UBC LIBRARY BLOGGERS

Image courtesy of Martin Dee / UBC Brand & Marketing

Overview

Explore cIRcle’s growing collection of award-winning publications written by UBC undergraduate and graduate students, including winning papers from UBC Library’s Undergraduate Prize in Library Research! cIRcle has supported the deposit of student work since its inception, and encourages UBC’s students to explore how cIRcle can amplify their work by making it openly accessible to their peers around the world. These items showcase the unique intellectual output of UBC by highlighting the valuable and meaningful work that UBC students consistently produce, through their coursework and beyond.

Undergraduate Prize in Library Research

The Undergraduate Prize in Library Research acts to showcase students’ innovative and effective use of library services, information experts, and UBC library resources. Student award winners have created a variety of engaging and unique works that are currently available in cIRcle:

Ciara Albrecht’s project, A Memory of Skin and Bone : Lace as a Lifeline in Nineteenth Century Ireland, follows the relationship between Irish Lace and the lace-making artisans, utilizing visual and textual sources from the Music, Art & Architecture Library.

(Extra)ordinary People : Familial Memory and Heterotopia in the Visual Chinatown of Yucho Chow, by Alexei Villareal, focuses on five families photographed by Chinese-Canadian photographer Yucho Chow. In this report, Villareal explores the ways in which Chow’s portraits establish a ‘visual Chinatown’, and how they act as cultural resistance against historical erasure.

Ridhwanlai Badmos’ paper, Investigating Suicide Rates Across Demographic Subgroups in the Muslim American Community using Technical Frameworks, explores the underlying factors in suicide rates among the Muslim-American population and discusses ways to lower these rates through culturally sensitive interventions and improved mental health support systems.

Subject-Awards and Endowment Funds

cIRcle also hosts winning projects and papers from a variety of other subject-based awards and endowment funds. The UBC Okanagan Library’s Sharron Simpson Family Community Engagement Endowment Fund supports experiential learning that establishes and enhances university-community relationships with an emphasis on raising awareness of public history and regional identity. Mari Noble’s award-winning project, Metaphors of Beauty and Power in the Okanagan : Human-Centered Transfer of Knowledge through Metaphoric Language, is a photo essay that focuses the role of metaphor in the transfer of knowledge. Through this project, Mari examines how these metaphors are built through the lived experience of humans and therefore cannot be replicated via AI or machine learning.

The J. H. Stewart Reid Medal and Prize in Honours History is awarded to the honours history student with the most outstanding record. The 2025 recipient, Laura Silveira, wrote about the Carnation Revolution in Mozambique in their honours thesis, From Carnations to Complications : Decolonization and Portuguese-Mozambican Relations (1975-1977).

Maya Ballin’s graduate-level paper, “I’d Rather Have Something than Nothing” : Presence and Absence in the Records of Transracial, Transnational Adoptees, won the Gordon Dodd’s Prize and was published in Archivaria, the journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists. Ballin’s paper discusses the complex intersection of archival research and record-keeping with personal identity for adoptees.

Deposit Your Research

Are you a UBC student, or UBC faculty or staff supporting students with awards-oriented research? If so, please consult our Submissions page for more information about adding your work to cIRcle!

Further Reading

UBC Okanagan: Student Awards. University of British Columbia. Accessed November 19^th, 2025.

UBC Vancouver: Student Awards. University of British Columbia. Accessed November 19^th, 2025.

Submit Content: Undergraduate Work. cIRcle. Accessed November 19^th, 2025.

Submit Content: Graduate Work. cIRcle. Accessed November 19^th, 2025.