Lisa Davidson

Dr. Lisa M. Davidson is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Anthropology. Her current project, All in God’s Time: Hope, Conviviality and Place-Making among Filipino Canadian Protestants, is a collaborative study with Filipino Christian communities living in Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg. The focus of this project is the question of tolerance, specifically what does it mean to be tolerated? This study elucidates how Filipinos in Protestant congregations are working to create and sustain a sense of place, community and belonging and the kinds of programs they are developing to support political and spiritual connections within their own communities, with newly arrived immigrants, second and third-generation Canadian Filipinos, and biracial and multiracial Filipinos. Pedagogically, this research includes undergraduate students for them to connect community learning with a deeper understanding of decolonizing research methods and urban anthropology. Previously, her research with multiracial and socio-economically underprivileged Protestant churches in Toronto focused on the political and emotional work involved in sustaining unity and in growing multicultural Christian communities amidst the challenges of doing multiracial and multiethnic hospitality. She is co-editor (with Roland Sintos Coloma, Bonnie McElhinny, Ethel Tungohan and John Paul C. Catungal) and contributing author of Filipinos in Canada:  Disturbing Invisibility (University of Toronto Press, 2012).