The Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change brings together geographers, physical scientists, social scientists, humanities researchers and artists whose innovative research seeks to advance sustainability and social justice. Using field-based science, policy analysis, critical social theory, planning skills, geomatics, and cultural and arts-based approaches, our researchers drive action to address the world’s environmental and urban challenges.
By the Numbers
54
Faculty researchers
76
Research projects in 2020
33
Countries engaged in EUC research
$15M
In Research funding
Research Spotlights
Rhythm of revolution in Iran: In the name of Zhina (Mahsa) Amini
Theorizing animal labour in Thailand’s tourism industry
Unconscious desire and its constitutive role in global political economy
EUC Research Update
EUC Research Update
Welcome to the May 2023 edition of the EUC Research Update - bringing you highlights from research activities at York's Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change.
Research Accolades
Linda Peake has been awarded the American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) Lifetime Achievement Honors for her scholarly contributions to feminist and urban geographies, and for a career dedicated to extending equity, diversity and inclusion at her institution and across the discipline of geography. Peake’s four decades of scholarship have spanned feminist, social and urban geography, studies of race and racism, and mental health. Her early research was focused on feminist urban geography and led to co-edited volumes such as Women, Human Settlements, and Housing (1987) and Women in Cities (1988). In the 1990s, her perspective broadened to include race and sexuality and engaged the idea of intersectionality, a hallmark of Peake’s scholarship, long before this term came to be commonly used and understood in geography. Peake has also helped shape these fields through her editorship of Gender, Place and Culture (GPC), Social and Cultural Geography and as associate editor on the AAG Encyclopedia.
Dayna Nadine Scott (Osgoode/EUC) received a SSHRC Partnership Grant for their project on Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism: Material Approaches to Restoring Indigenous Jurisdiction to explore novel approaches that will restore Indigenous governing authority over lands and waterways.
The funding will enable Scott and her collaborators to continue support for Indigenous land defenders across several bioregions who are working to build up and restore vital infrastructures in their territories. Scott’s own project continues in partnership with Neskantaga First Nation which is launching a new youth-focused Lake Sturgeon Stewardship program, Namekaa Gaagige, in the face of extractive pressures in the Attawapiskat River watershed due to the proposed development of the Ring of Fire. The project aims to generate insights about the relationship between infrastructure and jurisdiction, and to evaluate strategies for reclaiming and restoring Indigenous jurisdiction over lands and waters through the generation of vital infrastructures against extractivism. (See SSHRC News Release on details of grant recipients and YFile News).
Andil Gosine received the Duke University Press Scholar of Color First Book Award for Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (2021).In Nature's Wild, Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean.
Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine is curator of Wendy Nanan at the Art Museum of the Americas (2021-22), everything slackens in a wreck- at the Ford Foundation Gallery (2022), and Unfinished Work at the Leslie Lohman Museum (2024).
Sarah Rotz is the recipient of the 2022 Julian M. Szeicz Award for Early Career Achievement. The award is presented annually by the Canadian Association of Geographers in recognition of research achievement and career potential by a Canadian geographer at an early career stage.
Sarah's work is grounded in environmental justice applied to land and food systems. Much of her research aims to situate political economic processes -- such as agri-food industrialization, financialization and policy - within the lens of settler colonial patriarchy and racial capitalism. She also draws from anti-colonial, feminist and community-based methodologies to engage in accountable and reciprocal research practices for more just and sustainable land and food futures.
Nadha Hassen, PhD candidate in Environmental Studies and Vanier Scholar, has been awarded Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship for her research on Parks Prescriptions and Perceptions: Experiences of Racialized People with Mood Disorders in Green Spaces.
The scholarship is awarded to outstanding doctoral students in their final year of doctoral study to concentrate exclusively on and complete their dissertations. Nadha’s research 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.
Carli Melo, PhD student in Geography, has been awarded a SSHRC CGS Doctoral award for her research on Internal migrants in Myanmar's manufacturing sector: Examining exploitative labour practices and social reproduction in global production networks.
The program supports high-quality research training experience to doctoral students at Canadian institutions and strives to foster impacts within and beyond the research environment. Carli’s research emerges from years of working with the Mekong Migration Network – a network of over 40 civil society organizations from across mainland Southeast Asia working to promote and protect the rights of migrant workers and their families.
EUC Research & the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
EUC Research for Sustainable Development
The UN SDGs provide a framework for urgent action in seventeen areas that are critical to ensure peace and prosperity for people and the planet. York University has embedded a commitment to the SDGs into its academic planning, and EUC is at the forefront of research on many of the SDGs.
