Rim Fathallah is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) and Director of the Daniels Writing Centre at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her research and teaching bridge design and peacebuilding education, focusing on how designers learn to collaborate across differences, negotiate power, disrupt the status quo, and cocreate for the public good.

Previously a program chair in the Gulf Region, she now aims to build equity centered pedagogy in the Daniels Writing Centre and across the larger Faculty. Rim cofounded culturalSYNERGY, a yearly intercultural design charrette that, since its inception in 2016, has brought together over 1,000 students from multiple countries to coproduce culturally responsive artifacts and relationships. Her scholarship appears in International Journal of Art & Design Education, Journal of Interior Design, and The Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories of Education. She earned her PhD in Curriculum & Pedagogy (OISE, University of Toronto), a Master’s in Art, Design and Architecture in Education (University of Glasgow/Glasgow School of Art), and a B.A. in Interior Architecture (Lebanese American University).

Rim situates her work as a guest and Treaty Partner on the lands where the University of Toronto stands. Informed by decolonial scholarship that warns against turning reconciliation into metaphor, she commits to ongoing learning and action with Indigenous communities. As a visibly Muslim educator originally from Lebanon, her faith calls her to service, truth, and justice. Immigrating to Canada taught her to examine her own access to space and resources and to ask how her teaching and research can help repair harms and redistribute voice. Practically, this means designing initiatives and learning experiences built on respect, students’ identities, and care; supporting policy and programming that honor treaty responsibilities; and tracking how everyday decisions in design schools affect representation and power. She is accountable to students and communities to align her work with peacebuilding practices.

Her goal is to position Design and Peacebuilding in conversation: each informing, challenging, and transforming the other.
Learn more at https://rimfathallah.wordpress.com/