Dr. Robert L.A. Hancock

Bio

Dr. Rob Hancock (he/him/his) is Metis on his mother’s side and English Canadian on his father’s, although he was born and raised, and is grateful to live and work, in the territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people.

He earned degrees from the University of Victoria (PhD, Interdisciplinary Studies; MA, History) and McGill University (BA Honours, Anthropology and Canadian Studies) and held postdoctoral fellowships in First Nations Studies at the University of Western Ontario and in Anthropology at UVic.

Since 2020, Rob has held the role of associate director academic in the Office of Indigenous Academic and Community Engagement, where his responsibilities include co-teaching research and community engagement methods to cohorts of Indigenous students through LE,NONET and engaging in projects and initiatives that advance the university’s commitments to Indigenization and decolonization in the Indigenous Plan and the Strategic Plan. Building on his work with LE,NONET, he also serves as the UVic primary applicant for the BC Network Environment for Indigenous Health Research, a training program for Indigenous student researchers (supported by CIHR).

Research

Trained as a historian of anthropology, Rob’s research and teaching interests fall in a two distinct but related areas: (1) the representations of Indigenous peoples in the social sciences, primarily but not exclusively within anthropology; and (2) the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the state, particularly in northern North America.

His research focuses simultaneously on the discipline’s past and on the ways that understandings of that past have been and continue to be constructed and used by current practitioners. He is interested in the contexts from which anthropological research and theory have emerged, and in the uses to which they have been put beyond the discipline (in fields such as Indigenous studies and Indigenous education). While grounded in his training in anthropology and history, his work crosses disciplinary boundaries, and he has done a considerable amount of research, publishing, and teaching in Indigenous studies and Indigenous post-secondary education.

Rob has three ongoing research projects. The first, along with his colleagues at the University of Alberta, Dr. Adam Gaudry (Faculty of Native Studies) and Danielle Lorenz (Faculty of Education), is an analysis of Indigenous strategic documents at Canadian universities (supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant).

For the second, he is conducting archival research exploring the influence of Indigenous anthropologists (including D’Arcy McNickle, Edward Dozier, Beatrice Medicine, Robert K. Thomas, and Alfonso Ortiz) on the emergence of American Indian Studies as a discipline in the 1960s and 1970s (supported by a Research Fellowship from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and a Platzman Memorial Fellowship from the University of Chicago Libraries).

The third project builds on his work as a scholar-practitioner with 15 years of experience in Indigenous Student Affairs, where he is collaborating with colleagues across North America on journal articles, edited collections, and encyclopedia articles intended to help define and grow the field.

He is excited to engage with students whose research interests overlap with his own.

Interests

• Indigenous anthropology and anthropologists
• history and historiography of anthropology and anthropological theory
• Indigenous education and pedagogy (post-secondary)
• Indigenous–state relations
• Indigenous studies
• Metis studies

Publications

For an up-to-date list of Rob’s publications, please visit his Google Scholar page.