University of British Columbia Okanagan Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies

The University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO) is a relatively young campus, having welcomed its first students in 2005. As of Fall 2024, it enrolls about 10,500 undergraduates and just under 1,500 graduate students. It emphasizes Indigenous, community, and global engagement. 

Because the university is relatively small, it has never been feasible for it to offer Master’s and PhD programs in all traditional disciplines, though it does offer them in many fields, including psychology and English. However, some disciplines at UBCO could not support a standalone graduate program, and so out of necessity, the university became inventive. Prior to 2018, it was possible to pursue an entirely individualized course of interdisciplinary graduate study. However, this resulted in a lack of cohesive programming and few administrative guardrails, with students and advisors essentially making the program up as they went along. 

To address these problems, pool resources, and provide students with much-needed structure and community, the program was reorganized between 2017 and 2019 into interdisciplinary “themes” that draw on UBCO’s unique strengths. Each theme is an academic unit centered around a broad idea or grand challenge. Faculty are drawn from departments across campus. As of 2024, UBCO’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies (IGS) program offers Master’s degrees and PhDs in:

• Community Engagement, Social Change, Equality (CESCE)
• Global Studies
• Indigenous Knowledges
• Power, Conflict, and Ideas
• Sustainability
• Urban and Regional Studies
• Digital Arts and Humanities (DAHU)

The reorganization into themes provided administrative structure and allowed IGS to hire an administrator, Colin McKay. Along with McKay, IGS Program Coordinator Helen Yanacopulos and faculty theme coordinators comprise the administrative heart of the program. CESCE faculty coordinator Virginie Magnat notes that the theme coordinators work to support students within each theme but also across all themes. She acknowledges that this “takes time and a lot of openness and willingness to speak across themes and areas of research” that would not usually come into contact with each other, but it is part of a collective effort to avoid siloing. 

One crucial administrative and bureaucratic advantage IGS has in contrast to interdisciplinary programs at other universities is that its budget is centralized. IGS does not depend on departments for its funding, nor does it ask them to donate faculty teaching hours. Yanacopulos and McKay noted the benefits of not having to request funds every year from multiple deans or chairs, which can introduce too much variance into the annual budget. Instead, all tuition dollars get paid into the “bank of IGS,” which is then used to fund teaching buyouts to the departments. Scholarship funds and administrative salaries also come out of the centralized IGS pot, though TAships and RAships are often funded through departments or individual faculty researchers. Centralized funding for an interdisciplinary program is critically important for maintaining truly interdisciplinary structures, Yanacopulos and McKay emphasize, and it requires buy-in from very senior members of the university.

Although the organization of graduate programs into interdisciplinary themes stemmed from necessity, it was in alignment with an ethos of interdisciplinary and community engagement that permeates UBCO as a whole. Magnat says that faculty who participate in IGS are almost always interdisciplinary in their own work: “There’s a foundation of interdisciplinary research at UBCO that was there to begin with.” The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), for example, includes departments such as Community, Culture, and Global Studies; Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science; and History and Sociology.” The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCCS) includes disciplines from across the fine arts and the humanities. Founding coordinator for the Digital Arts and Humanities (DAHU) theme Karis Shearer notes that the organizational divide between creative and critical faculty doesn’t exist at UBCO the same way it does at most universities in North America, and this allows students and faculty to do work that merges the two. Involvement with IGS often deepens faculty members’ understanding of other disciplines by bringing them into contact with colleagues they would not otherwise meet. The dissertation committee of Nassim Zand-Dizari, a PhD candidate in CESCE, includes members in sound studies, cultural heritage, gender studies, and anthropology focusing on creative ethnography.

An IGS PhD is intended to take four years, and students are required to do many of the same things they would need to do to earn their degrees at other universities, such as comprehensive exams and coursework. There are a number of courses that are shared by all IGS themes, and that means that faculty often end up teaching subjects other than their discipline. Magnat, whose home department is Theater and Performance, has taught the advanced qualitative research methods course for IGS since 2017. She teaches it from an interdisciplinary perspective, encouraging students to look at all the ways different disciplines have contributed to qualitative research. 

In addition to the focus on interdisciplinarity, there is also an emphasis on community engagement, in alignment with UBCO’s mission and identity. Zand, whose dissertation work focuses on Iranian women refugees in Vancouver, says that the four-year program can be a challenge for community-engaged projects, because human collaboration requires relationship building that is difficult to rush. The academic system assumes a linear process, but community engagement is iterative. However, Zand said that IGS is open to this feedback and has made some accommodations for students doing community-engaged research. 

Similarly, within the DAHU theme, there is a strong emphasis on the public humanities and research-creation, with students doing work that is accessible but also provides a critical framework. DAHU graduate Gao Yujie’s dissertation project, “Flowing to Unsettle,” “[invited] participants to explore the elasticity of experiential time through a durational performance” over the course of 6 weeks. This performance was highly participatory; Gao wanted those who attended “to engage with their own temporal perceptions in an embodied experience where they are encouraged to slow down, reflect, and connect with the environment.” 

Far from being a typical proto-monographic dissertation, “Flowing to Unsettle” is considered a “research-creation” project. That such projects have taken root in the DAHU theme is not an accident. Shearer’s first move as the founding coordinator of the theme was to recognize a report from the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies about reforming the PhD dissertation. This is yet another area where UBCO’s relative youth as a campus was an advantage, as there was not yet an ingrained commitment to a particular type of dissertation. There is a high level of enthusiasm and acceptance for diverse modes of scholarship, Shearer says, but there is still a lot of work to be done around assessment and expectations. To avoid students embarking on projects that spiral out of control, the faculty need to ensure they have the capacity to teach students a diverse set of skills or that students come into the program with those skills already in place. 

IGS degrees prepare students for both academic jobs and jobs beyond the academy. Yanacopulos notes that interdisciplinarity is rarein university structures, and that academic jobs and the tenure process remains biased toward scholars with strong disciplinary training. This can be a challenge for applicants whose work does not fit neatly into disciplinary boxes. That landscape seems to be changing; Canadian universities are seeing increasing numbers of interdisciplinary departments and positions. Yanacopulos and McKay believe that IGS is ahead of its time, and while the world catches up, they take seriously the need to ensure that their students are successful in the current job markets. To this end, a year-long professionalization core course offers students a chance to develop both academic and industry professional skills through curated guest speaker presentations, publication development, and other career-related exercises.

The outlook for IGS at UBCO is bright. Enrollment has held steady across most programs over the last several cohorts, with the highest enrollment in the CESCE program. Moreover, Yanacopulos––who sits on three dissertation committees––says that the quality of applications and students in the programs is very high, especially for a relatively young program. They have just started a new theme, Indigenous Knowledges, and Yanacopulos and McKay expect proposals for more themes. This will necessitate some consolidation so themes don’t proliferate, but the flexibility of the program allows for this. Indeed, the IGS themes at the University of British Columbia Okanagan provide a roadmap for flexible, interdisciplinary, rigorous, community-engaged graduate education.