Spotlight – James Stinson, Reflections on a Postdoctoral Exploration of Planetary Health Education

Between 2019 and 2023, I had the privilege of serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow cross-appointed to the Dahdaleh Institute of Global Health Research and the Faculty of Education at York University, co-supervised by Dr. James Orbinski and Dr. Kate Tilleczek. As I begin a new chapter as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, I am excited to also be re-joining the Dahdaleh Institute as an Adjunct Faculty Fellow. This feels less like a return and more like a continuation of a research and intellectual home that has profoundly shaped my work.

When I began my postdoctoral fellowship, my mandate was clear but daunting: to help develop new research initiatives in the emerging area of planetary health education. Coming from a background in political ecology and environmental anthropology, I had utilized ethnographic methods to explore how structural political and economic forces—colonialism, extractivism, and environmental governance—shaped the conditions of Indigenous health and wellbeing in particular local contexts, including Belize and Canada. The Dahdaleh Institute provided a uniquely generative space to connect these critical perspectives with global health, education, and practice-oriented research.

One of the most formative experiences of my postdoc was collaborating with Mark Terry on the Planetary Health Film Lab. This initiative brought together planetary health, media literacy, and youth-led storytelling, supporting young people to explore how climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality shape their lives and futures. Youth participants produced short documentary films that were later shared through the United Nations Youth Climate Report and screened at UN climate conferences. Seeing youth voices move from community-based learning spaces to global policy arenas was a powerful reminder of what education can do when it is grounded in care, creativity, and collaboration.

Alongside this work, I led several externally funded research projects as Principal Investigator that were deeply shaped by the Institute’s interdisciplinary ethos. Through a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant, New Journey to Save Fish: Oshki Maadaadiziwin Jaa Bimaaji’ut Gigooyike, I worked with the Bagida’waad Alliance – an Indigenous environmental organization based on the Saugeen (Bruce) Peninsula –  to support Indigenous youth-led story-telling grounded in an Anishinaabe worldview and emphasizing relational health, responsibility, and sovereignty, and mobilizing outcomes through youth-produced films, conferences, and public-facing writing.

Building on this momentum, I was awarded a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant for the project Planetary Health Partnership: Anishinaabe youth guardians, land-based learning, and the practice of living well with the world. This multi-year project supported a wide range of experiential and community-driven activities—from youth guardianship programs and habitat restoration to ceremonial canoe journeys, water walks, and intergenerational learning—demonstrating what decolonial planetary health education can look like in practice.

During my postdoc, I also continued a parallel stream of research examining the political economy of conservation and health. A SSHRC Insight Development Grant for the project Smart Conservation and the Production of Nature 3.0 in Belize allowed me to study the growing use of “smart” technologies in protected areas in Belize, exploring how digital surveillance and predictive policing intersect with Indigenous wellbeing. This work led to conference presentations, public scholarship, and interviews with organizations such as the Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, reinforcing the importance of critically examining how technological solutions are framed within global health and environmental governance.

In the later stages of my postdoctoral fellowship, I served as Co-Principal Investigator (alongside Kate Tilleczek) and Belize Country Lead for the Partnership for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing (PYPW), a large interdisciplinary initiative funded through York University’s Catalyzing Interdisciplinary Research Clusters program. PYPW brought together scholars from education, global health, environmental studies, and the social sciences with youth, educators, and community partners across Canada, Belize, Chile, and Costa Rica. The project was designed to better understand how young people experience and make sense of planetary change—climate disruption, environmental degradation, digital transformation, and social inequality—and how these forces shape their wellbeing, identities, and futures.

A defining feature of PYPW was its commitment to youth-led and youth-advised research and education. Across project sites, we worked with Youth Advisory Committees who helped shape research questions, methods, and knowledge mobilization strategies. In Belize, where I coordinated project activities in partnership with the Julian Cho Society and the Maya Leaders Alliance, this involved training Indigenous Maya youth in qualitative research methods and digital storytelling, supporting them to conduct interviews with peers and Elders, and working alongside them to produce documentary films on planetary health and wellbeing. These youth-created films were subsequently shared through the United Nations Youth Climate Report and screened at UNFCCC COP28, creating opportunities for youth voices from the Global South to be heard in global policy spaces.

Beyond individual outputs, PYPW functioned as a space for collective learning and relationship-building. The project fostered sustained dialogue among youth across different cultural and ecological contexts, while also supporting collaboration among researchers and educators committed to decolonial, care-centred approaches to planetary health education. This work culminated in a SSHRC Connection Grant–funded Conference for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing, which brought youth advisors, educators, and researchers together to share insights, reflect on lessons learned, and collectively imagine future directions. For me, PYPW exemplified the kind of planetary health research and education that the Dahdaleh Institute champions: grounded in justice, attentive to power and inequality, and oriented toward meaningful engagement and transformation.

Most recently, I have been working  with colleagues at the Young Lives Research Lab to create Canada’s first official Digital Wellbeing Hub, a national initiative developed through funding from the Government of Canada. While often framed as an individual or psychological issue, our team’s approach situates digital wellbeing within broader political-economic and infrastructural contexts. Guided by UNICEF-Canada’s Index for Child and Youth Wellbeing and co-designed and developed with a Youth Advisory Committee, the Hub supports educators, families, and policymakers in understanding how platform economies, surveillance, and data extraction shape young people’s social and emotional wellbeing. This work extends political ecology into the digital domain, treating digital infrastructures as socio-technical environments that condition health and wellbeing.

During my time at the Institute, I was also deeply involved in academic service and community-building. I was a founding member of a Dahdaleh Institute committee dedicated to advancing the decolonization of global health research, an initiative that emerged from shared recognition that global health must more directly confront colonial histories, power relations, and epistemic inequities. Through this committee, we helped launch a multi-year seminar series on Decolonizing Global Health Research, creating space for sustained dialogue, critical reflection, and institutional learning across disciplines.

In addition, I served as a Steering Committee Member for the Critical Perspectives on Global Health (CPGH) Symposium and Seed Grant Initiative (2023–2025). In this role, I contributed to shaping symposium themes, reviewing seed grant applications, and supporting early-stage, critical, and interdisciplinary global health research led by faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students.

I am deeply grateful to James Orbinski and Kate Tilleczek for bringing me into this postdoctoral role and for creating an environment in which I was able to learn, experiment, and grow as a scholar. Their mentorship, trust, and intellectual generosity gave me the space to take risks, to build new collaborations, and to develop a research program that bridges critical scholarship with engaged practice. I am also thankful to the broader Dahdaleh Institute community for fostering a culture of collaboration, care, and critical inquiry that continues to shape how I approach research and teaching.

Looking back, what stands out most about my time at the Dahdaleh Institute is not just the projects I worked and the outputs produced—though I am proud of those outcomes—but the Institute’s commitment to critical, justice-oriented, and practice-engaged global health research. The space to think across disciplines, to take political and ethical questions seriously, and to work alongside scholars and practitioners who value collaboration and care has been foundational to my development as a researcher and educator.

As I step into my new role at Wilfrid Laurier University, I am thrilled to continue this relationship with the Dahdaleh Institute as an Adjunct Faculty Fellow. I look forward to ongoing collaboration on planetary health education, youth wellbeing, and decolonial research practices, and to supporting the next generation of scholars working at the intersections of health, environment, and social justice.

Re-joining the Institute feels like coming full circle—and I am excited to see where this shared work will go next.

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