Saghar Shahidi-Birjandian is a faculty member at University Canada West where she teaches courses on human rights and social justice. She is also the founder of Collaborative Social Change, a not-for-profit specializing in structural and institutional change for atrocities prevention. Her areas of focus in research and practice include decoloniality in transitional justice, evidence-based and contextualised problem analysis for transitional justice policy development and practice, and strengthening the capacity of transitional justice interventions to prevent recurrence of mass violence.
Expert
To facilitate inclusion in transitional justice policy and practice, Saghar's research and work on case studies in Canada, Iran, and Uganda demonstrate the utility in grounding problem analysis based on contextual dynamics and the views of affected communities. To this end, findings in Saghar's body of research show the benefits in abandoning normative assumptions and field-specific jargon, and in using systems thinking to understand the interconnections between policy problems to strategically sequence response.
Fields of expertise: Social change / social transformations
