BRN Academic Practice Lab: Navigating Academia as Black and Indigenous Scholars

Dr. Robin R. R. Gray is Ts’msyen from unceded territories in Lax Kw’alaams, BC, and Mikisew Cree from Treaty 8 territory in Fort Chipewyan, AB. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology, former Special Advisor on Rematriation to the Vice-President & Principal, and current Special Advisor on Indigenous Studies to the Vice-Principal Academic & Dean at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She also holds a non-budgetary cross-appointment in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto St. George. Dr. Gray is a socio-cultural anthropologist (PhD University of Massachusetts Amherst 2015) and an Indigenous Studies scholar whose research is centered on the politics of indigeneity in settler colonial contexts. Her current research projects are focused on addressing issues concerning the ownership, access, and control of Indigenous cultural heritage, and conducting community-based research that supports the rematriation of Indigenous lands, bodies, objects, and knowledge’s with, by, and for Indigenous nations and communities.   

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah B.A. (Carleton), M.A., Ph.D. (Toronto), is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and governing board chair at Massey College. He holds affiliate scientist status at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.  Dr. Owusu-Bempah’s work examines the intersections of race, crime and criminal justice. His current research spans across criminal justice institutions. He is also studying various aspects of drug legalization in Canada and around the world. Dr. Owusu-Bempah publishes regularly in both academic and popular forums. Dr. Owusu-Bempah began his academic career in the United States at Indiana University, Bloomington. Prior to becoming a professor, he held positions with Canada’s National Judicial Institute, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and the Ontario’s Ministry of the Solicitor General. Dr. Owusu-Bempah is frequently sought out to provide commentary and advice to police agencies, government bodies, community organizations, and media outlets on matters relating to policing, justice, and social inequality. 

Kai Recollet (Cree) is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. An urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, Recollet’s work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other. 

Karina Vernon is an Associate Professor and Chair of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. She is the editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020). With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo), she co-edited Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (forthcoming McGill-Queens 2026), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.