Althea Thauberger

Althea Thauberger

Prof. Althea Thauberger wearing a black top, blue jeans, and glasses, smiling


Academic Director, Public Humanities Hub
Associate Professor, Art History, Visual Art & Theory
Email: althea.thauberger@ubc.ca

Professor Althea Thauberger is an artist, filmmaker and educator known for place-based experimental documentary projects that emerge from collaborative research and production processes. Her work—spanning photography, film, video, and performance—explores relationships between community stories and geopolitical histories. She was born in Saskatoon, and is of settler Scandinavian and Black Sea German descent.

Prof. Thauberger’s recent exhibitions include the Kaunas Biennial (2021); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2020); The Toronto Biennial of Art (2019), The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2019); The National Gallery of Canada (2019); La musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017), and the inaugural Karachi Biennale 2017.

Prof. Thauberger’s work has been the subject of numerous articles and reviews published by journals including Art Forum, Canadian Art, Tema Celeste, Flash Art, European Photography, Artnet Magazine, Frieze, the Guardian, C Magazine International, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, The Mainlander, and Flash Art. Her work has been the subject of monographs published by The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Liverpool Biennale; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Artspeak, Vancouver; and Musagetes, Guelph.

Photo credit: Zinnia Naqvi

Research Area: Photographic history and theory; documentary studies; collaborative/collective community research and production; place-based contemporary art, settler colonial studies, and archival studies.

Welcoming Prof. Althea Thauberger as incoming Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub

Prof. Althea Thauberger wearing a black top, blue jeans, and glasses, smilingDean of Arts Clare Crowston has announced the appointment of Professor Althea Thauberger as Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2027. Professor Althea Thauberger is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory. Prior to joining UBC in 2018, Professor Thauberger taught for close to 15 years at a number of institutions, including the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, and Emily Carr University. She was also a Guest Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Artist-in-Residence at Concordia University, and Guest Professor at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi. Professor Thauberger is an artist, filmmaker and educator known for place-based experimental documentary projects that emerge from long-term collaborative processes and immersive social and historical research.

We express our huge thanks to Dr. Mary Bryson for their vital contributions to PHH over the last two years, expanding its funding programs and resources to support public humanities research and knowledge mobilization activities by faculty and graduate students at UBC, building interdisciplinary connections between the three collaborating Faculties—Arts, Education, and Law—and expanding publicly engaged programs that redistribute access to diverse publics.

We look forward to carrying out PHH’s mission to support interdisciplinary, collaborative, public humanities research at UBC under Prof. Thauberger’s leadership.

June 30, 2025

Fostering Trustworthy Science

Mar 28, 2025 | Although many have argued that science as an institution should be generally trusted by the public, others have noted that there are lots of reasons for distrust between the public and science. This focuses our attention on what should be considered trustworthy science, how to generate that kind of science, and how to signal its presence. Dr. Heather Douglas will argue that there are three interrelated bases for grounding the trustworthiness of any particular piece of science, and that these bases can be utilized by the non-expert to assess the trustworthiness of scientific expertise. These bases are 1) a method for detecting the presence of expertise, 2) an assessment of the expert community with which the expert is engaged, and 3) shared relevant social and ethical values. With this view, scientific expertise is capable of being assessed for trustworthiness by the non-expert. These bases provide reasons for trustworthiness in both cases of expert consensus and dissensus. Dr. Heather Douglas will conclude with implications for the practices and institutions of science for fostering trustworthy science.