Join us for the Toronto launch and book panel of A Woman is a School with Céline Semaan, founder of the Slow Factory.
The Technoscience Research Unit is excited to host A Women is a School Toronto book launch and panel with author and Slow Factory founder Céline Semaan, in conversation with Samira Mohyeddin from On The Line Media and Tai Salih from The Red Ma’at Collective.
A Woman is a School is the first memoir and cultural anthropological book by Slow Factory founder, Céline Semaan. As a war-survivor and child refugee sharing endangered and discredited ancestral knowledge of the Global South, particularly tales from Lebanon from 1948 to 2023—the book follows the tradition of the hakawati, the storytellers of the Levant, holding Indigenous knowledge and wisdom, Céline Semaan, a hakawati herself, documents what she has witnessed throughout her life and the lives of her family members, sharing her upbringing and cultures of resistance.
Céline Semaan is a Lebanese-Canadian designer, writer, artist, speaker, and advocate working at the intersection of environmental and social justice. Céline is the founder of Slow Factory, a 501c3 public service organization addressing the intersecting crises of climate justice and social inequity — filling the gap for climate adaptation and preparedness, building community power through open education, narrative change and regenerative design.
Samira Mohyeddin is an award-winning producer and broadcast journalist and is the President and Editor in Chief of On The Line Media. She has a Master of Arts in Gender and Mideast History from the University of Toronto and a post graduate diploma in journalism from Centennial College's Story Arts Centre.
Tai Salih (she/her), E-RYT® 500, YACEP®, is an unapologetic intersectional pan-African abolitionist and fierce womanist from Sudan. As a multi-disciplinary social and healing justice educator and facilitator, she dismantles oppressive systems through her diverse roles as an integrative counsellor, social justice advocate, anti-oppression educator, wellness ambassador with lululemon, and emergency response reservist with the Canadian Red Cross. Her life's mission is rooted in decolonization and the radical empowerment of marginalized communities.
The Slow Factory is an award-winning arts for collective liberation movement and organization led by Arab and Afro-Indigenous women and queer gender non-comforming artists, producing media, conferences, interactive exhibitions, gatherings and workshops centering the lived experience of people of the Global Majority: displaced or local, who thrive for collective liberation. Built on a feminist lens for climate and social justice, its practice is to create in a way that is good for the planet and good for people.
The Technoscience Research Unit is an Indigenous-led home for critical and creative research on the politics of technoscience. Since 2007, the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto has been the institutional Indigenous-led home for many scholars researching within the fields of science, technology and environment. Through research projects, micro-laboratories, and working groups, we support and foster Indigenous, feminist, queer, environmental, anti-racist and anti-colonial methodologies for studying the history and politics of technoscience. Our research activities – clustered together in laboratories – are organized according to three priority areas: Environmental Data Justice; Indigenous Science, Technology & Environment Studies; and Indigenous Science and Ethical Substance.