Chandni Desai

Biography

Dr. Desai completed her PhD at the University of Toronto at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She was the recipient of the American Education Research Association (AERA) Division B Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2017. In 2016-2017, Professor Desai was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Social Justice Initiative. At UIC she worked with the historian and black feminist Barbara Ransby on a project “Geographies of Justice: A Scholarly and Public Dialogue Series about the Contested Terrain and Meaning of Freedom in the 21st Century World.” This project explored prisons, policing, educational inequality, wealth disparity and the meaning of freedom in three international and social contexts: Palestine/Israel, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and the U.S. Black Freedom Movement from 1960s to the present. Dr. Desai completed her PhD at the University of Toronto at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She was the recipient of the American Education Research Association (AERA) Division B Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2017. In 2016-2017, Professor Desai was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Social Justice Initiative. At UIC she worked with the historian and black feminist Barbara Ransby on a project “Geographies of Justice: A Scholarly and Public Dialogue Series about the Contested Terrain and Meaning of Freedom in the 21st Century World.” This project explored prisons, policing, educational inequality, wealth disparity and the meaning of freedom in three international and social contexts: Palestine/Israel, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and the U.S. Black Freedom Movement from 1960s to the present.

Research Interest

Dr. Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is an interdisciplinary scholar that has a wide range of research and teaching interests: comparative settler colonialism; transnational youth activism; social movements challenging racial capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy; national security regimes; migration and war; cultural resistance; hip hop; transnational solidarity; decolonization; critical race theory; anti-imperialist Marxist feminism and anticolonial theory. Her work is situated across the fields of Settler Colonial Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, Social Movement Studies, Youth Studies, Transnational Feminist Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.