Willow Samara Allen, PhD (she/her) is a white settler Ashkenazi Jewish woman with ancestral lineages tracing to Russia, Ireland and Scotland. She lives with her family on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen-speaking Peoples, the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Willow is a critical interdisciplinary scholar with a background in education, political science, and public administration. She takes an intentionally collaborative orientation to her work and prioritizes partnerships through which we can practice forms of non-hierarchical leadership and power, cultivate greater relational accountabilities, and grapple with theories of change.
Experience
Willow’s work examines the reproductions and disruptions of settler colonial socialization in public sector work, antiracist and anticolonial pedagogies and methods for critical adult learning and collaborative leadership, the subject-making and complicities of white settler women, and the micro socio-political spaces of multiracial families.
Her newer/emerging research projects include digging further into the puzzle of discretionary power with provincial public sector workers with Dr. Nisha Nath (AU), interrogating Jewish relationships and accountabilities to land, to community, and to settler colonialism with Dr. Charles Levoke (Lakehead), and cultivating critical research literacies for social change with Tracey Murphy, PhD Candidate (UVic), and a variety of incredible community actors.
Willow’s work can be found on Google Scholar and Academia.
Education
2017
PhD Languages, Cultures, and Literacies
Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education
2008
MA Public Policy and Public Administration
Concordia University, Department of Political Science
2003
BA Political Science and East Asian Studies
McGill University, Faculty of Arts
Research
Research interest
settler colonial socialization; discretionary power in public sector work,
antiracist and anticolonial pedagogies and methods; critical adult learning and leadership
white settler women and white supremacy; multiracial families