Our Collaborators
At the Indigenous Literatures Lab, we see our work as part of constellating collaborations and relationships with other Indigenous-led labs, institutions, organizations, and school boards.
Learning with Land and Country
This collaboration includes working with Elders and Traditional Knowledge holders who enact visions for Indigenous resurgence in educational contexts. Grandmother Shirley and Auntie Sue Atkinson have led dialogues that respond to fostering ethical relations with Land and Country in Canada and Australia, specifically in Tkaronto and Naarm. We have held workshops, such as a yarn activity with Grandmother Shirley and Auntie Sue in shared conversation, to learn from commonalities that transcend our different geographical and social locations. Through this collaboration, our intentions are to focus on sustained commitments toward Indigenous cultural safety and ethical engagements in foregrounding First Nations perspectives in education. This collaboration is also supported by the University of Melbourne.
Centring Climate Justice within Land and Country Education, University of Melbourne [forthcoming]
Collaboration description coming soon!
Indigenous Education Network (IEN)
The Indigenous Education Network (IEN) is a group of students, faculty and community members who share a common commitment to and passion for convening anti-colonial education, elevating radical ways of knowing, organizing action and change, and deepening relations between Indigenous, Black, and Black-Indigenous peoples. The Indigenous Education Network supports students through co-curricular programming, resources and mentoring. For over 30 years, the IEN have been crafting meaningful opportunities for mutual aid, collaboration, and deepening relations between students, staff, faculty and community members.
Dr. Jennifer Brant is the current Faculty Co-Chair of the IEN. The Indigenous Literatures Lab often collaborates with the IEN on community-based workshops and events because it is an integral space for Indigenous intellectual work at the University of Toronto and OISE. The IEN is a space where Dr. Jennifer Brant and the Indigenous Literatures Lab can bring theory and practice together and become more involved with community organizing, social movements and the kind of work that tends to socio-political action.
Childhood Place and Pedagogy Lab
Directed by Dr. Fikile Nxumalo, the Childhood Place and Pedagogy Lab focuses on reconceptualizing early childhood education such that it is situated within and responsive to children’s inheritances of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, environmental precarity and their entanglements.
Dr. Jennifer Brant and Dr. Fikile Nxumalo have been long time collaborators. They recently published a chapter together entitled “Decolonizing Praxis: Thinking with Pedagogical Place Encounters” in Teaching as Radical Logic edited by Noah De Lissovoy; Raúl Olmo Fregoso Bailón and Alex J. Armonda.
Critical Health and Social Action Lab (CHSA Lab)
The CHSA Lab is an Indigenous-led research and innovation centre dedicated to advancing health justice through partnerships with Indigenous communities. It is directed by Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos. For the CHSA Lab, health justice is rooted in the Anishinaabe philosophy of mino bimaadiziwin (the good life). This philosophy steers their health research towards life promotion, focusing on psychological, sociolegal, cultural, political, and environmental dimensions central to living a good life, as well as addressing challenges to it.
Dr. Jennifer Brant and the Indigenous Literatures Lab have collaborated with CHSA Lab and its members, as well as hosted joint events. Most recently, the Indigenous literatures Lab and CHSA hosted Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel and Sean Carleton in a student roundtable and conversation about their new book, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance!