About Us

About the Dandelion Collective

Dandelions have this amazing ability to thrive in diverse spaces while supporting other plants around them; we saw ourselves as a group who sought to do the same in a variety of academic and community settings. 

The Dandelion Collective is deeply committed to anti-oppressive values and practices in both our daily lives and in our research as graduate students. We recognize the lack of available resources and training for graduate students to develop skills and capacity as allies and/or to work in solidarity with groups who were and continue to be marginalized by the university. We therefore seek to leverage our own individual and collective privileges to provide opportunities for our fellow graduate students to unlearn harmful academic practices. 

In our work, we recognize our roles in perpetuating and/or challenging harmful systems from our various standpoints and positionalities. Working on stolen land and in an academic institution is a continued limitation of our practice. Our individual and collective ties to white supremacy, settler colonialism, racism, ableism and other forms of oppression require consistent attention and work. We therefore take responsibility for our own learning and unlearning throughout this process.

The Team

 

 

Maria Angélica Guerrero-Quintana

 

I was born and raised in Colombia and I am currently finishing my MA in Educational Studies: Society, Culture and Politics in Education. 

I am working on deepening my knowledge of social change frameworks, including theories of change, allyship and anti-oppression, and systemic power analysis. I am committed to engage in practices that sustain compassion and provide clarity of purpose in my life. 

I did my undergrad in Anthropology and I have been working on community building, peace education and conflict transformation with teachers, community leaders and youth in different regions of Colombia. My research interests include education among social movements, ethics in peacebuilding, and humanities-based research.

Maya Lefkowich

I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario and am of settler descent with roots in Eastern Europe. I am interested in anti-oppressive approaches to knowledge translation, and is exploring strategies for collaborative documentary-making in my dissertation about “empowerment journalism.”  In navigating difficult conversations about allyship and solidarity and as a white woman, I am passionate about interrogating implicit bias, structural racism, and white supremacy not only in longstanding research methods but also in how research outputs are assessed by, shared with, tailored to, and/or withheld from community stakeholders. As part of my involvement in this workshop series, I draw on my experience working in LGBTQ2SI+ and Indigenous communities as well as with men on topics related to masculinities. I am looking forward to learning alongside workshop attendees and sharing stories about her my puppy, Ginny. 
Janina Krabbe

I am a settler culture Canadian of Dutch ancestry who grew up in Blackfoot territory. Having moved to the West Coast for graduate school in 2009, I am grateful for the welcome and hospitality of the Coast Salish peoples. In all my work, play, and study, I seek to acknowledge and honour the Indigenous peoples’ upon whose beautiful and unceded lands she is a guest. My scholarship focuses on the intersection between colonialism, research ethics, and violence against women in the context of complex health interventions in Canada. An avid skier and sailor, I am most at home on the ocean or in the mountains.
Jennica Nichols

I am a settler who was born and raised in Southern Ontario with Dutch, Italian, English, and Polish heritage. I earned a Master in Public Health (epidemiology) from the University of Toronto and the Credential Evaluator designation from the Canadian Evaluation Society. My PhD research combines implementation science, evaluation, and theatre to create new methods to co-create in health care. 

My previous training taught me to remove myself from my work. As a consequence, I never learned the tools to recognize power and oppression as well as the ability to understand my own relationship to both. I have been trying to learn how to address this training gap so I can use my position to be a better researcher and do more respectful research. I am early in this journey and look forward to learning with others in this workshop series.

Wajiha Mehdi

 

I am a social justice researcher from India. I am currently pursuing my PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. My research studies how Muslim women negotiate access to public spaces in India at the intersection of rising nationalism and Islamophobia. I look at intersection of postcolonial, critical race theory, intersectional feminist work to develop an understanding of Muslim subjectivity in India. I am interested in how bodies materialize in space through affectual reading by other bodies in spaces thereby determining certain bodies as familial and others as strangers. My research interests include Islamophobia, rise of right wing nationalism, geographies of domination and geographies of resistance.

Final Thought

As adrienne maree brown beautifully puts it in her book “Emergent Strategy”, “Dandelions are often mistakenly identified as weeds, aggressively removed, but are hard to uproot….[they represent] Resilience. Resistance. Regeneration. Decentralization.” 

Join Us!

Register for our upcoming graduate student workshop series!