Janelle Joseph, PhD.

Janelle Joseph is an internationally recognized and award-winning scholar committed to disseminating knowledge that sits at the intersection of race, sport, and education. Dr. Joseph uses decoloniality and critical race theory to study racialized people’s physical culture experiences to counter the erasure of their intersectional stories and preserve health, life and dignity. Her current book projects use qualitative research, including digital storytelling. 

Dr. Janelle Joseph’s work has been transformative in deepening understanding of the race-sport-education nexus in three important ways: (1) applying intersectional analyses of race with ethnicity, sexuality, generation, disability, gender, and age; (2) storytelling about geographical routes, ancestral roots, and achievement in Black communities; and (3) documenting abiding racism, colonialism, and decolonial resistance in Canada. These three pillars of critical race studies (intersectional analyses, storytelling, and anti-racism) are essential interventions in Kinesiology, Health Studies, and in Sociology.  

Dr. Joseph’s research skills have been honed with the support of funding totaling nearly $4million.  She conducted two post-doctoral research projects, the first was held at the University of Otago in New Zealand in 2010, where she studied masculinities, Indigenous Maori culture, and multiculturalism in sport settings. She was the first scholar to ever hold a Banting Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Post-doctoral fellowship at Ontario Tech University in 2012. Through this position she made theoretical and empirical contributions to a number of fields (post-colonial research methodologies, leisure studies, and criminal justice) through collaborative thinking and writing. Since then, Dr. Joseph has worked as a Principal Investigator, co-invstigator, and collaborator on several university-, provincial-, and nationally-funded physical activity and racial justice projects.

Dr. Joseph is a member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Scientists and Artists and Fellow of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. At the University of Toronto she is the former Director of Academic Success, Student Life and Assistant Director, Transitional Year Programme. In each of these leadership roles she has applied, taught, and celebrated alternative ways of knowing and learning in the academy, and developed evidence-based curricula and leadership programming.