Leila Angod

Dr. Leila Angod (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Childhood and Youth Studies Program at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies.  In 2021–2022 Dr. Angod was awarded the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Early Career Research Award and the RIFA Research Award for her youth participatory action research project on Afro-Asian feminist solidarities.

Dr. Angod’s research mobilizes anti-racist, critical feminist, and decolonial theories and methodologies to pursue two research trajectories: (1) how schooling discourses, policies, and practices invite young people to live racial orders; and (2) how youth research can create the conditions to contest and subvert these racial orders.

In theorizing and intervening in the making of Canadian white supremacy, Dr. Angod employs interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches that reveal the interlacing of structural, affective, and subject-making processes. In so doing, she centres anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism as foundational to Canadian racial and colonial regimes. Her research attends to how young people, and especially racialized youth, navigate the imbrication of race, class, and gender to negotiate the terms of Canadian national belonging and global citizenship. Youth participatory action research (yPAR), including school-based yPAR, are integral to her work.

Dr. Angod holds a doctorate in the Sociology of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto (OISE/UT). She was a 2020-2021 Lillian Robinson Scholar at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute and has held Postdoctoral Fellowships at Bielefeld University in Germany and OISE/UT. She is affiliated with OISE/UT’s Youth Research Lab and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute.

Both of Dr. Angod’s manuscripts-in-progress address themes of race and colonialism at Canadian elite schools. Her young adult novel of speculative fiction explores how young women of colour make sense of the transnational, living legacies colonialism linking Canada and the Caribbean, with a focus on Guyana. Her scholarly manuscript draws from ethnographic and archival data to demonstrate how elite school histories, policies, and programs become sites for the ordering of humanity through the attribution of racial difference.

Dr. Angod’s research and teaching draw from nearly two decades of experience working with young people. Community- and arts-based approaches are integral to her work. She is a former secondary school teacher, co-principal investigator of a youth participatory action research study at a Toronto school, and co-founder of in:cite, a youth-led, online journal for youth research, art, and activism. She co-facilitates an online community of practice for students, scholars, and practitioners of school-based youth participatory action research. Email leila.angod@carleton.ca for more information.

Cross Appointment

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Current Grant

2022–2025, Spencer Foundation, Co-Principal Investigator, “Pedagogies of Community Engagement: Strengthening the Practice of Facilitation in Community-Based Projects and Partnerships,” $399,730.40 USD

Research Interests

• Critical race theory
• Black radical theory
• Transnational and women of colour feminisms
• Decolonial methodologies
  • Arts-based methods
• Sociology of education
  • Elite schools
  • Global citizenship
  • Volunteer abroad
• Critical youth studies
  • Youth participatory action research (yPAR), including school-based yPAR
  • Youth activism
• Speculative fiction and futures

Courses

Decolonial Futures in Young Adult Fiction (CHST 4001)

Youth Culture and Activism (CHST 3203)

Race, Childhood, and Youth (CHST 3205)

Select Publications

Angod, L. (under review). “Especially if you’re a girl, especially if it has to do with social justice”: When youth participatory action research amplifies the racism and gender-based discrimination under study. Children & Society. [Special issue: Conceptualising and researching child and youth activism.]

Angod, L. (2022). Learning to enact Canadian exceptionalism: The failure of voluntourism of social justice education. Equity & Excellence in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2022.2076787 (limited free digital copies available here)

Desai, K., & Angod, L. (2022). Unsettling the global, moving beyond liberalism: Intimacies as a reading practice in childhood studies. Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682221112991

Angod, L. (2022). Accountability in ethnographic research: Researching the making of white/northern subjects through anti-black racism while brown. In Macías, T. (Ed.), Unravelling research: The ethics and politics of knowledge production (pp. 67–87). Fernwood.

Angod, L., and Gaztambide-Fernández, R. (2019). Endless land, endless opportunity: The coloniality of elite boarding school landscapes in Germany, the United States, and Canada. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik (Journal for Pedagogy), 65(2), 227–241.

Gaztambide-Fernández, R., and Angod, L. (2019). Approximating whiteness: Race, class, and empire in the making of modern elite/white subjects. Educational Theory, 69(6), 719–743. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12397

Angod, L. (2016). Youth participatory action research at University of Toronto Schools: Co-constructing knowledge and communities for social justice. Research Brief, 7(Summer) (pp. 4–9). Centre for Urban Schooling, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Angod, L. (2015). The unruly curricula of the ruling classes [Editorial]. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(5), 427–436. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2015.1103604

Recent Podcast Guest

“What happens when you run onto the edges of progressivism?”: On conducting yPAR in elite schools. Invited guest. WhyPAR podcast. March 1, 2022. Episode 11.

https://twitter.com/leilangod
https://carleton-ca.academia.edu/LeilaAngod

https://www.leilaangod.com/