Social Justice Fellows

Dr. Nancy R. Tapias Torrado (2023-24)

PhD Sociology 
University of Oxford (2021)

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado is the Social Justice Centre’s 2023-24 Barry Pashak postdoctoral fellow. Nancy is a doctor in sociology from the University of Oxford, St Antony’s College (UK), and a human rights lawyer with an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex (UK) and an MPhil and an LLB/JD from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). She is also a Visiting Fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and a former Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculté de science politique et de droit at the UQAM.

Nancy’s community-based action-research programme is dedicated to the impact (or not) on corporate practice by Indigenous women-led mobilizations defending their ancestral territories from abuses committed in connection to mega-projects in Latin America and Canada. She develops an intersectional, decolonial and transnational research program that places Indigenous women at the centre. Thus, she acknowledges their victimization but goes beyond it to learn about their agency, leadership, legal mobilization, their processes of resistance and resurgence, and impact.

From Nancy’s investigation emerges the “braided action” theoretical framework, which she has shared widely with Indigenous women leaders, their organizations and supporters, and at academic conferences and university lectures for graduate and undergraduates of diverse disciplines. Part of her findings are now published in several peer-reviewed articles, magazines and book chapters, and she is currently focusing on publishing her doctoral and postdoctoral work in a book. In March 2023, Nancy received the Best Human Rights Dissertation Award from the International Studies Association (ISA) for her Ph.D. thesis: “Indigenous Women Leading the Defense of Human Rights from the Abuses by Mega-Projects in Latin America, in the Face of Extreme Violence” (2020).

Nancy’s research comes out of over a decade of experience working with and for neglected communities and human rights defenders at risk in Latin America and several previous years working in Colombia on gender, human rights and armed conflict. Among others, Nancy is a former regional researcher on the situation of human rights defenders in the Americas with the International Secretariat of Amnesty International (London, UK), a former law assistant professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia), and has consulted for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and several international non-governmental organizations, such as OXFAM, CEJIL and PBI.

Her publications can be accessed here (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nancy-Tapias-Torrado-2), and include the following:

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘The Violent Rollback of Indigenous and Environmental Rights: The Emblematic Case of Lenca Leader Berta Cáceres in Honduras’ in Simón Escoffier, Leigh Payne and Julia Zulver (eds.), The Right Against Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). https://bit.ly/3X20MxV.

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Postface’ in Nina Lakhani, Qui a tué Berta Cáceres ? (Les éditions de la rue Dorion, 2023). https://ruedorion.ca/qui-a-tue-berta-caceres/

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Overcoming silencing practices: Indigenous women defending human rights from the abuses committed in connection to mega-projects in the Americas – a case in Colombia’ (2022) Business and Human Rights Journal – Gender Special Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). https://bit.ly/3MeOe01.

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Acción trenzada. Indigenous women leading the defense of human rights from abuses related to mega-projects: impacting corporate behaviour - overcoming silencing practices’ (2022) Quebec Journal of International Law – ‘Opening to the Americas’ Special Issue (Montreal: Société Québécoise de Droit International - SQDI). https://bit.ly/3Ai3iG9.

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘De la victimización a la acción trenzada: la alarmante situación de quienes lideran la defensa de los derechos humanos en Colombia’ (2020) Revista Cien Días Edición Especial No. 100 (Bogotá: CINEP). https://bit.ly/3tKb8GI

Nancy R. Tapias Torrado, ‘Mujeres indígenas liderando la defensa de los derechos humanos frente a los abusos cometidos en el contexto de megaproyectos en América Latina: Una aproximación desde la acción, que trasciende la victimización’  (2019) 50:4 LASA-Forum 6–11.  [1 Nov. 2019] https://bit.ly/3yR3BHT

Dr Eleni Schirmer (2022-2024)

PhD Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019)

Eleni Schirmer is the Social Justice Centre's Barry Pashak postdoc researcher. She is also a freelance writer and an organizer with the Debt Collective. She conducts qualitative and historical research on the rise of debt-financed public education.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, she explores inequality as a set of power relationships that are materially-based, historically-formed, and malleable to change. How is inequality not only an economic and political force, but also a finely-textured, vividly-experienced human phenomenon? How do individuals not merely endure inequality but come together to resist and re-imagine it? To answer these questions, she searches for narratives that convey the complexity of the political economy and its influence on ordinary people’s daily lives. She is working on a book about debt and time.

In 2021, she was a researcher at the Future of Finance Initiative (UCLA, Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy).

She received the 2020 Frank L. Zeidler Labor History Award from the Wisconsin Labor History Society for her paper, “‘Power Is Only What You Chose To Do With It’: The Social Movements the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association Spurned, 1970-1974”

She recently published, with colleagues, “The other college debt crisis: institutional debt and higher education organizing” in The Journal of Academic Freedom, 2020, Vol. 12.

Her paper “Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Organizing Opportunities for Labor Activists during COVID-19” (co-written with R. Tarlau) is forthcoming in the Journal of Labor and Society.

Her work also appeared in many high-impact venues:

• How the Government Cancelled Betty Ann’s Debts, The New Yorker, February 23, 2023
  
• Life or Debt: What's next for the fight to abolish debt?, Lux Magazine, Issue 6.
• The Aging Student Debtors of America, The New Yorker, July 27, 2022
• We’re Burying Our Kids in Debt (Just Not The Way You Think), The New York Times, August 27, 2021
• The Fight for Fifteen at an Orlando McDonald’s, The New Yorker, February 15, 2021
• It’s Not Just Students Drowning in Debt. Colleges Are Too! The Nation, November 2020
• Jane McAlevey’s Vision for the Future of American Labor, The New Yorker, June 10, 2020

She organizes with the Debt Collective and was featured in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about student debt relief.

In 2023, Eleni co-edited a special issue of the radical social justice magazine, Rethinking Schools: "Resisting debt, funding justice: the struggle against debt-financed public education."

For more information, visit Eleni Schirmer's website. Follow her on twitter @elenischirmer.

 

Sisheng Chris Zhang

PhD Student in Political Philosophy, UPF Barcelona

Chris is an FPI fellow and doctoral researcher in the Department of Law at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His main research interests are theories of social justice and ethics. His PhD project “Justice, Autonomy, and Self-Employment" explores the normative justification of self-employment.

At Concordia, he works with Prof. Pablo Gilabert to examine the relationship between dignity and autonomy of the self-employed workers.

For more information, visit his website.

Gideon Abagna Azunre 

Gideon is a Ph.D. student in Geography, Urban, and Environmental studies at Concordia University. He holds an MSc. in Urban Planning and Policy Design from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy; an MPhil in Planning from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana; and a BSc. in Development Planning also from KNUST. His research sits at the intersection of urban planning, urban informality, and sustainable city development. Geographically speaking, his research has mainly focused on the sub-Saharan African region, with keen attention to Ghana and its rapidly urbanizing cities.

Gideon’s Ph.D. research aims to examine the politics of multi-stakeholder participation and inclusion in marginalized informal contexts (i.e., slums and informal settlements).

He asks: To what extent are the needs and interests of diverse stakeholders and vulnerable groups (e.g., women, children, youth, elderly, and the disabled) considered in redevelopment projects? 2) What factors mediate their comprehensive participation (for example, socio-demographics such as education, age, gender, and ethnicity)? and 3) What roles do power and politics play in influencing decision-making? He focuses on Participatory Slum Upgrading Programs in Accra, Ghana’s capital and most populous city.

Project: "The politics of multi-stakeholder participation and inclusion in informal contexts: Lessons from a Participatory Slum Upgrading Program (PSUP) in Accra, Ghana"

His paper "Symbolic legitimization of evictions in post-colonial African cities: A review from Ghana's Old Fadama" written in collaboration with Festival Godwin Boateng was published in Habitat International, Volume 135, 2023, 102809.

Dean Joseph

Dean is a second-year MA student at Concordia University, Montréal. He earned his BA with honours in philosophy at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Currently, he is a Co-Editor-in-Chief  for Gnosis, the graduate journal based at Concordia’s department of philosophy. Dean is interested in normative ethics as it relates to our social world and has a forthcoming article on social action and problems related to its theory and practice. His research focuses on the stringency and flexibility of ethical principles in nonideal theory, an area he hopes to continue researching and eventually teach as a doctoral student.

Project: "Maximizing Feasibility: Dynamic Normativity, Neutral Agency, and Ideology" 

Stephanie Eccles

Stephanie Eccles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies at Concordia University. She holds a MSc from the same department and an BA in Anthropology from the University of Waterloo. Stephanie’s research engages with political economy/ecology focusing on the links between energy and food systems, Discard Studies, and multispecies relations. Her dissertation research looks at how industrial animal agricultural waste is produced, managed, and turned into frontiers for capital, in particular for renewable energy projects, at two temporalities: the ordinary day and during disasters. Exploring issues of environmental (in)justice, extreme weather events in North Carolina and British Columbia, and the emerging industry for waste-to-energy projects in North Carolina, she grapples with the enduring waste problems produced by industrial animal agriculture and the proposed socio-ecological fixes.

Stephanie has also written about contested companionship with pitbull-type dogs, and what it means to conduct multispecies fieldwork that grounds practices of care. Stephanie continues to work on collaborative projects and policy-oriented work that focuses on disaster management at the scale of industrial animal agricultural systems in North Carolina and British Columbia. Stephanie is motivated to both generate knowledge and relationships through action-oriented research that is committed to broader political projects rooted in transforming how we relate to each other and the nonhuman animal world in an effort to work towards a future that is abundantly just and kind.

PROJECT:  "Making Animal Waste Essential: ‘Renewing’ Animal Agriculture through the Fraught Politics of Renewable Natural Gas Development"

Ra'anaa Yaminah 

Ra’anaa Yaminah received her Bachelor of Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture at Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture. Her thesis titled The Architectural Segregation of Chicago: Black Identity in the South Side laid the foundations for her passion for the intersection of art and activism, coined artivism. She further explores this with ardour in her capacity as Chair of Black Lives Matter Sudbury and Installation Coordinator for Up Here: Urban Arts Festival.

Ra’anaa has participated in and curated numerous artivist initiatives and has contributed her talents to the development of many Afrocentric artistic installations. She has taken on many leadership roles, as an artist, activist, and academic creating space for people of colour and continually promoting anti-racist practices and social justice in all facets of her life. A cultural curator and visual activist, Ra’anaa is currently pursuing her Ph.D. research tentatively titled: "Futurities With(out) the Institution: The Emergence of Black Art and Activism in N’Swakamok", at Concordia University in Tio’tia:ke, on the unceded Kanien'kehá:ka traditional territory.

PROJECT: "Futurities With(out) the Institution: The Emergence of Black Art and Activism in N’Swakamok"

Stefan Christoff (2022-2023)

Research Assistant
Social Justice Archives Project

Stefan Spirodon Christoff is a media maker, community activist and artist living in Montréal.

Stefan hosts Free City Radio, broadcasting weekly on CKUT 90.3FM, CJLO 1690 AM, CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg, CFRC 101.9FM in Kingston, Ontario, CFUV 101.9FM in Victoria, BC and shared globally as a podcast (Spotify + Apple Podcasts).

Stefan coordinates Musicians for Palestine and makes music with many people globally, including Rêves sonores, Sam Shalabi, Lori Goldston, Adriana Camancho and Anarchist Mountains.

Stefan is on the board of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Côte-Des-Neiges and works with Cinema Politica Network. Stefan is also a history student at Concordia University.

Dr Jesse Anne Tomalty (2021-2022)

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. For her Ph.D. research she looks at maps as objects with agency that produce particular effects both on individuals and between people as they are shared and redistributed across different networks and scales.

Where does a map go once it is made? Who mobilizes it, in which context and for what purpose?

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).