Leasider Alka Kumar is our resident doctor of peace – literally. With a Ph.D. in Peace and Conflict Studies, she is a senior research fellow and project coordinator at the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in migration at Toronto Metropolitan University. She leads roundtable discussions, mentors, consults, blogs regularly and volunteers, all in the name of social justice. Alka promotes positive peace, an environment which, she says, “fosters community wellbeing, mutual respect, social justice and equality.”
Born and raised in Delhi, she says her family valued education. This may account for her own scholarly curiosity and achievements. Alka’s first doctoral degree involved investigating the major fiction of Doris Lessing. She explains that she initially studied Lessing’s writings when doing her Master of Philosophy in Literary Studies at Delhi University. “In class we read The Golden Notebook, which had a profound effect on me what with its anti-war and pro-feminist themes.” Lessing won the Nobel prize for literature in 2007, only the 11th woman to have done so at the time. Alka was fortunate enough to visit Lessing at her home in England “where we had a cup of tea together and an unforgettable chat.”
Alka has a fire and energy that is uniquely her own. She has taught at a high school in Delhi, at a girls’ secondary school in London, UK while her husband did a two-year stint in hematology at Guy’s Hospital, and for many years at Delhi University, her alma mater. Not to mention raising her family – a daughter and son – during these early busy years.
Canadian connection
Around 2000 Alka first became aware of academic opportunities in Canada. She explains that “colleagues at Delhi University were talking about the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, which provides fellowships to gain firsthand research experience in Canada in a field of expertise.” Having a healthy curiosity in “learning how things are happening” in other countries, she applied for and won a millennial fellowship to the University of Toronto. She found the experience so rewarding that she ended up returning for short academic stays within a matter of years – to McGill and again to the U of T.
As fate would have it, her husband accepted a position as a hematologist at the University of Manitoba in 2008. There Alka completed her second Ph.D., focusing on migration, while continuing to learn about community engagement and peace building. She worked with an agency that assisted skilled racialized immigrants to Winnipeg in navigating the labour market. “Their stories were very real to me since I had similar lived experiences. These realities became part of my Ph.D. studies.” She learned that skilled immigrants face barriers that are hard to overcome, including lack of Canadian work experience and regulatory bodies that fail to recognize foreign credentials. “I learned how important systems are to people’s everyday lives, to our success and failure; not till we have equitable structures in place can we truly have peace.”
Opportunities for peace
As COVID-19 opened doors to remote opportunities, Alka continued to work with a non-profit in Winnipeg as a project advisor for the Building Bridges Project. It brought together members of cultural communities in a roundtable format to explore traditional cultural systems for building peaceful communities. She has also been leading the national Peace First, an organization bringing diverse communities together to explore what peace means to each of us, and why it matters. With special focus this year on youth from a variety of backgrounds joining roundtable conversations, she is excited about the safe space this can create – where young people can speak freely and listen closely to develop empathy and understanding. She sees her role as a facilitator, an elder, prompting conversations by asking “can there be peace without justice?”, “what does peace mean?” and “how can we ‘enact’ it in our daily lives?” The roundtables will be hosted in Regent Park, Jane and Finch, and Thorncliffe Park. And what to make of the conditions for peace in 2026? “It makes me angry,” she confides. “Too many world leaders act like bullies, which is retrograde to the promotion of peace.” It may make us want to become apathetic, but Alka’s solution reflects her strength, optimism and commitment to change: “it makes me more determined than ever to strive for peace because if I don’t, the bullies win!”
