Makda (she/her) is a first-generation scholar and Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Calgary. Her research centres intersectionality theory to examine how the presence of racially minoritized women in Canada’s Parliament shapes legislative agendas, policy debates, and patterns of political responsiveness and inclusion for the electorate, particularly racially minoritized women.
Her work is informed by sustained engagement with community-based spaces, particularly within the Eritrean community in Calgary, where her academic interests are closely connected to lived experiences of political inclusion, policy responsiveness, and democratic quality. Grounding her scholarship in both institutional analysis and community engagement, Makda’s research seeks to better understand how democratic institutions can more effectively reflect and respond to an increasingly diverse society.
Makda is a recipient of the SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship and the Distinguished Doctoral Recruitment Award. She holds a Master of Public Policy from Simon Fraser University, where she was awarded a SSHRC Master’s Scholarship, and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours, First Class) in Political Science with a minor in French from the University of Calgary. Aspiring to strengthen her proficiency in French, she spent one year of her undergraduate studies at Université Laval in Québec City.
From Candidacy to the Commons: Tracing the Politics of Intersectional Representation in Canada
My doctoral research asks how racially minoritized women in Canada access, navigate, and reshape political representation across the stages of candidacy, parliamentary participation, and policy articulation. Parliament stands at the centre of Canada’s representative democracy, yet its composition continues to reveal enduring inequalities. While scholars have explored representation in terms of gender and race, few have adopted an intersectional lens that examines how these identities interact to produce distinct political experiences. My project addresses this gap by tracing the representational trajectory of racially minoritized women in Canadian federal politics.
The project begins with a systematic scoping review of how intersectionality has been conceptualized and applied within political science. This review maps the field, identifying which intersections have been empirically examined and which remain overlooked. It provides the theoretical and methodological foundation for the empirical chapters that follow, ensuring that intersectionality informs every stage of the research rather than serving as a retrospective lens.
Building on this foundation, the empirical analysis unfolds across three studies. The first tests whether RMW are disproportionately nominated in unwinnable ridings, the “sacrificial lamb” phenomenon, assessing the inclusivity of party recruitment practices. The second uses computational text analysis of parliamentary debates (Hansard) to examine how RMW articulate policy priorities and navigate institutional norms within a historically exclusionary space. The third links parliamentary behaviour to public opinion data to evaluate whether descriptive representation translates into substantive responsiveness for RMW constituents.
The objectives of this research are twofold: to advance intersectionality as a concrete analytic framework within Canadian political science and to generate systematic empirical evidence on how race and gender jointly shape access, influence, and accountability in Parliament. By centring RMW as credible political actors, this research provides the first comprehensive empirical intersectional account of representation across Canada’s parliamentary process. It will demonstrate how Parliament can evolve to more fully embody the diversity and democratic promise of the society it hopes to represent. Beyond academia, this work aims to inform party recruitment strategies, support more inclusive policymaking, and contribute to public dialogue about who belongs in Canadian democracy and how representation can be made more responsive and just.
