Advisory Committee

CWAGS FACULTY

The following faculty members are appointed to the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies:

Gillian CREESE

Gillian Creese is the Director of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies, and a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include immigration and settlement issues in Canada, feminist research methods, and women, work and trade unions. Her most recent book is Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in a White-Collar Union, 1944-1994 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999). She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled African/Canadian Border Crossings: Migration, Exclusion and Belonging and editing a book (with Wendy Frisby), Feminist Methodologies in Community Research. Other recent publications appear in Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, Journal of International Migration & Integration, and International Migration. Her current research grants are “African Immigrant Youth: Challenges Facing Teen Migrants” (Metropolis-SSHRC grant) and “Gendering Disaster: An Interdisciplinary Approach” (CFIS-HSS grant). She teaches courses in the areas of feminist research methods; immigration, gender and racialization; gender, work and restructuring; and Canadian society. She is also on the Board of Directors of Umoja Operation Compassion Society/African Family Services, an NGO that provides settlement services to immigrants and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa.

Sunera THOBANI

Sunera Thobani is Associate Professor in CWaGS, College for Interdisciplinary Studies /Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Director of the Centre for Studies in Race, Autobiography, Gender and Age (RAGA) at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include race, gender and nation-formation, migration and globalization, and media, violence and the War on Terror. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Race & Class, Feminist Theory, Signs, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and The Supreme Court Law Review. She is also the author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2007). Dr. Thobani teaches courses in the areas of feminist theories, feminist activism, race and gender relations, migration, violence and globalization, including a graduate seminar called “Gender, Islam, Modernity and the West.” Her current research grants include: Gender, Globalization and International Conflict (SSHRC) and 100 Years of South Asian Migration into Canada (CHIS). A founding member of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity (RACE), Dr. Thobani continues to serve on the organization’s Steering Committee. During her tenure as President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (1993-1996), Canada’s then largest feminist organization, Dr. Thobani was committed to making anti-racism central to the women’s movement. Under her leadership, NAC worked with the Canadian Labour Congress to organize the cross-Canada Women’s March Against Poverty (1996).

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Erin BAINES

Erin Baines, Assistant Professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, teaches in Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science. She is Research Director of the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP), Gulu Uganda. Her areas of interest include gender and armed conflict, humanitarianism, youth and children and armed conflict, and transitional justice. Dr. Baines’s academic publications include “The Haunting of Alice: Local Approaches to Transitional Justice in Northern Uganda,” International Journal of Transitional Justice (2007); Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN and the Global Refugee Crisis (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2004); “The Contradictions of Canadian Commitments to Refugee Women” in Sjolander, Smith and Stienstra (eds), Feminist Perspectives in Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2003); and “Body Politics and the Rwandan Crisis,” Third World Quarterly (2003). She received a multi-year grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to pursue action research projects in partnership with community organizations in northern Uganda, supporting locally-owned justice solutions. In addition, Erin Baines has received the Henry Frank Guggenheim Essay Prize on “The Role of Academic Research in Reducing Violent Conflict,” and has written about the ethics of research in conflict affected areas. Erin has worked with documentary film crews, photographers, and advocacy organizations (GuluWalk, Resolve Uganda) to promote public awareness of conflict related issues in Uganda. The work of JRP was featured on the CBC documentary “A Hard Road Home” in 2006. Erin is co-founder of PeaceGirl, a collaborative research, income-generating, advocacy and multimedia initiative with female survivors of forced marriage and their children in the Lord’s Resistance Army. Please also see: www.erinbaines1.moonfruit.com

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Leila M HARRIS

Leila M. Harris is an Assistant Professor in CWaGS, and the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability (IRES), and is also the Associate Director of UBC's Program on Water Governance.  A fairly recent addition to the UBC campus, her research interests include socio-spatial difference and inequality and environmental resources, with particular attention to gender and ethnicity and water politics in Turkey and the Middle East as well as more recent work on water access, governance, inequality and citizenship in the contexts of Accra Ghana and Cape Town South Africa.  She also works on environmental and developmental politics and water governance questions, exploring contemporary development processes and shifting water governance practices with focus on lesser developed contexts of the global South. Her training includes geography (MA and PhD, University of Minnesota), development studies, political economy, and environmental studies.  Theoretical interests include focus on postcolonialism, political ecology, nationalism and state theory, feminist theory, everyday citizenship, politics of scale, and socio-spatial difference. Current research projects involve a) focus on socio-spatial difference and contemporary environmental politics in Turkey b) Evaluation of ongoing water governance shifts in the Global South, with particular attention to disadvantaged populations and lesser developed contexts and c) everyday experiences of water (in) access in underserved urban communities, particularly ways this connects to concerns related to identity, citizenship, and also the role of narrative in these negotiations.  for potential CWaGS graduate students, I am most interested in recruiting students who will work on the themes of environment and social difference/inequality (especially gender), or gender and citizenship questions in the global south. 

Link to my publications and other information through IRES website.  
Link to my video on research through the  the CFIS YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxQWi3rgkIY&feature=related

Leslie ROBERTSON

A cultural anthropologist by training, Leslie Robertson is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies. Her primary interests include memory and social imaginations of difference; colonialisms and health; stigmatization and poverty. Research includes a focus on the health and representations of street-involved women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside drug and sex trades; regional historiography; and, the legacies of contemporary and historical colonialisms in settler and aboriginal worlds. Methodologically, Leslie specializes in collaborative ethnography, oral history and participatory approaches. Her work has been published in: Anthropologica; Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness; and, Gender, Place and Culture: Journal of Feminist Geography. Her books include: Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town (2005); and (co-edited with Dara Culhane), In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (2005), winner of the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature and Publishing. At the invitation of members of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, Leslie is currently completing a book based on collaborative, inter-generational research that focuses on the political and social history of a female ancestor (1870-1951).

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