About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University where I teach courses on race and youth activism in the Childhood and Youth Studies program. 

My scholarship explores how schools invite young people to embody Canadian racial and colonial hierarchies, and how youth-centred research can create other worlds. I draw from critical race theory, transnational feminism, post-/decolonial theories, and critical youth and girlhood studies. My research and pedagogical interests are informed by my work as a secondary school teacher in southwestern Ontario and fifteen years of experience as an educator. 

I earned my PhD in the Sociology of Education at University of Toronto in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. For my dissertation I conducted archival and ethnographic research to demonstrate how elite status at Canadian elite schools requires whiteness. I am interested in the embodied ways in which power operates through national discourses of exceptionalism based in white settler colonialism, antiblackness, imperialism, and humanitarianism.

My current research project is a youth participatory action research project on Afro-Asian girls’ solidarity and the legacy of radical traditions of internationalism and anti-colonial resistance. This study was awarded the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Early Career Research Award and the Racialized and Indigenous Faculty Alliance Research Grant at Carleton University.

As part of my interest in how young people are shifting dominant paradigms in this moment, I am writing my first young adult novel of speculative fiction, which explores race, colonialism, and girlhood in the context of South Asian and Caribbean diasporas in Canada. As the Lillian Robinson Scholar at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, I presented on my creative process in bringing this work to life. Arts-based approaches are integral to my teaching, research, facilitation, and how I make sense of the world as a sociologist. As part of this, I am the co-founder of in:cite, an open-access, youth-led journal for art, research, and activism. 

Threading through my work is an interest in how worlds are made and unmade, and the centring of our unique perspectives, gifts, and multi-faceted selves in this creative work.