Osgoode PhD Candidate Earns Canada Graduate Scholarship to Honour Nelson Mandela

Osgoode Hall Law School PhD candidate Odelia Bay has received a major Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) to Honour Nelson Mandela in recognition of the important research she is conducting into the barriers to accommodation for workers with a chronic illness. CGS awards recognize and support graduate students who are conducting research in one or more of five areas championed by Nelson Mandela: national unity; democracy, freedom and human rights; leadership; children’s participation in society; and children’s health. The awards – up to 10 for master’s students and 10 for doctoral students in any given competition year – are administered by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Bay received an award of $105,000 for her research project titled “Mapping the Margins of a Disability Paradigm: Promoting Self-Care in the Accommodation of Chronic Illness in Employment”. Her PhD supervisor is Osgoode Professor Roxanne Mykitiuk. “The aim of my research is to understand how workers with a chronic illness experience the law of disability accommodation and how related perceptions of illness as disability influence the nature of work and workplaces as sites of stigma and discrimination,” Bay said. “By promoting a broader understanding of disability to include chronic illness and related self-care needs, I hope to expand the purview of Canadian human rights law and make the experience of employment more inclusive and more humane.” Bay has been in Osgoode’s PhD program since 2015. She has an LLM (Columbia), a JD (Ottawa) and a BJour (Ryerson), and has previously received numerous academic and community awards and honours