Opportunities

Become involved in the many scholarly and social activities that make up the life of UBC Anthropology and the university.

Anthropology Graduate Student Association

The Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) is a student collective responsible for managing student affairs, organizing social activities, and articulating graduate students’ interests to the department and the university as a whole.

The AGSA appoints representatives as voting members on several department and campus committees, and liaises with other organizations on campus. A new group of student representatives are elected each year.

Anthropology Graduate Student Symposium & Other Meetings

The annual Anthropology Graduate Student Symposium event is organized entirely by graduate students in UBC Anthropology.

Lasting two days, both graduate and undergraduate students deliver papers and multimedia presentations of their research.

UBC students also regularly present papers at meetings of the Canadian Anthropology Society, the American Anthropological Association, and the Northwest Anthropology Society, among others. 

Several UBC students have won prizes from these organizations for outstanding papers in recent years.

Research Collaboration

Graduate students often collaborate with faculty on research projects, working as research assistants and associates, and developing thesis topics from joint projects.

In recent years, faculty and students have had multidisciplinary collaborations on projects studying BC fisheries, archaeological sites on the Northwest Coast, Mexico and the Arctic, oral history of the Yukon, Indigenous justice, the colonial history of Papua New Guinea, women’s history in South America, and Alzheimer’s disease, among many other topics.

Students are strongly encouraged to publish the results of their research in scholarly journals.

Department Seminars

Both the Department’s Seminars and Special Events Committee and the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) schedule regular seminars on topics of interest.

Speakers include graduate students and faculty reporting on their own research, visitors passing through Vancouver to and from field research, spokespeople from First Nations communities, and invited scholars.

The Department hosts the Hawthorne Lecture every other year and invites scholars of note to speak. Past speakers include Claude Levi-Strauss, Lila Abu-Lughod, Marshall Sahlins, Tim Ingold, Marilyn Strathern, Marisol de la Cadena, and Sherry Ortner.

The Department of Anthropology has inaugurated, along with the Department of Sociology, an annual invited lecture on Racial (In)Justice.

Social Events

Both UBC Anthropology and the Museum of Anthropology host events at which graduate students may meet and mingle with each other and faculty members. In recent years our Department seminars are usually followed by receptions with sushi in our Faculty and Graduate Student lounge.

Teaching Assistantships

Student service appointments, or Teaching Assistantships, are intended to help qualified UBC students meet the cost of their studies at the university, as well as to assist the University in meeting its educational objectives.

Teaching Assistantships (TAs) are coordinated and administered at the departmental level. TAs work an average of twelve hours a week, for a total of 192 hours a term.

The call for TA positions for each Winter session is posted around May of each year. Students are typically notified of any TAships awarded for the Winter session by mid-July.

Current Anthropology graduate students who have not previously held a TA position within the department should submit a TA application form and two TA recommendation forms to the Graduate Office no later than May1st of each year.