About the Centre

The Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity (CSDD) facilitates rigorous debate on contemporary complex challenges faced by Canada and the world through research and public engagement that uniquely focuses on the intersection of democracy and diversity.

Our commitment to make an impact involves the following strategic goals:

1. Supporting ground-breaking and interdisciplinary research on themes related to democracy and diversity.
2. Challenging the division between teaching and research. Good researchers make effective teachers and effective teachers incorporate ground-breaking research. This is especially true at the graduate level, where the CSDD supports the MA specializations in Nationalism, Ethnicity, Peace, and Conflict and Political and Legal Thought.
3. Developing global partnerships and global outreach, to consider these questions comparatively and to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways in order to learn from other societies and research.

Acknowledgement of Territory

The Centre is situated on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. 

To acknowledge this traditional territory is to recognize its longer history, one predating the establishment of the earliest European colonies. It is also to acknowledge this territory’s significance for the Indigenous peoples who lived, and continue to live, upon it and whose practices and spiritualties were tied to the land and continue to develop in relationship to the territory and its other inhabitants today.

Furthermore, we understand that as a research and educational institution we have been called upon by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to make meaningful steps toward supporting research programmes and courses which engage in reconciliation and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The Centre commits to these objectives across all of our six research agendas as well as in our decision making regarding future projects, membership, speakers, and other activities.

The Centre will continue to pursue the critical investigation of core challenges of diversity and democracy within a framework of equity and inclusion and a commitment to embrace diverse, indigenous, and global ideas and perspectives.