Nishan Zewge-Abubaker

Nishan (she/her) is healing justice practitioner, researcher, and organizer born and raised in Toronto. Her intellectual work in and out of the academy plays out on a local scale: studying community-based research methodologies, abolitionist community-led practices of health, and the harms of normative local community health planning infrastructures on black life. This work combines critical qualitative and mixed methods, archival data, and community-driven approaches. Nishan holds a Masters of Public Health from the University of Toronto with a specialization in Public Health Policy.

Nishan has organized over the past decade across multiple sites including autonomous street medic collectives, neighbourhood crisis response groups, and grassroots black youth groups, and in the past has co-founded projects like the Black Public Health Collective and the Eri Ethio Solidarity Fund. Her prior professional work has included coordinating housing and health research projects in academic healthcare settings, policy research and evaluation in black-led non-profit organizations, and co-founding a consulting firm providing program design, evaluation, and organizational change serves to the social service sector. Nishan’s work has been published in journals like Geoforum, BMC Public Health, and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.