About Me.

My name is Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa (they/she) and I'm a sociologist, 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; decolonization and intersectionality; qualitative, digital, and arts-based methods; collective memory and pedagogy; critical health studies; and social movements.

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My PhD dissertation, From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards a Collective Memory of HIV/AIDS Resistance, explored how to mobilize a collective memory of HIV/AIDS resistance that confronts the historical/institutional erasure, or whitewashing, of Queer and Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activists from mainstream remembrances of the movement within and around the city colonially known as Toronto. I formulated this goal with the desire to enable younger and future generations of QT/BIPOC activists, advocates, and organizers to better connect with the region’s rich and ongoing history of non-white HIV/AIDS activisms.

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I am also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis, a graduate journal conceived by and for non-white, im/migrant, low-income, queer, trans, disabled, and/or woman-identified students, activists, organizers, and creatives, as well as the curator of Erotic Pedagogy, an online resource designed to help PK-12 educators decolonialize sexual education lesson plans, funded by SOGI UBC. Beyond academia, I am a cofounder and now executive 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. I am also the founder of Paper Roads, a traveling library for folx living around the southwest border of the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA). 

 

My postdoctoral research, Exacerbated Hunger: Addressing Racialized Food Insecurity in the Era of COVID-19, combines my academic and community work to help address the current food crisis among racialized and Indigenous communities within Ontario.