Research

Generally, What is my Research About?

What I'm Focusing on Now.

My research explores collective memory, identity, and resistance in the aftermath of violence, punishment, and atrocity. I examine how people remember difficult pasts and how these memories shape their identities and strategies of resistance. 

I am particularly interested in the ways that historical violence—especially that experienced by racialized and Black communities—is erased, distorted, or repurposed by settler and colonial states over time, and how communities push back against this erasure to reclaim their stories and histories.

Grounded in qualitative, comparative, and archival research, my work traces the evolution of collective memories across local, national, and transnational scales. I explore themes of race and ethnicity, punishment, justice, religion, politics, violence, and social movements, with a particular focus on the African continent and Black populations in North America.


At its core, my research is about power — who gets to remember, who is forced to forget, and what it means to fight for the right to be remembered.

Upcoming Conference Presentation.

I will be presenting my research project titled, "Shared History, yet Divergent Memories: Reconstructing the Violence of Chad's Cut-Cut Massacre" at the Canadian Sociological Association Conference (CSA) in June 2025. 

The panel itself is called, "Violence as a Cultural Process: Advancing Theory and Methods." Both the panel and my project questions how people construct the meanings they attach to violence and how they come to see various experiences as violent - whether lived, observed or distant.

My project is a comparative study of the 1917 Cut-Cut Massacre in Chad, central Africa, in which French colonial forces beheaded religious leaders as a public punishment aimed at suppressing the influence of Islam. I explore the divergent perceptions of the massacre among the Chadian diaspora in the Western world and local communities in Chad. I seek to uncover how these groups construct meanings around - and interpret the memory of - this violent historical event.

Read about my project, here!



AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS

Below are a few of my Academic Awards and Fellowships won and granted:

ACADEMIC DEGREES

  • PhD in Sociology, University of Toronto [in progress]
  • Master's in Sociology, McGill University
  • Bachelors of Arts, double-Major in Sociology and African Studies, McGill University

COMPREHENSIVE EXAMS

In the PhD, two comp exams must be taken, I have taken and successfully completed the following:

  • Crime, Law, and Punishment
  • Colonialism, Racialization, and Indigeneity



Using Format