Advisory Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Policy

Joël Dickinson was appointed president and vice-chancellor of Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) on July 1, 2022. Before joining MSVU, Dickinson was dean of the Faculty of Arts at Laurentian University and also held the positions of acting associate vice-president of Teaching and Learning (2020-21), and chair of the university’s Department of Psychology.

She has held a leadership role with the Laurentian University Sexuality and Gender Diversity Committee and was a long-standing member of the Presidential Advisory Committee for the Status of Women. She also served as an ex officio member of the Laurentian University Native Education Council, through which she has had the honour of learning from the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek First Nations People.

Born and raised in New Brunswick, the traditional unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) and Mi’kmaq Peoples, she continues to learn the history, traditions, and ways of knowing of these and other cultures as they contribute to the extended community and to her personal growth.

Barrington Walker is a professor of history and Vice-Provost of Equity and Inclusion at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in Canadian history from the University of Toronto and specializes in the histories of Black Canada, race, the racial state, migration and law. He has written and edited three books and has two others in progress. His long-standing interest in the racial state has him more recently also turning to scholarly interest in equity, diversity and inclusion; and diversity, equity and inclusion. He is vice-chair (and chair elect) of the board of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a member of the Inter-Institutional Steering Committee of the Scarborough Charter on anti-Black racism and Black inclusion.

Diyan Achjadi is currently the interim vice-president Academic, and provost of the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. They joined ECUAD in 2005 as faculty in Print Media, and have served in progressively senior administrative roles, including assistant dean, Decolonial Methodologies + Foundation, and interim dean of the Faculty of Culture and Community.

A fellow of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, Achjadi’s artistic research and practice in drawing, printmaking and animation has been exhibited internationally, and recognized by a VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation (2021). Achjadi holds an MFA in studio arts from Concordia University, Montreal, and a BFA in fine arts from the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.

Maydianne Andrade is a university professor, the University of Toronto’s highest academic rank. Her award-winning research on links between reproduction, behaviour, and diversity within and across species uses widow spiders as models and is based at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). A former Canada Research Chair in Integrative Behavioural Ecology, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and of the Animal Behaviour Society. Professor Andrade’s leadership roles at the university include terms as acting vice principal academic and dean and vice dean of Faculty Affairs & Equity at UTSC.

At a national level, Andrade sits on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Council of Canadian Academies, and on the board of Support Our Science. She also chairs the national Killam Selection Committee, working with National Research Council staff to implement new guidelines for adjudication of the Killam Prize and Dorothy Killam Fellowships. In 2016, Andrade founded the Toronto Initiative for Diversity and Excellence (TIDE), a multidisciplinary group of faculty who provide counsel, talks and workshops on increasing equity, diversity and inclusive practices across scholarly fields in the academy. In the past eight years, TIDE has welcomed thousands of colleagues into conversations about inclusive practices based on translating insights from the literature into practical advice geared to the academic context. As a co-founder and inaugural President of the Canadian Black Scientists Network, Andrade leads a national coalition supporting the success and inclusion of Black trainees, researchers and practitioners in STEM. Now representing over 700 members and elected allies across the country, the network was named a Community Champion by the Black North Initiative in 2023.

Katie Aubrecht is Canada Research Chair in Health Equity and Social Justice and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. Aubrecht completed a PhD in sociology of education in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute of Education, University of Toronto. As director of the Spatializing Care: Intersectional Disability Studies Lab, Aubrecht leads a participatory action research and training program on equity and accessibility science. Aubrecht is an alumnus of the inaugural cohort of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (IHSPR) Health System Impact Fellows and current chair the IHSPR Institute Advisory Board, which she joined in 2019. Aubrecht is also a member of the CIHR External Advisory Committee on Accessibility and Systemic Ableism. She is an associate scientist with the Maritime Strategy for Patient Oriented Research SUPPORT Unit (MSSU) and was MSSU’s equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility Science Lead from 2021-23. She has served as president and executive board member of the Canadian Disability Studies Association and as board director for Eviance (incorporated as Canadian Centre on Disability Studies) and Mental Health Research Canada, as well as associate editor of Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal. Additional information is at Spatializing Care Lab.

Tammy Bernasky is an assistant professor in the Department of L’nu, Political and Social Studies at Cape Breton University. Born and raised in Cape Breton, she has life-long experience of disability and more than 25 years of experience working on disability inclusion efforts at the local, national and international levels.

Bernasky completed her PhD in critical disability studies at York University, in 2020, where she focused on the intersections of gender-based violence and disability. In 2022, she published her research in the book Working to End Gender-Based Violence in the Disability Community: International Perspectives. Recognizing that historically disability has largely been ignored, erased or medicalized, she centres the stories of diverse people with disabilities in her research, which currently extends into areas related to human rights, policy, and the various social determinants of health.

Bernasky is currently working with the Nova Scotia League for Equal Opportunities on the development of a Quality of Life Index for Persons with Disabilities that will be used by disability organizations, the Nova Scotia Government, Prescribed Public Sector Bodies, and other stakeholders to monitor the protection of human rights of people with disabilities and the implementation of the Nova Scotia Accessibility Act.

Andrea Doucet is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care, a professor in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock University, and an adjunct professor at Carleton University and the University of Victoria. She has published widely on care ethics, feminist ecological epistemologies, parental leave policies, paid and unpaid work in diverse Canadian families, fathering, genealogies of concepts, and the Listening Guide approach to narrative analysis. Her first book is the award-winning Do Men Mother? (University of Toronto Press, 2006, 2018) and her most recent is a co-edited collection entitled Thinking Ecologically, Thinking Responsibly: The Legacies of Lorraine Code (SUNY, 2021). Her latest collaborations include research led by Black and Indigenous collaborators with community organizations on young Black motherhood, Indigenous approaches to paid and unpaid work, and feminist, ecological, and Indigenous approaches to care ethics. She is the project director and principal investigator of the Canadian SSHRC Partnership program Reimagining Care/Work Policies and co-coordinator of the International Network on Leave Policies & Research.

Julie Gauthier has a master’s degree in geography and has taught anthropology in the college network since 1995. At Collège Ahuntsic, she is a faculty adviser in the equity, diversity and inclusion service. Her institution is home to a diverse community of students, more than half of whom come from immigrant and newcomer families.

For the past 20 years, Gauthier has been involved in projects building closer relationships with Indigenous Peoples, including the Rencontres autochtones decolonization retreat, co-designed with members of the Atikamekw of Opitciwan community, for social sciences and humanities students. The program offers a direct, immersive experience in the Nitaskinan. In recent years, she has drawn on her experience and lasting relationships with a number of Indigenous communities to drive institutional Indigenization and decolonization based on reciprocity, listening and concerted action.

Gauthier is the founder and coordinator of the Rassemblement pédagogique sur l’autochtonisation, a symposium addressing Indigenization in education. This annual event gathers between 300 and 400 educators from colleges and universities to amplify and uplift the voices and perspectives of Indigenous Peoples, thereby helping to define how to collectively take transformative action in education.

Since 2023, through the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Gauthier and her team have been working to develop a research and support centre focusing on decolonizing and Indigenizing initiatives and the application of these initiatives to other educational institutions and agencies.

As an anthropologist and educator, teaching is one of Gauthier’s top priorities. In the classroom, she is dedicated to exploring the practical side of decolonization, with a particular focus on its transformative impacts, and the resistance it may face at times.

In recent years, Gauthier has been involved in creating teaching and research projects, including the “Portail (auto)éducatif Je te vois, je t’entends, je t’écoute […],” an equity, diversity and inclusion portal that equips teachers to develop approaches that help students feel safe.

She also helped develop an instructional guide for Quebec was born in my country, a graphic novel by Emanuelle Dufour in partnership with the Kiuna Institution.

Gauthier has served several times as one of the coordinators for the Department of Social Sciences and has been a member of the board of directors for Collège Ahuntsic since 2020.

Merlyna Lim is Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society within the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. An ALiGN Media Lab founder/director, Merlyna Lim’s research interests revolve around the mutual shaping of technology and society, focusing particularly on digital media and information technology (including social media, data, algorithms and AI) and their implications for justice, equality, democracy and citizen engagement. Among her notable publications are Roots, Routes, Routers: Communication and Media of Contemporary Social Movements (2018) and Online Collective Action: Dynamics of the Crowds in Social Media (2014). An award-winning scholar, in 2016 Lim was inducted to the Royal Society of Canada‘s New College of Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Lim draws theories and methodologies from diverse fields such as science and technology studies, sociology, critical media studies, and information science. Her research is grounded in empirical investigations in the Global South, primarily Southeast Asia. Lim is dedicated to challenging knowledge hierarchies and epistemic injustices by prioritizing the Global South as both a primary research site and a source for innovative methods, conceptual frameworks, and theoretical interventions.

Growing up in Dayeuhkolot, an industrial slum in Indonesia marked by widespread societal marginalization and exclusion, Lim is committed to addressing issues of justice and inequality throughout her academic career and research endeavours.

Susan Prentice is the Duff Roblin Professor of Government at the University of Manitoba and is a professor of sociology. She specializes in work-family, social care and social movements, with a focus on childcare policy. She practices public sociology and is a long-time contributor to childcare advocacy and to feminist organizations. In 2003, she was one of the eight faculty members who launched a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission about systemic discrimination in the Canada Research Chairs Program.

Annie Pullen Sansfaçon is a professor with the Université de Montréal’s school of social work, and the Canada Research Chair in Partnership Research and the Empowerment of Vulnerable Youth (CRC-ReParE, Tier 1). Since 2023, she has also served as associate vice-rector for Relations with First Peoples. In 2020, she co-founded the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la justice intersectionnelle, la décolonisation et l’équité (CRI-JaDE). Her research has received widespread recognition for significantly contributing to developing knowledge and promoting social change in Quebec, Canada and around the world. Sansfaçon has also been appointed associate research fellow at Stellenbosh University in South Africa through 2025.

Momin Rahman is a professor of Sociology at Trent University in Canada. His current research is on the international conflicts over LGBTQ2S identities and rights, including a particular focus on Muslim cultures, and the experiences of LGBTQ2S Muslims in Canada, with a book, Queer/Muslim/Canadian, to be published 2024.

He has presented this work at international academic conferences and at private policy meetings, including the United Nations Human Rights Office and Global Affairs Canada. He has published over 40 chapters and articles, as well as four books: The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics (2020, co-edited with Michael Bosia and Sandra McEvoy, Oxford University Press), Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), Gender and Sexuality (2010, with Stevi Jackson, Polity) and Sexuality and Democracy (2000, Edinburgh University Press). He has also published work on the difficulties of recognizing systemic racism in the academic profession, and served as the Equity Committee co-chair for the national Canadian Association of University Teachers from 2018-22, helping to develop an equity toolkit during that time. 

He also serves as an associate editor for the journals Global Social Challenges and Development in Practice.

In 2023, he received the Eminent Scholar Award from the LGBTQ Caucus of the International Studies Association.

As a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah First Nation) writer and artist, Dylan Robinson’s work prioritizes Indigenous resurgence. He holds an appointment as associate dean, Equity, in the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia (UBC), and associate professor in UBC’s School of Music. From 2015 to 2022 he was a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University.

Robinson’s work takes various forms, including creative writing, curation and inter-arts practices. Much of his research has examined the appropriation of Indigenous song in contemporary classical music, and artistic practices of repatriation and redress. This work has been recognized by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book Award and Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award (Hungry Listening, 2020), and the American Musicological Society’s Ruth Solie Award and Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ellen Koskoff Prize (Music and Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples in North America, 2019). Continuing this work, Robinson co-chairs the Indigenous Advisory Council of the Canadian Music Centre, that seeks to redress the appropriation of Indigenous song and misrepresentation of Indigenous culture in Canadian classical music.

Louis-Martin Rousseau has been a professor at Polytechnique Montreal for 20 years, where his research explores the frontier of artificial intelligence, operations research, and management science. His work focuses on combinatorial optimization, solving problems related to transportation logistics, personnel scheduling, and health-care resource optimization. Since 2016, he has held the Canada Research Chair in Health Care Logistics (HANALOG), which focuses on developing a new generation of optimization algorithms to solve health care’s descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytic problems. As personalized medicine continues to emerge and develop, there will be enormous challenges in the interaction between individual treatment planning and execution regarding limited and expensive medical resources. In particular, the Chair intends to research areas where population aging will have a big impact: cancer treatment, home-care services, and hospital logistics.

Paulette Steeves, PhD (Cree- Metis), is an Indigenous archaeologist. She was born in Whitehorse, Yukon Territories, and grew up in Lillooet, Canada, British Columbia. She is a first-generation college graduate. Steeves received her BA in anthropology, Honors Cum Laude, from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 2000. In 2008, Steeves was awarded the Clifford D. Clark fellowship for attending graduate studies at Binghamton University in New York State; she successfully defended her dissertation in 2015. Steeves has taught anthropology and archaeology courses in Canada and the United States, focusing on Native American and First Nations histories and the decolonization of academia and knowledge production. She is currently an associate professor and department chair of Sociology-Anthropology and a faculty member in the Geography Geology and Land Management Program at Algoma University, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous History Healing and Reconciliation. Steeves’s primary research is focused on the Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere and healing and reconciliation. Steeves argues that Indigenous Peoples were present in the Western Hemisphere as early as 130,000 years before the present and possibly much earlier. Her book, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, published in 2021, won the American Library Association Choice 2022 Outstand Academic Title Award. Steeves has authored numerous articles and book chapters in collected editions. She built a database of Residential Schools, Indian Day Schools and Indian Hospitals in Canada online at CRSCID.com and a database of Pleistocene archaeology sites in the Americas. The Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas is online at TIPDBA.ca.

Shirley Anne Tate’s area of research is Black diaspora studies broadly and her research interests are institutional racism, the body, affect, beauty, hybridity, “race” performativity and Caribbean decolonial studies, while paying attention to the intersections of “race” and gender. Her current Canada Research Chair research project is on antiracism and decolonization in universities. She is an honorary professor, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, affiliated to CriSHET, and a visiting professor in the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality, Leeds Beckett University, United Kingdom.

Joaquín Trapero is the director of Strategic Research Initiatives at the University of Victoria, where he has served in a number of roles pertaining to strategic planning, institutional research initiatives, and knowledge mobilization since joining in 2006. Responsible for developing and overseeing the university’s strategic research plan, Trapero has an interest in how universities can make a difference in the most pressing challenges of our world, in ways that are inclusive and respect diversity. For more than 15 years, Trapero has managed Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat and the Canada Foundation for Innovation programs, building equity, diversity and inclusion capacity at the institutional level to develop and implement equity, diversity and inclusion action plans for Canada Research Chairs, Canada Excellence Research Chairs, Canada First Research Excellence Fund, and Canada150 Research Chairs initiatives.

Trapero has a PhD in astrophysics and a BSc in mathematics. Prior to joining the University of Victoria, Trapero was a scientist in interstellar medium and space technologies, a university teacher, and an innovation manager in the private sector.

Kristopher Wells (he/him) is an associate professor in the Department of Child and Youth Care, Faculty of Health and Community Studies at MacEwan University. Currently, he holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier II) for the Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth. Wells also serves as the founding director for the MacEwan Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity. His scholarly work specializes in sexual and gender minority youth, health, education, sport and culture. Wells is one of the driving forces behind the creation of many ground-breaking initiatives, including PrideTape, Camp fYrefly, the Edmonton Queer History Project, and the Alberta GSA Conference and Network. Wells is a frequently invited national and international speaker on sexual and gender minority youth issues. He has served as an expert scientific consultant to the Government of Canada, Canadian Senate, Canadian Museum of Human Rights, Canadian Teachers’ Federation, RCMP, Public Health Agency of Canada, UNESCO, World Health Organization, and many provincial and municipal governments across Canada. Wells currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the international Journal of LGBT Youth, which is the world’s leading research publication on 2SLGBTQ+ youth. His work has been recognized with over 50 scholarly and community awards and recognitions, including the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s Public Education Award, the University of Alberta’s Alumni Horizon Award, the Alberta Centennial Medallion, and the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal.