About Us

Dr. Vidya Shah is an educator, scholar and activist committed to equity and racial justice in the service of liberatory education. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher & Adult Education (LHAE) at OISE/UT and teaches in the Educational Leadership & Policy (ELP) program. Her research draws on anti-racist, decolonial, and anti-colonial frameworks in educational leadership and school district reform, supporting educators in developing the orientations and capacities to create structural, ideological, and pedagogical transformation for racial and intersecting justices. Her scholarship broadens conceptions of educational leadership, school district reform, and community by challenging normative conceptions and approaches, centering marginalized and often-silenced knowledge systems and embodiments, and re/imagining the otherwise. Dr. Shah's aim as a scholar-activist-practitioner is to blur the boundaries between knowledge producers and knowledge users, between theories and practices, and between communities, schools and academies to create emancipatory possibilities for K-12 schooling and higher education. She has worked in the Model Schools for Inner Cities Program in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and was an elementary classroom teacher in the TDSB. Dr. Shah curates The UnLeading Project, a podcast and website that invites us to undo and unlearn how we have been socialized into leadership. She is also a facilitator with the Center for Courage and Renewal, focused on nurturing deep integrity and relational trust for a more loving, equitable, and healthy world.

Sachin Maharaj, PhD, is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership, Policy and Program Evaluation.His research, which focuses on student phone use in schools, the work of school boards/districts, teacher unions, and the equity implications of school choice has been published in Critical Education, Education Policy Analysis Archives, Leadership and Policy in Schools, and the Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy. Professor Maharaj is also a contributor to the Toronto Star external link and regularly appears in media outlets like CBC, CTV, Al Jazeera, Maclean’s and TVO. His current research projects examine anti-racist school district reforms and the implementation of policies to restrict student cellphone use in schools.

Dr. Beyhan Farhadi is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy and Equity at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Specifically, she researches K-12 EdTech policy: online education, learning and disciplinary surveillance, in public schools. Her focus on policy is critically focused, prioritizing teacher enactment and leadership. She is interested in questions of power, justice, and resistance to neoliberal restructuring using interpretive research. She draws from extensive experience teaching in Ontario secondary schools and public education advocacy to bridge research and practice. During her 2-year tenure as a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University, she researched policy enactment and the implementation of educational policy online during COVID-19 school closures. Dr. Farhadi holds an MA in English from York University (2010) where she studied critical theory, literature in the Global South, and researched activist performance art. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto (2019). Her dissertation research examined the relationship between e-learning and educational inequality in the Toronto District School Board. She has a book forthcoming with University of Toronto Press. Dr. Beyhan Farhadi is currently the Vice President of the Canadian Association of Sociology of Education.

Ateeqa Arain is a PhD candidate in the Educational Leadership and Policy program at OISE. An educator by profession, she has taught internationally as well in the Ontario public education system as an elementary teacher. Her research has focused on teacher leadership, experiences of occasional teachers, and efforts to reform schools through reviews in Ontario. She is interested in understanding the power dynamics at play in education policy implementation and how to leverage the power of the collective to transform education.

Steffie Dmello is a PhD candidate and part-time professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. She was born in India and has a background in Zoology (B.Sc., M.Sc.) and Education (B.Ed., M.Ed.). Her research focuses on exploring relationality between children and more-than-humans by employing diverse methodologies such as multispecies ethnography. Her work attends to how pedagogical and methodological practices might unsettle dominant anthropocentric assumptions and contribute to decolonial possibilities in education. It also engages with relational understandings of land and seeks to reimagine education as a space of relationality, reciprocity and response-ability across human and more-than-human worlds.

Stephen Francis is a multidisciplinary researcher, doctoral student, and research fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. His work sits at the intersection of educational leadership, policy, decolonial theory, and social justice, with a particular focus on critical and liberatory approaches to leadership praxis. He holds an MSc in Education from the University of Bristol and a BSc in Science & Education from the University of Technology, Jamaica. Stephen’s scholarly and professional experience spans research, policy analysis, monitoring and evaluation, and curriculum development across academic and applied contexts in Jamaica, the United Kingdom, and North America. Stephen is particularly interested in scholarship that interrogates dominant educational leadership paradigms, foregrounds subaltern and Indigenous epistemologies, and advances transformative, contextually responsive approaches to leadership and policy.

Dr. Myrtle Henry Sodhi is an award winning transdisciplinary artist-scholar whose work examines the racialized and gendered dimensions of labour, wellbeing, and care in educational and workplace contexts. Her novel, We’ve Been Here Before (Dundurn, 2026), extends her scholarly interest in storytelling, voice reclamation, and the labour experiences of Afro-Caribbean women.

Ahona Mehdi is a Master’s student in OISE’s department of Social Justice Education. Based in Ohròn:wakon (otherwise known as Hamilton, Ontario), she is an anti-carceral/disability justice organizer passionate about dismantling the school-prison nexus. In her work, Ahona is interested in the politics of un/childing in relation to school militarization and dominant constructions of race and disability. She also previously served as Co-Executive Director at the Disability Justice Network of Ontario (DJNO)—a province-wide organization whose mission is to dream a world where disabled people are free to be. Now working as DJNO’s Education Coordinator, her work supports Black, Indigenous, and racialized disabled youth who have experienced police violence or other forms of carceral punishment, confinement, or isolation in Ontario schools. Through her organizing, Ahona works to create networks where racialized and disabled youth can co-learn and dream collective liberation.

Chuka Obiadi is an educator, researcher, and doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa whose scholarly work investigates the complex intersection of immigrant post-colonial identities and settler-colonial existence in Canada. His research critically analyzes how the narratives of new Canadians are shaped by, and navigate, the country's historical and ongoing colonial frameworks. Specifically, Chuka examines how these overlapping histories influence immigrant perspectives on and engagement with Truth and Reconciliation. Through his teaching and research, he aims to broaden the discourse surrounding decolonization, moving toward a more inclusive framework of accountability and solidarity between Indigenous and diasporic communities.

Siva Thangeswary Sivarajah (He/Him) is a Transmasc mad and disabled autistic Eelam Tamil settler-refugee currently living on the traditional territories of many Nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. He is a thinai (திணை) scholar, student services practitioner, and community organizer, pursuing a Ph.D. in Education, Curriculum, and Pedagogy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Siva's research employs thinai; Tamil Cangam landscape-based storytelling practices to negotiate survivance in graduate school among mad and disabled neurodivergent QT2SBIPOC graduate students. He explores kathai (கதை) (storytelling), a dialectical and relational narrative approach, as a process of world-making; imagining and co-creating the world we want to see.