Advocacy is a big part of professor’s life

Sobia Shaikh is committed to social justice and making the province a better place

Its clear from her varied and numerous commitments — academic, volunteer, writer, spouse, mom — that Sobia Shaikh has a willingness to give time to others in Newfoundland and Labrador, particularly if it’s for a cause or people she cares about.

An assistant professor at Memorial University’s school of social work, Shaikh prides herself on being community minded. At the university, she serves as co-lead of the Addressing Islamophobia in NL project, and she’s also co-president of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women-nl and co-chairs the Anti-racism Coalition NL.

“The very foundation of our society (in Canada) is based on racist ideas that Indigenous people are somehow not full peoples. These are things that are troubling for me and they need to be talked about, they need to be looked at in the face and they need to be unravelled.” While studying for a science degree at Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Ont., Shaikh found herself volunteering with women’s’ organizations, working closely with people on matters related to immigrants and racialized women.

“Social work felt very practical, but also something which I was drawn to because of the work I had been doing in the community,” explained Shaikh, who completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work at Mcmaster before doing her PHD in sociology and equity studies in education at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

She cares deeply about addressing inequalities and the lack of action from those in power when it comes to the environment, racism, disability and a host of other social justice causes, and has found opportunities to uniquely dissect these matters through creative writing. Shaikh is a founding member of The Quilted Collective of Racialized NL Writers and The Creators’ Collective NL: Indigenous, Racialized and Migrant Artists and Arts Workers.

She completed a short monologue that Artistic Fraud NL produced for its “City of Stories” series and is keen to eventually write full plays.

Shaikh has short stories included in a pair of collections from Breakwater Books — “Us, Now: Stories from The Quilted Collective” and “Hard Ticket.” Both of those collections were edited by acclaimed St. John’s author Lisa Moore.