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Ontario Tech acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation.

We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

Learn more about Indigenous Education and Cultural Services

Steering Committee

Our accomplished Steering Committee brings together interdisciplinary perspectives in Criminology, Communication, Education, Political Economy, and Psychology to further scholarship and praxis around hate, bias and extremism. Members of the Steering Committee have a history of collaboration in both scholarship and service initiatives around inclusivity and social justice.

 

Dr. Tanner Mirrlees

Faculty of Social Science and Humanities

Dr. Mirrlees conducts research on the convergence of right-wing extremism and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. He interrogates the ways that right-wing extremist organizations use social media platforms, the technological affordances of these platforms to extremists, and the threat that platforms of hate pose to the values of a multicultural, democratic and socially just world. 

Dr. Kimberley Clow

Faculty of Social Science and Humanities

Dr. Clow's research examines how victims of wrongful conviction experience incidences of hate, stigmatization, and blatant discrimination. She focuses on negative public attitudes toward exonerees and investigates means of reducing the stigma that exonerees experience. Another line of her research explores the discrimination and stereotypes men and women encounter in occupational fields dominated by a particular gender.

Dr. Jennifer Laffier

Faculty of Education

Dr. Laffier's research and work are focused on addressing issues of bullying; specifically, she works to support victims of bullying with therapeutic approaches and to build and implement programs in schools across Canada that address and counter the social problem of bullying.

Dr. Scott Aquanno

Faculty of Social Science and Humanities

Dr. Aquanno's research focuses on the economics of social exclusion with emphasis on the political and institutional impact of neoliberal globalization. His recent work looks at the organizational, participatory and programmatic foundations of inclusive, anti-oppressive community development policy.

Dr. Olga Marques

Faculty of Social Science and Humanities

Dr. Marques’ scholarship focuses on the construction, policing and regulation of sex/uality and gender, attending to the inter-relationships between gendered and raced social norms, social control, and resistance. Olga also publishes Indigenous people's experiences of the criminal justice system, including the media culture's construction of the victimization and criminalization of Indigenous people. Her recent work investigates the stigma that mothers of incarcerated individuals experience.