Dr. John Paul (JP) Catungal (he/him) is Associate Professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and Co-Director of the Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work sits at the nexus of feminist and queer of colour theorizing and critical human geographies, JP’s scholarship and community engagement work are broadly committed to uplifting marginalized communities’ organizing and cultural production efforts as practices of placemaking and knowledge production from below.

JP has three active research projects, all committed in some way to public scholarship and community engaged research methods and approaches:

1. The “HIV in my Day” project: With core research partners from UVic and UNBC as well as Ribbon Community and CBRC, JP is part of the interdisciplinary research team for this ongoing oral history project focused on long-term survivors’ and caregivers’ experiences of social and community care and organizing during the first fifteen years of the HIV epidemic in Vancouver and the broader province. He has been involved, in particular, in the project’s knowledge mobilization work through the play “In My Day” (IMD). Written by Rick Waines, IMD is a genre-bending theatrical work that consists largely of verbatim material from the project’s archive of 120 oral history interviews to story-tell the first 15 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the perspectives and experiences of those who lived it intimately. IMD has had theatrical runs at the Cultch Theatre in Vancouver (December 2022) and the Phoenix Theatre in Victoria (March 2026), as well as a staged reading at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto (June 2026).
2. The “Kuwentong Pamamahay” (KP) project: JP is academic partner on the Kuwentong Pamamahay (Stories of Making Home) project, which focuses on the placemaking and home-making practices of Filipinx Canadian community members in BC. A community engaged research collaboration, the KP project brings UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies program and the Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement in partnership with Sliced Mango Collective and Heritage Vancouver Society. Through oral history and place-based methods, the project has produced several public-facing and arts-based outputs, include walking tours of the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood in Vancouver as well as a forthcoming documentary on the meanings and practices of place, home and community among Filipinx Canadians in Vancouver.
3. Heated Rivalry: A self-professed ‘loon’, JP examines the popular TV show Heated Rivalry, drawing in particular on queer of colour theories and Asian Canadian studies to examine the show’s narrativization and visual representations of queerness, racialization and nationalism, as well as its popular incorporation into larger discourses of Canadian identity and global sexual politics. A key aspect of JP’s work on Heated Rivalry is public education. He developed the widely circulated Heated Rivalry public syllabus, and organized the “Heated Rivalry through an Asian Canadian Studies Lens” monthly summer lecture series. His insights on Heated Rivalry have been featured in the Toronto Star, Xtra, CBC News and Gay Times Magazine.

In addition to the above projects, JP continues to be committed to the advancement of the field of Filipinx Canadian studies. A leading scholar in this field, JP was co-editor of Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility (University of Toronto, 2012) as well as two special journal issues, “FilipiNEXT: Filipino Studies in Canada” (Alon: Journal of Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, 2023) and “Filipinx Canadian Studies in, on and through British Columbia” (BC Studies, Autumn 2025). JP’s article “The Race to Indigeneity: Three Vexations in Filipinx Diasporic Politics”, co-written with Dr. May Farrales (SFU), received the BC Studies Prize in 2025.

JP teaches courses in community engaged research; queer of colour theories; global social justice issues; and media and popular culture in the GRSJ Institute and the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies program. He received the Killam Teaching Prize in 2025.

Selected Publications

Journal Special Issue Editorships

“Filipinx Canadian studies in, on and through BC” (2025). Special issue of BC Studies (Autumn issue) (with May Farrales)
“FilipiNEXT: Filipinx Studies in Canada” (2023). Special issue of ALON: Journal of Filipinx American and Diaspora Studies. (with Lisa Davidson, Marissa Largo and Casey Mecija). (Vol 3, Issue 2)
“Queer/Asian/Canada” (2017). Special forum section in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (Vol. 38) (With Dai Kojima and Robert Diaz)

Books

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

Journal articles

Catungal, JP and May Farrales. (2025). The race to indigeneity: Three vexations in Filipinx diasporic politics. BC Studies, 227: 129-152.
Catungal, JP and May Farrales. (2025). Articulating Filipinx Canadian Studies in, On and Through British Columbia. BC Studies, 227: 13-31.
Catungal, JP, Lisa Davidson, Marissa Largo and Casey Mecija. (2023). Setting the scene: an introduction to FilipiNEXT. Alon: Journal of Filipino American and Diasporic Studies, 3(2): 120-132.
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.
DasGupta, D., Rosenberg, R., Catungal, J. P., & Gieseking, J. J. (2021). Pedagogies of Queer and Trans Repair: Letters from Queer Geographic Classrooms. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 20(5): 491-508.
Catungal, JP and Tungohan, E. (2021). Racial Narratives on Repeat: Reflections on Collaborative Research on Asian International Students in COVID Times. Canadian Literature, 245(2): 157-166.
Farrales, May, Dawn Hoogeveen, Vanessa Sloan Morgan and John Paul Catungal. (2021). Queering environmental regulation. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(2): 175-190. (20%)
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.
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.
Catungal, J.P. (2017). With/out apologies: queering public conversations about redressive nationalisms. Historical Geography, 45: 102-107.
Catungal, J.P. (2017). The lessons of travel: teaching queer Asian Canada through Joella Cabalu’s It Runs in the Family and Alejandro Yoshizawa’s All our Father’s Relations. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 38: 93-101.
Catungal, J.P. (2017). Feeling bodies of knowledge: situating knowledge production through felt embeddedness. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 108(3): 289-301.

Book chapters

Catungal, JP and Hilt, M. (2022). 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.
Catungal, J.P. (2021). 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.
Catungal, J.P. and Robyn Dowling. (2021). Power, Subjectivity, and Ethics in Qualitative Research. In Meghan Cope and Iain Hay (eds.), Qualitative Research and Methods in Human Geography.
Catungal, J.P. (2020). Critic, advocate or 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.
Catungal, J.P. (2018). “We had to take space, we had to create space”: Locating queer of colour politics in 1980s Toronto. In J. Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, S.M. Ware (with Rio Rodriguez) (eds.), Queering Urban Justice: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto. University of Toronto Press.
Catungal, J.P. (2018). Towards queer(er) futures: Proliferating the ‘sexual’ in Filipinx-Canadian sexuality studies. In Diaz, R., Largo, M. and Pino, P. (eds.), Diasporic intimacies: Queer Filipinos/as and Canadian imaginaries. Northwestern University Press.

• BC Studies Prize (2025), for best article published in the BC Studies journal (for “Race to Indigeneity: Three Vexations in Filipino Diasporic Politics”, co-written with Dr. May Farrales)
• Killam Teaching Prize (2025), in recognition of excellence and leadership in teaching