Leila Angod

Dr. Leila Angod (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Childhood and Youth Studies Program at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies. Her work draws from critical race feminisms, anticolonial theory, and critical youth studies to explore worldmaking practices in schools. She is interested in how hierarchies become institutionalized and lived through feelings, subjectivities, and school programs and policies, and how to create other worlds with young people through research. Her work examines these processes in archival documents and using ethnographic and participatory approaches that centre young people’s worldmaking practices.

Dr. Angod is the Principal Investigator of a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and conducted in partnership with an Ontario school board. This youth participatory action research study uses visual methods to document and share Black students’ community-making practices at their school. The findings contribute to scholarship on the ethics and politics of school-based youth co-research at the intersection of school board initiatives for wellbeing and anti-Black racism.

From this work, Dr. Angod is developing a framework that applies Black and women of colour feminist scholarship on feelings in activism to the process of research design and facilitation with young people.  As part of this work, her current research project simultaneously creates and studies a young people’s advisory council for a non-profit organization. This project weaves a youth participatory action research methodology with an intersectional analysis of power and centres mind-body approaches to creating an intergenerational community of care.

As part of her love of arts-based research and knowledge sharing, Dr. Angod is writing a young adult novel of speculative fiction that explores the living legacies of colonialism and the power of the collective in the lives of three, mixed-race, Canadian high school students who find themselves linked through an unexpected connection with Guyana.

Dr. Angod has been awarded the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Early Career Research Award and the Racialized and Indigenous Faculty Alliance Research Award for her youth participatory action research projects. She was a Lillian Robinson Scholar at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute and has held Postdoctoral Fellowships at Bielefeld University in Germany and University of Toronto.

Cross Appointment

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Recent Research Grants

2024–2025 (Principal Investigator), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Partnership Engage Grant, “Youth Co-Research for Student Voice: Anti-Racism With and For Black and Racialized Students,” $24,283 CAD

2022–2025, (Co-Principal Investigator), Spencer Foundation, “Pedagogies of Community Engagement: Strengthening the Practice of Facilitation in Community-Based Projects and Partnerships,” $399,730 USD

Research Interests

• Critical race theory
• Black radical theory
• Transnational and women of colour feminisms
• Youth co-research
  • School- and community-based youth participatory action research
  • Arts-based methods and knowledge mobilization
• Sociology of education
  • Elite schools
  • Global citizenship
  • Volunteer abroad
  • Internationalization policies and practices
• Speculative fiction and futures

Courses

Youth Culture and Activism (CHST 3203)

Race, Childhood, and Youth (CHST 3205)

Special Topics (CHST 4001)

Selected Publications

Angod, L. (2024). Doing and undoing gendered racism with racialized girls: A school-based youth participatory action research study. Children & Society, 38, 774–788. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/chso.12826

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

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.