About Us

I am an associate professor of anthropology at UBC Okanagan, where I teach courses in linguistic anthropology. My research focuses on language documentation and revitalization in Canada and in Papua New Guinea, as well as the relationship between endangered language communities and created language communities. I have done research on the Na’vi speech community (from the movie Avatar) and am the creator of the Kryptonian language from Man of Steel (2013), the Eltarian language from Power Rangers (2017), and the Beama (also known as Cro-Magnon) language from Alpha (2018).

Jeannette Armstrong was born in 1948 and grew up on the Penticton Indian Reserve in British Columbia. Armstrong is the first Native woman novelist from Canada. Interestingly, she is also the grandniece of Hum-Ishu-Ma (Mourning Dove, b. 1927), the first Native American woman novelist. While growing up on the Penticton Indian Reserve, Armstrong received a traditional education from Okanagan Elders and her family. From them, she learned the Okanagan Indian language. She is still a fluent speaker of the Okanagan language today.In 1978, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria. The same year, she received a Diploma of Fine Arts from Okanagan College. Her education was a precursor to many remarkable career achievements. Today, Armstrong is a writer, teacher, artist, sculptor, and activist for indigenous rights.

I am currently Professor (Critical Geography). My research and teaching focus on critical geographies of knowledge production, critical geographies of health care and urban indigenous people in Canada, and place and the politics of identity.

JON CORBETT 

Cluster Leader for  Communication, Community and Representation
PROFESSOR, COMMUNITY, CULTURE, AND GLOBAL STUDIES (HUMAN GEOGRAPHY)
M.Sc. University of Oxford, UK, Ph.D. University of Victoria  
 
Jon Corbett is an Professor in Community. Culture, and Global Studies at UBC Okanagan. Jon’s community based research investigates cartographic processes and tools that are used by local communities to help express their relationship to, and knowledge of, their land and resources. Jon has worked with Indigenous communities in Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and since 2004 with several First Nations communities in British Columbia.

Rachelle Hole joined the faculty in 2004. Her main research interests are in the area of disability studies and identity theory. Her doctoral thesis explored the intersection of hearing loss and identity, exploring how three culturally Deaf women perceived the influence of hearing loss on their identities. The interest for this topic emerged from her social work practice over 20 years working with Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Deaf-Blind individuals and their families throughout the Province of British Columbia.

Dr. Schnellert researches teacher learning, practice, and collaboration. In particular he attends to how teacher professional development relates to student diversity, inclusive education, self- and co-regulation, and literacy instruction. His research grapples with the challenge of designing and facilitating teacher professional development that bridges theory and practice so as to achieve valued outcomes for students.

My academic research career focuses on investigating building cleaners’ campaigns to ‘crisise’ neoliberalism. By ‘crisising’ I mean their campaigns and organized attempts to argue the trauma of neoliberalism and its consequences in cleaners’ workplaces, personal lives and communities. This interest leads me to study cleaners’ strategies and discourses of resistance neoliberal policies of the erosion of industrial citizenship. Currently I seek to understand and follow how resistance against an emerging post-industrial citizenship is being organized between cleaners and their union across borders. It is in this context that I’m interested in contributing to the literature on global unions and organizing.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, GEOGRPAHY, DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITY, CULTURE AND GLOBAL STUDIES, UBC Okanagan.

BSc University of Ibadan, MSc and PhD King’s College London.

I am currently Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Community Culture and Global Studies. My research takes a critical, interdisciplinary and engaged political ecology approach to the intersection of climate change, forests, neoliberalism and development. I situate ideas, policies and projects at this intersection within critical debates on power and resistance, neoliberalization of nature, local resource politics, conservation and development, colonial and postcolonial conservation history, and social justice.  My community-based research investigates how and with effects local and Indigenous communities engagement with conservation and development, ‘natural climate solutions’ such as forest carbon offsetting, and wildfires. I have been working closely with local forest communities in Nigeria’s Cross River for many years. More recently I have also been working with communities in British Columbia, Canada.

My program of research focuses on the prevention and early intervention of mental illness for youth and young adults, through: 1) mental health service delivery, and 2) development of psychosocial interventions. Working closely with Foundry, an integrated youth health service in Western Canada (foundrybc.ca), my work aims to understand the decision-making process among youth accessing mental health services to increase the alarmingly low rates of service use among Canadian youth. I am also interested in investigating the intersections of identity and mental illness among young people in the early stages of psychosis, including novel interventions and recovery processes through community engaged research. In line with Canada’s Strategy for Patient-Oriented Patient Engagement Framework, engaging young people in research is central to my work, as it has been shown to improve the quality of health service research.

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UBC Okanagan. My teaching and research  explore the cultural politics of crime control as well as the social trajectories of law, religion, and systemic racism. In my current research I examine how these processes are reflected in the changing state regulation of immigration, security, and religion in British Columbia; as well as the case law surrounding the defamation of religious and racialized groups in Canada and the United States.

Burgess combines ethical and social theory with social science methods related to policy in health care, health research and biotechnology, recently focused on deliberative public engagement. His graduate supervision has been primarily in Interdisciplinary Studies, and his seminars typically include students with backgrounds in science, health care, health research, social science and humanities. His research has been funded by SSHRC, CIHR, Genome Canada and Genome BC, as well as NGOs and industry contracts.

Dr. Carlaw received his Ph.D. (2000) from Simon Fraser University, Canada and has held lecturer and senior lecturer positions at the University of Canterbury.  Dr. Carlaw has been an advisor and consultant to Industry Canada, the New Zealand Treasury, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development, the Australian National Office for the Information Economy, and the Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Dr. Carlaw’s major research focuses are in evolutionary economics applied to historical innovation, technological change, productivity and sustainable long term economic growth and development.  Along with his co-authors Richard G. Lipsey and Clifford T. Bekar, Carlaw wrote the 2006 Schumpeter Prize winning book Economic Transformations (2005) which analyses economic transformations generated by the invention and exploitation of major (general purpose) technologies from 8000 BC to present. He has also written extensively on productivity measurement and on evolutionary macroeconomic growth theory.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF TEACHING, ENGLISH AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Ph.D. Education, The University of British Columbia; M.A. English, Simon Fraser University; B.A. English, Simon Fraser University.

Dr. Kerrie Charnley has a PhD in Language and Literacy Education from the University of British Columbia. She is Coast Salish from Katzie First Nation and over the past 17 years has taught courses in Indigenous Education, Literature, and Health at UBC, SFU, and the Institute for Indigenous Governance (NVIT). Dr. Charnley’s research interests include: Indigenous Epistemologies, Salishan Intellectual Traditions and Literatures (Interior Salish Literatures and Coast Salish Literatures), Indigenous Literatures, Indigenous Storywork, Indigenous Oral Traditions, Indigenous Literacies, Indigenous Land/Ocean-Based Pedagogies, Indigenous Languages, Multimodal and Multi-sensory Literacies, Cognitive Maps and Geography, Rhetoric, Discourse Analysis, A/r/tography and Arts-Based Research, Autoethnography and Memoir, Mixed Genre Writing, Writing Education

Shirley teaches undergraduate-level courses in direct social work practice and theories of social work practice and a graduate-level course on health-interprofessional research and evidence-informed practice. Central to her teaching approach is the anti-racist and anti-oppressive lens for clinical practice, and social and organizational change.  Shirley’s clinical interests and experience are in the areas of work and wellness, crisis intervention, psychological trauma, and individual counseling. In addition, Shirley is an active researcher on marginalized populations and health, as well as on practice and policy relevant issues related to child welfare.  Her interest in conducting research on vulnerable and marginalized populations includes previous research on: housing issues in child welfare; the impact of inquests on child welfare organizations; the health and well-being of Chinese Canadian seniors; the settlement experiences of Asian immigrant adolescents; and the health of homeless youth exposed to violence on the streets of Toronto’s inner city.

Sabre Cherkowski is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. The focus of her teaching areas are: educational leadership; educational foundations; diversity and inclusion in education. Her research interests include organizational well-being; mindful leadership; teacher leadership; professional development; learning communities; reflective practice; and moral agency.  She is currently engaged in a SSHRC-funded research project investigating how it is that some schools and people within schools flourish. She brings her experiences as an educator, coach and parent to her passion for growing the theory and development of positive organizational capacities, such as flourishing, in schools.

Jonathan Cinnamon is an Assistant Professor of Geography at UBC Okanagan. Working in collaboration with stakeholders and across disciplines, his current research examines the societal conditions that emerge as grassroots, corporate, and municipal government actors invest in data and digital technologies. Additionally, he has a longstanding interest in developing novel spatial and visual methods of knowledge production appropriate for low-resource settings. Prior to joining UBC Okanagan, Jonathan was a faculty member at Toronto Metropolitan University (Toronto, ON) and the University of Exeter (Exeter, UK), and held visiting positions at Wits University (Johannesburg, South Africa), and Ohio State University (Columbus, OH).

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EDUCATION

Creative Writing, En’owkin Centre, Bachelor of Arts and Science with Distinction, University of Lethbridge, Master of Education: Administrative Leadership First Nations Focus, SFU, Education Doctorate: Policy and Leadership, UBC

BIO: Forthcoming

Dr. Evans has been involved in several community based research initiatives, and in particular has a long-term relationship with the Prince George Métis Elders Society. He has also worked extensively with colleagues at the Métis Nation of British Columbia on a number of research projects dealing with historic and contemporary Métis communities in BC, some of which are discussed in this volume. Together with Elders and community leaders in Prince George he put together a Métis Studies curriculum for UNBC and a number of publications including What it is to be a Métis (Evans et al 1999, 2007), A Brief History, of the Short Life, of the Island Cache (Evans et al 2004). He has also worked on a number of participatory video projects with collaborators from the Métis community and videographer and new media artist Stephen Foster. He is also involved in a number of active research projects concerned with Cultural Safety and Aboriginal health, especially in the Urban Aboriginal and Métis communities in Canada.

ASSISTAMT PROFESSOR OF TEACHING, ANTHROPOLOGY

BA, Philosophy, University of British Columbia, MA, Communication, University of California, San Diego, PhD, Communication and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego

My research investigates how scientific and technical knowledges are mobilized in different social and cultural contexts, and the opportunities for publics to reciprocally participate in the generation of relevant, situated, and responsive sustainability, conservation, and climate action knowledges and practices. I am working on several projects that advance place-based, community-engaged, justice-oriented, and interdisciplinary pedagogies for sustainability and environmental challenges. Community engaged teaching and learning, and the development of robust community-university partnerships, are core interests as I teach and lead the development of community service learning curriculum in the Bachelor of Sustainability Program.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF HEALTH AND EXERCISE SCIENCES
B.Sc.(Kin), (McMaster), MS (Queen’s), PhD (Queen’s), Postdoctoral Fellow (University College London)

Dr. Gainforth’s academic training in Health Promotion, Knowledge Translation and Kinesiology has fostered her belief that evidence-based health promotion interventions and guidelines must be widely disseminated both in general and special  populations.  Her research aims to close the gap between health behaviour change research and practice by examining knowledge translation – the act of moving research evidence into the hands of research users. Her emerging research program aims to identify, develop and implement novel strategies for disseminating evidence-based health information and interventions to populations.  Her systems-based research is grounded in behaviour change theory and techniques and is guided by strong collaborations between researchers and communities.

My primary interests are in the role of communities and their social, physical, and political infrastructures in the promotion of child welfare. I am also interested in place; the role of place in well-being, the interactions of person and place, including the ways in which professional practice is shaped by place. I approach these interests through a social constructionist lens. My experience as a social work practitioner includes supervision and staff training and development in child protection, mental health therapy with children, adults and families, and co-facilitation of group treatment programs for perpetrators of intimate partner violence. I have practiced community organizing in a variety of settings with much of this occurring in rural areas and Aboriginal communities in northern Alberta.

Prior to coming to UBC, he was Director of the School of Social Work at Florida Atlantic University, and before that at The University of Calgary where he had served as Murray Fraser Professor of Community Economic Development, and successively as MSW International Concentration Program Coordinator and PhD Program Coordinator. He is returning to a previous interest in homelessness research, and for the past 25 years has been a well cited, well funded scholar supported successively by the SSHRC, CIHR, HRSDC, and by NGOs. Further details are at https://ourstories.ok.ubc.ca/stories/john-graham/

Allison Hargreaves is a settler-scholar of Indigenous literatures and an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus), where she teaches courses in Indigenous literary and cultural studies in contemporary North America. Allison’s research investigates literary and policy interventions into gendered colonial violence in Canada, and has appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Canadian Literature Quarterly, Canadian Woman Studies, and Canadian Theatre Review.

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics.My area of expertise is public economics: the study of collective decision making, regulation, public good provision, and revenue raising to finance public good provision. I study special interest politics  and human behaviour as it relates to charitable giving, voting, trust and other aspects of non-market economic activity.

Dr. Susan Holtzman is an Assistant Professor and Lead Investigator of the Health Psychology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia – Okanagan.Dr. Holtzman received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  She completed a clinical internship at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University Health Network, University of Toronto. Dr. Holtzman’s research investigates the ways in which psychosocial factors can influence emotional and physical adjustment to chronic health conditions.  She is particularly interested in how social relationships can help or hinder patients’ efforts to cope with their disease, and how chronic illness can impact the family.  Dr. Holtzman uses experimental, longitudinal and daily process methods (which involve intensive daily monitoring of study variables) to better understand the connection between stress, mood, social relationships, and health over time.

My areas of research are: Learning analytics; computer science education; decision making under uncertainty; probabilistic user modeling; human-computer interaction cost models; experiment design and analysis.I teach to make students wonder; make student work harder than they ever thought they could, make students realize they can accomplish anything they put their mind to, make students figure out what they want out of their education. Why I research?
I create innovative applications; collaborate with interdisciplinary colleagues and motivated students. I engage students in quantitative methods and experiential learning. I support students in exploring career paths.

I am an associate professor of Economics. I joined UBC in 2007, after teaching for seven years at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. My primary research and teaching interests are in environmental and natural resource economics, with a special focus on the economics of water resources. Beyond the university, I enjoy almost anything outdoors that involves some exertion. You can easily distract me by talking about mountaineering, skiing, mountain biking, etc. However, a conversation about golf or fishing probably won’t last that long.

David Jefferess is a settler-scholar who teaches courses focused on postcolonial studies, critical interculturalism, global justice, and human rights narrative in the Cultural Studies and English programs. He has also developed a community engaged research course in Cultural Studies, in which students complete research projects for community organizations. His current research focuses upon contemporary humanitarian discourses and includes articles and chapters on the white saviour complex, the neoliberal politics of social enterprises such as Me to We, and the complicity of global citizen education initiatives in the development of the elite benevolent citizen. Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferess co-organize the AlterKnowledge project, which aims to foster critical dialogue on ongoing colonialism and practices of decolonization in the Okanagan region, and globally.

As a cultural studies scholar, I examine the links between media and social activism. My research draws on my experience as a community educator and video artist. I have worked in anti-violence, anti-racist, feminist, queer, and arts organizations, and I am interested in how art and media can be used to promote social, environmental, and economic justice. I explore this idea in the courses I teach, which include CULT 100: Themes in Culture and Identity and CULT 401: Feminism, Media, and Resistance.

I am Métis from Lac Pelletier, Saskatchewan and joined the faculty in 2020, but had previously been working in the Office of Research Services as an Indigenous Community Liaison. My research and teaching specializations are firmly rooted in Indigenous studies, with additional expertise in contemporary Métis studies. My previous and current research is centred on community-based interdisciplinary collaborations with Indigenous organizations, including Métis Nation British Columbia. I see myself as a bridge-builder and strive to connect communities to solutions-oriented research, build community research capacity, and create transformative learning experiences.

Dr. Li’s work has been published and presented in a number of academic journals and conferences such as the Association for Consumer Research, the American Marketing Association, Academy of Management Conference, and the Consumer Culture Theory Conference. Dr. Li teaches Qualitative Methods in Management Research (graduate-level), Digital Marketing and Consumption (graduate-level), and Introduction to Marketing (undergraduate-level) at the University of British Columbia. He also developed directed studies courses on fashion advertising, fashion, design and culture with senior marketing students in the past years. He was on the University of British Columbia – Okanagan’s Teaching Honour Roll in the 2012-2013 academic year. He is also the founder of the Healthy Living project, a community-based experiential learning project that connects management students with regional community partners such as regional governments, non-profit organizations, and for-profit organizations to promote healthy living. In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Li serves as the regular board member of the Behavioural Research Ethics Board (BREB) of University of British Columbia – Okanagan He is also one of the Faculty Advisors for the campus-wide co-op program at the University of British Columbia – Okanagan campus. Dr. Li is currently a member of Blockchain@UBC – a collaborative research cluster focusing on Blockchain Technology, the associate member of UBC’s Institute for Healthy Living and Chronic Disease Prevention, and the faculty associate at the York Centre for Asian Research.

Margaret Macintyre Latta is currently Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBC O) in Canada. She is also the Director of the Centre for Mindful Engagement at UBC O (http://cme.ok.ubc.ca/). Her scholarly and professional activities concern the nature of curriculum in relation to community, grounded in the varied ways multiple narratives, perspectives, strengths, and resources hold potential for reframing and reorienting individual/collective engagement in and with the world. In particular, how curriculum and community so conceived provide much-needed sustenance for genuine learning opportunities of all kinds and merit serious consideration as a pragmatic and philosophical necessity in schooling, forms her research interests. Ongoing efforts explore the possibilities for teaching/learning contexts, calling for rethinking and revaluing of what is educationally important, and identifying the concrete implications of taking arising considerations seriously in educative settings. To access scholarship, see: http://education.ok.ubc.ca/about/faculty/mmlatta.html#undefined

I believe that it is the responsibility of university theatre programs to familiarize students with the rich cultural legacy of world performance traditions and foster a shared sense of humanity as well as a genuine respect for diversity. My personal dedication to working cross-culturally is rooted in a foundational life experience: at the age of 15, I was fortunate to receive a two-year full scholarship to study at the Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific, a non-profit institution promoting international understanding through education. My early passion for theatre was deeply informed by this intensely fulfilling time in a “global village” hosting two hundred students from over seventy countries in the coastal forest of Vancouver Island. It was then that I became aware of the infinite potentialities that arise when people with different cultural legacies live and work together. I have since envisioned performance as a powerful site of encounter, exchange, and collaboration.

My research interests are: cold climate housing, water rights, material and visual culture, oral histories, curatorial theory, performance theory, and sensory ethnography. I am the co-founder of Ethnographic Terminalia Collective (ETC) (est.2009) (http://ethnographicterminalia.org/), an international curatorial collective that curates exhibitions at the intersections of arts and anthropology. My current arts-based research project with Dr. Benjamin Day Smith (IUPUI) is a digital arts-based ethnography that incorporating sensory input (aural, visual, touch, taste, smell) as a form of informal science learning around environmental issues through humanistic inquiry to create digital learning tools and immersive environments. Sensory Storytelling (www.sensorystortelling.org) is a community-engaged, multimodal, co-creation project with youth in schools (K-12) that draws from arts and music technology, cultural anthropology, and curatorial best practices. I am the Director of the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab (www.ce2lab.org) that will open in 2020 at UBCO and is co-Directed with Professor Susan Frohlick. The CE2 Lab is funded by the Canadian Funding for Innovation (CFI) and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF).

I am an associate professor with the School of Nursing at UBC Okanagan. My research interests include: health promotion for children and youth; active, safe and inclusive play for children; parent perspectives about risk and safety for children; the role of equity related factors in active, safe play: gender, income, disability, chronic illness, and also injury prevention and activity promotion experiences of families and children living with autism.

I am an environmental and economic historian, and my current research examines the human and natural history of British Columbia interior rangelands to better inform long-term sustainability and conservation planning for all rangeland communities. I draw on diverse historical sources—including archival collections, privately-owned historical materials, images, maps, orphaned scientific data, and oral history interviews—to develop detailed narratives, timelines, and visualizations of past conditions, specific change, and driving forces across multiple temporal and spatial scales. I am always interested in speaking with, and learning from, ranchers, range managers, and other rangeland community members.

Dr. Karen Ragoonaden is a Professor of Teaching in the Okanagan School of Education, University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus, Director of the Centre for Mindful Engagement and Senior Advisor to the President, UBC (Vancouver). As the recipient of numerous Tri-Council grants, her research and publications focus on transformative pedagogy and curricular innovation in relation to equity, diversity and inclusion. She actively supports authentic community engagement between the Okanagan and Vancouver campuses.

My main areas of teaching expertise are health and aging, research methods and statistics. I believe that students learn best under conditions that foster mutual respect between teacher and student, but also between students. I bring both knowledge and passion to the classroom. I believe that I must teach my students how to think critically, to identify the underlying assumptions of any given argument and to subsequently be able to weigh the argument’s validity. My research focuses on how to best care for persons who reside in nursing homes and includes the assessment of transitions between home, hospital, assisted living and nursing homes.

Research Summary: Latin American security and political economy, Critical Security Studies, and Global Politics Theory.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, FACULTY OF MANAGEMENT
BA, McGill University, MA, University of Toronto, PhD, Queen’s University, Postdoctoral Fellow, Université du Québec à Montréal

Adam Saifer is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Management at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. He is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research draws on theories of capitalism, nation, and race to critically explore organizational phenomena in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. Adam’s research is oriented around themes of social and economic justice, as well as research partnerships with community-led organizations. His current research projects explore the following topics: (1) social justice philanthropy under racial capitalism; (2) Canadian philanthropy’s entanglement with right-wing populism; and (3) philanthropy’s neglect of age, aging, and vulnerable seniors.

Marlowe Sam is a Wenatchi/Lakes descendent from the Colville Confederated Tribes of Washington State (CCT).Marlowe majored in Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and received a B.A. and M.A. with distinction.  He defended his doctoral dissertation “Oral Narratives, Customary Law and Indigenous Water Rights in Canada” to earn a Ph.D. majoring in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies from UBC Okanagan during which he was the recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Research summary: rural resilience, tourism and sustainability, landscapes of wine and food, international experiential education.

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of History and Sociology. My research interest includes the intersections of gender, health and sports using interpretive theories that focus on self and identity. I am a qualitative researcher with a strong interest in developing and using multiple methods (ethnographic content analysis, in-depth interviews, participant observation) to study everyday life. I am currently working on SSHRC funded project that examines how families of athletes manage traumatic brain injuries (concussions) suffered in the context of sports and the concerns and conflicts that emerge for interpersonal family relationships and dynamics.

I grew up on lək̓ʷəŋən territories in Victoria, BC where my interests in land and water, and how power dynamics impact our relationships to them, emerged. Since then, I have found myself in the university where I am privileged to work on community-led research projects on topics such as: intergenerational impacts of resource extraction, youth-led research for healthy and justice-oriented environments and communities, and modern treaties. As a queer and non-binary geographer of primarily Irish and Scottish ancestries, I’m also interested in how colonialism impacts our relationships to each other and to ourselves, including who and how we can love. These are all topics I’m excited to teach about at UBCO.

In my research, I strive to integrate the meta-narratives of transnational history and political economy with the methodological tools of cultural history that give shape to detailed studies of place and agency. As a cultural historian, my teaching frequently involves the exploration of art, performance, craft, and media technologies. I have recently begun a pilot project at UBC Okanagan teaching hands-on documentary filmmaking as a tool for historians and other humanities and social science scholars. My course Digital Media and History/Filmmaking for Scholars and Activists uses creative practice and dialogue to uncover the many ways in which historians use film and digital media for inquiry, interpretation, and communication. I have recently given talks on the role of digital media in political activism, collective memory struggles, and public history debates.

I am an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies. As a Maori (Ngāti Raukawa and Rangitāne) of the Manawatū region of Aotearoa/New Zealand, I am a happy to be a guest on the unceded and traditional territories of the Syilx peoples. My research and teaching have a focus on Indigenous approaches to wellbeing. My approach to scholarship includes an emphasis on Indigenous methodologies, history, and community engaged research.

I am a Professor in the School of Health and Exercise Sciences at UBCO. I am the Principal Investigator on the Supporting Survivors of Brain Injury and Abuse through Research (SOAR) Project which examines the intersection of intimate partner violence (IPV) and brain injury (BI). This community-engaged project is a collaboration between UBCO and Kelowna Women’s Shelter and seeks to characterize the incidence and effects of IPV-related BI, increase knowledge and awareness of this issue in those who provide supports for survivors, and implement and evaluate community-based interventions with the goal of improving quality of life in this underserved population.

I conduct research on human/water relations in the Okanagan Valley, the Columbia River Basin in Canada and the United States, and in Papua New Guinea. The Papua New Guinea project, undertaken in collaboration with the Kala Language Committee and other university researchers and students, is focused on documenting the Kala language through a study of their aquatic environment. In my Columbia River Basin research, I focus on water governance and the relationship of the Columbia River Treaty to irrigation, food security and food sovereignty. In the Okanagan Valley, I am working in collaboration with other university researchers and community organizations to develop a museum exhibition that will bring together indigenous Syilx knowledge and western scientific knowledge about our waterways, in support of wiser water stewardship, decolonization and reconciliation.

Dr. Yanacopulos is based in the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science.   After working in the corporate sector, she returned to academia having worked at the Open University in the UK (2000-2018) before coming to UBC in 2018.  Her research is at the intersection of International Relations and International Development, specifically looking at transnational networks, NGOs, social movements and civil society, transnational governance, human rights and the mediation and representation of international development. She has acted as a consultant for numerous international organisations and NGOs, and has been a consultant on seven BBC documentary series.