PhD Student Profiles

Joy Addae-Madzi

Research Interests / Specializations: Feminist disability theories, Post-conflict Reconstruction and Transitional Justice.

Sophie Apps

Research Interests / Specializations: Sophie Mae Apps (she/her) focuses on the evolving portrayal of "girlhood" in Western popular culture from the 2000s to the 2020s. Her research interests include girlhood, popular music, television, social media trends, consumerism, disrupted temporality, sexuality, and queerness.

Florence Anfaara

Research Interests / Specializations: Thesis: Grassroots Peace-building in a Post conflict Society: Liberian women’s activism in Peace Huts.

Arpana Awwal

Research Interests / Specializations: gender representation in South Asian popular culture and cinema; men and masculinity in post-conflict communities; gender and humanitarian aid organizations; gender and transitional justice. Thesis: The Question of Masculinity in Humanitarian Assistance and Transitional Justice Mechanisms in Refugee Camps in Bangladesh: The Case of the Rohingya Refugee Men.

Sydney Brouillard-Coyle

Research Interests / Specializations: Transgender Liberation, Asexuality, Queer Studies, Feminist Community Care, Arts-Based Activism, Queer Social Justice, Queer Literature, Queer Education.

Andrea Burke

Research Interests / Specializations: gender equality, pandemics, gender-based violence, international development, decent work, non-governmental organizations, public policy, women’s work, social cohesion, feminist international relations, feminist political economy. Thesis topic: COVID-19, gender equality, and frontline work.
Teaching: GSWS 1020E Intro to Women's Studies

Peyton Campbell

Research Interests / Specializations: queer ecology, gender and the environment, queer temporalities, sexual violence prevention, the politics of reproduction, and gender and labour.

Emily Carrothers

Research Interests / Specializations: Thesis: (De)constructing Graduate Social Work Education: Understanding Orientations to Poverty and Marginalization in Canada.

Hale Doguoglu

Research Interests / Specializations: Feminist ethics; feminist epistemology; feminist moral psychology; institutional (dis)trust within the context of marginalization; collective trauma and trust.

Kasey Egan

Research Interests / Specializations: sexual and gender-based violence, critical media studies & pop culture, violence in family structures, trauma studies, & front-line feminist communities. Thesis topic: Experiencing, Witnessing, Reporting: Teaching Assistants Institutional Knowledge of Sexual and Gender Based Violence in Canada.
Teaching: GSWS 2161B Women and Popular Culture; GSWS 2163A Sex, How To: Sex Ed

Jill Madelynne Hoffman

Research Interests / Specializations: Feminist disability studies, feminist pedagogy, arts based research, and death and dying.
Biography: Thesis topic: Picturing Disbility: Narrative Resistance in Autobiographical Comics and Zines

Arun Jentrick

Research Interests / Specializations: Arun's PhD dissertation delves into the challenges encountered by women-headed households (WHHs) in post-conflict Sri Lanka. Focusing on diverse ethnicities, his research identifies and compares challenges, explores opportunities, and suggests interventions. Arun's work addresses the scarcity of empirical data, contributing valuable insights for post-conflict settings globally. His findings aim to inform Canadian foreign policy and humanitarian assistance strategies.

Andrea Keber

Research Interests / Specializations: Language use, communication, representation, and knowledge transmission over time amongst queer and feminist folk of different generations in a Canadian context; queer temporalities; queer words/queer worlds; lesbian feminism.

Cynthia Lam

Research Interests / Specializations: ecological studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, popular culture, technoscience, posthumanism. Thesis topic: the potential coalition between ecofeminisms and queer ecologies.

Kat Newman

Research Interests / Specializations: Kat's research looks at how climate change effects transgender individuals through quantitative and qualitative methods. Namely, looking into health outcomes, urbanization, and vulnerability risk in social-ecological-geographical terms. Their work draws upon social and queer ecologies viewed through one lens.

Nancy Osei-Kye

Research Interests / Specializations: Decolonial theories and epistemologies, African women, Gender and Sexual-Based Violence. Thesis: Centering African Women in Discourses on Campus Sexual Violence.

Victoria Ocran

Research Interests / Specializations: Climate Change and Food/Water Insecurity || Women’s Reproductive and Maternal Health || Sanitation and Waste Management|| Physical and Sexual Violence.

Michael Osei

Research Interests / Specializations: Indigenous Female healers and their contributions to the Traditional Medical System of Ghana, Female Education, Welfare and Community Development in Colonial Ghana. Queer History of Indigenous African Societies.

Jennifer Marie Shaw

Research Interests / Specializations: Thesis: Canadian Jewish Women and the War Effort, 1939-1945.

Melanie Stone

Research Interests / Specializations: Thesis: Making her life work: Re-presenting motherhood, disability and employment engagement with photovoice.

Shambhavi Siddhi

Research Interests / Specializations: My research focuses on the resistance movements of Kashmiri women and how they challenge the Indian occupation in Jammu and Kashmir. My research interests include decolonial studies, resistance studies, South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, and conflict and genocide studies. Thesis: Epistemic Resistance: Kashmiri Women and India’s Femonationalist Project in Jammu and Kashmir.

Mehnaz Tabassum

Research Interests / Specializations: I am a first-generation immigrant in Canada from Bangladesh. My research examines the experiences of academic immigrants in North America, with a focus on their trailing partners and their trials and challenges as family members and mothers in the process of migration.

Akola Thompson

Research Interests / Specializations: Akola Thompson is a feminist organizer and researcher guided by intersectional Black Caribbean praxis. She holds a MSc in Sustainable Development from the University of Sussex. Her PhD research interests at Western University explore the intersections of care work, Indigenous food security, and feminist economies.