The Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE) was established in 2005 as part of a successful UBC proposal for a Canada Research Chair and is a cultural studies research centre that focuses on exploring various facets of and developments in the comprehensive issue of identity and its educational implications in local and international cultural contexts. Located in the Faculty of Education with Handel Kashope Wright and André Elias Mazawi as co-directors, the CCIE is a collaborative, cultural studies glocal praxis centre, meaning that it emphasizes utilizing cultural studies and related discourses in the promotion of local cultural and activist work as well as collaborative research undertaken at the local, national and global levels.
At the local level, the CCIE forges and maintains links (town/gown relationships) with selected local educational institutions, cultural and activist organizations as well as targeted communities (e.g. Aboriginal and immigrant communities).
At the national and global levels, the CCIE is a focal point of national and international consortium of scholars working on identity and identification issues as well as on discourses that articulate and represent sociocultural diversity, the nation-state and nationalism and social and global justice. CCIE work is facilitated primarily through formal links in some cases and informal links in others with centres, programmes, laboratories and individuals (faculty, graduate student, and community activist CCIE Associates) undertaking related work locally and at other Canadian, American and international universities and organizations. The CCIE emphasizes research and activist work that troubles fixed notions of identity and established approaches to categorizing and making meaning of individuals and groups. In other words it undertakes and promotes work that:
- troubles established and taken-for-granted essentialist identities based on fixed, singular or binary concepts of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.
- troubles and/or remakes established discourses for addressing sociocultural identity, difference and diversity (e.g. multiculturalism, anti-racism, critical pedagogy, international education) in local, national and global contexts.
- explores and puts forward developments in relatively new identity categories (e.g. mixed raced, queer, diasporic, cosmopolitan).
- utilizes and contributes to the development of relatively new discourses for addressing sociocultural identity, difference and diversity (e.g. cultural studies, diasporic studies, cosmopolitanism, red pedagogy, post-critical pedagogy)
- addresses the implications of the cleavage of established and new identities and approaches for representation and social and global justice (e.g. schools and educational policy, sport and athlete identities, local communities and community, social cohesion and social policy).
- advocates equity and social justice and engages a politics of representation for marginalized groups locally, nationally and internationally.