About Me.

My name is Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa (they/she) and I'm a scholar, community organizer, creative writer, and educator across Central Southern Ontario. I'm currently employed as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Guelph, in affiliation with Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice and The Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition. My research, organizing, art, and teaching all converge on topics of race and ethnicity; social justice movements; decolonization and intersectionality; qualitative and digital methods;  critical and engaged pedagogy; and critical social theory. 

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My PhD dissertation, From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards a Collective Memory of HIV/AIDS Resistance, examined how collective memory can both conceal and resist epistemologies of ignorance within social movement spaces by analyzing the intergenerational impacts of historical whitewashing on HIV/AIDS resistance within Toronto, ON. I identify pedagogical, digital, creative, and scholarly methods for cultivating a “collective memory” of HIV/AIDS resistance that can be used to educate younger racialized and Indigenous activists working in fields in or related to HIV/AIDS advocacy better connect to the movement's historical past (locally and globally). 

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Organizing wise, I am the founder and Editor-in-Chief of New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis, a social justice journal conceived by and for racialized, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, and/or woman-identified students, activists, organizers, and creatives, Additionally, I am the curator of Erotic Pedagogy, an online resource designed to help PK-12 educators decolonize their sexual education lesson plans, funded by SOGI UBC. Beyond academia, I am the cofounder and now director of The People's Pantry, a food justice mutual aid group formed in response to COVID-19 that feeds families from Tkaronto to the Haldimand Tract, as well as the founder of Paper Roads, a traveling library for families living at and around the southwest border of the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area.

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My postdoctoral research, Exacerbated Hunger: Addressing Racialized Food Insecurity in the Era of COVID-19, combines my academic and community work to examine the current food crisis among racialized and Indigenous Ontarians, as well as social movement responses to these impacts, using digital storytelling methods and qualitative interviews. The project is funded by SSHRC’s 2024 Insight Development Grant competition and will be completed by Fall 2026 with the support of Dr. Carla Rice, Dr. Andrea Paras, and Dr. Nadiya N. Ali (co-investigators), as well as Dr. Elizabeth Jackson (collaborator).