Leila is a Palestinian community and student organizer from the West Bank who has been organizing for over seven years. She is currently studying at the University of Windsor and has a background in social work and law. Leila has been part of the core negotiation team and one of the key organizers of the encampment.

 

Sara Kishawi is originally from Gaza, Palestine, Sara has been involved in organizing actions for Palestine since 2021. She served as a lead organizer for the recent encampment at Vancouver Island University and continues to support actions in Nanaimo and on campus. Sara was suspended from his university due to her Palestine solidarity organizing.

 

Yasmine Dukar is a recent McGill graduate and SPHR alumni.

 

Iman Barakat is a Palestinian undergraduate student at the University of Toronto who has been engaged in Palestine solidarity organizing.

 

Sara Rasikh (she/her) is a community organizer and graduate student based in Tkaronto. She has over seven years of experience in gender justice and Palestine solidarity organizing and her research at the University of Toronto focuses on anti-colonial social justice movements and transnational feminist theories. Her work combines practical and theoretical insights, focusing on emerging theories of solidarity.

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Joshua Sealy-Harrington is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Equality Law at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Before joining Windsor Law, Joshua was a Law Clerk at the Federal Court and Supreme Court of Canada, as well as an Assistant Professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, where he was awarded “Professor of the Year” by the student body and “Person of the Year” by the faculty association for his steadfast defence of academic and Palestinian freedom. Joshua’s research (as a doctoral student at Columbia Law School) and advocacy (as Counsel at Power Law) apply critical legal theory to questions of socio-legal identity and justice, with a particular focus on Black and Palestinian solidarity/resistance.

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Rachelle Friesen organizes with the Toronto Legal Support Committee. The Committee formed in in October 2023 and has been supporting everyone arrested for supporting Palestine. Rachelle also works with Community Peacemaker Teams doing unarmed civilian accompaniment and Indigenous solidarity. She previously spent 5 years living in Palestine working with a humanitarian aid organization.

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Dania Majid is the co-founder and president of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association and is the lead author of ACLA’s 2022 report “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations.” Dania is also the co-founder and artistic director of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival; and she sits on the steering committee for the Hearing Palestine program at the University of Toronto. In addition to being a long-time advocate for the Palestinian and Arab community, Dania is also a housing rights lawyer with a legal aid clinic in Ontario and sits on the steering committee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives - Ontario Chapter. Dania completed her Hon. B.Sc. at the University of Toronto before completing her MES/LLB at York University/Osgoode Hall.

Jillian Rogin is an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law and a criminal defence lawyer. She is an active member of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Faculty 4 Palestine, and the Jewish Faculty Network (JFN). Her PhD research focuses on pro-Israel advocacy in the enactment of hate speech legislation in Canada including changing conceptions of antisemitism over time. 

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Shane Martínez is a Toronto-based criminal defence and human rights lawyer at Martínez Law Professional Corporation. He litigated the first private prosecution of Israeli military recruitment in Canada, and has pursued complaints to the Canada Revenue Agency regarding the funneling of charitable donations to the Israeli military. Shane also defends individuals criminalized because of their participation in Palestine solidarity protests. In 2024 he represented Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association in their joint intervention in the case of Sarah Jama, a Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario who was censured for calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Sarah Jama is a Member of Provincial Parliament for Hamilton Centre, sitting as an independent. She is a community organizer from Hamilton, Ontario and co-founder of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario. In addition to being a community organizer and advocate for justice, Sarah is an educator, having taught sessionally at McMaster University and was the Unit 2 Strike Lead for CUPE 3906.

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Sarrah G. Malek is a Palestinian spoken word poet and writer currently living in Tkaronto, Canada. She writes on colonization and resistance using magical realism and creative performance. She has performed on numerous literary and community stages in Toronto for over 15 years including Toronto Poetry Slam, Mayworks Festival of Working and Toronto International Festival of Authors. She is co-editor of Min Fami: Arab feminist reflections on space, identity, and resistance, and winner of 2023 Briarpatch Writers in the Margins contest.

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Gary Kinsman is involved in Abolitionist Pride, the No Pride in Policing Coalition, and Queers 4 Palestine. He is a longtime queer liberation, anti-racist, Palestine Solidarity and abolitionist activist. He is the author of The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles (2024) and co-author of The Canadian War on Queers.

Duha ElMardi is a Sudanese organizer currently based in Tiohtiàke/ Montreal. She is a member of the Sudan Solidarity Collective, and supports a number of groups and organizations working towards social and climate justice. 

 

Beverly Bain is a Black Radical feminist queer activist scholar co-founder of Scholar Strike Canada.  She teaches in Women Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Historical Studies at The University of Toronto-UTM.

Patrick Teed is a PhD Candidate in the Social and Political Thought Programme at York University. His research projects cohere around: abolitionist theory and praxis; critical historiographies of racial slavery; anti-Blackness and settler-colonialism.

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Erica Violet Lee is a nêhiyaw poet, writer, scholar, and community organizer from Saskatoon, Treaty Six territory. Erica holds an MEd in Social Justice Education from OISE at the University of Toronto.

 

Inès Abdel Razek is the co-Director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD) and its digital platform Rabet, an independent Palestinian organization focusing on advocating and campaigning for Palestinian liberation. 

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Along with other active and retired Ontario teachers of conscience, Amina Ally is part of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) divestment campaign.

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Vincent Wong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law and a Member of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee of the Windsor University Faculty Association (WUFA). He teaches in the areas of international human rights law and law, migration, and colonialism.

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Vasanthi Venkatesh teaches at the Faculty of Law at University of Windsor and was a faculty advisor for the Palestine Liberation Zone students, whose encampment and resistance led to the agreement recognizing anti-Palistenian racism, the scholasticide and genocide in Gaza, boycott of institutional agreements, and processes for divestment. She is a long-time organizer with liberation and migrant justice movements and works on social movements, borders, and resistance.

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Rachel Small works as the Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, a global grassroots organisation and network working to abolish war and the military industrial complex, and is a founding member of the Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition. A longtime organizer with the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network, she has done grassroots organizing within local and international social/environmental justice movements for nearly two decades, with a special focus on working in solidarity with communities harmed by Canadian extractive industry projects.

 

Dalia El Farra has a strong background in Community Engagement, Relationship Building, Communications, and Strategic Planning. She has substantial experience in building Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives and various inter-sectoral partnerships and multi-partner networks. The bulk of her work has been in the non-for-profit world, mostly working with immigrants and refugees, as well as her current work with one of Toronto’s post-secondary institutions as a DEDI Advisor with their Human Rights Centre.
 
Dalia has a Social Service Work background and is currently completing her Master of Education in Social Justice Education with a focus on Workplace Learning and Social Change. She completed her Leadership and Inclusion Certificate through Centennial College, after which she became a Certified Canadian Inclusion Practitioner (CCIP™) through CCDI. Dalia is Canadian-Palestinian, is a native Arabic and English speaker, volunteers with various community organizations, has two teenage children, and two cats. 
 

Dr. Sheryl Nestel holds a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto where she taught sociology and equity studies from 2000-2012 and was the coordinator of the Office of Teaching Support. She is the author of numerous refereed journal articles, book chapters and reports on race and racism in the health professions and the author of Obstructed Labour:  Race and Gender in the Re- emergence of Midwifery (UBC Press, 2007), winner of the Canadian Women’s Studies Annual Book Prize for 2007.

She recently completed a ground- breaking research project, Unveilling the Chilly Climate: The Suppression of Speech on Palestine in Canada written with Rowan Gaudet, which surveys the impact of harassment, intimidation, and the suppression of speech on Palestine on faculty, students and activists in Canada. She serves on the steering committees of the Jewish Faculty Network and the Global Jews for Palestine. She is an Affiliated Scholar at New College, University of Toronto.
 
Dr. Alejandro Paz is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and he has written about the politics of migration, language and citizenship in Israel/Palestine, as well as settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. His book Latinos in Israel: Language and Unexpected Citizenship (Indiana UP) was published in 2018. His current research is about Israeli English online journalism, and its impact on North Atlantic public opinion. He co-chairs the Steering Committee of the Hearing Palestine Initiative at the U of T, and was a founding member of the steering committee of the Jewish Faculty Network.
 
Dr. Jasmin Zine is a Professor of Sociology and Religion & Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her recent book: Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation (McGill -Queens University Press) was named on the Hill Times list of Best Books of 2022. She is author of a major report on the Canadian Islamophobia industry that examines the networks of hate and bigotry that purvey and monetize Islamophobia.

She served as a consultant on combating Islamophobia for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Council of Europe (COE), and the Office for the Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (ODHIR/OSCE). She is a sought-after media commentator and has given Islamophobia Studies Research numerous invited talks and keynotes in dozens of countries internationally. Dr. Zine is co-founder of the International Association (IISRA).

 

Dr. Nahla Abdo is an Arab feminist activist, Professor of Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of extensive publications on women, racism, nationalism, and the State in the Middle East, with special focus on Palestinian women. Two of her notable publications are Captive Revolution: Palestinian women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Within the Israeli Prison System. Pluto Press and an An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba.

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Dr. Sunera Thobani is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author of Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality (2020) Exalted Subjects; Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada, (2007); and co-editor of Coloniality and Racial (In)Justice in the University (2022); Asian Women: Interconnections, (2005) and States of Race: Critical Race Feminist Theory for the 21st Century, (2010).  Her research is also published in numerous edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Borderlands, Atlantis, Feminist Theory, The Supreme Court Review, International Journal of Communication, Hypatia and Race & Class.

Dr. Thobani is a founding member of the cross-Canada network, Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity (RACE). She has served as Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Chair in Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University and as the first woman of colour President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. 

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Dr. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada, where he is Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of A Hermeneutics of Violence (UTP, 2019). He has published several academic articles on topics such as political violence, Zionism and colonial modernity, vaccine apartheid, anti-Palestinian racism, and Palestinian decolonial movements in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, the European Journal of Social Theory, Distinktion, Critical Sociology, and Middle East Critique. He has co-edited two books, the most recent with Jeremy Wildeman titled, Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine. He is also the author of multiple book chapters, and has written opinion pieces for Al-Jazeera, The Baffler, Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, and The Breach, among others. 

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Momodou Taal is a UK law graduate from the University of East Anglia. After obtaining his LLB, Momodou travelled to Cairo to study at Al-Azhar Mosque where he received an Islamic license in Islamic law and Arabic. Momodou is currently in the third year of his PhD at Cornell University in the Africana Department. His research focuses on conceptualisations of sovereignty, with a particular focus on West Africa. Momodou is the host of a popular podcast, The Malcolm Effect, dedicated to political education

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Sara Rasikh (she/her) is a community organizer and graduate student based in Tkaronto. She has over seven years of experience in gender justice and Palestine solidarity organizing and her research at the University of Toronto focuses on anti-colonial social justice movements and transnational feminist theories. Her work combines practical and theoretical insights, focusing on emerging theories of solidarity.

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Desmond Cole is a journalist, activist and author based in Toronto. His work focuses on struggles against state violence, particularly local policing. He has produced works for live news radio, podcasts, magazines, and newspapers in Toronto and across Canada. Desmond’s 2020 book, "The Skin We're In, A Year of Black Resistance and Power," is a national bestseller. In June of 2024, Desmond received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Ontario Tech University for his work combating anti-Black racism.

 

El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was Halifax's Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015.  She is the author of Abolition Intimacies published by Fernwood Press 2022.