Meet the Students

Aimee Copping is a teaching artist and the creator of Blackball, a non-profit electronic music education project for children and youth, currently sited at the Guelph Youth Music Centre.In collaboration with the restorative justice initiative Pros and Cons, Aimee established a dedicated music production space at a federal penitentiary, Grand Valley Institution for Women and produced two albums of original music composed and performed by imprisoned women. Aimee collaborates regularly with Girls’ Rock Camp Guelph and Silence Sounds, and has held board and committee seats with ARCH Guelph and the Upper Grand District School Board and is currently under consideration for a vacant seat on the Guelph Youth Music Centre board of directors.

Aimee performs and records electronic music as Transstar. In 2021, she wrote and produced Synths Always, a four-part audio documentary on the history of electronic music for broadcast on CFRU 93.3 FM and CHMA 106.9 FM in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Aimee holds a Master’s Degree in Critical Studies in Improvisation and is an Ontario Graduate Scholarship laureate.

The Canada Council for the Arts has awarded Aimee an Explore and Create grant for her literary fiction project, ‘Promise’, a novel about a dysfunctional suburban family living through the darkest years of the Cold War. Additionally, Aimee’s scored another Ontario Graduate Scholarship for her proposed PhD research, “From Right to Privilege: The Downsizing of Music Education in Ontario.” She is currently in her second year of the Social Practice and Transformational Change PhD program at the University of Guelph.

Hi! I’m Lilian (Lily) Barraclough (she/they) and I’m a writer, researcher, environmental professional, musician, and activist currently in my first year of the SOPR program. I’m a Queer, non-binary, white and able-bodied person from a Queer family. I grew up in Tkaronto but spent eight years in Mi’kma’ki [on the East Coast] before returning to Ontario to pursue my doctoral degree and currently live in Guelph, ON, the ancestral lands of the Attawandaron, the Anishnaabe, and the Haudenosaunee peoples and the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. 

My partner, Caden, and I have two horses (Alamar and Miller) and a dog (Anna), and we love to spend time outdoors on adventures with them. I love reading or playing board games and enjoy singing in choirs and playing piano and string instruments. 

I have a Master of Environmental Studies from Dalhousie University and a BSc. (Hons.) In Environmental Science from the University of King’s College – Halifax. I’m passionate about engaging with community through research, activism, and the arts on the multitudes of intersections between the climate emergencies, queerness and social issues that are often overlooked. My past research focused on the mental health impacts of climate change on youth climate activists, using an intersectional and arts-based approach as well as youth-adult partnership in climate related decision-making and organizing. My goal with my PhD research is to highlight the inequitable experiences of Queer communities with climate change to create more dialogue on how governments and communities can better support Queer folks in our changing climate. I am passionate about innovative arts-based methodologies, building sustainable, equitable futures, and strong, resilient communities and I was drawn to SOPR because of the unique focus of the program on methodological boundary crossing, community-engaged research, and decolonial change. Beyond my academic and research pursuits, I serve and support communities in addressing the multiple crises we face and building resilience through a variety of volunteer roles, including as a board member of the Youth Climate Lab, a member of the Rainbow Chorus of Waterloo-Wellington, an active volunteer with OPIRG Guelph, and a board member of the moonlight institute.

Hello, my name is Maria DiDanieli (she/her) and I am a 2nd year PhD student in the SOPR program, a retired allied health professional and mother of two young adult daughters, whose critical curiousity and kindness are out there permeating our complex world as we speak. I am a white settler of European descent. I am a recreational long-distance cyclist and a voracious reader.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Human Biology (emphasis neurosciences) at the University of Toronto while working in clinical applied neurophysiology. Over the years, I mostly served individuals with spinal cord injuries, acquired brain injuries and neurodevelopmental conditions. Although this emerging field was interesting, I felt that our reductionist technical ethic of practice precluded us from understanding, and caring for, our patients holistically, or even appropriately. As I listened to their stories, I began to see how the ableist healthcare environment embodies, and contributes to, the host of structural factors that disempower people with disabilities daily, inside and outside the clinic, removing their self-determination over their bodies and their lives. I also began to learn about, and appreciate, their understandings of their bodies and the richness of their affirming goals for their lives. I began to see my role differently and to adjust my commitments…and I also wanted to explore the human issues that healthcare is ensconced in further through academic work. And so, in 2015, I entered a Masters of Science program in Medical Bioethics from the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical School in New York. Then, in 2024, I completed a Master of Laws in Medical Law and Ethics from the University of Edinburgh – my thesis project in the latter involved a human rights-based critical disability theory analysis of medical assistance in dying legislation and its growing focus on disability as an indication for accessing physician assisted suicide. This was eye-opening work!

I had transitioned my career to patient/system navigation, where I served individuals with cognitive diversity due to brain injury in accessing legal support and housing justice when facing threat of eviction. As a platform for learning and advocacy, I initiated a Community of Practice for system navigators in Halton and Hamilton. I also worked closely with community legal clinics to support these inividuals in accessing housing and (housing related) human rights justice within Ontario tribunals and courts. I found the outcomes for these people at the hands of our housing justice structures disappointing, to say the least. As a result, I found myself on a mission to enter into full-time academic work in order to critically explore, contribute to knowledge in and advance advocacy for, disability rights and disability justice in the context of housing frameworks. It was in seeking a way to do so that I discovered the interdisplinary and innovative SOPR program. Although my academic and research work will center individuals whose cognitive/intellectual functionalities comprise diversity and difference, my goal is to explore how housing frameworks and housing justice policy and practices can be transformed to enable pan-disability empowerment and housing stability.

Hi! My name is Gustavo Gatti. I’m a Brazilian nature conservation planner and practitioner, currently pursuing studies as a SOPR student. I hold a degree in Forest Engineering and a Master’s in Biological Sciences from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil.

Throughout my career, I’ve been deeply committed to finding a balance between living well and allowing nature to thrive. As humanity faces unprecedented challenges, my academic work explores how we can better understand and appreciate the services nature has been providing us with and how we can act as responsible stewards within the complex web of life.

My current research focuses on the social and environmental benefits of unconventional, environmentally friendly food production systems. Specifically, I study erva-mate agroforestry in the Atlantic Forest as part of the global Food Learning and Growing (FLOW) Initiative.

Outside of work, I’m passionate about the outdoors. Whether hiking, climbing, cycling, backcountry camping, or simply enjoying time with nature, family, and friends. I’m grateful and excited to be spending this chapter of my life in beautiful Canada.

My name is Jennifer Jolie and I am a second-year student in the SOPR program. When I decided to pursue a PhD in SOPR, my partner and I relocated to Guelph from the traditional territory of Bawaating [Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario]! I am a white settler cisgender straight fat woman with a physical disability who lives with chronic illness and pain. I am often caught in the complex ways in which my fat body is restrained by the ableist arrangements of the world due to impairments resulting from physical illness. This is something newer to me that I am consistently negotiating and renegotiating as I age and move through the world.

I come from a working/middle class family and am also the first of my immediate family to go to university, and the only one in my extended family to pursue graduate level education.  Previous to entering the program I worked in a front-line harm reduction role with folks in my community/region. Working in the North meant that there are huge regions to cover with very few resources. I certainly learned to be creative! I also learned a lot about the realities of working within the constraints of funding and policy. During these 12+ years my professional work was to create educational spaces for community members and agency workers to learn about community care such as safer substance use and overdose response, education about how to discuss and support inclusive safer sex practices, information about Hep C and HIV testing and prevention, crisis intervention support and much more.

I have a Master’s degree in Education, and finished it through distance education at Lakehead University while working full-time. My thesis explored issues related to fat studies and social justice by examining the ways in which the body positivity movement on social media causes harm to fat women. Moving from full-time community work to pursue academia full-time represents a completely new path for me! I chose the SOPR program because I feel like it allows me to enter into academia with the work and life/lived experience I carry, and that it all has value. I wanted to do my PhD in an interdisciplinary program because I want my work to think through possibly divergent theoretical frameworks and innovative methodological commitments to find ways to reveal how the unique experiences of fat women might inform social justice. I am interested in fat studies and feminist critical theory. 

Outside of academia, I am enjoying reconnecting with my self and my interests while exploring Guelph and the surrounding areas! It is such a beautiful region with lots of fun new things to do. I love to be creative and enjoy sewing, crochet, embroidery and going thrifting for materials to upcycle into new creations. Fun facts: I am a lefty. I like doing puzzles, swimming, drinking coffee and collecting stickers. My furry companion Francis and I have been hitting the streets of Guelph to explore, so if you see us be sure to say hello! 

My name is Fabian (he/him), and I am a third-year PhD candidate in the Social Practice and Transformational Change and International Development Studies collaborative program. My research interests focus on the practices employed by activists to promote the growing recognition of the rights of nature. I want to examine how activists aim to shift from anthropocentric to biocentric legal frameworks, engage with Indigenous cosmologies, and advance alternative conceptualizations of well-being that transform attitudes toward society and the more-than-human world.

I hold degrees in Environment and Resource Management, International Studies, and Education from the University of Toronto and the Catholic University in Quito, Ecuador, the country where I grew up. I joined the Ecuadorian Foreign Service in 2006, which led me to live and work in Egypt, Germany, and the United States, including a position at the United Nations in New York, where I worked on social, humanitarian, and cultural issues.

I was drawn to the SOPR program because of its interdisciplinary and innovative approach, its emphasis on justice and community-engaged scholarship, and the opportunity to critically engage with the unsettling nature of change. I was also eager to study international development, making the collaborative program at UofG a perfect fit. Joining SOPR has provided me with wonderful opportunities, such as contributing to the Engendering Disability Inclusive Development (EDID-GHDI) partnership by supporting the Leadership Team and the Disability and Development Community of Practice. I have also become a member of the Grounded & Engaged Theory Lab, which supports empirical research methodologies and socially engaged studies that connect theorizing with people’s lived experiences.

I currently live in Oakville, on the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, with my family: Ana, Daniel, and Alex, who have always supported my decision to pursue (and complete!) a PhD. In my spare time, I enjoy writing fiction and playing chess. I have published two Spanish-language short story collections, Casa de fieras (2016) and El ojo de agua (2019). My debut novel, Madness, All Over Again, will be released in 2025.

Hello, I am Lindsey Thomson (she/her) and I grew up in a working-class family in a small town in what is known today as Southern Ontario. I am a white settler and I currently live in Guelph, Ontario, treaty lands and territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit. I live with my partner CJ, our Scottish Terrier Kevin, and our 30-year-old turtle Toby. I am a femme-identified queer woman who is also late-discovered autistic. I enjoy trail walks with Kevin, checking out local coffee shops, and playing music as part of queer-led band @groundcoverband.

I have worked as the Manager of Community Engaged Teaching and Learning Program at the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI) at the University of Guelph. After over a decade of facilitating and supporting critical community engaged research partnerships, I decided to apply to the SOPR Program in hopes of returning to school to apply and expand upon my knowledge and passion for engaged research and the role it can play in social justice learning and action.

Overall, I aim to conduct collaborative research to engage diverse autistic femme communities in storytelling and photovoice methods to understand their unique, undervalued knowledges and lived experience. My research aims to expand understandings of autism, support diverse equity-seeking neurodivergent queer communities, and re-imagine and deeply align engaged research and community practice with disability justice principles. Additionally, I currently co-facilitate a Collective of neurodivergent/autistic researchers, artists, practitioners, and activists under the leadership of Dr. Patty Douglas, Queen’s University, and the Re-Storying Autism in Education Partnership. I also co-facilitate Rainbow Pride, a monthly virtual social and support group for queer autistic adults through the neurodivergent-led Dori Zener and Associates.

Ultimately, I view critical femininities and femme theory as having major potential to bridge critical autism studies, disability justice, and broader queer theory and movements while pushing back against colonial binaries, logics, and assumptions through centering historically marginalized femmes and related ways of knowing and being.

My name is Nealob Kakar (she/her) and I am an incoming third year SOPR student and one of the editors of SOPR Stories! I am a Queer Afghan storyteller, poet, fibre artist, avid crafter, and well I like to think of myself as just a maker of all things! I spend a lot of my time crocheting, singing, performing spoken word, longboarding within the Haldimand Tract, journaling, making radical zines, daydreaming about the world I want to live in, and most importantly tending to my Persian cat. 

I completed an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Political Science: Public Law and Judicial Studies at McMaster University, and a Master of Public Service at the University of Waterloo. Aside from my academic work, I have a community-based background in creating and facilitating trainings and workshops at the university and community level focused on supporting Survivors of Sexual and/or Gender-Based Violence through peer support and abolitionist transformative justice oriented grassroots interventions.  

I am deeply interested in the ways communities at the intersection of marginalization, specifically racialized 2SLGBTQ+ Survivors, practice care, mutual aid, radical love, and a praxis of indispensability and radical relationality for one another in ways that colonial bodies of policy have not been and will never be able to. My research aims to contribute to a body of knowledge that reconceptualizes the discipline of policy through critical community-based perspectives that rethink difference and radically re-imagine transformative futures of collective care. 

My ultimate hope in this space is to dream of a better world, a just world. A world that isn’t so silent at the hands of structural violence. A world that begs for new ways, emergent strategies, transformative futures where we can exist, where we don’t think of people as disposable. Where we look inward and to each other through our relational shifts. Where we value and uphold our individual and collective responsibilities to one another. Where we refuse to abandon. Heck where we just refuse. At the end of the day our futures are entangled. Our liberation, our freedom, is tied, knotted, stuck, smushed together in a sticky web that cannot be made undone.

In entering this program, I came from a super disciplinary (and sometimes rigid) political science and public policy background. During my time in these academic spaces, I was simultaneously heavily involved in creative community-led activist work with Survivor, racialized, and queer communities I hold kinship with. I often found myself teetering 2 different worlds, trying to balance being a disciplinary academic (whatever that may look like?) and a community member practicing vital grassroots groundwork. It wasn’t until I started the SOPR program that I was able to fully enter an academic space with all of these parts of myself intact, and not have to reserve pieces for certain audiences. The interdisciplinary nature and social justice focus of this program allowed me to enter as I am. SOPR continues to provide me with the tools to move differently, rethink normativity, and practice ways of being that the traditional neoliberal academy does not.

Janna Martin (she/her)  is a white settler of Swiss-Mennonite ancestry. She lives in Guelph, Ontario and she grew up in the Waterloo Region, close to where her ancestors first settled on Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (land promised to the Six Nations and ancestral land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation). Her ancestor’s settlement (Mennonites from Pennsylvania) in the early 19th century contributed to the erasure and dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land and way of life. Her PhD aims to braid Indigenous and Mennonite histories in the Waterloo Region to develop a new public history methodological approach for settler decolonization. She is working alongside Mennonite history and heritage organizations to support their unsettling learning journey of truth-telling towards reconciliation. Additionally, she is working with her PhD advisor, Dr. Kim Anderson (a Metis historian) and the Decolonizing Place Narratives team to co-curate an Indigenous story of Guelph (read more).

In addition to being a PhD candidate, she is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Community Based Research. Janna conducts research and evaluation on a variety of topics across different sectors utilizing qualitative and mixed methods. Her passion is working alongside organizations to advance equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization. Beyond research reports and academic articles, Janna has led knowledge mobilization outputs such as community forums, photovoice, podcasts, infographics, website design, and the development of a scene in a community play.

Janna’s lifelong interest is in the connection between collective narrative, identity, and social change. In this regard, Janna has led projects on topics such as polarization on the university campus, urban heritage of equity-deserving communities, and the co-curation of a story of Indigenous presence in Guelph. Janna’s academic background is in Sociology (BA), Peace and Conflict Studies (MPACS), and Social Practice and Transformational Change (PhD). She has published articles in Settler Colonial Studies, the Engaged Scholar Journal, and the Journal of Mennonites Studies.

Hello! I am a third-year doctoral candidate in the Social Practice and Transformational Change program at the University of Guelph. I am a settler whose ancestors emigrated to what is colonially known as Canada as working-class agricultural laborers from the United Kingdom. My matrilineal family has settled on the shores of Azhoonyang (Lake Simcoe) in the territory of the Williams Treaty Nations for five generations. Today, I am grateful to live, work, and play in Guelph, Ontario, within the treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Treaty 3 between the Lakes Purchase) and lands long stewarded by the Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee. I love hikes and bike rides, hand embroidery, and playing with my pup Elvis.

Since 2019, I have been the manager of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership, an Indigenous-led network funded through an SSHRC partnership grant that aims to advance Indigenous-led conservation and transform the conservation sector in Canada. My doctoral work supports the broad goals of the partnership with a focus on the shifting roles and responsibilities of settlers in conservation. More specifically, my work aims to 1) help identify and widen decolonial cracks emerging in Canadian conservation practices, paradigms, and structures to make way for a new conservation that foregrounds Indigenous reattachment to Land through centering of Indigenous relationships with and responsibilities to Place, and 2) point to objective and subjective barriers that prevent non-Indigenous conservation institutions from fully engaging in decolonial change and potential strategies for addressing these barriers.

I was drawn to SOPR because I sought an interdisciplinary space to reflect on and deepen my practice as a settler committed to supporting decolonial change in conservation and beyond. The SOPR program design, with the six pillars and focus on praxis, has provided a nourishing space to think with a diverse group of peers who share a commitment to doing scholarship differently. I’m grateful for this space and community!

Allo, I’m Naty Tremblay (they/them) and I’m in my 4th year of the SOPR Phd program! I’m an identical twin, working class-agrarian, mad & white bodied trans person from Treaty 2 territories with mixed french Canadian, muskrat métis & ashkenazi jewish ancestry. My life’s work is co-creating interactive multidisciplinary projects, workshops & gatherings exploring identity & power, regenerative reciprocity, healing justice & magics of the natural world, amongst other things!

For a decade I ran the interdisciplinary community arts for social change training program for marginalized youth leaders at Sketch working arts and I’m the former ED of Rittenhouse: A New vision (2020-2022), Canada’s oldest abolitionist organization. I also have a 20+ year interdisciplinary arts practice – and I’m a proud founding member of the Switch Collective which has been mounting roving queer political performance works since 2016, as well as the Trans Healing Arts Web (THAW) which uses community arts gatherings to center the healing & creativity of Trans folks. In 2021 I was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Community Artist Award in 2021. I received SSHRC funding for my PhD research on Queer Transformative Justice Praxis in 2023.

More importantly, I am mystified by water, seeds, the cosmos, regenerative reciprocity and interspecies entanglements. <3

My name is Amanda Buchnea (she/her) and I’m a Doctoral Candidate starting my sixth and final year in the Social Practice and Transformational Change program at the University of Guelph. I am a white settler who grew up in the Haldemand Tract in so-called Kitchener. My ancestors were primarily farmers and working class families in Treaty #19 (Ajetance Purchase) and Treaty #29 (Huron Tract Purchase) territory, arriving from the UK and Ukraine. I am currently based in Tkaronto on Treaty #13, the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, living in Taiaiako’n, which are the ancestral lands of the Hunon-Wendat, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Chippewa. I live with my partner of 15 years and our two cats, Frankie and Gizmo, usually co-living with a family member or two! I love all forms of crafting, playing the violin, running, camping, going to concerts, and hosting/cooking for the people I love. 

My research and practice have been focused on advancing housing justice through critical community-engaged policymaking and planning. I am completing my dissertation research project which critically examines the practice of community homelessness planning in Ontario and across so-called Canada in order to identify the ways in which young people are made (in)visible. This community-engaged project emerged out of a decade of working at the intersection of research, policy advocacy and practice in the field of youth homelessness prevention at A Way Home Canada, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, and the Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab. I enter this field without lived experience of homelessness myself, but working in deep solidarity and a commitment to relationship with those who have lived/living experience and who are working to advance housing justice. Throughout my work in this space I have found so much affinity with abolitionist approaches that reject carceral systems of “care” for liberatory and restorative systems that invite us to stay in the struggle of being and building community and kinship. I believe in and hold onto a future in which everyone has safe and adequate housing to meet their changing needs and find belonging and community in the place they want to call home.

Prior to starting in the SOPR program I completed an Honours Bachelor of Social Development Studies (2015) at the University of Waterloo where I specialized in social policy and social work. I then completed a Master of Public Policy (2017) at the University of Toronto where I focused on community development and first connected with organizations working to prevent and address homelessness. I chose a PhD in the SOPR program because it aligned with the interdisciplinary nature of my praxis and provided the grounding frameworks for doing deeply community-engaged research and scholarship that advance social justice in all its forms. As I near the end of my degree requirements, I am so grateful for the friendship, community and mentorship I have found through the SOPR students, faculty and staff – they have greatly enriched my life and continue to challenge and expand my thinking around what it means to be a social justice-oriented scholar and human.