Research Spotlight

Making places, making lives: Queer and trans youth strategies for more-than-survival in suburban Toronto

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 […]

Wings of transformation: A post occupancy evaluation (POE) of India’s first gender-neutral (student) hostel

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 […]

De/centering the ‘community benefit’ in Toronto’s inner-suburbs

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 […]

The utility headquarters as a symbol of eco-modernism

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, […]

Climate risks and household responses to food insecurity in northern Ghana

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 […]

Using paleolimnological methods to assess environmental change across Canada

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 […]

From Rubble to Refuge: Advancing sustainability of the Leslie Street Spit

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 […]

Impact field of Canadian documentary films

‘Impact producing’ is an emerging field within documentary film that combines creative distribution, coalition building and audience engagement to build formalized campaigns for social change. As the name implies, impact producing seeks to maximize the impact of documentary films, and to increase the capacity of documentary filmmakers to effect social change. Early this year, MES […]

Bringing youth from the inner city and from First Nations to build Climate Solutions Parks

The work to build Canada’s first Climate Solutions Parks (CSP) has received an important boost, thanks to new funding from the Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning Canada (CEWIL Canada). The CSPs that are being built will focus on skills development in key areas such as community-focused agriculture, renewable energy, electric mobility, First Nations knowledge, sustainable […]

Gendered messaging

Performing and pushing back on diet culture: Exploring gendered messaging on Instagram Gendered messaging is a means through which ideas about power, norms, expectations, categories, behaviours, and practices of gender are presented, disseminated and reproduced across culture by Sarah Rotz With the rise of social media, hashtags have become key tools of cultural messaging, and […]