Welcome to the March 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
Linn Biorklund Belliveau on the everyday politics of migrant women at the Mexico-Guatemala U.S. proxy border
Mariyan Boychev on reshaping cities through sustainable urban planning strategies
Gregory Thiemann on knowledge co-production to address human-polar bear conflict in Southern Hudson Bay and James Bay
Patricia Figueiredo Walker on the vulnerability of Canadian children and youth to climate change
Mark Winfield on how the war in Ukraine will shape Canada’s energy policy — and climate change
Wesley Wu on using remote sensing to identify boreal disturbance mapping uncertainty
EUC Research in the Media
Kean Birch has an article in Policy Options titled Big Tech, Little Oversight noting that Canada stands out as the only G7 country that is doing little to regulate tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.
Sheila Colla and her EUC graduate class in Environmental Resource Management provided a public commentary on The Ring of Fire Regional Assessment Proposal to the Government of Canada.
Raju Das and Robert Latham interviewed King's College London Professor of Political Economy and International Development, Alfredo Saad-Filho on Breaking the Hold of Authoritarian Neoliberalism by Working Class Movements.
Legacies Team at the exhibit with (L-R) Diego Lopez, Deborah Barndt,
Hana Tagaki, Lauren Baker, Hannah Benyamin, and Alex Gelis.
Alex Gelis (PhD Candidate in Environmental Studies) has an ongoing Home(Land) exhibition at ArtworxTO Hub West at The East Mall, Etobicoke from Feb. 16 – May, 2022. "With - living migrant relations" is an immersive, interactive, sculptural sound and film installation that invites viewers to interact at multiple levels with the complexities of symbiotic relations of the Migrated Plants focused on the migration to the city of Toronto. Mayor John Tory marked the reopening of the ArtworxTO Hubs featuring the work of Alex Gelis, among other artists.
Ilan Kapoor and Zahi Zalloua wrote a commentary on Why the world needs a universal politics in The London School of Economics and Political Science - European politics and policy blog.
Research by Roger Keil and Murat Üçoglu was covered in a Toronto Star article story titled "York University study says vertical sprawl is equally an issue".
The Las Nubes' Grounded Project recently released a new documentary film titled "Buried Seeds" which looks at the life experiences of 20 peasants in Southern Costa Rica, their sense of identity, their daily struggles, the threats to their ways of life, and what sustains them. The film is directed by Felipe Montoya, with Mburucuya Marcela Ortiz Imlach as the academic lead in collaboration with York's Faculty of Health (FoH), Universidad Técnica Nacional de Costa Rica, San Carlos Campus, and York Libraries with thanks to the financial support of EUC, FoH, York International and York Libraries. Las Nubes will have a Workshop on Indigenous and Afro-descendant Autonomies from Central America and the Caribbean: A Knowledge-Exchange on Emancipation this April.
Shelley O'Brien is presenting at the Harvard Graduate Music Forum Conference on March 25-26. Her presentation is titled "Breathing-with: A Microbial song".
The PhD in Environmental Studies Students Association (PhESSA) recently held a Research Day featuring interdisciplinary research projects happening in EUC!
We are All Treaty People is the sixth and final EUC seminar-series on Polishing the Chain: Treaty Relations in Toronto, 2021-2022.
Martha Stiegman's final seminar on We are All Treaty People as part of the Polishing the Chain: Treaty Relations in Toronto speaker series is now available for viewing. Recordings of all seminars are available on YouTube. A Treaty Guide for Torontonians, co-created with Ange Loft, Martha Stiegman and Jill Carter will be launched at the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, March 26- June 5, 2022.
Laura Taylor delivered an informative and timely discussion on the issues and challenges of cities and climate change in a CITY webinar on Cities and the Climate Crisis as part of the Climate Change Research Month at York.
Mark Winfield published an article on War, Energy and Climate Change: The Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.
Jose Etcheverry recently delivered a talk on Top Climate Solutions at the IEEED speaker series organized by CIFAL York and BEST at Lassonde School of Engineering.
Buried Seeds (2022) premiered in February with a panel discussion on peasant resilience and well-being.
Stefan Kipfer gave an invited lecture in the Department of Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, Chicago in February on "Meeting up in the spatial turn: The historical geographies of Antonio Gramsci and a few others" that focused on his research on the geographical dimensions of Antonio Gramsci's work.
Justin Podur’s Anti-Empire Project produced a radio podcast titled Will Ukraine be Putin’s Afghanistan? with Scott Ritter. His other recent podcasts discussed Vaccine Mandates and Dispersed Convoys and The British Sack Benin in 1897.
Sarah Rotz's Relational Accountability for Indigenous Rematriation (RAIR) project has a new podcast series featuring dialogues that explore Indigenous land rematriation and land sharing within the context of ongoing settler colonialism in Canada. The first episode addressed Land, Colonialism & Patriarchy with Sherry Pictou & Martha Stiegman.
Cate Sandilands participated in a keynote discussion, "Is Climate Change (Only) Meterological," for The Seed Box Community Garden Festival.
Joshua Thienpont also a new podcast on The Next Best Thing Since Sliced Sediment. Follow their Core Ideas - A Palelimneology Podcast on Soundcloud.
The York Ecological Footprint Institute recently launched the Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts 2022 with special guest, Severn Cullis-Suzuki. The 2022 Edition of the Accounts covers the period 1961-2018 and details ecological footprint and biocapacity by total and by component, at a national level and on a world-total basis.
Anna Zalik participated in an Extractivism and Society Research Cluster panel discussion on New Strategies: Extractivist Corporations, Communities, and the State in a Post-COVID World. She delivered the Annual Critical Hope Lecture on The Aftermath of Extractivist Times: Towards a Post-Catastrophist Future Value at the Department of Global Development Studies and African Studies Program at UofT on March 9.
Accolades and Awards
ES PhD student Hillary Birch was awarded a Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholarship (DGHGS) for one year to study interwoven processes and power relations that shape water quality in African cities, drawing new connections between human activity, environmental health, and global health practice.
Sheila Colla and PhD alumna Victoria MacPhail received a grant from Environment and Climate Change Canada for a project on developing a model for a commercial bumble bee clean stock certification program for Canada. The project will develop recommendations on best management practices for managed pollinators and related products.
Honor Ford-Smith received a grant from Helen Carswell Chair in Community Engaged Research in the Arts for her project on Oral Histories, Music-Making and Food Justice. The research will create a socially engaged music curriculum that will share local oral histories of food cultures through intergenerational music-making in the service of urban food justice.
Roger Keil received an award from the Urban Studies Foundation for research on The city after COVID-19: Vulnerability and urban governance in Chicago, Toronto, and Johannesburg with Xuefei Ren (Michigan State University) and Philip Harrison (University of Witwatersrand). The project is a pilot study of a larger comparative project on the complex effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban governance.
Martha Stiegman, Leesa Fawcett, and Tamotsu Andres Campos were awarded a MITACS Accelerate research grant. The award will enable Tamo Campos to do Action Research on the Impact Field of Canadian Documentary Films with Independent Media -- Story Money Impact (SMI) Film Society. The research internship will explore the growing field of Impact Producing in Canada -- defined as the labor of maximizing a documentary film’s potential for social change. The field involves creating partnerships between documentary films and existing social movements and the nonprofit sector.
Anna Zalik has been selected to receive the Global Affairs Canada (GAC) Faculty Mobility for Partnership Building Program (FMPBP) 2022-2023 grant to do research in Mexico. The Faculty Mobility for Partnership Building Program aims to increase the number of institutional collaborations and exchange agreements between Canadian post-secondary institutions and non-Canadian post-secondary institutions eligible under the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program (ELAP). The Program awards short-term grants to professors to teach and/or conduct research in ELAP-eligible countries.
Publications and Reports
Bain, A. & Peake, L., Eds. (2022) Urbanization in a Global Context, Second Edition. Oxford University Press.
This new edition includes chapters by several members of our EUC community:
- Introduction: Global Urbanization and Urban Futures, by Alison L. Bain and Linda Peake
- Shifting Urban Contours: Understanding a World of Growing & Shrinking Cities, by Kenneth Cardenas & Philip Kelly
- Suburbanization Worldwide, by Richard Harris and Roger Keil
- Cultural Governance in Post-Industrial Cities, by Alison L. Bain and Friederike Landau
- Smart Cities: Big Data and Surveillance, by Brandon Hillier and Teresa Abbruzzese
- Women in Cities, by Linda Peake and Geraldine Pratt
- Healthy Cities, by Godwin Arku, Richard Sadler, Laurence Simard-Gagnon, and Vera Chouinard
- LGBTQ+ Urban Social Worlds, by Julie A. Podmore, Alison L. Bain, and Chan Arun-Pina
- More-Than-Human-Cities, by Lauren Van Patter, Laura Shillington, and Alice Hovorka
Birch, K. & Bronson, K. (2022). Big Tech, Science as Culture, 31:1: Forum on Big Tech, 1-14.
Brand-Correa, L. et al. (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.
Fraser, G. et al. (2022). Estimating the numbers of aquatic birds affected by oil spills: Pre-planning, response, and post incident considerations, Environmental Reviews, February 2022.
Johnson, L. and Colla, S. (2022). A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee: Creating Habitat for Native Pollinators (Ontario and Great Lakes Edition), Douglas and McIntyre. May 2022.
Keil, R. (2022). Of Flying Cars and Pandemic Urbanism: Splintering Urban Society in the Age of Covid-19, The Journal of Urban Technology, Volume 29, Issue 1, 29-37.
Keil, R. & Hertel, S. (2022). Fixing post-suburbia: Recalibrating the way we think, speak and act upon Toronto's periphery in Suburbia in the 21st Century: From Dreamscape to Nightmare? Edited by Paul J. Maginn and Katrin B. Anacker. Routledge.
Keil, R. & Murat Üçoğlu (2021) Beyond Sprawl? Regulating Growth in Southern Ontario: Spotlight on Brampton, disP - The Planning Review, 57:3, 100-118.
Treffers, S., Ali, S. H., Keil, R., & Fallah, M. (2021). Extending the boundaries of ‘urban society’: The urban political ecologies and pathologies of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
Ali, S. Harris, Mosoka P. Fallah, Joseph Mustapha McCarthy, Roger Keil, Creighton Connolly (2022) Mobilizing the social infrastructure of informal settlements in infectious disease response – The case of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa, Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 217.
Jonathan S. Davies, Ismael Blanco, Adrian Bua, Ioannis Chorianopoulos, Merce Cortina-Oriol, Niamh Gaynor, Brendan Gleeson, Steven Griggs, Pierre Hamel, Hayley Henderson, David Howarth, Roger Keil, Madeleine Pill, Yuni Salazar and Helen Sullivan, New Developments in Urban Governance: Rethinking Collaboration in the Age of Austerity. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
Kipfer, S. & Mohamud, J. (2021). The pandemic as political emergency, Studies in Political Economy, Volume 102, Issue 3, published online January 2022, 268-288.
Korosi, J., Coleman, K., Hoskin, G., Little, A., Emily Stewart, E., & Thienpont, J. (2022). Paleolimnological perspectives on the shifting geographic template of permafrost landscapes and its implications for Arctic freshwater biodiversity, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, January 2022.
Mensah, J. & Williams, C. (2022). Socio-structural Injustice, Racism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Precarious Entanglement among Black Immigrants in Canada, Studies of Social Justice, Vol. 16, No. 1, 123-142.
Firang, D. & Mensah, J. (2022). Exploring the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on International Students and Universities in Canada, Journal for International Students, Vol. 12, No. 1.
Remmel, T.K. (2022). Extending morphological pattern segmentation to 3D voxels. Landscape Ecology, 37, 373–380.
Rotz, S. (2022). Gendered Messaging. In Showing Theory to Know Theory (P. Ballamingie & D. Szanto, eds.). Ottawa: Showing Theory Press.
Rotz, S. (2022) Food as Relations: Reflecting on our Roots, (Re)visioning our Relationships. In Food Studies: Matter, Meaning & Movement. Edited by David Szanto, Amanda Di Battista, and Irena Knezevic. Ottawa: Food Studies Press.
Duncan, E., Rotz, S., Magnan, A., & Bronson, K. (2022). Disciplining Land through Data: The Role of Agricultural Technologies in Farmland Assetization. Sociologia Ruralis.
Sandilands, C. (2022) "Fifteen Minutes" in WATCH YOUR HEAD: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. 02-22, February 2022
Sotomayor, L., Tarhan, D., Vieta, M., McCartney, S. and & Mas, A. (2022). When students are house-poor: Urban universities, student marginality, and the hidden curriculum of student housing, Cities, Volume 124, May 2022.
Weima, Y. and Brancamp, H. (2022). Camp Methodologies: The “How” of Studying Camps. Area, 20 February 2022.
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 Students Ashraf Hutchcraft and Marcos Fernandez Porras. 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
If you are not on the EUC community listserves, but would like to receive this Research Update each month, send an email to eucresea@yorku.ca
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