ANNOUNCING THE NEW EDITOR OF BC STUDIES: Leslie Robertson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UBC.
September 8, 2016
It is with great pleasure that we welcome Leslie Robertson to the position of Editor, BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly.
We would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of the out-going Editor, Graeme Wynn. During his tenure, Graeme moved BC Studies from a paper-based, print-only journal available (incompletely) in digital form in certain libraries, to a partial open-access digital and print journal, making use of OJS. He created new features in the journal (case comments, maps, photo essays, reflections, research notes, and more), almost doubled the number of articles published annually, started a blog on the BCS website, and established an annual BC Studies Prize. We would also like to recognize our out-going Associate and Book Reviews Editor, Richard Mackie, for the tremendous work he has done for the journal which includes editing no fewer than 100 manuscripts and 650 book reviews during his six year tenure. It is with the utmost respect and our deepest gratitude that we thank Graeme and Richard for their significant contributions and commitment to scholarship in British Columbia.
BC Studies is a multidisciplinary journal that stands at the forefront of Canadian regional scholarship and contributes to informed public debate in British Columbia. In looking for a new editor, the committee, led by Matthew Evenden, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, launched a thorough search for an editor who had an ability to bridge different disciplinary approaches to research and who would present a new vision for the future of the journal.
“BC has this stunning diversity of languages and histories, and there’s an complexity of social and political projects people are engaged in right now. We’re working in a post TRC context of late colonialism and I think we have responsibilities as educators, scholars, stewards of texts – to recall and analyze colonial processes, and to try in whatever ways possible, to dismantle habits of representation and authority that continue to impact people in negative ways. This is an exciting time methodologically across disciplines. Ways of apprehending present circumstances, what constitutes the past and what is possible are expanding: there is an exciting cohort of scholars doing multi-sensory research and documentation; the influence of indigenous and other culturally-situated knowledges has opened avenues for different ways of listening and understanding phenomena; new considerations of power and knowledge are unfolding in all kinds of directions. And we are in a position to think through these things, to facilitate conversations (in sound, imagery and text) among scholars doing really exciting work.
Leslie has a critical interest in community-generated and collaborative methodologies. Her applied and ethnographic research includes projects about: intergenerational biography; aboriginal activism and historical colonial processes; street drug use, violence and homelessness; place-making and memory. She is the author of Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church and Custom (with the KwaguÅ‚ Gixsam); Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town; and, co-editor of In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Current work focuses on the afterlife of historical colonialism, how people from diverse cultural and social locations inhabit their histories, the imaginative resources they draw upon to speak about them, and the role of scholarship in translating and interpreting them.