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A close-up headshot of Kisha McPherson smiling person with curly, maroon-coloured hair swept to one side. She is wearing a black turtleneck and a grey patterned jacket.

Kisha McPherson

Associate Professor

Biography

Dr. Kisha McPherson is an Associate Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University's Creative School, where her research, teaching, and public scholarship sit at intersections of communication, education, cultural studies, and critical race theory. 

Dr. McPherson is the Faculty Lead of the Children's Media Lab and past resident in the Catalyst Research Residency Program (2023-2026). Her scholarship integrates Black feminist epistemologies, anti-colonial education practices, and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) to examine Black youth media engagement, Black girlhood, digital culture, popular culture, and platform technologies. Her scholarship on creative methods and gaming extends digital media inquiries to centre Black youth as knowledge holders and world builders to examine the tensions and possibilities through which young people negotiate identity, belonging, and cultural presence within and across digital and community spaces. 

Her SSHRC-funded research portfolio includes Black Culture/Pop Culture (BCPC), a youth-centred initiative examining creative world-building as a site of cultural production and resistance; Mapping Black Girlhood Geographies, a qualitative study of Black girls' experiences of belonging in Canada, leading to Vibrant Visions: The Art of Black Girlhood in Canada, an exhibition and archive of Black girls creative works from the project. Her most recent partnership with the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies advances collaborative scholarship on digital cultural sovereignty, examining how youth communities across the African diaspora navigate, resist, and reimagine their identity within global digital media landscapes. 

Across these projects, Dr. McPherson brings together community-engaged research, creative methods, critical race analysis, media and communication scholarship to centre Black youth voices within and beyond the academy.

  • Black feminist scholarship - using Black feminist epistemologies, I explore topics and issues related to cultural studies and media studies, to contextualize experiences of Black youth on topics within these fields.
  • Interdisciplinary education - as a trained educator, my research often intersects with education. Focusing on generally on youth, education, media, and culture, often converge and overlap as areas of focus in research on youth communities.
  • Community engaged scholarship - focusing on the experiences of Black people in my research, I use community based and embedded methods for research practices and analysis, which centre on the voice and priorities of community members on the central topic and issues.
  • Platform capitalism - examining how digital platforms shape and extract value from cultural production, I study the ways Black and Caribbean communities navigate, shape, and protect their cultural narratives within these systems.
  • Creative interventions - drawing on methods such as game design, world-building, and speculative storytelling, I work alongside youth to critically engage AI and emerging technologies and to imagine alternative digital futures.

Articles

  • McPherson, K. (2024). Children in Cuffs: Black girlhood in the wake of enslavement in North America. Childhood.
  • McPherson, K. (2022).  “The teacher said nothing”: Black girls on the prevalence of Anti-Black racism in Greater Toronto Area (GTA) schools. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (JAAACS). 
  • Kisha McPherson. (2021). Are We Free To Go? Anti-Black Racism and its Impact on Play. American Journal of Play. 13(2 and 3)
  • Kisha McPherson. (2020). Black girls are not magic; they are human: Intersectionality and inequity in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) schools. Curriculum Inquiry.
  • McPherson, K., Webster, C. & Chanelle Perrier-Telemaque (Under Review). Belonging on the Margins: Black Girls and the limits to Canadian multicultural inclusion. Special issue: Immigrant Diaspora and the Future Dimensions of Canadian Multiculturalism. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, University of Toronto Press 

Book Chapters

  • Brady, J., & McPherson, K. (2025). Dedicated to Black mothers and Black daughters: A Black feminist approach to duo-ethnography. In Mullings, E., Adelakun, O., and V. Mullings, D (Eds.). In Her Arms: Love and legacy of Black mothers and daughters. Demeter Press.
  • McPherson, K., & Perrier-Telemaque, C. (2024). Who is Entitled to Childhood: Black girls and the struggle against racial bias in Canadian Schools. In Beyond Innocence: Refusing the Limits of Contemporary Childhood. Rowman & Littlefield. 
  • Kisha McPherson. (2020). We Need a Seat at the Table”: Black Girls Using New Media to Construct Black Identity.Aria S. Halliday. The Black Girlhood Studies Collection. : 235-256. Published, Women's Press
  • Black Girls in White Spaces: Identity, intersectionality and the Perpetual Search for Humanity. (In Press) N. Wane, J. Brady, & E. Odozor. In My Sisters’ House – Black Feminisms in Canada and Beyond.
  • McPherson, K. Securing Black futures through intentional spaces for transformation: Black youth’s educational influences and directions in the GTA. In C. James & A. Forde (Eds.), Securing Black Futures in Canada (Vol. 1). University of Toronto Press. 

Presentations

  • July 2026 -  Digital identities and intersectional considerations: Black youth media engagement in the GTA [Conference presentation]. International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) 2026 Conference, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland.
  • June 2026 -  Collaborative methodologies for Caribbean digital cultural studies [Conference presentation]. In K. McPherson & P. Prendergast (Organizers), Digital worlds, cultural sovereignty, and collaborative knowledge creation: Jamaican influencers as cultural archivists [Panel]. Caribbean Studies Association 50th Annual Conference, Kingston, Jamaica.
  • April 2026 - Digital identities and intersectional considerations: Black youth media engagement in the GTA [Conference presentation]. Child & Teen Consumption Conference, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
  • July 2024 - Engaging Culturally Relevant Approaches in Media Literacy – For and By Black Youth in Toronto. Conference presentation at IAMCR 2024, Whiria Te Tāngata: Weaving People Together, Christchurch, New Zealand.
  • June 2024 - Black Canadian Girlhood & Beyond: Moving from the margins into the centre. Conference presentation at Gender Education Association (GEA), “Be the Change”, Charles Sturt University, Port Macquarie, Australia.
  • June 2024 - Mapping Black Girlhoods within a Canadian Context. Conference presentation at The Department of Childhood Studies Conference, “Visions of Racial Justice and Childhood”, Rutgers University, New Jersey.
  • October 2021 - Canadian Perspectives: Navigating the margins of Black girl geographies. Locating the Geographies of Black Girlhoods in Education. Virtual Conference Black Girlhood Education Research Collective (BGERC) and American Educational Research Association (AERA), Virtual, United States
  • June 2021 - Black Girls and the Impact of Adultification Bias in a Canadian Context. Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Virtual, Canada
  • April 2019 - Educating Black Girls. Black Feminist Pedagogy and the Oppositional Gaze.  Global Girlhoods: From Imaginings to Embodied Experiences (Keynote). Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden.