Jennifer Simpson Email & Phone Number

I have been thinking about inequity and change for most of my life. Universities have been a great place for me to reflect on my own experience and knowledge, and how I can, with others, move us into a more equitable future. After a couple decades of teaching, research, and leadership roles through which I have found ways to name inequity and imagine equity, I know this work both matters to me and is urgent and essential. What I hear from colleagues in relation to doing equity work, particularly as a settler and a white person, is the importance of walking the talk and understanding my own privilege and positionality. When it comes to making systemic change, especially in relation to anti-racism and anti-colonialism, I bring my head and my heart and a strategic vision. I currently serve as the Special Advisor to the President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Decolonization (EDID) Curriculum Transformation at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), where I also teach in the Department of Professional Communication. In my first year at TMU, I had the honour of chairing the University Renaming Advisory Committee, and it was a privilege to be so centrally involved with one of the university's responses to institutional colonialism. I have also served as provost and vice-president academic at TMU (July 2021 -- September 2022), Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Memorial University (2017 -- 2021), and in Associate Dean and Chair roles at the University of Waterloo (2007 -- 2017).I love meeting and working with others who are willing to accept the difficulty, demands, and uncertainty of equity work. As long as racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression continue to do harm in the communities in which we live and work, what could be more important?