As we welcome new people to the FEELed Lab, we want to make space for longer introductions to project team members and research affiliates joining us this year. This profile is on long-time FEELed Lab friend Robin Metcalfe, who officially joined the lab as a researcher in September 2025.
- Can you tell us about your work/research?
My doctoral research explores the implementation and implications of the Accessible British Columbia Act [SBC 2021]. This work focuses on self-advocates’ leadership and experience in advancing the implementation of the BC accessibility law. I am also thinking in the overlap of disability justice, health justice, and climate justice. I’m interested in how BC’s new accessibility law can be leveraged. There is potential in embedding (critical) access from the ground up. I’m also learning from multi-sectoral efforts where disability-led mapping and advocacy shape more just, ‘care-full’ responses to climate risk.
2. Why did you want to work with the FEELed Lab?
The commitments to interdisciplinarity and community-engaged, anti-colonial research practices at the FEELed Lab expand my thinking and learning experience through many thoughtful initiatives throughout the year. I have attended FEELed Lab events over the entire course of my learning at UBC, and have been influenced by the work of amazing FEELed Lab graduate researchers since the outset. Emphasis on care, emotional/expressive, embodied, Land-based and relational aspects of learning and research have made the FEELed Lab a place for dreaming more creatively. I meet people through the FEELed Lab whose work stretches me, and the trees and creek at the FEELed Lab are a treasured outlet when I am despairing in academic process and sociopolitical realities of the moment.
3. Why are expansive engagements with environmental issues important?
Expansive engagements allow us to be humbled often, to be constantly tickled with curiosities, to wonder about how seemingly unconnected things might be connected, and to listen more patiently. All the better for asking different kinds of questions, and to think of ourselves in relational dimensions that could easily be sidelined with narrower, pointed, engagements. Expansive engagements help me be moved, and be with complexity. I find the expansiveness of FEELed Lab efforts on environmental issues help me see the interconnectedness of everything, and help me remember to approach things e x p a n s i v e l y, with wide eyes and openness. In relation to my current directions in research, I think about how it helps me see where disability justice, environmental justice, and health justice connect, and how I can try to locate myself so I can learn through this interconnectedness.
The FEELed lab 