Helen’s Short Bio
Helen Lansdowne has a BA and an MA in Pacific and Asian Studies from UVic and was with the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives (CAPI) from 1998 to 2024.
Helen specializes in issues of development and gender in Southeast Asia and rural China state-society relations. At the CAPI she was instrumental in helping to administer seminal justice system development work in the emerging economies of Vietnam and Cambodia in the early 2000s, and, in addition to overseeing CAPI’s overall operations and administration, helped to establish and run the centre’s highly regarded international student internship program for outgoing Canadian students as well as the centre’s incoming cultural exchange and training programs, undertaken by thousands of visiting students and hundreds of cross-sector professionals from across Asia.
Helen is co-editor of numerous academic volumes, many derived from international CAPI conferences and helped found CAPI’s online, open access journal Migration, Mobility, & Displacement. Upon retirement from CAPI, the University of Victoria set up an endowed scholarship, The Helen
Lansdowne Award, to support undergraduate and graduate students at Uvic whose area of student focuses on migration, gender studies, or sustainability in Asia.
In addition to running the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, Helen taught undergraduate students at the University of Victoria (Dept. of Pacific & Asian Studies) and at Camosun College (Dept. of Social Sciences). As a faculty member at Camosun College, Helen offered Field Schools in Vietnam and India, providing students with experiential courses in development, gender and the environment in these two locations.
