Tuesday, September 30th, 2025
Black Research Network
Virtual Workshop
About the event
A recent virtual talk hosted by the Black Research Network (BRN) highlighted how academic institutions can better integrate Black and Indigenous histories and pedagogies into teaching and research. The event featured Jade Nixon, BRN’s postdoctoral fellow, and kara lynch, the artist-in-residence, both recipients of the Black Indigenous Waterways Fellowship.
The fellowship, launched in 2023, promotes frameworks that connect Black and Indigenous experiences—traditionally taught separately—through interdisciplinary and decolonizing approaches. Nixon and lynch helped design the University of Toronto Mississauga course Black Indigenous Waterways with associate professor Beth Coleman, encouraging students to explore how knowledge, ancestry, and place intersect.
lynch, who is of African and Wampanoag descent, emphasized collaborative, creative learning that amplifies marginalized voices and fills gaps left by colonial narratives. Nixon drew from Black feminist scholarship to stress the value of lived experience and ancestral knowledge in academia.
Both continue to extend the fellowship’s themes beyond the classroom—Nixon through a youth research project on urban waterways in New York, and lynch through Radio Outlaw, a mobile radio initiative exploring people’s relationships to land. Together, their work underscores that centering Black and Indigenous worldviews fosters deeper understanding, community, and critical engagement.
About the Speakers
Jade Nixon, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Women Gender Studies Institute, has been named the Black Indigenous Waterways Postdoctoral Fellow.
kara lynch, a New York-based artist and associate professor emerita of video and critical studies at Hampshire College, has joined the Black Research Network as its Artist in Residence.
