Gloria (Yu-ting) Lin, PhD, is a first-generation Taiwanese scholar. Recognizing the privilege of growing up on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded homelands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, kʷikʷəƛ̓əm, qiqéyt and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ peoples (also known as Burnaby), Gloria is committed to carrying out her responsibilities as a racialized settler. Her research and teaching focus on unpacking the legacies of racism, colonialism, and imperialism in the public school and higher education systems and advocating for justice, equity, and inclusion for Indigenous and marginalized communities.
Gloria completed her doctoral degree in 2019 at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, “Decolonizing the Social Imaginaries of British Columbia’s International Education Phenomenon,” argued how contemporary expressions of development and growth do not consider colonial practices and historical patterns of global inequities. Her current research—inspired by Indigenous and marginalized intellectuals and embodied memories of her lived experiences—includes herstories as a multilingual, transnational, first-generation Taiwanese racialized and gendered immigrant child and youth in Canada. She also draws from her experiences as a researcher and educator in various educational and institutional spaces.
To express her research philosophy and approach, Gloria cites an article (please see the citation and link below) that she co-wrote with two other authors on the politics, pedagogies, and poetics of belonging:
As decolonizing activist-researchers dwelling at the borderland and periphery of western academy we find decolonizing and decolonial notions of research very meaningful because they help us to claim, reclaim, support and legitimize ‘other’ epistemological positions in the academy. ... This epistemological shift, along with recognizing participants as researchers and pedagogues with agency even as they participate in informal researcher/teaching roles, asks us to re-imagine research as a non-hierarchical teaching/learning/advocacy process rather than a method of investigation and discovery which echoes violent colonizing projects of history. (2012, p. 11)
As a postdoctoral fellow, Gloria will address essentialization, misrepresentation, and misinformation concerning the absence of international students and the internationalization of higher education in institutional engagements. As well, working with Dr. Amy Parent, Gloria continues to research Indigenization, decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Her most recent publication—co-authored with Dr. Parent and several SFU FoE doctoral students—was prepared in collaboration with Indigenous learners, teachers, and parents for the Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows School District and is a significant piece of empirical research. The report’s 97 recommendations highlight the need for “a transparent and authentic commitment to Indigenous education, while addressing anti-Indigenous racism and equity” (Parent et al., 2022, p. 3).
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