Michelle Stack Recognized for Exemplary Public Scholarship

July 5, 2021

Congratulations to Dr. Michelle Stack (2020 Wall Scholar) who was recently awarded the UBC-Vancouver Public Humanities Hub (PHH) inaugural award for public humanities engagement.

The prize recognizes scholars whose work has contributed to the expansion of the range of voices in public discourse and who have gone beyond the traditional top-down research dissemination approach to facilitate two-way dialogue with broader publics.

Dr. Stack’s exemplary public scholarship has been front and centre during her time as a Wall Scholar. She has continued her research on how university rankings reinforce inequity and narrow who counts and what and how scholarly work is conducted. She argues this is bad not only for academics but also for universities trying to be leaders in expanding scholarly informed public conversations about urgent local to global issues.

Thanks to her commitment to public scholarship, Dr. Stack new book “Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge” is now available online through UBC’s Open Collections. The book, which addresses the lack of empirical research behind university and journal ranking systems, is also available in hardcopy through University of Toronto Press.

Dr. Stack also leads a PWIAS-funded co-operative working group. She hopes that by bringing together students, staff, and faculty, campus co-operatives could provide affordable food, housing, and other services and be spaces to learn how to work, live, and learn in healthy and equitable ways.

Her most recent commentary on co-ops was published in TheConversation.com.