Sadia Afrin (she/her)

Arts First Peer Tutor Coordinator
Image of Sadia Afrin, Arts First Peer tutor Coordinator

Sadia Afrin is a PhD Candidate under the stream of Rhetoric and Communication Design (RCD) at the Department of English Language and Literature in the University of Waterloo. She is currently teaching as a sessional instructor at the University of Waterloo and taught in Sheridan College as an Instructor in the Faculty of Arts. She is also working as the Arts First Peer Tutor Co-Ordinator and Arts first Workshop Facilitator in the Writing and Communication Center of the UW.  

Sadia sees herself as an energetic and dedicated teacher, researcher, and learner with 10 years of teaching and academic service experiences at the post-secondary education in the U.S., Canada, and Bangladesh. She has her B.A and M.A in English Literature from Bangladesh. Then Sadia did her second master’s degree in the College of Education at the University of Oklahoma, U.S. To be specific, she did M.Ed. majoring in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum with an area of concentration: English Education. She has published a book chapter as the first author titled: “Trajectories of Language, Culture, and Geography in Postcolonial Bangladesh” in the book Handbook of the Changing World Language Map publishedby Springer International Publishing. She has and continues to present in various prestigious conferences such as IWCA, CCCC, and MLA. She is originally from Bangladesh. Her areas of expertise are Post-colonial Literature and Theory, Writing Center studies, Writing studies, Critical Pedagogy, and Academic Writing.

Sadia’s research is invested in Writing Studies and classroom practices of the Western Academia, advocating for liberatory writing practices, creating equity in the learning environment, and challenging colonial power structures. She wants to contribute her knowledge, lived experiences, and creativity in teaching of writing in English, so that multilingual students can use their languages and cultural practices consciously in the Western Academia for their rights to their own languages and rhetorical traditions. Her current focus is on critical writing practices to integrate cultural capitals and knowledge domains of the Hybrid Generation in Canadian universities. Sadia strongly advocates for anti-racist pedagogy and believes that liberatory writing practices can transform boundaries into bridges among various cultures and scholarships.