Postdoctoral fellows are researchers who work on projects based at CITY and are usually supervised by a CITY Faculty Associate. They have either been awarded external post‐doctoral funding (e.g. SSHRC, Banting) or are directly employed by the university on a CITY based research project. Their membership is determined by the duration of their funding, upon completion of which, they can apply for CITY Associate status, which will need to be approved by the CITY Executive Committee.
2025/2027 Postdoctoral Fellows
Dr Tilen Kolar is a critical human geographer at the CITY Institute and the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Tilen recently completed his PhD at the University of Leeds (UK) on queer mobilities and spatial scale in Central and Eastern Europe. At York, he currently works on a project on queer cultural infrastructure and the remaking of inclusive cities with Professor Alison Bain, alongside a comparative study of modalities of queer mobility in the context of infrastructural citizenship and urban rail transportation in Canada, Spain, and India with Professor Patricia Wood. Tilen's work foregrounds semi-periphery as a generative site of geographical theory, challenging metronormative assumptions in queer studies and human geography more broadly.
A central concern in his scholarship is spatial scale and mobilities: how formations such as the hometown, the city, and the nation are at times bodily fragmented and at other occasions narrated through uneven power relations. His past ethnographic fieldwork centred on how queer world-making is navigated and negotiated within these scalar hierarchies through everyday (dis)ordered rhythms, encounters, and infrastructures in Slovenia and other contexts. His broader interests include queer and trans geographies, infrastructural thinking, corridors, policy mobilities, temporal geographies, decolonising pedagogies, inclusive fieldwork practices, and neurodiverse thinking as a methodological potential. Kolar has contributed to collaborative research on queer memorialisation, trans-inclusive research design, and mental health in fieldwork. He led the Royal Geographical Society-supported project The State of Queer and Trans Geographies, which responds to contemporary political and institutional pressures facing the field and works to re-centre peripheral knowledges to the disciplinary core.
His research has been published in Mobilities, where he conceptualises the notion of scalar submissiveness through mobile encounters and queer mobilities, in Memory Studies, and Gender, Place & Culture, among others. He is co-editor (with Alison L. Bain and Julie A. Podmore) of the forthcoming volume Elsewhere and Otherwise: Queering Metropolitan Peripheries (Edward Elgar), and a contributor to the Bloomsbury collection Queer Cultural Infrastructure (Bloomsbury Academic), and Routledge's Queer Memorialisation.
He serves as Co-Chair of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society, and is committed to challenging how geography is written, read and taught, emphasising the importance of 'other geographies' that emerge when centres (erotic, intellectual, sexual, cultural, and pedagogical) are critically un(desired).
Contact: kolart@yorku.ca
Maryam Lashkari is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the City Institute at York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from York University. Maryam has taught city studies workshops, urban geography, and economic geography, where she designed courses on migration, urban policy, economy, and globalization. Her research examines crisis urbanism and urban geopolitics, focusing on nation-state politics and migration policies.
Contact: maryamlk@torontomu.ca
Mantha Katsikana is a feminist geographer, transdisciplinary artist and activist, interested in issues of social reproduction, urban justice and ethics of urban planning, affect and affective labor, feminist geohumanities and DIY media as well as collaborative and decolonial knowledge production. Her doctoral research explores the ways affective geographies of social reproduction are formed through women’s and feminized subjects’ caring and commoning practices in the urban, during the multiple, overlapping ‘crises’ and on-going austerity, post-2007, in Athens, Greece. Mantha’s post doctoral research explores the urban geographies of community based abortion care in the Greater Toronto Area, through a reproductive justice and feminist urban geography framework.
Program Name: Post-doc, the Faculty of Health
Department: School of Kinesiology & Health Science
Stefan Treffers is a postdoctoral fellow and recent PhD graduate from the Sociology Department at York University. His research focuses on urban governance, housing policy, policing, and urban securitization. He has co-authored several journal articles in Urban Studies, Housing Studies, Journal of Urban Affairs, and the British Journal of Criminology.
In December 2023, Chan Arun Pina completed their PhD in Urban Geography at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. Their dissertation, Trans imaging of non-normative homes, offers a spatial-visual analysis of the housing experiences of LGBTQ+ postsecondary students in two Indian megacities. In doing so, the research also presents a queer and trans ecological critique of cisheteronormative planning of higher education campuses and student housing in Mumbai and New Delhi. Currently, Chan is working with professors Luisa Sotomayor and Alison Bain at the City Institute on the project “Undoing Town and Gown: Urban university campuses in Delhi and Toronto.” This transnational project aims to cross-examine how campus planning and governance, neighbourhood politics and socio-spatial conflicts are manifested at the campus edge as it tensely interfaces with the city.
Please fill out the attached form if you wish to become a postdoctoral fellow at the CITY Institute.