Our Team
Aytak Dibavar
They/She
Aytak Dibavar is an Iranian-Canadian lawyer and a decolonial feminist educator in Gender and Social Justice Program at McMaster University. Aytak’s work/research are entangled with feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production and creative/art-based teaching practices. Aytak reads and writes about race, gender, memory, political trauma and silence. For more than a decade, Aytak has developed a dual academic and activist career on issues pertaining to women’s and LGBTQIA+ community’s rights – specifically related to trauma survivors, resettlement, and barriers to education and workplace access for femme refugees. Aytak has a great passion for people and their lived experiences. She is interested in life-narratives; the ways in which people make sense of their own life, whether and how they narrate it to others and why they remain silent about it. Aytak tries to spend most of their free time either outdoors enjoying and experiencing nature or creating and consuming art. Painting and poetry are not only important political categories for their work but are deeply apart of who they are. They incorporate art in their daily life – through visiting local galleries and painting – and in their pedagogy.
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Roya Motazedian
They/Them
Roya Motazedian is in their last year of their English and Cultural Studies Bachelor's Degree at McMaster University. As someone who has spent all their life up to this point immersed in academia, they join Pedagogies of Hope with an interest in discovering new pedagogy-related perspectives, especially in a post-COVID world.
Maddi Chan
She/Her
Maddi Chan is a PhD candidate in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research explores how 19th-century Caribbean women’s articulation of embodied self-knowledge and queer intimacies emerge as a subversive force against the institutionalization and masculinization of Western medicine. Her project seeks to collaboratively reimagine reading the body in and of the text/archive in ways that reintegrate our present-day bodies—to account for the ways our bodies come in contact with the bodies in and of the archive—through an epistemological reorientation towards the contributions that Caribbean women have already made in shaping the world(s) we inhabit and in producing alternative methods to know, feel, and move ourselves in them.
Fay Daemi
She/Her
(Artist/ Writer/ Researcher) Fay is an Iranian queer artist, activist, and researcher based in Hamilton. Her background in Theatre and pedagogy and her enthusiasm for Gender studies and social justice have taken her from Iran to Canada. Fay is an award-winning published author who wrote the first Iranian young adult novel about sex education, Ava in the Mirror. She is a proud member of the Pedagogies of Hope collective and co-leads the Spark Teen Performance Intensive through the Hamilton Festival Theatre Company.
Fay recently completed her second Masters in Gender studies and Social justice and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Communications, New media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.
Christopher Maclean
He/Him
Christopher Maclean is in his third year of Justice, Political Philosophy, and Law Bachelor's Degree at McMaster University. As
a lifelong optimist, especially in the face of unbecoming realities of the world, Christopher shares in the Pedagogies of Hope teams aspiration to strive to support and develop new, inclusive, and creative ways of teaching, learning and re-learning, and reflecting as a means of hopeful change for our futures.
Cassidy Burr
She/Her
Cassidy Burr is a first year PhD student at McMaster University. Her research is interested in the ethics and responsibilities of witnessing silence, and examining the ways silence can communicate the unspeakableness of traumatic experiences. Cassidy's research is grounded in Miriam Toews' and Katherena Vermette's writings, and explores new methodologies for fostering empathy in relation to silence. Cassidy joins the Pedagogies of Hope collection with excitement and joy, and looks forward to both the serious and unserious conversations about what it means to engage with pedagogies that dream and hope for different futures.