Faculty of Art
Ihomehe Agbebaku
|
Background:Ihomehe Agbebaku is a Nigerian writer, filmmaker, and creative researcher pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her work spans visual storytelling, digital humanities, and critical media practice, with a focus on the emotional, aesthetic, and structural forces that shape Black life across diasporic contexts. She brings experience in communications, editorial leadership, community-engaged arts, and interdisciplinary creative production. Research:Ihomehe Agbebaku's current project, Mapping Colorism, investigates how beauty hierarchies circulate through contemporary Black popular culture and digital environments. Using computational approaches alongside cultural analysis, the project makes visible the patterns, narratives, and contradictions that structure colorism while foregrounding the forms of resistance and counter-representation that emerge within Black creative worlds.
|
Lia Braga
|
Background:Lia Braga is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of British Columbia, specializing in labor and health economics. She holds an M.Sc. in Economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and a B.S. in Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Her research experience includes work at the Institute for Health Policy Studies (IEPS) in collaboration with Imperial College London, and studies on the electoral impacts of primary healthcare and the effects of corruption on health outcomes in Brazil. Lia has been awarded the Four Year Doctoral Fellowship at UBC and a CAPES Foundation Scholarship. She has served as a teaching assistant for courses in applied economics, microeconomics, and game theory at UBC. Lia is skilled in Stata, R, and LaTeX. Research:Lia Braga's research sits at the intersection of labor and health economics, with a focus on how public health systems shape and are shaped by political and economic forces. Her earlier work examined the electoral impacts of expanding primary healthcare in Brazil and the effects of corruption on health outcomes, combining administrative data with quasi-experimental methods to study how institutions affect the delivery of public services. Her current research applies the tools of labor and personnel economics to the healthcare setting, using a novel linkage of Brazilian administrative data that connects hospital procedure records and facility characteristics to individual-level payroll data for every medical professional and hospital worker in the public health system. This allows her to estimate complementarities and substitutability across medical resources, including personnel, and to examine how staffing decisions, contract types, and exogenous changes in relative pay affect hospital performance and patient outcomes. Her work aims to inform more effective and equitable allocation of public healthcare resources in systems facing real budget and logistical constraints.
|
`
Sloane Madden
|
Background:Sloane Madden is an Undergraduate student pursuing an Honours Degree in English Literature and Minoring in Informatics at the University of British Columbia. She has extensive experience in researching information technology, having presented her research on student perceptions of Generative Artificial Intelligence at UBC's iSchool Research Day and the Institute of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning's Research Conference, being the first undergraduate to present at both these conferences; the work is now under peer review for publication. Recently, Sloane has begun working with McGill's Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy, being one of 100 Canadians invited to participate in a national policy creation process around AI's role in Canada, with the findings being presented to federal policy makers later this year. She has won extensive awards for her academic work in English Literature, including the Manzalaloui Prize, the Trek Excellence Scholarship for Continuing Students, and the Milton and Bess Narod Scholarship, and recently returned from a term abroad studying Cybersecurity and English Literature at Pembroke College in Cambridge University. Research:Having always been interested in the intersection between science and the humanities, Sloane Madden's research focuses on the impact of university policies in regulating student implementation of Generative AI. Building on a previous research project, Sloane is working with the Associate Dean of Arts to survey three separate courses across three arts disciplines, looking at students' self-reported history of AI use and tracking any changes that appear when different classes, assignments, and policies are introduced. By analyzing the survey data, she hopes to reveal any gaps or inconsistencies in the institution's policies, allowing information policies to be updated according to empirical, student-focused research.
|
Cal Smith
|
Background:Cal Smith is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. He completed his MA in English at McGill University in Montréal, where he studied the intersection of taboo, comics, and the functions of artistic practice. He earned a triple major in English Literature and Language, Spanish Language, and French Language from Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, and he’s taught as an English-as-a-second-language teacher for some years abroad before returning to academia. He currently serves as a GRA on the “Games for Decolonization” project of the Pop Pedagogies Cluster and also as a GRA on the Survivor Centred Visual Narratives SSHRC Partnership Grant. Outside the academy, he enjoys biking the chaotic streets of Vancouver, sketching city landscapes, and making zines and other small art projects. Research:Cal Smith’s research pursues questions around the effects of delving into archives in search of “lost” histories. His work centers on queer autobiographical comics and zines (an ephemeral, often self-published work) made in Canada in the 1980s and 90s. In that work, he argues that encountering queer autobiographical comics and zines produces a confrontation between reader and author that demands an attention to the affective power of these documents. His dissertation intends to merge close readings of texts with interviews from the authors themselves, many of whom are still alive but have stopped publishing comics.
|
