Laura K. Nelson

Laura K. Nelson

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Director, Centre for Computational Social Science
Email: laura.k.nelson@ubc.ca 

 

Dr. Nelson uses computational methods – principally text analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis techniques – to study social movements, culture, gender, and organizations and institutions. Substantively, her research has examined processes around the formation of collective identities and social movement strategy in feminist and environmental movements, continuities between cycles of activism and the role of place in shaping social movement activity, intersectionality in women’s movements and in the lived experiences during the 19th century in the U.S. South, gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship, the translation of academic ideas to practice in the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program (a program aimed at promoting women in STEM field in higher education), and gender inequality in emergency medicine departments. Methodologically, she has proposed frameworks to combine computational methods and machine learning with qualitative methods, including the computational grounded theory framework and leveraging the alignment between machine learning and the intersectionality research paradigm. She has developed and taught courses introducing social science and humanities students to computational methods and the scripting languages Python and R, data science courses, and graduate-level sociological theory. She is currently a co-PI on a million-dollar grant through the National Science Foundation to study the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through higher education networks, primarily in the United States.

Research Area: Social Movements, Culture, Gender, Organizations and Institutions

My current research projects include examining intersectionality in U.S. women’s movements; coverage of social movements in news media over time; ways in which history is recorded and remembered, particularly related to social movements; gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship, emergency medicine, and other STEM fields; and the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through networks in higher education (funded by a National Science Foundation grant).

Biz Nijdam


Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies
Email: biz.nijdam@ubc.ca

Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she lives, works, and learns on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Dr. Nijdam’s research and teaching examine the representation of history in comics, comics and new media on forced migration, intersections between Indigenous studies and German, European, and migration studies, and feminist methodologies in the graphic arts.

At UBC, she leads the Narratives Research Group in the UBC Centre for Migration Studies and founded and co-leads the recently established Comic Studies Research Cluster in UBC’s Public Humanities Hub.

Research Area: Comics Studies, German Studies, Media Studies

Dr. Nijdam’s research focuses on how new media and popular culture provide important entry points for engaging with complex discourses of human experience, illuminating systems of oppression, and interrogating issues of identity, gender, and sexuality.

Jasbir Puar

Jasbir Puar smiling, wearing a dark grey collared shirt


Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice
Email: jpuar02@mail.ubc.ca

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: