Dr. Onyx Sloan Morgan never imagined being at a university—neither as a student nor as a professor—but they chose to attend the University of Victoria anyway in an effort to better understand the world. Fast forward to today where they are an Assistant Professor with the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies as well as Principals Research Chair (Tier II) in Communities, Justice, and Sustainability. Learn more about their academic journey in this month’s Meet our Faculty.
Can you tell us a bit about your educational journey? How did you come to pursue the field you are in? What led you to come to UBCO?
I was always interested in land and relationships with land, and found it strange how humans tried to control what was around them and by virtue of doing so, each other. I thus landed in geography, which helped me to ask challenging questions. In my last year of my undergrad at UVic, I was offered an RA position to look at community-based research methods. This work overlapped a lot with (what I didn’t realize at the time…) practices that already took place around me. I decided to submit an application to a Master’s of Environmental Studies program to work with the same professor who had hired me as an RA. I was admitted to the program, deferred for a year while I decided if a graduate degree was feasible, and ended up quitting my apprenticeship to continue postsecondary.
Before landing at UBCO, I debated stepping off the academic path regularly. Each time I have been at that leave or stay crossroad, I received a choice/offer to nudge me in the right direction. When the position at UBCO came up, I was delighted at the prospects of being at a smaller campus that had the research potential of a larger institution, the interdisciplinary nature of what would become my department, and the graduate programs. It all ‘made sense’ to me and my Departmental colleagues are truly phenomenal.
Can you talk about your current role(s) at UBCO? What do you find enjoyable about them and what do you find challenging?
I’m an Assistant Professor and Principals Research Chair (Tier II) in Communities, Justice, and Sustainability. I also sit on the Executive Committee for UBC’s cross-campus Centre for Climate Justice. After four years at UBCO, I’m finally finding my feet and how to balance expectations of a tenure-track position. My Research Chair emphasizes a research workload, so much of my time is dedicated to my funded research projects, and the students and communities who make these projects possible.
Can you describe your teaching philosophy?
My courses often grapple with complex and challenging topics to embrace an interrogation of power in place, and how these dynamics shape geographies on a myriad of scales. In order to begin these conversations, I start my classes by looking at what the course means for people differently oriented to ‘where we stand’—on unceded syilx territories. For instance, in term I, I’ll again be teaching ‘Queer Geographies’. This class sees students from GEOG, GWST, and SUST programs, but also PSYCH, PHIL, HIST, and beyond. We always begin by discussing the classes main goals alongside resources publicly available by the Okanagan Nation Alliance and syilx scholarship/news/interviews to question our underlying assumptions moving into course themes. This also helps us to better understand one another as we move through what can at times be theory heavy content.
My teaching thus involves supporting students to situate their questions in ‘place’ and spirals out from there. I try to foster transformative learning through foregrounding intersectional theoretical frameworks, including drawing attention to the nature of knowledge production and utilizing creative pedagogies to interrogate knowledge itself. For instance, students complete a ‘Queer Map’ for Queer Geographies and have done such a great job of creatively sharing their perspectives and experiences of space(s). Last year’s class also wrote a Queer Geography Dictionary—they did a fantastic job! We’ll be working on version 2 of the dictionary again this term with last year’s class suggesting which terms should be defined.
What are your research interests and what do you hope to gain/solve/better understand from your research? What research projects have been most meaningful to you?
My research interests stem from the communities with whom I work. As a geographer, I am fascinated by ‘place’ and how ‘places’ have been created and are understood. While I have long term research partnerships that look at topics such as modern treaties in British Columbia, and settler colonial extraction and governance, I am particularly excited about a new project on fire and insurance in BC.
For the last few years, and with the initial support of UBC’s Hampton Grant, I have been researching the social, political, and legal spatialities of fire and how insurance operates in the background. Colleagues in Criminology (Dr. Paul Sylvester at U of Ottawa), Environmental Studies (Dr. Sarah Hunt / Tłaliłila’ogwa at UVic), and Political Ecology/Geography (Dr. Niyi Asiyanbi here at UBCO) and I will be looking into this topic more through our new SSHRC Insight Grant, Tracing the Settler Colonial Legacies of Insurance: From Empire to Wildfires in British Columbia, Canada. Over the summer, I was bringing together anti-colonial, queer, and critical geographies to look at geographies of fire. This upcoming year, colleagues and I are also starting a North America wide reading group on critical insurance studies to expand the scholarship on insurance, as well. I will be beginning some of the archival aspects of this project in term II and I hope to dive into the empirical focus fully by next summer.
What is the main thing you hope your students will take away from your classes?
Curiosity, confidence with care, and motivation. By its design, human geography as a discipline often touches on topics that students and faculty alike experience. From climate change to sports and gender, students are often surprised that they can connect their lived realities with broader systemic power dynamics that we discuss in class and through our readings. While students often share that topics like climate change can be heavy (we know this all too well in the Okanagan), I always strive to instill curiosity and hope that can then motivate students to follow their passions and curiosities.
Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?
As a critical scholar whose work is interested in power dynamics that impact geographies on multiple scales (i.e., from how we relate to one another and how we take up space, to how governance systems reflect and enforce these dynamics onto us as differentiated subjects), I hope in many ways that I have nothing more to share in the next 10 years. If that’s the case, perhaps I’ll open the motorcycle skill-share that I always wanted, or work as an attendant on the coveted Fulford to Swartz Bay BC Ferries route (a dream when I was young—I grew up on lək̓ʷəŋən territory). More realistically, however, I’ll continue to be trying to navigate the university in ways that align justice-based practices with scholarship, and hope that my work remains relevant to students and communities with whom I am lucky to work.
Can you tell us something (hobbies, interests etc.) that your colleagues may not know about you?
I’m a basketball fan. I played (and still play) in the Island Hoops league, and years before that in Queer Van Hoops. This summer I was able to attend the first regular season WNBA game that took place in Canada ever. The environment was absolutely electric and so uplifting!