Please join us in congratulating GRSJ faculty members Jasbir Puar and Jemima Pierre! Each are leading new Research Excellence Clusters that have received funding for 2026-27. Dr. Puar and Dr. Pierre are working to bring essential knowledge and shared understanding in their areas of specialization. More details about their clusters are featured below.
Research Excellence Clusters are networks of researchers addressing societal and cultural challenges that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. Funding for clusters at UBC Vancouver is awarded through the Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters (GCRC) competition. A total of 43 clusters led by researchers at UBC Vancouver are being supported in 2026/27.
Centre for Queer and Trans Cultural Praxis
Cluster co-leads: Jasbir Puar and Ervin Malakaj of the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern Eastern European Studies
The expansion of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation and the resurgence of reactionary politics have rendered queer and trans life increasingly precarious. Yet, queer and trans artists continue to generate aesthetic, embodied, and narrative practices to both resist contemporary forms of state violence, and insist on imagining and building alternative modes of relation, belonging, and futurity. This cluster brings together faculty, graduate students, and community-based artists working across the humanities, social sciences, and creative arts to center these practices as more than just artistic outputs, to study them as methods of thought, forms of collective learning, and infrastructures of survival.
Cluster Co-leads: Jasbir Puar & Ervin Malakaj (Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern Eastern European Studies)
The Black Pacific and the Critical Tradition of Black Studies
This project seeks to establish a structure at UBC for critical engagement with Black Studies as an intellectual, political, and cultural project using the specific location of the Black Pacific — that is, the geography of Black Vancouver and British Columbia — as crossroads for global Black intellectual life. Through a set of campus and community events, including a series of workshops, monthly community “Saturday Schools,” public lectures, print publication projects, and arts-based performances and exhibits, we aim to interrogate the conceptual and epistemological foundations of Black studies in a global context, sharing research priorities and pedagogical strategies.
Cluster Lead: Jemima Pierre
