CO-DIRECTOR OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL DATA JUSTICE LAB

Vanessa Gray (she/her) is Co-Director of the Environmental Data Justice Lab at the Technoscience Research Unit. She is an Anishnaabe kwe from Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Canada’s Chemical Valley. She is a long time advocate and educator of connecting Indigenous rights to Health and Environmental Protection. Her experience growing up in an Indigenous community surrounded by petrochemical facilities has led to her grassroots organizing including teach-ins, rallies, blockades, and direct action against companies and projects infringing on traditional and inherent rights. She firmly stands in solidarity with many communities and nations faced with similar struggles. She is co-founder of ASAP- Aamjiwnaang & Sarnia Against Pipelines, an Indigenous grassroots led group that organizes Toxic Tours, leading water ceremonies, and presentations on Environmental Racism in Canada.

COMMUNITY RESEARCHER

Beze Gray (they/them) is a Community Researcher of the Environmental Data Justice Lab at the Technoscience Research Unit. Beze is a two-spirit Anishnaabe, Delaware, and Oneida from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, treaty #29 territory. Beze is also a Youth Coordinator of the Niizh Manidook Hide Camp and one of the Producers of a grassroots documentary from the Kiijig Collective. Beze is a member of the Jiibwaabiigamowag Young Peoples Council (Aamjiwnaang Youth Council) and Co-founder of Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia Against Pipelines. Beze is a grassroots organizer, and has organized cultural and environmental gatherings and actions, including Toxic Tours, Niizh Manidook Hide Camp, and Aamjiwnaang Water Gathering. They focus on re-telling their experience of living in Canada’s Chemical Valley and promoting Indigenous culture/ language resurgence. Beze also practices Anishnaabemowin, sugar bushing, hide tanning, seed saving, and structure making

LAB ASSISTANT

Joel Piché (he/him) is a Lab Assistant with the Environmental Data Justice Lab at the Technoscience Research Unit, as well as Academic Advisor for Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Joel is from Aamjiwnaang First Nation. He has a degree in accounting from Western University and is passionate about using data and research to help his community prosper.

STAFF RESEARCH SCHOLAR

Dr. Reena Shadaan (she/her) is the Staff Research Scholar in STS and Sustainability at the Technoscience Research Unit and Acceleration Consortium as well as an affiliate faculty member at the Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI) at the University of Toronto. Shadaan is an award-winning community-based and justice-oriented researcher with a PhD in Environmental Studies (York University) and an MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Research (McMaster University). Her work intersects environmental, occupational, and reproductive justice and focuses on community-defined embodied and experiential knowledges. To date, Shadaan’s focus has spanned various sites of chemical violence and resistance – from Bhopal, India (site of the Bhopal gas disaster) to Canada’s “Chemical Valley” and to Greater Toronto Area-based nail salons.

STAFF RESEARCH SCHOLAR

Erin Konsmo (they/she) is a Staff Research Scholar in Indigenous Science, Technology and Environment at the Technoscience Research Unit and Acceleration Consortium. Erin is an Alberta-raised Métis (citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation and registered Métis harvester) fisher, mixed-media artist and scholar. With a background in environmental studies, Erin's research interests include climate justice, Indigenous harvesting practices, fishing, arts-based methodologies, feminist and queer theories, and politicized healing and embodiment. Their arts practice currently focuses on fish scale art, a land-based arts practice that includes harvesting fish, processing and cleaning the scales, as well as the vertebrae and bones to create intricate florals. Erin is also a somatic practitioner and educator in climate and social justice movement spaces and believes in the body as a place for transformation towards what we care about.

RESEARCH FELLOW

M. Fernanda Yanchapaxi (she/her) is a Research Fellow at the Technoscience Research Unit in the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Environment Studies (ISTES) Hub. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Social Justice Education Program, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at the University of Toronto. Fernanda’s research work focuses on the areas and intersections of intellectual property, Indigenous data sovereignty, and Indigenous research methodologies. She is interested in the ways in which Indigenous peoples form, access, use, and protect data and Indigenous knowledge and examines and highlights how Indigenous researchers do so through their research practices and the ways in which they enact principles of Indigenous data sovereignty and data governance.  She is Kichwa-Panzaleo/Mestiza, born and raised in Ecuador.

RESEARCH FELLOW

Andrew Wiebe (he/them) is a Research Fellow with the Technoscience Research Unit. Andrew is a Two-Spirit (Red River Michif) PhD student at the Faculty of Information. He thinks about how beavers may inspire ways of building Indigenous and Queer stories into traditional archival & data practices. The beaver offers a relational imagination of how to build Indigenous memory into institutions by being attentive to how dam-building regenerates ecosystems while selecting what is destroyed. Building a dam in the archive involves forming a structured space of diplomacy between these two worlds, where Indigenous Knowledge can structurally coexist with traditional archival practice. Andrew’s research is supported by the TRU’s research objectives and core values.

RESEARCH FELLOW

Vanbasten de Araújo (they/them) is a Research Fellow with the Technoscience Research Unit since 2020. de Araújo is a Brazilian scholar interested in decolonial science and technology studies in Latin America, especially in Brazil. They have a BA in International Relations from the University of Brasília in Brazil and an MA (High Honors) in Critical Gender Studies from the Central European University in Vienna, Austria. As a PhD Candidate at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, de Araújo researches chemical exposure related to agricultural and public health policies in 20th-century Brazil. In their dissertation, they are interested in connecting state-sponsored chemical exposure to eugenics ideologies in the country. de Araújo’s research is supported by the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies, the Connaught Scholarship, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin) is from Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Dr. Smiles is assisting with the broader NFRF-T project. Their research focuses on Indigenous responses to anthropogenic environmental change, particularly the roles that on-the-land learning and more applied geographies can play in furthering community resurgence. In addition to their role at TRU, they also assist the NFRF-T hub at the University of British Columbia with Indigenous research methods and protocols and serve as the director of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, a group focused on community-based research with Indigenous nations. Dr. Smiles holds a bachelor's degree in Geography from Saint Cloud State University, a master's degree in Global Indigenous Studies from the University of Minnesota Duluth, and a doctoral degree in Geography from The Ohio State University. 

RESEARCH FELLOW

Maysam Ghani is a Palestinian educator, grassroots organizer and poet based in Toronto. Currently, she is committed to joint struggle in practice and relationship through the building of alliances between groups working across Indigenous, Black, and anti-colonial struggles. She is pursuing a master's degree in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She holds a BA in Global Development Studies and a Bachelor of Education degree with a teaching specializations in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit studies, as well as History. In her research, she is interested in the intersections of counterinsurgency, cultural resistance, popular poetry and popular education rooted in a long lineage of Palestinian resistance culture. As a secondary school teacher and workshop facilitator, Maysam is committed to radical and abolitionist approaches to teaching and co-creating critical learning communities with young people.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Layla El-Dakhakhni (she/he) is a Research Assistant with the Technoscience Research Unit and a recipient of the University of Toronto Excellence Award. Layla is an abolitionist community worker from Hamilton, Ontario, and further back from Cairo, Egypt. She is an undergraduate student double majoring in Environmental Chemistry and the History & Philosophy of Science. Layla founded and serves on the steering committee of the Liberation Lab, a student group dreaming and building in the intersections of hard science and movements for liberation. For more information on the Liberation Lab, visit: www.instagram.com/liberationlabuoft

RESEARCH FELLOW

Sajdeep Soomal is a Research Fellow with the Technoscience Research Unit and a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research examines how chemical ideas and practices have influenced colonial political economies. His dissertation project, The Chemicalization of Substance, argues that modern chemistry transformed the tactics and techniques of 19th-century Canadian settler colonial governance. He introduces the concept of “chemical governmentality” to reveal that Canada’s staples economy increasingly relied on chemistry to commodify lumber, grain, oil and gas, and critical minerals by the turn of the twentieth century and to argue that chemical operations—from dissolution to catalysis—transited beyond the laboratory, generating novel tactics of socio-political governance. Sajdeep works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical visualization with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. He has recently conducted research and curatorial projects for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), and The Reach Gallery Museum and served as a board member of InterAccess.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Jasmine Wemigwans is an Ojibwe member of the Wiikwemkoong Unceded First Nation on Manitoulin Island. She is an alumna of Toronto Metropolitan University with a Bachelor of Arts. She also has a master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto. Jasmine is interested in spreading awareness of Citation Justice movements and safeguarding Indigenous data sovereignty. 

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Yojana Miraya Oscco (she/her) is a Research Assistant at the Technoscience Research Unit. Her research explores the erosion of Andean Indigenous institutions by extractive mining corporations and how Andean communities resist these forces through their traditional institutions and community organization. Yojana’s academic interests encompass Indigenous Politics, Environmental Justice, and Mining Extractivism. Yojana holds a Bachelor's degree in Geography from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru, and a Master’s in Environment and Community from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. She is from a Quechua community in Peru and has taught the Quechua language as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Toronto. Yojana is also a founding member of Kuskalla Abya Yala, a grassroots organization focused on revitalizing native languages, culture, and Indigenous politics, as well as fostering solidarity networks across global Indigenous communities.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Jazz Cook (she/her) is a Research Assistant, at the Technoscience Research Unit working on Indigenous Data Sovereignty initiatives. She is a Kanien’kehá:ka member of the Mohawks of Akwesasne with British and French ancestry. She is completing her Master of Information concentrating in Archives and Records Management at the University of Toronto. Her research looks at the intersections of contemporary Indigenous, Two-Spirit, and punk stories, histories, resistances, and resiliences and their representations within archival and cultural institutions. Jazz is a fledgling poet and musician, a former editor and literary arts professional, and a founding member of the Indigenous Editors Association. 

Sarandha Jain is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability, with an affiliation to the Ethnography Lab. Her work studies how the energy regime of oil mediates the relationship between the Indian state and citizens. She investigates how a regime of chemical governance encode sociopolitical possibilities into petroleum products, how they play out and are also distorted during distribution and consumption, and how this determines state-citizen relations. Sarandha holds a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University (New York) and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at The New School.

Johannes Chan (any/all) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at York University, writing about the history of watermill infrastructure in long 19th century Ontario. Their dissertation project, The Metabolism of Empire, attempts to re-understand 19th century hydro infrastructure within contexts of British colonialism, empire, and the emerging science of metabolism. This work traces the many ways energy infrastructure under racial capitalism was connected to military supply chains, chemical knowledge production, and unprecedented environmental transformations. Their research has been supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2022 - 2024) and the SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship (2024-2026). n goes here

Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Professor Keilty's research interests focus on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries, adult film, and the materiality of media. His research lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, information studies, cinema studies, and media studies. With M. Murphy and Banu Subramaniam, he was co-lead editor for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience from 2017 – 2019.