Willow-Samara Allen, PhD (she/her) is a white settler Ashkenazi Jewish woman with ancestral lineages tracing to Russia, Ireland and Scotland. She lives with her family on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen-speaking Peoples, the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
Willow-Samara is a critical interdisciplinary scholar with a background in education, political science, and public administration. She takes an intentionally collaborative orientation to her work and prioritizes partnerships through which we can practice forms of non-hierarchical leadership and power, cultivate greater relational accountabilities, and grapple with theories of change.
Willow-Samara’s work examines the reproductions and disruptions of settler colonial socialization in public sector work, antiracist and anticolonial pedagogies and methods for critical adult learning and collaborative leadership; the subject-re/making and complicities of white settler women, and the micro socio-political spaces of multiracial families.
Experience
Her current/new research projects include:
- The puzzle of discretion: Interrogating change with public sector workers in white settler colonial institutions (SSHRC-IG, 2025-2030) with Dr. Nisha Nath (Athabasca University). In this project, we investigate discretionary power to understand how public sector workers in three provinces (ON, BC, and AB) are learning to witness, conceptualize, and use discretion in their work, what are the impacts of that learning, and what is the relationship between discretion and institutional change in a context of systemic racism and white settler colonial bureaucratic violence. Our focus is on supporting impacts for everyday learning and application, spotlighting change practices and foregrounding the voices and knowledge of Indigenous and racialized public sector workers.
- Disinvesting in institutionalized white settler womanhood: A critical qualitative study with white settler women in the helping sectors (SSHRC-IDG, 2025-2027). This study investigates how white settler women in health, education and social work conceptualize and embody investment and disinvestment in institutionalized white settler womanhood, how carceral logics are enacted and challenged by white settler women, and what disinvesting in institutionalized white settler womanhood may look and feel like in work and relationships. The project’s attention is also on what conceptual and pedagogical approaches may be generative to challenge carceral logics and to support practices of disinvestment in institutionalized white settler womanhood in service to abolitionist and decolonizing futures.
- Re-storying Jewish relationships to community, self, and place: Interrogations of settler colonialism, Zionism, Israel and Canada (working title, under advanced contract with Athabasca University Press) with Dr. Charles Levkoe (Lakehead University). This edited collection is part of a broader re/storying project that contends with how diverse Jewish peoples are and will be in relationship to Palestinian liberation, Israel, Indigenous sovereignties, Judaism, self, community, and place. The collection offers stories of nuance and tension by Jewish artists, activists and educators in the Canadian settler colonial context that attend to the interconnections and complexities of ongoing settler colonial occupations and Jewish people's emplacement and co-resistance to them. The authors are challenging relationships to Zionism, shifting concepts of Jewish community and practice, and building coalitional relationships for transformative change and liberation.
Willow-Samara’s work can be found on Google Scholar and Academia.
Memberships and Committees
- SET Thesis Coordinator
- Research Ethics Board Member
Education
2017
PhD Languages, Cultures, and Literacies
Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education
2008
MA Public Policy and Public Administration
Concordia University, Department of Political Science
2003
BA Political Science and East Asian Studies
McGill University, Faculty of Arts
Research
Research interest
settler colonial socialization; discretionary power in public sector work,
antiracist and anticolonial pedagogies and methods; critical adult learning and leadership
white settler women and white supremacy; multiracial families