How do you define community? For Emilia Zamora (she/her), she recalls it as caring for others and allowing others to care for you. Whether it’s standing up for someone facing discrimination or having a neighbour bring you soup when you're sick, community is about vulnerability, intimacy and support. It’s also having a deep sense of belonging and the shared experience of land, culture, values, and cosmovision with others.
Her love for the community and her passion for activism began during her undergraduate degree in psychology at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, in Ecuador. She completed an internship for her clinical psychology program which involved therapy and supervision hours with patients, with many who came from marginalized communities. Something didn’t seem right, and Emilia started to notice a trend:
“I started noticing patterns—social contexts like violence, economic challenges, lack of access to higher education, and limited healthcare resources were significantly affecting their mental health. I realized that if I wanted to make a broader impact, I needed to move beyond the therapy room”.
This is when Emilia started to challenge Western treatments, as she saw they weren’t a right fit to serve the patients’ needs. “From my experience, I’ve seen how formal mental health services often neglect people's identities, offering only Western treatments, which creates further barriers for Indigenous and rural populations. My goal is to challenge these hegemonic mental health approaches that isolate individuals from their social, political and environmental contexts… I'm committed to applying a decolonial and feminist lens to my research, especially since I work with marginalized groups such as Indigenous peoples and rural communities”.
With this, Emilia decided to pursue a PhD at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences program after she saw how well the degree’s objectives fit well with her interests. Emilia was also particularly enticed to the Benoit Lab due to our community-based research methods and our approaches in applying a decolonial lens. Now working under the supervision of Dr. Anita C. Benoit, she hopes to deepen her understanding of the realities faced by Indigenous peoples in Canada and how health interventions can honour traditional knowledge and practices.
Looking ahead, Emilia sees herself staying in academia, hoping to teach and continue to work with Indigenous communities back in Ecuador and other resistant groups to improve their mental health through participatory and community-based research techniques.
As Emilia is starting her PhD journey, she offers a word of advice for those who are interested in pursuing graduate school: “The pursuit of knowledge is a lifelong journey. If you decide to pursue a PhD, make sure it’s because you genuinely love learning and want to produce meaningful, impactful work—don’t do it for prestige. Ground your decision in your values and beliefs and seek out a supervisor who cares about your aspirations and values… Often, our identities and lived experiences are our strengths—find someone who sees that!”.
Finally for international students who are starting school in a different place such as Toronto, know that you’re not alone; Emilia has been there before throughout her academic journey. “First, know that it’s challenging, and it has been for me too. Build a community, a support network, and find people who resonate with you. Toronto is a wonderfully diverse city, so you won’t feel out of place too often, which is a beautiful thing”.
We’re so excited to have Emilia on the team and we’re looking forward to the amazing projects she’ll develop in the future. Stay tuned!
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