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Amrita Daftary

Freedom To Breathe: Anchoring the Isolation of People With Tuberculosis in Human Rights and Equity

Tuberculosis (TB), an airborne infectious disease, affects 10 million people each year. Public health measures require those diagnosed to physically isolate, to curb transmission. These measures are institutionalized in health systems and normalized in societies. By contrast, evidence confirming TB non-infectiousness soon after treatment begins, and the ability for people to be free to resume contact–or stop isolating (i.e., de-isolate)–is vastly hidden in health communication and public discourse.

Drawing on rights, stigma, and equity lenses, wherein individual protections juxtapose collective interests, this research interrogates the dearth of policy dialogue supporting the restoration of freedom for people subjected to TB-related isolation. Our goal is to inspire equitable policy, empower communities, reduce stigma, and support recovery processes.

Ravi de Costa

Governing the Digital Turn in Biodiversity: Broken Incentives and Planetary Health

This project addresses a critical problem at the intersection of planetary health and biodiversity governance caused by massive and rapid technological change. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Nagoya Protocol were designed for a world of physical specimens, in which access and benefit-sharing (ABS) obligations arise when biological materials are physically accessed. Digital sequence information (DSI), that is the genomic and molecular data derived from biological materials in digital form, has seriously undermined the ABS system. Biodiversity data now circulates freely in global repositories, detached from origin, consent, and any obligation to the communities whose stewardship generated the underlying biodiversity. Every major international regime governing biodiversity and biological resources is now contending with this problem, in a context of fragmented coordination and diverging priorities.

Shital Desai

AirWear: Co-Designing Participatory Wearable Sensing for Urban Air Pollution Awareness

AirWear is a seed-grant phase of We Are Air Aware, a participatory citizen-sensing research project exploring how urban residents perceive and respond to localized particulate air pollution during everyday mobility. The project centres on AirWear, a custom wearable device that combines real-time particulate sensing, GPS-linked environmental logging, and interactive visual feedback. Through participatory co-design workshops with residents in Toronto’s Bathurst Quay neighbourhood, the project will examine how people interpret wearable environmental data, evaluate the comfort, visibility, and social acceptability of the device, and reflect on issues such as trust, uncertainty, anxiety, and environmental awareness in public space. Rather than treating sensing as a neutral technical solution, AirWear asks how environmental data becomes meaningful through embodiment, lived experience, and place-based knowledge.