Sarah Hunt
Wall Associate
Sarah Hunt joined FNIS and the Department of Geography in July 2015 as Assistant Professor of Critical Indigenous Geographies. She is Kwagiulth (Kwakwaka’wakw) from Tsaxis, and has spent most of her life as a guest in Lkwungen territories. Sarah’s scholarship in Indigenous and legal geographies critically takes up questions of justice, gender, self-determination, and the spatiality of Indigenous law. Her writing and research emerge within the networks of community relations that have fostered her analysis as a community-based researcher, with a particular focus on issues facing women, girls, and Two-Spirit people.
Dr. Hunt received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Victoria and her Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University. She was awarded a Governor General’s Gold Medal for her doctoral dissertation, which investigated the relationship between law and violence in ongoing neocolonial relations in B.C., asking how violence gains visibility through Indigenous and Canadian socio-legal discourse and action. She continues to build on this work, exploring geographies of resistance and resurgence in the intimate, everyday relations of Indigenous people and communities.
Co-Principal Investigator Awards
While Kylie Thomas is at UBC she will work together with Dr Sarah Hunt (Assistant Professor in First Nations and Indigenous Studies and in the Department of Geography) to facilitate a workshop on photography and resistance with two-spirit youth. She will also share her recent work on the contemporary student movements campaigning for the decolonisation of universities in the aftermath of apartheid, and on the powerful ways in which queer activists have responded to the rape and murder of LGBTQI people in South Africa.
She has also developed a collaborative research project with Dr. Shannon Walsh on the history of HIV and AIDS activism in South Africa, a subject that has been at the centre of both their research for close to twenty years. She met with Dr Walsh during her research visit to South Africa in August 2018 and began to work on a proposal for a collaborative book project that focuses on the visual history of the South African HIV and AIDS epidemic.
Dr. Thomas is keen to engage with students and faculty at UBC who are working on social justice issues in Canada.
