Righting History Scholars Fellowship
As a part of our 2025 Righting History offerings, we supported 3 individuals in researching and creating an educational resource for our anti-colonial education platform, Righting History (RH). This platform is created by the climate justice organization, Shake Up The Establishment. These educational resources are meant to be tools for critical inquiry, collective healing, and political imagination filled with impactful lessons and stories that are relevant for Canadians far and wide.
This year's theme is Lessons from Movements Before Ours: Sharing Stories Necessary for our Future.
We welcomed educational resource proposals that explore:
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Lessons and tactics from movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice
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Theories and modes of organizing informed by Indigenous sovereignty, abolitionist organizing, disability justice, queer/trans liberation
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Strategies to address polarization, disinformation, facism and propaganda
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Links between historical movements and today’s struggles for equity and systemic change
Serving the People: Migrant Justice Organizing and Solidarity Amidst Fascist Border Regimes
By: Adam Arca (any
A creative nonfiction essay that serves as both an informative guide and call to action for migrant rights and solidarity in so-called Canada. Although migrant labourers uphold economies across the globe, facing exploitation, precarity, and deportation in the process, they are the very ones being blamed and scapegoated for the inherent crisis of capitalist production. Centering the experiences of Filipino migrants—often unseen yet essential workers in the Global North—this essay offers an anti-imperialist critique of international migration and reclaims the migrant narrative through lessons from Filipino organizing in Toronto and the International Migrants Alliance.
Adam Arca is a Filipino migrant rights organizer with Migrante BC, writer, and sexual health researcher currently living and working on the unceded and occupied territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, Canada). A son to migrant workers from Bulacan in Luzon and Cebu in Visayas, their work is deeply informed by care and the archipelagic connections between anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles from Turtle Island to the Philippines. Their essays and poetry have been previously published in Briarpatch Magazine, The Funambulist, Plenitude Magazine, and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. They hold a Master's in Public Health from the University of British Columbia with a Graduate Certificate in Migration Studies.
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Lessons From Water: Queering Care & Memory in the Climate Justice Movement
By: Naomi Leung (they/them)
This zine explores queering care and collective memory within the climate justice movement, honoring the legacies of queer and racialized community organizers whose stories shape our shared futures. Through reflective essays, grounding exercises, and Toronto-based archival references, it offers pathways for remembrance, catharsis, and collective healing in times of ecological and social upheaval.
Naomi Leung 梁珮恩 (they/them) is a Han Cantonese settler, climate justice education facilitator and organizer, and mixed media artist. Naomi has a background in organizing for climate justice education programming and policy change with UBC Sustainability, The Climate Justice Organizing HUB, Sustainabiliteens, Climate Education Reform BC, Asha Collective, Climate Recentered, and Be the Change Earth Alliance. As a queer and genderqueer racialized artist and organizer, they intimately know the gap in funding and mental health support for their own communities’ wellbeing. Naomi desires to create anti-colonial spaces centering trans and queer diaspora to process intergenerational trauma, grief, and to co-create possibilities and programming for hope and healing. Naomi is a senior research in the psychology of climate justice with Dr Lauren Emberson at UBC and a recent graduate of BSc Global Resource Systems and Psychology. In their studies they integrate climate change studies with global health, the study of climate emotions, and the Asian diaspora.
By: Lamesha Ruddock (she/her)
Where Was the Final Stop on the Underground Railroad?
This piece traces Lamesha's journey in 2024 along the Underground Railroad with Afrika Outbound, exploring sites of Black resistance across Toronto and Southern Ontario to challenge the myth of Canada as the “final stop” to freedom. Beginning in Toronto, it moves the reader through Hamilton, Niagara Falls, St Catherines, Chatham-Kent, Dresden, Buxton, Amherstburg and Windsor. This piece explores how each site holds fragments of that answer, moments of arrival intertwined with ongoing struggle and how the legacies for liberation lives on in how communities organize in modern-day Toronto. Through narrative, research, and poetic reflection, it reimagines the Underground Railroad as an ongoing practice of liberation, connecting historical routes and present-day struggles for safety, home, and freedom.
Lamesha Ruddock is a cultural producer, performance artist, and historian specialising in 20th-century Black British feminist history. Based between the UK and Canada, Lamesha has held roles with Hamilton (West End), the Royal Court Theatre, and as Co-Executive Director of Boundless Theatre. She has produced with Luminato Festival, Pleasance Theatre, Shadowland Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East and programmed at BAND Gallery and is currently an Access Support Worker for Arts Council England. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Chair of Paprika Festival and V.P. Membership at Alumnae Theatre.
