Moska is the Digital Humanities Research Fellow tasked with coordinating the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA) at the IIS.
Moska’s research interests lie in the interdisciplinary crossroads of archives, critical race & ethnicity, media studies, and identity formation in diaspora communities of war and trauma. She is an advocate for activist archives that center reflexivity and reciprocity, and are community-facing. Moska employs critical ethnographic methodologies as a tool for responsible, representative archival practice of marginalized communities.
She completed her Master of Information (UofT) and defended her MI thesis in 2019. Her thesis builds on existing theories of symbolic annihilation, assimilation/integration, and community archiving/pedagogy by assessing the digital archival needs of a specific intersection of the Afghan-Canadian diaspora in order to create a proof-of-concept digital archive and to understand the identity-formation processes at play in this slice of the diaspora.
Moska is also interested in archival pedagogy and is a co-founder of The Diversity Working Group (DWG) at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information (iSchool). The DWG holds events and initiatives for iSchool students that focus on how colonialism and Eurocentric biases have shaped professional gallery, library, archives, and museum practices. The DWG endeavours to influence curricula change within the Faculty so that iSchool students can enter the workforce aware and ready to identify racial inequity.
She is actively involved in the Afghan-Canadian community and is a founder of a Canadian non-profit organization called ARCH (Afghans Reviving Culture and Heritage). ARCH aims to create awareness for Afghan culture and heritage in Canada, unite the diaspora, and critically tackle issues within the community through a variety of events and initiatives.
Click here for her CV: