of Toronto; OISE's Right to Education Committee; and was active with the Committee for Just Education (CJE); the Graduate Students' Union; the Eritrean Youth Coalition and other campaigns concerned with international solidarity, Indigeneous sovereignty, reparations and labour rights.

Saron earned a B.A. in Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University where she received the National President's Award and studied on full scholarship. There she worked on a variety of radio and film projects in addition to writing extensively on the subject of media literacy. Saron is passionate about learning languages and speaks French, Spanish, German, Tigrinia; and is presently studying Arabic and American Sign Language (ASL). Saron also studies music theory and plays classical flute. Saron is the recipient of numerous public accolades including: Canadian Association of Broadcasters Journalism Award; African-Canadian Women's Achievement Award; OMNI Television's Multicultural Award; YWCA 2007 Young Woman of Distinction of Award; and was named in Chatelaine Magazine's "Top 80 Women to Watch Out For" feature.

Victoria Kannen, Ph.D. candidate

I am currently a doctoral candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education with a Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies. My research interests are sociology of the body, poststructural feminism, critical geography, feminist disability studies, whiteness studies, and the sociology of higher education. I was brought to these interests many years ago when I left the space where the privilege of my embodiment had been shielded from me – a ‘white’, working and middle-class Northern Ontario community – and headed to York University to study Sociology and Women’s Studies in the hopes of finding my path to social justice and gendered equality(!) This ‘shielding’ meant that, of course, I had never considered that I was privileged. My body – my white, middle-class, hetero, able, thin, tall, femme, grrrl body – emerged and continues to emerge to me through my years of study in these diverse and interrogatable spaces. In specific, my research focuses on the ways in which identities are understood, problematized, performed, and embodied by those who are engaged with the sociological and feminist study of identities in higher ed. I am interested in how students and instructors who engage in critical identity studies perceive themselves in relation to these spaces. As a white, nondisabled feminist student and researcher, I have come to recognize that it is my responsibility to be conscious and critical of my own privileges and, in turn, excavate, research, and teach the possibilities, complexities and limitations of identities and anti-oppressive praxis.

Natalie Kouri-Towe, Ph.D. student

Natalie Kouri-Towe is a doctoral student is the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education and the Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies. Her research examines queer anti-war and anti-occupation activism, politics of solidarity, and the construction of terrorist embodiments. Natalie completed her Master's thesis, titled "War and Pride: 'Out Against the Occupation' and Queer Responses to the 2006 Lebanon War," at McGill University in the department of Communication Studies in 2008. She is primarily interested in the areas of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race and anti-racism studies, and psychoanalysis.

Athena Madan, Ph.D. student

Athena Madan is a PhD student at the Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) department at UT/OISE with a background in counseling psychology (specialisation creative arts in counseling). Her dissertation research at CRÉFO (Dr. Diane Farmer, supervisor) focuses on mental health access and equitable programming for vulnerable populations, and the roles schools can play in liaising treatment within communities. Her interests include: social and geopolitical determinants of mental health; integrating anti-racist and postcolonial thought in best practises for mental health treatment; social constructions of pathology; collectivist ways of learning; and interdisciplinarity in mental health teams / treatment for the promotion of transcultural ‘friendliness’ in counseling.

Athéna Madan (MA CCC) poursuit des études doctorales en Sociologie et études de l’équité en éducation (SESE) à UT/IÉPO, avec une formation antérieure psychologique et counseling (exploitation des arts créatifs). Sa mémoire à CRÉFO (Dre. Diane Farmer, superviseure) examine l'accès et la planification équitable en santé mentale chez les populations fragilisées, et le rôle que peut jouer les écoles en fournissant à ces communautés-là l'encadrement requis. Ses centres d'intérêt : les déterminants sociaux et géopolitiques de la santé mentale ; l'intégration de la pensée antiraciste et postcoloniale aux meilleures pratiques en traitement de la santé mentale ; les enjeux de race, de sexe et de classe sociale dans un contexte de trauma ; les stratégies collectivistes d'apprentissage ; et l'interdisciplinarité au sein des équipes de traitement en santé mentale, qui promeut la convivialité en counseling.

Anne McGuire

Anne McGuire is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research interests revolve around questions of disability representation and how contemporary cultural representations of disability contribute to the oppression of disabled people and limit possibilities for access, accommodation and respect. Her doctoral research – Representing Autism: A Critical Examination of Autism Advocacy in Contemporary Times – brings together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives including critical disability studies, postcolonial theory and cultural studies, to analyze the social significance and productive effects of cultural representations of autism in contemporary enactments of autism advocacy. Anne’s research has won several internal and external awards, including a SSHRC doctoral fellowship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the University of Toronto McLeod Fellowship. In addition, the Doing Disability Differently Research and Activist Group, of which she is a founding member, has twice been awarded an OISE Commendation Award. Anne’s research has been published in several national and international peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory, Disability Studies Quarterlyand Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal. She is also a co-author of a 2009 Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities publication, “Representations of Disability in Universities in Ontario”. After four years of involvement as a Teaching Assistant in the University of Toronto’s burgeoning disability studies course stream at New College, Anne is currently teaching “Disability Studies in Education” as part of OISE’s Initial Teacher Education programme. Anne will be defending her dissertation on June 6th 2011.

Alex Means, Ph.D. student

Alex Means is a PhD student in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. His research interests include urban education, policy studies, continental philosophy, and qualitative research methods. His dissertation is an ethnographic study which explores urban school surveillance and security practices through the intersections of space, governmentality, and citizenship. He is always happy to answer questions from prospective students about the program: alexmeans@hotmail.com

Michael Onyedika Nwalutu, M.Ed. student

Master of Education(M.Ed.), Sociology & Equity Studies in Education in Collaboration with the Comparative International and Development Education, (CIDE), OISE. University of Toronto. Canada.

Bachelor of Education, (B.Ed.) Initial Education, OISE. University of Toronto. Canada. Master of Science, (MSc) International Relations, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. Master of Business Administration, (MBA), Marketing, Imo State University Owerri, Nigeria. Bachelor of Science, (B.Sc.) Mass Communication, Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu, Nigeria.

Donna M. Outerbridge, Ed. D. candidate

Donna M. Outerbridge is an Ed. D candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. Her research interests include anti-colonialism, anti-racism, Black feminism, indigenous knowledge and Afrocentricity. Her research work will explore youth disengagement from schooling. In her work, she will be searching for the intersections between the academy and the community involvement and government authorities. She is currently co-editing a book on Decolonizing the Spirit with Professor Njoki Wane in the Department.

Ana Laura Pauchulo, Ph.D. student

I am currently a Ph.D student in my fourth year at SESE. My dissertation examines how people establish the conditions necessary for democratic life through public memories of past state sponsored violence. Specifically, my work focuses on the ways in which varying human rights groups in Argentina struggle to legitimize their memories of the 1976-1983 dictatorship as the "accurate" representation of this past in their efforts to construct a democratic Argentina. My position in this research - an Argentinean born in the later years of the dictatorship now living in Canada - has also motivated my interests in public and collective memories of historical violence in diasporic communities. E-mail: analaura.pauchulo@utoronto.ca)

Alessandra Renzi, Ph.D. student

I studied literature and linguistics at the J. F. Kennedy Institute of the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, where I also carried out a lot of research on minority groups and did advocacy work around migrant social justice. At present, I am completing my PhD on(/with) Telestreet, an Italian network of pirate television producers. Ever since I moved to Toronto in 2005, I have been juggling my time between academic life, political activism and performance art. I am involved in various media, immigrant and labour rights projects like Precarity Toronto (http://precarityto.wordpress.com), An Interference Project: Wait! (http://interferencewait.wordpress.com ) and the pirate TV Insutv in Naples, Italy (www.insutv.it). My commitment to relay activist and academic work has meanwhile snowballed into a series of experiments and collaborations that threaten to turn into an avalanche, with the hopefully devastating effects of cross-pollination, contamination and mutual support among communities. Some areas of interest include: French post-structuralist and Italian Autonomist thought, ‘artivism’ and guerrilla communication, radical sociology, DIY media and porn, and ethics and politics of eroticism. You can find my writings in Boler, M. (ed) Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008), Shuler, D. (ed) Liberating Voices A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution, (MIT Press, 2008), Eckardt, F. et al. (eds.) “MEDIACITY” Situations, Practices and Encounters, (Franke & Timme, 2008), as well as in Fuse Magazine, Inchiesta and Inflexions.

Nicole Sheck, M.Ed. student

Nicole Sheck is a full time Master's of Education student. Nicole's research interests include: Critical Race/ Anti-Racism Studies, Critical Media Literacy, along with Black Feminist Theory. More specifically, Nicole endeavours to critically examine the various ways in which media and popular culture - in large part - negatively impedes identity formation processes of young women and men of African descent.

Kristin Smith, Ph.D. student

Kristin Smith is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at OISE/UT. She received a Master’s Degree of Social Work (McMaster) in 2003 and a combined Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and Bachelor of Social Work (McMaster) in 1990. Kristin’s focus for her dissertation research is the effects of recent Ontario government restructuring measures in two key sectors of social work practice: child welfare and primary health care. These sectors are of interest because they are currently targets of emerging neoliberal reforms known as "Transformation" and "Renewal" and as such, they provide rich sites for thinking about the morphing and adaptive tendencies of neoliberal governing. For the research, Kristin has completed a qualitative study of the work-life accounts of 17 activist social workers, all of whom have extensive experience in restructured work settings. Her analytical perspective draws extensively on Foucault and the governmentality literature, as well as post-colonial and feminist critiques of that literature. The dissertation aims to find out how new government policies and programmes in these important sectors of social work shape activists’ sense of purpose and identities, especially when tensions exist between who and how activists imagine themselves to be as agents of social change, and what they must do every day to get by in their jobs. Kristin’s interest in these aspects of critical social work practice is informed by over eighteen years of work experience in front-line social, health and women’s services.

Andrea Tavchar, Ph.D. student

I am currently working on my PhD at SESE, OISE UT. My main topic of interest is the changing perspective on young people's media literacy needs in the age of social media. The topic has particular relevance to me as a public relations professor at Humber College and at the University of Guelph-Humber, where I have worked since 2002. I completed my MA in Adult Education at Central Michigan University and hold a BA in English from the University of Toronto. With over 15 years experience in business communication across a variety of industries including television, government and advertising, I have a lifelong interest in media. In addition to the communication and sociological theory I am gaining through my PhD studies, I am also trying to find my way on Twitter and Facebook. I hope to share my social media knowledge in the classroom.

Rose Ann Torres, Ph.D. Candidate

Rose Ann Torres is a Ph.D. candidate at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies with a collaborative program in Women and Gender Studies. She holds two masters degree: Masters degree in Education from the University of Toronto and Masters of Arts in Women and Development Studies from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City. She was a Director of Research and Training as well as a Founding Member ofGender Equality and Empowerment Consultancy Organization (GEECO), based in the Philippines. She was a Training Specialist of a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funded project at the Centre for Women’s Studies of the University of the Philippines. She was a Co-coordinator, Peer Support Program, Center for Women’s and Trans People of the University of Toronto. Her areas of interest include indigenous knowledges, healing, spirituality, indigenous feminism, anti-colonial and postcolonial discourses and anti-racist education.

Ricky Varghese, PhD. Candidate

I am currently pursuing my doctoral studies at the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. My research interests span across a number of different interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary sites. Primarily, I am interested in literary theory and criticism, with an emphasis on text, translation, and the (p)act of writing, as stemming from my background in creative writing and literature. As such, my seminal interest lies in exploring venues within a possible sociology of/for literature and film, as proposed by the school of Derridean deconstruction and Blanchotian literary theory. I am also influenced by the intersecting moments within Marxist theory, subaltern studies, postcolonial thought, and French poststructuralist theory. I have "another life" outside of the academy in my work as a social worker, where my interests in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory, with a reference to Freud, Lacan, Irigaray, and Kristeva, has enabled a bridging between the academy and practice (which was never a conflict that caused me much anxiety), and furthered my interest in the textual (im)possibility of representation. I am also deeply moved by the project of seeking out links between the continental European philosophical work of Levinas, Heidegger, Hegel, and Kant with the work within postcolonial thought by Spivak, Said, Gilroy, and Glissant. My interests extend, as well, into the realm of memory and historical consciousness, theological studies, with a particular focus on Judaic theo-philosophy, into Jewish and Eastern European literature, theories of cosmopolitanism and exile, city space configuration, narratives of dwelling, and the politics of seeking refuge, ethical responsibility, and critical analyses of encounters between and across alterity. My dissertation, tentatively titled "Haneke's Wounds: On the Ordinariness of Violence between Melancholy and Shame" is an exploration of the concept of violence as read through the films of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, where I employ the theoretical impulses of Freud, Levinas, Arendt, Benjamin, and Zizek to detail the distinction between ordinary violence and totalitarian violence, and to outline a relationship between ordinary violence, Freudian readings of melancholy, and the Levinasian interpretation of shame. Additionally, I am the author of a book that evolved from my M.A. thesis; the book being titled, "Unbearable Heartbeat: Reading Ethics and Politics in Derrida, Levinas, and Kundera" (VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller e.K., 2008). I have an on-going obsession with both Freud and Benjamin, which I'm hoping to nurture into something productive, in the future, either in the space of furthering my writing and/or developing a somewhat interesting psychoanalytic practice.

Zholdoshalieva, Rakhat, Ed.D. student

Rakhat Zholdoshalieva is a doctoral student from the Kyrgyz Republic, Central Asia. Rakhat grew up in the former Soviet Kirgizia and received her schooling during Gorbaechev’s regime and early independent Kyrgyz Republic. Rakhat comes from rural school teachers’

family and grew up extending respect and admiration to the work of educators. She has earned her first degree from Osh State University and was specialized to teach English as a Foreign Language. Later, Rakhat received scholarship from Aga Khan University in Pakistan to do her MEd. She worked as a classroom teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher and consultant in Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. Rakhat has contributed book chapters, published journal articles and contributed to teacher manuals and textbooks around the issues of citizenship education, teacher professional development, gendered identities through schooling and educational action research. For her doctoral project, Rakhat Zholdoshalieva is interested to examine schooling in the context of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan which is undergoing rapid political, social and economic transformations since the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991.