TARG Members
Dr. Lauren Hill, School of Education - Director
Lauren Hill (she/her) is an assistant professor of arts education at the Trent University School of Education. She is a researcher and educator of European decent with interests in decolonizing studies, critical pedagogy, arts education, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her research explores using the creative process as a vehicle to support equity, diversity, and inclusion in the public school system. She is also interested in the ways that collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers can decolonize the learning experience for all students .Additionally, and prior to her academic career, Lauren was a professional French horn player, performing with a number of orchestras and chamber ensembles in Canada and New Zealand.
Dr. Katie Tremblay, School of Education - Past Director and Co-Founder
Katie Tremblay (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Trent. She completed her PhD at UT/OISE in Curriculum Studies. She was a middle school music teacher for 10 years in the Durham District School Board. Katie's research interests include curriculum studies, decolonization in music education, and experiential learning/inquiry.
Dr. Denise Handlarski, School of Education - Co-Founder
In addition to being an Assistant Professor and the current Bachelor of Education Coordinator at the Trent School of Education, Denise is a rabbi and community leader. She brings art and poetry into her rabbinic work
Dr. Claire Mooney, School of Education - Co-Founder
At heart, Claire is an educator who strives to build communities of learners, to ensure agency and give voice to students. She is interested in mathematics education and the experience of pre-service teachers as they rediscover and explore this subject. She has written professional texts to support students in their endeavours. She also enjoys music and the creative arts and recognises the importance of creativity in all aspects of learning. Beyond this, Claire is interested in educational leadership and how this impacts the work of faculty within higher education.
Dr. Stephanie Muehlethaler, Otonabee College - Co-Founder
I obtained my Bachelor of Arts (English and History) from Wilfrid Laurier (05), MA in Higher Education and Student Affairs from The University of Connecticut (09) and my doctorate of education in Higher Education Leadership from the University of Calgary. I have worked at multiple different institutions around the world (USA, Canada and Switzerland) in the functional areas ranging from residence life, student conduct, first year and senior transition programs, service learning, orientation, emergency response management, sexual health programming, recruitment and admissions and most recently as the Principal of Otonabee College at Trent University. I have taught a variety of non-traditional, masters level and first year seminar course at UCONN, Franklin University Switzerland Trent University in the areas of service learning, first year transition and leadership.
Dr. Karleen Pendleton-Jiménez, School of Education & Department of Gender and Social Justice - Co-Founder
Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is a writer and professor of education, gender and social justice at Trent University. Her research explores intersections of queerness, gender, race and ethnicity through creative writing. She is the author of Lambda Literary Awards finalists Are You a Boy or a Girl? and How to Get a Girl Pregnant. She wrote the award-winning animated film Tomboy, and has been recognized by the American Library Association and the Vice Versa Awards for Excellence in the Gay and Lesbian Press. Selected book chapters and journal articles include: “Start with the Land: Groundwork for Chicana Pedagogy,” “ ‘I will whip my hair” and “hold my bow”: Gender-creativity in rural Ontario, “The Making of a Queer Latina Cartoon: Pedagogies of Border, Body, and Home,” and “Fat pedagogy for queers: Chicana Body Becoming in 4 Acts”. Her book Tomboys and Other Gender Heroes: Confessions from the Classroom explores queerness and homophobia in schools. Her new novel The Street Belongs to Us (for 8 years old and up) explores intersections of gender diversity, ethnicity, and relationships with the land.
Dr. Kelly Young, School of Education - Co-Founder
Kelly Young is a writer and Professor at Trent University’s School of Education and Professional Learning. Her areas of research include language and literacy, curriculum theorizing, leadership in eco-justice environmental education, and arts-based writing pedagogies. She is the founder of the Learning Garden Alternative program that was developed through a partnership between Trent University and GreenUP/Ecology Park in Peterborough.
Email: kellyyoung@trentu.ca
https://www.trentu.ca/education/faculty-and-research/full-time-faculty/kelly-young
Dr. May Chazan, Gender Studies and Social Justice
May Chazan is a professor, parent, and activist, who gratefully lives in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg territory (Peterborough, Canada). She holds the position of Canada Research Chair in Gender and Feminist Studies at Trent University and serves on the Executive Committee of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society. She teaches in the Department of Gender and Social Justice – courses on decolonial activisms, social justice methodologies, and the intersections of gender, race, and class. She supervises graduate students in Canadian and Indigenous Studies (as an affiliate of the Trent’s Frost Centre) and in the Masters of Sustainability Studies program, and she teaches Trent’s Graduate Collaborative Specialization in Gender and Social Justice Studies.
Chazan’s program of research, Aging Activisms: Storying Resistance, Resurgence, and Resilience, explores why and how activists of different backgrounds, genders, abilities, and generations work for change throughout their lives, how they connect across time and space, and how they narrate, circulate, and archive their own stories of resistance. Her work focuses explicitly on “less-recognized” activists and on “everyday” activisms, working to redress the omission of certain stories, knowledges, and practices from dominant narratives of social change. She brings a critical lens to how, across enormous differences in power, privilege, and worldview, activist alliances are forged, maintained, and sometimes disbanded. Drawing on queer, crip, and decolonial methodologies, she regularly facilitates intergenerational storytelling and arts-based research workshops, which push the methodological and epistemic boundaries of both aging studies and social movement scholarship. She also enjoys working creatively with oral histories, activist archives, and digital storytelling practices. Find her program of research at www.agingactivisms.org.
She has co-edited Unsettling Activisms: Critical Interventions on Gender, Aging, and Social Change (2018) and Home and Native Land: Unsettling Multiculturalism in Canada (2011) and written The Grandmothers’ Movement: Solidarity and Survival in the Time of AIDS (2015).
Dr. Miriam Davidson, Havergal College, Toronto, ON
Miriam Davidson earned her doctorate in Art Education at Concordia University, Montréal, followed by several years teaching in at Indiana University, Bloomington, and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She returned to Ontario in 2005 to begin a new position as Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Trent University. Her research and outreach projects focus on the role of the visual arts in enhancing student engagement in learning, the connection between the production of visual imagery (photography in particular) and student literacy, and artistic practices/traditions found in non-formal community-based settings. Her qualitative studies bring together underserved communities of learners with university students and artists through the implementation of arts enrichment service learning programs. This collaborative model that is central to all her work in art education.
A documentary photographer, Davidson spent many years travelling the province photographing more than 25 Agricultural Fairs in Ontario. Her photographs are housed in the Ontario Agricultural Museum, Canadian National Exhibition Archives, the Norfolk Arts Centre, the Riverdale Farm, and in many private collections. Currently, she is digitizing her photographic collection of 35 mm negatives in preparation for the creation of a portfolio of digitally produced archival prints from the Fair series ,and other bodies of work documenting public displays of culture in a variety of settings.
Dr. Jessica Marion Barr, Cultural Studies
Jessica Marion Barr (she/her) is an artist-researcher and educator who teaches at Trent University in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, the territory and treaties of the Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg. She completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen's University in fall 2015, focusing on ecological elegies. Jessica's interdisciplinary practice incorporates artmaking, arts-science research, and pedagogy, investigating creative and collaborative approaches to issues around climate change, species decline, and social/ecological justice. Jessica's 2013 Nuit Blanche (Toronto) installation project Indicator investigated the concept of indicator species and empire; the project was included in NOW Magazine's Critics' Picks as well as The Grid's "Nuit Blanche Animated" (listen to Jessica's sound installation Indications). Vernal Pool: A Participatory Project about Place + Precipitation, a collaboration with artist Karen Abel, was the recipient of the 2014 Jury’s Choice Award and the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects/GROUND Award at Grow Op: Exploring Landscape and Place at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto (more on this project, and listen to Jessica's sound installation Vernal Chorus).
Derek Newman-Stille, PhD candidate, The Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies
Derek Newman-Stille (they/them) is a disabled, queer, nonbinary, fat femme activist, author, artist, academic, and editor. They teach at Trent University where they are currently completing their PhD examining representations of disability in Canadian speculative fiction. Derek is the 9 time Aurora Award-winning creator of the digital humanities hub Speculating Canada. They have published in academic fora such as Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Creative Teamwork: Developing Rapid, Site-Switching Ethnography, The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, The Canadian Fantastic in Focus, and Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings. They have also published in the public press in fora such as Quill & Quire, Uncanny Magazine, Nothing Without Us, Accessing the Future, The Playground of Lost Toys, and The Spoonie Authors' Network. Derek's most recent books are Whispers Between Fairies (Renaissance Press, 2020), Over the Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales from the Margins(Exile, 2019), and We Shall Be Monsters: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein 200 Years On(Renaissance Press, 2019)
Dr. Anne Pasek, Cultural Studies
Anne Pasek is an interdisciplinary researcher working who studies how carbon becomes communicable in different communities and media forms, to different political and material effects. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University, as well as the Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Media, Culture and the Environment. In addition to traditional academic writing, she also produces research-creation and critical making zines. She directs the Low-Carbon Research Methods Group and the Experimental Methods and Media Lab.
Christopher Rooney, PhD student, The Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies
Christopher (he/him) is a two-time Trent University graduate (MEd in Educational Studies and BAH in Indigenous Studies), and a graduate of Carleton University (BA in Canadian Studies). He is currently studying part-time at the Frost Centre in the Canadian Studies PhD program. His research looks at stories and storytelling in sport and education, and their influence on gender and identity. Christopher utilizes story and creative writing to convey complex, multifaceted ideas about gender and identity. Christopher combines his arts research with professional practice, applying stories and storytelling to administrative functions in higher education.