May 10, 2016
Dear friends,
Our Institute’s location in the unceded land of the Musqueam people, and the aspirations of UBC’s Place and Promise plan, remind us that social justice is our duty and commitment and not solely an object of study.
Towards meeting this commitment to social justice, my focus in the coming five years will be to fashion the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (The Social Justice Institute) as a leading global hub of excellent collaborative, creative, and transformative interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach on social justice.
Since its creation, our Institute has amassed intellectual resources that place us in a privileged position to excel in research, teaching, and outreach. The next five years will be dedicated to the design and implementation of an intellectual framework at The Social Justice Institute that reflects the current ethico-political challenges of the global present. Both our undergraduate and graduate programs are tailored to train academics, artists, activists, organizers and mobilizers interested in engaging social justice research and providing the critical tools necessary to contribute on a local, national and global level.
And, we need to do more. In my next five years as Director, I will facilitate and draw strengths from our interdisciplinary collaborations, explore the potential for synergies between our different disciplines, tools, investments, research themes, which will inspire new forms of activism and organizing. We continue to ask, what does social justice look like to you? What can it look like in the global present towards futurity?
In maintaining hopefulness, the main challenge before us is to create the conditions for building capacity, community, and the institutional setting necessary for developing and engaging with these very questions. I look forward to exploring and building this with you.
