Retirement of Dr. Jennifer Chan


“Mauritania, June 2021: Waiting for the train with Mauritanian women and children to cross the legendary 704-kilometre railway line linking the iron mining centre of Zouérat with the port of Nouadhibou through the Sahara Desert. “

UBC, Faculty of Education

Retirement of Dr. Jennifer Chan:

I join everyone today in this celebration of our colleagues’ achievements and retirements. I am particularly grateful to the Dean’s Office for having invited me, as EDST Head, to speak to the cursus of Dr. Jennifer Chan, a member of the Department.

Dr. Jennifer Chan graduated from Stanford University (PhD) and joined UBC’s Faculty of Education in 2003. She has been with us for close to 20 years. At UBC and in EDST, she offered undergraduate and graduate courses on international comparative education, social movements, human rights, civil society, global public health, gender, anti-racism, immigration, multiculturalism, critical social theory, and research methodology. She has supervised masters and doctoral students working in some of these fields.

Her commitment to these areas of research are captured by her several books, published during her work at UBC. Between 2004 – the year following her arrival at UBC – and 2015, she published three seminal books with leading university presses:

2015. Politics in the Corridor of Dying: AIDS Activism and Global Health Governance. Johns Hopkins University Press.

2008, ed., Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

2004. Gender and Human Rights Politics in Japan: Global Norms and Domestic Networks. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

In addition, Dr. Chan has published more recently articles on the topologies of racism in Canada, AIDS activism, and the Japanese pacifist movement, among many other publications.

Over the past year, Dr. Chan has travelled extensively throughout Africa, documenting vividly and anthropologically her observations, experiences, and encounters with communities, people, and places. Her Blog, https://jenniferchanphotography.ca/ , offers an amazingly inspiring record of her engagement with the politics of geography, community, and cultural encounters.

Jennifer is an amazingly inspiring person in terms of her artistic creativity. Her short film, Day of Shame directed in 2007, examines the case of US military bases in Okinawa, Japan. The breadth and scope of her scholarship and teaching reflects her openness to the most fundamental issues bugging the times we live in.

While we will miss Jennifer’s presence in EDST, we know that she will continue to engage the world in ways that will continue to inspire us and keep us abreast of new areas of engagement.

Thank you, André