March 14, 2022
Congratulations to Faculty of Education professor Dr. Ryuko Kubota, recipient of UBC’s Envisioning Equality award in recognition of her significant accomplishments and contributions to the university.
Envisioning Equality is the first award to highlight and celebrate exceptional women and gender-diverse faculty and staff at UBC. Award recipients will be recognized through the installation of a series of street banners that will be designed by local artists and installed in 2023. The project will harness the transformative power of art to provides new perspectives on the award winners’ roles and contributions.
– Moura Quayle, Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President, Academic Affairs, Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic, UBC Vancouver
Dr. Kubota is a scholar in the field of applied linguistics. Her work unpacks the interlocking relations among social forces, such as power, politics and ideologies, linguistic practices and socioeconomic structures. It also questions assumptions related to language education and aims to promote equity, social justice and anti-oppressive approaches to language education.
Dr. Kubota’s scholarship links underlying critical multiculturalism to antiracism, drawing scholars’ attention to race, racialization and racism in the field. She points out racial biases in our knowledge system and critically examines how the criteria specific to white knowledge, as seen in citation practices for example, make all scholars, including women scholars of color, complicit with a EuroAmerican male-dominant epistemic hegemony, further marginalizing minoritized scholars and alternative epistemologies.
Dr. Kubota has demonstrated a sustained and committed approach to mentoring within the Faculty of Education. Since 2009, she has mentored 22 Masters and Doctoral students, 20 of whom are international students. She is a dedicated mentor to pre-tenure faculty within the Faculty and to other scholars, particularly Asian women, outside UBC.
Dr. Kubota’s research has led the field, introducing new inquiry topics and perspectives as well as examining other themes that promote linguistic, cultural and human diversity and justice.
Discover more about Dr. Kubota’s work and the Envisioning Equality project.
