Glendon introduces four new faculty members this fall

This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2020, part one. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Watch for part two on Sept. 25.

Glendon Campus welcomes four new faculty members this fall: Maya Chacaby, Alison Harvey, Marlon Valencia and Rémi Vivès.

“We are delighted to have these great scholars join the Glendon community,” said Ian Roberge, interim principal of the Glendon Campus. “As we ponder the post-pandemic world, we know that these new researchers and teachers possess the requisite experience, know-how and energy to help build the Glendon and York of tomorrow.”

Maya Chacaby

Maya Chacaby

Maya Chacaby aka Odehamik, is Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) Autochtone from the Kaministiqua region. Her family comes from Red Rock First Nation. Chacaby has been a sessional instructor at the Glendon Campus for more than 10 years and has recently joined the Sociology Department in a full-time role. Chacaby is an Anishinaabe survivance philosopher (survivance, not survival) and brings from her traditional territory a bundle of magical metaphor coins, a tough cloak of irony, heaps of her favourite food (Anishinaabe metaphysical conjecture), an instant pop-up escape from oblivion hatch, a pair of sweet shades against victimry and a high-quality set of nihilist cancelling head phones. She is best known as a confluence of transmogrificating phantasmagoricals often seen in awkward social situations gnawing on a pile of juicy etymologies (her second favourite food).

Chacaby is a mare’s nest of impossibilities with at least 20 extra autistic senses (synesthesia, alexithymia, stims, apraxia, non-interoceptive, non-proprioseptive, hyperlexia, atelophobia, dyspraxia, palilelia, echolalia, dyscalculia, munus exsecutivam, non-24 circadian rhythm, prosopagnosia, misophonia, non-object permanence, rejection sensitive, hyperacuisis, verbal/non-verbal); a proficient speaker of her language, Anishinaabemowin; a traditional ceremonial person; two-spirited, anti-colonial writer; a human-trafficking surviver; a former street kid; dyslexic; socially anxious; provincial policy analyst; researcher; community consultant on trauma; government consultant on boring technical tables; and (most importantly) a pro-gamer. Altogether, Indigenous and autistic, raised to be a “surrealistic oppositional creature of obvious liminality,” which is SO COOL for short.

Alison Harvey

Alison Harvey

Alison Harvey joins Glendon Campus as an assistant professor of communications. She is returning to Canada after six years of working at the University of Leicester where she led the MA Media, Gender, and Social Justice program. Harvey undertook a postdoc at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Information, and holds a PhD in communication and culture from York University.

Her research focuses on issues of inclusivity, justice and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on games, social media platforms and creative work. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015, Routledge) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity), and her work has also appeared in numerous interdisciplinary journals.

Harvey is committed to critical community-engaged scholarship. She is currently working on two projects in this vein. In her book project Dirty Methods, she and her collaborators explore the tensions characterizing digital research methods with social justice-focused aims. In her study of formal game courses, she engages with diverse stakeholders to understand the role of the university in contributing to inclusivity and diversity in this creative tech field.

Marlon Valencia

Marlon Valencia

Marlon Valencia is happy to re-unite with the York community after doing his MA in applied linguistics back in 2008. He joins the Department of English at Glendon College as assistant professor, teaching stream, in the area of English as a second language and applied linguistics (ENSL). He is also the new ENSL director.

Valencia did his PhD in language and literacies, comparative, international and development education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. His research interests include the intersection between language, imagination, identity and multiliteracies; language learner and teacher identities; language teacher education; visual ethnography; and language politics.

Valencia is excited to teach in the ENSL program, as well as in Glendon’s Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language (D-TEIL). He is also looking forward to collaborating with colleagues at York and D-TEIL’s globally networked partners in Brazil and Cuba.

Rémi Vivès

Rémi Vivès

Rémi Vivès joins the Department of Economics at Glendon Campus, York University as assistant professor. A specialist in macroeconomics, Vivès earned his PhD from Aix-Marseille School of Economics. Before coming to Glendon, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Portuguese Catholic University and a Franco-German University Fellow at the University of Konstanz.

In addition to macroeconomics, Vivès’ research and teaching interests include finance and data science. His research concerns the macroeconomic and financial effects of expectation shocks. In pursuit of this research, he uses an interdisciplinary and eclectic battery of strategies, from theoretical analysis, calibration and data confrontation to techniques taken from the computer sciences such as web scraping, machine learning and textual analysis.

In his spare time, you can find him playing the drums, hiking and enjoying the outdoors, and exploring other cultures through reading, films and travel.