John Paul (JP) Catungal

Candidate statement

Hello colleagues and friends. My name is JP. I am a queer Filipinx Canadian migrant scholar currently working at the University of British Columbia on unceded Musqueam territories (so-called Vancouver Canada). I am running for the AAAS Board as representative for the Pacific Northwest, Hawai’i, and Pacific Islands and Western Canada. I am interested in working with AAAS (i) to elevate community engaged research and public scholarship as politically attuned forms of academic practice, (ii) to advocate for Asian American studies scholars from outside the USA, and (iii) to help steward AAAS’ commitments to communities facing severe targeted violence, especially through state-led Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant and transphobic violence. These commitments also shape my academic and public scholarship, which has focused on the community organizing and cultural production work of Asian Canadian, LGBTQ+ and migrant groups in Toronto and Vancouver, and the kinds of knowledges, aesthetics and worlds that they produce as a result. I have had the pleasure of working with Filipinx Canadian and queer of colour organizations in Vancouver to use community based oral histories in order to name and address the marginalization of our concerns in policy and institutional conversations and to respond to the intersectionally racist impacts of gentrification, uneven arts funding, and one-size-fits-all design and delivery of health and education. As Co-Director of the UBC Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement, I also convene “Browning Asian Canada”, a public research and engagement series that amplifies work for and by South and Southeast Asian Canadian researchers and organizers in Vancouver. I am interested in mobilizing my position, skills and access to resources, as a university-based scholar, to work with and support marginalized communities’ ground-level organizing, knowledge making and advocacy work. If elected, I hope to use my position on the AAAS board to enact these commitments.

Candidate Biography:
Magandang araw po. My name is Dr. John Paul Catungal (JP for short). I am a queer, first generation Filipinx Canadian of Pangasinense descent. I work as an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. I am also founding Co-Director of the Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement at UBC, which facilitates, supports and conducts research in partnership with diverse Asian Canadian community partners in Vancouver. My scholarship is situated at the interface of critical human geography and queer of colour and feminist theorizing. Through community engaged research methods, I work with community organizations (including the Kababayan Academic Mentorship Program, Sliced Mango Collective, Heritage Vancouver Society and the hua foundation) to document and theorize diverse Asian Canadian community arts, activism and placemaking in Greater Vancouver and to engage in public facing, arts-based and policy oriented scholarship to amplify our communities’ histories, issues and agendas in policy circles and cultural and creative institutions. I have also had the pleasure of collaborating with fellow Filipinx Canadian and queer of colour studies scholars. I have served as co-editor of the volume “Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility” (University of Toronto Press); a special section of TOPIA: Canadian Journal for Cultural Studies on “Queer/Asian/Canadian”; and the first of two special issues of Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies titled “FilipiNEXT: Filipino Studies in Canada”.