Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/04/2025
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Location
Burke Science Building (BSB) 121

Dr. Rhonda C. George – We’re All in This Together? Unpacking Black Community Experiences in Health Advocacy and Policy in Ontario
Assistant Professor – Critical Race Studies in Sociology and Anthropology – University of Guelph

Rhonda C. George is an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph. Her interdisciplinary research examines the social and intersectional dimensions of race, racialization, and racial stratification within social institutions including sport, education, and healthcare systems. With a particular interest in the Caribbean diaspora in the United States and Canada and a keen eye on Black popular culture, Dr. George employs multidisciplinary and community-based methodologies to dissect the aspirations, identity formation processes, epistemologies, and intradiasporic migrations within Black communities.

Research has shown that like their American counterparts, Black Canadians have disproportionately felt the negative impacts of the global pandemic including higher risk for contracting COVID-19, higher likelihoods of acquiring multiple infections, significantly higher death rates, and bearing greater negative socioeconomic impacts. Through centering the counternarratives of Black community leaders in Ontario, this talk explores their experiences in advocating for their communities within formal health policy processes during the pandemic. I will also unpack the ways in which they experienced what I term – opportunistic engagement – in formal health policy spaces, and then will explore the participants’ articulations of potential paths forward.