Maj Britt Jensen
Why did you decide to pursue a graduate degree?
Seven years of rich and varied non-academic experience, self-lead research-based artistic practice, and the two years of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the School for the Contemporary Arts (SFU) made clear to me that if I want to be able to make meaningful interventions to the field of contemporary art and combine my work as visual artist with generous and critical teaching —today’s classrooms require knowledge to be situated, interrogated, and updated through thought that acknowledges positionality, and happens in-between disciplines—then I need to strengthen my thought into something that can stand the dialogue with my visual production, while expanding the structure for the understanding of my (emergent and future) praxis. A graduate degree allows for the required time, space, and resources.
Why did you decide to study at UBC?
UBC and my program are the specific environment that will guarantee that rigorous critique and subversive creativity, research and artistic practice can be pursued simultaneously without having to organize any of the parts into a hierarchy; in-depth research, extensive writing, and above all the development of artworks across media (performative installations, re-enactments, videos, audios, and drawings). My research is a search for ethical and political kinds of connectivities and needs to be done within an institution that appreciates non-conformity and risk.
What is it specifically, that your program offers, that attracted you?
The decision to pursue the PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the Social Justice Institute (UBC) is directly related to its socially and politically committed faculty, the interdisciplinary nature of the program, and the existence of the Critical + Creative Social Justice Studies research stream.