2024 Annual Meeting News

Lerato hails from the Batuang Clan of ba ha Moletsane from Lesotho in Southern Africa and lives as uninvited guest on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people, where she works and raises her children. She is currently the inaugural Associate Director for the Indigenous Research Support Initiative at the University of British Columbia.

Lerato is a proven strategic leader, public sector administrator and employment equity lawyer- deeply rooted in racial equity and anti-racism, DEI, decolonization and reconciliation. In her work at UBC, Lerato champions and supports scholarship and discourses in Indigenous community-based research, intersectional equity, decoloniality and critical race theory, that focus on the interests and priorities of Indigenous, Black and other racialized communities and researchers. She also works to understand how systems, policies and procedures can better support community-university collaborations and address issues of racism, decolonization, equity and justice on individual and system-wide levels. Lerato is very interested in exploring new approaches to recognize and center alternative ways of knowing and doing and how these are measured and evaluated in our academic systems

Lerato holds several leadership positions at UBC as well as provincially and nationally including serving as previous Chair of the Blackness Committee on the UBC Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force, previous Vice-Chair for the Racial and Ethno-Cultural Equity Advisory Committee that advises Vancouver City Council and as a current Director and member of the Board Executive for the Canadian Black Policy Network.

Closing Keynote Speaker- Ranjit Singh: The Ordinary Ethics of Putting People First

Ranjit Singh is a senior researcher at Data & Society, conducting qualitative research for the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab. With a particular focus on research equity, he also helps guide the organization’s commitment to equitable research practices both internally and with its external partners. Singh’s work examines the everyday experiences of people subject to data-driven practices and follows the mutual shaping of their lives and their data records, aiming to understand how data is increasingly used to imagine and develop new digital solutions for democratizing inclusion. His research sits at the intersection of data infrastructures, majority world scholarship, and public policy, and uses methods of interview-based qualitative sociology and multi-sited ethnography.