Meet Emerging Scholar Seon Yuzyk

One of my most influential mentors, from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, taught me how to structure an academic paper and strengthen my writing. His guidance made a profound impact on my academic contributions and raised my standards for scholarship. Even after 17 years, we remain in contact, though my mentorship networks have expanded over time. Mentorship has helped me become a more positive, independent thinker and has sharpened my pursuit of critical scholarship. I am deeply invested in mentoring because it builds bridges for students where none may exist.

You recently co-authored a paper entitled “Pharmakons: The poison and cure of black youth mentorship in Canada.” What motivated you to conduct this study? 

Being a Black queer researcher, much of my academic time during my PhD has been spent filling knowledge gaps. In Black Studies, scholars highlight histories of slavery and labour but push aside questions of gender and sexuality, which means Black queer political teaching is rarely acknowledged. In Queer Studies, scholars magnify sex and gender while sidestepping racism and anti-Blackness, again leaving little space for Black queer thought. I think within and through these voids - voids not created by accident but through the intentional removal and elimination of queer people in Canada and North America. Black queer political teachings, strategies, organizing, and leadership go unaccounted for, submerged, and invisibilized beneath market-driven approaches to mentorship. This silence is systemic, produced out of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and state-sanctioned homophobia.

2SLGBTQIA+ people, and Black women and girls in particular, are the least supported in the mentorship ecosystem in both Canada and the United States. In our study, we noticed that this structural silence on gender and sexuality also crossed into mentorship programs, where very few exist to support queer, trans, women, and girls through difficult issues. And mentors who are not part of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities or inexperienced in dealing with gender and sexual violence, do women, girls and queer folks injustice. Investments in mentorship are predominantly geared toward cis men and boys, while resources for Black queer youth are slim to none. This is especially troubling since Black, Indigenous and racialized youth face some of the most troubling consequences of colonial powers. Seeing this absence of mentorship spaces for queer youth, women, and girls, we wanted to experiment and create a space that fills this gap, identifies challenges, and magnifies the need for support.

As a queer scholar, I only began learning about Black queer histories and political strategizing during my PhD. In uncovering lost histories, I learned more about myself and the challenges I face and have faced. We want to support youth to be curious about their histories and identities, and to build a program that centres their voices and experiences. Most existing mentorship programs are hierarchical, organized top-down, leaving youth with little agency to shape the programming that impacts their lives. We wanted to open space where youth could experiment with mentorship, building a program from the ground up, where they learn key skills and competencies while also engaging histories of homophobia, racism, sexism, disability, and other exclusions. We wanted a program that acts like a living organism, able to shift and adapt to the needs of changing contexts. To me, mentorship programs like Back Youth Social Innovation (BYSI) are emblematic of an instance of Black queer recovery and self-care in the afterlives of slavery and racial capitalism. 

For anyone who hasn’t read your article “Pharmakons” yet, what is your study about?  

The paper is based on a study we led with support from Women and Gender Equality Canada, Advancing Black Youth Mentorship Programs in Canada. Using an intersectional, evidence-based approach, we examined all available mentorship programs for Black youth across the country and analyzed their contributions in supporting youth. We were especially curious about the availability of mentorship programs for girls and women, and we approached the categories of girl and woman through non-binary understandings, acknowledging the multimodal ways Black life is expressed and lived.

The study identified gaps, challenges, and made recommendations for governments and stakeholders to strengthen the mentorship ecosystem. We found that since 2020, during COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, mentorship programs for Black youth have increased. This growth corresponded with rising national conversations about racism and anti-Blackness in Canada. Importantly, we used the findings from this study to create the Black Youth for Social Innovation mentorship program at the University of Alberta. This program directly addresses the lack of mentorship opportunities for Black girls and women, the absence of spaces for queer and trans youth, and the dominance of top-down models that give youth little agency. Our program is designed to let Black youth shape the mentorship models that impact their lives.

Read a summary of the paper prepared by CCMR. 

What are you hoping researchers and mentoring programs take away from your study?

Most mentorship programs are built on the assumption that youth do not have any meaningful contribution to how programs are established. When programs are designed, youth are rarely consulted about the decisions that directly impact the course of their lives. We want researchers and mentoring programs to see mentorship as a way of reaffirming youth agency, placing youth in positions of leadership so that we can better understand what they want to create in the world. Right now, we know what adults and program directors want for youth, but we are missing a key piece of the puzzle: what do youth want?

Asking this question requires transforming the current top-down model into one that is more dialectical and rooted in consultation. Youth are not blank slates; they bring ideas, motivations, dreams, goals, and expectations of what mentorship should look like. They also carry distinct experiences with systems of power that programs must account for, recognizing how racism, sexism, homophobia, class, and disability intersect in their lives. Youth know who they are, where they come from, and where they want to go.

We want mentoring programs to move away from a colonial, top-down approach toward one that centres community and youth agency. Too often, mentorship is reduced to skill-building, while cultural and relational teachings are overlooked. Incorporating relational approaches can deepen the impact of programs and provide youth with culturally relevant supports that affirm who they are, where they come from, and where they want to go.

How does this study fit with your broader research interests?

My research helps people with the origins and perseverance of anti-Black racial capitalism in Canada. In my research I think about Blackness and queerness as constitutive to show how racism and state-sanctioned homophobia impact Black queer lives in the present. My research advances the concept of queer reconstruction, which articulates a process in which queer people rebuild their political, social, and economic lives in the aftermath of colonial violence and its continuing iterations that impact lives in the present. My work seeks to recover and rekindle the political practices and strategies that queer Canadians employ to transform them from “deviants” to “marketable citizens.”

As someone who was born and raised in the Global South beside two sugar cane plantations, queer reconstruction maps my movement from the “third world” to Canada to articulate a framework capable of attending to the dynamics that follow youth and queer Canadians across borders, and the extent to which the reconstruction of our lives supersedes rigid borders. Plantations also help me think about resource extraction, and how youth are imagined as future resources to be extracted and groomed for market inclusion. In my work, I look at the international movement and displacement of Black people and its relationship to broader systems of power.

Mentorship is an instance of Black queer self-care that seeks to address fissures caused by slavery and racial capitalism. Mentorship shows the piecing together of fragmented pieces as a result of colonial violence. To get a holistic picture of mentorship, movement and the transplantation of Black and queer political strategizing needs to be centered in the conversation.

What comes next? Are there other research questions related to Black youth mentoring you hope to explore?

A key question moving forward is: who is mentoring Black 2SLGBTQIA+ youth? Mentorship spaces need to be created more thoughtfully, with approaches to consultation that include Black youth from the start. Youth should be placed in positions of leadership, with mentors acting as “shadows” who provide guidance and feedback while allowing youth to determine the path forward. More in-depth research is needed that centres the voices of Black youth themselves.

In our initial study, we struggled to capture direct insight from Black youth. Yet, when we announced the launch of Black Youth for Social Innovation, dozens of young people came forward eager to join, contribute, and shape the program’s direction. This response underscored the need for programs that prioritize youth agency and leadership, rather than relying on top-down models.

Black relational ethics must also structure and inform mentorship programs from concept to execution. Community elders, both local and international, should be included in these conversations as we think about Black movement and life on Indigenous territories. Black mentorship and life do not occur in a vacuum; collaboration with Indigenous and other racialized communities can strengthen mentorship practices while addressing structural racism and gender violence.

Finally, there is a desperate need for statistical data on queer youth in Canada, especially in a context of rising violence against queer people. More focus should also be placed on advancing the 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan (2022) to support those living in the most vulnerable conditions, as the federal government itself outlined in the Plan.

Seon Yuzyk, a doctoral candidate (ABD) in political science at the University of Alberta, is currently working on his dissertation titled “The Canadian Tradition of Anti-Black Racial Capitalism.” This project explores the intersection of racial capitalism and anti-Black racism in Canada's historical context. He is also research lead for the Rainbow Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub national qualitative study in partnership with the Fyrefly Institute for Gender and Sexual Diversity at the  University of Alberta. The project seeks to remove systemic barriers facing Queer entrepreneurs in Canada. Seon is also an Associate Director for the Black Youth for Social Innovation Program where he mentors the next generation of Black social scientists in Canada. To learn more about Seon’s journey, explore his podcast appearance on Networking Naturally where he shares more about his life and what inspires his research.

Yuzyk, S., & Wesley, J. (2025). Pharmakons: The poison and cure of black youth mentorship in Canada. Journal of Black Studies, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347251333443