York University Professor recognized for work on cooperatives and informal economies
June 3, 2020
Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein has had a lot to celebrate this year.
The recipient of the 2020 Comparative & International Education Society (CIES) African Diaspora Special Group’s Emerging Scholar honour and Rodney Higgins Faculty Award was, for the third straight year, named one of York University’s research leaders.
The euphoria of winning these major awards, however, has been tempered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You cannot even think to celebrate, and if you do you just kind of have that guilty feeling because everything is just upside down,” said the Associate Professor of Business & Society in the Department of Social Science. “You don’t even have a moment to just process it and all of this in a lockdown world.”
With more than 3,000 members from over 110 countries, the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) contributes to interdisciplinary understanding of education and scholarship by promoting international research and disseminating cross-cultural studies.
The accolade was bestowed on Hossein for her significant research contributions across the African Diaspora in the Global South and among racialized people in Canada that offers a valuable perspective which demonstrates innovative thinking in collective economies.
In 2018, she founded Diverse Solidarity Economies (DiSE) Collective that comprises 25 anti-racist feminists writing on and/or working on economic development with a focus on cooperatives and informal collectives.
The CIES Award recognizes the value of cooperative and collective institutions led by Black people who reside in the Global South and the Americas.
“What I look at is this thing called ‘Solidarity Economies’ and that has to do with how people organize business in ways that have been largely ignored or is seen as too informal to think about as knowledge,” Hossein said. “So what I am trying to do is inject education and disrupt current thinking to acknowledge these various ways of doing the economy which includes these very informal ways or mutual aid that Black people do which actually right now during the pandemic is quite important.”
CIES was interested in the extensive empirical field methods of her research.
“I am actually impressed by the innovations in mutual aid and cooperative sector by Black people and doing these informal cooperatives made it possible for me to go to university,” she pointed out. “And as an academic, I am blessed to be able to study ancient systems of collectivity that the racialized people I saw all around me doing. This is gratifying. I am just doing what I am supposed to do as a scholar. And I couldn’t do this kind of research in a Canadian university without tenure as some of what I do in the Black Social Economy challenges the current practice and understanding. My work has reached an international academic association in a number of places which recognize what I am doing and this is a big sign to the Canadian academy to know that the study of the African diaspora in economics is of value.”
The Rodney Higgins Best Faculty Paper Award is presented at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists annual general meeting.
The award is named after the former Department of Political Science Chair Rodney Higgins, an African American scholar at Southern University in Baton Rouge who died in 1964.
Hossein’s paper, ‘A Black Epistemology for the Social and Solidarity Economy: The Black Social Economy’, was published in ‘The Review of Black Political Economy’ in 2019.
“This paper is contributing to knowledge-making,” the 2018 visiting professor at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia noted. “It’s more of a philosophical sort of theory-making paper that asks those in the solidarity economy and those concerned about alternative economics to start reading and using theories and ideas that are coming out of Black and racialized people’s scholarship.”
Hossein’s research projects in the Department of Social Science examines the role of the social and solidarity economy comprised of community organizations in the Global South as well as new work on small businesses of the diaspora in the Greater Toronto Area, London and Oshawa.
The 2009 Fulbright Scholar at the University of the West Indies Mona campus in Jamaica is among seven York University researchers who received funds through the Ontario government’s Early Researcher Award program in 2018. The project documents how racialized people, particularly women, are excluded from economic development programs and how people cope with and resist business exclusion by relying on local social economies such as social enterprises, self-help groups, co-ops and non-profits. A total of $190,000 is made available to each researcher over a five-year period ending in 2023.
She’s also the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant titled ‘African Origins in the Social Economy’ that examines rotating savings & credit associations, mutual aid and cooperatives in racialized communities in Toronto and Montreal and in an international context to the diaspora in five Caribbean countries as well field work in Ghana and Ethiopia.
“For the SSHRC project, I examine the Banker Ladies in Toronto and Montreal engaged in the system of collectivity such as Box Hand and Susu,” said Hossein who is one of the few scholars of colour to win the Helen Potter Award from an economics association that recognizes excellence in scholarship that confronts mainstream economics with literature that supports heterodox economic research. “I did hundreds of interviews and right now I am in the final stages of a documentary with Haitian-Canadian documentarian Esery Mondesir capturing three women of Somali, Trinidad and Sierra Leone background in the Toronto area who are engaging in money pooling coops and say why.
“It’s a great story that fills a gap in Canada’s social economy because Black people also have a rich history of cooperatives in the country. Canada has stood out from other countries in terms of the ways that we do cooperation. However, in all of that storytelling we do not appreciate that the Underground Railroad was a series of cooperatives because it was a collective system, underground to move people, and one needed to have money to get them, and you had to figure out the transport and then once the refugees got to Canada, you had to get resources to set them up and we had something called True Bands. So the Underground Railroad is very much a cooperative. As long as Black folks have been coming here, there would always be a system of economic cooperation at work.”
She is currently working on a manuscript to situate the role of cooperatives and the Black diaspora in the South and in Canada.
The editor of ‘The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-Based Markets’ and co-editor of ‘Business and Society: A Critical Introduction’, Hossein also authored ‘Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power and Violence in the Black Americas’ that adopts a historical and comparative perspective and draws on extensive fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana and Grenada. Through her research, she found prejudices, political power and violence shaped the operation of microfinance in different ways in the countries.
The book was recognized with the 2018 W.E.B Du Bois Distinguished Book Award and the International Association for Feminist Economics 2019 inaugural Suraj Mal & Shyama Devi Agarwal Book Prize.
Last February, she led a training session for federal policymakers in the Ministry of Employment and Social Services to learn how to use Black political economy epistemologies so that funding can better reach Black and racialized women in Canada.
Dr. Caroline Hossein is a trailblazer in her family
The first in her family to attend university, Hossein acceded to her father’s request to pursue Law Studies after graduating in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
“I was OK with that because my parents, who did not go to college, wanted a child who was either a medical doctor or lawyer,” she said. “My dad wanted a ‘lawyer daughter’ so much that he even helped organize a summer internship for me in Toronto.”
While articling with the Rosedale firm, Hossein realized she didn’t’ want to be in the legal profession.
“I did the degree, however, and my father said if I didn’t like it I could do what I want because no one could take that degree away from me,” she said. “I knew after I did my first degree in Halifax and influenced by cooperativism out there that I wanted to study more and to work internationally. My goal was to do something with a civil society people organization.”
Graduating with a Bachelor of Laws (Honors) from the University of Kent at Canterbury, Hossein acquired a scholarship to pursue a Masters of Public Administration at Cornell University’s School of Public Administration & Public Policy in Ithaca, New York.
After completing her graduate degree, she worked for 16 years in global non-profits, including managing a West African village bank in Niger and serving as a Senior Microfinance Consultant with the Waterloo-based Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) before using her University of Toronto PhD completed in 2012 to embark on an academic career.
The product of Isaac Hossein and Jacqueline Gittens who were born in Guyana and St. Vincent & the Grenadines respectively, Hossein – who enjoys travelling, reading fiction and watching movies -- is the eldest of three siblings.
The New York-born academic, who came to Canada at a young age, and her husband of 16 years have a seven-year-old daughter.
