Championing Awareness, Education and Advocacy

The Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair in Women’s Studies (Nancy’s Chair) was established at Mount Saint Vincent University in the mid-1980s. Endowed by well-known Toronto-based feminist and philanthropist Nancy Ruth, the Chair raises awareness of women’s issues by bringing to campus distinguished scholars in women’s studies and activists who have contributed to the advancement of women. View past Chairs »

About the Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies

The presence of the Chair adds substantially to the intellectual strength of women’s studies at Mount Saint Vincent and in the Atlantic region. Duties associated with the Chair include teaching, research, and public presentations on campus and around the Atlantic provinces.

Recent Events

The Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies actively participates, engages and facilitates in an array of events related to teaching, research and education. Read more »

Opportunities to get Involved

Students, faculty, staff and members of the broader community are invited to participate in events and get involved with the work of the current Nancy’s Chair. For more information on upcoming opportunities, visit us on Facebook »

Welcome Adwoa Onuora, 17th Nancy’s Chair (2022-2023)

adwoa onuora, nancy's chair

Dr. Adwoa Onuora is currently a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Women and Gender Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in Jamaica, where she teaches about equity, social and gender justice.

She has published on critical pedagogy and educational transformation, Indigenous epistemologies, as well as the intersection and impact of gender, sexuality/sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, class, abilities, and culture on women’s lived experiences. Her areas of interest and specialization also include women, gender and transformative education; critical, feminist and maternal pedagogies; social reproduction and the care economy; and sexualities and gender-based violence. Dr. Onuora has employed feminist analyses to study the gendered dimensions of corruption in Jamaica. In 2017, she led the European Union-funded pilot time use survey on unpaid care work in Jamaica — the first of its kind in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Dr. Onuora has served on advisory groups such as the National Strategic Action Plan to end Gender-Based Violence Jamaica, the UN Women’s Regional Advisory Group on the Measurement of Sustainable Development Goal 5.4.1 (Unpaid Care Work), and the Jamaica National Steering Committee for Skills to Access the Green Economy (SAGE) program. She has been heavily involved in community-based groups calling for the decriminalization of abortion in Jamaica, and has been active in social justice advocacy around legal reform to Jamaica’s Sexual Offences Act, and related Acts that criminalize marginalized groups.

As Nancy’s Chair, Dr. Onuora will undertake a community-based research project examining the challenges faced by queer Afro-Canadian/Caribbean youth and their parents, a subject she began exploring while completing her doctoral studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Using the methodology of participatory comic, and through the creation of a social media knowledge hub for queer black youth and their parents, she hopes to promote queer positive parenting within Afro-Canadian/Caribbean communities. The project will aim to equip Afro-Caribbean parents with the tools to support queer Black youth who struggle with issues of belonging within their communities.

As part of her continued work to advance human rights in the area of sex and sexualities, Dr. Onuora is also interested in examining how government disaster risk management orders during the COVID-19 pandemic have deepened structural violence against sex workers. Some of her time will be devoted to documenting (by way of an oral history project) the pandemic experiences of sex workers in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Kingston, Jamaica.