Onyx Sloan Morgan

(They, Them, Theirs)

Assistant Professor

Community, Culture and Global Studies

Other Titles: Principal’s Research Chair (Tier II) in Communities, Justice, and Sustainability
Office: ART 252
Office Hours: Please email for the term’s office hours
Email: onyx.sloanmorgan@ubc.ca

Research Summary

Critical human geography; resource extraction; queer geographies; settler colonialism; youth-led research and social movements; modern treaties

Courses & Teaching

GEOG 217: Geographies of BC; GEOG 358: Gender, Place & Culture; GEOG 460: Critical Geographies of the Anthropocene; GEOG/GWST 426: Queer Geographies; IGS 550: Voice, Justice, Change

Biography

My research is most often conducted in partnership with and at the direction of communities. My positionality as a queer, non-binary white settler of Irish and Scottish ancestries steers my engagement. Having grown up on unceded Lekwungen territories, my research seeks to: 1) reveal the power dynamics at the core of inequitable and oppressive structures, and 2) foreground the resistive, transformative relationalities that communities enliven every day for more just and sustainable futures.

Degrees

PhD, Queen’s University
MES, Dalhousie University
BA, University of Victoria

Research Interests & Projects

My research focusses on three overlapping interests: 1) socio-legal and colonial geographies; 2) healthy environments and communities in rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous locales; and 3) queering and critical political ecologies.

Socio-Legal and Colonial Geographies structure the very core of unceded territories across so-called British Columbia. These geographies are central to my understanding of place and impact everything from environmental decision-making to knowledge production to conceptions and structurings of gender. While my interests into these intersecting topics vary, at present and since 2010, I have collaboratively worked with Huu-ay-aht First Nations to explore these geographies byway of the negotiation and now implementation of the Maa-nulth Treaty.

My research on healthy environments and communities in rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous locales is driven by communities across so-called northern BC. Our work began by exploring youth perceptions of healthy and just environments and communities, particularly in light of extractive activities, dispossession, and legacies of environmental contaminantion.

Queering and Critical Political Ecologies is a burgeoning area of my research. Through the ‘Recasting the Geographies of Fire: How Fire Shapes Politics of Gendered, Racial, and Colonial Relations in Settler Colonial British Columbia’ project, I look at fire through a settler colonial lens to explore how fire has been weaponized as a tool for colonial dispossession with uniquely gendered and racialized effects. This work led me to property insurance as an often unquestioned mechanism that exists in the aftermath of fire, causing uneven effects across the myriad geographies of so-called BC. I’m excited to expand the framework of queering and critical political ecologies to ask questions and explore topics that continue to impact communities across BC and beyond.

Professional Services/Affiliations/Committees

Member of the ACME Collective and Editor-in-Chief ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies

Power, Conflict, and Ideas, Indigenous Knowledges / iʔ sqilxʷ aʔ cmiy̓ t smypnwíłnsəlx & Community Engagement, Social Change, Equity Theme Member, School of Graduate Studies, UBC Okanagan

Executive Member, UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice

Advisory Committee Member, Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia

Research Member, Institute for Community Engaged Research, UBC Okanagan