Advisory Board

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. Pat also served two-seasons as the weekend host of CBC Radio 2’s contemporary music show The Signal.

Dr. Jodey Castricano is one of the lead researchers in the Post-Antropocentrism & Critical Animal Studies Research Group (PACAS), a collaborative project between UBC Okanagan and the University of Exeter, supported by a UBC Okanagan-Exeter Excellence Catalyst Grant. PACAS is a network of activists, scholars, artists and writers who are invested in anti-speciesist and social justice research that advances human knowledge to improve nonhuman animal lives. Their research promotes the immediate and long-term societal changes needed to end our rapid killing of billions of nonhuman animals and the environment.

Julen Etxabe is Canada Research Chair in Jurisprudence and Human Rights and joined Allard Law as Assistant Professor in July of 2019. His current research combines legal and literary theory to identify a new model of dialogical judgment emerging in the area of human rights, which is transforming inherited notions of reasoning, rights, authority, and law in the post-national and diverse societies of the 21st century.

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, Shannon 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.

Sydney Lines (she/her/hers) has several years experience working in higher education, museums, and in various kinds of cultural programming. She is a multifaceted creative thinker who loves big ideas, memorable stories, and gathering communities through participation in arts and culture. She started at the Hub as a Graduate Academic Assistant in 2019 and completed two PhD Arts Co-op terms as the Program Manager, Strategic Initiatives for the Hub during Fall 2020 and Fall 2022.

Dr. Malakaj received his PhD in German with a concentration in Film & Media Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Before starting work at UBC in 2018, Dr. Malakaj worked as Assistant Professor of German and German Program Coordinator at Sam Houston State University. In 2016, he co-founded the international scholarly collective, “Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum.”

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.

Bernard C. Perley is Maliseet from Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick. He holds Bachelor of Fine Arts (studio arts) and Master of Architecture (architectural design) degrees from the University of Texas, Austin. His PhD is in Social Anthropology from Harvard. His academic training is interdisciplinary and aims to transcend disciplinary boundaries to serve his commitment to Indigenous community-based research and advocacy.

Kavita Philip is the President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures at UBC, Professor of English, and Associated Faculty in Geography and STS. She has written about nineteenth-century environmental knowledge in British India, information technology in post-colonial India, and the intersections of art, science fiction, and social activism with science and technology. She is author of Civilizing Natures (2004), and Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction (forthcoming, MIT Press), as well as co-editor of five volumes curating new interdisciplinary work in radical history, art, activism, computing, and public policy.

Dr. Rocha was promoted to Associate Professor and awarded the Killam Teaching Prize at UBC in 2019. At the end of 2019, he released his third full-length album, Anamnesis, and in 2020 he released a single, “The Freedom of Dialectic,” inspired by the life and thought of Maxine Greene. His newest book, The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach, was published in 2020 and received the same year’s Outstanding Book Award from AERA: Division B, Curriculum Studies.

Karis Shearer is an Associate Professor in English & Cultural Studies at UBCO where her research and teaching focus on literary audio, the literary event, the digital archive, book history, and women’s labour within poetry communities. She is the editor of All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek (WLUP 2008) and co-editor with Deanna Fong of Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks 2020). She has published essays on Sina Queyras’s feminist blog Lemonhound, George Bowering’s little magazine Imago, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology. She also directs the AMP Lab, is a Governing Board member and lead UBCO Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant. She held the 2010-11 Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at Vanderbilt University.

Mark Turin is a socio-cultural anthropologist and an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is cross-appointed between the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology. He currently serves as the Interim Editor of the journal Pacific Affairs.

Andrea spent a decade as a high school teacher before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education. Currently, Andrea is part of a multinational SSHRC-funded project, Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education.