Alumni

Noal Amir graduated in the MA program at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. She plans to research the relationship between gender and international wildlife conservation, specifically the roles of women in rural communities. She is interested in indigenous knowledge, political ecology and global justice. Her research interests are inspired by her work in West Africa and Central Asia.

Iman graduated in the MA program at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, and is an artist from Yemen. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Law and Society from UBC. Her research examines the intertwining of legal history and gender relations in southern Yemen through an investigation of shifts in Family Law. Complementing her research, Iman’s art touches upon topics of social justice and gender within Yemeni society and the Middle East.

Simone graduated in the MA program at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication, Media & Culture joint Publishing Media from Oxford Brookes University. Her current research project examines the intersectional positions of Black women and their production of self narratives in the face of representational bias. Simone is also interested in representation of radicalized bodies in the Media, sexual practices, interracial relationships, destabilizing gendered and raced HIV/AIDS bodies of knowledge.

Shruti is a literature postgraduate from India. She has worked as an editor at a newspaper and an international children’s publishing house. Shruti is also a poet and book reviewer, published widely in both, national and international literary journals. Her interests span across disciplines, ranging from poetry, literary theory, history and science to children’s literature, all sorts of tea, horror movies, and comic + graphic novels.

Kristi Carey graduated with an MA in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Educational Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies from Colgate University. Her research interests lie in the university’s self-management and management of relations with other institutions, and namely, how student resistance interacts with these bureaucratic and increasingly corporate processes in the context of censorship and increased professionalism of higher education.

Chany Chea with an MA in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice,  whose autoethnographical research focuses on the intergenerational dynamics postmemory work involving the Cambodian genocide. She is interested in memory work, public histories, intergenerational knowledge sharing, trauma and representational politics.

Pedro Daher graduated in the MA program at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and a Postgraduate degree in Literature, Art, and Contemporary Thought, both from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. His work seeks to rethink and redeploy difference, releasing it from the shackles of the projects of cultural and racial difference from the 19th and 20th-centuries and also 20th-century reworkings of the concept, as the famous Deleuzian solution of difference in itself. To do so, he is interested in performing a sort of genealogical work of reading the texts that wrote the Modern text itself to understand how subaltern populations were written as subaltern and forever placed outside of Universality, allowing them to suffer violence without any sort of ethical crisis ensuing from it. Since he is Brazilian, he is interested in understanding how Western metaphysics deployed itself in Brazil. This brings us back to difference and why it is important to rethink it: in order to change how we write, that is, to arrive at a moment wherein writing does not require the original violence explained by Derrida, he is convinced that a complete new sociality must be created, a sociality that writes itself from without the Modern text while inhabiting it simply to fully escape it.

Joshua M. Ferguson graduated with a PhD at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. Joshua (they/them/their pronouns) is a non-binary transgender filmmaker and scholar whose work employs film studies, film production, feminist poststructuralist theory and autoethnography to focus on expanding trans* and gender theory in order to raise awareness for the societal and cultural recognition of non-binary gender(s).

Katherine Fobear graduated with a PhD at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. Katherine is a queer scholar and activist whose work revolves around LGBTQ refugee settlement in North America. Katherine uses participatory photography, oral history, and community-based art projects to explore LGBTQ refugees’ stories of settlement. Through storytelling and art Katherine works with LGBTQ refugees and newcomers to share their story and fight for social justice.

Serah Gazali joined the GRSJ institute M.A. program in the fall of 2013. Her studies are focused on issues affecting the process of gender mobility and migration. She has been involved with refugees cases since 2008, both in the Mexican Aid Committee for Refugees and the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia where she works now as the assigned resettlement counselor for the Arabic and Spanish speaking communities. Her current research scope is concerned with gender roles’ reconstruction and negotiation strategies among Iraqi women who are resettled to Metro Vancouver.

Chaya was born and raised in Manila, Philippines. She completed a BA in Anthropology in UBC and an MA at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. From November 2013 to June 2014 Chaya worked as an emergency relief worker across the Visayan islands in the Philippines devastated by the super typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan. Her MA thesis is a feminist anthropological research on women survivors’ perceptions of disaster and their relations to water-related hazards.

Leah Grantham is an activist and academic interested in medicalization, biopower, nationalism, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

Hedda Hakvag graduated with an MA at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. She holds a BA with distinction in Women’s Studies and Creative Writing from the University of Alberta. Her research interests are diverse and include social discourses of the body/embodiment, consumerism, children’s toys and teen culture, gender violence activism, and terrorism and Islamophobia.

Lyra McKee grew up in Texas and holds an MA in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. She is a white settler whose research interests include transgender studies, critical race theory, political philosophy, queer theory, and qualitative geography. She also adores the performing arts and enjoys singing, dancing, and acting.

Kate Reid is a professional queer-musical-activist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. With rapid-fire wit, a raw and often irreverent delivery, Kate is a guitar-playing, harmonica-slinging, singer-songwriter and bona-fide entertainer. Her lyrics are honest and poignant, sometimes hard-hitting and sometimes hilarious and she is known for her self-deprecating and tongue-in-cheek humour.

Beth Stewart is a PhD candidate and Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. In collaboration with The Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) in Gulu town, Northern Uganda, her PhD research examines the everyday lives of children who were born into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). These are children whose mothers (and often fathers) were abducted as children and forced to ‘marry’ into the ranks of the LRA, and subsequently forced to bear children.

Manuela Valle’s research interests include the gendered and sexual narratives of neoliberalism, militarism and imperialism, and the intersections between gender and nationalism. Her research project aims to explore how in Latin American post-dictatorship societies such as the Chilean, the continued legacy of an authoritarian culture limits the exercise of citizenship and rights for women and men and children, arguing that a real democratization in these societies requires the transformation of gender meanings and sexual imaginaries through a repoliticization of the domestic space and gender relations.