Environmental Studies Archives | Research & Innovation

Explore 91��ɫ U research on public engagement for a just and sustainable world

muellerm — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 08:00:00 +0000

Explore arts, environmental studies and social sciences based-research at a celebration highlighting Public Engagement for a Just and Sustainable World. The celebration is being co-hosted by four of 91��ɫ’s Faculties, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation on Wednesday, April 16.

The event will highlight the research of six 91��ɫ scholars, on topics ranging from the past and future of sustainable development to engagement with the historiography of Plains First Nations and Canadian criminal law to the challenges and possibilities of engaging the public to address issues of social justice and equity as it pertains to youth in Toronto’s inner cities to Canada's history of oil pipeline spills, to Knowledge Mobilization in a Tropical Biological Corridor and more.

“T�� Public Engagement for a Just and Sustainable World research celebration highlights the diversity of research programming at 91��ɫ that informs and addresses a range of challenges in urban environments, including infrastructure, educational engagement, planning, land use, and more,” said Robert Haché, vice-president research & innovation. ��“91��ɫ has a broad and diverse community of researchers interested in sustainability.�� It is important for us to continue to support the growth and development of initiatives to enable the recognition of 91��ɫ as a Canadian leader in sustainability research. ”

The celebration will take place from 2 to 4pm in the Scott Library Atrium.��The event will feature mini-research byte presentations followed by Q&As from the audience.�� All 91��ɫ students, staff and faculty are welcome to attend.

Featured presenters will include: School of Social Work Pofessor and Graduate Program Director Uzo Anucha, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS); Shelley Gavigan, professor, Osgoode Hall Law School; Sean Kheraj, professor, Department of History, LA&PS; Felipe Montoya-Greenheck, professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES); Janine Marchessault, Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization and professor, Department of Film, Faculty of Fine Arts; and Gerda Wekerle, professor, FES.

Janine Marchessault: Landslide: An Exhibition on Possible Futures

Janine Marchessault

In her talk, Marchessault will engage with the site specific public art exhibition that took place at the Markham historical village in October 2013. The exhibition invited 30 national and international artists to consider the past and future of sustainable development. The most enlightened urban planners and designers have always been interested in public art’s capacity to communicate across diverse communities, to generate new insights, and to propose generative pathways. The cities of the 21st century need to address the most pressing tensions between ecology and economy; agriculture and development; and diversity and history, says Marchessault. The challenge is to move away from conventional top-down approaches, and instead incorporate participatory and inclusive processes in urban planning.��

Shelley Gavigan: “Legal History and the Stories We Tell: Reflections on Research into Criminal Law on the Nineteenth Century Aboriginal Plains”

Shelley Gavigan

Gavigan will reflect upon her engagement with the historiography of Plains First Nations and Canadian criminal law and the theoretical and methodological foundations of her recent book, Hunger, Horses and Government Men: Criminal Law in the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Vancouver: UBC Press; Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2012).�� She will also discuss unexpected sources that she how she hopes to incorporate into her ongoing research based on lower criminal court records, and the relationship between Canadian criminal law, early Indian Act legislation, and patriarchal relations in the North-West Territories in the nineteenth-century.

Uzo Anucha: How does it feel to be a problem? Youth in Toronto’s Inner Cities and the Violence of Place-Based Stigma

Uzo Anucha

Youth in Toronto’s inner cities have been the focus of relentless negative public discourse that brands them as ‘problems’ and their communities as synonymous with youth-on-youth violence, poverty and lack of opportunity. How can community-engaged research with/about/for youth reframe and multiply this single narrative and why does it matter to do so? Drawing from lessons from the ACT for Youth project, Anucha will reflect on the challenges and possibilities of engaging the public to address issues of social justice and equity.

Sean Kheraj:�� An Environmental History of Oil Pipeline Spills in Canada

Sean Kheraj

For more than a half-century,��corporations have transported oil��across Canada via pipelines. And those pipelines have spilled oil. These pipelines��fueled��postwar industrial expansion, but they also leaked, ruptured, and broke, causing millions of litres of oil to spill across land,��waterways, and even a��national park. In his lecture, Kheraj will explore Canada's complicated history of oil pipeline spills.

Felipe Montoya-Greenheck: Knowledge Mobilization in a Tropical Biological Corridor

Felipe Montoya- Greenheck

Montoya-Greenheck will talk about the��Las Nubes Project that is part of the Faculty of Environmental Studies. Las Nubes is a rainforest that forms part of a biological corridor in Costa Rica. 91��ɫ has a long-term relationship with local communities and stakeholders, along with a multi-pronged research, education and community engagement program to advance sustainable community livelihoods, well-being and environmental conservation.

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Explore health research Friday, from elite athletes to impacts of oil and gas

muellerm — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 10:00:00 +0000

Explore health, environmental studies and science based-research at a celebration highlighting Healthy Individuals, Healthy Communities and Global Health. The celebration is being co-hosted by three of 91��ɫ’s Faculties and Glendon College, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation Friday, March 7.

Robert Hache

The event will highlight the research of five 91��ɫ scholars, on topics ranging from healthy aged-care in long-term care settings to how human security provided a chart for assessing the impacts of oil and gas development in the northwestern Canadian Arctic. It will also delve into what elite athletes can tell us about maximizing health and changes in long-term care witnessed in Ontario over the years and more.

“T�� Healthy Individuals, Healthy Communities and Global Health celebration highlights the range and diversity of health research at 91��ɫ and its connections to other disciplines including science and environmental studies research. It also gives a glimpse into the health research taking place on both the Keele and Glendon campuses,” said Robert Haché, vice-president research & innovation. “All 91��ɫ students, staff and faculty are invited to attend.”

The celebration will take place from 2 to 4pm in the Life Sciences Building Lobby.��The event will feature mini-research byte presentations followed by Q&As from the audience.

Featured presenters will include: Professor Joe Baker of the School of Kinesiology & Health Science, Faculty of Health; Professor Dawn Bazely of the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, who is also the director of the Institute for Research & Innovation in Sustainability; Professor Martin Bunch, associate dean research of the Faculty of Environmental Studies; Professor Tamara Daly of the School of Health Policy & Management, Faculty of Health; and Professor Guy Bernard Proulx, CIHR Research Chair in Gender, Work and Health, of the Department of Psychology, Glendon College.

The event will be available for .

Martin Bunch: Ecohealth: Using complexity science to inform an adaptive ecosystem approach to environment and health in informal settlements in Chennai, India
Informal settlements (“slums” in Asian and United Nations parlance) are characterized by extremely poor living conditions. They are located on marginal and often dangerous sites; lack urban amenities; housing is dense and substandard; residents almost always lack tenure and are subject to eviction; and they are the location of poor, vulnerable and marginalized populations. Unfortunately, attempts to address problems of slums demonstrate that slum settlements are resilient and resistant to change. ��In May 2004 a Canadian and Indian project team began working with NGOs and two community partners to explore the efficacy of applying an adaptive ecosystem approach, which draws upon complexity theory and resilience thinking, to environment and health in those communities. Bunch will discuss how the perspective of complexity and self-organization helped to understand why these communities can be so perversely resilient, and identify key relationships and processes that should be either undermined or promoted to encourage this social-ecological system to evolve to more desirable configurations.

Tamara Daly

Tamara Daly: Healthy Public Policy for Living and Working in Long-term Care
Daly will discuss how an ethos of care must inform public debate about healthy aged care, drawing on her local and international research in long-term care settings. She will highlight some challenges in long-term care settings and raise questions about how to create healthy care communities that include a focus on the needs of residents, families and workers.

Dawn Bazely

Dawn Bazely: Navigating the waters of transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaboration
Bazely’s presentation will explore how human security provided a chart for assessing the impacts of oil and gas development in the northwestern Canadian Arctic. ��She will also discuss how human security has provided a map for supporting local peoples,��both in Canada��and elsewhere in the world, who are facing the consequences of climate change. Her presentation will briefly highlight the lessons learned and exported from the IPY GAPS project: International Polar Year, Gas, Arctic Peoples and Security (2006-11).

Joe Baker

Joe Baker: Optimal function and optimal health: What elite athletes can tell us about maximizing health
Elite athletes can inform our understanding of the limits of human potential, which may have particular relevance for older adults. Masters athletes typically show exceptional maintenance of cognitive and physical function compared to the normal aging population and challenge our notions of what older adults are capable of doing.

Guy Proulx

Guy Proulx: ��The Shifting Borders of Cognitive Aging
The field of cognitive aging is changing rapidly. Half of Canadians born in 2012 can expect to live to 100 years and the hope is that their “health expectancy” could be as long. The presentation will contrast changes in long term care witnessed in Ontario the last decades and the need for more applied research addressing the wide variability within the normal aging population.

Please .

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Two PhD students create podcast series on environment

fmaquito — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Environmental studies PhD candidate Andrew Mark knows what’s it’s like to have a long commute to campus, but he tries to use this time productively by thinking about and listening to podcasts.

In fact, he likes podcasts so much, he and a fellow student have created a podcast series he hopes other 91��ɫ commuters will find intriguing and thought-provoking.

This week, Mark and Amanda Di Battista, also an environmental studies PhD candidate at 91��ɫ, will launch CoHearence, a new podcast series exploring the connections between the environment and history and culture.

The first episode will explore mourning,��loss and the environment��

On Thursday, Feb. 9, 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES) will host a screening and discussion based on the first episode of CoHearence as part of the FES Lecture Series at 12:45pm at 141 Health, Nursing & Environmental Studies building. Mark and Di Battista, along with other participants from the episode, will be on hand for a Q&A period.

Funded by (Network in Canadian History & Environment) and the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES), CoHearence is a six-part, monthly audio program free to the general public. Part one of the pilot podcast is “Melancholy, Mourning and Environmental Thought: Making Loss the Centre” and it looks at the loss involved in today’s changing environment.

Cohearance will also look at protests and the environment

For anyone not familiar with podcasts, they are similar to radio broadcasts with a difference in the delivery system. Instead of tuning in via radio, listeners download episodes digitally and listen to them through a computer or personal media device, such as an iPod or cellphone. “We think [podcasting] is ideally suited to talking about complex environmental issues,” says Di Battista. Mark agrees, saying “We hope this medium can create a new venue for information dissemination, beyond the written word, the lecture, the conference or an advising session.”

Di Battista says her goal in creating CoHearence is to “facilitate interesting discussion about the relationship between culture and environment. We work really hard to make each episode interesting both to those within the academy and the general public.”

Mark hopes the project will also reach an audience outside of the University. “Our primary objective is to improve the interdisciplinary discussion happening within our Faculty. We can [also] create narratives that are engaging to people outside of our community. For example, not only does our Faculty have theoretical ideas about the G20 protests, but we also have lived knowledge of those events.”

Each podcast episode will highlight current FES research. Di Battista says the reason for choosing melancholy and mourning as the topic for the first podcast is that “in the wake of the huge amount of environmental loss we talk, teach and learn about each day here in [FES], thinking about the ways that we might deal with the grief and anger that come out of those experiences seemed like a great place to start.”

Subsequent episodes will address a range of topics, including food justice, protest and resistance, and even highlights from the held last October at the Gladstone Hotel.

Di Battista and Mark hope that series will endure on the airwaves for a long time. To help ensure this, they are offering workshops on podcasting through the (CAP) program so future generations of FES students may continue to produce CoHearence. “People will discover and rediscover the series as a document of our times,” says Mark. “T��y might listen to our shows to hear about the topics or merely to come to know the people we interview better.”

CoHearence is available now on as a part of Sean Kheraj’s established podcast called Nature’s Past. It is also available on the website, which currently features a short preview video.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Student delegates report on UN Climate Change Conference

fmaquito — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

In December, two 91��ɫ graduate students attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa as non-voting delegates with observer status.

On Thursday, Ewa Modlinska, an MES student in environmental studies, and Alex Todd, an MA candidate in geography, will share their observations on the panel, in 120E Stedman Lecture Hall from 3 to 5pm.��

Right: 91��ɫ delegates, from left, MES student Ewa Modlinska, Curtis Kuunuaq Konek and Jordan Konek from the Arviat Youth Project, and MA student Alex Todd

The COP 17 Debrief panel is hosted by 91��ɫ’s , which, as a non-government organization, successfully applied for delegate status to the conference, and sponsored Modlinska and Todd.��

Modlinska will speak about the importance of listening at international climate change conferences. It is the topic of her fourth and final posted about the conference.��

is short for the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Established in 1992, it meets annually to set intergovernmental frameworks for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change. COP 17 took place from Nov. 28 to Dec. 9.

Modlinska went back and forth between the official conference inside��and meetings organized by��NGOs and other interest groups outside. She heard “a plurality of voices bringing different perspectives to the issue of climate change.” Official delegates focused on equity and development rights, while the protesters stressed climate justice, she said. “T�� biggest problem,” she told YFile, “was that there was not enough interaction between inside and outside.” Inside, they were proposing market-based mechanisms to mitigate climate change, profit-based solutions opposed by those outside.

Todd spent most of his time with protesters, so will have a different perspective on the conference, says Modlinska.

On the panel with her and Todd will be three others. Youth delegate April Dutheil attended the conference to set up a booth about how climate change is affecting Arviat, her home on the shores of Hudson Bay. From the Faculty of Environmental Studies, Professor Ellie Perkins specializes in globalization and the environment, and postdoctoral fellow Rachel Hirsch, in climate change and food insecurity in the North.

If you cannot attend the panel discussion, join the conversation��.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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91��ɫ rated greenest university in Canada

fmaquito — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ has ranked first among Canadian universities in a global campus sustainability survey��and 14th in the world. This is the second year in a row that 91��ɫ has ranked No. 1 in Canada.

The 2011 UI GreenMetric Ranking of World Universities rated participating universities in 42 countries based on criteria such as energy consumption, commuting practices, waste and water management, percentage of green space on campus, and the application of eco-sustainability policies and efforts.

“91��ɫ continues to strive to be at the forefront of sustainability strategies,” said 91��ɫ President & Vice-Chancellor��Mamdouh Shoukri. “Our first place ranking in Canada by the GreenMetric World University Ranking demonstrates that we are committed to enhancing our environmentally and socially responsible practices for the benefit of all members of our community."

The University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom placed first overall in the ranking, while Northeastern University and the University of Connecticut from the United States placed second and third.

From 2006 to 2011, 91��ɫ has met or bettered its sustainability targets, all while increasing enrolment and adding new buildings to both the Keele and Glendon campuses.

“This is testament to the excellent work of students, faculty and staff on sustainability issues here at 91��ɫ”, said Professor Ilan Kapoor, chair of the President’s Sustainability Council. “This is only the beginning, and clearly demonstrates that we are on the right track.”

91��ɫ’s recent achievements in the area of sustainability include:

The design and construction of��seven campus buildings to green building standards in the last 10 years, including the Lassonde Building which was one of the first ‘green’ buildings constructed in Ontario. This, along with the 91��ɫwise program that has guided the retrofitting of lighting, heating, cooling and water fixtures in older buildings, has enabled the University to achieve a 20 per cent��reduction in energy usage between 2007 and 2010, totaling over 60 million kilowatt hours of electricity over��three years��– enough energy to power both Keele and Glendon campuses for 240 days.
A 50 per cent��reduction in single occupancy vehicle use by the 91��ɫ community over the past 10 years. Currently, approximately two thirds of 91��ɫ community members commute to campus by environmentally preferable means, including walking, cycling, public transit and carpooling. 91��ɫ also operates a free campus shuttle service, offers a discount on public transit passes and awards incentives to carpoolers. Cyclists can make use of bike racks, indoor monitored bike parking and shower facilities.
A 70 per cent��increase in waste diversion rates between 2004 and 2010, resulting in��more than��10 million��kilograms of recyclable and compostable materials being diverted from landfills. Over the past year, 91��ɫ’s ZeroWaste program has increased food waste composting by approximately 20 per cent and significant increases were also found in the recycling of building materials and furnishings, with a 50 per cent��increase in scrap wood and a 45 per cent��increase in scrap metal recycling.

91��ɫ also offers a broad curriculum of sustainability programs, with over 350 undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on environment and sustainability across several Faculties including Environmental Studies, Education, Science��& Engineering, the Schulich School of Business and Osgoode Hall Law School.

“Effective sustainable practices reduce University costs, and will result in the legacy of a better environment for current and future generations, so the University is committed to the principles of sustainability, both in the classroom and across all aspects of campus operations,” said Richard Francki, assistant vice-president of Campus Services��& Business Operations. “We will continue to enhance our environmental management practices to ensure that 91��ɫ maintains its leadership in campus sustainability in Canada.”

In light of this commitment, the President’s Sustainability Council is advancing a number of new initiatives such as the Sustainability Ambassadors and Green Office programs, both of which will be launched in early 2012.��These initiatives will actively engage the 91��ɫ community in further achieving the University’s sustainability goals through a number of activities and learning opportunities.��

For more information on sustainability initiatives at 91��ɫ,��visit the President's Sustainability Council website,��or send an email to sustainability@yorku.ca.

Submitted by Andrew Plunkett, sustainability project coordinator, and Pavel Graymason, sustainability engagement coordinator, in the Office of the President.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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