Photo courtesy: Unsplash
International Women’s Day is a global event to honor and acknowledge achievements by women and girls. It is also a day to recognize the work being done to push this movement forward. This month, the cIRcle team is featuring items across different collections that look at gender through an intersectional lens.
UBC’s First 100 Theses Collection
UBC’s First 100 Theses project, one of the first of its in kind in Canada, aimed to digitize the earliest theses and dissertations awarded at UBC and make them openly accessible online. Notably, out of the first ten graduate degrees conferred at UBC, six were awarded to women. We spotlight a few theses by women across different programs in this collection hosted on cIRcle.
Edna (Marwick) Napier graduated in 1920 with a Masters of Arts in English and a thesis on Joseph Conrad’s women. Under the Masters of Arts program in Mathematics, Charlotte Islay Johnston submitted a thesis on the Isosceles triangle solutions of the problem of three bodies two of which are oblate spheroids in 1925. Graduating from the class of 1926 in a Masters of Arts in Bacteriology, Helen M. Mathews completed her thesis on the Transfer of infection by handshakes. Margaret Gordon received her Masters of Arts degree in History in 1927 after having completed her thesis titled, National autonomy in relation to foreign affairs: A study in Canadian development.
For theses and dissertations from 1919 to present explore the UBC Theses and Dissertations collection.
NEXUS Spring Institute Collection
cIRcle archives materials for dozens of conferences and events with the NEXUS Spring Institute (2004-2009) being one of our earliest partners. This was an annual conference with a yearly theme “related to the NEXUS mandate of researching the social contexts of health behavior”. This event produced a collection of material on a range of topics addressing intersectionality and gender in the health services. The 2008 conference on “The Future of Diversity and Health research in Canada” included a presentation titled, The Colonial Context of Sweet Blood: The Intersection of Ethics, Indigenous Knowledge, and ‘Participatory’ Research in Alert Bay. Presenting insights from two community based participatory projects, they explored the intersections of colonization, ethics, and health in Indigenous and Aboriginal communities. Another presentation titled, Gender and ethnic differences in perceptions of mortality risk, explored ethnic differences in the understanding of the risk of heart disease mortality in women. The 2009 conference on “Knowledge Exchange: From Research to Social Action and Back” featured a paper titled, Using intersectionality to inform health services for Aboriginal women experiencing marginalization. Through an intersectional approach, they “examine[d] how health services can be uniquely delivered to address the intersecting health needs and realities” of highly marginalized women’s lives in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Faculty Research and Publications
cIRcle’s UBC Faculty and Research Publications collection provides access to nearly 9,500 openly accessible scholarly works produced by UBC authors. Exploring this collection, you’ll find a range of material across disciplines such as this 2021 research article, Gender, education, and labour market participation across the life course: A Canada/Germany Comparison, which attempts to unravel the “interplay of activities across the life course in relation to social inequality” in Canada and Germany. Examining the intersection of gender and sustainability, Gender-responsive public transportation in the Dammam Metropolitan Region, Saudi Arabia suggests that “due to the absence of a gender-responsive design and infrastructure, women are forced to use taxis” which still don’t completely alleviate safety and privacy concerns.
Discovering more resources
Whatever your research interest, you are sure to find relevant material in cIRcle. Use the Open Collections Advanced Search to refine your search or Ask a UBC Librarian for help.