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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Between 2009 and 2015, FES/DIGHR postdoctoral fellow, Mark Terry, produced feature films for the United Nations (UN) reporting on the climate research in the polar regions: The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning and The Polar Explorer, both films back-to-back winners of the Audience Choice Award at the American Conservation Film Festival. The films broke new […]
The megadisaster of Lac-Mégantic offers important lessons on how disasters and recovery are negotiated within local capacities and contingencies of smaller towns. Born and raised in Nantes, a rural community in Quebec where the catastrophic train disaster happened in 2013, Professor Liette Gilbert, is very familiar with the case and the region. She then started to […]
The issues around flooding have increasingly received attention in a variety of fields, and Jakarta has been a primary case study for a lot of researchers including Abidin Kusno, professor and director at the York Centre for Asian Research. Existing research has significantly contributed to our understanding of the inadequate institutional, organizational and individual capacities for flood […]
Rita DeMontisMore from Rita DeMontis You can call Dr. Mark Terry Canada’s original Renaissance man, and one of the country’s real-life modern-day explorers. Described as a digital-media scholar, he is one of the friendliest people you could ever meet — kind, curious, highly spirited if a somewhat humble being — who has turned the dry, […]
In the midst of global upheaval, recent oil spills in Canada have received little attention. These spills occurred as governments, both federal and provincial -- notably Alberta and Ontario (which later reversed the suspension) -- suspended environmental regulations for the oil and gas sector, mirroring suspensions in the U.S. But the recent Saskatchewan train derailments and Trans Mountain pipeline spill point at how dangerous […]