Lead Researchers
Aaron Devor, PhD, FSSSS, FSTLHE, has been studying and teaching about transgender topics since the early 1980s. He is the world’s first Chair in Transgender Studies, Founder and Subject Matter Expert for the world’s largest Transgender Archives and the Founder and Host of the international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational Moving Trans History Forward conferences.
He has published widely on transgender topics and has delivered lectures to audiences around the world. He is an out trans man and a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Sarah M. Steele, PhD, (they/them) is a postdoctoral scholar for the Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, BC with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Sarah’s academic work, activism and research interests lie at the intersections of race, sexuality, and trans and queer politics. Sarah spent many years building community with incarcerated LGBTQ/HIV+ folks in the United States and enjoys urban gardening in their free time.
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Advisory Committee
Jennifer Metcalfe, LLB (she/her) is the Executive Director of human rights of people in prison.
Melissa Munn, PhD, is an an activist and criminologist working at Okanagan College, BC. Dr. Munn operates the only open-access, virtual library of Canadian prisoner-generated materials (www.penalpress.com). Her areas of expertise are the effects of long-term imprisonment, penology, parole, and the rehabilitation & reintegration of prisoners. She also has extensive experience traveling to prisons to work with convicts, their support people and community agencies.
Nyki Kish is a community engaged researcher who works with the University of British Columbia and The University of Victoria. Nyki is also the Associate Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies which works to address the persistent ways in which women and gender-diverse people impacted by criminalization are denied humanity and excluded from community. Nyki also has extensive experience advocating for the inclusion and equality of LGBTQ2S+ people who are federally incarcerated in Canada.
Wesley Crichlow, PhD is an African Canadian Critical Race Intersectional Queer Theorist whose work critically connects Theories of Anti-Black Racism and Decoloniality as the signature praxis and framing of his research, teaching and service. His work aims to provide measures to alleviate anti-Black racism, heterocisnormativity, transmisogyny, structural, and systemic inequalities. His current project works to understand the community re-entry needs of formerly federally incarcerated Black men who have a range of same-gender experiences.
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We acknowledge and respect the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose territory the University of Victoria stands, and the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.