Bridging the gap between theory and practice is an interdisciplinary program designed to foster critical examination of social practice and its relationship to policy, programs, and transformational change.
The University of Guelph's PhD in Social Practice and Transformational Change (SOPR) is rooted in collaboration, community-engaged scholarship, and Indigenous philosophies and ideologies. The program prepares students to design and implement practice-based research projects and research-based practices while developing principled, ethical, and sustainable frameworks for collaborative initiatives.
In this student spotlight, PhD candidate Nealob Kakar shares her experience as a SOPR student and what led her to joining the program.
My name is Nealob Kakar (she/her) and I am a fourth year SOPR student and one of the editors of SOPR Stories! I am a Queer Afghan storyteller, poet, fibre artist, avid crafter, and well I like to think of myself as just a maker of all things!
I spend a lot of my time crocheting, singing, performing spoken word, longboarding within the Haldimand Tract, journaling, making radical zines, daydreaming about the world I want to live in, and most importantly tending to my Persian cat.
I completed an honours bachelor of arts in political science: public law and judicial studies at McMaster University, and a master of public service at the University of Waterloo.
Aside from my academic work, I have a community-based background in creating and facilitating trainings and workshops at the university and community level focused on supporting Survivors of Sexual and/or Gender-Based Violence through peer support and abolitionist transformative justice oriented grassroots interventions.
I am deeply interested in the ways communities at the intersection of marginalization, specifically racialized 2SLGBTQ+ Survivors, practice care, mutual aid, radical love, and a praxis of indispensability and radical relationality for one another in ways that colonial bodies of policy have not been and will never be able to.
My research aims to contribute to a body of knowledge that reconceptualizes the discipline of policy through critical community-based perspectives that rethink difference and radically re-imagine transformative futures of collective care.
My ultimate hope in this space is to dream of a better world, a just world. A world that isn't so silent at the hands of structural violence. A world that begs for new ways, emergent strategies, transformative futures where we can exist, where we don’t think of people as disposable. Where we look inward and to each other through our relational shifts. Where we value and uphold our individual and collective responsibilities to one another. Where we refuse to abandon. Heck where we just refuse.
At the end of the day our futures are entangled. Our liberation, our freedom, is tied, knotted, stuck, smushed together in a sticky web that cannot be made undone.
In entering this program, I came from a super disciplinary (and sometimes rigid) political science and public policy background. During my time in these academic spaces, I was simultaneously heavily involved in creative community-led activist work with Survivor, racialized, and queer communities I hold kinship with.
I often found myself teetering two different worlds, trying to balance being a disciplinary academic (whatever that may look like?) and a community member practicing vital grassroots groundwork.
It wasn't until I started the SOPR program that I was able to fully enter an academic space with all of these parts of myself intact, and not have to reserve pieces for certain audiences. The interdisciplinary nature and social justice focus of this program allowed me to enter as I am.
SOPR continues to provide me with the tools to move differently, rethink normativity, and practice ways of being that the traditional neoliberal academy does not.