Dr. Joel Heng Hartse is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Second Language Writing, Across the Disciplines, English Today, the Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, among other journals. His books include Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (with Jiang Dong, TESOL Press) and Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do (Cascade Books). He is currently president of the Canadian Association for Studies in Discourse and Writing.

Dr. Özlem Sensoy is the inaugural director of the Cassidy Centre for Educational Justice. She is also Professor of Education in the Faculty of Education, an associate member of the Department of Gender Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and an affiliated faculty member with the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her primary field of research is social justice education. Social justice education seeks to reveal how inequities become embedded in the fabric of society, and to identify strategies to advance change for greater justice. Her research examines the opportunities and barriers inherent in advancing a more equitable and just society, through social justice education. Her work occurs along two parallel trajectories: analyzing how inequities are reproduced in social institutions (such as schools, universities, media, policing), and identifying constructive interventions to interrupt them (such as developing social awareness via pedagogical approaches, institutional literacy, and political/civic action). Her research has been published in journals including Radical Pedagogy, Rethinking Schools, Gender & Education, Race Ethnicity and Education, and the Harvard Educational Review. She is the co-author of the award winning books: Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education; and Muslim Voices in School: Narratives of Identity and Pluralism.

Dr. Celeste Nazeli Snowber, PhD is dancer, poet/writer and award-winning educator who is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Celeste has written extensively and her books include, Embodied inquiry: Writing living and being through the body, three collections of poetry and most recently, Dance, poetics and place: Site-specific performance as a portal to knowing. Her 2021 book of poetry, The marrow of longing explores her Armenian identity. Celeste creates site-specific performances in the natural world, including botanical gardens and sites between land and sea. She can be found at www.celestesnowber.com.

Dr. Thashika Pillay is Assistant Professor in Education Policy in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Dr. Pillay completed her PhD in Social Justice and International Education in 2018, in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta. Dr. Pillay has extensive research and teaching experience in K-12 and higher education in Canada, Australia, and Ethiopia. Her research program explores questions of social, cultural, economic, political, and epistemic justice in working towards reimagining education for anti-colonial futures with regards to curriculum and policy in formal and informal educational contexts both in Canada and global South contexts.

Mr. Fisseha Gidey Gebremedhin is an experienced educator, lecturer, and researcher, who worked at Abi Adi College of Teacher Education and Adigrat University in Tigray, Ethiopia from 2005 until the forceful closure of higher education in Tigray in 2021. Thereafter, he took on the role of Sub National Education Cluster Coordinator-Tigray Unit for Save the Children International coordinating emergency education services for children affected by the war from December 2021 through February 2023. Presently, he is engaged in a collaborative effort with Queens University for a research project funded by SSHRC, titled “Black Youth Experiences of War and Justice in Tigray in Times of Conflict.”

Dr. Magali Forte holds a PhD in Languages, Cultures and Literacies from Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on identities in plurilingual educational contexts involving multimodal literacy practices. She is particularly interested in postqualitative inquiry and she thinks with sociomaterial theories – including posthumanism, new materialism, and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. As a researcher and an educator, she feels fortunate to also be learning from the many rich and diverse Indigenous perspectives that have offered a relational view of the world for thousands of years. She is the co-founder of the Reading/Thinking/Doing (RTD) club which offers regular opportunities for people from different horizons and fields to engage conversation about relational concepts and theories. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with Bishop’s University and she also supports in-service teachers in BC in their reflection on their own pedagogical practices and philosophy of teaching and learning.

Dr. Nathalie Sinclair is a distinguished SFU professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her primary research interests focus on the consequences of embodied cognition in mathematics thinking and learning. She studies the role of the aesthetic in the development of mathematics as a discipline and in the understandings of both research mathematicians and school learners. Dr. Sinclair also investigates the ways in which digital technologies–and dynamic geometry software in particular–change the way people think, move and feel mathematically.

Dr. Natasa Lackovic is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University (UK). Natasa’s research broadly tackles educational futures as linked to challenges and complexities of material, digital and social futures, via inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches and theories. These incorporate concerns for social justice; visual and arts-based research and pedagogy (photographs, sketching and graphic narratives), socio-materiality; (digital) semiotics and a semiotic theory of learning; multimodality, critical thinking and critical media literacy; student/staff wellbeing and mental health. Her scholarship also includes critical approaches to graduate employability and identity, the postdigital, posthuman, and post-truth.

Dr. Michael Ling is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on the History, Sociology, and Anthropology of Education, particularly related to the philosophy and history of ideas, educational theory, and the intricate social contexts of learning institutions, including a profound exploration of the history of universities. In addition to this extensive expertise, Michael has delved into Arts Education, with a focus on aesthetics, cross-cultural approaches to the arts and performance, contemporary and popular culture, as well as the sociology and psychology of creativity. Michael's commitment to advancing qualitative research methods is evident through his contributions in areas such as methodology, history of inquiry, teacher inquiry, and self-study, showcasing his dedication to approaches for understanding the complex facets of education and human creativity.

Dr. Alin Olteanu is a Post-doctoral Researcher, Käte Hamburger Kolleg Aachen: Cultures of Research, University of Aachen, Germany. Alin’s main research interests fall at the intersection of embodiment and mediality, which he explores from a semiotic perspective. He holds a PhD from Roehampton University (London) in philosophy of education and has held postdoctoral grants at Kaunas University of Technology and the University of Tartu, besides other academic positions. He is pursuing research on the social and cultural consequences of digitalization. Specifically, he is interested in understanding how digitalization can foster opportunities for rethinking education and scientific practices that support sustainable development.

Dr. Cary Campbell is a term lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University as well as a music educator. His research interests include philosophy of education, place/Land-based pedagogy, multimodal curriculum development and music and arts education. Broadly, he employs biosemiotics, post-humanist, and decolonial theory to articulate the educational challenges and opportunities jointly posed by digitalization and climate-change. Through his ongoing work as Director of Research for the registered BC society The Group (multimodal research), Cary collaborates with teachers, artists, and community members, to create curriculum resources and digital tools that connect people and students with their own localities, communities, and public spaces.

Dr. João Gabriel Ascenso is an assistant professor at the Colégio de Aplicação of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He holds a PhD in Cultural and Social History from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), researching the Indigenous movement during the Brazilian military dictatorship. He was a visiting researcher at the History Department of New York University (NYU) (2019-2020), and his thesis was awarded the 2022 CAPES Prize, the most prestigious prize for PhD theses in Brazil. Starting in August as a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Ascenso will analyze the teaching of ancient history from the perspective of Amazonian archeology.

Amir Michalovich is a PhD Candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. His doctoral research explores digital multimodal composing with newcomer youth from refugee and socio-economically marginalized backgrounds in a secondary school in Metro Vancouver. His research and teaching also explore critical media literacy, computer-assisted and multimodal qualitative data analysis, arts-based research, classroom interaction, and linguistic landscape. He recently published in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, TESOL Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry.

Dr. Amber Moore is a Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her interests include: adolescent literacies; arts-based research; English education; feminist pedagogies; teacher and teacher librarian education; rape culture; and representations of youth in popular culture and YA literature, particularly sexual assault narratives. Her work can be found in publications such as English Journal, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship.

Dr. Suzanne Smythe is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her focus is on Adult Literacy and Adult Education, where she works at the intersections of adult literacy, digital equity and community-based learning. Her current research program explores new technologies, literacies and digital justice in community-based adult learning settings.

Dr. Natasa Lackovic is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University (UK). Natasa’s research broadly tackles educational futures as linked to challenges and complexities of material, digital and social futures, via inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches and theories. These incorporate concerns for social justice; visual and arts-based research and pedagogy (photographs, sketching and graphic narratives), socio-materiality; (digital) semiotics and a semiotic theory of learning; multimodality, critical thinking and critical media literacy; student/staff wellbeing and mental health. Her scholarship also includes critical approaches to graduate employability and identity, the postdigital, posthuman, and post-truth.

Dr. Alin Olteanu is a Post-doctoral Researcher, Käte Hamburger Kolleg Aachen: Cultures of Research, University of Aachen, Germany. Alin’s main research interests fall at the intersection of embodiment and mediality, which he explores from a semiotic perspective. He holds a PhD from Roehampton University (London) in philosophy of education and has held postdoctoral grants at Kaunas University of Technology and the University of Tartu, besides other academic positions. He is pursuing research on the social and cultural consequences of digitalization. Specifically, he is interested in understanding how digitalization can foster opportunities for rethinking education and scientific practices that support sustainable development.

Dr. Cary Campbell is a term lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University as well as a music educator. His research interests include philosophy of education, place/Land-based pedagogy, multimodal curriculum development and music and arts education. Broadly, he employs biosemiotics, post-humanist, and decolonial theory to articulate the educational challenges and opportunities jointly posed by digitalization and climate-change. Through his ongoing work as Director of Research for the registered BC society The Group (multimodal research), Cary collaborates with teachers, artists, and community members, to create curriculum resources and digital tools that connect people and students with their own localities, communities, and public spaces.

Maverick Y. Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate, teacher, and activist at The University of Georgia. Their research interests include discourse studies, embodiment, critical multicultural-lingual education, critical posthumanism, teacher education, critical literacy, and functional linguistics. Recent publications: