Collective Members

Jennifer Brant, (she/her), belongs to the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk Nation) with family ties to Six Nations of the Grand River Territory and Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. Jennifer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Curriculum Inquiry Faculty Editor, and is the current Indigenous Education Network Faculty Co-Chair. Jennifer’s research interests include: Indigenous literatures; Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies and Methodologies; and Ethical Spaces for Liberatory Praxis. Jennifer’s scholarship positions Indigenous literatures as educational tools to foster sociopolitical action and calls for immediate responses to racialized, sexualized, and gender-based violences. Jennifer is the coeditor of Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and currently working on the second edition. Her latest piece on racialized, sexualized, and gender-based violences can be found in Global Femicide: Indigenous Women and Girls Torn from our Midst University of Regina Press. Her work on Indigenous mothering is featured in several Demeter Press collections as well as a Routledge Reader on Maternal Studies. Jennifer’s latest work includes ‘Finding Homeplace within Indigenous Literatures: A Pedagogical Juncture of bell hooks’ Feminist Theory and Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies’ in press with Hypatia and ‘Hood-in-g the Ivory Tower: Centering Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous Feminist Solidarities’ in press with Curriculum Inquiry. Through her community work, teaching, research, and writing, Jennifer encourages effective responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's 94 Calls to Action and the 231 Calls for Justice released in Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

Gioconda Coello is a doctoral candidate in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is interdisciplinary and looks at the history of ideas in education and their relation to the politics of being, Indigenous, Brown and Black lives, and environmental education in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Her work has appeared in Revista Asia-America Latina. She is co-editor of the books Crecimos antinegros en Latino América y el Caribe and Indigenous perspectives on Future(s) and Learning(s): Taking Place.  

Sameena Eidoo is an award-winning educator and an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Born and raised in Mississauga, Eidoo is Muslim with roots in India.  She identifies as part of Muslim and South Asian Diasporic communities.  Through her work as a scholar-practitioner, she strives to enact more just and liberatory futures as though they exist in the present. Her work encompasses alternative futures, culture and media studies, embodied anti-racist teaching and learning, global Islam, pedagogies of solidarity, narrative change, and transnational feminisms.  Eidoo is the author of Shaping Muslim Futures: Youth Visions and Activist Praxis (2021), a non-fiction book that amplifies the counter-narratives of activist Muslim youth living into their desired futures, and creates space for readers to clarify their own.

Sefanit Habtom is a PhD Candidate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Black Studies at Queen’s University (2022) and a Senior Doctoral Fellow at New College, University of Toronto (2021-2022). Sefanit is a Senior Graduate Research Assistant in the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab. She is the co-editor of Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators, published in Fall 2021 with AK Press, and the co-author of To Breathe Together: Co-Conspirators for Decolonial Futures. Sefanit is a first-generation Eritrean who grew up on the traditional lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations

rosalind hampton works as an Assistant Professor of Black Studies, in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her current areas of teaching and graduate student supervision include Black radical thought; arts and creative practice; Black women’s life writing; and racialized social relations. As a scholar and activist hampton is especially interested in anticolonial, anticapitalist solidarities within and beyond academia. Her current research examines Black Studies initiatives in Canadian universities; student activism and coalition building; and critical-creative praxis in Black Studies research and pedagogy.

Diane Hill comes from the Oneida Nation of the Thames and has been residing in Tkaronto for the last 10 years. She is a PhD student in the department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Hill’s work is concerned with Indigenous self-determination, climate action and food sovereignty in the field of critical Indigenous Studies. Previously, in her M.A. thesis, she interrogates these ideas by asking Indigenous food growers about their relationship to concepts and involvement with food sovereignty in Tkaronto. Hill’s work aims to understand more critically what assertions of sovereignty looks like for young Indigenous people.

Leeza Holguin is a Phd student at the University of Melbourne. Leeza is a scholar of early childhood education, special education, sociology and education, and educational policy. Leeza’s research is focused on the decolonization and reimagination of current educational practices within colonized lands with a particular focus on Indigenous education policy. Leeza has a professional background as a primary school teacher having taught in many diverse settings around the globe such as Japan, Kuwait, Hawaii, New York City and rural Alaska.

Natacha Ndabahagamye Jones is a PhD candidate in Early Childhood Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Jones engages Black feminist and emancipatory epistemologies in her work to center, document, and reimagine how Black children and children who have been racialized experience schooling, enact their agency, and matter in school. Natacha has spent a little over a decade as a classroom educator, teaching and learning with first graders, elementary school children and their communities.

Ligia (Licho) López López is Caribbean, Queer, and of Abiayala. She lives as an uninvited person on Wurundjeri-Woiwurung Country where she is an academic at the University of Melbourne. Licho’s scholarship moves through the geographies of continental Africa, Europe, the United States, and Australia and is located at the intersection of curriculum studies, Indigenous and Black studies in education, and Afrodiasporas and youth studies in the digital. Her latest book (co-edited with Gioconda Coello) is Crecimos antinegros en America Latina y el Caribe (Growing up antinegros en America Latina y el Caribe) published by Abya Yala. Her work has also appeared in the The British Journal of Sociology of Education, Race ethnicity and Education, and the Curriculum Inquiry among others. Licho's current projects draw from global histories of cimarronaje/maroonage as Black future making in the 21st century, and Afrodiasporic youth Black geographical formations in the digital - Tik Tok and Instagram. She serves in the advisory board of the University of Melbourne’s Antiracism Hallmark Initiative, is a fellow at the Australian Center, and with Fikile Nxumalo co-leads the Afrodiasporas Futures Collective.

Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak is a PhD candidate at Monash University’s Faculty of Education, a single mum of two boys and a local Palestinian Muslim organiser in Naarm (Melbourne). Her research examines and theorises the emergence of 9/11 political subjectivities through counter-storytelling journeys of learning. She is a teaching associate at Monash University and the University of Melbourne.

James Mayen is currently a PhD Candidate at Deakin University. His PhD thesis aim is to explore the educational aspirations and experiences of South Sudanese youth in Australia. He holds a Bachelor of Social and Community Studies (formerly bachelor of community education), he studied a Graduate Certificate of Politics and Policy and Graduate Certificate of Education Research both at Deakin University.

Mayen has worked with various organizations in Australia and overseas with people of different nationalities, religions, and cultures. Currently, he is working as a School Community Liaison Officer in Melbourne. He had previously worked as a Senior Child and Family Practitioner, Cultural Liaison Officer, Project Coordinator, Case Manager, Trainer, and Community Advocate among other roles.

Terresa Moses (she/her) is a proud Black queer woman dedicated to the liberation of Black and brown people through art and design. She is the Creative Director at Blackbird Revolt and an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and the Director of Design Justice at the University of Minnesota. As a community engaged scholar, she created Project Naptural and co-created Racism Untaught. She is currently a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. She serves as a core team member of African American Graphic Designers and as a collaborator with the Black Liberation Lab.

Preeti Nayak is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her doctoral research explores how racialized educators teach youth about local and global climate justice issues, both in the classroom and in community programs across southern Ontario.  Broadly, her research interests are in climate justice pedagogy, epistemic diversity in curricula, and anti-racist and anti-colonial models of climate change education.

Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where she directs the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab. She is also affiliated faculty in the School of the Environment. Her scholarship focuses on developing anti-colonial environmental and place-based education.

Nnenna Odim (she/her) has spent her time listening to young children as a Kindergarten teacher, supporting regional leaders implementing state/city policy, designing academic research plans with communities in migration, and everyday moments laughing with family as testimonies of our knowledge!

Drawing on the intersections across Black Geographies, Indigenous & Place-Based Studies and Early Childhood Education, her dissertation was an interdisciplinary study into how families with mahogany, ash, and oak skin reinforce multiple ways of knowing. She has published articles about futuristic visions in early childhood, resisting anti-Black violence and inequity in Caribbean childhoods and Black geographies in early childhood studies. 

Nnenna’s parents migrated to Turtle Island from Biafra and Nassau, Bahamas. She brings memories of Hammertan breezes and emerald waves to her current place on the lands of the Choctaw and Chitimacha (New Orleans). You can find her searching for french fries with a strong crunchy/soft ratio, listening to music shows with a magical trumpeter, and reading about migration policy.

John Pierre (JP) is a Black creole (la lwizyàn) PhD student in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Their current research focuses on the pedagogical possibilities that emerge from solidarities between Black and Indigenous peoples in so-called Canada challenging environmental racism and violence and building life-sustaining futures beyond the settler state. JP's work has been published in Spectrum: A Journal for Black Men and the edited volume, Shifting the Mindset: Socially Just Leadership Education.

Nadia Qureshi (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She is a diasporic South Asian brown settler living in Tkaronto/Toronto, a teacher, and a mother. Her research interests include access and equity in post-secondary education. Her doctoral research uses Critical Race Theory to centre the experiences of excluded and oppressed voices in the field of STEM education. She also holds a Masters in Education, Bachelor of Education, and Bachelor of Science in biology. She can be reached at nadia.qureshi@utoronto.ca or @nadia_toronto.

Alison Smith (she/her) is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Early Childhood Studies program at Toronto Metropolitian University and holds an Honours degree in Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour from McMaster University. Alison has worked in early childhood development projects in Nicaragua and Rwanda, with a focus on supporting teachers in early childhood and inclusive education. Alison has worked in community-based research for nearly a decade, both as Community Interviewer and Coding Analyst for the Black Experience Project and a Project Coordinator with the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System Project. Alison is currently a PhD student in Social Justice Education at OISE, University of Toronto. Her research interests include Black disabled childhoods, Black girlhood, global childhoods and antiracist early childhood education.

Kayla Webber is a Ph.D. student in the Social Justice Education Department at the Ontario Institute Studies for Education, University of Toronto, specializing in Women and Gender Studies. Her research interests are housing precarity, Black and Indigenous communities, models of wellness, anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, Black affirmation, sexualized violence, and transformative justice through the lens of storytelling and Hood feminism. Kayla Webber is currently undertaking research into past and current relationships among Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous and Black communities to inform sustainably healthy future relationships, with a focus on housing, especially housing for Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Black Women and Girls who have and or are experiencing gender-based violence(s)/sexualized violence and how that housing is necessary for their health and safety. Webber’s ancestors and bloodlines are from Trinidad, Grenada, and Nova Scotia, but she was born, raised, and resides in the Eglinton West Little Jamaica community in Toronto. Webber is an 1834 Fellow Alumni, Co-Chair for the Indigenous Education Network, an advisor for the Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy in co-collaboration with Social Planning Toronto and the City of Toronto, and Vice-Chair for For Youth Initiative (non-profit co-collaborating/co-dreaming with Black, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, newcomer, and racialized youth).

Hannah Yared is a registered psychologist and PhD Candidate at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include topics exploring race and racism in education and psychology. Hannah’s PhD research examines student’s racial literacy, experiences of racism, and how this connects with their racial identity and sense of school belonging.