Welcome to the May 2022 edition of the EUC Research Update聽 - bringing you highlights from research activities at 91亚色's Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change. We invite you to view our past updates on our Research News page.
Research Spotlights
Carli Melo on inclusion and exclusion in global production networks, through her work on Myanmar migrant workers in Thailand's seafood sector.
Abidin Kusno on YCAR's celebration of its 20th anniversary, and Asian Heritage Month.
Wendy Alejandra Medina de Loera on sand and stone materials mining in the Jeneberang River in South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Aidin Torkameh on the production of Iran as a national state spacetime: Late development and formal subsumption.
Philip Kelly on imagining political and economic alternatives between Canada and the Philippines.
Tahmid Rouf on Bangladeshis in Toronto and what they can teach us about diasporic civic organizations, cyberspace, and superdiverse locales.
Accolades and Awards
Congratulations to our inaugural EUC Undergraduate Research Awardees and their supervisors!!
Trevor Doe is working with Martha Stiegman on a project titled Polishing the Chain: Treaty Relations in Toronto.
Madison Downer-Bartholomew is working with Tarmo Remmel on a project titled Quantifying boreal fire boundary gradient.
Ashraf Hutchcraft is working with Gail Fraser on a project titled Quantifying the location and type of nest material gathered by nesting double-crested cormorants at Tommy Thompson Park.
Claire O'Hagan is working with Joshua Thienpont on a project titled Assessing a potential tool for rapid assessment of shoreline permafrost thaw impacts to lake sediments.
The EUC Undergraduate Research Awards (EUCURA) provide opportunities for selected students enrolled in EUC undergraduate majors to tackle a focused research project under the mentorship of a faculty member. These awards, tenable over the summer term (May-August), provide students with hands-on experience and one-on-one mentoring in the completion of a research project.
Don't miss the world premiere of the , co-directed by MES Candidate . The Klabona Keepers is an intimate portrait of the dynamic Indigenous community that succeeded in protecting the Sacred Headwaters, known as the Klabona, northwest British Columbia, from industrial activities. Spanning 15 years of matriarch-led resistance ,the film follows a small group of determined elders in the village of Iskut as they heal from the wounds of colonization to push back against law enforcement, the government, and some of the world鈥檚 largest multinational companies. This on opening night of the in Toronto on May 26. Tickets available starting May 12 at
Five were presented to EUC faculty and staff in recognition of their significant contributions to the Faculty and beyond. The awards are granted to faculty and staff members nominated by their peers in four categories: Research Excellence, Teaching Excellence, Service Excellence, and Staff Service Excellence. Ilan Kapoor and Linda Peake received the Dean's Research Excellence Awards; Jin Haritaworn received the Teaching Excellence Award; Luisa Sotomayor, the Service Excellence Award; and Rhoda Reyes, the Staff Recognition Award. Congratulations to everyone!
, EUC adjunct professor, recently on Corporate Rules: The Real World of Business Regulation in Canada (James Lorimer & Co 2022) with a who discussed issues on the environmental, health and safety regulation of Big Energy in Canada, looking at the cases of federal Climate Change and Energy Policy, the Alberta Oil Industry and the Tar Sands, and Nuclear Energy. SEI Co-Chair and contributing author (Institutionalizing Regulatory Capture as Regulatory Practice) Mark Winfield moderated the webinar.
Sheila Colla will be launching her new book co-authored with Lorraine Johnson and illustrations by Ann Sanderson on Wednesday, June 8 from 6-7:30pm at High Park Nature Centre (375 Colborne Lodge Drive), OURSpace outdoor garden. Bring friends and family! Books will be available for sale thanks to Blue Heron Books.
Also ahead of on May 20, know more about the status of pollinators in Canada for a special edition of Scholars鈥 Hub @ Home with Sheila Colla and Amro Zayed who will discuss how the average person can help save declining pollinators on Thursday, May 19, 12-1pm.
(ES PhD candidate) has been selected as the recipient of the Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded to outstanding doctoral students in their final year of doctoral study to concentrate exclusively on and complete their dissertations. In her doctoral study on "Parks Prescriptions and Perceptions: Experiences of Racialized People with Mood Disorders in Green Spaces," Hassen explores the experiences of racialized people living with mental illness in urban green spaces in Toronto. Using a visual research method called photovoice, her research captures the experiences of people who are racialized and living with mood disorders as they interact with Toronto鈥檚 urban green spaces. Hassen's research work is situated at the intersections of health equity, social determinants of health, environmental justice and community development - with a focus on understanding the lived experiences of people who face social barriers to health and well-being. A Vanier scholar, Hassen was also a CIHR Fellow in Public Health Policy, a Charles Caccia Graduate Awardee in Sustainable Development, a NextGEN Awardee by the Canadian Urban Institute, and a James A. McNab Awardee at UofT's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She has worked at several research institutions including Public Health Ontario, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Wellesley Institute, and the Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael's Hospital. Sarah Flicker serves as her doctoral supervisor.
(ES PhD) has been awarded the Mary McEwan Memorial Award for 2020-2021 by The Centre for Feminist Research. Shadaan is the Mustard post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Work and Health and a researcher at the Environmental Data Justice (EDJ) Lab (Technoscience Research Unit, University of Toronto). She is a former recipient of the Canada Graduate Scholarship to Honour Nelson Mandela and 91亚色鈥檚 President鈥檚 University-Wide Teaching Award. Shadaan鈥檚 research intersects environmental and occupational health and justice. In her , Shadaan used feminist and worker-centered visual methods to map the occupational health of nail technicians who contend with musculoskeletal aches and pains, routine exposure to harmful toxicants, verbal abuses, and labour exploitation. Shadaan鈥檚 work further traces common toxicants in the nail salon to their roots in petroleum extraction and petrochemical production, underscoring connections across sites of violence and harm. This latter focus is rooted in Shadaan鈥檚 work on gendered and colonial environmental violence, including through her participation in the Land and Refinery project, which attends to the intersections of fossil fuel extraction and settler colonial violence. Her dissertation was supervised by Dayna Nadine Scott with Deborah McGregor and Andil Gosine as committee members.
is our new EUC postdoc! The Director of , she did her PhD at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and recently received a CIHR postdoc fellowship. SExT is a theatre-based, trauma-informed, culturally relevant, peer education participatory action research project that she developed through her doctoral work. Her project on Adapting the Sex Education by Theatre (SExT) Health Promotion Model for Culturally-Safe, Trauma-Informed Remote Virtual Delivery with Indigenous Northern Youth will identify the unique opportunities and challenges of online delivery of the SExT program in remote Indigenous contexts using two-way video technology as well as compare virtual delivery to in-person delivery (data previously collected). SExT鈥檚 COVID-19-inspired pivot into the highly scalable and cost-effective virtual realm is an unprecedented opportunity to explore digital delivery of the SExT model at a time when multiple regions face STBBI outbreaks, travel is uncertain, and traditional sex education has failed Indigenous youth. Taylor's postdoc will be supervised by Sarah Flicker.
Courtesy of The Artist and the Toronto Biennial of Art
(ES PhD) has been awarded for her outstanding contributions to the Biennial. Her multimedia installation combines Afrofuturism and historical research to shed light on 鈥榯he entanglement of colonial Canada in the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans through links between the nave of a church, the hold of the ship, the tomb, and the womb of the world鈥. In this artwork, a time traveler from the future Age of Awakening鈥 performed by the artist鈥攙isits a church in the Age of Silence, circa 2021,to perform a ritual connecting with ancestors of the past. Turner is an explorer of race, space, home and belonging. Straddling media, social practice and performance art, her work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally. She is the founder of Outerregion, an Afrofuturist performance group and has successfully defended her dissertation on Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond with Honor Ford-Smith as supervisor and supervisory committee members, Jin Haritaworn and Warren Crichlow (FoEd).
EUC Research in the Media
Ian Kamau (MES 2016) has a short film feature "" celebrating Toronto's hip-hop scene in the 90s & 00s that . The film was commissioned by the Luminato Film Festival.
Ute Lehrer recently delivered a keynote presentation on at the Finish Studies Urban Conference. In her presentation, Lehrer focused on the role of common spaces in high-rise buildings. Following Henri Lefebvre鈥檚 fertile theorization of the social production of space that involves conceived, perceived and lived spaces, she argues that shared spaces, as a multidimensional phenomenon, have the potential to become public space. Accordingly, within verticality鈥檚 built and social environments, there is great potential for fostering a transformative capacity around what John Friedmann describes as the 鈥済ood society鈥. If social sustainability in urban design is understood as infrastructure supporting social and cultural life, then these common spaces are sites of creating opportunities for social sustainability.
Andil Gosine's exhibition will be at the in New 91亚色 City! Running from June 1 to Aug. 20, the exhibit will feature seven 91亚色 community members, including exhibiting artist and BFA and MFA alumna Margaret Chen, artistry from master of environmental studies graduate and incoming PhD candidate in environmental studies Amber Williams-King, and a film edited by masters in cinema and media studies student Kathrin Mentler. ES PhD student Aitak Sorahitalab, master of environmental studies student Kafia Abdulkader and sociology PhD student Elena Chou are also featured in the exhibit鈥檚 catalogue exploring.
Sarah Flicker is co-lead in a (VI) research-creation project with John Greyson (AMPD). VI is a program of six new artist videos produced in Toronto featuring the works of Zachary Longboy, Lesley Chan, Samuel Lopez and Christian Hui, Mikiki, Andrew Zealley (ES PhD), and Esery Mondesir. The premiere will be held on June 22 at the Anthology Film Archives.
Victoria MacPhail (ES PhD alumna) in an Ontario Nature blog discusses using programs such as the to support conservation through community science by filling knowledge gaps, supporting conservation status assessments, and increasing public awareness.
Rod MacRae was featured in . Accordingly, although food is a public resource, there is no effective and joined-up national policy to guide it which is an issue that should be addressed. MacRae's presents relevant information on a joined-up food policy to create a healthy, just and sustainable food system.
(ES PhD student and Indigenous food activist) will speak about in a event on May 19. She also recently received a for her project on Feeding the Good Mind: Nourishing the New Faces Coming and the Post-Partum Family.
Deborah McGregor and the 91亚色U Indigenous Alumni Network (YUIAN) participated in the 20th All Nations Pow Wow organized by the Indigenous Students Association at 91亚色U (ISAY) on May 07 at the 91亚色 Lions Stadium. The Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Languages (CIKL) will also be hosting a virtual workshop on presenting your research for Indigenous graduate students on May 25. Their April Earth Day conversation event with MES student Joseph Pitawanakwat on is now available on YouTube. If you are interested in becoming an associate of CIKL, visit their membership options prior to filing an application.
Lisa Myers has an exhibit on Mike MacDonald: Planting One Another from June 1-October 9 at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG), produced in partnership with the Woodland Cultural Centre (WCC Brantford). Planting one Another features a twin re-planting of a Medicine and Butterfly garden by the late Mi鈥檏maw artist Mike MacDonald (1941-2006). KWAG's re-planting of MacDonald's butterfly and medicine garden in partnership with WCC sustains the late Mi'kmaq artist's work of cultivating native plants in-situ butterfly gardens from 1995 to 2003 from the Presentation House, North Vancouver to Mount Saint Vincent Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Dayna Scott gave the closing keynote address at the Socio-Legal Studies Symposium on the theme of 鈥溾 She also recently organized a workshop on Contested Authorities exploring how Indigenous-led Impact Assessments (IAs) challenge the presumed unilateral authority of settler laws. In 2020, she co-authored a . She recently presented a talk on explaining the state of play for Indigenous-led impact assessment in Canada offering the example of the Regional Assessment for .
Justin Podur鈥檚 recently produced several podcasts on a range of topics from Imran Khan's ouster in Pakistan to the Fashoda crisis between Britain and France, Karachi University bombing, Germany's scramble for Africa, as well as western environmentalism and US politics.
Martha Stiegman's co-authored book will be launched on June 5 as part of the closing BBQ at the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga.
Deborah McGregor (right) with Sadie Hamilton (YUIAN) at their PowWow booth during the 20th All Nations Pow Wow held on May 7 at 91亚色U Stadium.
Ellie Perkins participated in the Johns Hopkins University Sawyer seminar titled . The seminar brought together experts from the fields of climate economics, anthropology and sociology of the climate, and the theology of climate.
Sarah Rotz will be presenting a paper on Disciplining Land, Deepening Inequity: The Relationship between Agricultural Technologies, Data Bias and Farmland Assetization at the virtual workshop on May 20-21, organized by the (GLRC) at 91亚色. To see the full program and registration, visit their for more information.
Peter Vandergeest (Professor Emeritus) delivered a talk on the problems faced by workers in the fishing industry and discussed why the industry is particularly difficult to monitor and regulate. He outlined emerging initiatives to improve these conditions and examined what Canada can do around . For more information visit their project website.
Luisa Sotomayor will chair the Robarts Centre book launch and webinar on (Routledge, May 2022) with Patricia Wood as one of the discussants. The author, Mariana Valverde (UofT) has carried out intensive studies of infrastructure planning and decision-making, mainly in the province of Ontario, but research on international projects is also discusssed to illustrate how the various governance practices have been used around the world, and what political effects (mainly anti-democratic effects) result from the routinized use of particular governance tools.
As a provincial election in Ontario nears, Mark Winfield breaks down (also published in and ). Accordingly, for Ontarians looking for alternatives to the current government around climate change and environmental issues, the province's Green Party has, unsurprisingly, provided the most so far and weighs in on the possibility of the Green Party winning a few more seats during the upcoming Ontario election.
Publications and Reports
Birch, K., Ward, C., and Tretter, E. (2022). , Competition and Change, April.
Brand Correa, L., Brook, A., Buchs, M., Meier, P., Naik, Y., O'Neill, D.W. (2022). The Lancet: Planetary Health, Volume 6, Issue 4, e371-e379.
Brand Correa, L. (2022). , Energy Research & Social Science, Volume 87, May 2022, 102475.
Colla, S. R. (2022). . International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife, 18, 30鈥32.
Damian, M., Harris, A., Aussage, J., and Fraser, G. (2022). , Marine Pollution Bulletin, Volume 177.
Deranger, E, Sinclair, R, Gray, B, McGregor, D, Gobby, J. (2022). , Community Development Journal, Volume 57, Issue 1, January, Pages 52鈥73.
Hassen, N. (2022). Health Promotion International, Volume 37, Issue 2, April.
Hoicka, C., Zhao, Y., McMaster, M. L., Das, R. (2022) Diffusion of demand-side low-carbon innovations and socio-technical energy system change, SSRN.
Hyndman, J. (2022). , Stability - International Journal of Security & Development, 4(1), p. Art. 14.
Iantorno, M., Doggett, O., Chandra, P., Yujie Chen, J., Steup, R., Raval, N., Khovanskaya, V., Lam, L., Singh, A., Rotz, S., & Ratto, M. (2022). . CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts.
Kapoor, A., Fraser, G.S., Carter, A.V., and Brooks, D. (2022). . Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management.
Keil, R. & Wu, F. (Eds, 2022). . University of Toronto Press, October.
Loft, A., Freeman, V., Stiegman, M., and Carter, C. (2022). , Jumblies Press and Toronto Biennial of Art, May.
Reed, G., Brunet, N., McGregor, D., Scurr, S., Sadik, T., Lavigne, J., and Longboat, S. (2022). Toward Indigenous visions of nature-based solutions: an exploration into Canadian federal climate policy, Climate Policy, Volume 22, Issue 4. For more information: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2022.2047585
D鈥橲ouza, J., Ekra, M., Preston, V., and Shields, J. (2022). Building Migrant Resilience in Cities (BMRC) Research Report, May.
Rotz, S. (2022). In Food Studies: Matter, Meaning & Movement, Pressbooks.
Sotomayor, L., Tarhan, D., Vieta, M., McCartney, S., & Mas, A. (2022). . Cities, Vol 124, May, 103572.
Stiegman, S. (2022). , Canadian Food Justice, Vol. 9No. 1, pp. 266鈥280, April.
Contact Us
The EUC Research Update is compiled by the Research Office at EUC: Research Officer Rhoda Reyes, Associate Dean Philip Kelly, and Work-Study Student Claire Morson. Thanks to Paul Tran for the web design and development.
We welcome the opportunity to pass along research-related information and achievements from our whole community - faculty, postdocs, visiting scholars, students, and retirees.
News for future updates can be submitted using the EUC Kudos and News form, circulated monthly. Or, send your news directly to: eucresea@yorku.ca
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