The CFR supports numerous Research Associates whose work animates the Centre. Research Associates direct research clusters and research projects, are featured in Feminisms and Focus, and share their work through research events at the CFR. The CFR offers grant writing support, research administration, and knowledge mobilization support to our dynamic network of researchers.
Research Associates are part-time, full-time or emeritus faculty members or researchers at York University, or faculty or researchers elsewhere who are members of a CFR-housed research project. Research Associates submit and administer research grants through the Centre, or are active in a research cluster and in organizing workshops and conferences.
Meet Our Research Associates!

Myra Bloom is an Associate Professor of English at York University’s Glendon College in Toronto. In Fall 2024 she was the Eakin Fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Her research is focused on Canadian women's writing and intercultural relations in Québecois fiction. She is completing a SSHRC-funded monograph on confessional Canadian women's writing, Evasive Maneuvers. Her scholarship and criticism are published in various academic and popular venues, including in a recent issue of The Walrus dedicated to the best arts and culture writing of the past 20 years. Her collection Shelter in Text, co-edited with Kasia Van Schaik, is being published by University of Alberta Press in Fall 2025.

Jessica Braimoh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science (Criminology Program). Operating from an anti-racist /queer/ feminist lens, Jessica’s research examines the interrelation between criminalization and systems of domination, the coordination of socio-legal processes across multiple public institutions, and the experiences of “at-risk” populations. She is currently working on three projects. The first project examines experiences and narratives surrounding homelessness, crime, and public safety in mid-sized cities in Ontario. The second project pursues a solutions-oriented framework for homelessness prevention by investigating how the youth justice system (YJS) can reduce instances of discharge into homelessness, and, how the youth homelessness sector can support rapid and sustainable exits from homelessness to prevent YJS (re)engagement. And the third project looks develop a series of impact-first skills building and experiential learning opportunities that will connect students and researchers in the social sciences, humanities and arts (SSHA) with community organizations across Canada.
Read Jessica's Feminisms in Focus interview about doing sociology from the margins.

Dr. Chloë Brushwood Rose (she/her) is a Professor in Education cross-appointed to several other graduate programs, including Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, and Cinema and Media Studies. Her research interests include community-engaged visual research methods, media and arts-based pedagogies, media studies, histories of photography, and gender, feminist and queer studies. Chloë is currently Principle Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project “On our own terms: An oral history and archive of femme cultural production in Toronto, 1990-2000” (@femmestoryarchives) and Co-Investigator on “Archive counter archive: Activating Canada’s moving image heritage” (www.counterarchive.ca, @counterarchive), a project dedicated to activating and preserving audiovisual archives created by Indigenous Peoples, Black communities and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+, and immigrant communities. She is the co-author of Community-based Media Pedagogies: Relational Approaches to Listening in the Commons (Routledge, 2016), and her scholarly work has appeared in many journals, including the Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society; Qualitative Studies in Education; Visual Studies; Changing English; International Journal of Leadership in Education; and, Gender and Education. Chloë is co-editor of several anthologies, including two anthologies on queer culture: the Lambda short-listed Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002) and Golden Crown Literary Society Award-winner And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families (Insomniac Press, 2010). Chloë is also a Registered Psychotherapist working with children, adolescents and their families.

Alison Crosby is an associate professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University and the former director of the Centre for Feminist Research (2014–2019). Her research uses a transnational feminist lens and participatory methodologies to accompany protagonists’ multifaceted struggles to redress and memorialize colonial racialized gendered violence in Guatemala, where she has worked for over thirty years. She is the co-editor (with Heather Evans) of Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Reflections (Rutgers University Press, 2025). She is the co-author (with M. Brinton Lykes) of Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), which received the 2021 Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. The book was published in Guatemala as Más Allá de la Reparación: Protagonismo de Mujeres Mayas en las Secuelas del Daño Genocida (Cholsamaj, 2019).
Alison is the chair of the Memory and Memorialization Research Cluster.

Desirée de Jesús is a video essayist and moving images curator whose digital projects concentrate on girls, women, and folks of colour. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Her research uses experimental animation to reimagine Black girls’ critical resistance strategies and participatory filmmaking to explore racialized girls’ experiences of COVID-19 inequalities. She is the host of the GAMERella podcast, co-developer of the satellite guide, and a former GAMERella game jam co-organizer.
Desiree is the Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project "Mapping Black Girl Geographies and Belonging in Canada."

Christopher Dietzel, Ph.D. (he/him) is a research associate in the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) and a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University. Dr. Dietzel’s research explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, health, safety, and technology, and some of his recent projects investigate the barriers, harms, and violence that LGBTQ+ people experience when using social media and dating apps. Dr. Dietzel is a co-investigator on Digitally Informed Youth (DIY): Digital Safety, and he works with the Digital Intimacy, Gender, and Sexualities (DIGS) Lab, and the Sexual Health and Gender (SHaG) Lab, and the iMPACTS Project.
Christopher was the 2022-2023 Visiting Scholar in Sexuality Studies at the CFR. Check out his research talk titled, "Ageing Online: Exploring Older 2SLGBTQ+ Adults’ Experiences with Digital Platforms."

Lyndsay Hayhurst is a qualitative, feminist participatory action researcher who works collaboratively with community partners on issues of social justice and inequities in/through sport/leisure/recreation in a variety of contexts. She is a Tier 2 York Research Chair in Sport, Gender and Development, and Digital Participatory Research and the Director of the DREAMING Sport Lab (Digital participatory Research in Equity, Access, Mobility, Innovation aNd Gender in Sport). She is an Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is also a faculty associate in CITY Institute, the Centre for Feminist Research, the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research and Graduate Program in Development Studies at York University.
In 2017, Lyndsay was recognized with a Sociology of Sport Journal’s Early Career Researcher Award; and in 2024 she was a co-author for its Outstanding Paper Award. She has secured research funding from SSHRC, CFI, Abuse-Free Sport Canada and PHAC. Her work critically examines equity, inclusion, mobility justice, and climate justice, particularly with/for equity-owed groups, including women (*cis and trans) and gender-diverse youth.
She is co-author of Sport, Gender and Development: Intersections, Innovations and Future Trajectories (with Holly Thorpe and Megan Chawansky, 2021). She has published extensively in leading journals such as Women’s Studies International Forum; Gender, Place & Culture; Third World Quarterly, and the Sociology of Sport Journal.
She also co-directed and executive produced the documentary Changing Gears (2024), which focuses on bicycles, development and mobility justice and is being screened globally in partnership with the UNEP. Lyndsay’s has previously worked for the UNDP and Right to Play, and her research continues to inform policy, advocacy, and curriculum development in sport, physical culture, and social justice for a variety of local, national and global sport for development organizations.

Shiva Hemati received a doctorate degree from Malaya University. Her research is based on Irigaray’s feminist philosophy and psychological theories of ethics of non-violence as a way to deconstruct the patriarchal norms oppressing women in the West and East. In her research, Hemati goes beyond the border of self and other, men and women, and matter and spirit to show the irreducible otherness of women. She acknowledges women’s self-consciousness and self-awareness through Irigarayan feminine divine. Hemati has published several journal articles and presented numerous conference papers, nationally and internationally. She has taught feminist critical theories and feminist concepts including “women’s identity” and “women’s becoming.”
Shiva is a member of the Critical Femininities Research Cluster.

Dr. Salman Hussain is a Cultural Anthropologist with research interests in Human Rights and Social Movements, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Political Violence and Terror, and Law and Decolonization. Dr. Hussain has held research and teaching fellowships at York's Centre for Feminist Research, York's Department of Social Anthropology, The Graduate Center, CUNY, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In his postdoctoral project, he studies new forms of queer activism at the intersection of liberal legality and sexual biopolitics in Pakistan. He examines how activism for demanding gender rights and contesting inequality and marginalization revolves around the evidentary politics of the body by traditional communities of khwajasaras. Hussain's project is a part of his long-term research and activist commitment with the khwajasara communities and follows their engagement with third gender laws in the country. His research has appeared in Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Postcolonial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Anthropologica.
Salman is the Principle Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project titled, "Hijra Human Rights and Legal Recognition in Pakistan: Gender Justice, 'Third Gender' and Embodied Identity." He was the 2021-2022 Visiting Scholar in Sexuality Studies at the CFR and is currently a member of the Home, Identity, and Belonging Research Cluster.

Tuulia Law is an Associate Professor in the Criminology Program at York University. She is also appointed to and supervises students in the Socio-Legal Studies, and Gender Feminist and Women’s Studies graduate programs. She has been involved as a researcher and member in various sex worker advocacy organizations for more than a decade; she currently works with a Toronto-based strippers’ social and advocacy group called Work Safe Twerk Safe. Her previous research has examined: third party work and management in indoor sex and adult industry venues; sex workers’ creative problem solving and security strategies; racialized, gendered and classed tropes of sex work and management. Her current projects explore stripper-management relations and tensions, and strippers’ engagement with provincial labour and human rights protection mechanisms.
Tuulia is the co-chair of the Critical Trafficking and Sex Work Research Cluster.

Guida Man is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department and a member of the Graduate Program at York University. As a Faculty Associate of York's Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and of the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR), her research intersects im/migration and transnationalism, families, gender and work, and racism and racialization, with a focus on Chinese immigrant families and communities, in the context of neoliberalism and global economic restructuring. Her research findings have been published extensively as journal articles and book chapters. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume entitled Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic (UBC Press 2025). Her edited volume with R. Cohen is entitled Engendering Transnational Voices: Studies in Family, Work and Identity (WLU Press 2015). She is the Principal Investigator, Co-Investigator and Collaborator of numerous SSHRC-funded projects. Her current SSHRC-funded research focuses on the Transnational Eldercare Work of Chinese Immigrant Women Professionals in Canada.
Guida is the Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project Transnational Migration and Social Reproduction: Eldercare Work of Chinese Immigrant Women Professionals in Canada.

Nick J. Mulé, PhD, is a professor in the School of Social Work, cross appointed to the Sexuality Studies Program in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Faculty of Health at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His research interests include the social inclusion/exclusion of LGBTQI populations in social policy and service provision and the degree of their recognition as distinct communities in cultural, systemic, and structural contexts. He also engages in critical analysis of the LGBTQI movement and the development of queer liberation theory. He has co-edited LGBTQ People and Social Work: Intersectional Perspectives (2015); Queering Social Work Education (2016); The Shifting Terrain: Nonprofit Policy Advocacy in Canada (2017); Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope (2018); and directed, wrote and executive produced the feature documentary “QueerEdge: From Gay to Queer Liberation” (2019). He is Project Director of the $2.5 million SSHRC-funded and first national study, “2SLGBTQ+ Poverty in Canada: Improving Livelihood and Social Wellbeing.” A queer activist for many years, Nick is the founder, past chairperson, secretary, and currently member at large of Queer Ontario. In addition, he is a psychotherapist in private practice serving LGBTQI populations in Toronto.

Carmela Murdocca is the York Research Chair in Reparative and Racial Justice and a professor in the Department of Sociology at York University. She is appointed to graduate programs in sociology, sociolegal studies, and social and political thought. Her research is concerned with the intersections of racial carceral violence and the social and legal politics of repair, redress, and reparations.
Carmela is a member of the Memory and Memorialization Research Cluster and the Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project "Colonial and Racial Genealogies of Socio-Legal Personhood."
Read Carmela's Feminisms in Focus interview on the limits of reparative policies.

Shirin Shahrokni is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Glendon Campus of York University. Dr. Shahrokni’s research is at the intersection of race and migration politics across various geopolitical locales, specifically in France and Canada. Her first book, Higher Education and Social Mobility: Challenges and Possibilities among Descendants of North African Immigrants in France applies intersectional and critical race frameworks to the study of upward intergenerational mobility and to the higher education experiences of descendants of France’s post-colonial migrants. Her current Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project is a multi-sited research on francophone migration in Canada outside of Quebec. She is also involved in collaborative projects on the higher education trajectories and experiences of Asian international students – the Racialization of Asian International Students (RAIS) project – and students with precarious migration status in Canada.
Shirin is the Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project, "Undelivered Promises of Immigration? Examining the Integration Pathways of Toronto's University-Educated Immigrants from France through an Intersectional Approach."
Read Shirin's Feminism in Focus interview on racialized educational experiences.

Ann Shteir (Rusty) is Professor Emerita in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies, York University. Her book Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women’s History; a Chinese translation came out in 2021. She is the author of numerous articles about women in the history of science, and editor most recently of Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022). Her research interests are in historical perspectives on women and nature, feminist approaches to botanical cultures, and gender and mythologies at the intersection of art and science.
Read Rusty's oral history of the CFR in Thirty Years of Feminist Research: Reflections on Thirty Years of Research, Notes for the Next Thirty.