The Seven Shades of Resistance

Catherine Richardson Kineweskwêw

Cathy is a Métis therapist, researcher and academic working at Concordia University. Gwich’in, Cree, Metis and English/Swedish ancestry, with maternal ties to Fort Chipewyan, Alberta and Red River.

Cathy is a co-founder of the Centre for Response-Based Practice. She is a teacher, a supervisor, and a professor in First Peoples Studies and Creative Arts Therapies. She also holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Healing Knowledges. Cathy is interested in the broader and multi-dimensional aspects of healing, including social interaction, violence, resistance and dignity-promoting responses. She works with individuals, families and workteams.

Cathy explores various approaches to well- being on her substack podcast, where she speaks with healers, activists and response-based therapists. She has numerous publications, including a recent co-edited book entitled “Life course, missive and methodology: Conversations about health and wellness from the Indigenous collective.”

Lan

Lan’s everyday practice grows from many sources, including a career in medicine, teaching as affiliate faculty at McGill University, a grounding in embodied disciplines and engaged mindfulness, and the lived knowledge of communities. After acquiring a strange constellation of accreditations of highly variable practical relevance, they’ve lately been tending to what often lies beyond the reach of formal institutions: the many ways we negotiate and enact the worlds we inherit, inhabit, and carry forward together, artfully and ever toward what is yet to be.

Sundus Abdul Hadi 

Sundus Abdul Hadi is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and curator of Iraqi origin. Her work spans painting, illustration, writing, and book arts. Rooted in a decolonial artistic, cultural and curatorial practice, Abdul Hadi utilizes ancestral knowledge and space-making in both theory and praxis. She is the author of Shams and Take Care of Your Self: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation, and the founder of Maktaba Bookshop—an experiential installation and artist-run space in Montreal’s Old Port. With a 20-year career in the arts, Abdul Hadi has exhibited internationally and continues to develop a holistic, multidisciplinary practice. She holds a BFA and an MA in Media Studies, and is the co-founder of We Are The Medium, a cultural production hub. She lives and works in Tio:tia’ke/Montreal.

Zeina Ismail-Allouche

Zeina Ismail-Allouche is Research Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia at the director of partnerships and Program development at CPN PREC, See has a PHD in Social Sciences and Arts with over 25 years of experience in the field of child protection, gender-based violence, and child trafficking for illegal transracial/international adoption practices. She has assumed leadership positions within numerous international organizations.

Zeina has contributed to international initiatives promoting family strengthening to prevent separation and lead integrated reform initiatives to reform the child protection sector in many countries. She collaborated with Georgetown University to design and deliver a child protection specialist training program with a focus on interdisciplinary and comprehensive case management. She developed a policy on child protection for media (UNICEF Lebanon).

An oral history/autoethnography storyteller and performer, Zeina is grounded in Indigenous methodologies and decolonized research practice. She contributed to various publications advocating for child protection, with a specific focus on gender-based Violence, transracial/international adoption, child protection in the media, and the rights of children without parental care.