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Accolades, Awards and Acknowledgements

A warm welcome to Evelyn Amponsah, CITY/EUC Postdoctoral Fellow at the , a working partnership between Gore Mutual Insurance, its Cooperators, Social Innovation Canada, and 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Her research project will explore how climate change affects housing experiences and opportunities for vulnerable groups in three Canadian cities. A scholar and advocate, she holds a PhD from 91��ɫ, where her research examined the political economy of anti-Black racism. She was the co-founder of the 91��ɫ Black Graduate Students Collective, which spearheaded institutional change, resulting in the creation of Black Studies programs and a commitment to increase Black faculty representation.

Raju Das was awarded a seed grant for his Global Research Excellence (GRE) proposal with the Public Policy Research Institute on “Health Impacts of Climate Change on Construction Workers.”

The GRE supports investigator-led collaborations that have targeted outcomes while also affording 91��ɫ research teams the ability to take risks and the versatility to work with leading universities, industry, government agencies, IGOs and NGOs from across the world. GRE supports all stages of international research of collaborations from co-creation to knowledge moblization.

Likewise, Luisa Sotomayor and Shubhra Gururani were awarded GRE funding for their project on "Navigating Infrastructural Disrepair" with Karachi Urban Lab, Institute of Business Administration in Pakistan.

Urban Workarounds is a three-year project (2025-2027) between The CITY Institute, 91��ɫ Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and the which aims to address infrastructure disrepair, including climate impacts, through transnational knowledge exchange. The project will foster collaboration among academics, policymakers, and grassroots organizations via conferences, workshops, and policy roundtables.

A warm welcome to Angie Quick, EUC artist-in-residence this January. Based in London, Ontario, Quick’s evocative paintings delve into themes of embodiment, intimacy, and human connection, offering raw, emotional depictions that resonate with the complexities of the human experience. Leading up to the Eco Arts Festival this March, her program is part of the Nature’s Wild exhibition series, led by Andil Gosine, which will feature a student exhibition during the festival. Running from January 21 to March 7, Quick’s residency program, "I Can’t Come to the Party If I Won’t Fall in Love", included an exhibition, artist talk, performance, and workshop, all hosted at the Cross Road Gallery and Zig Zag Lounge.

For the first time, the National Communication Association (NCA) in Washington has awarded its prestigious to a Canadian! Mark Terry, EUC Adjunct Professor and Research Fellow in Documentary Film & Global Health at the Dahdaleh Institute was named winner at the NCA annual conference in late 2024.

The NCA’s accolade noted “Dr. Terry’s impressive history as a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and academic evinces major contributions to the study and practice of environmental communication. Dr. Terry’s civic engagement and environmental advocacy have had an important impact on the global community; his work embodies the very spirit of the J. Robert Cox Award.”

Congratulations to our Environmental Studies and Geography PhD graduates in 2024 and their supervisors!

PhD in Environmental Studies

• William Bedford: Urbanizing the Countryside? The Governance of Rural Restructuring in Bancroft and North Hastings, Ontario. Supervisor: Roger Keil.
• Laurence Butet-Roch: Toxic Images: Visual Representation of Industrial Contamination and Frontline Communities. Supervisor: Cate Sandilands.
• Morgan Brie Johnson: Clowning Canada: Performing the Structured Innocence of Settler Colonial Domesticity. Supervisor: Honor Ford-Smith.
• Benjamin Kapron: The Survivance of Water and Rock: An Environmental History and Settler Autoethnography of Nishnaabeg Thought Worlds, Other-than-Human Personhood, and the Trent-Severn Waterway. Supervisor: Martha Stiegman.
• Alexandra Simpson: (Un)Masking Along The Line: (In)visibility, Embodiment, and Place In Contemporary Pipeline Debates.
  Supervisor: Cate Sandilands.
  
  PhD in Geography
• É��������&�Բ�����;����������: Platform Labour, Migration, and Resistance: Organizing against Hyper-Exploitation in Paris and Toronto's Food Delivery Industries. Supervisor: Steven Tufts.
• Linn Biorklund: Moving, Waiting, Searching Across Borders: Gendered Geographies of Violence, Disappearance and Contestation in Southern Mexico. Supervisor: Jennifer Hyndman.
• Mantha Katsikana: The Affective Geographies of Social Reproduction: The Case of Athens under Austerity. Supervisor: Linda Peake.
• Maryam Lashkari: Feminist Counter-Geopolitics: Knowledges, Practices, and Spaces of Activism in Iranian Diasporas. Supervisor: Alison Bain.
• Charvaak Pati: Consciousness and Action among Auto Workers in India: The Maruti Movement, 2007-2017. Supervisor: Raju Das.

It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Ravi Ponnudurai, a Masters Student in EUC who suffered a major heart attack while in Sri Lanka. Peter Timmerman is Ravi's MES supervisor and here is an excerpt from his tribute: "Ravi was an integral part of our community, engaged in everything from tree planting to extraordinary support for our International Students (that support can be seen in a already set up in his memory by his friends and colleagues belonging to a startup group, iGoCitizen). He was deeply involved in the development of the International Ecological Footprint Network, led by Eric Miller who worked extensively with Ravi. He had a strong commitment to the environment both at EUC and elsewhere, especially nature watching and gardening. He was a wonderful, caring student, and I considered him a colleague, especially as he began to undertake his extensive research. Ravi was working from Jaffna on his Major Paper on Community Gardens".

Publications and Reports

Aguiar, R., Keil, R., Gray, R., & Wiktorowicz, M. (2024). . Critical Public Health, 34(1), 1–23.

De Vries, P. and Kapoor, I.

Flicker, S., Ivanski, C., Gareau, L., McIntyre, C., Gilbert, J., Walker, J. (2025). Sex Education; Sexuality, Society and Learning.  

Gebresselassie, M. (2025). Travel Behaviour and Society (38). 

Gosine, A. (2025) ” in The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading.

Gosine, A. (2025) ” sx art.

Hoskin, G., Thienpont, J., Phuong Do, P.H.,, Coleman, K. and Korosi, J. (2024). Journal of Great Lakes Research, Volume 50, Issue 6, 102437.

Kallis, G., Hickel, J., O’Neill, D., Jackson, T., Victor, P., et al. (2025).
The Lancet Planetary Health, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2025, Pages e62-e78.

Kapoor, I. (2024) “” Theory, Culture and Society, 42(7): 1-21(open access).

Kish, K. and Miller, E. (2025). . Ecological Economics, 227, January, 108403.

McAllister, C. (2024). : Guatemala and Israel boast a long friendship dating to the formation of the Zionist state. their shared histories of violence against Mayas and Palestinians bely each state’s claims to liberation. NACLA Report on the Americas, 56(4), 410–418.

Rotz, S., Ruck, D. and LeBlanc, J. (2025). . Antipode Open Access.

Rotz, S., Levkoe, C., Stiegman, M., Koc, M., Singh, I., Ajl, M., … Podur, J. (2024). . Canadian Food Studies La Revue Canadienne Des études Sur l’alimentation, 11(3), 43–64.

Samaddar, R., Bunce, S., Camponeschi, C., Wilson, D., Harris Ali, S., Connolly, C., & Keil, R. (2025). . Urban Studies, 62(2), 404-426.

Seidman-Wright, T., & Rotz, S. (2024). Canadian Food Studies La Revue Canadienne Des études Sur l’alimentation, 11(3), 65–89.

Whitney, R.A., Sotomayor, L. (2025).  Cities (158).

EUC and Associate Events

On Tuesday, January 28, 9-5pm at 91��ɫ Lanes 280N, the Jindal School of Art and Architecture (JSAA) at OP Jindal Global University, together with 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC), City Institute and 91��ɫ Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) are undertaking a research discussion on the ways in which people respond to the diversity of urban conditions and transformations in (though not limited to) the Global South.

List of participants include: Saeed Ahmad and Ekta Chauhan (JSAA), Joseph Palis (University of Philippines Diliman) and 91��ɫ’s faculty members and graduate students: Teresa Abbruzzese, Kenneth Cardenas, Ria Jhoanna Ducusin, Jennifer Foster, Shubhra Gururani, Philip Kelly, Stefan Kipfer, Abidin Kusno, Esmond Lee, Arsam Saleem, Luisa Sotomayor, Huiyao Sun. Register here or email ycar@yorku.ca.

On Thursday, January 30, 5-6:30pm at HNES 142, the CITY Institute will host "Bringing Lefebvre to Urban Planning in Geneva" bringing together two scholars whose research is connected to urban planning issues in Geneva, Switzerland.

Karine Duplan will discuss how social inclusion is taken into account by public policies in relation to gender and sexual minorities. She is an urban social and cultural geographer at the University of Geneva dedicated to issues of social inclusion and the right to the city, with specific expertise in gender, sexuality, and migration in globalized urban contexts.

Sébastien Lambelet will discuss the way the Canton of Geneva has relied on the Swiss-French border and French cross-border workers to maintain an urban development model that is highly concentric. He has joined EUC and The CITY Institute as a postdoctoral fellow since February 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Roger Keil. His research focuses on urban and metropolitan governance, policy studies, cross-border metropolitan areas, land-use planning and land policies (especially in relation to the recent emergence of net land neutrality objectives). Stefan Kipfer will serve as discussant. Register here.

On Friday, January 31, 11:30-12:30pm, HNES 141, Dr. Ahmed Abu Shaban will deliver a talk at the Geography Colloquium on "Food Resilience Amid Conflict: The Use of Food as a Weapon in Gaza and Community Coping Mechanisms". Dr. Shaban is EUC Visiting Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine at Al Azhar University, Gaza. There will also be a coffee morning in HNES 201 beforehand, starting at 10.30.

On Monday, February 3, 9am-1:45pm at HNES 141, the Ecological Footprint Initiative is hosting an undergraduate workshop to introduce students to the conceptual framework of Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity along with offering insights into using the data in Microsoft Excel. Students can register for the event . The event will take place on February 3, 2025, from 9am to 1:45pm in HNES 141. There will be lunch provided. If you have any questions, please contact dworatzp@yorku.ca.  

The is also hosting a series of virtual workshops on scaling ecological footprint and biocapacity data to different levels. These workshops will take a deeper dive into frameworks, methodologies, and techniques. There will be one workshop each month in February, March, and April each with a different scaling focus. The workshops will begin with a panel of presentations, followed by a question-and-answer, and ending with an interactive activity to explore the potential for applying this work. 

• Institutional scaling of ecological footprint and biocapacity on February 20 at 11am. .
• Community scaling of ecological footprint and biocapacity on March 20 at 11am. .
• Geographic scaling of ecological footprint and biocapacity on April 10 at 11am. .  

On Friday, February 7, 11am-2pm at HNES 201 & EUC Lounge, join us for the second episode of . In this workshop, you’ll learn the technique of sashiko, taught by Montreal-based fibre artist Xiaoxiao Yarn (check out her amazing work here- ).

The workshop provides materials and instruction on artful mending in response to fast fashion. Discover how mending promotes sustainability by extending the life of garments and offering both moments of focused creativity and mindfulness in a world dominated by disposable fashion.  to participate in the workshop.

On Monday, February 10, 1-3pm via online zoom, presents Queer Ecologies with Maxwell Matchim and EUC postdoc Loren March, hosted by EUC Professor Jennifer Foster. The seminar series explores the ecological evolution of cities, focusing on wilderness as an ecological attribute that expresses freedom and possibility in urban spaces. The series examines how cities function as ecologically dynamic and fertile terrain that produces novel assemblages.

The Urban Wilds series takes a relational approach to ecology, valuing the relationships between and among life forms rather than fixed understandings of what is desirable and appropriate or how ecological systems function. Relationships that challenge or subvert oppressive and exclusionary understandings of ecology are foregrounded as ecological alternatives to the urban mainstream.

The research and thought of queer ecologies advances rich understanding of the fundamental complexities and indeterminacy of nature. With a powerful critique of Western heteronormative projections of nature and culture, queer ecologies offer a more liberatory ecology that sharpens perceptions about what exists in the world and relational possibilities going forward. for the online zoom link.

From Thursday-Friday, February 20-21, the Global Labour Resource Centre (GLRC) will hold its 9th annual Graduate Student Symposium: Critical Conversations in Work and Labour. The conference is designed to showcase the scholarship of new voices in labour studies across a diverse range of disciplines and will provide an interdisciplinary venue for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to share their research in a collaborative and supportive environment.

GLRC aims to confront the major challenges and injustices encountered by workers, families and communities within the global economy. It is a hub for pan-university collaboration with a community engagement model that encompasses a range of labour and community partners. Visit the symposium webpage or email: glrc.conf@gmail.com.

On Wednesday, February 26 from 12:30-2pm EST, the (SEI) presents a talk on "Eliminating the Need for Mining EV Battery Minerals by 2050: Data Driven Insights on Enabling an Efficient Responsible EV Battery Supply Chain with Laura LoSciuto & Sudeshna Mohanty", hosted by Mark Winfield.

The rapid electrification of transportation is an essential component of climate change mitigation strategies. However, the growing fleets of electric vehicles will require supplies of specialized materials, particularly for advanced battery manufacturing. Projections of the need for 'critical' minerals in this context suggest large growth in future demand. At the same time, questions are being raised about the environmental, climate, social and cultural impacts of the increased mining of these materials.

Analyses of future directions in EV battery technologies, and the impact of more circular approaches to battery material supply chains have been limited. New analyses from the Rocky Mountain Institute have examined the potential for significant reductions in the levels and intensity of ‘critical’ mineral extraction needed to support widespread EV adoption, and wider energy systems transitions. or contact marksw@yorku.ca.

On Wednesday, February 26, 1-2pm, the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research presents a talk on Chlorine, Bacteria, and the Urban Governance of Water Quality in Lusaka, Zambia by Hillary Birch, DIGHR Graduate Scholar and EUC PhD Candidate.

The city of Lusaka, Zambia, is experiencing recurring cholera outbreaks as rapid urbanization and climate change bring about groundwater contamination and flash floods. What results is an uneven distribution of waterborne disease where drinking water is produced at multiple scales and locations across the city, superseding the ‘modern infrastructural ideal' of centralized and separate circulations of water and waste. Based on her recently completed fieldwork in Lusaka, the presentation will use the measurement and mapping of free residual chlorine in drinking water during a recent cholera outbreak there as an entry to explore how water quality becomes a contested attribute across a range of actors who are drawn into water’s flows in urban space. Visit DIGHR event website or RSVP: yorku.ca/dighr/events.

EUC Media Coverage and Other News

This January, the CITY Institute presented results from several research projects and collaborations at the

The hybrid panel, titled “Caminar y Vivir en los Márgenes” (or “Walking & Living at the Margins”) was organized by Professor Liette Gilbert, with contributions from CITY members Farida Rady (PhD student in Geography), Luisa Sotomayor (Director of CITY), Ryan Anders Whitney (Tecnológico de Monterrey) and Feike de Jong (journalist and independent researcher).

Ilan Kapoor penned an Aljazeera opinion article on noting that "the termination of DEI, just like the junking of fact-checking, will bring into further relief the inequality (and inequity) upon which corporate capitalism is founded. If DEI put a human face on this inequality, its abandonment will make inequality more naked: corporations will now be less hesitant to continue to engage in hiring and procurement practices that privilege the already privileged." He also co-authored an article in The Conversation on This article explains how Donald Trump is stoking American anxieties and strengthening his populist politics by encouraging ideologies that create fear around the rise of China and its implications for the global status of the U.S. Trump’s taunts and ultimatums, directed towards Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, are an attempt to reassert American dominance over sectors it has fallen behind in, forcing Canada to engage in the trade war between the U.S. and China. He was also quoted in a ���������Dz�’s article titled . This article presents Elon Musk’s latest efforts to influence global politics and his support for the rise of populism and far-right across Europe.

Kapoor asserts that Donald Trump and Musk favour authoritarian forms of government because “democracy, debate, disagreement, state welfare systems all get in the way of business.” He also states that Trump and Musk believe they can function more efficiently by diminishing the role of government, which contradicts their need for state intervention for their ‘law and order’ agenda.

Charles-Antoine Rouyer (MES alumnus) published an article on , including a mention of Michael Hough's early contribution as envisioning this project with . He interviewed Ken Greenberg (also former FES instructor) on Hough's contribution as well as 91��ɫU LA&PS Professor Jennifer Bonnell.

Siobhan Speiran (former EUC postdoc) was quoted in a New 91��ɫ Times article on . She notes that while non-humans such as animals have become newsmakers and their social media stardom have been used to harness support for conservation efforts, it can also have the opposite effect.

“Whenever there’s a very notable celebrity animal, especially a wild animal, there’s an uptick in desire to own them,” which was the sentiment that Moo Deng, a pygmy hippopotamus living in Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Si Racha, Chonburi, Thailand, elicited from Facebook. She became a popular internet meme at two months of age after images of her went viral online in September 2024. “It tends to be, ‘Oh, I want her’” sparking talks about animal captivity in zoos.

Mark Winfield published an article in The Conversation titled . In this article, Winfield discusses Canada's federal and provincial governments’ responses to Donald Trump’s threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican exports to the U.S. Winfield states that the provinces are too divided to provide effective and coordinated responses to Trump without federal leadership.

According to Winfield, Canada's next steps include using its substantial negotiating assets against Trump, promoting provincial engagement with their sub-national counterparts in neighbouring states, and strengthening Canada's economic and political alliances with the rest of the Americas, Europe, and Asia.