Mark Campbell
Associate Professor
Mark V. Campbell is a DJ, scholar and curator. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations and notions of the human. Dr. Campbell is a former Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Fine Arts at the University of Regina and is currently the Principal Investigator in the SSHRC funded research project on Hip Hop Archives. As co-founder of the Bigger than Hip Hop radio show in 1997 and founder at Northside Hip Hop Archive in 2010, Mark has spent two decades embedded within the Toronto hip hop scene operating from community engaged praxis as both a DJ and a Curator. Mark’s forthcoming books include B-sides and ‘Othered’ Kinds of Humans, the co-edited collection of essays, Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production with Murray Forman as well as Hip Hop in Canada: Diasporic and Indigenous Reverberations with Charity Marsh. Dr. Campbell recently published …Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto hip hop Culture from Analogue to Digital as part of his recent Contact Festival exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. He has published widely, with essays appearing in the Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society and the Journal of World Popular Music. His popular writing can be found in various public sources, such as the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star as well as hip hop magazines such as Urbanology.
Allison Crawford
Associate Professor
Allison Crawford, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, at the University of Toronto. She is a psychiatrist and Clinician Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where she is the Chief Medical Officer of the Canada Suicide Prevention Service; Medical Director of the Ontario Psychiatric Outreach Program; and a Founder and Co-Chair of ECHO Ontario (www.echoontario.ca), an award-winning, virtual community of practice. She also holds a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University (2021-2022). These activities advance access to mental health services, with a focus on public mental health, suicide prevention, and community and citizen engagement in health care. Crawford also has a PhD in English literature, and leads the Health Humanities portfolio in the Department of Psychiatry. As the Founder and Scientific Director of HeART Lab (www.healthequityART.com), and Editor-in-Chief of Ars Medica: Journal of Medicine, Humanities and the Arts (www.ars-medica.ca), she brings arts-based research approaches to her work in community engagement and knowledge translation, and believes that the arts contribute to public mental health.
Obidi Ezezika
Associate Professor
Obidimma Ezezika (BSc, Ph.D., MEM, ACUE) is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto in the Department of Health & Society (Scarborough Campus) and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (St. George Campus). He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ontario Tech University. He is the Founding Director and Principal Investigator of the Global Health & Innovation Lab: an Implementation Science research and education initiative on the systematic uptake of evidence-based interventions into routine practice in global health. Prof. Ezezika’s research examines how to scale evidence-based interventions to meet marginalized communities’ health needs at the local and global levels. His research aims to promote evidence-based health interventions, particularly in low and middle-income countries, using implementation science research. These interventions range from mhealth technologies, vaccination campaigns, infectious disease treatments to large-scale nutrition interventions. He is the inaugural recipient of the University of Toronto Global Educator Award, recognizing faculty members who embody its global mission and profile. He is also the recipient of several other awards, including the D2L Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning and the Next Einstein award.
Barry Freeman
Associate Professor
Barry Freeman is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, and currently Chair of UTSC’s Arts, Culture & Media Department. He is the author of Staging Strangers: Theatre & Global Ethics, co-editor of In Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions, Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review. He is currently PI of Belongings, and co-lead on PLEDGE.
Cassandra Hartblay
Assistant Professor
Cassandra Hartblay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Health & Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she is also Director of the Centre for Global Disability Studies. Dr. Hartblay is also graduate faculty in the UofT Department of Anthropology and Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. She is the author of I Was Never Alone or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia (University of Toronto Press 2020) and a co-curator of the disability arts exhibition #CripRitual (postponed to January 2022). Her arts-based research creation work has been staged or installed at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and Yale University. Her scholarly work appears in journals including American Ethnologist, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Ethnography.
Elliot Leffler
Assistant Professor
Elliot Leffler is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Toronto – Scarborough. As an artist and a scholar, Elliot explores how theatre can be used as a catalyst for intercultural, interfaith, and intergenerational dialogue. He has led theatre projects with white, black, and coloured South Africans, with Jews and Palestinians in Israel, with Kurdish and Arab Iraqis, with urban US high school students, and with racially-diverse houses of worship. These creative and scholarly projects frequently take Elliot away from traditional theatre spaces: he has worked in summer camps, prisons, rural villages, church basements, and urban high schools. Currently, Elliot is researching the diverse community of artistry that produces the Oberammergau Passion Play, in Oberammergau, Germany. Elliot holds a PhD in Theatre from the University of Minnesota, an MA in Applied Theatre from the University of Cape Town, and a BS in Theatre from Northwestern University. He frequently presents at national and international conferences, and has published in The Drama Review, Research in Drama Education, Theatre Research International, Theatre Topics, and Contemporary Theatre Review. His forthcoming book, Applied Theatre and Intercultural Play: Ludic Encounters with Otherness, is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.
Roger Mantie
Associate Professor
Roger Mantie (PhD) is Associate Professor, Department of Arts, Culture and Media at University of Toronto Scarborough, with a graduate appointment at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He held previous appointments at Arizona State University and Boston University. His teaching and scholarship focus on connections between education and wellness, with an emphasis on lifelong engagement in and with music and the arts. While working in Phoenix he brokered partnerships with the Phoenix Center for the Arts and Mayo Clinic (the latter supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts) to create and study programming focused on community music engagement. In 2019, he helped launch wellness-focused programming in Scarborough retirement residences. A widely-published scholar, researcher, and collaborator, Mantie is author of Music, Leisure, Education: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (2021, forthcoming), co-author of Education, Music, and the Social Lives of Undergraduates: Collegiate A Cappella and the Pursuit of Happiness (2020), co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education (2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure (2016).
Janet Parsons
Associate Professor
Janet Parsons’ program of research is focused on the development and application of qualitative methodologies to study a range of issues in health services and health policy. While her work encompasses a variety of topic areas and approaches, she specializes in narrative and visual methods. Theoretically, she draws on the work of Arthur Frank and other narrative theorists, and is also interested in theories of representation, the role of images, and their intersection with text. How stories can be used to inform our understanding of patients’ experiences, clinicians’ practices and policy uptake is a major focus. Along with her colleague James Lavery (a fellow scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital and an associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health) she has developed a new film-based research method called Brokered Dialogue, which explores how stories are shared and taken up by others, and how those with divergent perspectives encounter one another.
Janet is experienced in mixed methods research, because of her extensive collaborations with investigators from a broad range of disciplines. She has a specific interest in arts-based methods of inquiry and knowledge translation, and is a founding member of a national collaborative on arts-based qualitative health research, led by Dr. Katherine Boydell (Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto).
Janet is a physical therapist who practiced for 18 years in acute care settings, primarily in the areas of surgical oncology and critical care. She earned her MSc and PhD from the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis entailed a narrative study of experiences of illness work, vocational work and identity work amongst persons treated for primary bone cancer. She undertook postdoctoral training at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael’s Hospital, in a CIHR-funded program focusing on the health of marginalized populations. Currently, she is a research scientist with the Applied Health Research Centre at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital. She is cross-appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at University of Toronto, as well as being an Associate of the Graduate Department of Rehabilitation Science, School of Graduate Studies. She is also a Fellow at the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research.
Nikki Woods
Associate Professor
I am currently a Scientist at The Wilson Centre, and Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. I completed my PhD in cognitive psychology with a primary interest in categorization and human memory. My research focus over the last ten years has been understanding the integration of basic and clinical sciences in clinical reasoning. I use theories from cognitive psychology to understand the mental processes and structures that underpin expertise across the health professions.