Cancer’s margins BC
In British Columbia, we conducted interviews from 2012-14. To contact Dr. Mary K. Bryson, email them at mary.bryson@ubc.ca
Dr. Mary K. Bryson
Dr. Mary K. Bryson, Cancer’s Margins Principal Investigator
Mary K. Bryson is Director, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and Professor, Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Mary is a proud Board of Directors member, of Vancouver’s Catherine White Holman Wellness Centre, which provides low-barrier wellness services to transgender and gender nonconforming people.
Mary is a gender nonconforming, queer advocate for social justice efforts within higher education and far beyond the University. Mary led a successful campaign for same-sex partner benefits at her Vancouver home University, UBC, in 1989, and has taught courses in queer theory and critical gender and sexuality studies. Mary was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer and during that period (2007-2009), authored a queer and trans* cancer blog Adventures in Deconstruction.
Dr. Mary Bryson’s research focuses on social media, sexuality and gender and the politics of social justice initiatives that aim to create and to support, all-genders, trans* and queer public knowledge sites. Mary was awarded the 2012 Significant Body of Work Award (Queer Studies SIG, American Educational Research Association) and the Pioneer in Media and New Technology Award (2000), has authored numerous articles on gender, sexuality and media (http://ubc.academia.edu/MaryKBryson), presented multiple invited keynotes, and been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Western Sydney, Centre for Critical Psychology.
Dr. Lorna R. boschman
Dr. Lorna Boschman, Project Coordinator
Dr. Lorna Boschman worked as a post-doctoral fellow with Mary Bryson and was the project coordinator for the Cancer’s Margins project. She co-designed and led the Cancer’s Margins Digital Storytelling Workshop with Dr. Bryson. Before attending graduate school, she had a long career as a media artist and director of award-winning socially engaged videos. A Cancer Video (1996) was a video collaboration with a friend who had breast cancer and her son; Lorna also directed three videos about the queer art collective Kiss & Tell. In March 2011, she was selected as a featured media artist at the Panorama of Quebec and Canadian Video, 29 FIFA Festival International Du Film Sur L’Art in Montréal.
For the past decade, Lorna has been active in community-based media projects, at first as a director, and then as a researcher. She began to work with art-based methodologies while conducting her MA research, meeting weekly with a group of adults with developmental disabilities (or ‘self-advocates’ as they call themselves) who learned to direct their own videos. Her 2010 contribution to Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice was a chapter called Community Media Arts, Encouraging Citizenship Through Creative Self Expression. During her doctoral studies at SFU, she conducted mixed methods research, tracking how women over forty incorporated the active game Wii Fit Plus into their overall program of physical activity. She is a founding member and project leader for the East Van Digital Literacy Project.
Dr. Mary K. Bryson and Dr. Lorna Boschman at the Vancouver Public Library