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Subalterity, public education, and welfare cities: Comparing the experience of displaced migrants in three cities - Havana, Toronto, Kolkata

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 […]

Urban life in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic

In an article in The Conversation on February 17, Professors Roger Keil, Creighton Connolly, and S. Harris Ali, stressed that “[o]utbreaks like coronavirus start in and spread from the edges of cities,” noting that merging infectious disease has much to do with how and where we live, and that the ongoing coronavirus is an example of the close […]

Vaccine geopolitics during COVID-19

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus illustrates that we are connected globally like never before, yet responses to the virus are decidedly local and national, exposing new geopolitical fault lines and exacerbating material divides that make the difference between living and dying.   To put it bluntly, “we are simply not all in this […]

Traversing Toronto in pandemic times

From mid-March to late May, Professor Stefan Kipfer posted a series of short articles and photo essays on social media. Inspired by his daily walks and bicycle trips around Toronto, the images tried to make sense of the news about the coronavirus that started in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and became widespread around the world. In […]

We’ve already used up the Earth’s supply of resources for this year

By Marc Montgomery | english@rcinet.ca You probably never noticed, but last week we used up all the resources that can be renewed annually by the Earth. That means we’re now spending more than we earn environmentally, so to speak. Last Saturday was Earth Overshoot Day, or as they put it on the website, it’s the date “when humanity’s […]

Re-imagining public spaces and designing liveable communities in a COVID-19 world

How do we reimagine public spaces – such as parks, streets, beaches, schools, libraries, and other areas of communities – in a way that they will be liveable for people in a COVID-19 world? What are the issues around equal access and rights to public and social spaces as we begin to live in this […]

Reorienting labour unions in the time of COVID-19 crisis

The shut-down of non-essential work in response to COVID-19 has decimated labour markets. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 20.5 million more workers lost their jobs in April, as official unemployment skyrocketed to 14.7%. It is the largest single-month increase in unemployment since the data series started in 1948. In Canada, the news […]

The COVID-19 pandemic and the flight to exurbia

As many people work from home, and as many are suggesting a preference to work from home, perhaps permanently, are people leaving the city for the countryside to live in exurbia, where larger homes on larger lots give people access to natural greenspaces? Exurbia has long been an interest of Laura Taylor, with her first article […]

The pandemic as a portal to food sovereignty

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the fragilities and inequities within the globalized industrial food system: ecosystem collapse through deforestation, loss of animal habitat, monocultural production, long supply chains dependent on fossil fuel based transportation, loss of access to land through trade agreements, lack of state support for small producers, forced migration and farm labour […]

Reframing public dialogue about homelessness: Building housing solidarity during COVID-19

Professor Luisa Sotomayor’s new SSHRC Partnership Engage project examines community responses to the siting and development of new homeless shelters and supportive housing in Toronto. As Sotomayor explains, “the introduction of new housing for a low-income or vulnerable group in a community is typically not without local conflict. In fact, the acronym NIMBY—or Not-in-My-Backyard—refers to an increasingly common […]