Q&A with GRSJ Co-director Dr. Jemima Pierre

In July of 2025, the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice welcomed new co-directors to lead the institute after the end of Dr. Nora Angeles’ term in the position. We asked co-director Dr. Jemima Pierre to introduce herself and share some thoughts about the work being done in this extraordinary unit.

What inspired you to take on the role of Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ)?

Service is a key aspect of our work as faculty members in a university. In fact, our unit functions through the service provided by faculty and the labor of staff. Faculty members provide service to our unit, our university, and our broader communities. As a senior faculty member in GRSJ, it is my responsibility and duty to provide service to the unit. Thus, when the unit needed new leadership, I offered to take on the role of Director. I also wanted to ensure that GRSJ, and the communities it serves, survives and thrives.

We are in a very difficult moment – both of global social and political retrenchment against social justice, and of economic turbulence.

Universities are facing major financial crises caused by shifting national political and economic policies and priorities. In the face of these multiple crises, there is an urgency to ensure the survival of our Institute and to defend its intellectual mission. I took on the position to fight for our survival as a place for critical teaching and learning in an increasingly uncertain world, and as a safe space for our communities within the university and beyond.

Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?  

I joined UBC in the summer of 2023 from Los Angeles, California, where I had been Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California (UCLA). I had been at UCLA for nine years. Prior to UCLA, I taught, respectively, at Vanderbilt University and University of Texas at Austin. In both schools, I was jointly appointed in anthropology and Africana Studies departments. I am a cultural anthropologist by training, with specialization in Africa and the African Diaspora.

On a personal front, I was born in Gros Morne, Haiti, and raised in Miami, Florida. I have spent the better part of my life in the U.S., living, over the years in a number of cities – Miami, New Orleans, Austin, Texas, Washington, D. C., Chicago, Nashville, and Los Angeles. I grew up in a tight-knit Haitian immigrant community; it was this community that provided solace for me, as a teenager, when there was extreme discrimination against Haitian migrants in South Florida. I attended Tulane University and was the first person in my extended family to attend college. I went on to graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin, where I obtained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology – both with a specialization in African and African Diaspora Studies. My dissertation research was in Ghana and became the basis for my first book, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago, 2012).

I decided to attend graduate school to study and understand structures of power. As an immigrant from Haiti living in the United States, I recognized early the significant power of the US empire in the Western hemisphere, especially in dictating political, economic, social and cultural processes in the region. I became especially interested in the cultural connections and the similarity of experiences of communities of people of African descent throughout the world (called the “African Diaspora”). My focus, therefore, was on understanding the historical context for the creation of the African diaspora, and what it means to exist in the aftermath of 500 years of enslavement, colonization, and racialization (as well as resistance and self-determination).

My personal and political trajectories have helped to consolidate my key intellectual commitments. These commitments are, first, to interdisciplinarity. While trained as an anthropologist, my research and writing have always combined an anthropological approach with a vast array of other approaches, ranging from history to philosophy – all shaped by a critical perspective on the world at large. One cannot study power without knowing history, and one cannot study history without understanding the Western ideological apparatuses that structure what is considered history and whose history matters. My focus has been broad, rigorous, and relentless analysis of western empire and its mechanisms for entrenching inequality and despair among the wretched of the earth.

I arrived at UBC with my family including my partner (who teaches in the Geography Department at UBC), and our younger child. We have an older child who is currently a 4th year student at the University of California, Davis. Vancouver is a big change for us. Not only are we no longer in the United States (despite what Donald Trump believes, we don’t see Canada as the 51st state !), but we have left a sprawling and bustling city with unending sunshine to move to a calmer – though no less remarkable – city that has changing seasons. Our family has come to love Vancouver and feel grateful to live and work in this beautiful place, the rightful land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.  We even love the rain!

Can you share an experience from your first few months as Director here that particularly inspired you?

Becoming director of an academic unit while also being (relatively) new to the university, the city, and the country, was daunting and entailed  a steep learning curve. I honestly under-appreciated the number of meetings I would have to attend, and the broad scope of administering a unit.  

Three major sets of relationships have inspired me. First, the students. GRSJ has a robust undergraduate and graduate student associations. The leadership of these groups attended our first faculty meeting of the fall semester to discuss their goals, projects, and dreams. I was utterly impressed, not only by the students’ commitment, but also by their engaging work with other students to support the GRSJ community. 

Second, the staff. I want to express my deep gratitude for the hardworking staff at GRSJ. Pilar and I  could hardly begin work as co-directors without the expertise and archival knowledge of UBC by the staff. From covering the minute details of running departmental meetings to knowing which section of the faculty “collective bargaining agreement’ to consult for academic matters, the members of the GRSJ staff has been our lifeline!

Finally, I am enjoying learning so much about the amazing scholarship and activism of my colleagues. I am constantly amazed at all that they do – on campus and off – and am grateful to be in community with them.

What do you think is your main objective as you serve as part of the leadership team for GRSJ and for the Faculty of Arts?

We are living through an extraordinary moment of political, economic, and sociocultural upheaval. The convulsions of the U.S. empire and the seeming decline of Western global hegemony reflect the deep contradictions of a capitalist world order based on continuing exploitation and extensive inequality. We also know that it was a similar set of global convulsions – at the moment of African and Asian decolonization and the civil rights and Black Power movements – that enabled the formations Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, anti-racist feminist scholarship, Queer Studies, Subaltern studies.

Indeed, the Social Justice Institute was founded on the intellectual foundations of critical analysis and knowledge production that aimed to engage with the social and cultural politics of our time. My vision for the Institute builds on this foundation in ways that take into account the new realignment of global and local politics, intellectual shifts and backlash against social justice, and ongoing institutional austerity.

My primary objective, in assuming leadership of the Institute, is to ensure its existence – to keep GRSJ alive and functioning amidst acute financial retrenchment from both the university administration and the regional and federal governments. As austerity remains entrenched, as the surging backlash against our feminist, anti-racist, and anticolonial programs (re)gain momentum, the Institute must exist. To do so, it must use all the tools in its intellectual and social justice arsenal to provide rigorous analysis and training to prepare our students to advocate for themselves and their communities in this difficult world.

I will be a strong advocate for GRJS with the university administration and broader university community. This means working to maintain the integrity and viability of the Institute through the ongoing sustenance of our robust teaching and administrative staff, and to enhance our capacity as a unit. But importantly, there is also the need to extend and redouble our efforts in community outreach and engagement. My experiences at other universities have demonstrated to me that the strongest university programs – especially those concerned with social justice and transformation – are the ones with local community support. In Vancouver, we can work with local communities by making our work clearly relevant to the city and region.

As a new transplant to UBC (and Vancouver), I admit that I still have much to learn. Nevertheless, I have appreciated my colleagues’ ethical commitment to teaching to the Institute’s stated intellectual and political mission. My vision is for an intellectual consolidation of the Institute’s mission that reaffirms the significance of interdisciplinarity, while challenging injustice through a direct critique of western gendered imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.