Dr. John Paul “JP” Catungal recalls the moment he was first approached by a stranger on the topic of his own Queerness. It was in the early 2000s, in a geography 241 classroom at SFU during Catungal’s pursuit of an undergraduate degree in geography and sociology.
“I remember vividly a classmate asking if I was Queer,” he said. “And that was the first time in a very public way … I mean it was a one-on-one conversation, but that was the first time I felt confronted — not in a bad way — about acknowledging to someone else my Queerness.”
Geography 241 was formative for Catungal in more ways than one. This was the class that led him to tackle questions of transgression and sexuality in writing for the first time, questions that would go on to define his academic life for years to come.
Drawing on the work of British poet-geographer Tim Cresswell, particularly his 1992 book In Place/Out of Place, Catungal wrote a paper on schools and transgressive sexualities — those deemed “out of place” by establishment forces — for his class, taking as a case study the 1997 Surrey school board ban on select books depicting same-sex parents.
“I used that [ban] as a lens to think about schools and sexuality,” said Catungal. “When something is out of place, what does that reveal about how we understand place? Focusing on transgression allows us to actually identify the taken-for-granted norms that structure the world. If we say that something is out of place, we must have measures about what it means to be in place, right?”
The intersection of transgressive sexual identity with societally imposed norms got its hooks into Catungal. Now, 20 years later, he works as an assistant professor in critical racial and ethnic studies with UBC’s Social Justice Institute and was awarded a 2024/25 Faculty of Arts Killam Teaching Prize in recognition of his approach to mentorship and equity in the classroom.
The Killam Teaching Prize, one of many academic awards under the Killam Program umbrella overseen by the National Research Council, is adjudicated on the faculty level at UBC via an extensive nomination process.
“[The nomination] requires a dossier, really, that includes statements of [candidates’] teaching philosophy and practices, the kind of assignments that you do [and] the way you might think about questions of equity and difference and accessibility in the classroom,” said Catungal.
The philosophy of equity-forward teaching and mentorship described in Catungal’s nomination portfolio runs through all aspects of his academic life, he said, inextricable from the qualitative lived-experience-based research that he has conducted throughout his career.
“My work as an academic across all areas of professional practice … is shaped by a commitment to advancing equity and elevating historically marginalized people's agency and knowledge.”
Catungal’s commitment to the pursuit of truth and justice for marginalized peoples is reflected in his work on the HIV In My Day oral history project, an extensive database of interviews conducted with long-term HIV survivors and their caregivers between 2017 and 2020 aimed at recording and preserving personal histories of the epidemic from 1996 and earlier.
Catungal explained the people behind HIV In My Day — a multi-disciplinary group of community organizers, leaders and caregivers as well as academics mostly from SFU, UVic and UBC — designated ‘96 as the cutoff point for the scope of their research “because that was the year when more effective … therapies to manage AIDS became publicly available.”
Far from the extractive and stigmatizing methodologies that characterized early anthropological and sociological fields, the HIV In My Day project saw significant reciprocal collaboration with subjects. One interviewee, playwright Rick Waines, became involved in the project as a transcriber after sharing his history with the researchers. He went on to write and produce In My Day, what starring actor Alen Dominguez called “a verbatim theatre piece” in a 2022 interview with The Ubyssey on the production’s debut at The Cultch’s Historic Theatre.
The play, narratively based on stories shared by survivors during the HIV In My Day project, is set for another run at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre in March 2026. Catungal was involved in the Cultch production as chair of a Committee for Anti-Racism and Equity that he formed to help “ensure that the production of the play itself maintains its commitment to questions of equity.”
Catungal’s work is also influenced by his lived experience as a member of the Filipino diaspora in Canada. In a similar fashion to his work chronicling the HIV epidemic, he lent his expertise in 2023 to a project that used oral history as a tool of resistance to a rezoning plan that threatened several Filipino culinary institutions in Joyce Collingwood.
"Many of those businesses are businesses of significance to Filipino communities but also more broadly Asian and other racialized communities in East Vancouver,” said Catungal.
The lack of community consultation by developers and City Hall with the community on the impact of the project on these important businesses made it clear to many in the community that a more specific avenue for telling Filipino-Vancouverite stories was needed.
To address this, Heritage Vancouver Society, Sliced Mango Collective, UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies and the UBC Public Humanities Hub established Kuwentong Pamamahay (Tagalog for “Stories of Homemaking”), an oral histories database for Filipino Canadian stories.
Grassroots community projects like Kuwentong Pamamahay and HIV In My Day arising in resistance to overtures from repressive and marginalizing forces is central to Catungal’s academic perspective.
“I'm not just interested in the damage inflicted on historically marginalized communities, the violence they experience, the experiences of inequality that they live through but also their capacity to respond to them,” he said.
“Marginalized communities are far from passive actors in the world. They are great, courageous, creative movers of the world, and they intervene and adapt and imagine and create new worlds through the ways that they support each other.”
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