I am a Professor of Geography at U of T’s Scarborough campus. My first major research project and book (Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa) combined political economy and intimacy to explain the history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa. More recently, I wrote a history of the segregation and desegregation of South Africa’s schooling system, Race for Education: Gender, White Tone, and Schooling in South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2019). For the last six years I have had the pleasure of teaching a third-year undergraduate course called Geographies of Education. I try to use this course to reflect on privilege and disadvantage in schooling systems.
Now, as part of the University Worlds group, I am excited to work with undergraduate and graduate students to interrogate “Why Students Drop Out of UTSC.” This simple question provides the UTSC research group with a window into themes which include the disproportionate number of Black students dropping out, and the large number of hours students work to support their education.