Advisory Board

Henry Yu is a scholar of migration, race and colonialism involved in the collaborative effort to reimagine the history of Vancouver and of British Columbia through the concept of “Pacific Canada,” a perspective that focuses on how migrants from Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Americas engaged with each other and with First Nations peoples historically.

As a history professor, Dr. Yu’s research and teaching has been built around collaborations with local community organizations, civic institutions such as museums, and multiple levels of government. He is passionate about helping British Columbians and Canadians undo the cultural and historical legacies of colonialism and to be inspired by the often hidden and untold stories of those who struggled against racism and made Canadian society more inclusive and just.

During Dr. Yu’s period as Principal of St. John’s College, SJC has come to be known for initiatives such as Staff Hot Lunch that help build a meaningful sense of belonging and community on campus. Dr. Yu’s commitment to fostering collaboration at UBC has also allowed SJC to serve as a crucial incubator for important academic initiatives such as the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program in the Faculty of Arts and the UBC Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement.

Research Area:

• Global Vancouver
• Trans-Pacific migration
• Asian Canadian and Asian American history
• Race and immigration
• Social Science and Social Theory in US and Europe
• Public History and History Education
• Hong Kong and Canada Crosscurrents

Faculty profile

Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC

Vancouver Chinatown Foundation i

PCHC-MoM

Chinese Canadian Museum of BC

National Forum on Anti-Asian Racism, Final Report

“Anti-Asian Racism”

“Racism and Canadian High Schools”

Dr. Nadena Doharty is Canada Research Chair in Black Experiences in and Through Education. Nadena’s work brings together the theoretical strands of: critical race feminism, the sociology of emotion, and, more recently Black Critical Theory. Nadena’s theoretical frameworks have been applied, principally, to Black African and Caribbean young people and adults in school and post-secondary institutions.

Research Area: Black Critical Theory, Mad Studies, Critical Race Theory, Institutional Racism, Critical Race Feminism,

Faculty profile

Jordan Wilson is a Curator of Pacific Northwest Coast and Contemporary Indigenous Art at the UBC Museum of Anthropology (MOA). A member of the Musqueam Indian Band, he holds a PhD in Anthropology from New York University, with a background in Indigenous Studies and Museum Studies. Wilson was a co-curator of the exhibitions c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city (2015), and In a Different Light: Reflecting on Northwest Coast Art (2017) at MOA. He is co-author of Where the Power Is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art (2021). More recently, he curated I Use My Haida Eyes: The History Robes of Jut-ke-Nay Hazel Wilson (2026).

Research Area: At MOA, Jordan is responsible for curating exhibitions and stewarding the collections related to Pacific Northwest and contemporary Indigenous art. He works closely with Indigenous communities, artists and knowledge holders to ensure culturally grounded and community-informed approaches to exhibition development and collections care. Drawing on his academic research and curatorial experience, Jordan brings critical insight and cultural connection to MOA’s curatorial team.

c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city (2015)

In a Different Light: Reflecting on Northwest Coast Art (2017–)

Where the Power Is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art

Lindsay Massara is a PhD candidate in Law at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral research broadly considers British colonial administration and the genealogy of common law emergency. She traces the phenomena of emergency and martial law through case studies across Jamaica, Ireland, and India in an effort to magnify circuits of power and complicate common law formations of race, property logics, and a rule of law. Her work is situated within sociolegal and legal history spaces, informed by critical legal studies and TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law). Recently, Lindsay co-authored a chapter with Michelle McKinley (University of Oregon Law School) on slavery, critical methodologies, and the power of speculative history for The TWAIL Handbook (Antony Anghie, B.S. Chimni, Michael Fakhri, Karin Mickelson, and Vasuki Nesiah eds.) and has previously published on liberation, transgression, and property with Greg Baltz (Rutgers Law).

Research Area: Colonial Legal History; Common Law Emergency; Law and Violence; Martial Law; Order and Disorder; Property; Race and Racism; TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law)

Prior to joining the Allard School of Law at UBC in 2021, Brenna Bhandar was a Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London, and previously held faculty positions at Queen Mary School of Law, Kent Law School and the University of Reading Law School. She has also held visiting appointments at L’École des hautes études en science sociales (Paris) and the Stellenbosch University Faculty of Law (South Africa). She is the author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), and a research associate at the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London and a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.

Research Area:

Dr. Brenna Bhandar’s research and teaching lie within the fields of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history and critical race feminism. She is the author or editor of 4 volumes, including  Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership, published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-authored book of interviews (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought published in 2020 with Verso. Her work has been translated into Catalan, Spanish, German and Italian.

Faculty Profile
Peter A. Allard School of Law

Dr. Britton researches and teaches early modern English literature, with a focus on the history of race, critical race theory, Protestant theology, and the history of emotion.

He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Spenser Studies on “Spenser and Race.” He is currently working on two books, Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Difference on the Early Modern English Stage and Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England.

Research Area: Medieval and Early Modern Literatures, the History of Race, Critical Race Theory, Protestant Theology, the History of Emotion

Faculty Profile

Dr. T. Patrick Carrabré is a Métis composer living in Vancouver. Construction of identity and community engagement are long-term themes in his compositions, concert and radio programming, and administrative activities. Recognition for his music has included two JUNO nominations, a recommendation at the International Rostrum of Composers, several WCMA nominations and one award (Best Classical Composition). For well over a decade he worked closely with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, including six seasons as composer-in-residence and co-curator of the Winnipeg New Music Festival. Dr. Carrabré also served two-seasons as the weekend host of CBC Radio 2’s contemporary music show The Signal.

Research Area: Community Engagement, Decolonization, Digital Strategies for Musicians, Music Composition

Dr. Carrabré’s current research-creation project is a musical work for the Harbourfront Centre’s Music in the Garden concert series. It will explore manifestations of Métis identity from the early 1800s to the present. Following the Red River Resistance (1869–1870) and the Battle of Batoche (1885), it was often dangerous to publicly identify as Métis. Beginning with a reworking of Pierre Falcon’s “Battle of Frog Plain”, through the years of hiding (“My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” Louis Riel), this work will conclude with a setting of Gregory Scofield “Since When,” showing the ever changing face of the Métis. To realize this project, Dr. Carrabré is working with Métis mezzo-soprano Rebecca Cuddy, who already has a rich repertoire of Métis related material that will provide further context for our continued struggle to be recognized as a unique people and claim space wherever we might now live.

Website
School of Music
Faculty Profile
Twitter

Christina Laffin is Associate Professor of Classical Japanese in the Department of Asian Studies and a former Canada Research Chair in Premodern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Social Sciences and Humanities Research Advisor in the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation.

Dr. Laffin researches women’s writing, travel literature, and the processes of education and socialization in premodern Japan. She has worked on equity and knowledge sharing for an eight-year project on East Asian religions, collaborated with graduate students to produce a video series on premodern Japan, and led a research cluster representing travel culture in early modern Japan through digital approaches to a seventeenth-century manuscript.

Research Area:

Medieval travel diaries; women’s education and socialization before 1600; poetic practices and waka culture; theories of travel, gender, and autobiography; noh theatre; and comparative approaches to medieval literature.

Faculty Profile
Department of Asian Studies

Dr. Shannon Leddy (Métis) is a Vancouver based teacher and writer whose practice focuses on decolonizing education and Indigenous education within teacher education. She holds degrees in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Saskatchewan (1994), an MA in Art History (1997), and a BEd (2005) from the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research at Simon Fraser University focused on inviting pre-service teachers into dialogue with contemporary Indigenous art as a mechanism of decolonizing education and in order to help them become adept at delivering Indigenous education without reproducing colonial stereotypes. During her time as a public school teacher with the Vancouver School Board, Dr. Leddy worked at several high schools as a teacher of Art, Social Studies and English. After a two-year secondment to work as a Faculty Associate in SFU’s Professional Development Program in teacher education, she returned to the VSB to undertake the coordination of an arts-based mini-school. She has also worked as an Instructor in SFU’s Faculty of Education teaching courses in pedagogical foundations and Aboriginal education. In 2013 she was awarded SFU’s Aboriginal Graduate Entrance Scholarship and a SSHRC Bombardier Scholarship in 2015.

Research Area: Art Education Research, Arts Education, Cultural Studies, Environmental Education, Indigenous Education Research, Media, Semiotics, Text Studies, Museum Education Research, Non-Formal Learning, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Teacher Education Research, Ways of Knowing

The Situation of Education

Dr. Leddy developed a podcast on education that gives an opportunity for researchers, parents, teachers and students to discuss their experiences in education. As the facilitator/moderator, she brings a two-eyed seeing perspective to the production, looking at interviewee’s responses with both Western and Indigenous eyes. This podcast launched formally in January 2019, with the long-delayed second season anticipated in July of 2021.

Decolonizing Teaching Indigenizing Learning

In 2020 Dr. Leddy completed work on the Faculty of Education’s new website, Decolonizing Teaching Indigenizing Learning, which features Indigenous curriculum bundles developed by students in their third year of the NITEP program.

Faculty Profile
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy

Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. From 2022-2025 she is a Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London. Renisa is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020). With Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020). With Antoinette Burton and Samantha Frost, she is co-editor of Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).

Research Area: Colonial Legal History; Critical Theory, Race and Racism; Affect; Time and Temporality; Oceans and Maritime Worlds; Settler Colonialism and Migration; Colonial India and the Diaspora; More-than-human Worlds

Faculty Profile
Department of Sociology

Dr. André Elias Mazawi serves as Head, Professor, and Sociologist of Education, in the Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (BC), Canada. He is Affiliate Professor with the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research at the University of Malta, and an Affiliate Researcher with the Équipe de Recherche en Dimensions Internationales de l’Éducation (ERDIE) at the University of Geneva. His academic interests are in the areas of the cultural politics of schooling and higher education, the intersections between colonialism and education, with particular attention to the effects of privatization and geopolitics on schooling and educational policies, school governance, and school-higher education restructuring in the Arab region.

Research Area: Adult education, Citizenship and democracy, Higher Education, International Comparative Higher Education, International Development Education, Media and democracy, Policy, Post-colonial studies, Research methodologies, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Higher Education

Faculty Profile

Jasbir K. Puar is a Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Extraordinary Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and Professor Emerita at Rutgers University where she was faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department for 23 years.

Dr. Puar is the author of the award-winning books: The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), which has been translated into Spanish and is forthcoming in Portuguese, and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), available in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, and translated into more than 20 languages.

Dr. Puar is also co-author of exhibitions for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the Sharjah Art Biennial (2023). In 2019 she received the Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, which recognizes lifetime achievement in and impact on queer research and organizing.

Research Area:

Faculty Profile
Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice