QTRL Cohort 2026-27

Primary Investigators

Loretta LeMaster, PhD

Associate Professor of Queer Studies

Department of Social Justice Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, CAD

Role: Primary Investigator

Dacheng Zhang, PhD

Assistant Professor of Intercultural Communication

Department of Communication Studies

Utah Tech University, St. George, UT, USA

Role: Co-Primary Investigator

Billy Huff, PhD

Director, Gender and Sexuality Center

University of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Role: Co-Primary Investigator

Despite claims of inclusion, trans workers experience workplace discrimination. While most trans workers take active steps to reduce discrimination, up to a third report experiencing compounded mistreatment as a result. Survey reports continue to support these findings with BIPOC trans folks bearing the brunt of these impacts. Nonetheless, trans folks labour to keep one another alive through care work. To that end, this project employs a critical qualitative and performance approach to honour and explore care work among trans folks. Developing from an earlier pilot study, the current project invites trans care workers to reflect on their communal worldbuilding efforts. In this way, the current project contributes a trans/feminist Marxist approach to social reproduction theorizing from the vantage of trans care worker experiences. Such an approach pays critical attention to the illusory idea of labour inclusion and prioritizes care work beyond organizational metrics of assimilation. With funding support from QTRL/Bonham Centre for SDS, our research team will collect interviews and conduct focus groups with trans care workers in the U.S. states of Arizona and Illinois. Arizona was selected because it is a border state through which trans folks immigrating from the Global South pass and receive care. Illinois was selected because it has emerged as a so-called “safe haven” state for trans folks fleeing violence across the U.S. Findings will be used to draft research articles, secure further funding to expand our efforts into Canada, and to stage interview data in Tkaronto beginning in Fall 2026.

Primary Investigators

Dr. Notisha Massaquoi  

Dr. Massaquoi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, with cross appointments in the Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and the Dept of Family & Community Medicine at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. She is also the founder and Director of the Black Health Equity Lab.

Co-Investigators

Dr. OmiSoore Dryden

Dr. Dryden is a Full Professor at Dalhousie University, where she holds the prestigious Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CIHR) in Black Health Studies. A nationally and internationally recognized scholar, Dr. Dryden’s work has transformed conversations about Black Studies within medicine, medical education, health research, and healthcare systems. Her interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship centers the experiences of Black 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, examining how anti-Black racism, homophobia, transphobia, and systemic inequities shape access to and experiences of health and healthcare.  

Dr. Sulaimon Giwa

Dr. Giwa is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs in the School of Social Work at Memorial University with a cross-appointment to the Department of Sociology (Police Studies). He is the Endowed Chair in Criminology and Criminal Justice at St. Thomas University, and is an antiracism, equity, diversity, and inclusion trainer and consultant. Dr. Giwa’s academic and applied-research program centralizes critical race transformative pedagogies and human rights theories as frameworks and analytic tools for social justice and equity. His research interests are in the areas of critical race and anti-Black racism; race and sexuality; LGBTQ+ migration, settlement, and integration; intersectional stigma and human rights; minority stress and coping; critical social work pedagogy; and the criminal justice system.

Dr. Marie-Jolie (MJ) Rwigema

Dr. Rwigema is an assistant professor in Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University. Her work draws from twenty years of community practice with Black, racialized, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities. Her work focuses on the interlinkages between resistance, political voice, and recovery from racial trauma.

Dr. Thabani Nyoni

Dr. Nyoni is an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University’s School of Social Work. His research focuses on contextual stressors and psychosocial resources, exploring their impact on mental and sexual health, as well as health equity within marginalized populations facing challenges such as pandemics, chronic illnesses, and infectious diseases. From January 2022 to December 2023, he served as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and the Department of Health and Society in Ontario, Canada. Where his research concentrated on the intersections of HIV and COVID-19 vulnerabilities and strengths among racialized sexual minorities.

Dr. Cornell Grey

Dr. Grey is a scholar of Black queer life whose research spans Black Studies, Queer Health, Critical Public Health, and Black Diaspora Studies. My work explores how Black queer men navigate intimacy, desire, and risk in ways that challenge dominant frameworks in medicine, public health, and sexuality studies. Drawing on qualitative and archival methods, he investigates the politics of care and embodiment, with particular attention to the significance of touch, pleasure, and vulnerability in Black queer men’s lives.

The Black Queer and Trans Health Equity Project is a one‑year, community‑based research development initiative dedicated to advancing equity‑oriented knowledge on the health and wellbeing of Black 2SLGBTQIA+ communities across Ontario, Québec, and Atlantic Canada. Despite Canada’s progressive legal protections for Queer and Trans people, Black Queer and Trans communities continue to experience profound health inequities shaped by intersecting systems of anti‑Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Existing Canadian research has largely focused on risk, mental health, and HIV, with limited attention to the structural determinants that produce and sustain these inequities.

Guided by an intersectional Social Determinants of Health framework, the project centres lived experience, community expertise, and strengths‑based approaches. The project will establish a Community Advisory Committee composed of Black Queer and Trans community leaders to guide governance, ethics, and accountability. Key activities during the funding period include a targeted literature and policy review, stakeholder mapping and key informant interviews.  Together, these activities will identify national research and policy gaps, document community‑defined priorities, and surface promising practices for culturally responsive and affirming healthcare.

The primary outcome of this preliminary project is the co‑development of a competitive, community‑informed full research proposal for submission to a Canadian Tri‑Agency competition. Additional outcomes include strengthened community–academic partnerships, enhanced research capacity among Black Queer and Trans scholars and trainees, and a shared national agenda for advancing health, dignity, and wellbeing for Black Queer and Trans people in Canada through inclusive research, policy influence, and community‑led systems change.

Primary Investigators

University of Toronto Affiliates:

Tia Glista, PhD Candidate—English & Sexual Diversity Studies, UTSG

Abby Lacelle, PhD Candidate—English, UTSG

Adrianna Michell, PhD Candidate—English , UTSG

Erica Cardwell, Assistant Professor—Arts, Culture & Media, UTSC

Non-University Affiliates:

Winnie Wang (Toronto Review Head of Special Projects)

Emma Olivia Cohen (Toronto Review Fiction Editor)

Sonja Katanic (Toronto Review Art Director)

Across North America, literary and artistic works by or about queer and gender-diverse people are being censored and banned, and at the same time, platforms for artistic and intellectual communities are facing closure and defunding. Our forthcoming magazine, Toronto Review, sees these problems as interlocking ones, and seeks to launch a new leading outlet for literary criticism, essays, fiction, and interviews that stimulates critical thinking and spotlights incisive writing to challenge the conservative tide.

Our funding from the Bonham Centre and the QTRL Emerging Projects Fund will support a quarterly column on queer & trans aesthetics as well as an award in 2SLGBTQ+ writing. The column will highlight critical writing that situates gender and sexuality in its diverse contemporary contexts, connecting literary and cultural tides to a rethinking of identity, sociality, community, and knowledge. The award addresses the fact that although there are generally many literary awards in Canada, none focus on the craft of criticism, and thus creating this award signals an investment in taking the genre seriously in its own right and supporting critics, most of whom are freelance and working precariously for poor pay.

These funds will create paid opportunities for 2SLGBTQ+ writers to publish in-depth critical writing that highlight queer & trans cultural production, introduce their work to new audiences, and provoke transformational ways of thinking and writing about sexuality, race, gender, and aesthetic production more broadly.

Primary Investigator

SA Smythe, Associate Professor of Black Studies & the Archive, Faculty of Information

“Still Here: Cultivating Skills & Community Aesthetics for Black Trans Thrival” is a care-centred research-creation and community-engaged pilot project led by Prof. SA Smythe (Associate Professor of Black Studies & the Archive, Faculty of Information) in collaboration with research fellows and community participants through the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis and other Black-led, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit-centred community spaces. The project builds sustainable infrastructures of study, skill-sharing, and mutual aid for Black queer, trans, and nonbinary students, artists, culture workers, and system-impacted community members, including those navigating housing insecurity, shelters, detention, and other carceral conditions. In a moment marked by intensifying anti-trans legislation, anti-Black violence, disability injustice, migration precarity through border imperialism, warmongering, and expanding carceral and (settler-)colonial systems, Still Here is a commitment to relation through writing and collective learning as conditions of more-than-survival. Rather than positioning care as secondary to research, the project cultivates accessible knowledge-sharing and collective study as central to meeting the ethical and political demands of the present.

This project will develop three interconnected components: (1) a retreat-style Black Trans Gathering focused on restorative creative practices and transnational cultural memory preservation, and community stewardship; (2) a community writing series anchoring a Freedom Library initiative at the CBP sustaining third spaces against carceral sites that try to dispossess people of kinship and memory; and (3) making public resources in workshops on global trans justice movements, anti-carceral correspondence, zine-making, print production, and anticolonial abolitionist study. This emerging project redistributes resources towards communities often excluded from traditional research frameworks, building durable networks of care and political education that affirm Black trans presence, resilience, and the insistence that we are, and remain, still here.