The TransLab is an interdisciplinary research hub that supports the production and dissemination of leading-edge research in Transgender Studies.
The TransLab prioritizes decolonial actions that challenge colonial violence, including the imposition of settler gender norms. We aim to center Indigenous peoples and trans* people who are multiply marginalized. By considering the impact of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, our work contributes to social movements seeking justice.
We value intellectual and political resistance, as well as the subversion of neoliberal academic norms. The lab is inspired by the late trans
philanthropist Reed Erickson who funded research that “was too new, controversial, or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support.” We aim to facilitate a creative meeting place for the undercommons, which is Harney and Moten’s (2013) term for an ungovernable realm within academia.
Learn more about the TransLab’s innovative research concentrations.
Community-based participatory research is a deeply collaborative and social change-oriented approach to qualitative research. It aims to include all those who are involved in the research process as collaborators and partners, especially the community members who are most impacted by the study. This accessible research process recognizes that each person can make essential contributions to knowledge production.
This approach is particularly valuable when conducting research with marginalized communities that have historically been the of academic study, with very little consideration of their voices and needs. For example, Two-Spirit, transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse people have been scrutinized by researchers in a pathologizing way, often to try and find the “cause” of gender difference. With a community-based approach, marginalized people are seen as experts on their own lives and are empowered as who can direct interventions into complex social problems.
Critical Theory is a scholarly approach to many different humanities and social science disciplines based in the Frankfurt School. It aims to reveal, analyze, and challenge the invisibilized power structures that shape our everyday experiences. The various perspectives that fall under this umbrella–such as critical race theory and post-colonialism–recognize that culture and social structures have a profound impact on the subjugation or oppression of specific groups of people.
Transgender Studies has drawn from several different academic disciplines to challenge the primacy of cisgender perspectives and its imbedded social norms. These taken-for-granted gendered structures have a multitude of impacts on Two-Spirit, transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse people including access to medical care, incarceration, violence, and erasure. With critical theory, scholars are given the theoretical tools to interrogate, deconstruct, and imagine trans* lives otherwise.
Arts-based research is a series of qualitative methods that use artistic interventions in academic research. Although the use of art in research is expansive, some examples include the incorporation of photovoice, digital storytelling, movement improvisation, performance, sculpture, collage, and zine making. This approach to research is often participatory, and has strong roots in arts-based therapy, feminist research, queer political movements, and disability activism.
“Research-creation” an emergent method that combines scholarly investigation and creative practice within the Canadian neoliberal university. Given that some research-creation values the production of art as a research output in-and-of-itself (instead of writing a research paper, for example), it inherently subverts traditional research outcomes. Two-Spirit, transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse people have long used art and craft as a form of political activism and visibility.
Dr. Tobias Wiggins (he/him) is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University (AU) currently living in Treaty 7, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His research specializations include transgender mental health and sexuality, psychoanalysis, research-creation, queer visual culture, and cisgender psychology. Wiggins’ work addresses the ongoing pathologization of gender diversity and supports trans-competent care and social advocacy. At AU, he coordinates the University Certificate in Gender & Social Justice Counselling, a program that integrates contempoary intersectional feminist and social justice theory with applied counselling practice and community-based mental health work.
Dr. Wiggins’ recent scholarly outputs include contributions to significant trans anthologies like The Queerness of Psychoanalysis (2024), Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care (2023), Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities (2020); journals including Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2022), The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (2021), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (2020); as well as community-based publication projects and digital storytelling.
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