Taghreed Al Soumairy is a 2025-2026 CFR Visiting Scholar. Taghreed holds a Ph.D. in Media and Communication from Lebanese University. Her interdisciplinary research spans media studies, memory studies, migration, and gender-based violence, focusing on how traditional and digital media construct and transmit collective memory in contexts shaped by colonization and conflict.
Since 2005, she has conducted research in the Middle East and Canada, specializing in intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and media policy analysis. Her recent work focuses on forms of collective forgetting, the future of collective memory in the era of artificial intelligence, and the role of women as references in memory. She also studies gender and memory; her recent article “Women as References of Collective Memory in War Zones” was published in 2025, and she has published papers on both collective forgetting and AI’s impact on memory.
She is the author of the upcoming Arabic-language book Digital Palestinian Memory: Forms, Challenges, and Future Prospects (Centre for Arab Unity Studies), which explores the dynamics of Palestinian digital memory as it travels across time, space, and contexts, as well as the acts of forgetting practiced by Palestinians in digital spaces.
Currently, she coordinates public education and community programs at the Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration (MRCSSI), developing and delivering content on gender-based violence. Before academia, she worked as a freelance journalist and TV producer in Lebanon.
Chanelle Gallant is the CFR's 2025-2026 Visiting Scholar-Activist. Chanelle is an abolitionist feminist who has been fighting to free women’s sexuality from criminalization for over 25 years. She is a frontline organizer, writer, thinker, strategist and the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. Chanelle has contributed to dozens of influential publications including Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Abolish Social Work (As We Know It), and Defund, Disarm, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada.
She cut her teeth fighting the cops as a core organizer in the historic fight against the Pussy Palace raid in 2000, and went on to found numerous sex work organizations and SURJ-Toronto. She now sits on the national board for multiple organizations in the US and Canada.
Chanelle is a queer femme, a survivor and the eldest daughter of a poor family that has been impacted by criminalization and incarceration. She works as a donor organizer and advisor, social movement strategy consultant and trainer. Chanelle is a Lambda Literary Fellow and holds a M.A. in Sociology.
Shahira Hathout is a 2025-2026 CFR Visiting Scholar. Dr. Hathout holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Trent University. Hathout’s research focuses on New Materialism, Post/De/colonialism, Literature, and the different Anthropocene discourses. Her ongoing radical rethinking of classical literary and philosophical texts within the context of the Anthropocene unsettles time and space to destabilize the rigid boundaries established by modernity; reveal the violence of racism, sexism, and extractivism that form the foundation of this constructed world; affirm our deeply entangled existence within the ecosystem; and create the possibility for imagining issues like difference, identity, and hope differently. Her research emphasizes the entangled nature of academic research practices and activism to highlight its important agentic role in the decision-making process beyond academia.
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of her research, Hathout has presented her work in
multidisciplinary international conferences like Studies in Romanticism, International Studies
Association (ISA), International Congress on New Materialism, British Society for Eighteenth
Century Studies (BSECS), and the Association for Philosophy and Literature (APL) among
others. Her publications (single and co-authored) also appeared in different interdisciplinary
peer-reviewed journals like Interconnection: Journal of Posthumanism, New Perspectives,
Gender, Place & Culture, and World Futures Review, among others. Shahira is a member in the Posthumanism Research Institute, the National Society of Eighteenth Century Studies, and the Association of Philosophy and Literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled What Emerges from Re-membering a Dis-appearing Coast in the Anthropocene: Re-thinking Biopolitics at Lyme Regis.
Yasmine Mathurin is a 2025-2026 CFR Artist in Residence. Yasmine is a Haitian-Canadian, award-winning filmmaker based in Toronto. She's drawn to stories that explore the quiet, often invisible emotional labor of survival, especially among Black and diasporic communities. Her work often sits at the intersection of the personal and the political, and she uses intimate storytelling to illuminate systemic silences. A former United Nations Human Rights Fellow and recipient of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie scholarship, her early advocacy and journalism laid the foundation for a career in filmmaking.
She holds a BA in Political Science from York University and a Master’s in Journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her early work at CBC Original Podcasts includes The Shadows, which won Gold at the 2019 Canadian Digital Publishing Awards and Tai Asks Why, which won a Webby people’s choice award. A graduate of programs such as Hot Docs Accelerator Lab, TIFF Writers Studio, and Berlinale Doc Toolbox and the Chanel TIFF Women Writers Network. Mathurin brings a rigorous, creative approach to nonfiction and narrative filmmaking.
Her debut feature documentary One of Ours—a powerful portrait of identity and belonging within Black and Indigenous communities—won the Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs and earned three Canadian Screen Award nominations. Mathurin is also the recipient of the 2023 TIFF–CBC Films Screenwriter Award for her upcoming fiction feature Sorry Pardon Madame. A committed mentor and speaker, she supports emerging voices through various organizations including the Documentary Organization of Canada.
She has since directed for CBC Witness and produced for CBC’s For the Culture with Amanda Parris, while developing her next feature documentary with support from Telefilm and CBC’s Documentary Channel.
Zainub Mawaz is a 2025-2026 CFR Artist in Residence. Zainub is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and community-based researcher whose work bridges the spaces between visual storytelling, oral traditions, and feminist pedagogy. Working across Canada and Pakistan for over two decades, her practice centres on memory, craft, and belonging—particularly among Indigenous communities in the Kalash and Chitrali valleys of the Hindu Kush and Himalayan regions. She is the founder of Art-i-Zen, a slow-fashion and storytelling studio rooted in collaboration, ancestral aesthetics, and sustainable livelihoods for women artisans. Zainub’s current project, A Needle Bit of Love, is a textile-based research-creation initiative that explores the preservation of endangered oral traditions through embroidery, co-created garments, and narrative-based craft. Her work embraces decolonial and embodied methodologies, drawing on community-engaged processes to recover the wisdom woven into material culture and everyday ritual. With a Master of Fine Arts and over a decade of teaching experience at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Zainub has mentored youth, led empowerment programs for artisan women, and curated exhibitions that honour cross-cultural visual language. Her approach is deeply relational, informed by an ethics of care, reciprocity, and situated feminist knowledge. As a 2025–2026 Artist in Residence at York’s Centre for Feminist Research, Zainub will develop new work at the intersection of oral storytelling, cultural preservation, and visual poetics. Her practice brings together art, activism, and archival work—asking what it means to stitch intergenerational memory into fabric and how craft can become a form of feminist resistance.
Dr. Kimberly Martinez Phillips is 2025-2026 CFR Visiting Scholar. Kimberly is an early-career scholar who earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2025. Her research studies the lives of childfree, never-married, single women of color. As a Visiting Scholar, she aims to strengthen her connections to the larger Canadian feminist community and to apply for future funding. Her research interests include Single Studies, Feminist Standpoint Theory, Decolonial Feminism, and Intersectionality. She has taught Sociology courses at universities and colleges in California and Canada.
Dr. Martinez Phillips was an invited panelist in 2024 for the Special Session Intersectional Solidarities at the American Sociological Association (ASA) Conference and her work has been published in Symbolic Interactionism, The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and the Family Court Review. She also has two forthcoming articles: “Coloniality, capitalism, and patriarchy: childfree, never-married Black Women and Women of Color on the Rise” and “Planning Trips, not Weddings: Intersecting Single and Childfree Women of Color” to be published in late 2025.
Her research has been featured in The Society Pages Council on Contemporary Families, and in Psychology Today. It is also highlighted in the article “Busting the Myths Around Single Childfree Women of Color” in an interview with Vicki Larson. She is currently turning her dissertation “Autonomous Women: An Examination of the Lives and Experiences of Childfree, Never-Married Single Women of Color from a Decolonial Feminist Perspective” into a book. Her ambition is to continue to engage within academia, the media and the general public about issues that impact the lives of all women and women of color in particular. To learn more about her work, you can visit her website www.ichoosefeminism.com.
Aashraya Seth is a 2025 CFR Visiting Scholar. Aashraya is currently a mid-career Fulbright Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, a Policy Specialist at the Minnesota Senate, a Member of the Minnesota Menstrual Equity Coalition, and the Founder of Impact91 and Happy Periods, national non-profits working on menstrual equity, girls' education and gender justice. His work is accounted as case studies for the Global South by UN Women, the Gates Foundation, and the Swedish Government, among others. Aashraya is responsible for designing over a dozen non-profit projects in education, environment and public health, cross-cutting gender. His multi-award-winning innovations include building India’s most affordable sustainable menstrual product vending machine at $25, launching a $3 menstrual cup, and a messenger-based chatbot for literacy in SRHR (and a menstrual curriculum), which has impacted over half a million underserved and tribal women and girls.
He studied Physics and Information Systems, before getting his first Public Policy fellowship at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, followed by at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, Korean Development Institute, United Nations, and HSF Germany. For close to a decade, Aashraya has advised and managed programs for the British, Indian, and Australian governments in the areas of science, technology, space, education, and gender equity, and has contributed to dialogues and policy discussions at the UN and World Economic Forum. He was recently placed amongst the top 80 social innovators in India and the top 50 emerging policy leaders in the world.
Aashraya enjoys writing Op-Eds, and the most recent one was for The Minnesota Daily on The 2024 U.S. elections — a critical juncture for reproductive rights.