Faculty of Health recognizes four with research, teaching and service excellence awards
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The Faculty of Health has recognized four of its faculty members for their accomplishments in teaching, research and service.
Four faculty members were recognized with the annual Dean’s Awards, which reflect excellence and innovation within the Faculty.
This year’s recipients are: Mathieu Poirier – Dean’s Award for Excellence in Educational Leadership, Pedagogical and/or Curricular Innovation; Julie Conder – Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching; Adrian Viens – Dean’s Award for Excellence in Service & Engagement Impact Award; and Amy Muise – Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.
The annual awards alternate each year between “early career” faculty and “established career” faculty in the categories of Teaching, Research and Service. This year’s awards cover the 2020-21 academic year for early career faculty.
“These Faculty Awards recognize the excellence of four individual faculty members whose dedication and expertise have enabled us to achieve our mission of providing an innovative and supportive environment for learning, teaching and discovery,” said Faculty of Health Dean Paul McDonald. “On behalf of all faculty, staff, students and community partners, congratulations and thanks to this year’s winners.”
Dean’s Award for Excellence in Educational Leadership, Pedagogical and/or Curricular Innovation
Mathieu Poirier
Award Recipient: Mathieu Poirier, School of Global Health
Nominated by Assistant Professor Tarra Penney
This award recognizes outstanding educational leadership, pedagogical and/or curricular innovation.
Poirier is an innovative educator who has demonstrated leadership in internationalizing pedagogical approaches to experiential learning. For example, he has taken the lead to coordinate several projects delivered by through our Costa Rican partners and campus. Poirier volunteered to be the faculty lead on a documentary film project that explored the determinants of health of migrant workers in Costa Rica during COVID-19. The documentary was released this summer with plans to produce many more episodes that focuses on various topics.
Poirier is York’s leader in the Globally Networked Learning Environment (GNLE) partnership with universities in Germany and Romania. This network was launched in the fall of 2020 with the course he created entitled Global Health Policy: Power & Politics. Over 200 students participated from three countries and had the opportunity to develop policy briefs, supporting podcases and policy solutions to a range of pressing issues such as mitigating the medical, social and economic impact.
His nominator, Assistant Professor Tara Penny, wrote that Poirier “embraces the opportunities and the challenges in the course of planning and implementing pilot initiatives and has not been deterred to work through them. These innovative approaches to pedagogy and curricular development are laying the groundwork to internationalize our course offerings and deeply integrate experiential education learning into the fabric of our School of Global Health.”
Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching
Julie Conder
Award Recipient: Julie Conder, Department of Psychology
Nominated by University Professor Suzanne MacDonald
This award recognizes outstanding commitment to high quality teaching.
Conder’s love of teaching and dedication to students manifests itself through the innovative ways she engages with them. She is leading the way in creating innovative teaching resources that she openly shares with her colleagues. Here are just two of her outstanding contributions:
A Roadmap to Learning is a series that she spearheaded to provide resources and training to psychology faculty and graduate students enabling them to develop more effective online courses.
A collaboration with the Faculty of Science to host science communication panel which provided students an opportunity to learn how to effectively communicate science to the public
She teaches in the areas of critical thinking, writing and communication in psychology. In her nomination letter, Conder’s colleagues shared praise of her teaching and noted they look to her for tips that they can use in their own teaching.
Dean’s Award for Excellence in Service and Engagement Impact
A. M. Viens
Award recipient: Adrien Viens, School of Global Health
Nominated by Assistant Professor Oghenowede (Ede) Eyawo
This award recognizes the outstanding service and impact of faculty members in the Faculty of Health who has gone beyond the usual service expectations.
Viens has been a stellar colleague who has made service contributions at all levels of the University from his School to the University Senate. He stepped forward to serve as the inaugural Chair of the School of Global Health. For the last several months he has also served as it undergraduate program coordinator. As Chair of the new school, he has been developing innovative strategies to increase student recruitment and successful career development.
In addition to co-leading and contributing through his membership on committees that range from hiring, curriculum, EDI and tenure and promotion, Viens also led the school’s first cyclical program review. As an example of his contributions, Viens volunteered to assist another unit’s UPD when they experienced an unusually high volume of Academic Honesty meetings.
In addition to University service, Viens serves on provincial and national committees providing advise on COVID-19-related strategy. He continues to engage in service internationally, with his leadership as Editor-in Chief of a highly regarded international Journal of Health, Philosophy and Policy.
Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research
Amy Muise
Award recipient: Amy Muise, Department of Psychology
Nominated by Associate Professor Jennifer Steele
The Dean’s award for Excellence in Research recognizes a Faculty of Health faculty member whose research is making an impact through its innovation, level of excellence, and commitment to dissemination.
Muise joined York in 2016. Her research focuses on the successful maintenance of romantic relationships, a key contributor to overall health and well being. Muise’s work has had a national and international impact.
In 2016 Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) President’s recognized her with a New Researcher Award
The Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science bestowed an early research award in 2018.
Also in 2018 she received the Caryl E. Rusbult Early Career Award from the Relationships Research Interest Group of Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)
In 2019 she was awarded a York Research Chair in Relationships and Sexuality
In 2020 she received the Sage Young Scholars Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Gerald R. Miller Early Career Achievement Award from International Association of Relationship Research (IARR).
Muise has secured more than $1.8 million in Tri-council research funding. In the past three years, Muise has published 45 articles in some of the highest impact journals in her field. She has been a frequent invited speaker, conference presenter, and already mentored more than 30 graduate students.
Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue, part two
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Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. In this special issue, YFile introduces new faculty members joining the York University community and highlights those with new appointments.
The New Faces Feature Issue 2021 was presented in two parts: part one on Friday, Sept. 3 and part two on Friday, Sept. 10.
In this issue, YFile welcomes new faculty members in the Faculty of Education; the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies; the Faculty of Science; Osgoode Hall Law School; and the Schulich School of Business.
New Faces was conceived and edited by Ashley Goodfellow Craig, YFile deputy editor; Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor; and Lindsay MacAdam, communications officer
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies welcomes 18 new faculty members
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
Eighteen new faculty members join the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) this fall: Damilola Adebayo, Kelly Bergstrom, Duygu Biricik Gulseren, Jessica Braimoh, Asad Haider, Desirée de Jesus, Paul Lawrie, Sunwoo T. Lee, Zhixiang (Steven) Liang, Ann Marie Murnaghan, Katherine Nastovski, Katarina O’Briain, Margaret O’Brien, Jay Ramasubramanyam, Isha Sharma, Rianka Singh, Liz Smeets and Zachary Spicer.
“LA&PS is delighted to welcome a strong cohort of new faculty members to York this fall,” said J.J. McMurtry, dean of LA&PS. “These new faculty, hired in many of our diverse programs across LA&PS, will add to our already impressive research and innovation initiatives and provide first-class teaching practices for our students, whether remote or in-person.”
Damilola Adebayo
Damilola Adebayo
Damilola Adebayo is an assistant professor in the Department of History. He is a historian of anglophone West Africa whose research and teaching interests are at the intersection of social and economic history; science, technology and society; and the role of international organizations in the African past.
Adebayo earned a BA in history from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where he was a Grace Leadership Foundation Scholar; an MA from the Graduate Institute, Geneva in Switzerland, as a Hans Wilsdorf Foundation Scholar; and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge-Africa Scholar.
Adebayo’s current research investigates the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in Africa since the 1850s. He is keen to understand the varied contexts within which Western energy, communication and transportation technologies were adopted, appropriated, hybridized, reinvented or discarded by the upper class and everyday people; and the ways in which these technologies have been a cause and effect of change in African societies. A product of this theme is his ongoing book project, provisionally entitled Electric Urbanism: Technology and Socioeconomic Life in Nigeria.
Internationally, Adebayo was the 2019 recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Life Members’ Fellowship in the History of Electrical and Computing Technology. In 2017, he won the Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Society for the History of Technology. His has also won grants from the Past and Present Society, and the Economic History Society in the U.K.
Kelly Bergstrom
Kelly Bergstrom
Kelly Bergstrom is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Prior to her return to Canada, she was an assistant professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Previously, she was a postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s Institute for Research on Digital Learning and a MITACS postdoctoral researcher at Big Viking Games.
Bergstrom’s research examines drop out and disengagement from digital cultures, with a focus on digital games and social media. She is co-editor of Internet Spaceships are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and her work has been published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication and Social Media + Society.
In 2023, she will join the Markham Centre Campus to teach in courses in social media and public relations.
Duygu Biricik Gulseren
Duygu Biricik Gulseren
Duygu Biricik Gulseren is an assistant professor in the School of Human Resources Management. Prior to York University, she worked as a senior research associate at the Haskayne School of Business; taught at Haskayne, Saint Mary’s University and the Sobey School of Business; and worked as a human resources consultant. She has a BSc in chemical and biological engineering and an MA in social and organizational psychology from Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, and she completed her PhD in industrial/organizational psychology at Saint Mary’s University.
Biricik Gulseren’s research focuses on healthy and safe work and leadership, and aims to create meaningful knowledge for theory and practice in collaboration with organizations. She studies these topics at the individual, team and organizational levels using a wide range of methodologies, including experiments, interventions, qualitative and quantitative methods. She has published a number of research articles and book chapters on these topics.
Being guided by the experiential teaching and learning philosophy, Biricik Gulseren has designed and delivered several courses, and she is very much interested in working with graduate and undergraduate students.
Jessica Braimoh
Jessica Braimoh
Jessica Braimoh is an assistant professor in the Criminology program in the Department of Social Science. Her research and teaching interests include the interrelation between social inequality and criminalization; socio-legal processes and organizing institutions; and the experiences of “at-risk” populations.
Prior to coming to York, Braimoh was a postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University. There, she explored the criminalization of homelessness in B.C. and more specifically the socio-legal processes managing encampments and the use of public space by unhoused people. She has published her work in Critical Sociology, The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Canadian Journal of Public Health, PLOS One and Social Science & Medicine. Guided by principles of social justice, her work seeks to uncover the ways that inequality is perpetuated and maintained.
Asad Haider
Asad Haider
Asad Haider is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics. He completed his PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018. He also holds a degree in cultural criticism and theory from Cornell University. After finishing his PhD, Haider was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University, and then a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
His dissertation, “Party and Strategy in Postwar European Marxist Theory,” was a comparative study of social movements in France and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on developments in Marxism that arose as Communist parties and extra-parliamentary movements addressed the social and political changes of the period.
His dissertation research paralleled his work as founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine, which combined journalism on contemporary social movements, intellectual histories of past movements and translations of historically significant texts of revolutionary theory. Alongside this research, Haider pursued a project on the theoretical interventions of anti-racist movements in the United States, resulting in the book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, which was published by Verso in May 2018.
Haider has published articles in scholarly journals, including History of the Present, Radical Philosophy, and Comparative Literature and Culture. He also frequently publishes in popular publications like The Baffler, n+1, The Point, Slate and Salon. He has been invited to speak in both academic and public contexts at universities and institutions around the world.
Desirée de Jesus
Desirée de Jesus
Desirée de Jesus is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She is also a video essayist and moving images curator. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race, gender, aesthetics, and technology in narrative film and media through traditional, creative/curatorial and maker methodologies.
Paul Lawrie
Paul Lawrie
Paul Lawrie is an associate professor in the Department of History. A historian of Afro-America whose research examines the intersections of race, labour, disability, urbanism and time in modern America, his book Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (NYU Press, 2016) details how evolutionary science and industrial management crafted taxonomies of racial labour fitness in early 20th-century America.
His article “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction” won the 2014 Ernest Redekop Prize for Best Article in the Canadian Review of American Studies. He was also a contributor (“Race, Work and Disability in Progressive Era America”) to the Oxford Disability Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2018) and winner of the 2021 George Rosen Book Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine. His current Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ”The Color of Hours: Race, Time and the Making of Urban America,” traces how time – as both lived experience and a category of analysis – mediated racial difference and identity in the American city, from the time-work management of the factory floor to the vagrancy statues of the streets.
Sunwoo T. Lee
Sunwoo T. Lee
Sunwoo T. Lee is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. She received a BSc in consumer sciences and business administration, and an MSc in consumer sciences from Seoul National University, and a PhD in consumer sciences from Ohio State University. Her research interests include household economics, financial behaviours, financial decision-making processes and the personal characteristics affecting those financial decisions.
Zhixiang (Steven) Liang
Zhixiang (Steven) Liang
Zhixiang (Steven) Liang is an assistant professor of management, teaching strategy management and international business at York University. He received his PhD in business administration from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University.
Liang’s research interests focus on how institutional environments interact with corporate governance and strategies in different business contexts. His recent works address such issues as comparative corporate governance, business groups, market entry and foreign direct investment. He has publications in a wide range of academic journals, including the Journal of World Business and Industrial and Corporate Change. Before joining academia, Liang held various roles in the finance industry, non-profit organizations and consulting firms in China.
Ann Marie Murnaghan
Ann Marie Murnaghan
Ann Marie Murnaghan is an assistant professor in the Children, Childhood and Youth Program in York’s Department of Humanities. Her research expertise and publications focus on discourses of childhood, children’s worlds and material cultures in cities, both historically and in the present period.
Murnaghan’s previous research analyzed how the material cultures of play and playgrounds influenced discourses of childhood and children’s identities in early 20th-century Toronto. In her current research, she examines how museums act as sites of children’s informal education and how integral these are to the formation of children’s identities, using film studies, critical museology and participatory, playful methodologies. In future research, she will explore children’s play in communities and public spaces, and what this means for children and families in the local community.
As a committed collaborator, she currently participates in three Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded projects and is passionate about community-oriented teaching and research. Authoring over 20 articles and chapters, she co-edited the internationally representative and interdisciplinary Children, Nature, Cities, published by Routledge in 2016. She has held teaching positions at University of Manitoba and Ryerson University, and research fellowships at the Centre for Digital Humanities at Ryerson and the Centre for Research in Young Peoples Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg.
Katherine Nastovski
Katherine Nastovski
Katherine Nastovski is an assistant professor in the Work and Labour Studies Program in the Department of Social Science at York University. Her research explores possibilities for transformative models of transnational trade union action, solidarity and co-ordination. Rooted in her experience as a union activist and educator, her community-engaged research agenda works to advance the field of global labour studies. On a practical level, her scholarship contributes to efforts to explore new strategic directions for building workers’ collective power and solidarity in light of the changing nature of work.
Nastovski is currently completing a book manuscript, titled Transnational Horizons: Workers in Canada Enter the Global Sphere (under contract with the University of Toronto Press). The book provides a dialectical analysis of the way workers and workers’ organizations in Canada have acted globally from the mid-1940s to the present. With attention to the social dimensions of transnational labour practices, the book advances a theoretical framework to understand how ideas of race, gender and citizenship shape transnational resistance strategies, and how racialized and gendered class formation in Canada continues to influence ideas of workers’ justice and responses to imperialism, colonialism, nationalism and the regulation of the border.
Katarina O’Briain
Katarina O’Briain
Katarina O’Briain specializes in transatlantic 18th-century literature and culture. Before joining York, she taught courses in literary history, Black Atlantic literature and research methodologies at St. Mary’s University in Calgary, where she received a Teaching Excellence Award in 2021. Her classes often centre around the development of slow, close readings of texts to offer new perspectives on old works of literature and to think carefully about how some of the most urgent social questions of the 18th century live on in our present moment.
O’Briain is at work on a book manuscript, titled Georgic Possibilities: Craft Labor and the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century, which examines the ways georgic poetry – often defined as the poetry of agricultural labor – imagines alternatives to racial capitalism in the long 18th century, as well as in 20th- and 21st-century activist, anticapitalist and eco-poetry. This project ends by tracing the ways georgic poetry has been used to justify an ongoing history of dispossession and settler colonial violence in what is now called Canada. She has published articles relating to this research on the poetics of craft labour and on the political economy of accident in the development of the novel.
Margaret O’Brien
Margaret O’Brien
Margaret O’Brien is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. Before starting at York, she taught at the University of Edinburgh in both the law school and the Philosophy Department. She received her PhD in philosophy from McMaster University in 2016 and completed a master’s in studies in law from the University of Toronto in 2017. Her areas of specialization are social and political philosophy, but she also works on a set of related topics in moral and feminist philosophy. She writes on judicial review, public reason, hypocrisy, privacy, candour and standing.
Jay Ramasubramanyam
Jay Ramasubramanyam
Jay Ramasubramanyam is an assistant professor in the Law and Society program at York University. He obtained his BA in criminology from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 2009; he received a postgraduate diploma and LLM in international human rights from Birmingham City University in the U.K. in 2011; and he received his PhD from the Department of Law and Legal Studies and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University in 2021.
Ramasubramanyam is a global south migration researcher whose expertise includes forced migration, international refugee law, statelessness, third world approaches to international law, human rights, race and racialization, postcolonial theory and South Asian studies. His research explores the asymmetries of power, knowledge production, and the ostensible legitimacy of norms in the field of refugee studies and refugee law. He recently published an article in the Asian Yearbook of International Law on refugee law in the Indian subcontinent, and two book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law.
Ramasubramanyam has taught at Carleton University in the areas of social justice and human rights, refugee rights, international law, and race and racialization, and won the Contract Instructor Teaching Award in recognition of his teaching excellence.
Isha Sharma
Isha Sharma
Isha Sharma is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies and holds a PhD in management. Her teaching interests include consumer behaviour, digital marketing, advertising and communications, and brand management. Her research focuses on studying consumer behaviour pertaining to emerging technologies, exploring the application of artificial intelligence in marketing, gamification in marketing, brand identity, consumer brand relationships, online consumer culture and services transgression. She has published research articles in reputed peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Product and Brand Management, the Journal of Consumer Marketing, the Journal of Global Information Management and the Online Information Review. She has also earned a competitive research grant this year from the AIM Sheth Foundation for her research proposal on service inclusivity for differently-abled consumers.
Rianka Singh
Rianka Singh
Rianka Singh is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, and was formerly a postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information and a researcher at U of T’s McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology.
Singh’s research, which has been published in First Monday, Feminist Media Studies and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, is primarily concerned with the relationship between platforms and feminist politics.
She is currently working on a monograph titled Platform Feminism and the Politics of Elevation. In it, she puts feminist media studies, geography and critical race studies in conversation with digital platform studies. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming book MsUnderstanding Media: A Feminist Medium is the Message (Duke University Press).
Liz Smeets
Liz Smeets
Liz Smeets is an assistant professor of linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. She received her PhD from the Department of Linguistics at McGill University in 2020 and two bachelor’s degrees, in linguistics and Italian language and culture, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2012.
Her research interests include the second language acquisition of the syntax-semantics interface, the syntax-discourse interface and the syntax-prosody interface. Most of her projects focus on conditions for language transfer on interface phenomena in bilingual populations (adult L2 learners and bilingual children).
Smeets is also interested in how knowledge and strategies from linguistics can help students and language instructors in the foreign-language classroom to improve their understanding of how languages are structured, how they function and how they are learned.
Zachary Spicer
Zachary Spicer
Zachary Spicer is an associate professor in York University’s School of Public Policy and Administration. Prior to joining York, he served as the director of research and outreach with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Western Ontario, and began his career as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University after completing postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance and the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has also served as a senior policy advisor with the Ontario Public Service. He is the recipient of both the Susan Clarke Young Scholars’ Award and the Norton Long Young Scholars’ Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
Osgoode Hall Law School welcomes four new faculty members
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
Osgoode Hall Law School welcomes four new faculty members this fall: Rabiat Akande, Barnali Choudhury, Valerio De Stefano and Ivan Ozai.
“I am thrilled to have these very accomplished and internationally renowned scholars and teachers joining us at Osgoode,” said Osgoode Dean Mary Condon. “As we work towards implementing our new strategic plan, they will help us enhance our reputation for research excellence and high-quality, innovative legal education.”
Rabiat Akande
Rabiat Akande
Rabiat Akande works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law, and (post)colonial African law and society. Her current research explores struggles over religion-state relations in comparative contexts and illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues – the relationship between religion, the state and society – while also interrogating law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity and sociopolitical change. These issues are at the forefront of her book project, Constitutional Entanglements: Empire, Law and Religion in Colonial Northern Nigeria (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
Akande is a lifelong Academy Scholar at the Harvard University Academy for International and Area Studies, where she was in residence from 2019 to 2021. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2019 with her dissertation “Navigating Entanglements: Contestations over Religion-State Relations in British Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1978,” receiving the Law and Society in the Muslim World Prize. At Harvard, Akande held the Clark Byse fellowship and was a dissertation Fellow and graduate student associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She also served as an editor of the Harvard International Law Journal. Akande taught several courses at Harvard, both at the law school and in the Department for African and African American Studies. She also served as adjunct faculty at Northeastern University School of Law. Prior to her graduate work, Akande was an associate at G. Elias Solicitors and Advocates, Lagos. She obtained her bachelor of laws from the University of Ibadan and she later studied at the Nigerian Law School.
Akande’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants, including the Cravath International research fellowships, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs fellowship, Harvard Academy grants, and the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World research grant, among others.
Barnali Choudhury
Barnali Choudhur
Barnali Choudhury is a professor of law and the director of the Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Prior to joining Osgoode, she was a professor at University College London (UCL) and academic director of UCL’s Global Governance Institute.
Choudhury is an internationally recognized expert on business and international economic issues, particularly as they relate to issues of human rights. She has published numerous books, including Corporate Duties to the Public (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Understanding the Company: Corporate Governance and Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Public Services and International Trade Liberalization: Human Rights and Gender Implications (Cambridge University Press, 2012), as well as a forthcoming commentary on the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Her work has appeared in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, the Berkeley Business Law Journal, the International & Comparative Law Quarterly, and the Journal of Corporate Law Studies, as well as in numerous other journals and book chapters. It has also been featured in the Oxford Business Law Blog, the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog and the American Society of International Law Insights, among others. She has written op-eds for the Globe and Mail, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung and iPolitics, and her work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek. She has held numerous research grants, including a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, one of the U.K.’s most prestigious research bodies.
Regularly invited to give talks, Choudhury has presented her work throughout Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, and at the United Nations. She has visited New York University, the University of Cambridge, the University of St. Gallen, the University of Otago, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private Law. In addition to numerous academic citations, her work has been cited by the United Nations, the U.K.’s House of Commons, the House of Lords EU Select Committee and international arbitral tribunals, and has been relied on by governments and international non-governmental organizations.
Valerio De Stefano
Valerio De Stefano
Valerio De Stefano will join Osgoode in January 2022. Since October 2017, he has been the BOF-ZAP Research Professor of Labour Law at the Institute for Labour Law and the Faculty of Law of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.
De Stefano read law at Bocconi University in Milan, where he obtained both a master’s and a doctoral degree. He also served as a postdoctoral researcher there, while working part-time as an associate at an international law firm. From 2014 to 2017, he worked as an officer of the International Labour Office in Geneva. During the course of his career, he was a visiting academic at UCL, a postdoctoral member of Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge, a distinguished speaker at the William C. Wefel Center for Employment Law at Saint Louis University Law School and a senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
In 2018, De Stefano was awarded an Odysseus Grant from the Research Foundations – Flanders (FWO), amounting to 880,000 euros, for an interdisciplinary research project on the working conditions and labour protection of platform workers. Since 2020 he has been the principal investigator at the KU Leuven of a Horizon 2020 Grant about in-work poverty.
De Stefano regularly publishes articles in major specialized academic journals. He is the co-editor of the Dispatches Session of the Comparative Labour Law and Policy Journal and an editorial adviser of the International Labour Review. He is currently co-authoring a monograph about algorithmic management, platform work and artificial intelligence to be published by Hart in 2022.
De Stefano has acted as a consultant for the International Labour Office, Eurofound, the Joint Research Center of the EU Commission and national governments. Besides numerous academic conferences, lectures and seminars, he has been invited to speak an as expert on the labour protection of new forms of work at the European Parliament, the European Social and Economic Committee, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Canada-EU dialogue on employment, social affairs and decent work. He is a member of the OECD’s Network of Experts on AI (One AI).
Ivan Ozai
Ivan Ozai
Ivan Ozai researches and teaches national and international tax law and policy, with a particular focus on the intersection of tax law with legal theory and political philosophy. His academic writing has appeared in various law reviews and peer-reviewed journals such as the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, the Columbia Journal of Tax Law, the Fordham International Law Journal, the Dalhousie Law Journal, the World Tax Journal, the Journal of Constitutional and International Law, and the Journal of Tax Studies. He has authored chapters in several edited volumes, including, more recently, Tax Justice and Tax Law: Understanding Unfairness in Tax Systems (Hart Publishing, 2020). He is also the author of Expenditures in the Value-Added Tax (2019), published in Portuguese by Editora Lumen Juris.
Ozai has been the recipient of multiple awards for his scholarly work, including the 2018 IFA USA Writing Award by the International Fiscal Association and the 2019 Paul-Gérin-Lajoie Rising Star Award by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture. He currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Public Law and serves as a reviewer for several journals in the fields of law and philosophy.
Before joining Osgoode in July, Ozai practised tax for more than 10 years as a litigator, a legal adviser and a chartered professional accountant. He was appointed to several senior government positions in Brazil, including as a tax court judge and the head of the Advance Tax Rulings Directorate of the Department of Finance of the State of Sao Paulo. He was also the founding director of the Centre for Research in Taxation in Sao Paulo.
During his doctoral studies at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where he was a Richard H. Tomlinson Fellow, Ozai was a visiting scholar at the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in Amsterdam, at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de Montréal and at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.
Two new professors join Schulich School of Business this fall
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2020, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
Two new professors will join the Schulich School of Business this fall: Vibhuti Dhingra and Majid Majzoubi.
“The Schulich School of Business is very pleased to welcome Vibhuti Dhingra and Majid Majzoubi to our Faculty,” said Schulich Interim Dean Detlev Zwick. “They are first-rate scholars, and their expertise in the fields of operations management and strategic management will bolster the research and teaching capacity at our school.”
Vibhuti Dhingra
Vibhuti Dhingra
Vibhuti Dhingra is an assistant professor of supply chain analytics at the Schulich School of Business. She received her PhD in management science from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research interests are in data-driven analytics and incentive problems, with applications to supply chains and public sector operations. Her work has been published in top-tier journals, including Management Science and European Journal of Operations Research. While at UBC, she won the Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award for teaching excellence.
Majid Majzoubi
Majid Majzoubi
Majid Majzoubi is an assistant professor of strategic management at the Schulich School of Business. He received his PhD in strategic management from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, his MBA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tehran Polytechnic. His research focuses on how firms can position themselves strategically within various market spaces to gain higher ratings and rankings. In Majzoubi’s research, he demonstrates how machine learning algorithms could be used to facilitate empirical studies and enable a dynamic and customized view of firms’ optimal positioning strategies.
Schulich contributes to research advancing theory of institutional drift
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Even the smallest variations in the way people interact with one another and perform their jobs inside an organization can lead to significant institutional change over time, according to new research published in the Journal of Management Studies.
Maxim Voronov
Maxim Voronov, a professor of organization studies at York University’s Schulich School of Business, co-authored the research paper together with Mary Ann Glynn, an associate of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, and Klaus Weber, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management.
The research paper puts forward what it terms the “theory of institutional drift” to explain how minor, under-the-radar changes to standard practices can lead over time to significant and unexpected changes in organizations. A classic example of institutional drift, says Voronov, is what happened at NASA regarding the Challenger disaster in 1986, when the NASA space shuttle suddenly exploded one minute after takeoff, killing all seven crew members aboard.
“When ongoing deviations from routine interactions between people within an organization are ignored or normalized, the result is institutional drift.”
— Professor Maxim Voronov
A number of studies have shown that one of the contributing factors in the accident was the slow but steady tolerance from NASA engineers for accepting greater levels of risk, which in turn led to an erosion of safety standards within the organization – what the researchers describe as the “normalization of ever-greater deviations from routine practices.”
“Institutional drift leads to institutional change by altering the repertoire of practices associated with certain roles, thus redefining the shared understandings of acceptable and normal practice,” says Voronov. “When ongoing deviations from routine interactions between people within an organization are ignored or normalized, the result is institutional drift.”
The key lesson here for organizations, adds Voronov, is that small practice deviations on the part of a large number of employees should not be seen as trivial – particularly when they build up over time.
Former York University professor Ruth Schattner died on Aug. 10. She was a longtime faculty member in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies’ Department of French and Department of Humanities.
Ruth Schattner
Schattner, born in Vienna, Austria in 1930, emigrated to New York City with her family in 1948. She attended Hunter College, and earned a bachelor’s degree in French in 1951. She moved to Canada shortly thereafter to study French at the PhD level at the University of Toronto, where she earned a scholarship. She was awarded her PhD in 1963 and accepted a role at York University in 1964 – first at Glendon Campus and then at the Keele Campus.
She was hired on to teach French language and literature, but was later cross-appointed to the Humanities Division. She was known for making her classes exciting by including music, art and theatre.
With a strong belief in the value of liberal education for all, Schattner accepted a part-time position at York University’s Atkinson College where she taught evening classes in addition to her regular faculty appointment. She continued in this role at Atkinson even after her retirement from full-time teaching.
Off campus, Schattner spent her time supporting and enjoying the arts – plays, concert and performances, as well as art and live music. For several years she served as docent at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
She is survived by daughters Evelyn Straka (Blake Landor), and Michèle Straka (Christopher Klugman), and son Alexander Schattner.
Religious Accommodation Guidelines for the 2021-22 academic year
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The following is a message to the University community from Provost and Vice-President Academic Lisa Philipps and Vice-President Equity, People & Culture Sheila Cote-Meek:
La version française suit la version anglaise.
Dear colleagues,
Academic accommodation for Students’ Religious Observances (Policy, Guidelines and Procedures) can be found at the York Secretariat Policies website.
The policy addresses York’s commitment to sustaining an inclusive, equitable community in which all members are treated with respect and dignity and outlines the following guidelines/principles:
Guidelines/principles
All students are expected to satisfy the essential learning outcomes of courses. Accommodations shall be consistent with, support and preserve the academic integrity of the curriculum and the academic standards of courses and programs.
The University provides reasonable and appropriate accommodation for students whose religion or spiritual beliefs requires them to be absent from the University for the observance of recognized religious days of significance.
A list of Commonly Observed Dates of Religious Significance are compiled concurrently with the establishment of the Sessional Dates for the upcoming academic year and disseminated to assist instructors in course planning.
Normally the form of accommodation will be alternative dates for final examinations, and adjustment of dates for term work, mid-term examinations or other course components.
The Registrar’s Office takes into consideration the dates of religious significance in its establishment of the final examination schedule.
Documentation from faith leaders is not required to support requests for accommodation.
To assist you, we provide the following list of Commonly Observed Dates of Religious Significance. It is meant as a guide to religious accommodations. This is not a comprehensive list of all holy days of observance and the absence of other dates on this list should not be interpreted to mean that accommodation will not be provided to students who observe the additional holy days associated with their faith or spiritual beliefs.
The guide has been compiled in consultation with York’s student Interfaith Council to ensure it is inclusive for York’s student body. You can also consult the Interfaith Calendar (not maintained by York).
Event planners and faculty members are encouraged to take these days into consideration when scheduling events.
Sheila Cote-Meek Vice President Equity, People & Culture
Directives pour les adaptations religieuses : Année universitaire 2021-2022
Chers collègues, chères collègues,
La politique Academic Accommodation for Students’ Religious Observances (Policy, Guidelines and Procedures) relative aux adaptations académiques liées aux pratiques religieuses de la communauté étudiante peut être consultée sur le site Web des Politiques du Secrétariat de l’Université York.
Cette politique reflète l’engagement de York de favoriser une communauté inclusive et équitable dans laquelle tous les membres sont traités avec respect et dignité. Elle énonce les lignes directrices et principes suivants :
Principes et lignes directrices
Il est attendu des étudiants et étudiantes qu’ils et elles satisfassent aux objectifs d’apprentissage essentiels des cours. Les adaptations fournies doivent respecter, appuyer et préserver l’intégrité académique du programme d’études et les normes académiques des cours et des programmes.
L’Université fournit des adaptations raisonnables et appropriées aux étudiants et étudiantes dont la religion ou les croyances spirituelles requièrent qu’ils et elles s’absentent de l’Université pour l’observance de jours religieux reconnus comme étant importants.
Le guide Commonly Observed Dates of Religious Significance est préparé en même temps que les dates de la session à venir et est distribué aux membres du corps enseignant pour les aider à bien planifier leurs cours.
Normalement, ces adaptations consistent en l’ajustement de dates d’examens finaux et de travaux durant la session, d’examens de mi-session ou d’autres éléments du cours.
Le Bureau du registraire prend en compte les dates liées à des pratiques religieuses lors de l’établissement du calendrier des examens finaux.
Aucune documentation de la part de chefs religieux n’est requise pour appuyer ces demandes d’adaptation.
Vous pouvez consulter le guide Commonly Observed Dates of Religious Significance ici. Veuillez noter que ce guide n’est pas une liste exhaustive de tous les jours saints; l’absence de certaines dates sur cette liste ne doit pas être interprétée comme signifiant que des adaptations ne seront pas fournies aux étudiants et étudiantes qui observent d’autres jours saints associés à leur foi ou à leurs croyances spirituelles.
Le guide a été compilé en concertation avec le Conseil interconfessionnel des étudiants de York afin d’assurer son caractère inclusif pour toute la communauté étudiante de York. Vous pouvez également consulter ce calendrier interconfessionnel (non géré par York).
Nous invitons les organisateurs d’événements et les membres du corps professoral à tenir compte de ces dates lors de l’organisation d’événements.
Lisa Philipps Rectrice et vice-présidente aux affaires académiques
Sheila Cote-Meek Vice-présidente de l’équité, des personnes et de la culture
Reminder: Music Professor Ron Westray’s autobiography is available now
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York University Associate Professor Ron Westray, in the Department of Music, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, released an autobiography this month titled Life in Reverse: Tales of a Very Stable Narcissist (Anthem Press).
Ron-Westray
“It is possible that we exist in a predominantly narcissistic society in which people want you to love them; and then they don’t want you anymore,” says Westray, the inaugural Oscar Peterson Chair in Jazz Performance at York, about the book’s key message.
Starting from present and going back 30 years to 1990, the story of African-American jazz musician Westray’s life journey – striving for knowledge, opportunity, acceptance and understanding – is written in reverse.
An embedded road itinerary guides the progression of the book. Years are rarely mentioned in the text; and, in most cases, only initials are used for all characters. People, places and things are all real in relation to the timeline. The work involves the insertion of common conversations – from sources such as texting and emails – to shed light on the fallibility of human relations. To a large degree, and within reason, the length of conversations are meant to be overbearing, countered by other aspects of the writing. Stories from Westray’s father and grandfather are featured in the book and his mother’s free-verse poetry is the soul that binds it together like a second narrator.
Kindness Campaign promotes community and support this fall
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York University students, staff and faculty are invited to join the Division of Students in spreading kindness on campus and online through the Kindness Campaign this September.
With a focus on patience and non-judgemental support, this important campaign fosters an ongoing dialogue about the importance of kindness in our everyday lives as we get used to new health protocols this fall. Gentle reminders and tips around kindness taking time, holding space and giving support will inspire York community members to take the campaign to heart as we navigate changes to the ways we interact.
“It has been a long time since a lot of us have interacted in person on our campuses,” said Alfred Ene, manager of the Office of Student Community Relations (OSCR). “For most of our new students, staff and faculty, it is their first time. The Kindness Campaign is a helpful reminder to stay mindful of others in the community as we navigate new ways of being around each other and move forward together. Whether it is helping out a colleague or a stranger who needs support, waiting a few extra minutes for a service or even getting coffee for the person behind you in line, simple acts of kindness will let everyone on our campuses feel welcome and supported.”
To get involved and show your support, explore the Kindness Toolkit to download, use and share campaign assets, from social media avatars and Zoom backgrounds to website buttons and print postcards. Let’s help spread some kindness!
The Kindness Campaign also helps raise awareness about the supports and services offered by the Division of Students, including Athletics & Recreation; the Centre for Sexual Violence Response, Support & Education; OSCR; Student Counselling, Health & Well-being; and Student Accessibility Services.
