Aytak Dibavar is an Iranian-Canadian lawyer and a postcolonial feminist educator in Gender and Social Justice & Global Peace and Social Justice Programs at McMaster University. Aytak’s work/research are entangled with feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production and creative/art-based teaching practices. Aytak reads and writes about race, gender, memory, political trauma and silence. For more than a decade, Aytak has developed a dual academic and activist career on issues pertaining to women’s and LGBTQIA+ community’s rights – specifically related to trauma survivors, resettlement, and barriers to education and workplace access for femme refugees. Aytak has a great passion for people and their lived experiences. She is interested in life-narratives; the ways in which people make sense of their own life, whether and how they narrate it to others and why they remain silent about it. Aytak tries to spend most of their free time either outdoors enjoying and experiencing nature or creating and consuming art. Painting and poetry are not only important political categories for their work but are deeply apart of who they are. They incorporate art in their daily life – through visiting local galleries and painting – and in their pedagogy.
