BA Honours, Geography with Sociology minor, Simon Fraser University (2006)
MA, Geography, University of Toronto (2007)
PhD, Geography, University of Toronto (2014)

Research

JP’s research is animated by a commitment to uplifting the community knowledges, organizing efforts and histories of marginalized LGBTQ, migrant and racialized communities. His scholarship is animated by and contributes to anti-racist feminist and queer of colour theorizing, and employs qualitative, community-based and public scholarship methodologies. His current research program extends his history of scholarly work on racial and sexual marginalizations and their manifestations in health, social service and education spaces. It involves three main projects:

1. “HIV in My Day” Oral History Project: A community-based project, “HIV in my Day” has assembled an archive of oral histories of the early years of British Columbia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic from long-term survivors and caregivers. with the end goal of sharing findings with diverse community audiences. Along with being Co-Investigator on the project, JP also serves as Convenor of the Committee on Anti-Racism and Equity (CARE), which oversees the project’s equity commitments especially as they manifest in knowledge mobilization and public scholarship outputs.
2. “Mediating contagion: International Students Negotiating Media, Policy and Institutions” (with Dr. Ethel Tungohan (Associate Professor, York University): This project examines the lived experiences of Asian international students at UBC and York University during the first 18 months of the COVID-19 crisis. The project employs a feminist geopolitics analytical lens to historicize COVID-19 in relation to the longue duree of anti-Asian racism in Canada and to attend to how state, institutional and media responses to the pandemic bear upon the felt and embodied experiences of Asian international students.
3. Filipinx Canadian community organizing in educational spaces: This research examines Filipinx Canadians’ community organizing responses to racialization and marginalization in spaces of education. He examines, in partnership with Maureen Mendoza, founder of the Kababayan Academic Mentorship Program (KAMP), how peer support programming functions as a source of ground-level critique of and response to racialized abandonment in educational institutions. JP’s research in this area also involves an examination of the emergence of student clubs in post-secondary institutions in Vancouver and their politics and practices of representation and visibility.

Selected Publications

Journals

2022, Tungohan, E. and Catungal, JP. (2022). Virtual Qualitative Research Using Transnational Feminist Queer Methodology: The Challenges and Opportunities of Zoom-Based Research During Moments of Crisis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21: 1-12.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/16094069221090062

2021, DasGupta, D., Rosenberg, R., Catungal, J. P., & Gieseking, J. J. Pedagogies of Queer and Trans Repair: Letters from Queer Geographic Classrooms. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 20(5): 491-508.

2021, Catungal, JP and Tungohan, E. Racial Narratives on Repeat: Reflections on Collaborative Research on Asian International Students in COVID Times. Canadian Literature, 245(2): 157-166.

2021, Farrales, May, Dawn Hoogeveen, Vanessa Sloan Morgan and John Paul Catungal. Queering environmental regulation. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(2): 175-190.

2021, Catungal, J. P., Klassen, B., Ablenas, R., Lambert, S., Chown, S., & Lachowsky, N. (2021). Organising care and community in the era of the ‘gay disease’: Gay community responses to HIV/AIDS and the production of differentiated care geographies in Vancouver. Urban Studies, 58(7), 1346-1363.

2021, Catungal, J. P. (2021). Essential workers and the cultural politics of appreciation: sonic, visual and mediated geographies of public gratitude in the time of COVID-19. cultural geographies, 28(1): 403-408

Books and Edited Collections

2017. Kojima, D., Catungal, JP and Diaz, R. (eds.). Feature section: Queer/Asian/Canadian. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 38. https://www.utpjournals.press/toc/topia/38.

2013, Nash, C. and Catungal, J.P. (eds.). Special issue: Sexual landscapes, lives and livelihoods in Canada. ACME International Journal of Critical Geography, 12(2). (P)

2012, Coloma, R., McElhinny, B., Tungohan, E., Catungal, J.P., and Davidson, L. (eds.). Filipinos in Canada: disturbing invisibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chapters

Catungal, JP and Hilt, M. (Geography’s Sexual Orientations: Queering the Where, the What, and the How. Lovell, S., Coen, S. and Rosenberg, M. (eds)., Routledge Handbook of Methodologies in Human Geography. [Forthcoming]

2021, Catungal, J.P. Disrupting normative choreographies: queer Asian Canadian interventions making a mess with/in a “Too Asian” university”. In Kale Fajardo, Alice Y. Hom, and Martin Manalansan (eds.), Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America, pp. 265-274.

2021, Catungal, J.P. and Robyn Dowling. Power, Subjectivity, and Ethics in Qualitative Research. In Meghan Cope and Iain Hay (eds.), Qualitative Research and Methods in Human Geography.

2020, Catungal, J.P. “Critic, advocate, enforcer: the multiple roles of academics in public policy”. In Sarah Hall and Ralitsa Hiteva (eds.), Engaging with policy, practice and publics: intersectionality and impact, pp. 135-154.

J. Warren Nystrom Award, American Association of Geographers (2015)|Governor General’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence |Starkey-Robinson Award for Graduate Research on Canada

Governor General’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence (June 2014)

Starkey-Robinson Award for Graduate Research on Canada (May 2014)

JP Catungal’s research, teaching and service interests, commitments and approaches are heavily informed by his embodied subject-positions as a first generation queer Filipinx migrant from a working class family who is the first in his extended family to complete graduate studies. His scholarship has attempted to think reflexively through the methodological and ethical implications of such positionality and embodiment for knowledge production and for being in the academy. These include an essay on the politics of ‘felt embeddedness’ in research processes; a chapter in the book Q&A on ‘disruptive choreographies’ and performances of Filipinx queerness in the university; and a forthcoming methodology piece on power, subjectivity and reflexivity in qualitative research.

In addition to the above, JP is committed to public forms of scholarly practice. He is a regular media commentator on issues related to queer and sexual politics and issues of racism and anti-racism. He is also active in collaborations with community organizations, including the hua foundation, Tulayan Filipino Diaspora Society, the Kababayan Academic Mentorship Program, Vancouver Heritage Society and the C19 Response Coalition. These include projects to address gaps in culturally and linguistically appropriate resources related to the COVID-19 pandemic; to advocate for the collection of race data to inform policymaking; and to expand public knowledge about Filipinx Canadian foodscapes as cultural heritage spaces that are threatened by gentrification. In addition to the above, JP is involved in In My Day, a verbatim play, currently in development, about the history of HIV/AIDS in Vancouver in the 1980s. He chairs the Committee on Anti-Racism and Equity, which provides guidance to the play’s creative and production teams on issues of equity and difference both on- and off-stage.