This year, we will be celebrating two outstanding colleagues who are retiring this year: Profs. Becki Ross and Gillian Creese. As part of our celebration of their careers and retirement, we invite you to share stories, photos and messages of congratulations via the forms below. These submissions will be used as part of our celebrations, shared via our website and delivered to each of them respectively.
Dr. Gillian Creese has been a member of our UBC community and the departments of Sociology and GRSJ for over 35 years. Throughout this time, her contributions have been exceptional, spanning teaching and learning, research, and service to the University and the community. Many of these forms of service have drawn upon her demonstrated expertise in race and gender inequality and her commitment to advancing social equity. She has served on a variety of committees advising the President on issues of race, gender and equity and was Associate Dean, Faculty and Equity in the Faculty of Arts for 5 years.
Gillian was essential in supporting Gender Studies at UBC and its evolution into GRSJ. She was an important supporter of the effort to establish Women’s and Gender Studies in the early 1990s, serving as chair of the Women’s Studies Program in 1993 and playing a key role in its development. She was also a critical participant in the reorganization of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies into the more inclusive Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, serving as a co-founding director of the new Institute.
Gillian has been active in public sociology. She has twice served as an expert witness, served for five years on the Board of Directors of MOSAIC, an important local immigrant settlement organization, and more recently six years as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Umoja Operation Compassion Society, an organization addressing the needs of African immigrants in the Vancouver Metro region. Across these roles, Gillian’s community service is tied to her important research on the experiences of immigrants, especially African immigrants, in Canada.
Gillian has been an enormously productive scholar, publishing three solo-authored books, one co-authored volume, three edited volumes, 23 peer-reviewed articles and 32 chapters in peer-reviewed books. As with her service work, social equity concerns lie at the center of Gillian’s research agenda. Her research adopts a feminist, anti-racist framework in an effort to understand the dynamics of gendered, racialized, and classed forms of exclusion.
Gillian’s contributions to teaching and mentoring have also been exceptional, supervising 65 graduate students and teaching a wide variety of courses. Her strong commitment to equity and inclusion in the classroom and in mentoring has been felt by generations of her students.
Dr. Becki Ross has worked at the University of British Columbia for almost 30 years in the Departments of Sociology and GRSJ. Her contributions across the university and community have been extensive. Her public sociology work, which is inspired by her deep commitment to equity and justice, has been recognized with the Angus Read Practitioner/Applied Sociology Award (co-won with long-time collaborator Jamie Lee Hamilton) in 2020. Becki’s public sociology has focused on her long-standing commitment to honouring the lives and stories of sex workers through engagement in community dialogue around protecting the rights and dignity of this group.
Together with Jamie Lee Hamilton, she has worked, in the best tradition of academic public sociology, to help bring voice to sex workers through scholarship and community engagement. She has sought to advance sex workers’ sovereignty, human rights, safety, and security in the face of enduring stigmatization, criminalization, and racialization. This work has been trail-blazing and has informed public dialogue and official police and government policy. For example, this work has informed the Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision in Bedford v. Canada (2013) to declare sex-work-related laws unconstitutional. It has also had a notable impact on the Vancouver Police Department’s Code of Conduct for working safely with sex worker populations (2015-2019).
Becki’s engagement in community knowledge mobilization, such as community-based workshops, public talks, and media engagement, has brought this important work to the larger community. Becki was also a critical organizer in the campaign to make a permanent memorial to sex workers who are victims of violence in Vancouver. The memorial was unveiled in 2016 with an event welcoming 25 speakers, including the Vancouver Police Department Superintendent and the Mayor of Vancouver. This work has also been the basis of the West End Sex Work Commemorative Stroll, also co-designed and co-delivered by Becki.
Becki’s research has furthered her larger goals of equity and justice. She has published two solo authored books and one co-authored book. She is the author of 16 peer-reviewed articles and 16 book chapters. Her work on equity issues has also been instrumental at UBC in supporting the development of the vibrant intellectual community in GRSJ and across campus for colleagues and students from all backgrounds and identities.
Becki’s teaching and mentoring have been described as transformational. She has supervised 20 graduate students and sat on 29 other graduate committees. She was honoured in 2005 with the UBC Killam Teaching Prize for her outstanding work in the classroom.
