Academic Appetizer Hour with Green College Leading Scholars

Bite-sized research presentations by recently appointed UBC Faculty Members across disciplines. Faculty presentations in this session by the 2023-25 Leading Scholars Program cohort include:

Both and Neither: Transing Gender and Transing Genre in Nonfiction
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Creative Writing

I am a creative nonfiction writer, working primarily in hybrid forms that allow me to mix memory, history, archival research, and imagined renderings to create work that transes the historical and the personal. My training is in both writing and law, and much of my writing concerns questions of what narratives we place on the body and the self and how to resist simplification in those narratives. I am currently at work on two projects: Both and Neither, a transgender and trans-genre inquiry into life beyond the binary, and Body of Knowledge, about selfhood and medical epistemology.

Legal Ordering of the Human-Nature Relationship: What's the Future of the Common Law?
Supriya Routh, Law

My research develops an empirically-informed theoretical account of the law of work justified through the logic of fair treatment of workers for their social contribution, thereby overcoming the conventional narrow lens of labour law, which imagines work as a private contract. Such expansive conceptualization will promote innovative regulatory interventions for an extensive range of working arrangements, including unpaid care and socio-ecologically beneficial work such as sustainable agriculture, water management, and waste recycling. In conceiving work as a socio-political idea meriting workers’ social citizenship for their social contribution, I also investigate the role of divergent participatory deliberation in the lawmaking process.

Theorizing Archival Wake Work: Bead Art as Black Feminist Memory Practice
Elizabeth Shaffer, Information

My research interrogates how information policy, practices and systems emerge and evolve in digital spaces and infrastructures, particularly in collections that document traumatic human events. Informed by anticolonial research and pedagogies, my current work examines how Blackness is constructed from the absences, erasures and violence of colonial archives and narratives of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.