Precarity and Uncertainty in Academic Research: Three Case Studies

As researchers, academics are tasked with making new discoveries, articulating original insights, pinpointing the “correct” answer, or evaluating competing threads of evidence for accuracy. As professors, we are knowledge bearers who separate fact from fiction for our students in an era where veracity and truth are increasingly threatened. Yet, we often find that our scholarship leads us down rabbit holes that produce more questions than answers, generating more uncertainty than we initially possessed. How do we grapple with this sense of precarity? How do we approach research on topics that are ambiguous, subject to multiple interpretations, or in a perpetual state of flux?

Join three UBC professors for a discussion of how precarity and uncertainty applies to case studies from their own humanities and social-science focused research. Dr. Alexandra Peck (Audain Chair in Historical Indigenous Art & Assistant Professor of Art History, Visual Art, & Theory) highlights Canada’s Potlatch Ban—a time of severe uncertainty for Indigenous communities—in relation to the repatriation and reintegration of Kwakwaka’wakw cultural belongings. Dr. Katharina Piechocki (Associate Professor of French, Hispanic, & Italian Studies) explores how the concepts of “precarity” and “uncertainty” translate across different languages, with a particular emphasis on English, French, and Italian. Dr. Helena Wu (Canada Research Chair in Hong Kong Studies & Assistant Professor of Asian Studies) examines popular culture’s posthumous embrace of “street writer” and calligrapher Tsang Tsou-choi (1921–2007), whose life was defined by precarity and marginality.

Alexandra Peck is the Audain Chair in Historical Indigenous Art and is an Assistant Professor within the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. As an anthropologist and material culture specialist, her scholarship examines historic Coast Salish art, landscape, and cultural change, as well as Northwest Coast Indigenous art more broadly. Her past research explored the 20th-century adoption of totem poles into Coast Salish artistic repertoire, Coast Salish public art in urban settings, and Coast Salish mortuary practices. Her current projects range from ancient Coast Salish stone carvings and Kwakwaka’wakw repatriation claims to Haida depictions of fungi and sexuality via argillite.
 

Katharina Piechocki's work focuses on 17th-century opera librettos and the joint question of poetic production and bodily reproduction which she explores through the figure of Hercules, often associated with the institutionalization of the arts and questions of procreation and filiation. Drawing inspiration from recent gender, masculinity, women and queer studies—often focused on the present times—and conducted against the backdrop of the affective turn and the history of medicine, this project redirects literary, opera and performative studies as it challenges common assumptions about early modern representations of absolutist power, gender politics and medical conceptions of the body.
 

With her background in comparative literature, film studies, and cultural studies, Helena Wu is keen on developing cross-disciplinary approaches to textual and visual narratives, popular culture, and creative practices. Her primary area of research is Hong Kong, with a focus on cinema, literature, and culture, while she is also interested in exploring cross-cultural dynamics and inter-Asian connections at large. Her first monograph examined the relationship between cultural icons, thing, and place. Currently, she researches spectators and spectatorship, with a view to critically examining the changing interactions between cultural expression, memory, affect, and identity.