Daniel Huizenga

Biography

During my undergraduate degree in International Development Studies at Trent University (2004-2008), I enrolled in the course Law, Rights, and Development and spent a year in Ghana as a student and intern for the United Nations Refugee Agency. At the time I had no idea how influential those years would be for the course of my career. Since then I have studied the dynamic ways that community members, their lawyers, and advocate-researchers apply human rights and assert Indigenous legal principles to challenge histories of dispossession, exclusion, and oppression in South Africa and Canada. My passion for community-based research and social innovation led me to the position as Manager of Social Innovation Research at Centennial College (2022-2024), and to my current role as Research Partnerships Officer at Ontario Tech University (2024 – present).In my role at Ontario Tech, I support the development of research partnerships between the University and external partners through strategic identification of funding and partnership opportunities, development and management of multi-stakeholder collaborations, and post-award project stewardship.In my research I take a critical interdisciplinary approach to human rights. In my dissertation research I explored how the expected beneficiaries of land reform (a program of transitional justice in South Africa designed to give land back to those dispossessed during the apartheid regime) have leveraged state law and policy in creative ways to forge new legal pathways for justice and human rights. Through this research I came to understand some of the ways that self-identified Indigenous peoples interpret and apply international and state law and articulate local customary law to expand land rights in South Africa. The research involved working with land reform advocates, conducting key informant interviews, analyzing transcripts from public consultations, and learning from civil society groups working on land rights. The dissertation illustrates how legal norms and categories, including Constitutionally protected human rights, International Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and local articulations of customary law, coalesce in the courts, in local struggles, and in policy objectives.My doctorate led directly into a research-stream Master of Laws at Osgoode Hall Law School, where I wrote a thesis on the law and politics of Indigenous Peoples’ struggles for the right to consent to extractive activity in South Africa and Canada. By comparing the efforts of the Xolobeni community in South Africa and the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in Canada I describe the relationships between local assertions of self-determination and broader colonial histories, constitutional frameworks, and national land reform strategies.I began a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough and 2019. During the fellowship I continued conducting research on the legal geographies that have emerged through the struggles of the Xolobeni community for their right to ‘say no’ to mining. I also responded to informal requests from my colleagues in South Africa to explore how Indigenous peoples’ legal struggles in Canada might inform efforts in South Africa by developing a manuscript proposal. The manuscript is titled Weaving law through frayed relations: Learning from Indigenous Peoples’ struggles for land and environmental justice in South Africa and Canada and is now under advanced contract with UBC Press.My published work appears in Geoforum, Journal of Human Rights Practice, Social & Legal Studies, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, The Extractive Industries and Society, and the Southern African Historical Journal as well as chapters in edited volumes published by SAGE and the University of British Columbia Press.