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Co-presented by the Samara Centre for Democracy and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, From Peer Review to the Public: Re-imagining Academic Freedom and Advocacy is a timely conversation about how the humanities and social sciences shape our understanding of civic life, power and participation in a period of democratic backsliding.
As political pressures intensify in the United States and ripple into Canada, researchers are facing new scrutiny over what they study, how they speak out, and even what information they are asked to disclose. With increasing numbers of American scholars moving to Canada and thousands of Canadian academics pushing back against a parliamentary committee’s request for their demographic data, this conversation is taking on a new sense of urgency and raising important questions about the strength of our democracy.
Speakers:
- Dr. Debra Thompson, Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University, Board member at the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Samara Centre for Democracy
- Dr. Beatrice Wayne, Director of Research and Policy at the Samara Centre for Democracy and one of the founders of the Student Vote Research Network
- Dr. Eve Haque, York Research Chair in Linguistic Diversity and Community Vitality at York University
- Sabreena Delhon (Moderator), CEO of the Samara Centre for Democracy
Date:
Thursday, March 5th, 2026
12pm to 1pm ET
Register here.
Speaker Bios:
Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. She is a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship seek to analyze the complex historic and contemporary relationships among race, the state, and inequality in Canada and other democratic societies. Dr. Thompson’s multiple award-winning first book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Her best-selling second book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (Scribner Canada, 2022) is equal parts a personal meditation, penetrating analysis, and pointed social critique of the dynamics of race and belonging over time and across the Canadian-U.S. border. The Long Road Home was one of Indigo’s top 100 books, CBC’s best non-fiction of 2022, the Hill Times top 100 books of 2022, the winner of the Canadian Political Science Association’s Donald Smiley Prize for the best book on Canadian politics and government and a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Dr. Thompson is a frequent commentator in print media, radio, podcasts, and television. She appeared in the 2022 documentary Black Ice, is a contributing opinion columnist at the Globe and Mail, and, in collaboration with the Institute for Research on Public Policy, produces and hosts the In/Equality, a special series of the Policy Options podcast on the many facets of inequality in Canadian society. She is currently working on several projects that extract and examine the mechanics of systemic racism in Canada.
Beatrice Wayne is an award-winning researcher, teacher and passionate advocate for participatory democracy. She has taught popular courses on youth democratic activism at Harvard University, the University of Sydney and New York University. She holds a PhD from New York University and a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and has received major grants to conduct research across Canada, the United States and Ethiopia. In addition to her academic research and teaching, she has served on steering committees and provided her research and pedagogical expertise to a variety of non-profit organizations and educational publishers, including Students Learn Students Vote, Scholastic Books, and the Faculty Network for Student Voting Rights. She is one of the founders of the Student Vote Research Network. She is frequently asked to provide commentary on democratic engagement and civic participation for diverse media outlets.
Eve Haque is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University. She is also co-editor for TOPIA: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching interests include multiculturalism, white settler colonialism and language policy, and her most recent project is on the racialized terrain of academic freedom and free expression. She has published widely on these topics and is also the author of Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada published with University of Toronto Press.
Sabreena Delhon is the CEO of the Samara Centre for Democracy, Canada’s leading non-partisan organization focused on strengthening and protecting Canadian democracy. For over a decade she has directed multi-stakeholder research and public engagement initiatives that have made an impact across justice, academic, and non-profit sectors. Sabreena has appeared as an expert witness before Parliamentary committees on matters relating to political participation and frequently provides commentary about democratic engagement for various media outlets such as The Globe & Mail, CBC Radio, The Social and The Toronto Star. She is the host of Humans of the House, an award-winning podcast that explores the lived experience of former Members of Parliament, and Group Chat, a podcast about contemporary issues in Canada’s democracy. Sabreena is a Senior Fellow at Massey College and is a recipient of the Coronation Medal for service to Canada. She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Alberta and an MA in Sociology from Dalhousie University.
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