Professors Cristina Delgado Vintimilla (Faculty of Education), Sarah Flicker (Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change), Matthew Perras (Lassonde School of Engineering) and Dayna Scott (Osgoode Hall Law School) are the principal investigators on the winning projects, which were announced in late May.

鈥�91亚色 is delighted to see Professors Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Sarah Flicker, Matthew Perras and Dayna Scott receive these highly competitive NFRF Exploration grants. My heartiest congratulations to them,鈥� said Vice-President Research and Innovation Amir Asif. 鈥淭hese grants allow Canada鈥檚 foremost researchers to build strength in high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research for societal benefit 鈥� an historical strength for the University.鈥�

Cristina Delgado Vintimilla is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education. Delgado Vintimilla鈥檚 project, titled 鈥淓cological Devastation in Extractive Zones: Resistance, Recuperation and Regeneration,鈥� received $248,053.00. Working with a multidisciplinary team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, artists and activists from across Canada and Ecuador, including Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies sociology Professor Denielle Elliott, the research team will explore what it takes to recuperate the devastation of the 鈥淐apitalocene.鈥�

The project considers the urgent nature of ecological and environmental challenges posed by the devastation of blasted landscapes (Mountaintop removal mining, open-pit mining, strip mining). Women and children who are targets of annihilation through capitalism and colonialism, specifically, Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC), understand the value of non-hegemonic knowledges/practices to heal ruined places. The challenge is in recognizing their unconventional ways of knowing and doing as legitimate healing alternatives to the technological 鈥渇ixes鈥� that damaged blasted landscapes.

This research will congregate a diverse team of scholars, students, Indigenous activists, Elders, knowledge keepers and healers to lead an interdisciplinary project that draws from and contributes to education, anthropology, biology and the arts. The researchers鈥� approach is to codesign recuperative practices in 鈥渂lasted landscapes鈥� in Canada and Ecuador in an urgent effort to address the damage of extractive capitalism and exploitative investments. The sites鈥� built on the dispossession and enslavement of BIPOC鈥攁re connected through capitalist, extractive industries that have left the environments forever changed.

Sarah Flicker, a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, is the principal investigator on the project 鈥淭ransnational Perspectives on COVID-19鈥檚 Impact on Youth Sexuality, Risk and Relationships.鈥� The project, which involves an international research team that includes Faculty of Education Assistant Professor Jen Gilbert, received $249,038.00 in funding.

COVID-19 has fundamentally altered nearly every aspect of youths鈥� relational lives; new norms regarding physical and social intimacy and access to public and private spaces affect family, peer, and sexual connections. The challenge of navigating this new terrain coincides with adolescence, a developmental period when choices regarding risk and well-being are already fraught and complicated. Though decisions around how to connect, date, and love continue to be influenced by factors including gender, race, sexual cultures, community, and space, pandemic logics cause a profound shift: behaviors that once sparked alarm are now endorsed as low risk (e.g., sexting); practices that were up for debate are now decidedly off limits (e.g., sleepovers); and what were idealized as innocuous romantic gestures are now the height of danger (e.g., kissing). Changing policies and regulations (e.g., wearing masks, keeping distance, forming pods) influence sexual and intimate possibilities in new and unanticipated ways.

The international and interdisciplinary team brings together scholars in education, psychology, public health, social work, sociology, and youth studies with expertise in participatory methods, sexuality, and global health research. The project鈥檚 multi-method, multidisciplinary, and multi-site research will examine how COVID-19 is redefining risk and re-forming youth sexuality in Australia, Canada, and the United States, all countries with liberal democracies with comparable discourses and debates surrounding youth sexuality, but starkly different experiences of and responses to the pandemic.

Results will be used to develop site-specific and transnational briefings, videos, podcasts, and other resources to help sex educators, parents and youth navigate social norms, health risks, and sexual relationships during (and, eventually, in the wake of) a pandemic.

The ecological devastation of these sites is the point of departure for this project. The researchers will ask: How are women and children who identify as BIPOC staging unconventional relations with the land to regenerate 鈥渂lasted landscapes鈥�? And how are they activating alternative modes of belonging in the process? How can we approach blasted landscapes as sites for imagining other futures?

Matthew Perras, assistant professor, Department of Civil Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering is the principal investigator on the project 鈥淯sing machine learning to understand ancient climatic influences on the stability of cliffs and tombs in the Theban Necropolis of Egypt.鈥� Working with an international research team that includes his colleague Usman Khan, also an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Lassonde, who is a co-principal investigator on the project, the research focuses on the Theban Necropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage site comprised of tombs and temples near Luxor, Egypt. The project received $250,000 in funding.

The tombs in the Theban Necropolis are often shallow excavations with entrances at the base of cliffs. The tombs hold evidence of rock mass collapses during construction through to recent deterioration leading to potential instabilities. Climatic variations are known to cause rock to deteriorate, however, there is debate about the exact influence on crack growth rates. Due to lack of detailed observations and experiments on long-term crack growth in rock, since such experiments span many months or even years, current numerical tools are not capable of capturing the influences of climate change on crack growth. This leads to challenges in determining when instabilities will develop and problems designing preservation strategies. To address these challenges, Perras and the research team propose to utilize machine learning (ML) to aid in analyzing existing climate data and crack growth indicators to predict instability. A ML algorithm will be trained on current measurements (weather & crack movement), then on historic climate & photographs of crack growth.

Ancient climate records and models (Nile sedimentation, tomb flooding & collapses) could be used to back analyze the influence on crack growth with time. With the expertise of geotechnical engineering, geology, archaeology, data and climate science, the researchers will seek to understand the prevailing conditions that led to the current state of stability and develop guidelines for preserving the stability into the future. The novelty of this research is in the combination of machine learning with archaeology and geological engineering. Machine learning in both fields is in its infancy, however, such techniques allow for nuanced behaviors to be extracted from large and complex data sets as in this project. Understanding the current measurements, past influences and applying it to predict future instabilities will help to identify key areas for protection and aid in preserving this UNESCO site for generations to come.

Dayna Scott, 91亚色 Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy; associate professor, Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, is the principal investigator of the project titled, 鈥淛urisdiction Back: Infrastructure beyond Extractivism.鈥� The project received $ 246,725.00 in funding.

Resource conflicts and legal uncertainties have dominated the political landscape over the last decade. From Standing Rock to the TransMountain pipeline, conflicts over extraction and its infrastructures have intensified, catalyzing a fierce Indigenous resurgence. As Scott and the research team conceived this project, Wet'suwet'en hereditary leaders were blocking a pipeline company from accessing their lands, inspiring solidarity actions that blocked rail lines, ports, highways, and political offices. The situation dramatically demonstrated that when corporate interests thrust contested projects onto Indigenous homelands - even with governmental approvals 鈥� they must contend with Indigenous governing authority.

The research project offers a transformative way forward: a fundamentally new set of relations based on different underlying assumptions about law and land. It is a vision that insists the future is not foreclosed, but pregnant with potential for renewed relations of jurisdiction and infrastructure. If anything, the new COVID-19 reality has only made this more obvious. Will we rebuild? Should we rebuild? Or, even more importantly, what should we build anew? The ground-breaking 2019 Yellowhead Red Paper documents how Indigenous-led consent processes based on fulfilling responsibilities are already having the effect of restoring Indigenous jurisdiction and reclaiming Indigenous lands and waterways, foodways and lifeways. Scott proposes to systematically document, support, expand and evaluate this work to determine which strategies and approaches have the most success. How can remaking the material systems that sustain collective life enact Indigenous jurisdiction? What does infrastructure resilience look like for Indigenous communities emerging out of COVID-19 in an era of ongoing climate crisis? How can the 鈥渏ust transition鈥� to sustainable economies be imagined and infrastructured to foreground Indigenous governance systems? This project offers an agenda for fundamentally re-making our socio-technical systems; for both conceptualizing and building infrastructure otherwise.

Article from the June 6, 2021 issue of

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The lessons learned from changes to these curriculums in 2015 and 2019 are outlined in a new report, , launching April 27.

Although most teachers interviewed for this report welcomed changes to the 1998 health, sex and physical education curriculum, they felt highly surveilled and stressed, and frustrated with the way the new curriculums were rolled out without adequate supports, training and resources. In the space of several years, they were asked to teach three different curriculums.

The researchers wanted to know how teachers at the frontlines of this confluence of ideological battles between governments, parents, teachers, human rights and students were navigating this charged political environment, and what could be done differently next time.

鈥淲hile we collected the data pre-COVID, in many ways I think so many of the recommendations that are coming out of this report in terms of the kind of supports that teachers need, and more supportive work environments, are even more salient today,鈥� says Flicker, 91亚色 Research Chair in Community-Based Participatory Research in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. 

鈥淭hey鈥檙e trying to navigate teaching and learning and communicating around health and safety in this new environment, in this very changed landscape, thinking about sexuality, risk and relationships. I don鈥檛 think public health has had a moment when more of us were paying attention to things like hygiene and setting boundaries, understanding consent, and understanding the well-being of ourselves and others.鈥�

Health and physical education teachers play an important role in helping young people think about their bodies, their well-being, making safer decisions and reducing risks, but in many ways, teachers are even more surveilled now as they Zoom in from their homes into their students鈥� homes, says Flicker.

The report will launch at a virtual event 鈥� Teaching Health & Physical Education in Uncertain Times 鈥� on April 27, from 4 to 6 p.m.

The event will include a talk by Flicker on the key findings of her study, followed by Faculty of Education Professor Sarah Barrett sharing her final report, Emergency Distance Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Teachers鈥� Perspectives, released last month. To register, visit the Zoom conference registration .

For the Changing the Rules study, Flicker and her team, including Faculty of Education Associate Professor , interviewed 34 teachers who had taught health and physical education in K-12 Ontario schools for at least five years. They hailed from 17 school boards, including public school boards, independent First Nations boards, Catholic boards, and French boards. 

Almost all teachers interviewed agreed the curriculum needed updating and the proposed changes were important. They felt young people need to be able to talk about how things like cell phones and the internet impact their lives, including sexually and romantically, and have teachers be able to discuss these issues with them as part of the curriculum. Many felt that sharing information about substance use, STIs, pregnancy, hygiene, and healthy relationships would help young people make decisions that would help them grow up to live happier or healthier lives.

Teachers said they need more resources particularly in the context of changing demographics in Ontario.

鈥淎s the province becomes more diverse, teachers need resources that reflect that diversity and help them have health and physical education conversations in ways that honour very different cultural traditions and understandings around the body and health, and well-being,鈥� says Flicker.

Some of the suggestions for the future included changing the curriculum incrementally on a regular basis to ensure it remains relevant and responsive to the changing realities of Ontario students. Diverse stakeholders should be included in future consultations to ensure the curriculum is meeting the needs of all students and their communities. In addition, policies, templates and strategies need to be put in place to accommodate those students not participating in sex education classes. A culture of learning and support for teachers and students should be fostered.

Watch Flicker discuss the results of her study and their relevancy to today in the series of videos below:

Article from the April 21, 2021 issue of .

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