Social Justice Fellows

Dr Jesse Anne Tomalty (Fall 2022)

Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Bergen, Norway

Jesse Anne Tomalty received her PhD in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews (UK) in 2011 and her M.A. in Philosophy at Concordia University (Canada) in 2007. 

Her research focuses on normative and conceptual issues related to global justice and human rights. 

She recently published “The Link between Poverty and Human Rights”, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice, edited by Thom Brooks (OUP, 2020), “Justifying International Legal Human Rights” in Ethics & International Affairs (2017) as well as “Remedial Responsibility for Global Poverty: Justice or Humanity?” in the Journal of Applied Philosophy (2017).

She also published “Is There A Human Right to Internet Access?” in Philosophy Now (2017).

For more information, visit Jesse Anne Tomalty’s website.

Nicholas Goberdhan 

Nicholas Goberdhan is an interdisciplinary PhD Student and multimedia creative. Born and raised in a classified, “Neighbourhood Improvement Area” within Toronto, he brings years of community research and activism to the Social Justice Centre.

Nicholas is based in the Communications program and supervised by Dr. Arseli Dokumaci. In aligning his research interests of disability, race and care relations, he serves as an Executive Board Member for the Access-in-The-Making (AIM) Lab at Concordia University.

Nicholas’ research project is focused on taking an intersectional approach to “young carers,” a cohort of individuals under the age of 25 who care for a disabled parent(s). Drawing from personal experience, an objective of this project is to ensure that no one who goes through the “young carer experience” must ever feel invisible, or that they are alone, again.

Balam Kenter  

After getting a BA in History of Art from Cornell University, Balam Kenter wrote their first MA thesis for UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department, Culture and Performance Program, which utilized the Foucaultian “care of the self” to reclaim so-called “eating disordered” and “obese” bodies as non-normative bodies and non-normative alimentary practices. After a non-academic period working as a theater manager and translator, Balam received a second MA from Bogazici University's Department of Philosophy where they wrote an award-winning thesis exploring the concepts of exploitation and oppression through the lenses of disability, Marx’s theory of surplus populations, and intersectional theory.

Balam is currently a PhD student at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Humanities PhD Program. Bridging Political Philosophy, Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies, Balam’s dissertation work focuses on the historical and material entanglements of ableism and anthropocentrism under late capitalism. The project features a novel combination of Foucaultian and Marxist analyses of power where capitalism emerges as a system that disables and animalizes certain bodies, human and non-human. The overall objective is to create a new paradigm of domination that envisions structural solutions without sacrificing singular flourishing needs.

When they are not studying in Montreal, Balam lives with two humans, three cats, and a dog in Istanbul.

Gustavo Henrique de Andrade

Gustavo Henrique de Andrade is a Master’s student in Political Science at Concordia University.

Gustavo also holds a B.A. in Public Administration from Fundação João Pinheiro and a B.A. in Physics from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

His work focuses on informal work with an emphasis on resistance in Latin America.

Léa Denieul

Léa joined the Ph.D. program at Concordia University’s Geography, Planning, and Environment Department in September 2019. After completing a masters in Cultural Geography at Wageningen Research Institute in the Netherlands, she became fascinated by the power of maps as storytelling devices.

She is dedicating her Ph.D. research to finding ways to strengthen alliances that engage both settler and Indigenous communities around the land-based issues that both unite and divide them. For this, she hypothesizes that mapping land dispossession can serve as a mediating tool to create space for the high-stakes conversations necessary for building solidarity and political collectivity to tackle Land Back efforts. In other words, she explores the ways in which a map could tell a story of past relationships to the land that could have led to coexistence, but were ruptured by settler colonialism, and stimulate conversations about how these relationships could be regenerated in the present and future. With this information in hand, she aims to identify better communication strategies to augment the ways Indigenous Land Back campaigns reach out to their target audiences.
 

Koby Rogers Hall

Koby Rogers Hall is an artist, writer and social practice facilitator based in Montreal. Her recent projects are dedicated to dialogical arts practices, archiving as cultural activism, and public interventions for political engagement.

She conceives and facilitates social practice design with the performance collective Mischief Theatre, the multidisciplinary arts activist PreOccupations, the Politics & Care project, and the Artists’ Bloc of the Immigrant Workers’ Center in Montreal. She has taught classes at UQAM (Montreal), the Department of Arts Politics (NYU), and as part-time faculty with the Theatre Department and with the Community Economic Development (CED) Graduate Diploma Program through the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University. Her pedagogical practice has been invited by the Living Knowledge project of the Office of Community Engagement at Concordia, distinguishing itself as a community-based experiential learning project. 

Koby holds an MA in Arts Politics from Tisch School of the Arts (NYU) and a BFA in Theatre, specialised in Collective Creation (York University). She is pursuing her PhD in Humanities at Concordia's Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISCC) with a focus on migrant justice in social arts practices.

To learn more, visit her faculty profile.  

Agnes Tam (2020-21)

PhD in Philosophy
Queen's University

Agnes Tam received her PhD in Philosophy at Queen's University under the supervision of Will Kymlicka. Her doctoral thesis, Norms, Reasons, and Moral Progress, explored how partial and conformist group reasoning under appropriate conditions facilitates rather than obstructs moral progress. Her current research project, “Rethinking Democracy in the Populist Age,” explores the role of group belonging in populism.

Dr. Tam also holds a Bachelor's degree in Law from the University of Hong Kong and a Master's degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. She has recently published articles in the Journal of Political Philosophy and Analyse & Kritik.

https://www.agnestam.net

Heather M. Maranges (2020-22)

PhD in Social and Personality Psychology
Florida State University

Heather M. Maranges received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology at Florida State University. Her research seeks to understand what facilitates cooperation. In particular, she studies the nature and implications of self-control, moral cognition, and often their intersection. Heather not only employs traditional experimental and individual difference methods but also leverages diverse theories and methods, including those of evolutionary biology, relationship research, philosophy, neuroscience, and genetics to understand how people arrive at their social and moral judgments. 

As a Horizon Fellow in the Social Justice Centre and Psychology and Philosophy Departments, Dr. Maranges is working with Drs. Katharina Nieswandt, Kristen Dunfield, and Ulf Hlobil to on the SSHRC-funded research programme, Brilliant Thinkers, Empathic Therapists: What Explains the Gender Gap in Philosophy versus Psychology?

https://www.heathermaranges.com/

Isabella Trifan (2019-20)

PhD in Political Philosophy
Department of Law, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)

Dr. Isabella Trifan’s main research interests include distributive justice theories, global justice, family justice, and the ethics of procreation and childrearing.

Her current research centres on the ethics of policies which address population ageing, a problem faced by virtually every country in today’s world, starting from the observation that procreation and immigration, though seemingly unrelated practices, are both ways of adding members to a society. Examining procreation and immigration policies as potential demographic levers provides new insights for evaluating both practices, and for determining what states may permissibly do to tackle the effects of population ageing.

Before Concordia, she was a doctoral researcher at Pompeu Fabra University, working as part of a research project on Family Justice funded by the European Research Council and she has been a visiting student at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.

In coordination with the co-directors of the Centre, she will be in charge of organizing a public panel on immigration featuring scholars, policy-makers, and journalists in winter 2020.

Mostafa Henaway

PhD Student, Geography, Planning and Environment

Mostafa holds an M.A. from the Berlin School of Economics and Law where he specialized on labor policies and globalization, studying trade union strategies to challenge austerity in the U.K.

A long-time community organizer defending the rights of immigrant workers, Mostafa will be working under the supervision of Prof. Norma Rantisi (Geography, Planning and Environment Department). His doctoral work is part of the larger book project City Politics: Towards a Just and Sustainable Montreal in the 21st Century in collaboration with urban planner Jason Prince (School of Community and Public Affairs) and Prof. em. Eric Shragge, former chair of Concordia’s School of Community and Public Affairs.

Maxine Iannuccilli

PhD Student, Psychology

Maxine holds a B.A. in Psychology and was awarded a Certificate of Academic Excellence by the Canadian Psychological Association in 2018. Her undergraduate thesis studied the effects of bilingualism on children’s development of conventional understanding.

Under the supervision of Prof. Kristen Dunfield (Psychology) at the Social-Cognitive Development Lab, Maxine will be working on The Career Project: Investigating Factors Influencing the Gender Gap in Philosophy and Psychology. Her work is supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Arman Motaghi

PhD Student, Business Administration

Arman obtained his Master’s degree from Concordia University. After several years of professional work and a long history of volunteering and donating to NGOs (such as Plan Canada), he decided to pursue a doctorate in Business Administration.

His research project is titled A case study on Political use of levers of control and its effects on employees' health and benefits and is supervised by Prof. Michel Magnan and Dr. Matthäus Tekathen.

Elisabeth Roy Trudel

PhD Student, Interdisciplinary Humanities Program

Elisabeth holds a Master (LL.M.) in international law, a graduate diploma in journalism with a focus on human rights issues, as well as a B.A. in political science, human rights and the environment. She has been a visiting researcher at the Law School of the University of Western Australia in fall 2018 and taught a 300-level course on Contemporary Issues in Human Rights at Concordia in winter 2019. She previously worked as a consultant researching human rights violations at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.

Her article “The unfulfilled promise of the universality of human rights in a world dominated by vision” is forthcoming in International Law and Universality (Oxford University Press). Her research project Discourses of dignity? An interdisciplinary analysis of the paradoxical tendency in human rights to create exclusions is conducted under the supervisor of Prof. Amy Swiffen (Sociology and Anthropology) and co-supervised by Profs. David Howes (Sociology and Anthropology) and Rosemary Collard (Geography, Planning and Environment).