CrimSL proudly hosted five Jackman Scholars-in-Residence (SiR) — Eesha Fahad, Nathaniel Luces, Kaina Mendoza-Price, Grace Smith, and Ana Tarc — May 6 – May 31, 2024. The A&S undergraduate students, who hail from a variety of academic disciplines, used CrimSL facilities at the Canadiana Gallery building as their home base during the program which was one of about 30 SiR research projects led by U of T faculty mentors.
The program is an intensive paid research fellowship in humanities and humanistic social-science research for upper-year undergraduates. It offers undergraduate students the opportunity to work on research projects with humanities faculty for four weeks during the summer. Students get to participate in, and contribute to, original faculty research projects, develop skills, and build relationships with peers and professors.The program gives students an opportunity to acquire advanced research skills and experience while collaborating with an interdisciplinary and intellectually vibrant community of peers, professors, and research professionals. Students selected for SiR work as research assistants in small teams on projects led by professors. Students also share group activities including multidisciplinary workshops on research methodologies, standards, protocol, and professional communication; cultural events; and talks featuring professionals such as lawyers, policy-makers, and documentary filmmakers that highlight research-intensive career trajectories.
Each student hosted at CrimSL researched an aspect of Knowing Black Atlantic Worlds led by CrimSL Director Professor Kamari Maxine Clarke.
Knowing Black Atlantic Worlds
Black researchers face serious challenges in the production of new knowledge about Black Atlantic worlds because of the reality that European modes of knowledge production established racial hierarchies and Eurocentric ways of knowing and organizing knowledge in ways that excluded other forms of meaning-making. As a result of the historical erasure of Black knowledge and social thought there is a failure to document social practices, artifacts, and experiences of Black people. This has led to a misrecognition and devaluation of Black social thought.
This project explores how foregrounding recovered epistemologies change what we know about Black lives in the twenty-first century, in Canada and throughout Black Atlantic worlds.
The goal of Knowing Black Atlantic Worlds is to establish, in Canada, a new, transnational community-academic research collaboration.
Meet the scholars
Eesha Fahad
Eesha is a fourth-year student double majoring in peace, conflict & justice and criminology & sociolegal studies, and minoring in political science.
My research focuses on displaying archival material to display absence, presence and emergence in the diaspora as expressed through adages and proverbs. Adages and proverbs play a crucial role in oral communication and are embedded within all contexts — conversations, songs, sermons, judicial proceedings, etc., as well as non-oral communication such as artwork. Because the meaning can shift with context, my research collects adages and proverbs within the context they are found.
Nathaniel Luces
Nathaniel is a third-year student in the international development studies specialist (co-op) program at University of Toronto Scarborough.
I am currently working under Professor Kamari Clarke’s Knowing Black Atlantic Worlds project, showcasing how humour within the African diaspora has been utilized as a form of resistance to respond to our intentional silencing and oppression both within and outside of academia. More than anything, I am excited to demonstrate how the tradition of African diasporic humour has enabled us to connect with parts of our ancestry in ways we may not realize or simply take for granted.
Kaína Mendoza-Price
Kaína is a fourth-year student double majoring in religion and Latin American studies.
My contribution to the archive will focus on the realms of religion as it pertains both to divination as a memory-making practice and the entities that facilitate it such as Eshu/Esu/Exu-Eleggua and Orunmila-Ifa. As I had the chance to think together with these Orishas, I also explored how race, transnationalism, and social imaginary cultivates certain connectivities to how divination is understood and the context in which it takes place.
Grace Smith
Grace is a third-year student double majoring in political science and ethics, society & law.
I'm researching names and naming through the lenses of ancestral naming practices, slave naming and contemporary naming challenges. This research focuses on making information about traditional naming practices (specifically Akan naming) more accessible, exploring the stripping of ancestral names during slavery and how this was both adapted to and resisted, and finally, presenting the emergence of the black community in the political spaces not as a monolithic process, but as a multifaceted journey.
Ana Tarc
Ana is a fourth-year student double majoring in ethics, society, and law and history, and minoring in critical studies in equity and solidarity.
I am researching the domain of music and movement in the context of the Black Atlantic, looking to the ways that music works to establish a differentiated a sense of place, and how space and place directly influence the evolution of music through time. I explore how the criminalization of movement through space directly affected the ways in which persons of African descent in the United States engaged with musical practice.
About the Scholars-in-Residence program
Student eligibility
Undergraduate students with a minimum CGPA of 3.0 who are currently in second year or higher in any program in the Faculty of Arts & Science, the Faculty of Music, the Faculty of Information, or the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at any U of T campus are eligible to apply to the Scholars-in-Residence program.
Administration
The Scholars-in-Residence program is administered by Victoria College, supported by:
- Jackman Humanities Institute
- The Office of the Vice-President Research and Innovation
- Faculty of Arts and Science
- University of Toronto Mississauga
- University of Toronto Scarborough
- the St. George Colleges
- Bader Philanthropies Inc. through Victoria University
Visit the Scholars-in-Residence website to learn more about this program.