Instructor, Criminolgy & Sociology
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
School of Social Sciences
Criminology
Sociology
604.986.1911 ext. 7305
Fir Building, room FR439
essyanabbali@capilanou.ca
Education
PhD (ABD), Simon Fraser University.
MA, York University.
BFS (Honours), University of Windsor.
Bio
The “nibling” of a martyr of the Algerian decolonization war, Essya is a second-generation immigrant raising the grandchildren of a survivor of BC’s Japanese internment camps on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, while under the omnipresence of a toxic drug public health emergency which disproportionately targets structurally-marginalized bodies and persists through intergenerational trauma. It is with great respect that Essya acknowledges these tensions (among others), how deeply they move and, in turn, how much they inform the roles and responsibilities that Essya carries, especially as a parent, neighbour, educator, researcher and activist.
Faculty at Capilano University (since 2020), adjunct to the Justice Institute of BC, affiliate of the Women's Health Research Institute and board member of both the Elizabeth Bagshaw Society and Madness Canada, Essya can be described more casually as a de/organizer, data storyteller, capacity-builder and occasional poet. Essya has spent nearly two decades exploring the impacts and implications of policies, genders and inter/national situatedness, including structural poverties, on health, care and humanity, with notable experience in qualitative and community-based methodologies, including long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, Ghana. Much of the work can be framed as "Mad" and seeks to recentre compassion with the aim of redefining living together.
Committed to knowledge translation and an empowerment agenda, Essya has partnered extensively over the years with social profit and government agencies to build accessible, inclusive and meaningful care and learning spaces.
As an educator (and equity scholar), Essya centres intersectional, anti-oppression principles (effectively harm reduction approaches) to help create classrooms that care, where students from all backgrounds/perspectives are well-served. Not only does this amplify the value of diversities to inquiry, but it seeks to foster lived-experience-led engagements, student- and community-driven curiosities and hopefully/ultimately meaningful, collaborative outcomes.
Medical sociology, care, equity, public policy, mad and disability studies, surveillance and social conrols, diasporic and change politics.
Nabbali, E. M. (Forthcoming, expected 2026). Mad activism as civic epistemology, in P. Beresford et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Global Political Participation. London & New York: Routledge.
Nabbali, E. M. (Forthcoming, expected 2026). psycho, in B.A. LeFrançois, et al., eds., Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies, 2nd edition. Toronto: Canadian Scholars.
Nabbali, E. M. (2021). Bodies, boundaries, b/orders: A recent critical history of differentialism and structural adjustment, in P. Beresford & J. Russo (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (pp. 276-289). London & New York: Routledge.
Nabbali, E. M. (2019). Diaspora: Dislocation and its resentment, or, the impossible dialogue of “safe space," Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 8 (4), 156-168.
Nabbali, E. M. (2016). On becoming “White” through ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana: Are ideas imperial by course? Language, Discourse, & Society, 4 (7), 83-110.
Nabbali, E. M. (2015). ID politics: The violence of modernity, Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, & Practice, 4 (1), 1-14.
Nabbali, E. M. (2013). “Mad” activism and its (Ghanaian?) future: A prolegomena to debate, Trans-Scripts, 3 (1), 178-201.
Nabbali, E. M. (2010). Vive la révolution, Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 6 (4), 25-30.
Nabbali, E. M. (2009). A “mad” critique of the social model of disability, International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities, and Nations, 9 (4), 1-12.