Executive Committee | The Harriet Tubman Institute

Muna-Udbi Ali

rebsl — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:27:39 +0000

Dr. Muna-Udbi A. Ali (she/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environment and Urban Change (EUC), specializing in Black Studies in Geography and Environment, at �첥��Ƶ in Toronto, Canada. Before joining the faculty of EUC, Ali worked as an Assistant Professor at California State University San Marcos, and as a Visiting Faculty member at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, her primary research covers diverse theoretical foci including Black studies, critical refugee and migration studies, critical race studies, Black feminist studies, Black geographies, transnational feminism, environmental justice, popular education, critical Muslim studies, public policy, critical pedagogy, and higher education studies. She has published several book chapters and scholarly articles in journals including The Black Scholar, Darkmatter, Reconsidering Development, and The Conversation, among others. Outside of academia, Ali is a community worker, curriculum and policy consultant, researcher, and anti-oppression educator. She has designed curricula and policies on gender-based violence, Afrocentric education, and anti-racist praxis. She has worked in education and curriculum development in Canada, United States, Kenya, and Somalia.

Keywords: Black Studies, Black geographies, Black feminist theories and methods, critical refugee studies, higher education studies, critical pedagogy, popular education, environmental justice, public policy, and surveillance studies.

Adeyemi Olusola

rebsl — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:00:04 +0000

Adeyemi Olusola is a hydrogeomorphologist whose research examines river processes and changing waterscapes using high-resolution in situ measurements, remote sensing, and machine learning. His work bridges field-based hydrogeomorphology with data-intensive methods to better understand how rivers respond to environmental change and human intervention. He currently serves as Theme 3 Lead for the International Association of Hydrological Sciences HELPING Initiative (Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world) for the decade (2023 – 2033), where he contributes to advancing inclusive and community-engaged water science. He is also an active member of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committees of both the Canadian Geophysical Union (CGU) and the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Keywords: Rivers, Human-Water Interactions, Decolonizing Hydrology

Karina Deepnarine

rebsl — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 20:02:08 +0000

Karina Deepnarine is a third-year student whose work sits at the intersection of race, identity, and post-colonial thought. She currently serves as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the Harriet Tubman Institute. Beyond her research, Karina has a distinguished record of leadership and community engagement. From 2021-2023, she served as Vice-President and President of Goetz Black Voices, where she spearheaded initiatives like assemblies, panels, and discussions addressing colorism, texturism, microaggressions, and Black student empowerment, as well as the organization of Black History Month programming. She has collaborated with Black graduation coaches through the Black Community Advisory Council (BCAC) to help predominantly non-Black schools establish Black Student Associations. She has been interviewed by the Peel District School Board (PDSB) on strategies to better support Black students and has spoken on several high-profile panels, including Jean Augustine’s BSA Conference 2025 with PDSB at �첥��Ƶ on the Black undergraduate experience. Her leadership spans multiple organizations: she is the social media Director for the Black Business Student Association (BBSA), Ontario Hub Leader for the Federation of Black Canadians, Social Justice Chair for United Caribbean Islands (UCI), and an active member of the RISE Committee. She has also serves as VP of Internal Affairs for the Black Women in Law Association (BWLA), where she advocates for the advancement of Black women in the legal profession. Her advocacy has been recognized through numerous awards, including the NDP Rosemary Brown Social Justice Award, the Jacor Marketing Award for Inclusivity, and a Peel Regional Police Scholarship for Equity and Diversity. Her body of work reflects a commitment to dismantling the post-colonial mindset and advancing racial justice both within academic spaces and the broader community for Black communities.

Keywords: Advocacy, Human Rights, Anti-Black Racism, Black Education, Awareness

Clifton Grant

rebsl — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 19:21:57 +0000

Clifton Grant is a Graduate Student in the Department of Social Legal Studies at �첥��Ƶ and an Executive Member of the Harriet Tubman Institute. His research interests explore the intersectionality of race, education and criminality primarily by exploring the "school to prison pipeline" that disproportionately impacts marginalized and racialized communities. The Canadian mosaic has a "discourse of denial" of discriminatory and racist policies manifested from the discourse of institutionalized racism. This has intentionally created an oppressive pipeline that is characterized by under resourced schools, overuse of suspensions and expulsions aided by the overuse of Police in schools. Clifton's objective is to engage in solution-based discourses that provide methodologies to decrease criminalization of youth, reduce barriers to education and break the generational cycle of incarceration. His research hopes to facilitate the creation a paradigm shift of reform that empowers systematic changes to the punitive system of retributive justice that will manifest into the significant use of the restorative social justice model that emphasizes healing, reconciliation and community involvement. His research also plans to explore the removal of the stigmatization of criminality that will many positive repercussions for Canadian society including the assimilation of individuals who have paid their debt to society facilitating their transformation to becoming productive members of society with the ultimate beneficiary goal of the elimination of criminal recidivism. Clifton's active community engagement and advocacy at �첥��Ƶ continues to embolden his academic and civil pursuits as an impactful changemaker.

Keywords: Race, racism, discrimination, oppression, criminality, policing discourse of denial. liberation, freedom, social justice, education, stigmatization, incarceration, recidivism, reconciliation, restorative justice.

Ify Okadigbo

rebsl — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:07:53 +0000

Ifeyinwa (Ify) Okadigbo, PhD. is a Black African Canadian scholar-activist with a strong record of developing theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding the nuanced and complex experiences of Black African women across diverse physical and ideological contexts. She earned her PhD from �첥��Ƶ in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies, completing it in four years, passing without revisions, and receiving a nomination for dissertation prize by the faculty of Graduate Studies. In addition, she holds dual master’s degrees from �첥��Ƶ where she earned a distinction, and the University of East Anglia, UK, in Gender and International Development.

With over a decade of research, teaching, and community engaged experience, her work explores gender, spirituality, governance, and institutional power in African and Black contexts. Her pedagogical practice is informed by critical, inclusive, and decolonial approaches that empower students to interrogate power, resistance, and social transformation. Beyond the academy, she collaborates with policymakers and community organizations to produce engaged, policy relevant research that advances gender justice, challenges racism, patriarchy and sexism across public and private spheres.

Keywords: Decolonization, Spirituality, African Feminism, Gender, Coloniality, Power

Bianca Beauchemin

rebsl — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:23:32 +0000

Bianca Beauchemin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at �첥��Ƶ. She recently was the 2022-2023 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University. She was also awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Gender Studies.

She has published a book review of Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and is currently working on the final draft of her article entitled "Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities” for the Journal of Canadian Studies’ special issue on Black Studies in Canada. She is also working on her book manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, where she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.

Mohamed Sesay

rebsl — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 21:30:22 +0000

Dr. Mohamed Sesay (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Coordinator of the African Studies Program at �첥��Ƶ. He is also a member of the UKRI GCRF Gender Justice and Security Hub hosted by the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. Mohamed Sesay graduated from McGill University with a Ph.D. in Political Science, specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics. His research and teaching focuses on the rule of law, legal pluralism, customary justice, transitional justice, international criminal justice, and postconflict peacebuilding and reconstruction in sub-Saharan Africa. His works have appeared in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Third World Quarterly, Journal of Human Rights, African Affairs, European Journal of International Security, International Journal of Transitional Justice, International Studies Perspectives, and Cooperation & Conflict. Mohamed Sesay’s monograph, Domination through Law, is the winner of the 2021 International Studies Association’s Lee Ann Fujii Book Award.

Ruth Rodney

rebsl — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 21:24:20 +0000

Dr. Ruth Rodney is a mother, registered nurse, the Associate Director of The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diaspora, and Associate Professor at �첥��Ƶ’s School of Nursing where she teaches global health, women’s health, and theoretical approaches to nursing science. She entered the academic and research field with 15 years of frontline nursing experience in a number of clinical areas in Canada and globally. Her research focuses on violence prevention and health promotion primarily using critical qualitative methodologies to examine how communities can create environments that support healthy relationship development. She is an academic fellow at the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research at the University of Toronto and currently serves as the Chair of the grant review committee for the Youth Opportunity Fund which focuses on funding Black and Indigenous led community projects addressing systemic barriers in Ontario. Dr. Rodney also serves her community in Hamilton, Ontario as a board member for the Afro Canadian Caribbean Association and the Canadian Mental Health Association.

Clusters: Genders and Sexualities, Health and Disability

Annie Bunting

rebsl — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 21:53:19 +0000

Dr. Annie Bunting is a Professor of Law & Society at �첥��Ƶ and York Research Chair in International Gender Justice & Peacebuilding. Her research expertise includes socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods, feminist international law, and culture, religion and law. Since 2010, she has directed an international research collaboration (SSHRC-funded Partnership) called Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnership for the study of enslavement, marriage and masculinities with historians of slavery, community-based researchers and women’s human rights scholars. This project includes partners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Canada and England.

She is the co-editor of Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (Ohio University Press 2016) with Benjamin Lawrance and Richard Roberts; Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (University of British Columbia Press 2017, Cornell University Press 2018) with Joel Quirk; and Research as More than Extraction? Knowledge Production and Sexual Violence in Post Conflict African Societies (openDemocracy/ Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, eBook 2020) with Allen Kiconco and Joel Quirk.

Keywords: International gender justice; contemporary slavery; conflict-related SGBV

Sharon Henry

rebsl — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 21:27:32 +0000

Sharon Henry is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at �첥��Ƶ.
Sharon is a long-standing graduate member of Race Inclusion and Supportive Environments (RISE); an executive graduate caucus member of the Harriet Tubman Institute (HTI); a graduate representative at Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC); a graduate representative on the Equity Diversity and Inclusion Council, (EDI); and a graduate representative on the Faculty of Graduate Studies Council (FGS).