Faculty of Arts new and emerging research explores the richness and depth of Black Studies

Jumoke Verissimo, Department of English

Verissimo’s creative writing has received honours from the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award (shortlist), RSL Ondaatje Prize (shortlist), and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize (winner) among several others. 

Verissimo’s current research project, Ancestral Mist (external link) , is part of a four-pronged project titled “Home Relations Project,” which investigates and reflects on how severed ancestral ties translate into silence and absence across generations, ultimately triggering a search for home and belonging. This ongoing research-creation project aims to explore the gaps in the history of a non-elite family of returnee slaves through the lens of a Brazilian returnee’s journey from Brazil to West Africa. As a descendant of this returnee, Verissimo seeks to rethink the idea of identity and belonging through her grandfather, Fortuna Anastasia Verissimo (1886-1976), one of the returnee’s sons. The project hopes to expand our understanding of what constitutes meaningful kinship, mobility, and continuity within Black ancestry and narratives by rediscovering, revising, and revisiting untold stories.  

Darcy Ballantyne, Department of English

“With love, Dad”: Imaging and Imagining Austin Clarke (external link) 

Over the course of Ballantyne’s brief relationship with Austin Clarke, he gave her a number of small things that, from the point of view of a daughter trying to make a connection with a newly-discovered father, Ballantyne initially considered trivial; they did not fit the image of the father that she had created for herself. Most of his offerings ended up in boxes stored at the back of closets and under beds in her home. Since his death in June 2016, Ballantyne has been working her way through the Clarke ephemera she held onto and realize that, taken together, this small personal archive forms an intimate and tender narrative that offers a context for the history that connects them and their shared past.

Sam Tecle, Department of Sociology 

Since the 1970s, Jane and Finch, a community tucked in the corner of northwest Toronto, has been marked pejoratively as poor and working-class. Also known as a site of notoriety, danger and criminality, Tecle begins with the contentious assertion that in an ostensibly white country that touts its history of multicultural benevolence Jane and Finch is also known as a Black community. Rather than dispute this assertion, Tecle’s project begins from there, thinking and working from that Blackness asserting that Jane and Finch – this Black community in white Canada – teaches us much about Canadian urban development, resident-led community mobilization and the right not only to the city but to life. Thinking Black is core and integral to that understanding.

Emmanuel Kyeremeh, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies

In his work entitled Immigrants’ Network in Canada, The Case of Ghanaian Immigrants’ Personal Network in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area, Kyeremeh interrogates the construction, composition, and rationale behind the personal networks of recent immigrants to Canada. Drawing on egocentric-network analysis and interviews with 172 Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto, Kyeremeh reveals their networking strategies during their integration. The nature of this network is explained by examining the migration project of immigrants together with the context of reception in Canada, which suggests a desire by immigrants to stay in Canada and make Canada their second home. These findings have implications for their successful integration in Canada. 

Angela Doku, Department of Economics

Angela Doku was a leading contributor to  (PDF file) “The Case for Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) in the Upper West Region of Ghana” project (external link) . This research assesses the impact of peer choices on the decision to adapt to climate change in rural Ethiopia. Through the use of a 3-year panel of farmers in the Nile Basin region, researcher found that peer choices positively affect the uptake of different adaptation strategies. This emphasizes the importance of social networks to achieve adaptation to climate change in sub-Saharan Africa.

Marie Christelle Mabeu, Department of Economics 

Marie Christelle Mabeu’s primary research agenda explores the long-run impact of historical and contemporary institutions on reproductive behaviour, early-age human capital accumulation and female empowerment, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa (external link) . In her interview with the International Economic Association, Mabeu discusses her research and the importance of racial diversity and inclusion in economics research. 

Anan Xola Lololi, School of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation

 (PDF file) Policy Paper on Black Food Sovereignty (external link) 

Anan Xola Lololi is a Food Policy Fellow for the School of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation, a food justice advocate and a policy leader.  

Black food sovereignty challenges global systems of exploitation that have historically denied Black communities control over their land, labor, and food production. As a response to industrial agriculture and food apartheid, Black farmers and activists worldwide advocate for sustainable, community-based food systems rooted in ancestral knowledge and self-determination. This movement spans the African diaspora, linking struggles from the U.S. to the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, where food justice efforts resist corporate dominance and promote cultural and economic sovereignty. 

Hyacinth Simpson, Department of English

From 2005 to 2014,  Simpson was the Editor of MaComère, the peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars. Under her editorship, MaComère won the Horizon Award (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) Simpson formerly organized a SSHRC-funded international conference Caribbean Migrations: Negotiating Borders. 

Simpson was the principal investigator on the multitiered SRC social history project Black Canada and the Great War, which includes the eponymously titled SSHRC-funded Symposium (2021).

Melanie Knight, Department of Sociology

Black communities have consistently mobilized through activism and organizations to fight for social change. While well-documented groups like the UNIA and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters are recognized, this project explores lesser-known Black-led organizations in Canada, analyzing their creation, initiatives, tactics, challenges, and impact. Using a critical race and resource mobilization framework, it examines how financial insecurity, bureaucratic surveillance, and state interference have hindered Black movements. Despite systemic barriers, these organizations exemplify Black Canadians’ enduring struggle for equity and self-determination.

Melanie Knight, Department of Sociology

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Department of English

The Black Archival: Routes & Risings (external link)  project, spearheaded by Melanie Knight and Anne-Marie Lee-Loy aims to collect, preserve and steward archival materials important to the history of Black people in Canada and globally. The genesis of the project is rooted in the unacknowledged richness of archival materials encapsulating Black histories dispersed among various Black communities and organizations nationwide.

Ndeye Ba, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Ndeye Ba, along with Melanie Knight is researching and writing about a little known publication called Mapou which was published in 1977 by Haitians living in Ottawa, Canada. Although the archival record is only of two issues, the Canadian publication reveals interesting reflections from a Haitian diasporic community wrestling with ideas of identity, belonging, power and oppression. 

Rai Reece, Department of Sociology

Reece examines how carceral processes in Canada are shaped by historical and contemporary narratives of colonial violence (external link) , particularly concerning anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. She examines the intersection of punishment and misogynoir as enacted through governance and white settler capitalism.

Stephanie Latty, Department of Criminology

Latty examines the media and legal discourses surrounding Black women and girls who have experienced strip-searching and other forms of state violence in Canada.

Sam Tecle, Department of Sociology

Tecle argues that surveillance, particularly increased CCTV surveillance in Black and racialized neighbourhoods perpetuates racial profiling and policing injustices (external link)  rather than addressing systemic issues like poverty, housing, and access to resources, while critics link the initiative to broader patterns of gentrification and displacement.

Lahoma Thomas, Department of Criminology

Thomas focuses on political violence, organized crime, non-state governance, and collective political struggle in the Americas, analyzed through a transnational Black feminist perspective.