Roundtable Participants
Othon Alexandrakis
Othon Alexandrakis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at York University. His research focuses on resistance, social justice, migration, and childhood, with a regional emphasis on Greece. Over the past fifteen years, he has conducted extensive ethnographic research on political subjectivity, unaccompanied child migration, and everyday responses to precarity, austerity, and displacement. His monograph, Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility (Cornell University Press), examines how Athenians negotiated the political effects of neoliberal austerity. He is also editor of Impulse to Act: A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice (Indiana University Press). His current projects include Hidden Sites of Liminality, a SSHRC-funded study of migration and waiting in Italy, Greece and France, and the development of the Multisensorial, Multimodal Ethnography Collaboratory (M2EC), a research lab dedicated to advancing arts-based and multimodal methodologies.
Website: https://discover.academics.yorku.ca/Othon.Alexandrakis/about
Kenzie Allen
Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. Her debut poetry collection, Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024), was a finalist for the Indigenous Voices Awards and the National Poetry Series, and she is the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, and the 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
Kenzie’s most recent project is a multimodal book of poetry and creative ethnography that incorporates intergenerational histories and diasporic movements, Haudenosaunee traditions, and archival materials of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School. She received her PhD in English & Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, her MFA in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and her BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at York University, where her research centers on documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography, and the enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative works.
Natalia Balyasnikova
Dr. Natalia Balyasnikova is an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Eduction, York University. A critical applied linguist, adult educator, and community activist, she explores the complexity of language and literacy education for immigrants, with a current focus on the discourses surrounding older immigrants' language learning in community-based settings. In her research, she combines traditional qualitative data generation procedures with the facilitation of diverse creative work such as autoethnographic storytelling, theatre and poetry.
Sheetala Bhat
Sheetala is a theatre researcher, artist, and playwright. She specializes in South Asian theatre and politics, South Asian diasporic theatre in Canada, and Indigenous theatre in Canada. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research in Canada, and the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts. She is the author of Performing Self, Performing Gender: Reading the Lives of Women Performers in Colonial India.
She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on the interconnections between settler colonialism and performances of Hindu nationalism in Canada.
She is the co-convenor of the Performance and Migration working group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR).
Link to York website: https://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/bsheetal/