91��ɫ

Aitak studies public art in postmigration contexts as an entangled field where knowledge production and spatial authority are negotiated and shaped across material-discursive formations. I examine how diasporic artists engage public space through translocal practices, navigating power relations, institutional constraints, and conditions of visibility.

Supervisor: Lisa Myers

Decolonizing the Future: Climate Struggles and Resistance in the Era of the Anthropocene

My research interests lie at the intersections between coloniality, modernity and nature, with a focus on critical approaches to development, the Anthropocene and decolonial futures. In the PhD, I am working on the concept of “colonization of the future” in relation to the climate crisis. I am a research associate at the Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Languages (CIKL) in the project “Indigenous Climate Leadership and Self-Determined Futures” and a collaborator of Indigenous Climate Action.

Supervisor: Felipe Montoya

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Popular Education and Conjunctural Analysis: Lessons from the Counter-Archive

I have been practicing popular education in Canada and abroad since 1978. My research focuses on popular education in the name (i.e., linked to Freirian history) and in principle (i.e., as practiced in diverse social movements for whom the term popular education is incidental if used at all).

Supervisor: Leesa Fawcett

Inhabiting care: how housing production and arrangements shape and disrupt women's care practices in Colombia.

Professional in Urban Management and Development, holding a Master's degree in Interdisciplinary Development Studies. I possess experience in research and consulting and as a Teaching Assistant. I have also been engaged in the international cooperation sector, specializing in project management for social development. My research interests encompass housing accessibility, residential trajectories, urban informality, feminist urbanism, and institutional analysis.

Supervisor: Luisa Sotomayor

Exploring Emergence through Multispecies Art-Science Practice on the Leslie Spit Cormorant Colony

My art-science research investigates Toronto’s double-crested cormorant colony, the continent’s largest gathering of a notorious waterbird. Resisting dangerous imaginaries on cormorants fuelled by extractivist worldviews, I take up a performative research methodology based in field work, studio practice, and exhibition to confound species divides. By investigating ecological emergence, I promote community investment in the well-being of our neighbours in the colony.

Supervisors: Gail Fraser and Lisa Myers

Evictions and the wage form

Supervisor: Stefan Kipfer

Research Description:
Deepikah, an Indian immigrant and interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, holds an MFA from OCAD University and is pursuing a PhD at 91��ɫ. Her speculative work explores nature, care, hope, and nonhuman agency through biomaterials and found objects. Her installations resist categorization and insist on a shift from human-centred narratives to multispecies kinship amid ecological crises.

Supervisor: Lisa Myers

My doctoral research looks at the story of two lifeworlds within Toronto’s declining post-war towers and rising condos. Drawing on feminist and queer socio-spatial theories, I bring together macro-level political economic and micro-level affective analysis to examine how housing crisis is inhabited through everyday embodied, affective, and material relations. Focusing on narratives of everyday life, I use creative writing methods to trace the fragmented and uneven texture of lived experience.

Supervisor: Jennifer Foster

Potentialities and Problematics of Participatory, Socially Engaged Art in relation to Borders

Supervisor: Andil Gosine

More than Access: The urban governance of water quality in Lusaka, Zambia

Hillary Birch is a PhD student in Environmental Studies where she studies how projects of global health intersect with processes of urbanization that shape flows of water in a city and change its quality, focusing on a case study of Lusaka, Zambia. At 91��ɫ, Hillary is a Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholar in Planetary Health, and she holds an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She has master’s degrees in urban governance from Sciences Po, Paris, and in political science from McGill University.

Supervisor: Roger Keil

Research Spotlight:

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The Common Worlds of Women and Birds

My research aims to explore the relational ethics that are enacted between women and birds in the practices of birding. The main onto-epistemological question I use to explore these everyday relationships is: What are the embodied co-flourishing relationships between women and birds that emerge from everyday encounters in the multispecies common world(s) of birding? I use a Common Worlds approach and more-than-human methodologies to investigate what is co-constituted in these relationships.

Supervisor: Laura Taylor

How Indigenous philosophy and practice may transform the way we make and view movies

Moore is Kanyen'kehà:ka (Mohawk), a fluent Kanyen'kè:ha speaker (ACTFL intermediate/high), and an enrolled member of Six Nations of the Grand River territory. She is an independent filmmaker, podcaster, and educator. Moore is also a founding member/co-owner of The Aunties Dandelion: a media-arts collective informed by traditional Onkwehòn:we (Indigenous) teachings and focused on revitalizing communities through stories of land, language, and relationships.

Supervisor: Cate Sandilands

Wayside Ecologies: Mobilities, Margins, and Landscapes in Historic Transportation Corridors

Karl writes on themes of mobility, media, infrastructure, and landscape. His work on wayside ecologies explores environmental history and political ecology along the margins of historic transportation corridors. Using archival and fieldwork methods to investigate road and rail verges both past and present, his research seeks to uncover alternate lines of connectivity and continuity in regional landscapes.

Supervisor: Jennifer Foster

Research Topic: Degrowth; environmental education; critical pedagogy; post-capitalist thought; climate futures

Research Description:
Thinking through a Black feminist theoretical framework, my research examines Middle Passage memory and imagines futures of Black freedom. Working through an interdisciplinary research-creation methodology and drawing from Orishá cosmology, I explore intersections between the figure of the Clown and African and Caribbean trickster figures, reimagining the Clown as a Black female subject seeking to understand what it means to be human in the afterlife of slavery.

Supervisor: Andil Gosine

Knowledge Mobilization: From Knowledge to Action in International Development

My research aims at exploring options for knowledge mobilization (KMb) practice and build the capacity to engage in it more effectively at the community level in Latin America. I propose to include the exciting developments in the field to support co-production models in the service of social justice. My research also incorporates and analyzes a lifetime of professional practice in newcomer and health services delivery to develop a robust contribution to the field of KMb.

Supervisor: Felipe Montoya

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Rescuing Rabbits: An Institutional Etho-Ethnography of Rabbit Welfare, Affects, and Advocacy

Rabbits occupy a number of roles in human societies, but they remain on the periphery of animal advocacy. I investigate how rabbits are cared for to improve their welfare. I focus on animal shelters, rabbit rescues, and veterinarians in British Columbia and reveal how rabbit-human interactions are organized and structured by affective dynamics and (colonial) social systems in these settings. This study will identify entry-points for improving rabbit welfare and animal-human relationships.

Supervisor: Leesa Fawcett

Haudenosaunee Resistance and a History of Infrastructure Expansion Projects in Canada and the US

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Modelling gendered health impacts of climate change in Malawi's Lake Chilwa Basin

Nilanjana's doctoral research focuses on applying an intersectional lens to model the gendered health impacts of climate change in Malawi through a combination of community participatory methods and systems thinking methodologies. She worked in the gold mining industry in West Africa for six years, where she recognized the need for better integration of health into environmental impact assessments, prompting her to return to academia to learn more about such intricate relationships.

Supervisor: Martin Bunch

Ecosystem Service Payments as a Climate Solution: An Examination into Successful Aspects of Ecosystem Service Payment Policy Programs

Supervisor: Mark Winfield

Research Description:
My research asks how research-creation practices in collaboration with the more-than-human world might contribute to the development of reciprocal relationality which honours both individual expression and collective belonging in urban multispecies communities. I seek to develop practices of engagement with the multispecies communities I interact with in my everyday life, while implicating the beings around me in the material and immaterial interconnectedness of our existence.

Supervisor: Catriona Sandilands

Isoko Land's Aftermath: The Impact and Legacy of Resource Extraction by Shell Oil

Supervisor: Anna Zalik

Sex and Disability: Theatre as a Tool of Liberation and Sex Education

Supervisor: Sarah Flicker

Critical Design Pedagogy for Social Wellbeing

Supervisor: Justin Podur

The political ecology of private sector investment in nature-based solutions to the climate crisis

For the past 20 years, Simon has worked in the field of international development and humanitarian action, as a researcher, policy analyst, and project manager. Most recently he has supported communities, governments, and NGOs to develop innovative solutions to the climate crisis, especially in contexts affected by compound risks such as chronic poverty and inequality, biodiversity loss and land degradation, conflict, and forced displacement, with a focus on Eastern and Southern Africa.

Supervisor: Stefan Kipfer

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