Faculty
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Prof. Ali studies environmental disasters; the environment and health; environmental sociology; and preventive engineering. In addition, he is embarking on a major collaborative project that will investigate how processes of globalization have affected the transmission and response to SARS within the context of Toronto as a global city.
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Anisef, former director of the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) and Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, is currently undertaking a study of immigrants to York Region that will lead to better policy formation, decision-making, and strategic planning. He also recently edited The World in a City, a collection of essays that explores Toronto’s ability to sustain a civic society in the face of immigration and multiculturalism.
School of Social Work, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Anucha’s scholarship focuses on: Homelessness and Under-Housing; Immigration and Diversity; and International Social Work. She actively seeks to bridge the gap between knowledge production and knowledge use by translating and disseminating research findings to communities, agencies and policy makers using diverse forums. She is the Director of a six-year (2006-2012) international collaboration with the University of Benin, Nigeria that is focused on building the capacity of social workers to better address the vulnerability of women and girls in Benin City to poverty, trafficking and HIV/AIDS.
Emergency Management, School of Administrative Studies, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Asgary’s research focuses on urban disaster and emergency management issues ranging from economic assessment of risk mitigation/prevention and emergency preparedness measures to urban disaster simulations and automation, and post disaster reconstruction.
Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Bain is a geographer who studies contemporary Canadian urban and suburban culture. Her work examines the contradictory relationship between artists, cities, and suburbs with particular attention to questions of occupational identity formation and urban change. In her current research she focuses on cultural production and creative practice on the margins of Canada’s largest metropolitan areas.
Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Basu uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to explore issues of inequality, social justice, and public service provision in cities. Her work focuses on the geographies of collective action, neoliberalism and educational restructuring in Ontario’s cities.
Division of Humanities, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Berland’s research is focused on cultural theory, with an emphasis on Canadian communication theory, the cultural studies of science, music and the media, and the notion of space and place. Prof. Berland recently published a book North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, she is currently working on her project “Virtual Menageries in Network Culture” and was awared the 2008 Association for Canadian Studies Award of Merit for her work.
Division of Social Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Caulfield is on the editorial boards of Visual Studies and of the Canadian Journal of Urban Research, and his work has received awards from the Toronto Historical Society and the American Sociological Association. His research interests include old church buildings in inner Toronto, the redevelopment of deindustrialized space and the use of photography in urban research.
Department of History and Humanities, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Dr. Tom Cohen taps the extensive verbatim records of criminal courts, to explore the social, political,and cultural anthropology of life in Renaissance Rome and its hinterland. The work is microhistorical, expounded as stories, with an eye to the colour and flavour of daily life, to explore the ephemeral structures of social life, its alliances and enmities, the strategies of self-help, brokerage, negotiation, and mutual support in a city of weak formal institutions where jury-rigged solution made good the deficiencies of governance. He tracks “entanglement” and “communion” –devices for civic and social coherence, via webs of gifts, both material and symbolic, and shared experience — to read the ceremonial life ofthe “baroque city” through the lens of an exchange economy
Faculty of Education
Dr. Warren Crichlow is a member of the University Faculty of Graduate Studies, and he is associated with the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, Culture and Communication, Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Centre for the Study of Black Cultures in Canada. His current research initiatives include the development of a transnational, collaborative project on media arts practices in schools and communities in Canada, Argentina and the U. S., a Robarts Centre project investigating the role of festivals and cultural policy in constructing the creative city, among others. He sits on the Advisory Board of the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), and is active in the Gallery’s contemporary art and education outreach initiatives with local communities.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Dr. Sébastien Darchen joined the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management (University of Queensland) in 2011 after being affiliated with the Faculty of Environmental Studies (York University, Toronto) as an Assistant Professor from 2009 to 2011. Previously, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Canada Research Chair on the Socio-Organizational Challenges of the Knowledge Economy (Teluq-UQAM, Montreal) from 2007 to 2009. He holds a PhD in Urban Studies (INRS-UCS) and a Master in Housing Development and Management (University of Cape Town, South Africa). Dr. Sébastien Darchen studies the strategies of urban stakeholders in the provision of the built environment. It includes the following areas of research: urban regeneration, economic development strategies, globalization & network society, mobility of urban policies, urban design and place-making, public participation in planning. Dr. Darchen is currently affiliated to the Faculty of Environmental Studies as an Adjunct Professor (2011-2014), his aim is to develop collaborative research between Canada and Australia on the mobility of urban policies related to urban regeneration and economic development in a global context.
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Darroch is the York U site director of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure project, a pan-Canadian, multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional effort to develop a set of interrelated databases centred on data from the 1911-1951 Canadian censuses. The project will permit unprecedented analysis of how Canada has become one of the most urbanized nations on earth, ultimately providing a new foundation for the study of social, economic, cultural and political change.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Prof. Desfor’s research focuses on gaining an understanding of dynamic processes of urban change. He is currently completing a study that has been investigating Toronto’s changing waterfront for the past hundred years.
Faculty of Education
Professor Dippo’s interests include: the social and political organization of knowledge, environmental and sustainability education, global migration and settlement; university/community relations; and teacher education. Dippo is the co-director of ”the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project, a CIDA funded initiative designed to bring post-secondary education opportunities to people living in the Dadaab refugee camps in northeastern Kenya. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and is on the Board of Directors of Success Beyond Limits, a not-for-profit organization that supports high school age youth in Toronto’s Jane/Finch community. Recent publications include Pre-Service Teaching and Pedagogies of Transformation (ed. with R. McKeown and N. Nolet, Springer, 2012) and Feasibility Study Report: The provision of High Education for Long-Term refugees in the Dadaab Camps, Kenya (with A. Orgocka and W. Giles, Mastercard Foundation, 2012).
Division of Social Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Demonstrating York’s commitment to urban research on a global scale, Lisa Drummond researches Vietnamese cities, with an emphasis on popular culture and social norms of femininity and womanhood.Lisa Drummond has a Faculty of Arts Fellowship for 2008-09, giving her full teaching and service release in order to complete a book manuscript entitled: Mad Dogs to Motorbikes: Public Space in Hanoi, Vietnam, from the French Colonial Period to the Present. The research for this book was funded by an SSHRC Standard Research Grant.
Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts
Professor Fallis’ research focuses on public policy, particularly housing policy and public finance. He is also interested in how urban policies evolve in the larger context of the evolution of the welfare state, and in the role of cultural institutions in city development.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Professor Foster’s research investigates the many ways that ecology is politicized and landscapes are socially constructed. She researches landscape form and processes across Toronto’s public green spaces in terms of urban socioecological metabolism.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Prof. Fraser is an applied ecologist, with a focus on avian ecology. Part of her work centres on urban wildlife research in Toronto.
Faculty of Education
Prof. Gaetz is committed to research on homelessness, youth culture, criminal victimization, and community development within urban settings. He coordinated the highly successful 2005 Canadian Conference on Homelessness, the first national interdisciplinary research conference on homelessness to be held in Canada.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Professor Gilbert studies the criminalization and marginalization in North America, meanings and representations of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, the neoliberalization of immigration and multiculturalism, as well as the multicultural-isation processes of cities.
Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Professor Gururani’s research and teaching interests lie in the areas of cultural politics of environment and development, postcoloniality, third world feminisms, and social movements. She has conducted ethnographic research and published on the politics of conservation and gendered struggles over livelihood in Central Himalayas, India, exploring the cultural production and representation of environmentalism, place, gender, and identity. Professor Gururani is currently working on a new project on Third World urban forms in emerging cities like Gurgaon, which investigates the changing environmental and territorial politics in urban metropolis and suburbs in the context of neoliberal transformation.
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Professor Laam Hae studies and teaches urban political economy, cultural politics, critical race theory and feminist methodology. More specifically, Professor Hae has researched popular struggles over gentrification, the post-industrialization of urban economies, city marketing, zoning regulations, the militarization of urban space and the right to the city, in both North America and East Asia (specializing particularly in South Korea).
Department of Sociology
Prof. Ratiba Hadj-Moussa’s areas of specialization are sociology of culture and political sociology. Her research interests range from common cultural artifacts to art (cinema) and visual culture in general. Her work is anchored within the scope of three major fields: 1. Mediascapes, principally new media, in relation to politics and shared spaces as they are constituted and evolve in non-Western contexts; 2. Secularism ; 3. Marginalized forms of protest and new forms of the political, regions vs urban centers.
Department of Visual Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts
Professor Hornstein looks at the intersections between architecture, memory and place in urban sites. She has published widely on cities as memorial scapes in the postwar period, Google Earth and virtual places, and Architourism. Her most recent research is on demolition as urban amnesia. Among the courses she teaches are: Cultural Cartographies, Memory and Place, Sex and the City, and The Metropolis Revisited.
Faculty of Education
Prof. James researches equity in education related to ethnicity, race, social class, and gender. He also studies anti-racism and multicultural education, urban education, and community development.
Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Jenkins studies cultural and historical geography, diaspora and nationalism, and Irish-Canadian studies.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Prof. Keil researches global suburbanism, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance. Among his recent publications are The Global Cities Reader (ed. with Neil Brenner; Routledge, 2006); Networked Disease: Emerging Infections and the Global City. (ed. with S.Harris Ali; Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); Changing Toronto: Governing the Neoliberal City (with Julie-Anne Boudreau and Douglas Young; UTP 2009); Leviathan Undone? The Political Economy of Scale. (ed. with Rianne Mahon, UBC Press 2009) and In-Between Infrastructure (ed. with Patricia Burke Wood and Douglas Young; Praxis(e)Press 2011). Prof. Keil is a co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA).
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Stefan Kipfer’s research is focused on two related areas: (1) the comparative analysis of urban politics, and (2) the excavation of urban dimensions in social and political theory. In metropolitan regions like Toronto, Zurich and Paris, he has been investigating the relationships between social movements, modes of state intervention (including planning and policy) and patterns of social, economic and cultural restructuring. His current theoretical explorations are trying to articulate critical marxist and anti-colonial traditions, notably in the works of Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci.
Schulich School of Business
Robert V. Kozinets teaches Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business and researches resonant brands across a range of industries and domains. He also runs a blog at www.kozinets.net. His co-edited volume, Consumer Tribes, was published this year by Elsevier.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Prof. Lehrer’s research focuses on urban geography, cities and globalization, image production in cities, and economic restructuring and urban form. She also studies the built environment, ethnicity and immigration to urban areas, and the theory and history of planning, urban design and architecture.
Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Lo uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to map the settlement of immigrants, and to help develop public policies on immigrant services. In particular, she is studying the preferences of Chinese immigrant consumers for local, ‘ethnic’ businesses, and how larger, ‘mainstream’ businesses are attempting to compete with the ‘ethnic’ economy.
Department of Film, Faculty of Fine Arts
Prof. Longfellow is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and film theorist, and has published numerous articles on feminist film theory and Canadian cinema. She is currently developing Weather, a feature-length documentary film and web site exploring meteorological representation through the popular media.
Faculty of Education
Prof. Lotherington teaches and researches language and literacy education in linguistically diverse urban contexts. Her research focuses on the development of multimodal literacies pedagogies in the urban elementary classroom. She was selected to be People For Education’s inaugural Researcher of the Month. Her latest book is Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Rewriting Goldilocks
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. MacDermid is interested in voting behaviour in Canada with an emphasis on political parties, election campaigns, and campaign advertising. Prof. MacDermid’s recent work has looked at municipal election financing and the use of corporate donations in campaigns.
School of Industry and Labor, Cornell University
Ian completed a PhD in Political Science at York University in the Fall2011. His research interests include comparative political economy,urban politics and labour geography. While at CITY, he will be extending his doctoral work with a SSHRC-supported research projection organized labour’s role in local economic development and urban policy formation. The research will compare trade union strategies and outcomes in New York and Toronto in various sectors and policy areas,including film, hospitality, energy, child care, and public transit. It will contribute to our understanding of how urban political economies are shaped by the interventions of organized labor, keeping to a critical register concerned with a sustainable and socially just urbanism.
Canada Research Chair, Department of Film, Faculty of Fine Arts
Prof. Marchessault, Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, studies the role played by artist communities and cultural industries in the life of cities such as Toronto, Helsinki and Mexico.
University Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Massam, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is engaged in the search for definitions and interpretations to determine what constitutes ‘quality of life’ (QOL) for particular individulas and groups. His work helps academics, government officials and the general public to incorporate the concept on QOL in their deliberations concerning urban public policy issues that impinge on matters such as well being, equity, sustainable development, and global flows of capital, labour and information.
School of Social Work, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. McGrath, Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies, is active in university-community research and planning partnerships in Toronto’s Black Creek community and has written on issues related to social planning, community development and settlement. She has extensive experience as a practitioner and researcher in social service agencies and advocacy organizations including child welfare, housing, child poverty, social planning and refugee settlement. She leads a global refugee research network that links researchers, practitioners and policy makers concerned about forced migration issues including in urban settings.
Prof. Jean Michel Montsion
Department of International Studies, Glendon Campus
Prof. Montsion’s research focuses on gateway cities from an international migrations and international political economy perspectives. He studies the impacts of gateway strategies on community politics and everyday life in locations constructed between East and West such as Singapore and Vancouver.
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Karen Bridget Murray is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science. Her research is at the nexus of politics, geography, and governance. From July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009 she is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto. Her recent work has appeared in The Canadian Historical Review, Canadian Journal of Urban Research, Canadian Public Administration, Social Theory and Health, as well as in several edited collections.
Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Glen Norcliffe researches the geographies of industry in the neoliberal era. Specific projects forming parts of this over-arching theme include: the development of global supply chains by Canadian industry; the impact of neoliberalism on small towns in Ontario’s North; Ulrich Beck’s risk society and the resource periphery; and the consequences of segmenting the workforce in peripheral resource regions. Glen also continues to research the bicycle as an instrument of modernity, including the geographical construction of technology, and the notion of a cycling citizen.
Department of Biology, Faculty of Science and Engineering
Prof. Packer’s research is largely concerned with the biology and conservation of bees and seeks to understand the biological diversity of bees, to understand their biodiversity patterns and to ensure the long-term persistence of bee populations. His research involves a diverse arrange of approaches to questions on the basic biology, conservation and systematics of bees and other insects. His research involves field work which has been carried it out in many different parts of Canada and throughout the world, including within urban settings.
Division of Social Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Peake is a feminist geographer with interests in the gendered social organization of urban space. She has conducted research on the articulation of social relations of class, gender, race and sexuality in relation to urban places in both the North and the South.Prof. Peake studies urban Canada and feminist geography, particularly the gendered social organization of urban space. She also explores the articulation of social relations of class, gender, race and sexuality in relation to urban places in both the North and the South.
Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Preston is a social geographer currently investigating public debates concerning the impact of immigration on the landscapes of Canadian and Australian cities, immigrant women’s integration in urban labor markets, and the ways transnational migration affects citizenship in Canadian cities.
Dean, Faculty of Environmental Studies
Dean Rahder has been researching urban issues for almost 30 years, with an emphasis on participatory social research and planning with urban residents, particularly women marginalized by poverty, racism, sexism, and other experiences. Much of her work has focused on issues of access to affordable housing and community services.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Prof. Sandberg’s research focuses on environmental and forest policy; environmental economy; environmental and professional history; alternative economic development; as well as Canadian, Maritime, and Scandinavian studies.
Geography and Social Sciences, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
John Saunders is a Resident Faculty Member at the City Institute. He teaches urban, cultural and social geography at York University and the University of Toronto. He was also the research co-ordinator for the In-between Infrastructure Research Project from 2007 to 2009. John’s research interests include urban planning, public space, infrastructure and citizenship.
Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Schmid has conducted research in Egypt on inequality and spatial control, including the development of the city of Luxor by the Egyptian government, World Bank, UNESCO, and the UNDP. His current projects include grasping the diversity of suburban Cairo and the relationships between its highly segregated areas, and the potential social and cultural implications of an energy transition within the Greater Toronto Area.
Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts
Prof. Shwartz undertakes research focused primarily on applied analysis and research in the fields of regional and urban economics, as well as broader issues on the problems of cities.
Department of History, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Stein researches gender and sexuality in urban politics and urban geographies, and is the author of City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. He is also on the editorial board of H-Urban, a moderated, multi-disciplinary forum for discussion and dissemination of scholarship on urban history and urban studies.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Professor Laura Taylor’s research interests are in exurbia and the issues of urban dispersion, and natural and cultural heritage conservation in Toronto’s countryside. She is keenly interested in the influence of ideologies of nature on the residential choices people make and the influence of planning in shaping those choices. Laura Taylor is a consulting planner in the greater Toronto area, and a registered professional planner with the Ontario Professional Planners Institute and a member of the Canadian Institute of Planners, American Planning Association, and the Canadian and American Associations of Geographers.
Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Film
Temenuga Trifonova explores the production of space in the city film, from the street film through the city symphony, the genre-inflected city, nouvelle vague films, the global city film, the transnational ghetto film, and the franchise city film. Her other research focuses on theories of film and photography; film and philosophy; psychopathology and cinema; film criticism; contemporary American and European cinema; theories of globalization and identity; cross-cultural and cross-genre film remakes; and screenwriting.
Canada Research Chair
School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
Leah F. Vosko is Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy at York University. She is the author of Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship and her latest book Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment., andeditor of Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada. Since 2001, she has overseen the collaborative Gender and Work Database-Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database project (GWD-CPD) involving co-investigators from across Europe and North America as well as Australia.
Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Professional Studies
Prof. Warkentin is interested in the interrelationships amongst towns, cities and regions, and has long studied rural and urban landscapes in Canada.
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Prof. Wekerle researches urban movements, urban growth management and sprawl, urban public policy, urban politics, gender and cities, urban agriculture and food planning. Recent publications focus on environmental movements in exurban areas, urban growth policies, regional movements, environmental governance, land trusts, bioregional citizenship, the urban security agenda and anti-terrorism, food justice movements, gender and the neoliberal city and gender planning in transportation.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health
Prof. Wiesenthal studies traffic congestion and driver behaviour in the urban environment, and has developed the “Driving Vengeance Questionnaire” to gauge a motorist’s potential to commit violence against other motorists. He also researches tactics for stress reduction, safety aspects of cellular telephone use, and a variety of objectionable driving behaviours.
Prof. Patricia Wood
Department of Geography, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Patricia Wood’s research focuses on diversity, identity politics and citizenship, particularly in cities. She does both contemporary and historical work in Canada, the United States and Ireland and conducts research primarily with immigrant groups and indigenous peoples, with an emphasis on participatory, collaborative research practices. She is the author of Nationalism from the Margins (McGill-Queen’s, 2002) and co-author, with Engin F. Isin, of Citizenship and Identity (Sage, 1999), and has also published in several journals, including Citizenship Studies and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Department of Social Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
Douglas Young’s current research is in two areas: the legacies of socialist and modernist urbanism in Berlin, Hanoi, and Stockholm, and the processes of suburban decline and renewal in Toronto and Leipzig. He is co-author (with Julie-Anne Boudreau and Roger Keil) of “Changing Toronto: Governing Urban Neoliberalism” published in 2009 by U of T Press. He is co-editor (with Patricia Wood and Roger Keil) of “In-between Infrastructure: Urban Connectivity in an Age of Vulnerability” published in 2010 by Praxis (e) Press.
Canada Research Chair, Osgoode Hall Law School
Prof. Zumbansen, Canada Research Chair in Transnational and Comparative Law of Corporate Governance, is studying the impact of globalization on national economies by examining the changing nature of capitalism in globally integrated markets, and business activities in different political and market contexts.
