The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice UBC

03/19/2026

Save your spot for Dr. Elif Sari and Dr. Rana Abughannam's upcoming GRSJ Noted Scholars Speaker event!

Join us for a conversation about about the colonial and carceral frameworks that render people “stuck” in undesired conditions and people’s grassroots approaches to “counter” these violent, confining conditions. Full details below, RSVP required:

RSVP here: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/timespaces-of-stuckness-and-countering-with-elif-sari-and-rana-abughannam/

Title: “Timespaces of Stuckness and Countering”
Speakers: Elif Sari and Rana Abughannam
When: Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Where: Buchanan Tower, Room 1099, UBC (In-Person Only)

02/27/2026

Save your spot for Kateřina Kolářová's upcoming GRSJ Noted Scholars Speaker event!

Join us for a conversation about Kateřina Kolářová’s 'Rehabilitative Postsocialism', which offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Full details below, RSVP required:

RSVP here: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/inadaptable-noncitizens-racialized-capital-and-lessons-from-postsocialist-neoliberalisation-with-katerina-kolarova/

Title: "Inadaptable (Non)Citizens, Racialized Capital and Lessons from Postsocialist Neoliberalisation"
Speaker: Kateřina Kolářová
When: Wednesday, March 4, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Where: Buchanan Tower, Room 323, UBC (Hybrid event)

02/13/2026

Save your spot for Christine Kim and Renisa Mawani's upcoming GRSJ Noted Scholar Speaker event!

Join us for a conversation about the challenges of working within discourses of human rights and emergency, with the speakers proposing alternative methods for historical research that are attentive to our persistently colonial present. Full details below and at link in bio, RSVP required.

Title: “Methods for Tracing Empires: a conversation on war, race, and migration”
Speakers: Christine Kim and Renisa Mawani
When: Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Where: Buchanan Tower, Room 323, UBC (Hybrid event)
A light lunch will be provided.

RSVP here: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/methods-for-tracing-empires-a-conversation-on-war-race-and-migration-with-christine-kim-and-renisa-mawani/

01/16/2026

Save your spot for Dr. Jodi A. Byrd’s upcoming GRSJ Noted Scholar Speaker event! Join us for conversation about how Indigenous visions of dystopias reveal how video games encode settler structures of governance even athey provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

Full details below and at link in bio, RSVP required.

This event is co-sposored by Green College, UBC Critical Play Lab, & the UBC Pop Culture Cluster.

Title: Indigenomicon: A Conversation
Speaker: Dr. Jodi A. Byrd
When: Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Where: Buchanan Tower, Room 323, UBC (Hybrid event)
A light lunch will be provided.
RSVP here: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/indigenous-relationality-in-the-grind-of-the-sh*tty-future-with-dr-jodi-a-byrd/

About the Speaker:
Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Their first book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) won the 2013 Best First Book of the Year award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the 2012 Wordcraft Circle Award for Academic Work of the Year.

The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series (co-sponsored by Green College, UBC Critical Play Lab, & UBC Pop Culture Cluster) presents: “Indigenomicon: A Conversation”   Dr. Jodi A. Byrd WHEN & WHERE Wednesday January 28, 2026 12-1pm Buchanan Tower, Room ...

01/05/2026

Reminder! Ignite, the undergraduate journal for GRSJ, is re-launching this spring and the team is looking for submissions. Deadline to submit is January 9, 2026.

Volume IX's theme is Worldbuilding. From the co-editors, "We are particularly interested in how student scholars and activists can make theory work for them. This means considering how theoretical frameworks can guide, inform, or amplify social justice imperatives."

https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/news/re-igniting-the-grsj-undergraduate-academic-journal/

12/12/2025

GRSJ is looking for an Assistant Professor of Teaching Without Review to join us this year at the UBC Vancouver Campus. Applicants with educational leadership and coursework focused on globalization, political economy, and social justice are encouraged to apply.

Deadline to apply is January 23, 2026.

Full details available here: https://www.arts.ubc.ca/academic-postings/gender-race-s*xuality-and-social-justice-assistant-professor-of-teaching-without-review/

12/05/2025

GRSJ 425B Course Promo

Check out GRSJ 425B with Dr. Rosanne Sia! This WT2 course explores the role of sound in building colonial infrastructures and in resisting oppressive imaginaries, while also offering students the opportunity to create and workshop their own creative sound-based projects.

Link in bio for more information!

12/02/2025

AMS Food Bank Drive

Call for donations! Join us in supporting the Food Bank.

If you are able, please consider dropping off non-perishable food items and/or hygiene products to our donation basket located in BuTo 1097B (8:30AM-4:30PM).

We wish to support students facing food insecurity, and to support the AMS Food Bank staff, who are stretched thin with the record number of users in the past few years. Every donation helps!

12/01/2025

Congratulations to the November Class of 2025! Please join us in celebrating these talented and dedicated graduates from the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice.  
 
Our November graduating class is made up of 3 PhD students, 2 MA students, and 7 undergraduate students. We are so proud of what they have accomplished at UBC and beyond, and we can’t wait to see what they do next.  
 

11/18/2025

Upcoming GRSJ Noted Scholar Speaker Series:

Video Games and the Po*******hy of Death
Speaker: Dr. Amanda Phillips
When: Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Where: Buchanan Tower, Room 323, UBC (Hybrid)
RSVP here: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/.../video-games-and-the.../

ABOUT:
Amanda Phillips (they/he/she) is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. They are the author of Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture and co-editor of the NYU Press Q***r/Trans/Digital/Diaspora book series. Amanda writes about s*x, death, identity, and politics in video games.

ABSTRACT
This talk explores the so-called “pornography of death” in video games. Once infamously called “murder simulators” by anti-obscenity activist Jack Thompson, the simulation and animation technologies of video games are indeed often used to depict elaborate, explicit, and exploitative fantasies about dying and killing. From exploding heads and blood fountains to flailing bodies and x-ray vision, the mechanics of death in video games are polymorphously perverse, and understanding the ways that digital technologies stimulate our curiosity of how bodies respond to violence or how individuals behave under threat is crucial in this moment of genocide, rising fascism, racial injustice, and trans- and q***rphobia.
See more: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/video-games-and-the-pornography-of-death-with-amanda-philips/

11/07/2025

Upcoming GRSJ Noted Scholar Speaker Series:

Q***ring Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times
Speaker: Dr. Tamara Lea Spira (GRSJ Visiting Faculty)
When: Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Where: Buchanan Tower, Room 323, UBC (Hybrid)

RSVP here: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/q***ring-families-reproductive-justice-in-precarious-times-with-tamara-lea-spira/

ABOUT:
Tamara Lea Spira (she/her) is an interdisciplinary feminist and q***r theorist whose work lies at the intersections of critical race, feminist, and transnational American Studies. Dr. Spira is currently a Professor of Q***r Studies and American Studies in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. Spira obtained her PhD in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was also University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. She recently served as a “Beyond Health” Fellow at UC Davis’s Feminist Research Institute.
Professor Spira is the author of Q***ring Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (University of California Press, 2025) and Movements of Feeling: Feminist Radical Imaginations in Neoliberal Times (University of Washington Press, under contract). Her writings have been widely published in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies, including Boundary2, Feminist Formations, Radical History Review, Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, Identities, Signs, and Abolition Feminisms and popular venues such as Nursing Clio, The Feminist Wire, and LGBTQ Nation. Her new book project, Life Before Conception: Gamete Personhood in Times of Ecocide, examines the backwards creep of white legal personhood that accompanies the intensified forms of premature death that greet the majority of the world’s children—and the planet itself—in a battle over futures. Dr. Spira is also at work on a collection of prose and poetry called Into the Interregnum: Two Deathbeds and the Tending of Fires. see more: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/q***ring-families-reproductive-justice-in-precarious-times-with-tamara-lea-spira/

10/03/2025

Apply now! Students pursuing studies in social justice are encouraged to apply for the Pamela Smith-Gander Educational Bursary, presented by .

Two bursaries of $2500 are available. Deadline is October 10, 2025. Full details available at the link in our bio: https://connective.ca/resources/pamela-smith-gander-bursary/

Pamela was a dedicated social justice lawyer and advocate for equity and community. Reflecting her values and legacy, this award will give preference to applicants who are single parents. 🧡