Faculty

Anna Kruzynski

Graduate Program Director

Anna Kruzynski is a professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs and director of the Community Economy Development program at Concordia University.  For the past 25 years she has been involved in many different types of social movements: from the student movement, to health and feminist community organisations in Point-Saint-Charles, to anti-globalisation direct action, to busy work with neighbours and anarchist comrades to set-up local economic and political initiatives inspired by a post-capitalist politics. She has piloted three major research projects over the years. She was involved in Bâtiment 7 (Building 7) both as neighbourhood organizer and engaged scholar. She engaged in participatory action research and accompanied the deployment of large-scale self-management within the organisation. Her work with the CourtePointe collective and the Popular Archives of Point St.Charles was to document women’s contribution to local organizing efforts. Her work with the Research group on collective autonomy, a feminist anti-authoritarian research collective, documented anarchist and antiauthoritarian organising in so-called Québec. She is currently a member of the Community Economies Institute and of a self-managed research collective that is mapping emancipatory economic practices proliferating on the margins of the social economy. Her teaching is inspired by both her activism and her research. She teaches strategies for fundamental social change, economic literacy to enable people to take back the economy, basic community organizing skills and tools for direct democracy.

For more infomation on Dr. Kruzynski's research projects - Faculty Biography

Email: anna.kruzynski@concordia.ca
Phone: 514-848-2424 ext. 5194

Elsa Beaulieu Bastien

Elsa Beaulieu Bastien has been active in feminist research and organizing for 18 years, both in Quebec and abroad. As an anthropologist, she studies women’s collective economic initiatives and alternatives and has done fieldwork in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mexico, Brazil, and Mozambique. In Quebec, she has coordinated a research group on the Working Poor, and promoted analyses of the sexual division of labor. She is currently involved in a five-year team project on solidarity-building across differences around feminist struggles for food sovereignty in the World March of Women. As a feminist activist and organizer, she has been part of several groups and collectives. Among other things, she was involved in organizing the first Quebec Young Feminist Gathering in 2003, and the first Pan-Canadian Young Feminist Gathering in 2008. Ever since her participation in the Nyeleni International Forum on Food Sovereignty in 2007, she has been involved in raising awareness about, and developing feminist analyses of the food system and other socio-ecological challenges. She has been teaching feminist approaches to community economic development at the SCPA since 2008.

Colin Bérubé

Colin Bérubé has been active in the field of community economic development and the social economy for 20 years. Throughout his career, he has worked in a community loan fund, with a community foundation and today is part Filaction’s investment team. Filaction is a development fund that is present throughout Québec. Colin has collaborated on the development of specialized funds designed to finance and support small business lead by women entrepreneurs, divers ethnocultural communities, as well as projects in the social economy, the arts and culture, in fair trade and in sustainable development. His experience also includes grant program development in support of initiatives and organizations that provide concrete solutions to the challenges and issues affecting vulnerable populations in our community. Today, he continues to be very active in financing and as a member of Filaction’s team, he works with a portfolio of companies and organizations known and recognized for the clarity of their mission, their strong roots in their community, the quality of their management, the relevance of their work and their economic and financial potential.

Norman Nawrocki

Norman Nawrocki has been teaching in SCPA at Concordia since 2005, and in the Quebec Ministry of Culture and Communications 'Culture in the Schools' provincial program since 2003. He has lectured and facilitated workshops about social issues and the arts at dozens of universities and colleges across Canada and in the USA since 1993. For the past 30 years, he has given thousands of performances of his own socially engaged theatre, music and poetry across North America, Europe and Hong Kong, written fourteen books of poetry, short stories and a novel (some translated into French & Italian), several theatre musicals and solo cabarets, and released over 60 albums of spoken word and music. A community organizer in Vancouver and Montreal since the 1970s, his research focus is how grassroots movements for social justice can incorporate the arts in their work.

Prof. David Newhouse                       

David Newhouse is Onondaga from the Six Nations of the Grand River community near Brantford, Ontario. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies and the Business Administration Program at Trent. Professor Newhouse has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Western Ontario. “My interest is in examining the ideas that are forming the basis of collective, i.e. societal or institutional action within contemporary Aboriginal society. I want to try and counter the idea that we laid in front of the bulldozer of western civilization and waited for it to flatten us. The historical and contemporary record indicates that we have always understood the world around us, knew what was happening and tried to affect the world to make it more hospitable and amicable to us. For the most part, our agency as living thinking human beings has been erased. I want to show how we used our imaginations to live in the world we found ourselves in.”

Research profile

Jason Prince

Jason Prince is an urban planner with over 20 years experience in community economic development and the development of collective enterprise. Trained at McGill University, he has worked in both urban and rural contexts in Canada and has been teaching part-time for Concordia University’s Graduate Diploma in Community Economic Development for the past 10 years. His course specialty is SCPA 505: Social Enterprise Development, which offers a practical introduction to collective business planning. He is also a guest lecturer at Cape Breton University's MBA in Community Economic Development.

From 2008 to 2013, Jason coordinated an action-research project at McGill's School of Urban Planning seeking to optimize the positive impacts on community from the arrival of a mega-hospital near Montreal's downtown core, with an accent on social and economic interventions. He currently works at PME MTL Centre Ville in the support of the social economy and coaches in the social entrepreneurship stream at Concordia's District 3. He sits on a variety of boards and has two young children.

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) and with 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.

Koby has exhibited and performed at La Mama ETC. and No Longer Empty, New York; centre des arts actuels Skol, Fonderie Darling, Tangente, and Studio 303, Montreal; the Rhubarb Festival and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto; the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentros in Montreal and Sao Paolo; and in Hawai’i as a YEMOYA international artist in residency with mentor-facilitator d’bi young anitafrika; among others.

She has received awards and grants from York University, Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), the Rosa Parks Fellowship for Non-violent studies, the Zonta Club of Ottawa Emerging Artist Award, the Canadian Millenium Scholarship Awards, Engrenage Rouage Noir, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Koby holds an MA in Arts Politics from Tisch School of the Arts (NYU '11) and a BFA in Theatre, specialised in Collective Creation (York University '05).

Shannon Franssen

Shannon Franssen has worked with community groups since 1997 and has been designing and facilitating group processes for more than 15 years. She is a recognized and accomplished leader in community development and has collaborated with hundreds of community-based organizations, NGOs, government institutions, networks and elected officials on a wide variety of projects and issues.  She specializes in strategic and community planning and supporting the creation and development of collaborative community projects.

Shannon teaches community development at Concordia University’s School of Community and Public Affairs and served for 11 years as the director of a Community Development Corporation in Montreal.  She loves tackling intractable problems and believes that mobilizing our collective intelligence is the most powerful way to solve issues facing us today. 

Karine Awashish

Originally from the Atikamekw community of Obedjiwan, Karine Awashish has set personal and professional goals related to the cultural affirmation and identity of Indigenous communities. She holds a Master's degree in Recreation, Culture and Tourism from Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) and a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration (UQAM), and is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Université Laval.  With a wealth of professional experience in the socio-economic development of Quebec's First Nations, she co-founded Coop Nitaksinan, a solidarity cooperative that enables the realization of collective socio-economic and cultural projects (Espace Onikam, Tapiskwan project, etc.). While contributing to the cultural influence of the Atikamekw, she is also actively involved in youth development and the dissemination of Indigenous arts and culture.

Rushdia Mehreen

Rushdia Mehreen is a grassroots organizer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories. For over a decade she has been involved in various social justice struggles, including Palestine/anti-colonial solidarity, the Quebec student movement, migrant justice, collective care and anti-racist organizing. She is currently a college teacher in a precarious capacity and a PhD student at Université du Québec à Montréal. Over the past years, she has conducted research on the role of power dynamics in activism and has conducted interviews on life stories of activists and their experience of burnout. She is published in Briarpatch, Canadian Dimension, among other publications.

Marc D. Lachapelle

Marc D. Lachapelle is a lecturer in social innovation and alternative organizing. His main interests are on organizational tensions, and alternative practices and tools in management. Moreover, he works on research and pedagogical engaged practices as a researcher at the Centre de recherche sur les innovations et transformations sociales (CRITS). His recent work focuses on participatory action research in management, the tensions between management and activism in the community sector, and the self-management movement in Quebec. He recently launched a science popularization project that creates a dialogue between Quebec's citizen movements and the social innovation community: Perspectives et Dialogue en innovation sociale (FRQ-DIALOGUE and CRISES).