MELISSA N. SHAW - PhD Candidate

Queen's University

 

“The War of 1914 Woke Him Up to Better Things”: An Enlistment Battle and Reawakened Black Canadian Race Consciousness in Ontario

 

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Melissa is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Queen’s University. Her dissertation, “Blackness and British “Fair Play”: Burgeoning Black Social Activism in Ontario and its Responses to the Canadian Colour Line, 1919-1939,” explores the symbiotic relationship between anti-Black racisms in Canada and the rise of Black Canadian social activisms in Ontario. Questioning social articulations of “race” consciousness within a variety of Black Canadian organizations, it examines the ways activism initiatives claimed rights for Blacks as Canadian citizens and British imperial subjects through local, continental, and Diaspora methods and networks of race politics.

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