Role: Associate Professor in Education at the University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada

  Contact: michelle.stack@ubc.ca

  Research Interests:
Education | Social Justice | Media | Citizenship and Democracy

Michelle Stack is an associate professor in Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where she also serves as the coordinator of the Educational Administration and Leadership program.  Prior to coming to UBC in 2003 she served as the Communications Director for the British Columbia Children’s Commission.  She was also a political advisor to a former Minister of Education.  Having worked with children, youth, journalists and educators, she is keen to understand how to strategically engage with media and policymakers on critical issues of education.  Michelle is also interested in how children and youth could be included more in how they are represented in the media. Issues of social justice and equity are central to her work.  More recently she has done work on the use of standup comedy as a strategy for challenging notions of the deserving and undeserving and the legitimate knower.

Michelle’s work focuses on the ways in which institutions are increasingly constituted through media. She is interested in how we come to know about “troubled” and “troublesome” young people through media, and the ways in which this knowing is gendered and racialized within institutions. Her research also examines how journalists and policymakers determine whether policy ideas meet the test of common sense through both their own media consumption and production.

While at Emory, she worked with Professor Martha Albertson Fineman on issues of equity, and developing strategies for the implementation of a vulnerability approach across government ministries, boards, agencies and commissions. Michelle is particularly keen to work on strengthening and developing structures for academic-policymaker engagement and exploring the role of media within these exchanges.