The Pop Culture Cluster is committed to collaborative, interdisciplinary, innovative arts-based research and reciprocal community-engaged work, none of which is possible without fostering and engaging with a rich network of researchers, practitioners, and community knowledge keepers. If you’re interested in partnering with us, send us an email pop.culture@ubc.ca.
Research Partnerships
Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (Turtle Island Cluster)
The UBC Pop Culture Cluster supports the Turtle Island Cluster of the SSHRC-funded Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project hosted at the University of Victoria. The Turtle Island Cluster is situated in two regions of Canada, Vancouver and Ottawa, with two graphic narratives emerging through the collaboration of Indigenous co-leads, Shannon Leddy and Duncan McCue, settler scholar Biz Nijdam, Indian Residential School survivors and two Indigenous graphic novelists.
Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North
Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North is a three-year, Indigenous-led initiative that connects storytellers, artists, and scholars from across the Circumpolar North to share stories of Indigenous survivance through comics, documentary film, podcasts, and digital media. Spanning Canada, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Sápmi (Norway, Sweden, Finland), and Denmark, the project brings together First Nation, Métis, Inuit, and Sámi knowledge holders to co-create graphic narratives and arts-based public programming that highlight resilience, resurgence, renewal, revival, and resistance.
Youth Perspectives on Trauma-Informed Care
This partnership brings together pediatric health researchers at BC Children's Hospital, the Canadian Paediatric Society, and comics artists to co-create knowledge mobilization tools that centre youth perspectives in BC health care. Guided by a national Youth Advisory Council, the collaboration draws on community-based participatory methods to ensure that young people’s lived experiences shape how trauma-informed care is understood and practiced.
Learn more
Exams Under Anaesthesia (EUA) Graphics: Equity and Neurodiversity in the Operating Room
Led by Dr Elizabeth Nijdam, in collaboration with community-based pediatrician Anamaria Richardson, this project brings cartoonists together with neurodiverse children and their families to create short graphic novels based on the experiences in the BC healthcare system. This project focuses on the often challenging and complex interactions that neurodiverse children, including those with autism, intellectual impairments, and limited verbal capacity, face within medical settings.
Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference & the Monolingual University
This UBC project, directed by Drs. David Gramling and Ervin Malakaj, seeks to address the "muffledness" of visual imagery depicting multilingualism by expanding the multilinguistic visual imagination, pushing past simple and simplistic answers. Six artists are creating critical, conceptual, experiential, personal, and political visual narratives of various kinds that test the boundaries and critical power of the concepts of Linguaphobia (fear of language(s), Linguistic Disobedience, Linguistic Indifference, the Monolingual University and Authoritarian Language.
Community Partnerships in Comics
Rain City Comic Con
Rain City Comic Con is a new convention for the comic and visual arts, started by a coalition of independent publishers and comics affiliates in the Greater Vancouver Area. The UBC Comics Studies Cluster is a coalition member with Weirdspace and Soaring Penguin Press.
Cloudscape Comics Society
Cloudscape Comics is an ongoing partner with the UBC Comics Studies Cluster, playing a vital role in helping to facilitate connections between UBC comics projects and the local comic arts community.
Remember Comics Project
The Remember Comics Project is an ongoing collaboration between Education without Borders, the UBC Comics Studies Cluster, Indigenous Storybooks, Homalco journalist and media personality Tchadas Leo, and the Homalco First Nation.
Community Partnerships in Games
Pe Metawe Games
David Plamondon (Whitefish Lake First Nation), co-owner of Edmonton-based Pe Metawe Games, has been a long-time collaborator on Indigenous-led PopCC gaming initiatives including facilitating board game workshops for Games for Decolonization and speaking about Indigenous representation and agency during the Games and Social Justice Lecture Series.
GoodBot
We are exploring a range of granting opportunities to fund a critical play project called "Ready or Not: Critical Thinking for Digital Spaces - A Systems Thinking Curriculum to prebunk online harms and strengthen youth resilience." Led by the Pop Culture Cluster and GoodBot in partnership with BrainTrainr, and the Students Commission of Canada, the project brings together educators, community leaders, and youth to build a shared understanding of how digital systems affect civic life through a series of role-playing simulations.
ProtoCon BC
The Pop Culture Cluster was a Silver sponsor of ProtoCon BC 2025, a playtesting conference in Burnaby November 7-9.
We sponsored tickets for UBC Critical Play Fellows, members of UBC Wargamers, and for three Indigenous game designers to playtest their games.
Terminal City Tabletop Convention
In 2025, the Pop Culture and Comics Studies Clusters were Gold sponsors of the Terminal City Tabletop Convention and organized the Roundtable on Indigenous Voices in Tabletop Games as part of the convention program.
Vancouver Playtest
We are exploring a new partnership with Vancouver Playtest, a local playtesting group for testing and developing new board game prototypes. Playtesters help test games, share feedback on how to improve them, and also bring their own game prototypes to be playtested or to find collaborators.
The Game Master Tim
The GM Tim collaborates with the Critical Play Lab through role-playing tabletop game workshops that are designed to help creators draw inspiration from pop culture and cultural texts for RPG storytelling, worldbuilding, and other writing.