Welcome to the November 2022 edition of the EUC Research Update - bringing you highlights from research activities at York's Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change. We invite you to view our past updates on our Research News page. Research Spotlights Wiley Sharp on making places, making lives: Queer and trans youth strategies for more-than-survival […]
How do LGBTQ2S+ youth survive and thrive in suburban Toronto? Queer and trans youth are more likely than their straight peers to experience isolation, depression, harassment, violence, and suicide; these structural inequities are amplified by intersecting racial, class, and gendered oppressions. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened this crisis, as lockdowns and health restrictions deprived queer and […]
How do migrants settle in different local contexts and develop capacities to overcome settlement challenges? Why do particular migrants do better than others even when compared to their peers from the same background? How can institutions facilitate and support migrant settlement and integration in urban areas across Quebec and Ontario? These are some of the […]
by Chan Arun-Pina (they/them) One of the key tasks of my research/artwork is to visualize the trans potential of spaces, especially at the scale of higher education institution (HEI) and of domestic as they intersect in student housing. And, in so doing, to critically disrupt the socio-spatial reiteration of cisnormativity in urban residential landscapes. By […]
In Toronto, Canada, core-periphery relations have shifted through re-mappings of city boundaries and districts over the past seventy years: austerity-led amalgamations resulting in new peripheralizations, with subsequent attempts at addressing disparity with an emphasis on place. Publicly disinvested, the now inner-suburbs of Toronto are driven into new competitive relationships, and therefore becoming vulnerable to private […]
by Zachary Dark As part of my broader research into the contemporary politics of hydroelectricity in Canada, I am interested in how hydroelectric infrastructure both physically and symbolically remakes environments. In 2009, Manitoba Hydro (a provincially-owned electricity utility in Manitoba, Canada) opened its new headquarters on the edge of downtown Winnipeg. The award-winning headquarters building, […]
by Balikisu Osman The unequal geography of hunger in Ghana Around the world, millions of people are struggling to secure social, economic, and physical access to safe, sufficient, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and preferences. In Ghana, for example, an estimated 3.6 million people, representing 11.7% of the population, do not know […]
The Canadian landscape has an abundance of lakes under pressure from multiple stressors. Lakes are sentinels of environmental change, as they archive changes occurring both within the lake, and in the surrounding terrestrial ecosystems within its watershed. Paleolimnology, that is, the study of lake sediment cores to reconstruct past climatic and environmental changes, helps us […]
The Leslie Street Spit is a 500-hectare construction waste dump that also functions as an ecologically rich urban landscape feature. Since the 1950s, trucks have been depositing construction waste along this narrow landform, to the point where it now extends 5 kilometers from downtown Toronto into Lake Ontario. Due to the site’s auspicious location […]
Professor Emeritus Senior Scholar Research Interests My interests lie in how the writing and study of geography developed in what today is Canada. This has taken me from exploration literature to the scientific exploration of Canada, the mapping of Canada, settlement studies, early teaching of geography in Canadian universities, and regional writing on Canada whether […]