Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

2024-25


LJ Slovin received their PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. Their first book, Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, is based on a yearlong ethnography conducted with trans youth in a high school. In the study, Slovin interrogates how dominant approaches to trans-inclusivity in schools reproduce constrained understandings of trans identity that are informed by and uphold structures of whiteness, settler colonialism, and ability. Slovin focuses on how this context demands significant labour from youth, including work they must perform daily to navigate relationships with teachers, peers, the curriculum, policy, the physical space of the school as well as to build worlds outside of adult surveillance to exist in their genders more capaciously. Before joining as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre, Slovin was an instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC and in the Women’s Studies Program at Langara College. They will join the faculty at the School for Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria in 2025. Slovin was a Vanier Scholar, the 2020 recipient of the Pat Clifford Award, and the 2021 recipient of the Queer SIG Article of the Year Award at AERA. Their work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Sex Education, Journal of LGBT Youth, and RERM.



Ruth Ramsden-Karelse received her DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. She is currently completing her first monograph, Gays and Girls Make Worlds, which shows how gender and sexually diverse communities of colour living under apartheid in South Africa undertook the politically and culturally significant work of creating more just and expansive realities, with a particular focus on the GALA Queer Archive’s Kewpie Photographic Collection and associated depictions of Cape Town’s lost District Six. Building on this research, Ruth’s next major project will offer the first critical genealogy of the Southern African word moffie: customarily a pejorative descriptor for individuals read as effeminate men that has been recently reclaimed as a defiant term of self-identification in a manner comparable to queer in the global North. Prior to joining the Bonham Centre as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Ruth has been a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, a Research Associate at the University of Manchester’s Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, and Merton College’s inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Scholar. She remains an Associate of the Stuart Hall Foundation and is an organizing member of the queer South African collective Salon Kewpie. Her writing has appeared in publications including GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography and has been awarded a prize by the Queer African Studies Association.


Previous Post-Doctoral Fellows

2023-24: LJ Slovin

LJ Slovin received their PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. Their first book, Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, is based on a yearlong ethnography conducted with trans youth in a high school. In the study, Slovin interrogates how dominant approaches to trans-inclusivity in schools reproduce constrained understandings of trans identity that are informed by and uphold structures of whiteness, settler colonialism, and ability. Slovin focuses on how this context demands significant labour from youth, including work they must perform daily to navigate relationships with teachers, peers, the curriculum, policy, the physical space of the school as well as to build worlds outside of adult surveillance to exist in their genders more capaciously. Before joining as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre, Slovin was an instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC and in the Women’s Studies Program at Langara College. They will join the faculty at the School for Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria in 2025. Slovin was a Vanier Scholar, the 2020 recipient of the Pat Clifford Award, and the 2021 recipient of the Queer SIG Article of the Year Award at AERA. Their work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Sex Education, Journal of LGBT Youth, and RERM.


2021-22: Elif Sari

Elif Sari is the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology (2021) at Cornell University with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Before coming to anthropology, she received an M.A. (2014) in Near Eastern Studies at New York University and a B.A. (2011) in Political Sciences and International Relations at Bogazici University in Turkey, where she was born and raised. Elif’s scholarship lies at the intersections of transnational sexualities, migration, asylum, waiting, humanitarianism, and queer and critical race theory with a specific focus on the Middle East and its diasporas as well as collaborative, multimodal, and social justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production. Since 2014, she works as a co-editor for the Turkey page at Jadaliyya, an independent e-zine that provides critical analysis and pedagogy on the most pressing issues related to the Middle East and North Africa. Elif will join the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia as an Assistant professor in Fall 2022. More information about Elif’s work can be found on her website.


2019-21: Sara Shroff

Sara Shroff is the 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar at The Centre for Feminist Research/ Le Centre de recherches féministes at York University and a Fellow at the Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Most recently, Sara was an Assistant Professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, with joint appointments in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Political Science. From 2019-2021, Sara was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work takes up racialized histories of labor, capital, and coloniality of brown femininities alongside the geo-poetics of desire, migrations, and sacred knowledges. Sara’s work has appeared in top academic journals such as Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Kohl, and Third World Thematics as well as several anthologies in Peace Studies, Feminist Economics, South Asian Studies and International Relations. Sara received her PhD in Urban and Public Policy from The New School and has taught at The New School, New York University, and PACE University. She currently serves on the editorial board of Gender, Place & Culture and as a Co-Editor for the Conversations section of International Feminist Journal of Politics. She previously served as a committee member at the Saida Waheed Gender Institute and Queer Asia. Prior to joining academia, she worked in public policy, global philanthropy and finance for over 18 years.