OCAD University has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Postdoctoral Research Award, as part of the Canada Research Training Awards Suite, awarded to Dr. Remi Rana-Allen from the University of the Arts London.
Dr. Rana-Allen is a prominent British-born South Asian visual artist, educator, and researcher whose work explores equity, decoloniality, and representation. She will undertake her two-year postdoctoral research project at the University, beginning in November.
The award, valued at $70,000 per year over two years, is supporting her research project, “Miaha: Diaspora, Decolonial Memory and Community Resilience through Practice-Based Research Across East Africa, the UK and Canada.”
“I’m delighted to be joining OCAD University as a SSHRC Canada Impact+ Research Postdoctoral Fellow, working with Dr. Immony Mèn. Our research shares a focus on diasporic identities, storytelling and the role of creative practice in connecting communities,” says Dr. Rana-Allen. Dr. Mèn is OCAD U’s Canada Research Chair, Tier 2, in Diasporic Digital Humanities.
“Through the Miaha project, I look forward to bringing together our complementary perspectives and networks to develop interdisciplinary research connecting Toronto, Nairobi and London. This fellowship is particularly meaningful to me as an opportunity to develop my research, amplify marginalised voices and explore how artistic practice can foster intercultural understanding, dialogue and collective healing,” she says.
Her practice-based research centres on maternal lineage, identity, migration, and decolonial storytelling, focusing on her Kenyan heritage and matrilineal ancestry. The research traces diasporic movement from India to East Africa, the United Kingdom, and now Canada, exploring how memory, kinship, and cultural traditions are preserved, adapted, and transformed across generations and geographies.
Supported by an Arts Council England award (2022), this research led to her touring solo exhibition, Swan Song: Sing Her to Me (2024-25), which explored the story of her great aunt, the first Indian woman sentenced to death by hanging in colonial Kenya following the murder of her great grandfather in 1949. The project also initiated a sustained collaboration with the University of Nairobi.
Through ongoing dialogue with Prof. Lilac Osanjo and Dr. Joyce Akinyi Akach, they identified an urgent need for cross-cultural research platforms centring East African and diasporic narratives that are often absent from institutional archives and dominant Western frameworks.
The “Miaha” research project is being developed as an inclusive platform bringing together global narratives through an open call, with contributions from Luo, Kikuyu, Maasai, Kenyan Arab, and South Asian diasporic communities across East Africa, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
The project will combine fieldwork, oral histories, workshops, and artistic production to create a living archive of underrepresented narratives surrounding marriage, kinship, adornment, textiles, sound, and embodied cultural practices.
Through artistic practice, storytelling, placemaking, and public engagement, “Miaha” will create spaces where historically marginalized voices, particularly women and diasporic communities, actively participate in cultural knowledge production.
“Miaha” proposes a global research ecosystem centred on transnational artistic practice. Central to the project are art residencies as spaces for immersive research, cross-cultural engagement, and collaborative knowledge production grounded in decolonial methodologies, ethical exchange, and lived experience.
