The Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research (CQ) is pleased to invite you to join us on October 23, 2026 for a CQ Public Seminar with Dr. Tola Mbulaheni.
This hybrid event welcomes participants to join in person or online. Light refreshments will be served for those attending in person.
Event Details
Seminar Speaker: Dr. Tola Mbulaheni
Title: Storying Black life: A critical race narrative methodology for social research on health and well-being
Date and Time: October 23, 2026 | 12pm to 1.30pm (EST)
Venue: (In-person) NUR 270, 155 College St, Health Sciences Building (Doors open at 11.30am); Online (Zoom)
Register here. If you are attending in person, please select the “in-person” ticket option. If you are attending online, please select the “online” ticket option.
Seminar Description
Narrative approaches to critical inquiry are a powerful tool for examining health and health inequalities. However, there remains a gap in their critical engagement with race and racism, particularly in public health research. This presentation introduces a critical race narrative methodology as a multi-phase approach for conducting critical, reflexive narrative inquiry of race, racism and health. Grounded in critical race theory, the presentation discusses the methodology’s epistemological commitments and phases, illustrated through research on structural racism and Black women’s HIV service access in Toronto. It concludes with reflection on methodological tensions for advancing race consciousness in narrative inquiry.
About the speaker
Dr. Tola Mbulaheni is a public health researcher and critical race theorist whose work examines how racism, institutions, and policy shape health systems, access to care, and health outcomes. She completed her PhD in Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She has worked across academic, community health, and government sectors, most recently within the Ontario Public Service, using social and health equity-focused research to drive institutional change within health and social systems.
Tola’s doctoral research examined the ways structural and discursive forms of anti-Black racism shape how Black women experience and make sense of HIV service access in Toronto, and how these experiences inform their prevention and treatment decision-making. Responding to an absence of race and racism as a critical framing in HIV prevention and critical social science literature, Tola situates her doctoral work within a growing body of scholarship on Black life in Canada, mobilizing critical race and black feminist methodologies to conceptually shift how we think about and redress racial, social and health inequalities. Tola is the award recipient of the 2025–26 Joan Eakin Award for Methodological Excellence in a Qualitative Doctoral Dissertation.
