Graduate Academic Assistant: Gender+ Research Guide Developer

**Activities during COVID-19 are modified to reflect public health restrictions and recommendations in Canada and abroad, but remain active through necessary modifications**

Collective for Gender+ in Research Background:
Through the ongoing work of the Collective for Gender+ in Research -located within UBC ORICE, we seek to promote a community for rich dialogue in which gender and other identity intersections, including race, class, sexuality, and ability, among others, are considered when conducting community-engaged research. We are focused on mutual capacity-building and providing the tools researchers need to utilize a gender+ lens. Among other questions, the Collective explores:

1. How to facilitate a research culture in which gender and other intersections (+) are part of the research process from its beginning?
2. Which tools are necessary to facilitate the integration of gender+ into research questions and throughout the research process?
3. What are some of the barriers for graduate students and research faculty in seeking to undertake research with gender+ considerations in mind?

The Project + Questions:
The project proposed here will centre around producing, through a collaborative approach, a “question and resources guide” to provide a tangible tool for scholars (of all stages) to utilize in framing their research questions, design, methodology, and analyses. This guide will be available online and will incorporate learnings from the Collective’s seminars to date in addition to dedicated research, allowing us to pull together relevant resources to assist researchers in addressing gender+ considerations in their work. We will consider:

1. What are the stages of the research process and how can gender+ considerations be embedded from question formation through to knowledge dissemination?
2. In considering work relevant to the students who take part in this collaboration, where can we see opportunities for gender+ considerations to have been included? How could the work have been improved, and what questions might researchers have asked themselves as they went through the stages of the research process?
3. Remembering that this is a question guide, not an answer guide, what are the important questions for researchers to keep in mind at each stage of the research process to ensure they are thinking about gender+, even if their research does not ultimately focus on this perspective? In other words, if work does not include a gender+ lens, how can we help researchers answer the question of why not?

Position Summary:

Over the summer a team of 3 graduate and/or senior undergraduate students will collaborate in spending 5-10 hours each week in building a question and resources guide for embedding gender+ in scholarly and community-based research. The guide will take the form of prompting questions and resource links, but with a clear structure, to guide researchers through the thinking required in including gender+ into their work, regardless of their current level of knowledge around gender and intersectionality. We are building towards producing a visually appealing, clear, concise, and user-friendly guide to encourage researchers with little gender+ knowledge, through to those more experienced but who are perhaps curious about alternative perspectives, or who manage / supervise students for whom this guide might be useful.

Specific duties may include:

• review scholarly literature, grey / community-based / government literature,
• conduct relevant interviews
• launch  and analyze surveys to graduate students and faculty supervisors
• pilot and review / reformulate questions & guide segments as needed
• work collaboratively as a team to ensure coherence in sections of the document.

Note: The student team is not expected to provide a step-by-step guide for how to do gender+ research, but rather to encourage reflexive and critical questioning for researchers through a series of prompts, questions, and accompanying resources.

Anti-Racism and Ethics of Engagement:
The Collective for Gender+ in Research and the Office for Regional and International Community Engagement (UBC ORICE) are committed to embedding anti-racism in our daily work and ongoing projects. Students are encouraged and expected to consider how they can take an anti-racist lens to the work they produce around incorporating gender+ frameworks in research. This might include, but is not limited to, ensuring the incorporation of the ongoing and often unrecognized work of organizations advocating for including gendered intersectional analyses, data, or frameworks in research; and / or engaging with the politics of citation in including and citing the work of non-white scholars and other researchers.