Dr. Zahir Kolia

Zahir Kolia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He joined the faculty in July 2018. Zahir completed his H.B.A. in Criminology and Political Science at the University of Toronto, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in the Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University. From 2016-2018, he held the post of Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University, teaching primarily in the specialized Pre-Law Program. Additionally, he taught in the Department of Community and Justice Services at Humber College from 2014-2015.

His research broadly examines how Indigenous and racialized communities have been organized under settler colonial and secular forms of neoliberal governmentality using Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory, Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Theory, Post-Secular Studies, and Decolonial approaches to World/Political Ecology. Currently, his research examines how sovereign power and attendant juridical forms of state violence are organized by race, coloniality, and the theological-political. Additionally, he examines how liberal reconciliatory justice frameworks – such as truth and reconciliation commissions – are unique colonial archival forms used to obscure structural forms of social and political inequality.