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In 2021, the Office of the Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (AVPEDI), in collaboration with the Tshepo Institute for the Study of Contemporary Africa and Laurier’s Black Faculty and Staff Caucus, launched the annual EDI speaker series named after Associate Professor Lamine Diallo. Professor Diallo is a distinguished scholar in the Leadership program, the founding member of our two partnering groups at Laurier and one of our institution’s long-term champions promoting notions of equity, diversity, and inclusion across our campuses. This series is in recognition of his tireless efforts to embed these principles into our collective consciousness.
Speakers for this series consist of recognized internal Laurier EDI champions, community activists, administrative and professional practitioners, and academic speakers from across the country. Consistent with Laurier’s broader EDI institutional strategy, the Lamine Diallo EDI Speaker Series helps to raise awareness, competencies, and understanding about equity, diversity, and inclusion within the context of Canadian universities, while encouraging and fostering meaningful conversations. Each event will serve to complement other EDI dialogues taking place across the university.
2026-2027 Series: Refusing Empire: Building Accountable Solidarities Across Difference.
"Refusing Empire: Building Accountable Solidarities Across Difference.” The theme explores the complexities and need to build coalitions among diverse groups within the Canadian settler colonial context. While understanding solidarity as part of a refusal of empire, this theme also acknowledges that solidarity is not a simple given but a fraught and contested process that requires reckoning with histories of complicity and distinct experiences of marginalization. This theme invites a critical examination of how different communities, defined by their unique and sometimes conflicting relationships to the settler state, can work towards a more just or decolonial future.
Refusing Empire: Individual and Collective Stories of Relation
November 6, 2026
1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST
Zoom
This first panel takes up that invitation by centering stories — individual and collective — as a practice of refusal. Empire depends on singular, controlling narratives: Who gets remembered? Whose knowledge counts? Whose relations to land and each other are recognized? Against that, this panel insists on storytelling as a way of refusing erasure and building relation.
Dr. Ryan Neepin is a Cree scholar, educator, and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Wilfrid Laurier University. As a member of Fox Lake Cree Nation, his work focuses on Indigenous education, decolonial pedagogies, and anti-colonial practices in teacher education. He is the co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Indigenous Education and Research (Bloomsbury, 2025), a collection that brings together global Indigenous perspectives on pedagogy, research ethics, sovereignty, and 2-Spirit/Indigiqueer knowledges. His scholarship is grounded in relationality, community engagement, and the integration of Indigenous knowledge systems into educational theory and practice.
Dr. Karina Vernon is Associate Professor and Chair of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on Black and Black-Indigenous histories of the Canadian Prairies, archives, and critical pedagogy. She is the editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (2020) and co-editor of Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (2026). Her current work examines Black cowboy songs as "alternate archives" of the Black Atlantic.
Grounded in four questions — Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are our responsibilities? — each speaker will offer individual reflections before joining in conversation with Dr. Andrea Davis, Associate Vice-President: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Together, they will explore what it means to tell stories of relation and accountability, and how those stories take up the series theme’s call to critically examine how communities with unique and sometimes conflicting relationships to the settler state can work toward a more just and decolonial future.
Past Events
“Reshaping the Present and Future Worlds” is the overarching theme of this year’s speaker series. The modern university has a complex relationship with dissent. On the one hand, it is a site where scholars are given space to push the boundaries of our collective knowledge to build an understanding of our existing world and imagine new futures that do not yet exist. At the same time, the modern western university is deeply intertwined with histories of colonialism, statecraft, and capital. Universities in settler colonies have mobilized research and education in support of extractive industries and the dispossession of Indigenous communities. Speakers in this year’s series will share how they work and research amid these contradictions, while imagining new possible futures.
Reflections on Solidarity and Complicity: A Conversation on Indigenous and South Asian Entanglements in Dismantling Settler Colonialism
A partnership between Laurier’s Lamine Diallo EDI Speaker Series and the Office of Indigenous Initiatives.
March 20, 2026
1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST
Zoom
This virtual panel brings Dr. Beverly Jacobs and Dr. Nishant Upadhyay together in conversation to think through the complex relationship between South Asian immigrant populations and Indigenous populations of Turtle Island. Both are comprised of various communities with varied and complex histories with colonialism. Both have suffered through/endured centuries of systemic structural oppression, genocide and power imbalance at the hands of European colonial empires. Yet, on Turtle Island, both now also have extensive histories of living alongside each other because of the colonial encounter. This conversation explores the responsibilities encoded in early treaties like the Two Row Wampum; how immigrant populations have grappled with complicities that inform their presence on Turtle Island; and how our communities have worked and can work in solidarity together to build a future that dismantles settler colonial violence, racism, and casteism. We use this space to discuss both shared and distinct expressions of colonization, and how we might join hands in friendship, kinship, love and solidarity and push back against colonial structures that consistently aim to pit and divide colonized peoples on stolen land.
Black Intellectual Life and the Post-EDI University
A partnership between Laurier’s Lamine Diallo EDI Speaker Series and the Black Researchers of Southwestern Ontario network (BRSO), in collaboration with the University of Waterloo's Pan-African Initiative for Research (PAIR), and Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism (EDI-RO).
March 5, 2026
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST (luncheon)
2:30 pm – 4:00 pm EST (panel)
Paul Martin Center
This panel explores how Black scholars are situated within Canadian universities, and why the research they do is critical for the contemporary global world. “Black Intellectual Life and the Post-EDI University” brings together a panel of Black scholars across multiple disciplines from the Universities of Waterloo, Laurier and McMaster to think together about these and other questions. Refusing the idea that knowledge can be contained within the discrete borders of individual universities, these scholars gather as an act of Black intellectual community to consider what it means to teach and do research in a shifting social, political, and academic landscape.
This event's panel of thinkers includes Naila Keleta Mae (Canada Research Chair in Race, Gender, and Performance, Waterloo); Dalon Taylor (Faculty of Social Work, Laurier); Maurita Harris (User Experience Design, Laurier); moderator Shaunasea Brown (Communication Studies, Laurier); and respondent Alpha Abebe (Humanities, McMaster).
Black Struggle and Intellectual Life: Post Academia’s Capitulation to White Supremacist Power
October 2, 2025
1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST
Zoom
Yannick Giovanni Marshall develops the argument in his forthcoming book The End of Supplication (Bloomsbury, 2025): that Black resistance traditions have been politically neutralized and replaced with performances of supplication, vulnerability, and moral deference in order to be legitimated. If meaningful dissent survives anywhere on campus, it is in the gutters and “undercommons” of the university — with the targeted and undervalued students and professors. As even these spaces are increasingly occupied, the talk asks: where is the next refuge for serious thought, and how might we build or join centers of intellectual life elsewhere?
Yannick Giovanni Marshall, PhD is a faculty member at California Institute of Arts, USA in self-imposed exile. A writer and scholar of African and Africana Studies he holds an MA in African American Studies and a PhD from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Columbia University currently under academic receivership. Marshall has published two collections of poetry, regularly contributes editorials and articles to Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Current Affairs, and has given numerous talks and interviews on race, colonialism, radical dissent and policing. His forthcoming book The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon will be out with Zed-Bloomsbury Press in 2025. His writing and courses can be found at yannickgiovannimarshall.net
“Shifting Paradigms for Authentic and Accountable EDI Work” is the overarching theme of the 2024-2025 series. Invited speakers discussed how university-led EDI initiatives might truly serve and empower the communities they aim to support, delving into the complexities of aligning action with stated values and addressing the gap between intention and impact. Through thought-provoking discussions and practical insights, we aim to inspire a shift towards more authentic, transparent, and community-centred EDI practices. This series seeks to catalyze a reimagining of EDI work that places the voices and experiences of marginalized communities at the forefront, fostering a more just and equitable learning, teaching, and research environment.
Jean Augustine
Member of the Order of Canada, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and Member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada
Film Screening of STEADFAST- the Messenger and the Message, in Conversation with Hon. Jean Augustine
In Conversation with rosalind hampton and Rinaldo Walcott (moderated by Andrea A. Davis)
Black Studies as a Paradigm for Justice
“Mobilizing Research Towards Activism” is the overarching theme of this year’s speaker series. Invited speakers will be sharing how they have mobilized research to advance activism in support of anti-oppression within their communities and institutions. The scholars who share in this series will speak about their research work and its impacts on the community and society.
All events this year will be hosted online via Zoom and are open to all members of the Laurier community and the general public. We hope that you will join us to hear from the researchers featured on this year’s program. Please note that you will need to be logged into your personal Zoom account in order to access the webinar.
Deirdre McCorkindale
Assistant professor, department of History, University of Guelph
- History as a Weapon and a Tool: Chronicling the Black Experience in Southwestern Ontario
Ngozi Iroanyah
Director of Health Equity and Access, Alzheimer Society of Ontario
- Diversity in Dementia in Canada
“Antiracism in Scholarship” was the overarching theme of this year’s speaker series. This theme provides opportunities for invited speakers to share how they have mobilized research to address racism, how they embedded antiracism into their research process, and how they led antiracism efforts within their field or research community. The scholars who share in this series will speak about some of the successes and challenges that resulted from their work.
All events this year will be hosted online via Zoom and are open to all members of the Laurier community and the general public. We hope that you will join us to hear from the EDI champions featured on this year’s program.
Ardavan Eizadirad
Ardavan Eizadirad, assistant professor, Faculty of Education, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant professor of Physics, core faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies, the University of New Hampshire.
- The Disordered Cosmos: In Conversation with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Maryam Khan
Maryam Khan, assistant professor, Faculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University
“Reflections from EDI Champions,” the overarching theme of this year’s event, provides opportunities for invited speakers to share some of their individual and unique experiences, journeys, passions, reflections, and thoughts about the things that have guided and informed their work as it relates to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in a university environment.
As EDI advocates, we will hear about some of the successes and challenges that have resulted from their work and ideas about how we, as a university community, can continue striving to ensure these principles are firmly rooted in the ethos and culture of Laurier.
All events this year will be hosted online via Zoom and is open to all members of the Laurier community and general public. We hope that you will join us to hear from the EDI champions featured on this year’s program.
Lamine Diallo
Inaugural speaker: Lamine Diallo, associate professor, Leadership program, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Dawn McDermott
Dawn McDermott, senior advisor, Human Rights and Conflict Management, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Clinton Beckford
Clinton Beckford, Acting Vice-President of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, University of Windsor.
- "Beyond Personal: My Story of EDI Leadership in 'This Moment'"
Jeanette Parsons
Jeanette Parsons, director, Accessible Learning, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Contact Us:
Andrea Davis, Associate Vice-President: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion