Scholar, critic, consultant: Dr. Neil Price on building Black community in higher education

Dr. Price's dissertation, an autoethnographic study, was completed in December 2025 through OISE's flex-time PhD program in Adult Education and Community Development. Submitted photo.

Neil Price (BEd 2007, PhD 2026) has learned to accept the complexities and contradictions of his academic and professional life.

He is a scholar whose work examines how Black communities navigate and transform higher education institutions, an art critic whose eye is trained by Black feminist theory and a consultant whose organization helps nonprofits tell stories about their impact.

For Price, the power of narrative is everything. It helps him integrate his many interests. “I go all the way back to my childhood, where I was always enthralled with story,” he says. “I come from a Caribbean background with a very strong oral tradition. My grandmother, my aunts – they were always telling stories.”

That commitment to storytelling is the connective thread running through Price’s dissertation, Surfacing the Undercommons: Unmaking the Academy through Black Collectivity, an autoethnographic study completed in December 2025 through OISE’s flex-time PhD program in Adult Education and Community Development. “The flex-time program allowed me to maintain my community work while working on my PhD,” says Price. “It created an opportunity to bring my community work directly into my scholarship in a meaningful way.”

Price’s thesis examines how the university’s epistemological foundations structurally exclude Black people and Black experiences. Critically, he documents how Black scholars have developed a range of practices, grounded in collectivity, protest and cultural tradition that allow them to persist and persevere within it.

“While the university purports to be a welcoming and inclusive space,” Price explains, “my dissertation showed how my own experiences paralleled that of other Black people who have fought to survive within the academy.”

Price is candid about the complexity of that position: the university is, in his analysis, both a colonial and formative space, one he has benefited from and been complicit within.

Finding the questions for his dissertation

Price came to his doctoral studies through years of straddling community practice and academia. His experience at Pathways to Education and the Boys and Girls Club sharpened his thinking about the factors that limit young people’s routes to post-secondary education.

“How do we get marginalized young people to stay on educational paths? What does it take to fortify their efforts?” he recalls asking. Those questions followed him into the dissertation.

Before pursuing his doctoral studies, Price had already been deepening his focus on Black communities and the social determinants of health. “I became interested in social justice, Black life and what shapes our possibilities,” he says.

That inquiry found its scholarly expression in the thesis’s engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and Black feminist theory, frameworks that also inform his work as an art critic.

Completing his dissertation over eight years, while managing a full professional life, required sustained support.

His doctoral supervisor, Dr. Jamie Magnusson, was a critical anchor. “The role of the thesis supervisor is so important,” Price says. “You need someone who understands not only your subject matter but who you are and how you work. Professor Magnusson was critically important for me in that regard.”

Magnusson reflects on their collaboration with equal admiration.

“In our current moment of internationally woven genocides, fascism and racial capitalist imperialism,” Magnusson says, “Neil’s thesis generates hope that a different world, and a different kind of university, is possible.” Of Price’s path forward, Magnusson adds that he “will no doubt continue to enrich collective struggle through writing and other forms of public pedagogy.”

What he hopes others will take away from his thesis

Since completing his PhD, Price has moved quickly to apply his scholarship in new ways.

He was invited to develop a course in the University of Toronto’s Urban Studies program (in the Department of Geography and Planning) examining community responses to health and food justice issues. This was an opportunity that came about through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded project exploring how communities innovated during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

He continues to lead LogicalOutcomes, the nonprofit consultancy he co-founded in 2014 with Dr. Gillian Kerr, which specializes in research, evaluation and community engagement with a strong social justice orientation.

“We help non-profits tell a story about their impact,” Price says. His art criticism operates from the same impulse: an interest in how artists see and make meaning, shaped by the critical lens he refined through his dissertation.

Price hopes readers of his thesis will take one or two of his ideas and push them further. His advice for those still in the middle of their own doctoral journeys is one of hope: “Keep yourself open to where ideas can emerge. They can come from anywhere.”

Originally published by OISE