In this session, Dr. Ahmed Ilmi will explore how Black Muslim Somali youth navigate belonging, racialization, and identity within increasingly data-driven urban environments. Drawing on research with Say-Walahi youth in Toronto, it examines how algorithms, digital platforms, and political narratives shape experiences of surveillance and exclusion while highlighting youth-led digital resistance, creativity, and transnational forms of connection.
Dr. Ilmi will also explore how algorithmic governance, digital platforms, and political narratives shape urban experiences of belonging among Black Muslim Somali youth. Drawing on his longstanding research with Say-Walahi youth in Toronto and transnational Somali communities, the session examines how data systems reproduce racialized and Islamophobic logics while also highlighting youth-led digital resistance, creative expression, and community media. It considers how Somali communities navigate xenophobic political rhetoric through transnational solidarity, digital creativity, and everyday acts of refusal and belonging.
About the speaker
Dr. Ahmed Ali Ilmi is a sociologist and interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His research examines race, youth, African/Somali diasporas, education, digital politics, and belonging, with a particular focus on how Black and Somali youth navigate racialization, surveillance, and identity. His current work explores how data, algorithms, and digital platforms are reshaping belonging, visibility, and exclusion in the city. Dr. Ilmi is the author of The “Say Walahi” Generation: Identity, Profiling, & Survival in Canada: A Somali Canadian Perspective. His scholarship has been published in Urban Education and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, and he received the 2024 African Scholars Community Development Award for his community-engaged scholarship.
