This page reflects the significant and substantive relationships that sustain S.I.T.Y Lab. All of us are committed to animating the work of S.I.T.Y alongside our own projects and political urgencies. If you’re interested in working with Dr. Abdillahi or being a S.I.T.Y Collaborator please get in touch here and introduce yourself, tell us what you’re working on (or want to work on), your vision, and what it is that you’re seeking specifically from our interaction.

I’m a daughter, aunt, and grand-aunt. I’m also a practitioner, scholar, and researcher who works to support, uplift, and amplify Black lives. I’ve been working with and alongside Black and racialized communities for almost twenty years, including extensive work with mad-identified people within and outside systems that contained and sought to contain them in the name of alleged “care.” This is what brings me to S.I.T.Y Lab as Lab Director and Principal Investigator.

My PhD is in Policy Studies where I explored the interlacing of contemporary critical thought and the lived experiences of Black women in Ontario on social assistance. My research filled a gap in social policy literature, which typically disregards the subjective experiences of Black women or treats them as a mere addendum. 

Black life and Black Studies prepared me to understand how the human is constructed. This focus enables me to research and write at the collisions of Policy Studies, Legal Studies, Disability Studies and Mad Studies, Black Canadian Studies, Critical Black Feminisms and Gender Studies, Critical Technology and Surveillance Studies, and Experimental Methods. I have a particular focus on notions of criminality and madness and how systems of carcerality are deployed against Black people. In this role, I’m an Assistant Professor at the School of Disability Studies, cross-appointed to the School of Social Work, at Toronto Metropolitan University.

In 2019, I co-authored BlackLife Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom, and In 2022, I wrote Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty & the Violence of Social Assistance. This book makes explicit how social systems are made opaque so that we don’t connect them to the carceral state.  

Collaborators

Abdi O.

Allie W.

amber w-k.

Anwar K.

Apollo K.

Bonnie L.

Lannii L.

Maddy D.

Margot C.

Olivia S.

Peace A.

Selma L.

Disability Publics Lab, Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora in the Faculty of Education at York University, Laurier Centre for Community Research, Learning and Action, and Race and Disability Canada.