Lisbeth Berbary

Contact information

Office: B.C. Matthews Hall (BMH) 2210

Phone: 519-888-4567, ext. 45404

Email: lberbary@uwaterloo.ca

Research interests

My current work moves to reverse the directionality of academic research by extracting from the university to offer funded labour as research practice to ongoing community-led justice projects. I mobilize with Becoming Coalition, a group of subversive scholars whom out of organic, radical collaborations move with shared radical politic athwart identities against tyranny and toward useful connections grounded in love, respect, and community among the academy’s oppressive structures and beyond. Together we grapple with current moments of racialized formations (Omi & Winant, 1994), pandemic practices, academic policing, equity projects (EDI) and our use amongst it all. We constantly find ourselves “formulating critique of the ways that social justice movements have felt, and where [our] longing for something else was strongest” (Brown, 2017, p. 44). Our current work engages “longing as method” for unearthing those embodied yearnings that arise within us against discontents, empty promises, and institutional lackings towards useful questionings, hope-full cravings, and progressive desires for more just futurities for our world(s), academies, and utopias beyond. In conversation with various radical thinkactors, we, as Becoming Coalition, trace our longings as method for mobilizing and organizing towards more beautiful worldsenses (Oyéwùmi,, 1997). We begin with, and constantly revisit, a question that moves us to action, triggered by our readings of Ahmed (2019): how can we continuously become of use to ourselves, each other, and our communities? 

Graduate supervision and student opportunities

I am currently accepting applications from graduate students with research interests related to:

• Liberatory social theorypractices (critical, feminist, critical race, Black radicalisms, poststructural, queer, decolonizing, post humanist, abolition)

• Qualitative methodologies and decolonizing critiques of inquiry as invasion 

• Sociopolitical mobilizing/organizing/transformation with/in community 

• Creative Analytic Practices/Reverse research

Current Student Project Topics: abolishing the medical-industrial complex; complicating food care practices on stolen land; queer anti-gentrification; resisting gentrification in Little Jamacia, Toronto; understanding Black men’s racial formations towards health in higher education; and non-extractive tourisms for anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist escape. 

Graduate studies application details

Teaching interests

• Social theorypractices 

• Qualitative Inquiry/Post Inquiry

• Community transformation/Structural change

• Liberatory Leisure

• Onto-epistemological frameworks

Courses

• REC 201: Leisure and Social Justice
• REC 663: Foundations for Qualitative Inquiry
• REC 700: Foundations of Knowledge in Leisure Studies

Education

BA, Ithaca College

MSc, SUNY Cortland

PhD with graduate certificates in women's studies and interdisciplinary qualitative research, University of Georgia

Selected publications

See Google Scholar for a full list of publications.

Berbary, L.A. & Mohamed, L.A. (2022). Longing as method: A rant on yearnings for our world, academia, and utopian futurities beyond liberalism(s), Qualitative Inquiry. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221111379

Becoming Coalition, Berbary, L.A., Lopez, K.J., Moran, R.*, & Pereira, M.* (2022). Musings on Becoming the Ghost in the Machine: Writing into practice subversive academic relations towards care, Leisure/Loisir, Special Issue on Reimagining Academia 

Berbary, L.A. (2020). Theorypracticing differently: Re-imagining the public, health, and social research. Leisure Sciences. DOI: 10.1080/01490400.2020.1720872 

Burns (Moran), R* & Berbary, L.A. (2021). Placemaking as Unmaking: Settler Colonialism, Gentrification, and the Myth of “Revitalized” Urban Spaces, Leisure Sciences, 43:6, 644-660, DOI: 10.1080/01490400.2020.1870592 

Berbary, L.A. (2019). Creative Analytic Practices: Onto-epistemological and theoretical attachments, uses, and constructions within Humanist Qualitative Leisure Research, Leisure Sciences, (reprinted) 

Berbary, L.A. & Guzman, C. (Artist), (2018). We exist: Combating erasure through creative analytic comix about Bisexuality, Qualitative Inquiry, 24(7), 478-498. doi.org/10.1177/1077800417735628