Reimagining Equity in Global Health Research: Power, Principles, and Possibilities!

Funke Oba is a professor and graduate program director in the School of Social Work at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and an adjunct professor with University of Regina and Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU). Oba promotes reciprocal North-South collaborations and anti-colonial, contextualized social work practice. She is a member of the academic network of York University’s YouthREX youth research hub and advisor/director of several youth-serving organizations. Oba founded CARE for Black youth Waterloo in 2015. Her research and practice interests include anti-Black racism, racial justice, community action, Black youth educational outcomes, child welfare, and domestic violence prevention framed by a cultural capital lens. Oba, who has received teaching awards from TMU and WLU, engages actively in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her work as an African Diaspora visiting scholar and Carnegie fellow at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, underscores the international relevance of her scholarship.

Henry Parada is a cross-appointed professor at TMU’s School of Social Work and the immigration and settlement studies graduate program. His experience includes working in the Caribbean, Central America and their respective diaspora populations in Canada on issues surrounding child protection, human rights, youth participation, and the settlement and resettlement of immigrant and refugee populations. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses at TMU and was a regular lecturer at universities in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Argentina. His research interests include immigration, children and youth’s rights, international cooperation, institutional practices, diasporas and refugees. He has published in the area of child protection and governance of workers and clients, institutional ethnography, the construction of subject locations, and community social work. He has co-edited two books on anti-oppressive research and practice. Presently, Parada is the principal investigator of a seven-year project working with six Central American and Caribbean countries and their diasporas in Canada in areas of youth immigration, child welfare and violence against youth.

Josephine Pui-Hing Wong holds the positions of professor and research chair in urban health in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at TMU. Her teaching and research focus on social justice and health equity locally and globally. She has extensive experiences in community-based action research and capacity building initiatives. She is currently leading numerous interventions and implementation research on stigma reduction and collective empowerment with Asian, Black, and Latinx communities in Canada, and university students in China. 

Mónica Ruiz-Casares is a professor in the School of Child and Youth Care at TMU and adjunct professor of psychiatry and in the School of Social Work at McGill University. She is a credentialed evaluator, member of the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association, and co-chair of the International Society for Child Indicators. For over 25 years, she has led mixed-methods research and evaluation on child protection and wellbeing internationally, mainly with migrants and refugees, in low- and middle-income countries, and in contexts of parent-child separation including child-headed households, children home alone, in institutions, or in other alternative care arrangements. She is particularly interested in ethical and methodological issues involved in global health and protection research with and by young people.