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The Overcoming Epidemics in Transnational Black Communities – Response, Recovery and Resilience research cluster is redefining how epidemic studies are done, placing Black communities at the centre of inquiry and turning scholarship into action across Canada and Africa.

Launched following the COVID‑19 pandemic through �첥��Ƶ’s Catalyzing Interdisciplinary Research Clusters program, the group brought together Black scholars from five Faculties to study structural inequalities that influence how Black communities experience and recover from epidemics.

From the outset, members knew the work would require a differently approach to fulfill a key goal: collaborating and centring the lived experiences and resilience strategies of Black populations.

“We were clear from the start that we had to depart from traditional means of doing research that tend to be extractive,” says Sylvia Bawa, associate professor of sociology and co‑principal investigator. Research in marginalized communities, she explains, often involves collecting data without collaboration or returning findings in accessible ways.

Jeffrey Squire, an instructor in the Department of Social Science and co-principal investigator, notes this top‑down approach is common in academia. “We undertake research that affects the lives of a community, but often their input is limited,” he says. “We wanted to incorporate those voices.”

Cluster members began by meeting with local organizations, including Toronto’s Black Creek Community Health Centre, to discuss research opportunities. Rather than arriving with a fixed agenda, researchers outlined their goals transparently and asked, “What would make sense for you as a partner in knowledge creation?” Those discussions led to more in-depth engagement through town halls with the broader communities, ensuring priorities reflected lived concerns.

At a public town hall in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood, residents spoke candidly about challenges – from vaccine hesitancy to unequal access to care – and emphasized that inquiry should reflect real, everyday priorities. This reinforced that meaningful research requires listening first and allowing community concerns to shape questions, methods and outcomes.

The cluster extended its approach internationally, connecting with think tanks, advocacy organizations and local health groups across six African countries, including Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda. These partnerships were central to its transnational mandate: to link Black communities in Canada and Africa for knowledge sharing on how epidemics are experienced and managed in different social and health contexts.

Early conversations revealed a common concern that partners valued collaboration on data collection but wanted supporting research. “Many of those groups talked about the fact that conducting research was important because the data was helpful for them, but they also wanted research that would be helpful for their work – not necessarily research questions that would be helpful only to us,” Bawa recalls. In response, the cluster created small internal grants for co‑developed projects and committed to shared authorship, ensuring collaborators were involved in producing publications and other knowledge outputs.

Three years into its efforts, the initiative has now entered what Bawa describes as its “research dissemination phase.”

Findings will be published, such as a forthcoming open‑access paper co‑written with Black women leaders in the Greater Toronto Area about guiding communities through the pandemic. It has also contributed to other research examining how the pandemic intersected with gender‑based violence in ways relevant to advocacy and intervention.

Impact on the community remains central, and Bawa stresses the importance of providing accessibility through open‑access venues and plain-language reporting. Published findings are structured so community partners can provide feedback, engage with findings and see their voices reflected.

Research is also shared through interactive forums to foster dialogue and bring together scholars and community partners to exchange insights and reflect on findings. Last fall, the Community Research Showcase and Gathering at York’s Keele Campus featured presentations of funded projects alongside community‑led reflections, with panels deliberately weighted toward community voices. African collaborators joined via Zoom, while local organizations, including Toronto Public Health and grassroots health groups, participated in person.

During the event, Bawa and Squire observed how meaningful the work – and the international engagement – has become. “There’s a real appetite for this kind of work,” Squire says, noting one participant in Africa logged in by generator after losing electricy and another found the session so valuable they stayed up until 2 a.m. local time.

The cluster plans to continue meeting that appetite. Members are translating findings into practical recommendations, organizing an academic-community panel for an upcoming Canadian Association of African Studies conference and planning public showcases focused on Canadian and African contexts to ensure ongoing transnational knowledge exchange.

These efforts of the cluster have real‑world stakes; since SARS in the early 2000s, major epidemics have emerged every few years, says Squire.

Now, with networks firmly in place across Canada and Africa, lessons learned through the cluster's work can travel faster and reach the contexts where they matter most when health crises emerge. “Through our research, through talking to people, through observing what is going on in communities and overseas, we are able to disseminate information that now will be very useful in addressing responses,” Squire says.

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