Principal Investigator: Sheila Colla.

Funding: W. Garfield Weston Foundation.

Term: 2016-2022.

Interviews and farm tours were done with conservation program Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) participants. These interviews took place in Norfolk County, Ontario where previous work showed bee richness to be positively impacted on the land of ALUS farmers when compared to non-ALUS sites. Nine semi-structured, in person interviews with growers in Southern Ontario were conducted and transcribed to gather qualitative data on the following themes: Farm history and grower education, current grower pollination strategies, attitudes toward native pollinators, knowledge of native pollinators and pollinator habitat, grower support and knowledge networks, and understanding the role of biodiversity on the farm.  The goal of the survey is to characterize the relationships between demographic, land management, and pollination services variables and 6 concepts were hypothesized that impact the likelihood of adopting biodiversity and bee friendly practices. These are:  (1) awareness of bees; (2) beliefs around threats to native bees; (3) perceptions about contributions of native bees; (4) perceived vulnerability to changes in the honeybee industry; (5) social networks; and (6) practical barriers.

Principal Investigator: Raju Das.

Funding: SSHRC Insight Grant.

Term: 2016-2025.

Geographically uneven development (GUD) is an enduring problem worldwide. Its urgency is more apparent in the context of the recent phase of industrialization occurring in the South since the onset of the neoliberal form of capitalism. This industrialization, which takes different forms, including transplantation of large-scale industry into rural areas, creating newly industrialized cities, is occurring in many parts of India, in which state’s earlier role in promoting equality between areas (and groups/classes) is relatively diminished since 1991. This new context raises a specific question: how does this pattern of industrialization cause uneven development between newly created urban areas and rural areas, and within the rural periphery? This multi-year project involves much theoretical work, to guide the empirical component of the project. It intends to produce a thoroughgoing, rigorous critique of some of the existing views on uneven development and to provide an alternative framework to understand it.

Website: https://www.yorku.ca/research/ycar/neoliberal-industrialization/

Principal Investigator: Sheila Colla.

Funding: NSERC Discovery Grant.

Term: 2017-2026.

The savethebumbblebees lab is com prised of members from both the Department of Biology and the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. As a lab, the project team is interested in all aspects of native pollinator conservation. Research is interdisciplinary, including ecology, conservation biology, policy and citizen science. Please take a look at our site, and hopefully learn a little more about our research, bumblebees, and conservation efforts in general. Related projects have generously been funded by The W. Garfield Weston Foundation, The Province of Ontario, MITACS and The Liber Ero Fellowship Program. Research partners include BumbleBeeWatch.org, The Nature Conservancy of Canada, Friends of the Earth Canada, Wildlife Preservation Canada, Ontario Nature and The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

Website: https://www.savethebumblebees.ca/

Principal Investigator: Steven Tufts

Funding: SSHRC.

Term: 2016-2021.

The research aims to provide an analysis of the rise of populism in the context of austerity politics in North America as well as the implications for labour movements in terms of engagement with forms of both left- and right-wing populism.

Principal Investigator: Abidin Kusno.

Funding: SSHRC.

Term: 2016-2021.

The research builds on the insights of current scholarship from critical geography and anthropology of infrastructure to make sense of a social formation (such as Jakarta) in which environmental degradation, informality and lack of planning have led to both disaster and opportunities as well as modes of governing society.

Principal Investigator: Alison Bain.

Funding: SSHRC Insight Grant.

Term: 2016-2023.

This research addresses key knowledge gaps regarding the lives, service needs, and place-making practices of suburban Canadian LGBTQ2S (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, and Two-Spirit) populations. The dearth of attention to sexuality among suburban scholars and the limited investigation of the suburbs by geographers of sexualities means that little is known about the LGBTQ2S populations living there, or how to situate them within changing suburban landscapes. In Canada, this inattention has significant implications: a limited understanding of the spatial, embodied and discursive dimensions of everyday queer lives in suburbia; an inadequate grasp of the support services and the socially inclusive policymaking needed at the municipal and metropolitan scales; and an inability to imagine suburbia as a queer location. This research uses queer and intersectionality theories to document the geographies of queer suburban lives as they intersect with other minority identity markers (e.g., ethnicity, racialization, class, gender, and age) in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Principal Investigator: Philip Kelly.

Funding: SSHRC Insight Grant.

Term: 2015-2022.

The research project is interested in transnational economic practices that fall outside either the mainstream economy of corporate trade and investment or the private flows of remittances between family members. The study seeks those linkages that depend on the social networks created by migration and which generate or promote collectivized or non-monetized forms of well-being. This includes: humanitarian fundraising for typhoon victims; collective financing of social infrastructure such as school or clinics; the donation of volunteer skilled labour by members of the Filipino diaspora who return to the Philippines; networks of unpaid labour to care for children and the elderly; the fostering of alternative economic imaginaries through activism; the creation of channels to export products from small-scale and sustainable enterprises in the Philippines. The research profiles these kinds of practices, assesses them critically, and seeks to foster the expansion of socially beneficial transnational economic practices.

Website: https://ateproject.wordpress.com/

Principal Investigator: Ranu Basu

Funding: SSHRC Insight Grant.

Term: 2015-2023.

The project traces the geopolitical impacts of forced displacement on cities and schools through questions of conflict and displacement in Havana, Toronto, and Kolkata. The research explores the interrelationship between the quality of state-based education, the subalterity of displacement, and the implications which these issues have for the urban public realm.  State funded public education (within capitalist and anti-capitalist orientations), long valued as a critical tool for reducing inequality, promoting economic mobility and advocating for social justice, can have an ongoing transformative effect on the evolution of the public realm.

Project Investigators: Mark Winfield and Jose Etcheverry

Funding: Various

Term: Ongoing

The Sustainable Energy Initiative (SEI) builds and strengthens research, education and skills for students and professionals in energy efficiency and conservation, renewable energy sources and community energy planning. SEI seeks collaboration and partnerships to support analysis of technical, economic, social and political contexts and innovation in sustainable energy and its applications. It supports undergraduate and graduate student teaching and research, including the EUC Certificate in Sustainable Energy, to educate and train the new cohort of sustainable energy entrepreneurs, social innovators, policy-makers, and community activists and builds and strengthens partnerships among educational institutions, government agencies, business and industry, and non-governmental organizations through research, knowledge mobilization, and experiential education.

Co-Principal Investigator: Sarah Flicker.

Funding: IDRC/SSHRC.

Term: 2015-2020.

This international and interdisciplinary partnership based at McGill University brings together government and community-based organizations focusing on girls and young women, 40 co-applicants and collaborators from 14 post-secondary institutions in Canada and South Africa and a network of stakeholder partners located in both countries. The partnership seeks to examine and learn from the contexts in which communities of girls and young women are subject to exceptionally high rates of sexual violence. In the Canadian context, this grouping refers to self-identified young Indigenous girls/women, including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, status or non-status, beneficiary or non-beneficiary, and includes Indigenous girls and young women who identify as Trans, Two Spirit, or gender non-conforming. In the South African context, the partners are working with girls and young women of a range of sexualities who belong to two of the official government designated groups, Black and Coloured (mixed race), and who live in rural areas. The partnership is supported by International Partnerships for Sustainable Societies (IPaSS), a joint initiative between the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Website: https://www.mcgill.ca/dise/research/facultyresearchprojects/girls4change