Fourth session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent

Professor  Marieme  Lo, originally from Senegal, is  the Director of  the African Studies Centre  and  an Associate Professor in Women and Gender Studies and African Studies at the university of Toronto. She holds a Licence from Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, a MA from the University of Dakar (Senegal) and MSc and PhD from Cornell University. She has also received numerous awards and held fellowships at the University of Oxford and Georgetown University. Prof. Lo works on intersecting research fields entwined in critical, feminist, alternative and creative epistemologies, and social justice praxis. Her publications and scholarship encompass the political economy of gender and development, female entrepreneurship, trade, and economic justice; the political economy and creative dynamism of African urban informal economies, urban poverty and inclusive urbanism particularly in African post-colonial cities; migration and African diaspora  social networks, vulnerability, resilience, livelihood studies and climate change in the Sahel and coastal communities at the interstices of anthropogenic risks, geopolitics, biopolitical governmentality, and extractivism.
Professor Lo served as WGSI Graduate Coordinator ( 2015-2017), African Studies Director ( 2017- 2021), a faculty mentor to students from Africa in the MasterCard Foundation Program (2017-2021) and the School of Cities Associate Director for Education (2018-2021 and 2022).

She was also a member of the first Board of Governance of the Université de l'Ontario français (UOF) (2018-2021) and is currently an advisor for the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (BEKH).

In and outside academia, she has vast experience leading and assessing large scale social impacts, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research and design projects and has collaborated with grassroots women’s organizations, civil society networks such as the West Africa Civil Society, and international organizations such as UN-Women, the World Food Programme (WFP), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Professor Lo is passionate about African art and design and an amateur photographer.