We are pleased to announce that Dr. Rupaleem Bhuyan has been appointed as the new Director of CQ and the inaugural Eakin-Hoffmann Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research, beginning January 2026. This appointment was made possible through the generous support of Joan Eakin and Chris Hoffmann, with matched funding from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. We are deeply grateful for this transformative investment in the future of critical qualitative inquiry.
We extend our sincere thanks to Dr. Brenda Gladstone for her thoughtful leadership as Director (2019–2024). Brenda will continue in an interim role until Dr. Bhuyan assumes her post. We also acknowledge the shared leadership of CQ’s Academic Fellows and students, whose contributions continue to shape CQ as a vibrant, collaborative space for critical inquiry.
Dr. Bhuyan is Professor and Director of the PhD Program at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW), University of Toronto, and has been an Academic Fellow at CQ since 2018. Her research focuses on gender-based violence, immigration policy, systemic racism, and health equity, using critical qualitative and community-based methods to center the knowledge and leadership of migrants and racialized communities.
Her path into critical qualitative research is deeply personal. Born to immigrant parents who left rural Assam in search of opportunity, Dr. Bhuyan’s early life was shaped by movement across landscapes marked by racial, cultural, and political difference. Raised by a defiant mother who forged her own path, she learned to question authority and find meaning at the margins. Often the only immigrant in predominantly white spaces, she witnessed the ways otherness is imposed—while also encountering joy, resilience, and fierce community.
Her commitments were shaped through student activism against rape culture, building sexual assault prevention programs and organizing for immigrant rights. These experiences deepened her concern for intersecting systems—colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism—that normalize inequality while obscuring responsibility. This grounding continues to inform her research: a commitment to uncovering structural harm and imagining more just ways of being.
Tell us about a current critical qualitative project/s you would like the CQ community to know about.
Two active projects reflect my commitment to feminist, action-based, and community-engaged research.
Bordering Practices: Systemic Racism, Immigration and Child Welfare is a collaborative project co-led with Mandeep Kaur Mucina at the University of Victoria. Working with child welfare, immigration, and gender-based violence service providers and First Voice advocates in Ontario and British Columbia, we examine how immigration policies and systemic racism shape child welfare practices. This project builds on advocacy led by the Our Children, Our System, Our Responsibility coalition, which seeks to end the deportation of immigrants who have been involved in Canada’s child protection system.
A second project, co-led with the South Asian Women’s Rights Organization (SAWRO), explores how racialized migrant women respond to gender-based violence through collective organizing. We’re documenting how SAWRO’s holistic settlement service model supports safety, decent work, and community-led advocacy. Calls for decent work, housing, and freedom from violence must include space to learn from community-based leaders who have built integrated responses through mutual aid, direct services, education, and collective action.
Do you have a particular philosophical approach or theoretical perspective on how you approach your inquiry?
I approach my work as an activist scholar grounded in feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, and action-based frameworks. My thinking is shaped by postcolonial and Third World feminists, Indigenous scholars, and queer and crip theorists whose work challenges dominant epistemologies and affirms the transformative power of lived experience.
bell hooks has been especially influential in shaping my scholarly and pedagogical commitments. Her assertion that “language is also a place of struggle” reminds me that how we speak, write, and relate in research can either reproduce or resist systems of power. I take seriously her invitation to enter the margins—not as sites of exclusion, but as spaces of radical possibility where new ways of knowing and being emerge.
This philosophy aligns with my commitment to epistemic justice: to center the knowledge of those most impacted by structural violence and to build theory through collective reflection, struggle, and care. I see research as a tool for building solidarity and co-creating more just futures.
Can you tell us about the qualitative methodologies and/or methods you use in your research and how they are influenced by your approach?
My methodological approach is grounded in the belief that research should be situated within, relevant to, responsible to, and recognizable to the communities most directly impacted by its knowledge claims. I primarily draw on ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and narrative inquiry—methods that allow for deep analysis of institutional systems like immigration, child welfare, and health care, while centering the lived experiences of racialized and migrant communities.
Much of my work is co-produced with grassroots organizations, with research questions and processes shaped by long-standing relationships and shared commitments. Participatory action research plays a central role, inviting migrant women, service providers, and organizers to co-interpret and mobilize findings in ways that support collective goals for safety, dignity, and justice.
Ultimately, I view qualitative methods not just as tools for data collection, but as relational, political, and creative practices that can expose systemic violence and build toward transformative social change.
If you teach qualitative health research can you tell us a bit about the courses you teach and/or the pedagogical approaches you use?
I teach doctoral-level courses that support students in developing critical and reflexive approaches to qualitative research. One of these is SWK 6007: Advanced Qualitative Research Methods in Social Work, which focuses on critical discourse and narrative methods for interpretive policy analysis. In this course, students explore feminist, decolonial, and action-based methodologies and are encouraged to design research that is both theoretically grounded and socially engaged.
I also teach SWK 6302: Epistemology and the Development of Social Work Knowledge, which invites students to examine how knowledge is constructed, validated, and deployed within and beyond the academy. We explore the onto-epistemological foundations of social work and engage with Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial critiques of dominant paradigms.
My teaching is grounded in bell hooks’ vision of engaged pedagogy—an approach that emphasizes mutual learning, care, and the integration of theory and practice. I incorporate experiential learning strategies that encourage students to reflect on their own positionality and apply critical concepts in real-world contexts. Across all my courses, I strive to cultivate inclusive spaces where students can unlearn colonial logics, center lived experience, and co-create research that is accountable to the communities they serve.
