Meet the research team

Co-Principal Investigators

Willow-Samara Allen PhD (she/her) is a white settler living on the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, the Songhees & Esquimalt Nations, where she is an Associate Professor at Royal Roads University. An interdisciplinary scholar with a background in education, political science and public administration, her work centres on antiracist and anticolonial pedagogies and methods for adult learning and anti-hierarchical leadership. Her other research attends to disinvesting in institutionalized white settler womanhood and carceral logics (SSHRC-IDG, 2025-2028), Re-Storying Jewish Relationships to Community, Self, and Place: Interrogations of Settler Colonialism, Zionism, Israel and Canada (Allen & Levkoe, forthcoming, AU Press), and co-cultivating an emergent ocean methodology with Chaw-win-is.

Nisha Nath (she/they) is a racialized settler whose family comes from diverse social locations in India. She is an Associate Professor, Equity Studies at Athabasca University and is based in Treaty 6 in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). Trained as a political scientist, she takes a critical approach to citizenship, focusing on the politics of race and racism in and across custodial/carceral spaces. She collaborates on the Insurgent and Resurgent Knowledges Lab (IRKlab.ca) alongside coauthors (Davina Bhandar, Rita Dhamoon and Anita Girvan ) of her forthcoming book, The Letters: Institutional Lives and EDI (Fernwood, 2026) .

Graduate Research Assistants

Alexondra (she/her) is a white settler of mostly Irish descent, studying a Master of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. She has experience working on the frontlines of the war on drugs, and her research interests include settler state abolition, harm reduction, and community forms of resistance & care.

Yunhui (she/her) is grateful to live, study, and work on the lands of Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples while pursuing her PhD at the University of Victoria. Influenced by her own lived migratory experiences and observation of those around her, she is interested in how social injustices are produced, experienced, and contested during migration. Her research spans labour activism, care activism, and marriage migration.

Evelyn (she/her) is a MAIS student in Heritage & Social History at Athabasca University. She works as a collections technician at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and lives in the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe. Her research interests include museology, material culture, and history. She is invested in studying what objects reveal about the past and what modern heritage practice reveals about the present.