Our Academic Advisory Committee

York University, Critical Disability Studies

Rachel da Silveira Gorman is Associate Professor and former Program Director in the Graduate Program in Critical Disability Studies at York University. Gorman is an interdisciplinary disability studies scholar working across fine arts, humanities, and the sciences. Gorman’s current projects focus on critical race studies and anticolonial aesthetics; data justice and co-design; community-based AI applications; environmental justice and climate science; research-creation; disability arts; dance and VR; screendance; biochemical and cellular mechanisms of health inequity; embodied and community-based aesthetics; dialectics of disability and disablement; and social movement learning.

University of Toronto, Critical Disability Studies and Health Equity

Chavon is a Guyanese Canadian community-based researcher. She holds a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where her doctoral thesis explored the experiences of racialized immigrant youth with disabilities living in the Greater Toronto Area to better understand how they navigated education, rehab/health, and social services drawing on critical social theories. Her academic and community research and teaching intersect as she makes visible systems of inequities embedded in rehab, health and social services that further invisiblize the experiences of underserved communities.  Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, cross appointed in the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.

Toronto Metropolitan University, Disability Studies

Dr. Idil Abdillahi is an assistant professor in the School of Disability Studies, cross-appointed to the School of Social Work, and the advisor to the dean on Anti-Black racism at the Faculty of Community Services (2020-2021). Dr. Abdillahi is a critical Black Interdisciplinary scholar, researcher, policy analyst, grassroots organizer, and experienced practitioner across healthcare, institutional, policy, and social service settings. She is the author of Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty & the Violence of Social Assistance, (2022), author of Blackened Madness: Medicalization, and Black Everyday Life in Canada (forthcoming), co-author of BlackLife: Post-BLM and The Struggle For Freedom, (2019), and a co-editor of the forthcoming edition of Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian mad studies.

Simon Fraser University, Anthropology

Dr. Parin Dossa, Emerita Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, received her education on three continents: Africa, Europe, and North America. Her published works include: Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work (2017, ed. Dossa, Parin and Coe, Cati), Afghanistan Remembers: (2014), Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: (2009), Politics and Poetics of Migration: (2004). The Circle Unfolds: Envisioning Social Justice from the Margins, 2023 (graphics/C. Corden), Social Palliation: Canadian Muslims’ Storied Lives on Living and Dying (2020), nominated for New Millennium Book Award, Society for Medical Anthropology.

University of Calgary, Social Work

Yahya El-Lahib is an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary. His research and teachings question the operation of coloniality and colonial powers that manifest through dominant knowledge and culture. Situated within disability justice, critical migration and refugee studies, Yahya’s academic and community work focuses on disability activism and centers on the intersection of disability and displacement to challenge the racist, ableist and colonial construction disabled displaced populations. His current research focuses on interrogating social work’s role in facilitating coloniality and white supremacy that manifest through neoliberal and neocolonial professional spaces.