Fellows

Ranu Basu is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at York University. Her research and teaching interests relate to the geographies of marginality, diversity and social justice in cities; power, space and activism; anti-imperialism and post-colonial geographies; geopolitics of subaltern cosmopolitanism, critical geographies of education; and spatial methodologies including critical GIS.

Her projects have explored the impacts of neoliberalization of educational restructuring in Ontario; multiculturalism in schools through questions of ‘integration’; social sustainability and the meaning of public space as it relates to migrants; and politics of infrastructural provision. Her work extends internationally to Cuba and India and she is PI on a SSHRC funded project entitled: Subalterity, education and welfare cities that historically traces the geopolitical impacts of displacement on cities and schools; and the everyday politics of resistance in Havana, Toronto and Kolkata. 

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Cuba

Keywords: power, space and activism; anti-imperialism and post-colonial geographies; geopolitics of subaltern cosmopolitanism; critical geographies of education; and spatial methodologies including critical GIS.

Agnès Berthelot-Raffard is an Associate Professor of critical disability studies at York University. As a feminist political philosopher, Agnès Berthelot-Raffard’s research interests are broad and diverse. She is deeply engaged in Black African-American and Afro-Caribbean feminist epistemologies, gender-inclusive social innovation and community care in the Caribbean, and the political and epistemological implications of the Haitian Revolution.

Throughout her career, she has delivered more than  92 talks, including 55 as a guest speaker, and published several papers solo-authored in political philosophy, philosophy of public health, critical disability studies, and feminist philosophy. She is the co-editor of Penser le sujet femme noire francophone (2021), Recherches Féministes, 32 (2).

Since September 2023, she has also been a regular columnist on Radio Canada Ontario’s  A échelle humaine for the philosophy segment.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, French Guiana.

Keywords: Black women’s epistemologies, Ethics of knowledge, Experiential Knowledge in the Caribbeans, Guadeloupe and Martinique politics, gender-inclusive social innovation in health, decolonial thoughts, the Haitian revolution.

Professor Canel’s research focuses on the role that social movements, community organizations and NGOs play in shaping or resisting development agendas through contentious strategies and/or through partnerships with institutional actors. He is currently working on the growth of socio-environmental conflicts arising from the intensification of resource extraction promoted by the new development agendas of leftist governments in Latin America (neo-developmentalism and new extractivism).

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Latin America

Keywords: State-Civil society, social movements, participatory democracy

I work in the traditions of critical health, social, and policy studies. My research in the social production and developmental origins of health and disease is strongly grounded in my medical training and former clinical practice, and informed by the politics of public policy, the geopolitical economy of health, and medicalization and social control in the health sciences.

Over the years I have used diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer disease, and more recently, Covid-19, as case studies to examine how the social production and developmental origins of health and disease operate. Other intellectual interests include the philosophy and history of science, the critical analysis of discourse, propaganda studies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

I have published widely in my areas of expertise in refereed and popular venues, presented at international, national, and regional academic and professional conferences, and served as Editorial Board Member and reviewer of various refereed journals.

My research has been funded by the California Department of Public Health, the California Department of Transportation, the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Cuba, Venezuela

Keywords: political economy of health; global health and the NGO-state-corporate complex; Social and health policy in Cuba and Venezuela; neocolonialism and the left in Latin America

Alison Crosby is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Her research and publications use an anti-racist anti-colonial feminist lens to explore survivors’ multifaceted struggles for agency and subjectivity in the aftermath of militarized violence. She is currently completing a book manuscript with Professor M. Brinton Lykes on gender and reparation in Guatemala, based on four years of feminist participatory action research with Mayan women survivors of violence during the armed conflict in Guatemala, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). And with Dr. Malathi de Alwis, she is exploring memorialization as a site of contestation in Guatemala and Sri Lanka in a project entitled The inhabitance of loss: A transnational feminist project on memorialization, funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Guatemala

Keywords: Transitional justice; gender, violence and trauma; memory and memorialization; anti-racist feminist participatory action research