The School of Social Work is proud to celebrate Kristi Pinderi (UBC, BSW ’23, MSW ’25) for the successful completion of his Master of Social Work thesis. As one of the few MSW students to pursue the thesis route, Kristi has demonstrated exceptional dedication to advancing social work research and practice.
Kristi’s thesis can be accessed through UBC Library, Open Collections: UBC Theses and Dissertations:
The following is Kristi’s own reflection on his scholarly journey and thesis:
Eight years ago, I walked for the first time on the streets of UBC’s campus, fascinated by its beauty but also shocked by the idea that I could ever study there. I was almost afraid to think of that possibility.
Today, I presented my MSW thesis to my committee – Dr. Hannah Kia, Dr. Barbara Lee, and Dr. Trevor Goodyear – as the most recent milestone in the journey that began that afternoon. That journey took me back to school: at Langara College first, and from there into my BSW and MSW at UBC, where I have reinvented myself as a social worker.
This thesis was written on the stolen land of the Stó꞉lō Coast Salish people. In the Halqemeylem language, Stó꞉lō means river, and Stó꞉lō people proudly consider themselves river people. The river’s complex, rough, sometimes dangerous and uncertain curvatures remind me of my own journey in Canada. Arriving here in 2017 I was faced with the usual exclusions of being new and foreign. Learning from Leanne Simpson about the Indigenous concept of biskaabiiyaang – to turn back your head not to mourn what you have lost but to gain power to reproduce it in a new setting – I realized I could bridge my previous experience as a queer activist with my new life in Canada by becoming a social worker and redirecting my commitment to social justice into this new home.
My thesis drew on the stories of eight participants: five with lived experience as 2S/LGBTQ+ former youth in care, and three current or former child welfare practitioners. Guided by interpretive description and using photo-elicitation interviews, I identified four themes:
1) Strategic affirmation conceptualizes affirmation as intentional, thoughtful, and sometimes risk-taking practices that interrupt shame and silence.
2) Survive–hope–become describes the pathways youth followed to find stability and to hold on to hope as a form of resistance.
3) Restorative queer worldmaking centers the relational nature of healing through everyday acts of care: a teacher who listens, a caregiver who connects youth with queer culture, a worker who repairs a mistake, a community member who offers shelter. These moments create kinship and belonging – what I describe as queer family-ing – and help shape becoming in dialogue with community.
The final theme, 4) between care and constraint, highlights the tension between systemic failures and individual responsibility, showing how rejection is sometimes reproduced inside the system and at other times held back by determined practitioners.
One participant told me: “We were the last who held hope.”
My thesis, I like to think, was about both hope and grief. This grief- which can be constant in queer communities, for the people we have lost, for the lives we have not dared to imagine, and for our collective wounds – is often interrupted by a striking light of hope. That light becomes a form of survival and guidance, a way of showing possibility after loss. I saw the brightest form of it in the participants who shared their stories with me. This research – which I hope will offer practitioners some new tools – is dedicated to them and to their contagious hope.
I am deeply grateful to my committee for their guidance and encouragement, and to Erjon for making this journey a better one.
Next step: I am preparing my PhD applications. I plan to expand this research by exploring affirmation as a spectrum of practices, using ideally a mixed-methods design that can connect youth voices, adult practices, and institutional frameworks to help shift child welfare systems toward more affirming forms of care.
