Bangyue Qi (5 November 2000 – ) is a Master of Information student at the University of Toronto, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. He is a former Chinese second-grade athlete in swimming and was a member of the Dalian Maritime University Junior Swimming Team from 2011 to 2016. Academically, he focused on research related to Canadian Indigenous history and Canadian colonial history during his undergraduate studies, and now focuses on archival studies in his master's program.
Born and raised in Dalian, China, Bangyue Qi attended the Middle School of the Attached School of Dalian University of Technology from 2014 to 2016. He became interested in swimming at the age of 10 and was selected for the Maritime University Junior Swimming Team due to his outstanding performance. In 2016, he participated in the 4 × 100 medley relay at the Liaoning Junior Swimming Championship, where his team placed eighth. After the competition, he received certification as a Chinese second-grade athlete. After not achieving the desired result in the High School Entrance Examination in 2016, he left the swimming team and chose to focus on his studies. He attended high school at Dalian Maple Leaf International School, where he joined both the golf club and the model club. In his second year of high school, he became vice-president of the Golf Club and was responsible for negotiating cooperation with the Youyi Jinshi Valley Golf Club in Jinshitan, Dalian. In his third year of high school, he developed an interest in ship model making and participated in a model exhibition in Guangzhou, where he presented his model of HMS Rodney.
In 2019, Bangyue Qi enrolled in the History program at York University and moved to Toronto. He focused on ancient Roman and Greek history during his first two years. After attending a class on Indigenous residential schools in his third year, he shifted his interest and research toward Indigenous and colonial history in Canada. Bangyue Qi completing his Honours Bachelor of History degree in 2023. In the summer of 2023, he moved to Shijiazhuang, China, and began an internship at Dongtie Electromechanical Technology Co., Ltd. During this time, he participated in the China International Medical Equipment Fair as a translator and was also responsible for organizing customer information. During this period, he developed an interest in historical documents at the First Historical Archives of China and decided to pursue a career in the archival field. In July 2024, he enrolled in the Archives and Records Management concentration of the Master of Information program at the University of Toronto.
Born in Toronto, Ontario to Ghanaian immigrants, Alexie Ankomah spent her early childhood between Toronto and Kumasi, Ghana before her family decided to permanently settle in Toronto in 2006. In 2016, Ankomah would begin to attend A.Y Jackson Secondary School where she was a participant in the equity council, curling team, flag football team, photography club, where she began to take portrait photographs of friends and family, and the Black Student Society, where she would develop an interest in learning about Black Canadian and American history. Ankomah would graduate from A.Y Jackson Secondary School in 2020 and would begin to attend Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson University).
Ankomah would major in History before transferring to the Criminology and History major in 2021. During her time at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ankomah continued to develop her interest from high school by taking a variety of Criminology and History courses related to the treatment and experiences of Black Canadians and Americans. During her third year at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ankomah would take a course focused on archives where her interest began to shift to becoming an archivist and participating in archival activism focussed on changing the physical and intellectual structures of archives in order to allow Black Canadians to have greater access to archival material as a means of bringing social change in the archival field. In 2024, Ankomah would graduate from Toronto Metropolitan University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminology and History and would begin to attend the University of Toronto Faculty of Information as a Masters of Information candidate in the Archives and Records Management concentration to pursue her goals.
Clara Lynas was born in Scarborough, Ontario in 1997 to a family of Irish and Italian descent. Lynas is an only child and frequently spent summer months alone with her fathers family in rural central Ontario, this solitude influenced her development of strong interests in both visual arts and the outdoors at a young age. Lynas attended OCAD University from 2015-2020 where she co-created the OCAD University Queer Print Club, a group for LGBTQ students, staff, and faculty to learn printmaking techniques, founded in the spirit of printmaking as a political tool for queer activism, resistance and cultural production. Lynas ultimately received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus on printmaking form OCAD University. Her arts practice focuses heavily on expressive zines rooted in her personal queer feminized experience. Her work uses involved production methods such as silkscreen, relief printing, papermaking and letterpress. She has worked with arts education and outreach for several community arts organizations within the Greater Toronto Area, such as Open Studio, Scarborough Arts and Paper House Collective. She has frequently mobilized her skills for activist efforts as a poster designer, zine maker, and banner maker. Lynas is deeply involved in local habitat restoration, and is a volunteer lead steward with Toronto Nature Stewards where she leads community restoration work in Cedar Brook Park. Much of her personal time has been spent collecting detailed biodiversity data about these local urban ravine systems to support this work. Lynas currently resides in Scarborough, Ontario and has been pursuing a Masters of Information at The University of Toronto since 2024.
Madeleine Vien (b. 2002) is a Métis writer, researcher, and graduate student living in Tkaronto (Toronto), Ontario. She received an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto and is currently pursuing a Master of Information, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. Her academic and creative work reflects a sustained engagement with Métis identity, memory, and decolonial approaches to information practices. Vien has worked with community archives in both digital and physical capacities, contributed to exhibition curation, and created original works in poetry and multimedia. The records described in this fonds document her academic, artistic, and community-focused activities from 2020 to 2025.
Katherine Victoria Robertson (born 30 October 1997) is a full-time student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. She grew up in Scarborough, Toronto as the eldest child with three younger brothers, and is the first in her family to attend university. In the Interest of providing transparency and positionality she self identifies as a middle class, white, settler, disabled, queer, cis gender woman.
Katherine attended high school at Cedarbrae Collegiate Institute from 2011 to 2015, during which time she volunteered as a summer school teacher's aide in 2013, and worked as a summer school bus monitor and elementary-level teaching assistant in 2015. She went on to complete her Honours Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus from Fall 2015 to Winter 2023, where she majored in history and minored in anthropology and women’s and gender studies. Her research interests examined histories of gender and sexuality, race and post-colonial studies, and Ethiopian history. The duration of her degree was longer than usual due to balancing school commitments with working as a Locations Support Person for Entertainment Partners Canada Inc. from 2015 to 2019, necessary accommodations for her learning disability, and unforeseen obligations resulting from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these hurdles she achieved the Historical and Cultural Studies Emerging Scholars Award in 2018, the Dean's List in 2023, and graduated with High Distinction. Following the completion of her undergraduate degree she was invited in 2023 to present her course paper “Myth and Conflict Under the Solomonic Dynasty: A Case Study of Queen Gudit and the Queen of Sheba,” as part of a panel “Reckonings and Re-imaginings: The Ethiopian ‘Dark Ages’ (6th-12th centuries)” organized for the annual conference of the Canadian Society of Medievalists, in association with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences annual congress. In Fall 2024, Katherine began her graduate studies in the Combined Degree program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool). She is enrolled in the Archives and Records Management concentration and has focused her research on engagement between GLAM institutions and Indigenous communities. She is also working with Dr. Michael Gervers to publish a volume on the Ethiopian Dark Ages, which includes her paper “Myth and Conflict Under the Solomonic Dynasty.”