The UBC-V Public Humanities Hub is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Public Engagement Awards. These awards are given to individuals and partner organizations who have exhibited outstanding public humanities engagement in the past two years, and whose work has contributed to the expansion of the range of voices in public discourse. Congratulations to the winners.
Tenured or Tenure-Track Faculty
Dr. Leonora C. Angeles (School of Community and Regional Planning, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice)
Dr. Leonora C. Angeles is cross-appointed professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) School of Community and Regional Planning and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. As faculty affiliate at the UBC Centre for Human Settlements (CHS) and the Centre for Southeast Asian Research (CSEAR), she worked on number of applied research and capacity-building research projects in Brazil, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, related to community and international development studies, social policy, participatory planning and governance, participatory action research, and transnational feminist networks, particularly in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Efrat Arbel (Allard School of Law)
Dr. Efrat Arbel is an Associate Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law. Her research is focused on Canadian immigration detention, refugee protection, and border governance. She has published widely in these fields. Her research has helped shaped law and policy in Canada, and has introduced creative tools to advance legal education and public engagement
Dr. Camille Georgeson-Usher (Department of Art History and Visual Art)
Dr. Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish scholar, curator, and writer from Galiano Island, BC. She is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Indigenous Art at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC and is the Audain Senior Curatorial Advisor on Indigenous Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Through her research, she is interested in how peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a methodology for embodied theory and alternative forms of sensing place and, particularly, sensing the ocean.
https://www.instagram.com/camilleusher/
Graduate Students
Claire Sianna Seaman (Department of Geography)
Claire Sianna Seaman is a painter, filmmaker, and printmaker who seeks to share and cultivate community-based climate solutions through art. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Climate Change studies from Smith College, and is currently earning her MA in human geography at UBC. Claire is a contributor to the Olympic Nat’l Park Terminus Glacier Memorial Project, and has collaborated with the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group to create artwork imagining climate resiliency, which was featured in the 5th National Climate Assessment and is currently on display in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.
Sydney Lines (Department of English Language and Literatures)
Sydney Lines is a UBC Public Scholar, PhD Candidate in English Language and Literatures, and Co-PI of the Adaptive TEI Network, an innovative, collaborative project funded through the G+PS PhD CoLab award. She is also Project Manager of the Winnifred Eaton Archive, a TEI-encoded digital edition of the collected works of Asian North American author Winnifred Eaton and digital developer of the Kuwentong Pamamahay storytelling project and the Early Chinese in Montreal exhibit, both built with CollectionBuilder’s open source framework. Sydney is a seasoned experience designer and community-engaged organizer. She also supports UBC’s Pop Culture Cluster and Critical Play Lab.
Partner Organization
Don’t Call Me Resilient – The Conversation Canada
Don’t Call Me Resilient was a critical race podcast from The Conversation Canada, hosted and produced by Culture + Society editor Vinita Srivastava, that turned humanities research into accessible public conversations. It ran for eight seasons from 2021 to 2025, with scholars addressing urgent current news through an intersectional lens of race, class, and gender. It blended scholarship and lived experience through conversations with researchers, journalists, activists and community members. The podcast was a collaboration between The Conversation Canada and UBC Journalism researchers under a SSHRC Partnership Grant investigating how new revenue models, policy frameworks and novel modes of audience engagement can support knowledge-based explanatory journalism. It showed how humanities research can inform and challenge public understanding by bringing scholarship into dialogue with lived experience and community expertise.