Student Affiliate
Naïla Gravel-Baazaoui is drawn to stories that live in the margins, including her own. A Quebecer of Tunisian origin, her background has made her attuned to the complexities of diaspora and to narratives that either escape official archives or are deliberately erased from them. A graduate in Political Science from Université de Montréal, her research focused on deconstructing Orientalist discourses around gender and sexuality in the Maghreb-Mashreq. Since 2022, she has served on the editorial board of Saha journal, where she works with authors, translators, and creators to circulate Maghreb-Mashreq voices in academic spaces and beyond. As a researcher for community podcasts in Montreal, she documents the stories of racialized women, believing that slowing down time allows us to capture what conventional media formats cannot. She is now turning toward documentary filmmaking, seeking to create works where silences, gestures, and suspended moments can tell what words alone struggle to convey. Her work is grounded in decolonial feminist practice that prioritizes listening and collaboration with the communities whose voices she seeks to amplify.
