Please join us in congratulating the winners of the 2025-2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Award. The Public Humanities Hub Graduate Research Fellowship program aims to provide support for interdisciplinary, innovative and/or experimental public humanities graduate research projects, imagined broadly.
Alison Ariss, PhD Candidate, Art History, Visual Art & Theory
Title: Re-imaging the Local: Sustainable Material Flows and Vancouver Island Wool
Alison is a PhD candidate in art history and a UBC Public Scholars Initiative Fellow. Her research interests are in Indigenous textiles, museum studies and public art. As a settler-scholar, her research is an (un)learning process centering Coast Salish knowledge in analyses of Salish weaving installations. Alison volunteered with MOA for the Fabric of Our Land exhibition (2017-18); held a curatorial internship at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (2019-20) and collaborates with Coqualeetza Cultural Education Centre. She published in the Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice and RACAR and participated in Salish weaving workshops led by expert Salish weavers.
Project: The Material Flows Workshop is envisioned as a space for a small group of Salish textile producers to advance local materials knowledge and building a shared knowledge base of fibres and materials affinities with the Vancouver Island Fibreshed that are required by Salish weavers to produce the types of woven forms they desire. The project builds on existing Fibreshed models and forms a new relationship between wool producers and consumers within the region.
Mahashewta Bhattacharya, PhD Candidate, Anthropology
Title: Telling Tales Otherwise: Migrant Women, Care Work and Translating Ethnographies
In her doctoral research, Mahashewta traces the cultural meanings of the category of home among women circular migrants of rural West Bengal in Eastern India who are employed as domestic workers in cities. Through a multisensory ethnography of the various domestic spaces they inhabit, create and curate, she aims to study their sensory and material life-worlds at the intersections of outmigration, growth of the tech industry, postcolonial economic development and gender inequity.
Project: Mahashewta’s project builds on ethnographic research with rural Bengali women migrant caregivers by transforming their everyday storytelling practices into a collaborative, public initiative. Through workshops with theatre and performance professionals, participants develop and share their own narratives via community radio and social media, fostering visibility, agency, and community engagement.
Poorna Patange, PhD Student, Geography
Title: Mapping Every Newcomer Spaces in Rural Epekwitk/PEI
Poorna is a multidisciplinary scholar invested in creative practices that help people materialize complex ambitions and demands in uneven and unequal spaces. Before arriving at UBC, she completed a Master of Architecture at the University of Waterloo and is currently a PhD student in the Department of Geography, advised by Dr. Jemima Baada and Dr. Geraldine Pratt. Her dissertation examines how rural newcomers are settled through their relationships to Indigenous sovereignty, settlement services, and existing residents in Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island. As a PHH Fellow, she will draw on her background in architecture to run a collage-based mapping exercise with newcomers on the island, where she will explore feelings of being settled and unsettled in spaces of multiple sovereignties.
Project: Poorna’s project examines how newcomers in rural Epekwitk/PEI experience immigration, settlement, and Indigenous sovereignty within a settler colonial context shaped by targeted population policies. Using feminist geo-ethnography and an arts-based photo-collage method, it invites newcomers to co-produce relational spatial knowledge to generate public knowledge.
Romina Tantaleán-Castañeda, PhD Candidate, Gender, Race, and Social Justice
Title: Indigenizing Environmental Justice: Towards the Rights of Mother Nature Guided by Indigenous Women’s Leadership of the Peruvian Central East Amazon
Romina is a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) and a human rights lawyer from Peru. Her doctoral research, conducted in collaboration with the Federation of Indigenous Women of Atalaya Province (FEMIPA) in the Amazon, explores the relationships of organized Indigenous women leaders with their territory, while grounding this exploration in their resistance to extractivism and environmental injustice. The project examines how the Rights of Mother Nature and more-than-humans can be envisioned through legal pluralism from the ground up. She is also co-creating a short documentary that shares the stories of Indigenous women leaders related to defending Mother Nature, as knowledge mobilization and advocacy.
Project: Romina’s research explores how Indigenous women leaders in the Peruvian Amazon resist extractivism and environmental injustice by advancing the Rights of Mother Nature through their own relationships to territory and legal traditions. In collaboration with FEMIPA (Federation of Indigenous Women of Atalaya Province), this project uses feminist participatory action research to co-produce knowledge, inform policy and legal frameworks, and support community-led advocacy through shared resources and a short documentary.