I’ve worked on a variety of academic and solutions-focused, ethnographic projects with First Nations and settler communities in Western Canada.  Methodologically, I’m interested in community and academic approaches to difficult knowledge production (silenced pasts, colonial impasses, contested representations and counter-histories). Community collaborations include: intergenerational family history with a Kwakwaka’wakw clan; counter histories of Indigenous activism; participatory projects with street-involved drug users and sex workers regarding violence, homelessness, stigmatization and health. Ethnographic research includes projects with several First Nations in reserve communities and adjacent settler towns. These projects dealt with colonial imaginaries of difference, place-making and memory as well as collaborative engagements around other colonial conflicts: cultural impact assessment (pipeline), food security (climate change) and regional oral history (national parks, immigrations, coal mining).  Work with personal narratives includes life stories, dream narratives, memoir, ethnographic witnessing, cultural archival forms and oral histories. I am also currently writing about intersections of the fantastic and the quotidian.

Current projects focus on the afterlife of historical colonialism, how people from diverse cultural and social locations inhabit their histories, the resources they draw upon to speak about them, and the role of anthropology in translating and interpreting them. This includes thinking about ways that community-initiated, social projects are contextualizing and revising historical anthropological narratives. 

I am also exploring visual representations and digital formats: animated power point videos, photo installations, digitial atlas, iMovie video, painting, graphic memoir. I recently compiled and edited an Open Access collection of dialogues with researcher-scholars-activists and graduate students.

Broadly, my research examines forms of social knowledge (public histories, witness accounts, anthropological theories and representations, colonial legends, medical discourses), as they circulate in sensitive political and cultural contexts (settler colonialism,  extractivism, medical crises, war, historical immigration, labour conflict).

Primary Research Projects:

(2019 –     ) Re-Inhabiting History: Making the Past in Nak’azdli Territory- Re-Animating Customary Memory Genres. Collaborative work with Nak’azdli Whut’en (Dené) Natural Resources Department. Traditional narratives, co-analyses of anthropological field notes, oral histories about colonial events and pre-colonial life. (SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant).

(2020- 2023) Ecologies of Harm: Mapping Contexts of Vulnerability in theTime of COVID-19. A collaborative, open access, digital mapping project to generate an atlas of ethnographic descriptions of overlapping contexts to make visible variations in ways that “vulnerability” is defined and experienced. With Maya Dario and Stephen Chignell. (SSHRC Explore RA Grant).   Project website: https://blogs.ubc.ca/ecologiesofharmproject/

(2013-2016) Reasserting ‘Namgis Food Sovereignty in an Era of Climate Change. With ‘Namgis Nation, Terre Satterfield PI. (Peter Wall Solutions Initiative).  What would it take (time, labour, cost, etc.), for the ‘Namgis Nation to be food sovereign?

(2011) Cultural impact assessment of the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline. With the Gitga’at First Nation, Hartley Bay, British Columbia. (Team: Terre Satterfield PI, Nancy Turner and Anton Pitts).

(2002 -2011) Collaboration with Kwaguł Gixsam, Yalis (Alert Bay).  Invited to join members of the Gixsam clan to research and write a collaborative, intergenerational history about their ancestor, Ga’ax̱sta’las / Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951), a Kwakwaka’wakw leader and activist who testified at the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, worked with Franz Boas, was the only woman on the executive of the Allied Indian Tribes of BC, and was a fierce advocate for the material needs of women and children.  Ga’ax̱sta’las’s descendants introduce a gendered history of the potlatch. Research included attention to diverse methodologies, memory practices and processes of cultural renewal.

 Books

Robertson, Leslie with the Kwaguł Gixsam. 2012. Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church and Custom. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. https://www.ubcpress.ca/standing-up-with-gaaxstalas

Robertson, Leslie. 2005. Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. https://www.ubcpress.ca/imagining-difference

Robertson, Leslie and Dara Culhane, eds. 2005. In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Vancouver: Talonbooks.

Journal Articles, Chapters and Research Reports

2024    North America, Intermountain West, Coexistence, Religion, 1992. In, Denielle Elliot and Matthew Wolf-Meyer, editors, Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing, pp. 273-282. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2023 The Dialogue Group. Praxis Dialogues : Academic Engagements with Knowledge in the World. L.Robertson, editor and Introduction, i-xvii. The University of British Columbia: Centre for Community-Engaged Learning and Department of Anthropology. Open Access resource, UBC cIRcle URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85694

2021 Robertson, Leslie, Maya Durio, Stephen Chignell, Anita Lacey, Sally Babidge. Mapping Contexts of Vulnerability in the Time of COVID-19. Society for Applied Anthropology News, November, 32 (4): 1-8. (https://www.appliedanthro.org/publications/news/november-2021/mapping-contexts-vulnerability-time-covid-19).

2021  Robertson, Leslie. Making Sense: Reflections on Event-Based Memoir in an Existential Mode. Multimodality and Society, 1 (3): 322-349. Special Issue, Sensate Memory. ( https://doi.org/10.1177/26349795211042761)

2018 / 2019 Robertson, Leslie and Paige Raibmon (Co-editors) Special Issue 50th Anniversary, BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 200: 1-186.

2017  Satterfield, Terre, Leslie Robertson, Nathan Vadeboncoeur and Anton Pitts. Implications of a Changing Climate for Food Sovereignty in Coastal British Columbia. In, Conservation in the Anthropocene Ocean: Interdisciplinary Science in Support of Nature and People. Phillip Levin and Melissa Poe eds., pp. 399-421. London: Elsevier.  

2016  Robertson, Leslie.  Cultural Anthropology: Methodological Possibilities, in Ethnology, Ethnography and  Cultural Anthropology. [26,000 words]. Edited by Paolo Barbaro, in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems  (EOLSS), Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, EOLSS Publishers, Paris, France, [http://www.eolss.net]. Includes: glossary of terms and annotated  bibliography (with Lindsay Moore).

2015  Satterfield, Terre, Leslie Robertson, Anton Pitts, Diane Jacobsen and the ‘Namgis First Nation.  Re-asserting ‘Namgis Food Sovereignty in an Era of Climate Change, OR Three Boats and a Pick-up Truck. (109pp. + appendices). Peter Wall Solutions Grant. Online UBC cIRcle: https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/facultyresearchandpublications/52383/items/1.0307423

2013  Robertson, Leslie. (Reprint): Taming Space: Drug Use, HIV and Homemaking in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, (314-320), in Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei eds. The Domestic Space Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

2012  Terre Satterfield, Leslie Robertson, Nancy Turner, and Anton Pitts.  ‘Being Gitka’a’ata: A Baseline Report on Gitka’a’ata Way of Life, a Statement of Cultural Impacts Posed by the Northern Gateway Pipeline, and a Critique of the ENGP Assessment Regarding Cultural Impacts.’ (125pp). Submitted to the National Energy Board, Joint Review Panel.

2007  Robertson, Leslie. Taming Space: Drug Use, HIV and Homemaking in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Gender, Place and Culture 14(5):527-549.

2006 Robertson, Leslie. Risk, Citizenship and Public Discourse: Coeval Dialogues on War and Health in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Medical Anthropology 25(4):297-330.

1998 Robertson, Leslie. A Penny for Your Thoughts: (Cultural) Properties of Anthropology in a Transnational Present, Anthropologica, XL (2): 97–214.

Editorial Work:

2016- 2018 Editor: BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly.

2018 -2019 Co-Editor: BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly.

2013/15    Ethnohistory Quarterly, Board of Editors. American Society for Ethnohistory, Duke University Press.

Robertson, Leslie A. with the Kwagu’ł Gixsam Clan, Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las:  Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and  Custom. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012.

2015   Finalist (1 of 5), François-Xavier Garneau Medal, Canadian Historical Association, (shortlist March).

2014   Canadian Committee on Women’s History Book Prize.  Women’s and Gender History. Canadian Historical Association, (May).

2013  Wheeler-Voegelen Prize, American Society for Ethnohistory, (September).

2013  Canadian Aboriginal History Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association, (June).

2013  Clio Book Prize – British Columbia, Canadian Historical Association, (June).

2013  Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Book Prize, Province of British Columbia, (May).

2013   K.D. Srivastava Prize (1 of 2), Office of the Vice-President Research and UBC Press, University of British Columbia (March).

Robertson, Leslie and Dara Culhane,  In  Plain Sight:Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.

2006     Winner, George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature and Publishing, George Ryga Society, BC Bookworld, and CBC Radio.

2005    Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award, In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown   Eastside Vancouver. City of Vancouver.

Associate Professor, Sociocultural Anthropology

Memory & colonialism; collaborative configurations;  indigenous and settler historiography; ethnography & oral history;  politics of health; constructions of difference; personal narratives.

Email: leslie.robertson@ubc.ca