Gabriella Maestrini

Gabriella Maestrini is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Studies at UBC. In her PhD work, she focuses on humour in stand-up comedy as comic consciousness where knowing the world through humour emanates from being in the world differently. This presupposes stand-up comedians as tricksters, social commentators, transgressors and storytellers who in this role invite us to consider the world otherwise and who use this way of being to speak the unspoken, specifically the unspeakable of coloniality. Humour, used by stand-up comedians who identify as racialized, can be used to return the gaze, to interrupt, disrupt and to transform.

Supervisor: Shauna Butterwick (Educational Studies)
Committee Members: Sunera Thobani (Institute for Gender,Race, Sexuality and Social Justice); Elaine Decker (Educational Studies); Dónal O’Donoghue (EDCP)