Speakers
Sylvia McAdam
Sylvia McAdam (Saysewahum) is from the Treaty 6 lands in what is now called “Canada.” She is a direct descendant of Treaty peoples and Original peoples of these lands. Sylvia is from the nēhīyaw Nation. She has her Juris Doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan and a Bachelor’s degree in Human Justice from the University of Regina. Sylvia is co-founder of a global grassroots Indigenous-led movement called “Idle No More.” Idle No More has changed the political and social landscape of Canada as well as reached the global community to defend and protect all lands, waters, and animals.
Sylvia is also co-founder of the “One House Many Nations” Campaign, which designs off-the-grid sustainable tiny-homes to address and raise awareness about the epidemic unacceptable proportions of homelessness in such a wealthy state as “Canada” especially amongst Indigenous/Original peoples.
Through the work of protecting land and water, Idle No More has been selected for several awards, namely: the Carole Gellar Human Rights Award, Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers 2013, Social Justice Award, and 2014 Global Citizen Award. Most recently, it was awarded the Margolese National Design for Living Prize.
Sunera Thobani (she/her)
Professor Thobani teaches in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship is located at the intersection of the Social Sciences and Humanities. She studies and works on critical race, postcolonial, transnational and feminist theory; South Asian women’s, gender and sexuality studies; representations of Islam and Muslims in South Asian and Western media; South Asian Diasporic Films; Muslim Women, Islamophobia and the war on terror; intersectionality, social movements and critical social theory; colonialism, indigeneity and racial violence; and globalization, citizenship and migration.
The geographical areas of Sunera’s research include Canada, the US, South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her academic work follows in the tradition of the scholarship of engagement, it is informed by her activism in the anti-racist, feminist and anti-war movements. Sunera’s research and teaching address emergent issues of concern to disenfranchised and dispossessed communities, including within the University. She have spoken at, and helped organize numerous international women’s conferences, including the NGO Forum at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China; the First International Women’s Conference on APEC in Manila, Philippines; the first Asian-Pacific Women’s Conference in the US; the National Association of Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority Councilors; and the Black Feminism conference in the UK.
Khaled Beydoun (he/him)
Khaled A. Beydoun is a leading thinker on national security, civil rights and constitutional law. He has published a series of books, including the critically acclaimed American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, featured his insights in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and his work has been featured in leading law journals. Khaled A. Beydoun is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and Senior Affiliated Faculty at the University of California-Berkeley Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project. A Critical Race Theorist, Professor Beydoun’s research examines the legal construction of Arab and Muslim American identity, the foundational and modern development of Islamophobia, and the intersection of national security policy, civil liberties, and citizenship. A leading scholar on legal matters germane to civil rights and Muslim America, Professor Beydoun’s scholarship has been featured in top law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review, and the Illinois Law Review. His book, Islamophobia: An American Story (Univ. of California Press), will be released in early 2018. Professor Beydoun earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan; a Master of Laws from the University of Toronto; and his Juris Doctor from the UCLA School of Law. Before academia, Professor Beydoun practiced in the areas of racial justice, criminal defense, and international rule of law. He is a native of Detroit.
Professor Beydoun’s insight has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Salon, and ESPN; and television and radio news programming including CNN, the BBC, Fox, NBC and ABC News.
Faisal Bhabha (he/him)
Faisal Bhabha is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada. He also serves as the Faculty Director of the Canadian Common Law LLM degree program. He has researched and published in the areas of constitutional law, multiculturalism, law and religion, disability rights, national security and access to justice. He teaches constitutional law, human rights, legal ethics, and appellate advocacy. Previously, he sat as Vice-chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (2008-2011). He maintains a varied public and private law practice, appearing before administrative boards and tribunals and at all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He advises and represents a variety of individuals and public interest organizations in matters pertaining to constitutional law and human rights. He has appeared as an expert witness before Canadian parliamentary committees and served as a member of the Equity Advisory Group of the Law Society of Ontario. He has lived and worked in the Middle East and South Africa, and has lectured and taught in many countries. He is currently a senior editor with the International Review of Human Rights Law. Faisal has researched and published in the areas of constitutional law, disability rights, multiculturalism, legal ethics, national security, and access to justice. He advises a variety of public interest organizations and individuals in matters pertaining to public administration and human rights, and has frequently appeared at the Supreme Court of Canada as an intervener. Faisal has also served as an expert witness before Canadian parliamentary committees and as a member of the Equity Advisory Group of the Law Society of Upper Canada.
From 2008 to 2011, Faisal served as Vice-Chair with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, where he adjudicated and mediated hundreds of cases. Since 2011, Faisal has been a full-time professor at Osgoode Hall Law School where he teaches in the areas of constitutional law, international law, and legal ethics. He is also the Faculty Director of the Canadian Common Law LL.M. program and was formerly the Director of the Anti-Discrimination Intensive and Mooting Programs.
Faisal has held visiting academic appointments around the world, including at Monash University (Australia), Jindal Global Law School (India) and Sherbrooke Law School (Quebec). He has also spent time working with human rights NGOs in South Africa and Palestine.
Faisal was honoured with an Osgoode Hall Law School teaching award in 2014 and was named “Male Lawyer of the Year” by the South Asian Bar Association of Toronto (SABA) in 2012.
Houda Asal (she/her)
Houda Asal holds a PhD in socio-history. Her doctoral thesis was published in English : "Identifying as Arab in Canada - A Century of Immigration History" (2020, Fernwood publishing). She was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal and associate of the Maurice Halbwachs Center at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her work focuses on immigration, social movements, racism and islamophobia in France and Canada. Houda has published more than 15 articles and book chapters on these topics, such as : "Transnationalism, States'Influence, and the Political Mobilizations of the Arab Minority in Canada", in Green & Waldinger, A Century of Transnationalism, 2016. As a researcher at the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse of Quebec, she conducted a study of xenophobic and islamophobic hate acts in the province (2019). Her last articles analyses the phenomenon of Islamophobia in France ("From Separatism to Islamophobia", Qalqalah, 2022 : https://qalqalah.org/en/essays/from-islamophobia-to-separatism) and the political and racial profiling of the Arab community in Canada ("La défense de la cause question palestinienne sous surveillance", in Dufour & Dupuis-Déri, Les profilages policiers, 2022)
Vincent Wong (he/him)
Vincent Wong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law and PhD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he researches the production and management of status-excluded migrant labour in Canada through the lens of racial capitalism. He is also on the board of the Community Justice Collective (Tkaronto). Previously, Vincent was a Staff Lawyer at the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and Secretary of the Chinese Canadian National Council - Toronto Chapter. He has also previously worked for the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto and the African American Policy Forum. Vincent holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto and a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School, where he was a Human Rights Fellow and James Kent Scholar.
Mona Oikawa (she/her)
Mona Oikawa is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of critical race feminist studies, cultural studies, settler colonialism, and the internment of Japanese Canadians. She has been involved in feminist anti-racist organizing for decades. She is the author of Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment. Mona and Kirsten Emiko McAllister are co-editors (with Roy Miki) of the forthcoming edited collection, After Redress. She is the principal investigator on a SSHRC-funded research project examining the work of the National Association of Japanese Canadians’ Task Force on First Nations Issues.
Jennifer Matsunaga (she/her)
Jennifer Matsunaga studies reparations for historical injustices, racism, and colonialism in settler states (Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand). Her interests are in Indigenous-settler relations and more specifically, her work critically interrogates how institutional frameworks, such as truth and reconciliation commissions and the Canadian government, influence and encourage these relations.
Kanatase Horn (he/him)
Kanatase Horn is a member of the Mohawks of Kahnawake, but currently lives in the Ottawa region with his family. He is a doctoral student at Carleton University, in the Department of Law and Legal Studies. His work challenges the frequent assumption that cities are incompatible with expressions of Indigeneity, and instead celebrates how Indigenous peoples have developed strong urban communities over the decades. Publications include: A Report on the Relationship between Restorative Justice and Indigenous Legal Traditions in Canada.
Mustafa Farooq (he/him)
Mustafa Farooq is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM). A lawyer by profession, Mustafa completed his Juris Doctor at the University of Alberta and Osgoode Hall (York University) and later earned his Master of Laws (LLM) at UC Berkeley in California. He previously served as a senior political staffer to a provincial cabinet minister in which role he worked on various legislative and policy initiatives.
Mustafa was also a visiting scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School researching countering violent extremism policy in Canada. His book entitled Law, Politics, and Countering Violent Extremism (Routledge) is forthcoming.
He is a published writer and commentator in various news media and publications on issues related to Canadian Muslims, human rights & civil liberties, and public policy issues including Islamophobia and national security.
Mahad Yusuf (he/him)
Mahad Yusuf has over 30 years of experience in organizational development, project management, and strong creative leadership. This encompasses community advocacy, policy analysis, operations management, financial management and facilitation and public speaking.
Specialties: Mahad Yusuf is the founder of the Somali Immigrant Aid Organization and he was instrumental in setting up many organizations including Dejinta Beesha (Somali Multi-Service Agency), Midaynta Community Services, and the Somali Community Centre of Etobicoke to assist refugees and the Canadian government in processing these claims fairly and effectively.
Ayesha Mian Akram (She/her)
Ayesha Mian Akram (she/her) is an educator and community-based researcher whose work is rooted in the intersections of anti-racism studies, religion, gender, and subjectivity. Ayesha is a PhD Candidate in Sociology/Social Justice and Sessional Instructor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Windsor. Her doctoral research, funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), is a community-based project working with Muslim women activists to investigate how they develop collectives of resistance. She holds a Master's degree in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Alberta (2012), where she conducted a qualitative project to study how racism impacts the identity negotiations of Canadian-born Muslim women who practice hijab. She is currently the Managing Editor of The RAACES Review, the official journal of RAACES (Racialized Academics & Advocates Centering Equity & Solidarity) at the University of Windsor.
Ayesha has published and presented, in academic and community spaces, on anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, researcher reflexivity, immigrant workers’ experiences with racism in Ontario, and the importance of critical community service-learning. Her recent publication in Religions examines how being an Ahmadi Muslim woman in Canada remains rooted in deeply divisive politico-religious conflicts that transcend temporal and spatial boundaries and result in multiple layers of marginalities in the diaspora. Among other honours, Ayesha was a 2017 Final Five SSHRC Storyteller for her contributions to an Ontario-wide cross-sectoral research partnership uncovering the gaps in employment standards enforcement. She also received the 2014 Alberta Hate Crimes Awareness Day Award for her work with the Edmonton Police Service to develop a hijab prototype to accompany the official uniform, along with a corresponding educational campaign.
Obi Okafor (he/him)
Professor Obiora C. Okafor is the Edward B. Burling Chair in International Law and Institutions at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC, USA. He is also the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity and a former Chairperson of the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. He has held the York Research Chair in International and Transnational Legal Studies at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, Toronto, Canada, and the Gani Fawehinmi Distinguished Chair in Human Rights Law at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at a number of universities and institutes around the world. He was conferred the Award of Academic Excellence of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers in 2010 and the Gold Medal for Exceptional Research and Major Contributions to Jurisprudence of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in 2013. He is the author or co-editor of seven books and over one hundred and twenty articles and other scholarly pieces.
Alex Neve (he/him)
Over the past 35 years Alex has worked for human rights in Canada and globally as an activist, lawyer, researcher, student, community worker, teacher, academic, decision-maker, colleague, solidarity partner, advocate, public speaker, media commentator and civil society leader.
On October 1, 2020, Alex I stepped down after more than twenty years of serving as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada. In that role he led or participated in over forty human rights research, advocacy and campaigning delegations to more than twenty countries throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, the United States and Canada, including various First Nations communities, Guantánamo Bay, Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoïre, Chad, South Sudan, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and the United Nations in both Geneva and New York City.
The human rights work that Alex has been involved in has extended across a wide range of civil, political, economic and social rights and has focused on such themes as refugee protection, armed conflict, the rights of Indigenous peoples, women’s human rights and gender equality, corporate accountability, trade policy, national security, racism and discrimination, torture, the death penalty, free expression, consular protection, adequate housing, the multilateral human rights system, the global climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
That work has encompassed a variety of activities and strategies, including leading and conducting research in conflict zones, refugee camps and prisons, preparing human rights reports and other materials, campaigning to free prisoners of conscience, working in solidarity with grassroots human rights defenders, pursuing national and international law reform, initiating and intervening in litigation, seeking to influence government foreign and domestic human rights policy, building coalitions, engaging in UN and OAS advocacy, and shaping public opinion and awareness. Alex has also written and commented extensively in the media.
Sherene Razack (she/her)
Sherene H. Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. Her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network the Racial Violence Hub (RVHub). Formerly a Distinguished Professor of Critical Race and Gender Studies in the Department of Social Justice, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (1991-2016), she relocated to the United States from Canada in 2016. Sherene has published six single-authored books and three edited and co-edited collections, as well as over eighty journal articles and book chapters. Her publications illustrate the thematic areas and anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist scholarship she pursues. Sherene’s work focuses on racial violence; race, space, and the law; anti-muslim racism; imperialism, torture, and terror; race, gender, and disposability; critical race feminism; sexual violence, race, space and citizenship.
Razack is of Caribbean (Trinidadian) origin.
Jane Ku (she/her)
Jane Ku is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies program and of Sociology at the University of Windsor and holds a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies from the University of Toronto, the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (2003). Dr. Ku’s academic and research interests emphasize community activism, feminism and antiracism. She approaches feminism as what we do rather than who we are, and intersectionality as a moving intersection of struggles and histories rather than of identities. How we take up political projects and strategically make ourselves is more important than making a claim about whom we are. Her research has included racism, immigrant settlement and postcolonial diasporic experiences of gender. She is currently involved in research projects on African-centered community capacity and partnership building, immigrant youth resilience, and Japanese Canadian history and identity making. She is undertaking an autoethnographic approach to explore biographical narratives, social identities and activism. Her publications have appeared in Canadian Ethnic Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of International Migration and Integration, Journal of International Women’s Studies, Atlantis, and Social Identities. For Jane, teaching is about unsettling students from their taken-for-granted perspectives about everyday life so that they are able to unlearn the colonial, patriarchal and generally oppressive worldviews and practices. It is important then that students are able to apply theoretical concepts to the world around them and be self-reflective about their role and responsibility as engaged citizens in their social networks and in the larger community.
Shelina Kassam (she/her)
Shelina Kassam is a critical race scholar and sociologist whose research concentrates on Muslims in contemporary Western multicultural nation-states, focusing especially on how Muslims negotiate citizenship and belonging. Using postcolonial, feminist, and critical race analyses, she focuses on
the Acceptable Muslim in media, public and political discourses and how this figure reanimates racialized boundaries of citizenship. Since 2007, she has taught at the Women and Gender Studies Division, University of Toronto Mississauga and in the Gender Studies and Feminist Research program at McMaster University. Shelina has had senior leadership experience in the social justice, global development, and educational sectors, both in Canada and internationally. Among other positions, she has served as the Director of Policy and Programming at IDERA, a Canadian NGO, and as Executive Director of the Saskatoon Open Door Society, an immigrant settlement agency. She worked with the Institute of Ismaili Studies in the United Kingdom, where she developed a Humanities-based curriculum and led several teacher education initiatives. She was the Academic Director of an international teacher education program affiliated with the Karachi-based Aga Khan University. She was Editor of the ISIM Journal, with the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern world (ISIM) in the Netherlands. For the past 3 years, she was the Deputy Chair of the Aga Khan Council for Canada’s national Equity, Diversity & Inclusion team and sat on the national Social Justice Task Force. She has previously served as a Board member and President of the London Inter-Community Health Centre, and on the City of London Municipal Council’s Advisory Committee on Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Oppression.
Huda Mukbil (she/her)
Huda Mukbil is a Canadian national security expert and the author of Agent of Change: My Life Fighting Terrorists, Spies and Institutional Racism (McGill-Queen's University Press, Forthcoming Spring 2023). After nearly two decades in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the former senior intelligence officer and New Democratic Party candidate for Ottawa South crossed the public sector floor to run in the 2021 federal election. Through her media and public engagements, Huda raised awareness of the need for reforms in national security and foreign policy. She received a record-breaking 11k votes for the NDP in Ottawa South, placing third in a six-way race. Huda has also been published by the Hill Times and featured in the Ottawa Citizen, the CBC, and Globe Television, providing an insider account of how racism and misogyny undermine our national security.
Irina Ceric (she/her)
Professor at University of Windsor focusing on Law and social movements, Clinical Lawyering, Protest and Resistance, Injunctions.
Since the 1990s, she has mainly used her legal expertise in social movement contexts and in doing radical legal support organizing. In the last few years, she has also done important research into how such organizing has happened in North America over that time.
Among other things, she was involved in founding the Common Front Legal Collective in Toronto, which later evolved into the Movement Defence Committee. She has been active as a movement lawyer and heavily involved in collectives and networks doing radical legal support work ever since.
Yarden Katz (he/him)
Yarden Katz teaches at the University of Michigan’s Department of American Culture and Digital Studies Institute, and is the author of Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence (2020).
Anver Emon (he/him)
Anver M. Emon studies pre-modern and modern Islamic legal history, the role of Shari'a both inside and outside the Muslim majority world, and the historiography of that that field of knowledge production. Since 2018, his appointment is split between the Faculty of Law and the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the Faculty of Law, he has taught torts, constitutional law, racial politics and the law, legal ethics, and statutory interpretation. In history, he teaches in the field of Islamic legal history, law and religion, and historical epistemology in Islamic studies. He was named as a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in the field of law, a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada and awarded its 2017 Kitty Newman Memorial Award in Philosophy, and Senior Fellow, Massey College. The recipient of numerous research grants, he recently received two grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the projects: "Muslims in Canada Archive" (2020-2024) and "On CRA Audits of Muslim-Led Faith Based Charities" (2020-2021). In addition to publishing numerous articles, Professor Emon is the author of The 'Islamic' Deployed: The Study of Islam in Four Registers (Middle East Law and Governance, 2019), Islamic Natural Law Theories (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law: Searching for Common Ground? (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is the founding editor of Middle East Law and Governance: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and series editor of the Oxford Islamic Legal Studies Series.
Jasmin Zine (she/her)
Jasmin Zine (professor Sociology and the Muslim Studies Option, Wilfrid Laurier University). Her publications include numerous journal articles on Islamic feminism and Muslim women’s studies and Muslims and education in the Canadian diaspora. Her books include: Canadian Islamic Schools: Unraveling the Politics of Faith, Gender, Knowledge and Identity (2008, University of Toronto Press) the first ethnography of Islamic schooling in North America and the edited collection, Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada (2012, University of British Columbia Press) and a co-edited book (with Lisa K. Taylor) Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in post-9/11 Cultural Practice (2014, Routledge Press). She has completed a national study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) on the impact of 9/11, the ‘war on terror’ and domestic security discourses and policies on Muslim youth in Canada and has completed a book manuscript based on this study tentatively titled: Under Siege: Islamophobia, Radicalization, Surveillance and Muslim Youth Counter Publics. As an education consultant she has developed award winning curriculum materials that address Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism and has worked as a consultant with the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (ODHIR/OSCE), the Council of Europe, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on developing international guidelines for educators and policy-makers on combating Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslims.
Professor Zine is an affiliated faculty member with the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) at U.C. Berkeley, California.
Jasminka Kalajdzic
Jasminka Kalajdzic is an Associate Professor and Director of the Class Action Clinic at Windsor Law. She joined the Faculty of Law in 2009 after twelve years in private practice as a civil litigator. Her current research focuses on access to justice and class actions. She has published two books and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and reports on all aspects of class action litigation, among other topics. Professor Kalajdzic regularly makes presentations to the bench and the bar, both in Canada and abroad. In 2015, she published the Law of Class Actions in Canada (Carswell), a text co-authored with the Honourable Warren K. Winkler, Justice Paul Perell, and Alison Warner. In 2016, she prepared significant updates to the National Judicial Institute's Bench Book on Class Actions and in 2018, she published "Class Actions in Canada: The Promise and Reality of Access to Justice" (UBC Press). Professor Kalajdzic served three years as the Articles Editor for the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, the faculty's refereed law journal, and six years as a member of the Law Foundation of Ontario's Class Proceedings Committee. She served as co-principal researcher and co-author of the Law Commission of Ontario's Class Action Report, published in 2019. She also served on the Academic Expert Panel for the Australia Law Reform Commission's 2018 Report on Class Actions and Litigation Funding. Professor Kalajdzic served as Associate Dean in 2016-17. In 2021, she was awarded the inaugural OBA Excellence in Class Actions Award, and the University of Windsor's Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to University Teaching
Amira Elghawaby (MC) (She/her)
Amira Elghawaby is a journalist and human rights advocate. She is currently a contributing columnist for the Toronto Star.
Amira is a frequent media commentator on equity and inclusion and delivers keynote presentations and tailored workshops for a variety of audiences.
Amira currently leads strategic communications and campaigns at the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Prior to that, Amira worked in Canada's labor movement in communications and human rights. She also previously spent five years promoting the civil liberties of Canadian Muslims at the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) between 2012 to the fall of 2017.
Amira has had an extensive career supporting initiatives to counter hate and to promote inclusion, including as a past founding board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and past board member at the Silk Road Institute. She has served two terms as a Commissioner on the Public Policy Forum's Canadian Commission on Democratic Engagement.
Amira was a writer-in-residence at the 2019 Literary Arts Residency at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. Her 2019 TEDXOttawa talk is titled “Multiculturalism: Worth Defending”.
Amira obtained an honors degree in Journalism and Law from Carleton University in 2001.