Welcome to the May 2022 edition of the EUC Research Update - bringing you highlights from research activities at York'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

Nadha Hassen (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’s 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.

Reena Shadaan (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 York University’s President’s University-Wide Teaching Award. Shadaan’s research intersects environmental and occupational health and justice. In her doctoral work, 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’s 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’s 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.

Shira Taylor is our new EUC postdoc! The Director of SExT: Sex Education by Theatre, 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’s 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
Camille Turner (ES PhD) has been awarded Toronto Biennial of Art’s Artist Prize for her outstanding contributions to the Biennial. Her multimedia installation Nave (2022) combines Afrofuturism and historical research to shed light on ‘the 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’. In this artwork, a time traveler from the future Age of Awakening— performed by the artist—visits 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
Publications and Reports
Birch, K., Ward, C., and Tretter, E. (2022). Introduction: New Frontiers of Techno-Economic Rentiership, Competition and Change, April.
Brand Correa, L., Brook, A., Buchs, M., Meier, P., Naik, Y., O'Neill, D.W. (2022). Economics for people and planet—moving beyond the neoclassical paradigm. The Lancet: Planetary Health, Volume 6, Issue 4, e371-e379.
Brand Correa, L. (2022). Understanding, recognizing, and sharing energy poverty knowledge and gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean – because conocer es resolver, Energy Research & Social Science, Volume 87, May 2022, 102475.
Colla, S. R. (2022). The potential consequences of ‘bee washing’ on wild bee health and conservation. International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife, 18, 30–32.
Damian, M., Harris, A., Aussage, J., and Fraser, G. (2022). Seasonal deposition of marine debris on an important marine turtle nesting beach in Costa Rica, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Volume 177.
Deranger, E, Sinclair, R, Gray, B, McGregor, D, Gobby, J. (2022). Decolonizing Climate Research and Policy: Making space to tell our own stories, in our own ways, Community Development Journal, Volume 57, Issue 1, January, Pages 52–73.
Hassen, N. (2022). Leveraging built environment interventions to equitably promote health during and after COVID-19 in Toronto, Canada. 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). The Securitisation of Sri Lankan Tourism in the Absence of Peace, 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). Outsourcing Artificial Intelligence: Responding to the reassertion of the human element into automation. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts.
Kapoor, A., Fraser, G.S., Carter, A.V., and Brooks, D. (2022). Overcoming Divisive Strategic Environmental Assessments for Offshore Oil and Gas in Nova Scotia, Canada. Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management.
Keil, R. & Wu, F. (Eds, 2022). After Suburbia: Urbanization in the Twenty-First century. University of Toronto Press, October.
Loft, A., Freeman, V., Stiegman, M., and Carter, C. (2022). A Treaty Guide for Torontonians, 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’Souza, J., Ekra, M., Preston, V., and Shields, J. (2022). Pandemic Response Survey Results: OCASI Agency Frontline Workers - September 2020-2021. Building Migrant Resilience in Cities (BMRC) Research Report, May.
Rotz, S. (2022). Food as Relations: Reflecting on our Roots, (Re)visioning our Relationships. In Food Studies: Matter, Meaning & Movement, Pressbooks.
Sotomayor, L., Tarhan, D., Vieta, M., McCartney, S., & Mas, A. (2022). When students are house-poor: Urban universities, student marginality, and the hidden curriculum of student housing. Cities, Vol 124, May, 103572.
Stiegman, S. (2022). Seizing this COVID moment: What can Food Justice learn from Disability Justice, Canadian Food Justice, Vol. 9No. 1, pp. 266–280, 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.
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Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC)
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