Sonya Fatah

Sonya Fatah is an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism where she has taught since 2017. 

Sonya’s teaching, research and practice are invested in areas of community-based live journalism, representation in the newsroom, press freedoms and media narratives on international reporting. 

Sonya is the founder and director of stitched! a community-based, interdisciplinary live journalism studio at the Creative School. The studio develops student-led live-journalism shows exploring alternative journalism approaches and developing a unique code of ethics in journalistic practice. It also introduces new roles for journalists and adapts journalistic terms as part of a goal to develop alternative journalisms in response to the historical record. stitched! Shows introduce community gatherers as audience facilitators and end with calls to action to mobilize publics in a democracy to participate more fully based on their capacity and access. The studio also develops independent shows. In 2023, stitched! produced the second International Live Journalism Festival (external link)  at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Past shows/stories include: Climate Cocoon; Harmed in Hamilton; Under the Heat Dome; Letter from Battir; Childhood Interrupted; Who Let the Dogs Out?

Sonya is also the co-lead of the Canada Press Freedom Project (external link) , which received its seed funding from the Michener Foundation. The project launched in 2022 and has produced annual reports since then on the state of press freedom conditions across Canada. CPFP tracks violations quantitatively across 12 categories, including online hate, and also develops qualitative reports on critical issues that are harder to track quantitatively, such as access to information, media exclusion zones; publication bans and sealing orders, as well as internal newsroom concerns. 

Annual Reports: 2023 (external link) ; Inaugural Report, 2022 (external link) 

Sonya works with her colleague, Asmaa Malik on investigating newsroom culture based on inquiries about composition and its impact on the story table. An earlier study investigated which columnists were granted editorial space in at major Canadian news publications over a 21-year period. This research proved to be a useful case study for further investigation on internal newsroom dynamics. 

As a career journalism practitioner, Sonya has worked across mediums in a largely global context. She has studied and worked in China, India, Pakistan, South Africa, the United States, Russia and Canada. Most of Sonya’s working life as a journalist was spent overseas in India and Pakistan, covering South Asia for Canadian and U.S. publications. She was reporter-on-assignment for the Globe and Mail and later a special correspondent for the Toronto Star. She was India correspondent for the Boston-based GlobalPost, now PRI. While in India she wrote a column on India-Pakistan issues for the Times of India, the world’s largest paper by circulation and readership. She occasionally writes about Indo-Pakistan issues for the Globe and Mail. In addition, Sonya is the former editor-in-chief of J-Source (external link) .

In addition to developing audio documentaries, Sonya full-length feature doc, I, DANCE., was the result of an art documentation grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. The film, which follows a Pakistani classical dancer’s journey to use dance as a form of political dissent against state- imposed nationalism, screened in several cities across South Asia, as well as festivals in India, Nepal and the United States. In August 2019, it was one of several documentaries showcased as part of the Amritsar Film Festival.

Sonya’s narrative feature work has been published in several magazines across the world including Fortune, Columbia Journalism Review, Caravan, The Groundtruth Project, Walrus magazine and many others. She has also received several grants to pursue narrative projects, including Centre for Science and the Environment, the Panos-South-Asian Fellowship and the International Women’s Media Fund.

Courses taught: Feature Writing, Law and Ethics, Social Issues in Journalism, Narrative Writing, Magazine Workshop, International Journalism, Live Journalism, Reporting and Writing. Reporting on Food in Ancient Lands; Newsroom Masthead (On the Record; Review of Journalism); and Urban Politics and Society for Journalists.

Grants: FoLiE/ MITACS/ Cirque du Soleil; SSHRC Connections Grant; Michener-L. Richard  O’Hagen Fellowship for Journalism Education; New Collaborations 2024; New Collaborations 2023; Innovation Grant; SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant; Law Foundation of Ontario. 

She currently lives in Hamilton, ON upon the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas.