EUC Research Updates - August 2023

Accolades, Acknowledgement, and Awards

Laurence Butet-Roch (PhD candidate in Environmental Studies) received a Susan Mann Dissertation Award for her research studying visual narratives of environmental contamination and systemic environmental racism. Her research considers how to visually bear witness to environmental injustices, especially industrial contamination, without further rendering certain communities and habitats expendable and pollutable.

A photographer, photo editor, writer and art educator, Butet-Roch contributes to Aperture, The British Journal of Photography, National Geographic, Photolife, Point of View, Polka Magazine, The New York Times Lens Blog, The New Yorker Photo Booth, among others.

Sheila Colla and Rachel Nalepa released a report on Conserving Canada’s Wild Pollinators: National Strategy Recommendations that outlines a vision for a pollinator-friendly Canada. The strategy provides a blueprint that help wild pollinators not only to survive, but to thrive as well. The vision is supported by goals that address the top threats to Canada’s wild pollinators -- including habitat loss, pesticides and disease -- all in the context of ongoing climate change with each goal linked to objectives, clear action steps and research that fills knowledge gaps in this field of study.

Raju Das has new book titled Contradictions of Capitalist Society and Culture: Dialectics of Love and Lying (Brill, 2023) which examines the crisis of capitalist culture in a contemporary world that is marked by ideological-political lying to cover up the system's contradictions that cause mass alienation and suffering. A crisis-ridden capitalism produces a right-wing politics of lying (‘post-truth’ politics) which also harbours a politics of hatred (or, ‘post-love, or, anti-love’) against minorities, democrats and socialists. Das argues that the fight against hate-politics and post-truth politics must be part of the fight for a post-capitalist world (socialist democracy), imagined as a truthful and caring world.

Abidin Kusno has a new book titled Jakarta: City of a Thousand Dimensions , published by the National University of Singapore Press, and distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press. The book teases out some of the dimensions that have given shape to contemporary Jakarta, including the city’s expanded flexibility in accommodating capital and labour, the formal and the informal, and the consistent lack of planning which can be understood as both politics and poetics of governing. It shows how such a statecraft is configured, contested, and changed. A must read for those seeking to understand one of Asia's most dynamic cities!

Ute Lehrer, Roger Keil and Luisa Sotomayor participated in the visit of German Minister for Science, Research and the Arts in Baden-Württemberg, Petra Olschowski and her Delegation from Baden-Wuerttemberg to York University on August 22. Lehrer and Keil represented the work that FES/EUC has done in collaboration with German partners over the last 15 years, from experiential education to research partnerships and teaching exchange; while Sotomayor presented her vision for the CITY Institute in her role as the new director.

Luisa Sotomayor is the new director of the City Institute at York University. Sotomayor has been an active member of CITY since joining the Planning Program at the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change (previously the Faculty of Environmental Studies) in 2016. Sotomayor is thrilled to embark on this new position, building on the foundation laid by former CITY Directors Linda Peake and Roger Keil and tapping on the collective expertise, fresh perspectives, and dedication of its associated faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, students, visiting scholars, and community members.

Warm welcome to a new visiting scholar Nicholas Surber, PhD candidate in Science, Technology and Society at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. As a researcher, his background is in political ecology and economy, risk and economic sociology and policy-oriented science and technology studies. His research titled Too Enabling to Fail – Ethics and Practices in the Legitimation of Nanotechnology seeks to investigate empirical settings of value frontloading in engineering and design processes in nanotechnology. Surber will be working with Kean Birch in developing a broader theoretical framework for his dissertation which is supported by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA). His thesis will propose that nanotechnology matters not only because of the innovative technological opportunities, or its status as perennial case study for experimental research and innovation governance and democratization, but because emerging science and technology increasingly enables and constitutes the economy of tomorrow.

Coming to EUC in September is Claire Hooker, Associate Professor in Health and Medical Humanities at the University of Sydney Health Ethics and President of the Arts Health Network NSW/ACT. Hooker undertakes research and advocacy in two areas - risk communication, particularly in relation to infectious disease, and the creative arts and health. She combines creative research methods, critical humanities scholarship, cognitive psychology, and the history and philosophy of science, to produce new insights into ethical communication in health. Hooker will give a public talk titled "Arts and Cultural Activity Are Crucial For Effective Disaster Management: Here’s Why!" on Thursday, September 21, 3-4:30pm and will lead a workshop titled "What does art do in health?" on Friday, September 22, 12:30-2pm.

Mark Winfield and Susan Wyse (PhD candidate in Environmental Studies), received a new grant from MITACS Accelerate and Regional Municipality of Durham on an Evaluation Framework for Durham Community Energy Plan (DCEP).

The project will support the development of an evaluation plan that establishes metrics, measurement methods, tools and ongoing practices to track progress and evaluate the impact of key actions on DCEP priority outcomes. Developing a robust framework for evaluating the DCEP could be applicable to other levels of government in Ontario who have developed community energy plans, as well as the rest of Canada. The project aligns with Durham Region’s 2020-2024 Strategic Plan and falls under the pillar of Environmental Sustainability which aims to protect the environment for the future by demonstrating leadership in sustainability and addressing climate change.

Publications and Reports

Auger, B., Nevalainen, L., Blais, J.M. Thienpoint, J., and Korosi, J. (2023). A comparative paleolimnological analysis of Chydorus exposure to ultraviolet radiation associated with shoreline retrogressive thaw slumping in lakes of the Mackenzie Delta uplands (Northwest Territories, Canada), Journal of Paleolimnology, 70, 193–204.

Birch, K., & Ward, C. (2023). Struggling over new asset geographies, Dialogues in Human Geography, 0(0).

Butet-Roch, L. and Del Vecchio, D. (2023) Elaborated images as decolonial praxis, Visual Studies, July. DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2230466.

Colla, S. and Nalepa R. (2023). Conserving Canada's Wild Pollinators: National Strategy Recommendations.

Das, R. (2023). Contradictions of Capitalist Society and Culture: Dialectics of Love and Lying. Brill: Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Vol 253.

Kusno, A. (2023). Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions, National University of Singapore.

Liczner, A., Schuster, R., Richardson, L, and Colla, S. (2023). Identifying conservation priority areas for North American bumble bee species in Canada under current and future climate scenarios, Conservation Science and Practice, July.

Montero, S. and Sotomayor, L. (2024). Judicialización y política urbana: Ciudadanos, políticos y jueces en la suspensión de Transmilenio por la Séptima en Bogotá, EURE, Vol 50, No 149.

Ogunjo, S., Olusola, A., and Durowoju, O. (2023). Multidecadal trend analysis of hydrological drought along River Niger using the Streamflow Drought Index, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, August.

Creutzig, F., Goetzke, F., Ramakrishnan, A., Andrijevic, M., and Perkins, P. (2023). Designing a virtuous cycle: Quality of governance, effective climate change mitigation, and just outcomes support each other, Global Environmental Change, Volume 82, 102726.

Perkins, P.E. (2023). Climate Justice and Participatory Research: Building Climate-Resilient Commons. University of Calgary Press.

Sarrazin, P. and Norcliffe, G. (2023). Coupling in Sport: Geopolitics and Hockey Player Production Links Between Canada and China. Journal of Emerging Sport Studies, Volume 9, Summer.

Preston, V., McLafferty, S. and Maciejewska, M. (2023). Regionalization and Recent Immigrants’ Access to Jobs: An Analysis of Commuting in Canadian Metropolitan Areas, Geoforum, Volume 144, 103787.

EUC Media Coverage

EUC has created a compilation of podcasts and podcast appearances featuring our community members discussing topics from Indigenous thinking, to global geopolitics, to the environmental science of freshwater systems. They are available on the new Voices of EUC page.

The page also features the 'Changemakers' podcast series, produced by EUC students, featuring interviews with members of our community and reflections on the student experience at York.

Finding Flowers has launched its new website! The site opens creative pathways to share the work of the research project team (with Sheila Colla, Lisa Myers, and Dana Prieto as core team members in cooperation with York students and alumni as well as other community members) in the intersections of art, ecology and education. Within the portal, you will find its *Online Gardens*, a novel interactive virtual project that is deeply inspired by Mike MacDonald’s gardens. The platform is envisioned to become an online gathering place, and a research and educational tool for sharing experiences of the multiple forms of life existing around the gardens and on the land they are connected to. To celebrate the launch, we invite you to wander through the gardens, upload an entry in the “Tend” section, and then share with us your thoughts! We are excited to hear your ideas for community, ecological, artistic and/or pedagogical engagements within the site. Your insights and feedback will be invaluable as we continue to expand and enhance our platform. Thank you for your support in building a deeper understanding of the connections between native plants, native pollinators, Indigenous knowledge and artistic practices.

Deborah McGregor is included in the Canadian Encyclopedia as an Indigenous Knowledge Systems expert. An Anishinaabe scholar, her work focuses on how Indigenous knowledges, experiences and voices can be applied to solve environmental problems. McGregor has held roles in both academic institutions and public organizations to address issues related to climate change.

McGregor has published widely on the subject of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and environmentalism, She has contributed to at least 22 books, was the co-editor of Indigenous Research: Theories, Practices, and Relationships (2018) and sole author of Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age (2010). Additionally, McGregor is a co-editor of Anishinaabewin, a conference proceedings series. In 2022, McGregor contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. Her work outlined how Indigenous Peoples in Canada and the United States are experiencing and addressing climate change.

Ellie Perkins was featured in YFile News for her co-authorship of a paper on "Designing a virtuous cycle: Quality of governance, effective climate change mitigation, and just outcomes support each other" published in the Journal of Global Environmental Change. The paper investigates the role of quality of governance, social capital and equality as preconditions for enacting climate policies. Notably, Perkins worked previously with some of the co-authors of the paper on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report, that documented the close interrelationship evident in peer-reviewed literature between socioeconomic equity policies and successful climate policies.

Tarmo Remmel provides a short tutorial on YouTube that takes viewers through the steps of finding and downloading Sentinel 2 satellite imagery from the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem. In the tutorial, Remmel shows how to find the portal, log in, define a search area, add search filters, and finally download the required imagery. When downloaded and uncompressed, the image then becomes ready to be incorporated into your remote sensing environment.

Anders Sandberg penned an article on Larry Licht: Professor of Biology, Guardian of Wood Frogs (in the Boyer Woodlot), and Poet of Life on his Alternative Campus Tour webpage. Licht taught in the Department of Biology at York from the early 1970s to the early 2010s and now lives in retirement in Victoria, British Columbia. During his time at York he followed the fate of the wood frogs in the Michael Boyer Woodlot. One of Licht's major research achievements was to disprove the widely circulated claim in the 1990s scientific community and popular media that ultraviolet radiation was killing amphibians.

Valerie Preston's SSHRC Partnership Research project on Building Migrant Resilience in Cities (BMRC) released its Summer Research Digest on Gender, Immigration and Commuting in Metropolitan Canada. This research investigates the differences between immigrant women and men in the transportation modes used to commute to work as part of a larger investigation of migrant social resilience. The findings underscore immigrant women’s reliance on public transportation and active commuting during the first ten years living in Canada.

Another Summer Research Digest on Bordering non-citizenship assemblage through migrant legibility offers “a conceptual framework for educators, researchers, and policy makers to consider how immigration pathways are shaped by complex informal and bureaucratic relationships”.

Mark Winfield wrote an article titled "Doug Ford’s Greenbelt scandal: The beginning of the end of his years in power?" for The Conversation.

In this article , he shared his view on Doug Ford government's decisions on planning for the growth of the Greater Toronto Area as well as land-use planning system for the Greenbelt.