Andrew Michel Thomas

Andrew is a queer Afro-Jamaican-Haitian-Canadian researcher who investigates the spatial experiences of gay, queer men and persons in the Afro-diasporic communities in Germany and Europe, with a focus on the city of Berlin. He is particularly interested in how "mutuality of place, identity, and self" shapes belonging, inclusion, place bond, or attachment to a place and, in turn, shapes the consciousness of its members regarding who belongs to that community. A significant focus of his research is how spatial production combines imagination, power, and practice between people who are above, below, and in between and what this means, considering how much of our imagination is guided by the aesthetic values of those who control the ideologies that circulate in a given culture, such as heterosexuality, gender binarism, and proper masculinity and femininity. He is concerned with what this means for those who cannot or will not fit those scripts and on account of not "fitting" those ideal forms of embodiment that dominant members hold within that community, and in turn, their ability to access resources of that neighbourhood in an equitable manner, including housing, employment, and freedom from violence and exclusion so that they can make a home in landscapes that are often hostile to dissimilarities.

His experience includes teaching children, teens, and adults English as a second language and intercultural training. As part of his doctoral research at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, he assisted Professor Steven Farber. From 2021 to 2022, he worked on the Mobilizing Justice Research Project. Orly Linovski, Associate Professor of City Planning, University of Manitoba and Jay Pitter, MES, Author, Place-maker, and City Builder. In 2020 and 2021, he was a research fellow at the Center for Ethics, where he investigated the evolution of anti-black racism within Germany through rhetoric, media, tropes, visuals, and political commentary. From 2020 to 2021, he was a School of Cities Research Fellow. As part of his presentation at the School of Cities, Neo-liberalism and Necropolitics: Spatial, and Defensive (Hostile) Architecture, Planning, and Posture at the University of Toronto, he examined how hostile urban design, increased homeless density, and COVID-19 exposure interact and collide during this time of crisis. In 2020, he worked as an undergraduate research assistant at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, on the Naomi Wilzig Art Collection - A Collection on Sexuality Culture under Professor Andreas Krass' direction. Starting in the fall of 2023, he will be a visiting research fellow at the Center for Trans-disciplinary Studies at Humboldt University Berlin during his doctoral dissertation fieldwork.

Cohort

2021