Q&A: How this MUN professor creates change through education, advocacy and support
Sulaimon Giwa of Memorial University has been named one of CBC’s Black Changemakers for Atlantic Canada
CBC is highlighting Black people in Atlantic Canada who are giving back, inspiring others and helping to shape our future.
Last fall, members of the public submitted over 350 nominations for 161 Black leaders, teachers, entrepreneurs and artists from across the East Coast.
A panel of Black community members in Atlantic Canada selected 20 people to highlight for CBC Black Changemakers.
Sulaimon Giwa's career path has some twists and turns. He trained to be a police officer, but chose not to pursue the career. He worked as a professional dancer, and once considered sex work.
But he found his true passion in academia, even if it wasn't a linear path, and Giwa is now an associate professor and the interim dean of Memorial University's school of social work.
As a scholar, Giwa has offered courses about the rhetoric and reality of calls to defund police forces.
Giwa is looking at LGBTQ newcomers to Canada and other understudied groups, to help policymakers discover the type of support and services members of the communities need.
He also researches racial profiling, systemic racism and diversity and inclusion and is on a long list of committees, boards and advisory groups.
Giwa has been named one of CBC's Black Changemakers in Atlantic Canada for 2023. He spoke with CBC News about his life, career and research.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: At one time you wanted to become a police officer. What can you tell me about that and why you wanted to be a police officer?
Please note, a previous version of this story said that Giwa quit police college. He, in fact, graduated from police college.
A: It's always been a passion of mine, when I was a little boy still living in Nigeria.… A lot of my formative education was really at a military school.… The discipline, the military culture was something that was steeped into me from a young age. I think that just reflected who I was as an individual and my aspirations for wanting to get involved in public service and giving back to the community.
My father really drove my myself, my brother into Boy Scouts … and then when we moved here to Canada, it's something that I continued … all the way up to the chief scout.
I was looking for other ways that I can still be involved in this paramilitary culture and I enrolled in air cadets. So I did that until I "retired" and that's really when I actually got accepted into police college.
I did my two years there and as I was finishing, thinking about joining the police organization, it just dawned on me that maybe perhaps that's not really what I wanted to be doing necessarily in terms of arresting people and putting them in jail and that be that be the end of it. I wanted to find other ways that we can actually still intervene in people's lives in meaningful ways that will support people who are coming into conflict with the law.
What changed your mind to change … the direction of your life?
At one point I was dancing as well, in Vegas, so as a professional dancer. So I mean one could ask why I didn't pursue that continuously … and the answer to that would have been that my mom. Essentially she just said that, "Well, maybe you should think about other things beyond dancing because a dancer's career is really, really short.''
And that's when I stop dancing. I shifted directions to say, "OK, maybe I will go back to school, get my undergrad degree." And then after I was done with that, I said, "Well, maybe I'll get my master's degree and then after that I get my PhD" and then here I am.
A lot of your work has focused on criminal justice and criminology, and you've taught criminology courses about defunding the police. What can you tell us about that course the first time it was offered?
There are still things that I still feel committed to and connected to when it concerns criminal justice and that's why a lot of my work still involves that and particularly things around racial profiling.
The stuff that happened with George Floyd back in 2020 and the community visceral response to those kinds of incidents, those are things that I am passionate about and I want to be able to speak about. So that involves or requires me to be still connected to the criminal justice system so that I can actually have the … legitimacy that comes with speaking about those systems and actually challenging them.… Just because I'm not practising it as a police officer doesn't necessarily mean that I cannot speak to those issues as a scholar, as a general member of the public.
But in terms of the defunding the police scene and developing a course around that, that was really motivated out of an interest in trying to bring into a university space a conversation that I felt wasn't in that space yet, and allowing students the opportunity to be able to actually have a fulsome conversation in a safe of a space as much as possible.… I think that there's a lot of discourse surrounding defunding policing, what it means or what it doesn't mean, that hasn't necessarily been addressed to the extent that I think it needs to be addressed, to actually allow people to be able to make an informed decision if this is the direction that we need to be going.
How did you start your work studying LGBTQ newcomers and their experiences?
Issues around LGBTQ+ is very much intimate to who I am as a person. So I am a member of the community and so it wasn't much of a stretch of imagination…. because it's something that I live on a day-to-day basis.
The issue of LGBTQ+ newcomers, I think, is an aspect of research that is focusing on that particular population that hasn't really gotten much attention. Oftentimes when we think about migrations or when we think about settlement and reintegration, we think about the particular population that are coming into that particular system as being heterosexual. Our imagination and our thinking immediately goes to a father and mother with their kids. But oftentimes they don't think about the diversity of those people who are actually migrating.
I wanted us to be more thoughtful and more cognizant of those individuals who are coming into the province and to make sure that we're devising programs and services that will begin to respond to some of the challenges and the needs that those individuals have.
How has this work or started to change things for LGBTQ newcomers here?
We are sort of at the beginning stage of this work.… We've got the PCA, which is the project advisory committee, and this advisory committee is composed of individuals who are LGBTQ+ newcomers to the province and to the country. They are really informing and guiding all of the different elements of the project. So when it concerns research, they offer advice and guidance around what that should look like, when it concerns just some of the lived experiences and living experiences that individuals have, they bring that to our attention so that whenever we have audiences, with like let's say members of the provincial government here, we can actually raise those issues and to those stakeholders.
But right now the YWCA is also operating in the drop-in Group for LGBTQ +2 newcomers. So this is an opportunity for people to actually connect with themselves.
We also have … the stakeholders reference groups … so that we can begin to think again about how we infuse elements of LGBTQ concerns and matters into [their] organizational work, so that again people are not working in silos, but they are actually collaborating with one another in meaningful ways.
And we also have the mentorship that is also up and running as well. And so we're trying to connect people here in the community with LGBTQ+ newcomers so that they can be a resource for those individuals as they're trying to navigate the different systems within the province and connect to services that they need just to get themselves going.
How is your life experience factored into this work?
I came here from Nigeria when I was 11. So I've been living in Canada for a long time, but the experiences of migration and settlement are still ones that are very real and very present today.
When I listen to the experience of some of the newcomers here, it takes me back to when I first came here as well, too, and some of the challenges that I had in terms of just settling into school spaces, some of the many fights that I got into with other colleagues, who were very homophobic and things of that nature, so the intersections of being LGBTQ person, being a person of colour really, really posed a lot of challenges for me when I was younger and I would even argue still today.
Those are the kind of experiences and realities that I think I bring into the project … but those experiences also connect with some of the experiences that I'm hearing from LGBTQ+ newcomers here and hopefully they'll help to inform programs that get developed and services that get developed to be able to support those individuals as they're moving in here and settling and so on.
You've also researched male sex work as well … and you considered becoming a sex worker at one point. What can you tell me about that?
The research on male sex workers is really just an expansion of the research scope that I'm on. That's not to say that because I am an LGBTQ scholar that I'm assuming that male sex workers are also LGBTQ.… I'm not saying that. But I'm also recognizing that that is also a possibility. So in that sense, it's sort of like an expansion of the work that I'm doing to better understand the different diversities and the nuances of what it means to be LGBTQ. Again, when we look at the provincial landscape, a lot of work hasn't necessarily been done when it concerns male sex workers in the province.
The international literature that is out there, a lot of it still focuses on female sex workers. There's been some work done here in Newfoundland and Labrador, but nothing substantial that actually helps us to understand who these sex workers are.… So my research is really about trying to begin to understand the nuances and bring attention to those issues and again to say, are there programs, are there policies, are there services that we need to be developing to better support these individuals so that the work that they are doing is actually not in the shadows, but it's actually something that we recognize?
But again this is not necessarily being driven by my own agenda of like, you know, wanting to become a new sex worker and that didn't happen. But it's just more about trying to say there's a sense of humility that needs to come with the kind of work.
What does being named a CBC Black Changemaker mean to you?
I think it means recognition of the work that I'm doing in the community and that people recognize that the work is meaningful and ultimately that's really what I want. I want people to see that the work that I'm doing is meaningful and it's actually making a change in the lives of people who are coming into the province and settling into the province and living here and wanting to call Newfoundland and Labrador home.
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.
Corrections
- A previous version of this story said that Giwa quit police college. He, in fact, graduated but decided not to pursue policing as a career.Mar 05, 2023 2:14 PM NT
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