Our program is empowered by a welcoming and diverse community of students with a uniquely global perspective. Together we are making things right for our communities and our future.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2024
Agnieszka (Aggie) Frasunkiewicz is a writer and researcher based in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough). She holds a MA in Art History from Concordia University, where she explored feminism and female artists working in the Polish People’s Republic. Her current research considers the relationship between state socialism, women’s embodiment and the development of a socialist feminist phenomenology.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2024
I obtained my MA in Sociology from Carleton University, completing a thesis concerned with the political economy of knowledge production, the reification of the figure of the intellectual, and the mobilization of tropes understood as indicative of intellectual power or mastery, or conversely invincible ignorance or affective unruliness, to legitimize hegemonic perspectives or refuse to admit as meritorious subaltern interventions, often forcibly suppressed in tandem with work of marginalization.
In my dissertation, I intend to read the political domain as the site of the variably and variously collaborative production of fictions, understood in the tradition of Hans Vaihinger, and investigate the radical potential within, together with the limits of, abstention from or contravention of such processes, turning for guidance and inspiration both to psychoanalysis and Marxist theories of ideology.
Areas of research interest include the sociology of knowledge, the materialist conception of history, the political power of the communications industry, and patterns of anti-democratic thought.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2020
Ame Khin is a PhD candidate in the Department of SPTH at York University and is currently a fellow affiliated with the UBC-Myanmar Initiative. Her research focus area is exploring a complex set of gendered and intersectional impacts of displacement in the context of minority refugee women and female youths in the Myanmar diaspora in Canada. Concurrently, she is working as an RA for an SSHRC-funded project, “Practices of Solidarity in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution,” led by Dr. Matthew Walton from the University of Toronto. Ame is the recipient of an OGS (2021–23). She published a paper, “Refugee Motherhood and Mothering: Adversities, Resilience, and Agency,” in the 25th Anniversary Special Issue of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative. From 2023 to date, she has made and continues to make an exemplary commitment to her research by presenting papers at Glendon Campus, Chapman Uni California, CARFMS2025 (Toronto Metropolitan Uni), 16th International Burma Studies Conference (Northern Illinois), & CCSEAS Conference 2025 (Victoria).
Dissertation title: Gender Roles, Forced Migration, and the Impact of Internal Wars: Karen Refugee Women’s Settlement Experience in London- Southwestern Ontario
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2021
I am a Political Psychologist pursuing a second doctoral degree and working at the intersection of Political Science, Social Movement Theories, and Critical Psychology to understand how people are striving to embrace their agency and renovate representative democracies. I am the author of five books and numerous articles in Portuguese, English, and Spanish, and I have spent over five years as a community psychologist in underserved areas and as a mental health policy advisor at city, state, and federal levels in Brazil.In my upcoming dissertation, which will serve as the foundation for my third single-authored book, I critique the excessive influence of Psychoanalysis on Political Thought and propose a vision of the role of subjectivity in Politics that integrates insights from Brazilian social movements, radical democracy studies, and human development.
Dissertation title: Democratic innovations from the standpoint of the person
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2023
Andrew Fuyarchuk was awarded a research doctorate in religion from the Toronto School of Theology (2016), an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Alberta (1998), and an M.A. in education from Canisius College (2019). He has published on Plato, Augustine, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Chung-ying Cheng’s Neo-Confucian hermeneutics. He serves as associate and book review editor (Canada) for the Journal of Chinese Philosophy. His books include Gadamer’s Path to Plato: A Response to Heidegger and Rejoinder by Stanley Rosen (Wipf and Stock, 2010) and The Inner Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Mediating between Modes of Cognition in the Humanities and Sciences (Lexington, 2017).
Dissertation title: An Alternative to Metabolic Marxism: How Animals Teach us to Become Politically Efficacious Daoists.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2022
My research interests are in the Marxist philosophy of history, black studies, and anticolonial theory. My work has been published in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy and Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa. I am a co-editor of Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2022) and of the special issue 'Care and Cure' of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2023
Bilal Zahoor is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought (SPT) at York University. He is the founder and editorial director of Folio Books, a Lahore-based independent academic press, and the co-editor of two widely-reviewed books: Rethinking Pakistan: A 21st-Century Perspective (Anthem Press, 2020) and Politics, Economy and Society: Essays on Pakistan and Beyond (Folio Books, 2023). Before joining SPT at York, he taught philosophy and ecology at the Department of Liberal Arts, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, where he designed and directed two courses—“Philosophy in a Time of Ecological Crisis” and “Contemporary Political Philosophy.”
Zahoor’s research interests concern global climate change, the environmental crisis in South Asia, ecopolitics, environmental history of Punjab, environmental theory, and the history of global capitalism. His doctoral research aims to develop a novel understanding of anti-colonial eco-Marxism. Zahoor also occasionally contributes to The Philosophical Salon, New Politics, The Ecologist, Monthly Review, and Dawn.
Degree: MA
Start Year: 2025
Chenai David is a Master’s student in the Social and Political Thought program at York University, where she brings a deep commitment to exploring how systems of power shape bodies, identities, and experiences. Her research focuses on Body Politics and Black Girlhood, particularly the ways Anti-Blackness and Anti-Fatness intersect to influence eating disorders and medical discrimination within Black communities. Chenai’s academic journey began in Early Childhood Education and later expanded through her undergraduate studies in Humanities, during which she completed a field study abroad in South Africa. There, she engaged firsthand with questions of race, culture, and systemic inequality. With a background in social services and a foundation in Black Canadian Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Black Feminist Thought, Chenai’s work bridges scholarship and lived experience. Within the SPT program, she plans to focus on the Black Studies and Theories of Race and Racism stream, continuing her commitment to building more inclusive understandings of health, race, and identity.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2023
I began my PhD with a background in philosophy at both the undergraduate and graduate levels incorporating particular emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship. Throughout my studies I have taken an interest in questions and concerns at the crossroads of religion, politics, and aesthetics. My current work concentrates on the co-construction of “the occult” as a domain of rejected knowledge and “queerness” as a domain of rejected sex via the linked processes of secularization and colonization in the development of modernity.
My principle areas of interest include Continental Philosophy (Early 20th Century German and Post-Structuralist though in particular), Political Theology, Feminist and Queer Theory, Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Secularism, Mysticism, and Western Esotericism.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2024
Cynthia Kelly has worked over the last twenty years in higher educational institutions, both as part-time faculty and as a senior fundraiser, in the United States and in Canada. Currently, she is enrolled as a part-time student in PhD studies in the Social and Political Thought Program at York University, under the supervision of Distinguished Research Professor Carl James. She is the program lead for his groundbreaking Social Capital study which seeks to better understand the educational and career aspirations of racialized adults in Canada and their access to opportunities. The study offers the first-ever opportunity to conduct a large, quantitative and qualitative examination of the lived experiences of racialized adults in Canada. Her doctoral research is focused on examining pathways for racialized individuals to be more fully integrated at work, particularly in large corporations. She has provided training on equity, diversity and inclusion to a number of organizations, including an accredited professional course to a leading law firm.
Degree: MA
Start Year: 2024
Daysha Loppie is a journalist and researcher based in Toronto. She has a Bachelor of Journalism and a Black Studies minor from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her journalism was published in the Toronto Star, West End Phoenix, ByBlacks, The Local and more. She’s interested in long-form feature writing and primarily covers Black communities, social justice, business, arts and culture. Daysha is also interested in Black feminist theory and praxis, disability studies, communication and culture. She is a co-author of Possibilities of Care within Institutional Constraints: A Case Study in Black Creative Knowledge Production. Daysha is writing her major research project on the subjugation of Black women in the medical field of gynaecology.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2022
My research focuses on the field of the sociology of knowledge, with a main thread—the thought of Max Scheler—that connects two traditions: phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I attempt to use Scheler’s thought as a guiding thread, starting from human sociality and social conditions, to clarify how knowledge, especially knowledge in social sciences, as a product of human consciousness, inevitably carries both visible and invisible aspects, both clear awareness and illusion, both unconscious and conscious elements as it is produced and distributed in society.
Though working at the field of social theory and self-identified as a sociologist, I was trained as a phenomenologist at Peking University studying Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and I'm the translator for several books (published and to be published) of John O'Neill, Arthur Stinchcombe (English to Chinese) and Freud (German to Chinese).
For more information, see my academia profile: yorku.academia.edu/DongyuWang
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2023
After working in various positions in the public sector for approximately 13 years, I decided to resume my academic career where I left off.
In my MA research, I analyzed the textual corpus, primarily Old Turkic, Turkish and Chinese works, within the framework of the agro-vocabular heritage left by the Turkic nomads to attempt to challenge the essentialist and dichatomical assumptions that dominate the political and historiographical litearture regarding the ontology of nomadic entities and how they were perceived vis-à-vis the sedentary ones.
Currently, I am a doctoral student in SPT program at York University, and my academic interests lie in the intersection of politics, economics, history, language and culture of Eurasian countries such as Turkiye, China and Russia within the framework of their approach towards Central Asian countries, which are the closest heirs to the nomadic heritage.
I am proficient in Turkish, Chinese, and English and am a member of the Canadian Society for the Study of Names.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2024
Isabelle grew up in North York and Scarborough and is currently based in Toronto. Her research centres existentialism, Marx’s works, postcolonial theory, feminist philosophies of autonomy, and asexuality studies.
Isabelle's early work has been published in Crickets and the Contemporary Review of Genocide and Political Violence.
She teaches in the Department of Social Science.
Dissertation title: Existentialism and Anticolonialism: What is Left for Liberation
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2018
Jeff Black is a PhD candidate. His research is focused on Marx's mature critique of political economy and historical materialist approaches to the transition to capitalism.
Dissertation title: Centring Capital: Political Marxism and the Value-Form
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2022
Jeffrey Sedivy is a third-year Ph.D student in the Social and Political Thought Program at York University. He holds an hons. BA In Cognitive Science as well as an MA in Social and Political Thought from York University. His research interests Include; psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory; continental philosophy; post-colonial thought in an Islamic context; and critical secular studies.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2025
Judith Babirye is a dedicated public policy specialist, community leader, and former Member of Parliament in Uganda (2016–2021), with over 15 years of experience in legislative development, refugee resettlement, and cultural advocacy. Based in Canada, she is the Founder and Executive Director of Afri Music Canada Vibes, a non-profit empowering African and Caribbean immigrant artists through mentorship, cultural exchange, and integration support.
Judith has worked extensively with newcomers, most recently as a Newcomer Settlement Manager at Stepstone House Ottawa, providing legal guidance, employment support, and community orientation. She brings a unique blend of policy expertise, grassroots engagement, and artistic leadership to every initiative.
Judith holds a Master’s in Migration and Diaspora Studies from Carleton University, a Bachelor of Tourism from Makerere University, and is a Certified Scrum Master. She is a recipient of the Arthur Kroeger Public Affairs Scholarship and the New African Canadian Community Builder Award (2021). Her passion lies in empowering marginalized communities and fostering inclusive social systems.
Dissertation title: How do Black-led community organizations in Canada support recent African and Caribbean immigrants' integration without formal policies?
Degree: MA
Start Year: 2025
My name is Kybuky Bernard and I earned a bachelor's degree in sociology at the University of British Columbia. During undergrad, I worked as a teaching assistant and volunteered as a junior executive for the African Caribbean Student Club.
I am interested in exploring inequality, specifically within the context of race. At York, I have been admitted into the Social and Political Thought program, where I plan to research the ways in which tourism, racial division and migration lead to neo-colonialism in Jamaica.
Going forward, I would like to pursue a career in academia and provide steps towards decolonization within the Caribbean.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2018
Marcelle-Anne is a doctoral candidate in the Social and Political Thought programme and a research associate at the Institute for Social Research at York University. Her research interests include historiography, racial slavery, and cultural studies. Her most recent publications can be found in CR: The New Centennial Review and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. She has co-organized international conferences such as Strategies of Critique and Map to the Door at 20 at York, and guest edited special issues in TOPIA on their proceedings. She is currently writing her dissertation which explores the ethical, scientific, and geopolitical implications of representing slavery and genocide in Canadian museums.
Dissertation title: On the Uses of Analogy: Slavery and Genocide at Ontario Science Centre Museum
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2021
My academic interests look to analyze how biopolitics, necropolitics, and the state of exception* operate within the epoch of the Anthropocene. Within periods of exceptional circumstance, such as inter-state and intra-state war and conflict, the sovereign has the ability to suspend its legal orders as a means of preserving the state against oppositional forces. When it comes to our more-than-human counterparts during war/conflict, many are condemned to death and destruction, characterized as being collateral damage. The question becomes: What is the responsibility states have to the "Other" (our more-than-human counterparts) during periods of inter-state and intra-state conflict?
Research Interests: Biopolitics, Necropolitics, the State of Exception, the Anthropocene, Post-Structuralism, International Relations, Political Theory, War and Conflict (Intra-state & Inter-state), Forced Migration, Climate Change.
Degree: MA
Start Year: 2025
Interested in heterodox and post-Keynesian economics; financial markets; 20th century social and political thought
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2025
I am a PhD student in Social & Political Thought and an MA candidate in Counselling Psychology at Yorkville University. I attained an MA at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in 2023.
My interdisciplinary research includes psychoanalytic studies, queer studies, system theory studies and concentrates on theorizing the current overlapping economic and political structures that generate capitalist subjects while envisioning collective emancipatory possibilities through queer theory. Primary theoretical influences include Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Lee Edelman.
My research has two objectives: to account for the political and economic violence that deterritorializes subjects to recuperate them into the social body as capitalist subjects; to assess the role queer collectivity could offer for interfering with the reconstitution of the capitalist subject.
Prior to York, I worked in the British Columbia Government in the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction from 2023–2025.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2022
Nadine (they/them) is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University and holds a Master of Arts in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto (OISE). Their dissertation research examines the relationship between education, violence, and social change, focusing on the history of communist education and re-education—from the classroom to the prison—in relation to questions of freedom and justice. While their regional areas of study include Russia and China, they are broadly interested in the cross-pollination of radical movements worldwide, particularly anti-colonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. Nadine serves on the editorial board of The Vermin—a critical magazine dedicated to centring the marginal and the peripheral—and is also a contributor to the New Brunswick Media Co-operative.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2025
My research explores the intersections of philosophical history, philosophy of science, political economy, and normative political theory. In one area of my research I draw on new materialism as a framework for the environmental decolonization of Palestine, integrating ontology, epistemology, and ethics. I have also developed a material-discursive genealogy of prisons rooted in class antagonisms and advanced a normative theory for the separation of powers within corrections. While employing post-structuralist methods attentive to plurality, I seek to engage totalization and agonism where solidarity in the public sphere is available and politically efficacious. My work ultimately seeks to realize utopian and humanist ideals within historical, realist, environmentally holistic, and more-than-human material contexts.
Degree: MA
Start Year: 2023
Nina Thomas is a writer and scholar whose research interests include Black Radical Thought, Black Feminist Theory, and Black and Indigenous Solidarities. Grounded in an commitment to decolonization and transformative justice, her work interrogates the ideological architecture of "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (bell hooks) and its enduring effects on lived experience. With a focus on the entanglements of race, gender, and economic power, her work seeks to illuminate the often-imperceptible dynamics of structural oppression and to imagine new possibilities for collective liberation and relationality.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2018
Patrick Teed is a PhD candidate in the York University Social and Political Thought Program and incoming Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His scholarship, grounded in Black critical theory, covers a wide terrain of interests, including abolitionist politics, psychoanalysis, cultural criticism, continental philosophy, and science and technology studies. His peer-reviewed essays are available in differences, New Centennial Review, TOPIA, Lateral, and Rhizomes, and he recently guest edited a special issue of TOPIA on Black critical theoretical approaches to care and cure. His dissertation, “Deconstructing Life: Epigenesis, Antiblackness,” interrogates the racial violence structural to contemporary critical theory’s enchantment with postgenomic science. In addition to his scholarship, he maintains a theatre creation practice with his company, Afterlife Theatre.
Dissertation title: Deconstructing Life: Epigenesis, Antiblackness
Degree: MA
Start Year: 2025
I am a parent of three children and am of Jamaican and Irish descent. I founded Mixed in Canada in 2011, which is a national cultural resource centre for racialized mixed-race identified Canadians, and co-founded the MIXED Art Conference in 2013, which focused on critical mixed-race theory and intersectionality. I also co-founded the 3MW Collective, which was an artist collective devoted to exploring social constructions of race, colonialism, and colourism. I have been invited to speak at the University of Toronto, Ontario Public Services, CBC Radio Metro Morning, CTV Canada AM, CBC News The National, and more. I am passionate about climate justice and volunteer at Black Eco Bloom, whose mission is to support the growth of Black Women, Black Transgender Women and Black Non-binary people in the environmental sector. I am currently Manager, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Seneca Polytechnic. My research interests include: Black Feminist Ecologies, Visual Arts, Black Visual Cultures, Black Feminisms, Queer Ecologies, Ethnobotany and more!
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2023
Sheba Abena Wiafe is currently completing her PhD at York University in the Social and Political Thought Program. Her research focuses on investigating the migratory movements of African women to Europe against the histories of the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic slave trade through Black critical theoretical and psychoanalytic approaches. Her written work is forthcoming with The Black Lexicon edited volume, and she is currently guest editing a special issue of SAQ focusing on the intellectual interventions of Christina Sharpe’s first monograph Monstrous Intimacies.
Degree: MA
Start Year: 2024
Tapji Garba’s research engages political theology, legal history, and political economy from within the field of Black Studies. They have published in Philosophy Today, Antipode, Political Theology, and TOPIA.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2019
Theodore C.C. Torry is a 6th year PhD student. Theodore's research concerns the parallel developments of philosophy and clandestine thought formation. Inspired by Heidegger, and subsequent scholars engaging with hermeneutic and ontological traditions, his dissertation project, under the working title, "Fomentation of the Clandestine: A Psychopolitical Inquiry into the Philosophies and Practices of Conspirators" examines ontogenesis of political and executive activities developed and conducted in secrecy. This work aims provide a proper and scientific groundwork to address social patterns of collusion, conspiracy, illusion and control and to advance Neoreactionary experimentation. Key references include Leibniz, Kant, Weishaupt, Jacobi, Nietzsche, Simmel, Heidegger, Bachelard, Deleuze, Guatarri, Sloterdijk, Land.
Dissertation title: Fomentation of the Clandestine
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2022
I am working on my PhD in SPT. My research focuses on the intersection of political economy and settler colonialism in Canada, examining the relationship between capitalist development, and the construction of colonial institutions.
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2020
Research interests: Phenomenology, Heidegger and Buddhist Philosophy
Degrees: BEng, MBA, MA Philosophy
Dissertation title: Heidegger and Buddhism: A Dialogue in Fundamental Ontology
Degree: PhD
Start Year: 2025
My main research interests include Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, especially its political application by the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis; and political theology inspired by (but radically disloyal to) Carl Schmitt. I also have a broad interest in modern & contemporary Chinese political thought, as well as comparative religion. I have published an essay with AGITATE! named "From Ignorant Schoolmaster to Analyst Educator" that is coming soon.
Learn More
The Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York is an exciting environment to pursue innovative, socially engaging, career-ready education. Contact our Graduate Program Assistant to learn more.